Royals Review · Oct 21, 2022
Lesky’s Notes: Go National League Team!
The postseason is an overreactor’s dream. On the National League side, there were three 100-win teams entering the tournament and all three were eliminated in their first series. The Padres took down two of them and the Phillies the other, so now they’re battling for the right to go to the World Series. Of course, that led to all sorts of conversations about the regular season being meaningless now and all of that. And yes, expanding the postseason dilutes the regular season and reduces teams who were dominant over the long season to a short series where anything can happen. But that’s always been the case. The best team to start the postseason has reached the World Series in either league nine times since 2010. That’s 12 postseasons. In only two of them did the best team make it from both leagues. I also found it interesting when the team with the better record found themselves on the winning end of three of the first four AL series and nobody mentioned that. The point is that the playoffs are a crapshoot. There is a degree of luck with every single champion. It’s gotten harder with more teams and it will continue to get harder when they add two more in a few years because you know they will. The only thing we need to focus on as a country is to root for anyone but the Astros and Yankees.