If Baseball 2020 Were To Receive A Report Card

Baseball finished the 2020 season last week as the Los Angeles Dodgers won their first World Series since 1988, beating the Tamp Bay Rays in 6 games. Many people (myself included) were skeptical when the season started that it would reach the finish line, and certainly Commissioner Rob Manfred and his minions had to breathe a heavy sigh of relief that the season was concluded by games being played on the field, rather than a press conference announcing that the season needed to be cancelled. So how will the history books view the 2020 installment of Major League Baseball?  Let’s take out our red pens and do some grading, shall we?

RED INK FOR… Positive Tests.  

 In late July the Miami Marlins had an outbreak, and then a few days later, so did the St. Louis Cardinals. At that point cancellation of the season looked like a likely scenario. Overall, almost 150 MLB employees tested positive at one time or another this season. 

However, baseball handled the crisis well. 

Both the Marlins and Cardinals were shut down temporarily for a time, and the rest of the sport managed to stay afloat and (largely) virus free. Somehow the two teams made up the missing games and the Marlins turned into one of the truly amazing sports stories of the year. Following a season where they lost 105 games, and losing a large part of their roster for an extended period of time (maybe not such a bad thing since that roster, you know, lost 105 games the prior year), miraculously Miami rallied to make the postseason and even won a playoff series for the first time in 17 years. Then they lost a playoff series for the first time in franchise history. If there’s a stranger franchise in sports (0 division titles, 7 winning seasons in 27 years of existence, but somehow 2 World Series titles, which is 2 more than the Texas Rangers who have been around for 60 years), I can’t think of it. But do yourself a favor and ask me about the Hartford Yard Goats sometime.

RED INK FOR… Celebrating Mediocrity. 

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Sidebar alert – Baseball split the 1981 season into 2 half-seasons, and the winner of each half-season made the playoffs, which is how KC snuck in, and the Cincinnati Reds, who had the best overall record in all of baseball, stayed home.  Well done, Bowie Kuhn. Sub-Sidebar Alert – My Mom had the great idea to dress me as the “split-season” for Halloween.  It was creative, but let’s be clear.  There wasn’t ANYBODY who saw me on October 31, 1981 and had the slightest idea what my costume was. This year both the Milwaukee Brewers and the Houston Astros made the playoffs despite having losing records. The Brewers didn’t spend a day above .500 all season, so that doesn’t exactly scream PLAYOFF TEAM!  They hit .223 as a team, which would have been the lowest team batting average ever by a playoff team except that two other teams this year, the Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds, hit .220 and .212 respectively. The Reds get a special shout-out for managing to amass the WORST BATTING AVERAGE of any team in all of baseball this year.  And yet they made the playoffs.  And once they made the playoffs, man did they turn it on!  Wait, no, that’s not right, they actually scored ZERO runs in their entire series (22 innings) with Atlanta. That’s roughly the same amount they would have scored if they had filled their lineup with my 10-year old daughter and her best friends. None of which, might I add, have as of yet played professional baseball.

Still, let’s give baseball some props here.

For trying to make the best of an impossibly bad situation and generate as much fan interest as possible by expanding the playoff field (hopefully for just this one year) to 16 teams, which kept most of baseball in the hunt until the last couple weeks of September.  Plus, at the end of the day, the best team in each league made the World Series, and the best team won. That’s really all you can ask for as a sports fan.  Sidebar Alert Part 2 – I’m well aware that batting average is a terrible statistic to measure offensive efficiency. For anybody NOT yet convinced of that, consider that in a year when two teams with losing records made the postseason, 7 of the top 9 teams in the majors in Team Batting Average didn’t make the cut. Batting average is still a somewhat useful metric (it’s not WILDLY misleading like pitcher wins can be) but it’s not the go-to stat we all thought it was in 1979.

RED INK FOR… Some Weirdness 

Much of what a typical baseball fan might find most enjoyable about the game – action, balls-in-play, triples, stolen bases…has been pushed aside by advanced metrics which have taught us that 2 walks and a 3-run homer are a far surer path to success. Don’t blame the smart people who figured it out, just figure out a way to fix the problem.  Baseball has tweaked the rules dozens of time before, which is partially why there have been huge offensive eras (like the 1930’s) and pitcher-dominated eras (like the late 1960’s). I don’t know if the mound needs to be pushed back or lowered, rosters need to be shrunk down (so that each team doesn’t have 9 guys who can throw 100 miles per hour) or if we need to require that the decision maker for each franchise be approved by Harold Reynolds and Murry Chass (both of whom seem to believe that advancements in critical thinking about baseball stopped around 1983), but something has to be done. Die-hard fans like me will keep watching no matter what, but we’re getting older (or so my wife tells me), and the seemingly inevitable work stoppage coming after the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in 2021 sure won’t help the sport any. Bold actions are required.

But let’s also celebrate… 

The crazy stories that make baseball the game so many of us love.  Take Randy Arozarena for example.  The Rays’ star defected from Cuba, played in Mexico, signed with the Cardinals, and was included (not really featured either) in a trade to Tampa Bay in January.  Needless to say I had never heard of him until he decided it might be fun to be the best hitter in baseball for at least a few months, setting the all-time records for most homeruns and hits in a postseason. Try to imagine an NBA player you’ve never heard of suddenly throwing a team on its back and pulling it to the NBA Finals.  Not gonna happen. How about Will Smith hitting a game winning homerun off Will Smith in the NLCS?  How about the greatest Andy Griffith Show moment in sports history (there’s a top-10 list I need to work on), when Ryan Sherriff faced Chris Taylor in the World Series?  Let’s just say that Skip Caray would have approved.

FINAL GRADE

I’ll give baseball a solid B for 2020. 

The last image many people saw from the sport this year was Justin Turner, who was pulled from the last game in the 8^th inning with a late-arriving positive COVID test, coming back onto the field to celebrate with his teammates, basically ignoring the safety protocols which allowed the Dodgers to finally win their first championship in 32 years. So that’s not ideal. But if they find a way to get us a full season in 2021, and not cancel all of 2022 with a crippling labor dispute, I’ll consider retroactively raising the grade to a B+/A-.  Commissioner Manfred, please be in touch.