Pennant Races

From Espn.com today:

"The Boston Red Sox fired manager Bobby Valentine on Thursday, one day after completing the franchise's worst season in nearly five decades." 

(Inventor of the Wrap Sandwich)

I knew in April this wasn't going to be a good season for us but didn't realize how increasingly awful it would become.  It felt odd to root for Tampa and Baltimore to beat the Sox in the September series.

Good season though.  A Triple Crown winner (Cabrera), a history-making rookie (Trout), the RA Dickey story and lots more, including "That's A Clown Question, Bro!".  And who would have bet that Washington, Baltimore and Oakland would all make the playoffs with the Nationals having the best record in baseball and the Athletics winning their division (I thought they would lose 100 games)?

Big streaks in the second half, both bad (Pirates, Indians, Mets) and good (Athletics, Chase Headley of the Padres, Buster Posey).

I was recently looking at some old pennant races (thank goodness for Baseball-Reference.com), in particular the famous 1908 National League race which gained its notoriety for the late season tie game between the Cubs and Giants when Fred Merkle failed to touch second base on what should have been the game-winning hit.   This forced a final makeup game at the Polo Grounds which the Cubs won to take the pennant.  They went on to the win the World Series for the last time in Cubs history.

What I hadn't realized until I looked at the entire season was that from mid-August to the end of the season, in a three team race between the Cubs, Giants and Pirates, all three clubs played torrid winning baseball.  Collectively from August 16 on they went 111-41!  If you eliminate their games against each other, they were 91-21 against the other five teams in the league.

Pittsburgh, which was in first on August 16, went 34-17 afterwards which would normally assure a pennant yet finished one game out.
(Honus Wagner, best all-round player in baseball (1900-10))

The New York Giants won 37 out of 52 and also finished one game behind.
(37 game winner Christy Mathewson)

The Chicago Cubs went 40-9, coming from 6 behind to win the pennant.
(Three Finger Brown who beat Mathewson in the final game)

The American League race that year was just as good featuring a four team race for most of the season between the Detroit Tigers, Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and St Louis Browns (the Browns finally dropped off the pace in the last two weeks).  The Tigers won by a half game over the Indians and 1 1/2 over the White Sox.

The race also featured two of the greatest clutch pitching performances in baseball history.  On October 2, 1908, Addie Joss of the Indians was matched against Big Ed Walsh of the White Sox.  Big Ed had kept the Sox in contention till that point winning 40 games (46% of all of their(Ed Walsh) wins in 1908).  Walsh pitched(Addie Joss) great that day, giving up only 4 hits, striking out 15 and issuing no walks.  Joss was even better - he tossed a perfect game to win 1-0 on a White Sox error in the third inning.  Addie was a ground ball pitcher with great control and only threw 74 pitches in entire game.

If you look at the final American League standings you'll notice something odd:
                    W    L
Detroit        90    63   --
Cleveland   90    64   0.5
Chicago      88    64   1.5

That's right - two of the three teams did not play all 154 games and Cleveland finished a half game out.  Today this would not be allowed and the missing games would be played.  Detroit's game was against the Washington Senators and Chicago's games were against the Senators and Browns.  If Detroit lost it's game it would have fallen into a tie with the Indians triggering a playoff.  If Detroit lost and the White Sox won both their games the season would have ended in a three-way tie!   Good thing they didn't have Sports Talk radio back then.