Jerry Campany: Baseball’s changes robbed sport of its spirit

The game’s own general managers call MLB’s postseason a crapshoot. Shoot, I call it mostly crap.

The most recent edition of the World Series crowned the Texas Rangers as champions for the first time over the Arizona Diamondbacks, making the second-best team in the America League West the ultimate victor. Arizona won the National League with a negative run differential and were 16 games behind the Dodgers.

Commissioner Rob Manfred learned at Bud Selig’s knee and had to be thrilled with the matchup before seeing the historically low television ratings. He was riding a wave with his new pitch clock and bigger bases, helping his owners scoop up their coveted cash by selling off the spirit of the game. Then, when his ‘piece of metal’ was up for grabs it all fell like a thud.

Before I was born in 1969, fans could rest assured that the best team in baseball always won the World Series. After the divisions were formed and the Miracle Mets somehow swept the Braves and ran over the Orioles, they were still a top five team and that was somehow acceptable. Now? Just get yourself into the top 12 of 30 after 162 games and hope to get hot and become the 2003 Marlins, 2019 Nationals or 2023 Rangers.

March Madness is great in college basketball and the NFL and NBA always seem to produce a worthy champion, but those sports are suited to a tournament. Baseball doesn’t work that way, the best team doesn’t always win. The best team especially doesn’t always win over a three-game series no matter whose field it is played on.

Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the forefathers set up an impossibly long summer of baseball every day for any reason other than more gate receipts, but it works and has always worked to separate the 2023 Pittsburgh Pirates (19-9 in April!) from the truly good teams. Your Gods created trees and mountain ranges, mine made a long baseball schedule and helped the evolution to 90 feet between bases.

I could stomach the fallacy of Ronald Acuna being celebrated for stealing nearly as many bases (73) as Brian Hunter’s 74 in 1997 despite closer bases and a crazy limit on pickoff throws. I could handle not knowing what television station or streaming service each day’s game was on. I even grinned and bore it when the Swoosh and an insurance company soiled the Yankees’ uniforms. But by the time September rolled around the fact that the mediocre Blue Jays and Mariners fighting for a playoff spot has replaced the real pennant races of the past like when the 1993 Giants fell a game short of the Braves despite 103 victories. To me, that was a real all-or-nothing pennant race. Selig introduced the wild card the very next year.

About the only positive that came from this year’s Fall Classic was that the field manager still matters.

Analytics folks have always had a thing against the manager, and they seemed to do everything they could to make the title meaningless. They stripped most of the strategy out of the game with the universal designated hitter and the most forward-thinking of them took the lineup card and pitching changes out of his hands. But the guy who usually makes less money than his utility infielder still makes a big difference.

A year after veteran Dusty Baker got it done with the Astros, Bruce Bochy celebrated for a fourth time. I can’t imagine an Ivy League number cruncher signing off on Jose Leclerc in the closer’s role, but who is going to tell Bochy no?

As a lifelong observer of the game, I believe that Bochy and Baker are on the short list of managers who are not called onto the carpet to defend their decisions against Deep Blue after nearly every game.

Baker, Terry Francona and Buck Showalter are gone, perhaps it is time for the sabermetricians to re-run their data on the value of a field manager when looking to hire. Art Howe was cast as the villain in movie Moneyball (but not in Michael Lewis’ book that it was based on), but recent trends say that an old-school baseball man like Howe is the way to go over a fresh-faced button pusher.

Or they can just work all year only to throw their hands up and call it a crapshoot.