Elimination Baseball is the Best Baseball
Yankees/Indians should be a treat
Like many, I grew up watching baseball and breathlessly cheering for my favorite team (the New York Yankees). For my 10, 11, and 12-year-old self, nothing could compare to the excitement and drama of October baseball. And as a Yankees fan, I expected that my team deserved to be the postseason every year. I was cheering for my team, yes, but I also understood that way that playoff baseball can captivate people, and that appeal has never left me.
Tonight, the Yankees and Indians will play in a pivotal game five of the ALDS. Both teams have won a game by a wide margin and won a game by a slim margin (conversely losing two games by the same marks). Thus, even though New York came charging back from an 0–2 deficit to reach this point, this series doesn’t really have the feel of a blown lead or a mismatch of any kind. Both teams look and feel closely matched, even if Cleveland arguably has the better roster.
Tonight’s contest features two of the best teams in the playoffs, and it’s one of the best showcases for playoff baseball since last year’s World Series. Both teams have superstar talent: Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, Corey Kluber, and Andrew Miller are just a few of the names that will show up on televisions across the nation tonight. Perhaps even more impressively though, both teams are just good. Cleveland’s Pythagorean win-loss record stands at 108 for the season; New York is only a little less impressive at 100. The Los Angeles Dodgers set the world on fire until their end-of-season slump, but New York and Cleveland have both had excellent years as well.
One of baseball’s greatest strengths (or weaknesses, depending on the point of view) is playoff unpredictability. This makes for exciting sagas where an underdog wild-card team can fight through the best teams in the league, but it also means that those best teams often don’t make it far in the playoffs. New York and Cleveland are two of the best in either league, and Houston — waiting for the winner — is of equal caliber. Major League Baseball is probably happy that the Yankees won the wild-card game from a ratings perspective, but many observers are happy that one of the league’s best didn’t get wiped our by a sub-par Twins team in the first round as well.
If you’ve read this far, and if you love baseball, you probably don’t need me to sell you on the merits of elimination baseball games. The constant tension, the roaring ballparks, and the intense celebrations are all reason enough to tune in tonight. Baseball isn’t guaranteed this level of drama on a year-to-year basis though, and certainly not in the first round. Yankees/Indians is already easily the most entertaining of the four division series match-ups, and tonight both teams settle in to cap off an already-memorable battle.
I can’t wait to watch.
