what's on my mind grapes?

It’s hard to believe that one round of the playoffs is already done, and it’s League Championship Series time already. In large part, I’m sure, this is because I wasn’t particularly emotionally invested in 75% of the Divisional Series – Sox/Angels was pretty nice, rooting-differential wise, but I just could not take the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim as a serious threat to Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling. Indians/Yankees, of course, was the biggest emotional rollercoaster since the 2004 ALCS.

But now, I must celebrate one simple fact: one of my top two teams is going to the World Series. Once that starts, I will probably go into full-on one-minded baseball-crazed lunatic-hermit over-hyphenating mode. But first, a discussion of the remaining road to the Fall Classic:

Colorado (90-73) at Arizona (90-72): Right away, let me note how delightful it is to get two LCS featuring pairs of teams with almost identical records. No matter what happens, we won’t see another 83-win champion overcome three teams with an average of 93 wins. It’s unrealistic to expect the best team to win the World Series every year, but we can absolutely hope that such a title has some sort of legitimacy beyond “this team won 11 games in October.” Of course, that’s not to say that each of the NL clubs has an equal claim to the proverbial throne; Colorado outscored its opponents by 102 runs, while Arizona was outscored by 20 runs.

We can debate how timely hitting and pitching, good management, and odd run distributions would alter a team’s record, and I imagine that the Diamondbacks could conceivably have won a handful of games meritoriously. But no matter how we analyze it, there’s no way they won 90 games without an obscene amount of luck. And this year, anything less than 89 wins would have missed the postseason. When a club like Colorado sees young talent and unexpected veteran contributions all come together and has a great year, there is admittedly an element of luck in play. Their playoff berth defies pre-season stat-geek logic, expectation, and even explanation. Yet in the end, it is nonetheless a legitimately great season. Being outscored, on the other hand, says that one’s team has not played well. If Arizona won only as many one-run games as the next-best team in that category, the Diamondbacks would have missed the playoffs. Plain and simple, they got ridiculously lucky and still only made the postseason by a two-win margin.

Ironically, the Diamondbacks are one of the smartest franchises in the game, and I had looked forward to them winning in 2008. But as a thinking sports fan, I can’t just like a team because it’s “good.” I demand some sort of meritocratic system. Whether a club is originally assembled with shrewd analysis or by looking at chicken bones, I ultimately cannot root for it to achieve the ultimate success when it would only get there by dumb luck. All that said, I would not mind Arizona overachieving its way into the World Series – or at least getting the NLCS to the game six for which I have a ticket. (Thank you, people of Phoenix, for not appreciating baseball enough to sell out the cheapest tickets for the National League Championship Series.)

Cleveland (96-66) at Boston (96-66):…oh dear. By the second half of the season, Cleveland had re-taken a spot at the top of my rooting hierarchy. But the Tribe shared that honor with Red Sox… and now I’ve got to make a choice. I should note that I truly love both of these teams, and this is like being asked to root for either my wife or my child to make it out of a burning building alive. It’s painful, it’s difficult, and ultimately, my joy that someone I love will survive is greatly tempered by the knowledge that someone else I love will not.

I don’t know which team is my wife and which is my child, but in the narrow-margin-of-rooting model I have explained, I see no choice but to root for the Indians. They achieved as many wins (albeit not as astonishing a run differential) as Boston while spending $80 million less, they have the same sort of great and just-plain-likable players, and in many ways, they embody, in this series, what drew me to the Red Sox. They are the underdog – the team that must overachieve to compensate for inferior resources; the team that must scratch and claw its way to the World Series against a frightening juggernaut of a baseball team. They will not receive the media adulation of their opponent, and will endure road games at one of baseball’s most storied, iconic ballparks.

Even if we say all other things are equal, the Indians knocked the Yankees out of the postseason. To me, that alone is justification to say, “Theo, Papi, Lowell… I love you guys, but the Tribe deserves this one.” But if Boston’s stronger offense and closer win out, so be it. I will not let even a pulling-out-all-the-stops seven game series turn me against the Red Sox once the series is over. Whoever wins the ALCS remains one of my favorite teams and gets 100% support against the NL champion.

One thing about the Red Sox: why do they have a victory song called “Dirty Water?” As far as I know, they didn’t have a local river catch fire.