Losing Is Good For You!

Don't get confused by the title, this isn't one of those things your parents, teachers and other respectable members of society are trying to tell you.  The whole "losing builds character" thing is fine, but since we write about real sports and real competitions where winning is everything, to hell with character!  Especially since we are talking about baseball, not saying that all baseball players are bad people, but look at the top two all time hits leaders!  One is banned from baseball for the rest of his life and the next is considered to be a disgrace to baseball despite being the leading vote-getter for the introductory class for the Hall of Fame, and is still the 4th leading vote-getter of all time.  I also hold the stiff belief that Barry Bonds was the best player I've seen in my life, possibly only being threatened by Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and the potential of a healthy Ken Griffey Jr.  So you know what, character is great and I have all the respect in the world for the Chipper Joneses and Derek Jeters of the world, but in some cases you don't need to be the best person to be successful in baseball.  Returning to my point, even though you don't need character and losing builds character, losing can be important in the right circumstances.  Namely, the Championship Series.

Because I respect my readers..

As you should know if you are reading this, the San Francisco Giants are once again the World Series champions, and since the last time I wrote about this topic it went on to be one of my most viewed blog posts ever, I'll see if lightning can strike twice.  They once again won on a great pitching staff, which this time DID include Barry Zito and his curve.  But I don't want to talk about the Giants winning, I'm slightly more interested in talking about the Tigers losing.  They quite possibly have 3 of the top 10 players in the league right now yet looked completely helpless for the entire series, which only lasted 4 games.  The hell of it was that the Tigers also were playing their best baseball of the year down the stretch.  Miguel Cabrera had a fantastic September that catapulted him from "this guy is having a quite good season" to "this guy is winning the Triple Crown" and his Triple Crown is still something I didn't expect to see for a long time.  Their pitching staff was streaking with Max Scherzer and Doug Fister each having awesome Septembers, as well as Verlander being himself.  They had just swept the Yankees in an ALCS that looked too easy.  Yet Despite all this they still looked useless at the bat against San Francisco.  This could, of course, be due to the fantastic pitching staff they have, but that wouldn't be as fun to talk about as why they failed.

"Woah! San Fran can cheer for me!"

Even before the series started I couldn't have helped but remember the 2007 Colorado Rockies, streaking down the stretch of the season to make the playoffs, then not losing a single game before falling to the Red Sox in the World Series.  A World Series in which they were outscored 29-10, although most of that deficit was caused by a 13-1 loss in game 1 to set the tone of the series.  Needless to say the Rockies did not win a single game that series.  Being both a Red Sox fan and a fan of baseball in general, this was an interesting time for me, because while the Rockies swept their NLCS against Arizona, the Red Sox took their sweet time dispatching Cleveland in all 7 games.  So while the Red Sox were gaining tons of momentum coming back to win a series they once trailed 3-1, the Rockies were just sitting there at home waiting to find out where they had to go for game 1, a period of 9 days where they had not taken part in any real competition.  Needless to say if they had any momentum that was helping them out through the playoffs, it was long gone.

Also a little help from umpires, perhaps?

 Are you starting to see the connections yet?  I was vaguely thinking about this at the start of the series, but as it went on it seemed to be more and more like deja vu, so I actually took the time to look at the past results of teams that had swept their 7 game Championship series.  Since the 7 game series was introduced in 1985 here is the exhaustive list of teams that have won it in 4 games. The 1988 Oakland Athletics, 1990 Oakland Athletics, 1995 Atlanta Braves, 2006 Detroit Tigers, 2007 Colorado Rockies and the 2012 Detroit Tigers.  Out of these 6 teams in the playoffs, they have combined for 6 wins in the World Series, (4 of those coming from the 1995 World Champion Atlanta Braves) and a total record of 6-22.  Needless to say, sweeping the Championship Series has not been a particularly good thing for teams that desire to win the World Series, no matter how counter-intuitive and backwards that may seem.  This is by no means saying that if you sweep the Championship Series, you are going to get destroyed in the World Series, but it is starting to look like a trend, so please, try to lose at least one game will ya?

By being less hasty of doing this, you can do this more often!

I do need to make sure that I give proper credit to the San Francisco Giants once again, they played a great series, and got some pretty great production out of all their players.  Congratulations to the San Francisco Giants, but don't get too soft the Dodgers are gonna be coming for you next year.  Speaking of next year, MLB Fan Cave look no further, I'm comin' for ya!