Idiots Write About Sports

Every columnist at one time or another writes a clip-and-save story that comes back to haunt him. For Joel Sherman of the New York Post, that column came about a week ago. And the other shoe dropped relatively quickly.

Sherman’s column, entitled “Time to Root for the Red Sox,” posits that the New York Yankees — whom Post columnists are fond of reminding us are the greatest team ever assembled in any sport on any planet in this or any other epoch — would be best served by having the Boston Red Sox win the AL Wild Card (since, of course, the winner of the AL East has been long since pre-determined). Since the Yankees would not face the BoSox in the first round of the playoffs, that would mean Boston would have to play the AL West winner (either Oakland or Seattle) and New York would take on the Central Division champ. It is assumed that the ultimate survivor of the Chicago-Kansas City-Minnesota scrum will be a decidedly weaker opponent than the Athletics or the Mariners come October.

(We thought that last year in Oakland, too. “Hey, no Yankees in the first round this year,” we said. “We get to face the just-happy-not-to-be-contracted Twins!” I’m going to assume you remember how well that worked out.)

Quoting the relevant portion of Sherman’s article: “The Yankees do not play the White Sox for the first time in 2003 until [August 26], and Chicago’s top three starters of Mark Buehrle, Bartolo Colon and Esteban Loaiza would make the White Sox tough. Still, it is obvious the Yankees would rather face Buehrle, Colon and Loaiza than the A’s Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Rich Harden… or the Mariners’ Gil Meche, Joel Pineiro, Jamie Moyer and Freddie Garcia.”

Well, the results are in from the first White Sox-Yankee meeting of 2003, and they’re not good if you hail from the Bronx. The White Sox won the first two games of the series by scores of 13-2 and 11-2, with Loaiza shoring up his Cy Young credentials in game one, and Colon offering a dominant performance of his own in game two. The Sox held Buehrle out of game three, trotting out rookie Neal Cotts instead. He lasted a third of an inning, and the Yankees salvaged the series… but only after the tottering New York bullpen did its level best to kick away the game.

Still pulling for the Red Sox, Joel?

Truth be told, if the playoffs were to begin today, Chicago may be the one team no one should want to face. The Sox resumed play after the All Star Game by dropping a 10-9 decision to the woeful Detroit Tigers; that put Chicago eight games behind Kansas City. Since then, Chicago has won 26 of its last 40 games (a slightly better record than both the Yankees and Boston over that same stretch) to land in a first-place tie with the Royals. That’s momentum, and it’s what you like to see from your team as they head into the playoffs. Just ask the folks in Anaheim.

(In fairness to Joel Sherman, the underlying point of his article — that baseball’s method of determining playoff match-ups doesn’t always reward the team that had the best record — is not without merit. The team with the best-record is supposed to face the wild-card winner — but usually, the wild-card entry has a better record than the weakest of the three division winners. This year, the wild-card team could have a better record than two divisional champs in the American League. There’s something to be said for rewarding a team that win its division, but what if a team plays in a weak division like the AL Central? Then again, this is hardly an earth-shattering disparity, so don’t look for Major League Baseball to address it any time soon. After all, this is the league that only recently decided that the team with the better record shouldn’t have to play the deciding game five of the divisional series on the road and now insists on granting home-field advantage in its championship series based on the outcome of an exhibition game. We’re just lucky Bud Selig doesn’t award playoff seeding based on a home-run derby.)