Chaos, Clutch Hits and Chess Moves

Your daily dose of postseason baseball here on JoeBlogs!

Jackson Chourio—who, we were reminded at least 5,000 times during the day, isn’t even old enough to buy a drink!—prevented another first-round bloodbath, A.J. Hinch is a genius again, something has gone haywire with the Orioles, Atlanta’s season is mercifully over, and I try to get to the bottom of why I so deeply dislike the new win probability scoreboard on ESPN’s coverage.

All in today’s baseball installment on JoeBlogs!

Reminder: This week, we’re having a JoeBlogs sale…

We Finally Got a Game 3!

I wonder if there’s something fundamentally wrong with three-game baseball playoff series. I mean, of course there’s something wrong with them as baseball deciders, since three-game playoffs are utter crapshoots. We know this instinctively—ANY TEAM can take two out of three from ANY TEAM at ANY TIME. If the White Sox and Dodgers played a three-game series, the White Sox could absolutely take two out of three. Analysts would lose their minds, call it the biggest upset in the history of upsets or whatever… but we know as baseball fans that it not only could happen, but very likely would happen much more often than we’d like. Baseball, in small samples like this, is an utter crapshoot.*

*Football, I suspect, is less so. If last year’s Kansas City Chiefs played last year’s Carolina Panthers in a playoff game 10 times, I predict they’d win all 10. One of the games might be close.

I’m actually coming around to the idea that three-game series are utterly pointless… and they should just switch to one-game wild-card playoffs.

I have three reasons for thinking this: