This Season, the Possibilities Are Incredible

Let the amazement begin.

Perhaps the only thing we know about baseball in the 1980s is that we don’t know anything. There’s never been a decade remotely like this one for total absence of logical form.

Every season, predictions make no sense. Division champions almost never repeat--only two of 28 teams. That means the suicide rate among defenders is 93% in this decade. In fact, in one of baseball’s most incredible statistics, exactly half of the division winners in the ‘80s have been losing teams the next year. Yes, 14 of 28, including six of the last eight.

Conversely, clubs routinely win flags the season after being awful. Already in the ‘80s, 11 teams have come from the second division or below .500 to reach the playoffs.

No record is safe. A rookie like Mark McGwire might hit 49 home runs. A 20-year-old like Dwight Gooden might have a 1.53 earned-run average. Rickey Henderson might steal 130 bases, while Vince Coleman might steal more than 100 bases in each of his first three seasons. A 225-pound shortstop might not miss an inning for almost six consecutive years--until his father, the manager, benches him.

Could a kid pitcher strike out 20 men in a game and finish 20 games over .500 in the same year? Roger Clemens could; and he could back it up with another Cy Young Award. A batter like George Brett might hit .390, then suddenly discover that a youngster who’d worshipped him named Wade Boggs would surpass him--building a career average of .354 after six seasons, including four silver bats.

Who dreamed a player might hit 50 homers and steal 50 bases? Yet few doubt that Eric Davis might do it someday. Could McGwire and his teammates Jose Canseco and Dave Parker hit more home runs than any trio in history? Don’t tell them they can’t, since they weigh in together at more than 700 pounds.

These days, no team is too lousy to find itself in the World Series. And then win. You can be outscored for the entire season and wake up Christmas morning as a world champion. Ask the Twins. Can a grumpy rookie manager, who wears sunglasses indoors, accomplish in one season what Gene Mauch couldn’t do in 26--win a pennant. Darn right. And grab a Series, too. That is, if he’s Tom Kelly, whom Don Baylor calls, “One of the weirdest people I’ve ever met in baseball.”

No postseason deficit is too steep in this wacko era. Trailing in the playoffs or Series by 2-0 in games, or even 3-1, hardly seems worthy of notice. In the ‘80s, more teams have won from that position than have lost. You see, what was once miraculous is now the rule. No September lead is safe, either. If the Toronto Blue Jays need to lose their last seven games to blow a division flag, then watch out below; the Phillies have company now.

We’ve reached the point where no player is too old to go on forever and break the-Lord-knows-what career mark. Pete Rose can catch Ty Cobb in hits. Don Sutton, Phil Niekro and, who knows, maybe even old rebuilt Tommy John, can win 300 games. If he keeps eating his vegetables and losing close games, Nolan Ryan might yet strike out 5,000 batters and finish under .500 lifetime. How could a 37-year-old catcher hit 37 homers? Carlton Fisk did it; now, at 41, he’s still squatting. Creaky Bob Boone may not hold the all-time record for games caught for very long.

Except for a couple of dozen perennials--like the incredibly underrated Mike Schmidt, who’s hit 35 homers in 11 of the last 14 seasons--most players have more trouble producing consistent year-to-year statistics than at any time in history. Rick Sutcliffe might be pitcher of the decade in a symbolic sense. How do you have sequential seasons of 17-10, 3-9, 2-2, 14-8, 17-11, 20-6, 8-8, 5-14, 18-10? Go on, explain it. Dare ya.

Each season brings a new wave of stupefyingly talented phenoms, half of whom burn out or level out over the next couple of years. Goodby, Storm Davis. Hello, Don Mattingly, who’s proved he really is the next Stan Musial. Except Musial never homered in eight straight games or had six grand slams in a year as The Don did in ’87.

Law of Improbability Rules

Every new campaign brings with it players of such improbable heroism that we stop wondering where the magic might end. If Dennis Lamp can go 11-0 to help the Blue Jays win a division, if Aurelio Lopez can be 10-1 for a Tiger titlist, then what player--what invisible Buddy Biancalana--is so humble that we could forbid him from dreaming?

Baseball no longer conforms to any laws--except those of hindsight. No age in baseball history ever needed the “Elias Analyst” or the “Bill James Abstract” more. Only in the rear-view window, does everything make sense. Well, a little sense. Or, at least, no longer seem utterly impossible. For instance, who thought baseball would ever see a season when 51 players hit 20 or more home runs and seven teams would have 190 or more homers. Yeah, and that’s just in the American League last year.

Mere anarchy has been loosed upon the baseball world and, so far, nobody is complaining. Attendance records fall every season. Average salaries of $400,000 a player don’t force anybody out of business. Who guessed that illegal collusion by owners would be the game’s ideal, if temporary, route to a healthy fiscal balance. Drug scandals and strikes are forgotten like yesterday’s political kiss-and-tell spreads.

No level of foolishness is any longer impossible. Did George Steinbrenner really hire Billy Martin a fifth time as his manager? Did the rules committee attempt to enlarge the strike zone by shrinking it? You bet.

We’ve got strip searches for emery boards at the mound and bats being sawed to bits by umpires searching for contraband cork. We’ve got domed stadia with 110-decibel volume where wild-eyed P.A. men play Tarzan screams and locomotive wails in mid-inning. And the commissioner allows it. Get out your Homer Hankies and do The Wave. Whoever thought we’d see the day.

Whoever, indeed. Night games in Wrigley Field and $2.5 million salaries. The Dodgers buying talent because their farm system has run dry and the Baltimore Orioles giving up more home runs than any team in history--including 10 in one game. Buzzy Bavasi and Jim Palmer, please, phone home.

If two brothers can start in the same infield with their father as manager, then what is beyond the odds? Nobody dreamed that the St. Louis Cardinals, so close to a world title in 1987, would ever part with that season’s most productive offensive player--Jack Clark. Yet they let him go free agent to the Yankees without so much as a serious contract offer. Along the same incredible lines, New England still can’t believe that Lee Smith is really a Red Sox.

For the past five months, baseball fans have been gazing ahead and fan-tasizing. Perhaps even picking their rotisserie league teams. Forget it. Nobody figures out anything in advance any more. You sit back, jaw slack, and watch the goofiness unfold. Will Pascual (Expressway) Perez go 1-13, then disappear for a year, only to come back and go 7-0. Why not?

This is baseball’s age of the preposterous. After you’ve seen the Tigers win the AL East by picking up Doyle (9-0) Alexander on the cheap, you’ll believe anything. And most teams do. The Yankees think they can win a pennant with a rotation whose returning workhorse (most innings in ‘87) is Tommy John--soon to be 45. The Red Sox’s key pitching figure is Oil Can Boyd--who won one game last year. The Orioles think they’ll get back above .500 with three pitchers named Messa, Bautista and Peraza--not one of whom ever has pitched an inning at the Triple-A level.

It’s silly season all right. What bizarre behavior will befall us this season? Could Dennis Eckersley move to Oakland, become a relief pitcher and strike out 113 men in 116 innings while walking only 17? Could Ryan, at age 40, strike out more batters per nine innings than anybody in history? Could a general manager named Thrift turn the Pirates into a decent team while hardly spending a dime?

Oh, sorry, all of that happened last season.

Once, baseball was America’s stodgy, predictable game. Not anymore. Now, we never know what’s next. Except that, when it gets here, we probably won’t even know how to pronounce its name.