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believe it or not, this is all a result of computers.
once upon a time, winning the pennant was a huge distinction. with 8 teams per league, no divisions, it was easy to tell who was the league champ and it meant something.
expansion brought on divisions. suddenly there were 2 champs per league. but that's ok - you still had to be the best out of 6 or 7 to win your division.
then there were 3 divisions per league. suddenly, there were teams that not only had to beat just 3 teams to make the playoffs - there was 1 team per league that didn't have to beat anybody!
yeah. so what does that all have to do with computers?
well. once upon a time players looked at the money they received for making the playoffs - which they still receive, by the way - as a huge addition to their income. even in the 60s the yankees still negotiated with their players, telling them they could count on a world series share.
now, it's a joke. they use it to buy a spare robot for their neighbor's kids. they use it to buy different color covers for their pools, so that no matter what mood they're in during the winter, their pool reflects it.
players get compensated regardless of how successful they are. let me rephrase that: players get compensated regardless of how successful their team is. why is this? well, quite simply, because it is so overwhelmingly prevalent to measure a player's contribution in terms of pure statistics, as opposed to his contribution to winning, that nothing else, including winning, matters. not to how the players earn their living.
and that's letting alone the truth that many of us feel - that contribution as measured by statistics is not nearly as obvious as some people think. take the case in point of today's (tuesday's) new york post article comparing garret anderson to...carl yastrzemski?
anyway. computers made it possible to differentiate players on a new level. yes, there were statistics before computers, and plenty of them. but i don't know how many people realize that the baseball encyclopedia didn't exist until 1969.
why not? no computers. look at a copy of the baseball encyclopedia. it says so, right there in the preface.
player salaries have escalated because statistics have been turned into the primary tool used to measure value. in turn, the escalation in player salaries has made winning less relevant, as has the weakening of the playoffs through expansion.
because it means nothing to a player to win a pennant, and because you can win a pennant without being the best team in your league, and because teams are measured not by how good the team is, but how good the players are on the team, you've now proceeded to a world where the only thing that matters, besides money, is winning the world series. and at the start of october, more than one quarter of all baseball teams still have a chance to do that. which makes it not all that special, in my book.
all i can say is, bring back pennant races. baseball once had something over the NBA, the NFL - winning your league meant something. now it means nothing.
and that's why the world series means less every year.
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