7/13/2023 0 Comments Mlb playoffs standingsBut it doesn’t hold up as well in professional sports, where the talent gap between semifinalists or finalists is something less than North Carolina’s men’s basketball team against Saint Francis. That’s a real sensation that at least some of us feel. NCAA tournament upsets in the first two rounds are thrilling, because who doesn’t like watching a school they’ve never heard of send Kentucky packing? But at some point, you might like that school to politely bow out so that the Elite Eight and Final Four will be more competitive. Sometimes there’s an awkward conceit in that. What most of us want is for the games to be compelling as postseasons get longer. Most people do not want to get rid of the potential for magic. It said, in part: “If there ever was a case for canceling the playoffs and awarding a championship because one team was so clearly better than all the others, our 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers would be it.” The Padres’ elimination of the Dodgers, according to the columnist, is “akin to winning a 26.2-mile marathon by an hour, then having to beat the runners-up at a 100-meter sprint to be declared champion.” (It might be unfair to include the Braves here, as I really think I’ve seen more of it from New York and Los Angeles.) The most prominent establishment voice of this view is probably a Los Angeles Times column that came out just before the Padres eliminated the Dodgers. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about this, some of it (most of it?) just sour grapes from Dodgers, Mets, and Braves fans. But especially now that the Yankees have beaten the Cleveland Guardians in five games and avoided a sad divisional series exit of their own, it’s the National League’s results that will have people talking about whether the playoffs have fallen into perversion because the league’s best teams couldn’t push through them. The New York–Houston meeting has been a recurring series in recent playoffs, and it is a juggernaut going against a juggernaut. Whoever wins will play either the New York Yankees or the Houston Astros in the World Series.
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