Baseball’s Integrity Is Even Longer

It was Mark Twain who said, “Some of my biggest worries never happened.”

But major league baseball is not buying. One of its biggest worries since the beginning of time has been that some unworthy team might one day wear the mantle of champion.

Look at the lengths the baseball guys went to guard against it. First of all, there was that season. It was 154 games long. No random sampling for them. When they picked a winner, they wanted it to stand up in the laboratory.

When the league expanded, people thought they might decrease the number of games played. Not baseball. It went to eight more--162.

Then, the powers that are put in five-game playoffs--and the purists needed smelling salts. The chances for a mediocre team on a roll to eliminate a classier contender seemed limitless to them, never mind that this putatively classless squad had prevailed over a 162-game season to get there in the first place.

Baseball was not like basketball, hockey or even football. Cinderella does not even make baseball’s specs. This is no glass-slipper sport. There are no wild-card teams in baseball’s Super Bowl.

Basketball plays 82 games to drive the ribbon clerks out--then lets the ribbon clerks back in. Only 3 of 11 teams are eliminated in one division, only 4 of 12 in another. Fourth-place teams have won the championship.

In hockey, the Stanley Cup is a lottery. And football has--to a baseball man--the obscenity of the wild card, i.e. , spit-in-the-ocean football. Coin-toss championships.

Baseball had built-in integrity. It didn’t pick its winner out of a hat. It picked it out of a caldron.

The game never recovered from the embarrassment of the strike year when the team with the best season record, Cincinnati, never even got into the postseason tournament. That’s a recurring nightmare with the grand old game.

As other sports quickly proved, integrity is expensive. Under the old rules, baseball has had some “races” that were over by Labor Day. Some say Mother’s Day. As it was last year in the American League East.

In the old Yankee hegemony, the Yankees used to clinch the pennant as early as Sept. 4, as they did in 1941. In 1936, they won the pennant by 19 1/2 games. In 1939, in a 154-game season, the St. Louis Browns finished 64 1/2 games behind the leading Yanks.

September was tilt month in old baseball. The weather was cold but the game was dead. You not only sold no tickets, you sold no papers or radio broadcasts. Baseball shrugged.

Baseball even tinkered periodically with the World Series. Best-four-out-of-seven was not considered enough of a test. They went to five-out-of-nine. In one of those years, 1919, they could have gone to best 99 out of 100, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Arnold Rothstein was not interested in the duration, that year, just the outcome.

Baseball even gets nervous when one team leaps into a dot-on-the-horizon lead as Detroit did last year with its 35-5 start. The bulk of the evidence suggests that only a very good team could ever do that, but baseball’s fear is that some team will win it unworthily by opening up a huge lead and then coasting in with inferior forces.

The only case in point that comes to mind is that of the 1970 Reds, who opened a huge lead on the strong right arm of pitcher Wayne Simpson, then had to back into the pennant when Simpson threw his arm out in the last half of the season.

When the pitchless Reds were able to win the postseason playoff that year, the game’s philosophers never trusted the five-game playoff again. It was a crapshoot, not a tournament.

Baseball is a game so fine, it is measured in decimals, in thousandths of a point. It’s not a game, it’s an equation. It hates to be settled by coincidence.

It fears assault by the freakish, even though that has rarely been a factor in the equation. The team that won the most consecutive games in history, the 1916 New York Giants with 26, not only didn’t even win the pennant, they finished fourth.

But baseball hates to take chances. The 1985 playoffs, and those following, will go to best-of-seven. The game cannot stand to see a 162-game season settled in less than a week.

At first blush, a simple addition of one win or two games does not seem that decisive. Unless you know baseball. Seven games permit the use of a star pitcher twice for sure, and maybe three times. History shows that great hitters may have four- or five-game slumps, but rarely more.

Does this detract from the World Series? Not for your genuine hard-shell baseball nut. He’s never really trusted the World Series, anyway, to tell the truth.

If he had his way, a World Series would be 154 games. I mean, what do you want--a real champion? Or a fairy tale?