Total Baseball (1994 Edition)/Total_Baseball_1994_Edition_Creative_Multimedia_1994.iso/dp/0006/00060.txt

Text File | 1994-02-14 | 9KB | 150 lines

$Unique_ID{BAS00060}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Postseason Play:  Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{
Ivor-Campbell, Frederick}
$Subject{Postseason Play World Series League Champion POS AVG G AB R H 2B 3B
HR RB BB SB W L ERA GS CG SHO SV IP ER SO}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  The Highlights of the Game


Postseason Play:  Introduction

Frederick Ivor-Campbell


     As we all know, major-league baseball doesn't end with the end of the
season. There follows the postseason--the League Championship Series and the
World Series--when even the most casual fan is stirred to follow the games
which determine, eventually, the world's best team.
     Once there was much more baseball played in the postseason. In the
1880s, for example, nearly every major-league club played a couple of weeks of
postseason games, generally exhibitions against clubs they didn't face during
the regular season--like teams from the other major league, or a minor league.
     Before there was a World Series there were city and regional series. In
1882 Cleveland defeated Cincinnati for the championship of Ohio, and the next
year teams in Philadelphia and New York played for the championships of those
cities. These were informal series, arranged by the clubs themselves without
official league sanction, and varied in the number of games scheduled
according to the desires of the clubs involved.
     The same held true for the early World Series, which had their beginnings
in 1884. Two years earlier, the champions of the National League and the
brand-new American Association played a pair of postseason contests (in which
each team recorded a shutout against the other). Some would like to call
these games the first World Series, but no one in 1882 saw them as more than
exhibition games. In fact, because the NL didn't yet recognize the legitimacy
of the AA and forbade its clubs to play those of the new league, the NL
champion Chicago White Stockings had to release their players from their
season contracts so they could face AA champion Cincinnati as technically
independent players.
     That winter the two major leagues made their peace, and although a
proposed series between the 1883 NL and AA titlists was called off, the 1884
champion Providence Grays (NL) and the Metropolitan Club of New York (AA)
played three games "for the championship of the United States." The winning
Grays were acclaimed in the press as "champions of the world," and the World
Series was born.
     The brief 1884 Series set the stage for more elaborate World Series to
follow. From 1885 through 1890 the NL and AA pennant-winners met in Series
that ranged in length from six games to 15.
     The demise of the AA after the 1891 season caused a one-year gap in World
Series play. When the National League expanded from eight clubs to twelve the
next year (by absorbing four teams from the defunct AA), it divided the
regular season into two halves, with the first-half winner playing the winner
of the second half for the world title. Boston defeated Cleveland in the
first official World Series, but the unpopular divided season was not repeated
(that is, until the strike year of 1981).
     Two years later a new World Series scheme was devised when one William C.
Temple offered a prize cup to the winner of a postseason series between the
first- and second-place finishers in the NL. For four years these
best-of-seven Temple Cup games served as the officially recognized world
championship. But by the end of four lopsided Series (only one of which was
won by the pennant-winning club), fan interest--never robust--had declined so
much that the trophy was returned to its donor and the series abandoned.
     In 1900, partisans of second-place Pittsburgh felt that their Pirates
were the equal of pennant-winning Brooklyn, and a Pittsburgh newspaper, the
Chronicle-Telegraph, offered a silver trophy cup to the winner of a
best-of-five series between the clubs, to be played entirely in Pittsburgh.
Described in the press as the "world's championship series," the games
confirmed the superiority of Brooklyn's Superbas, who needed only four games
to subdue the hometown Pirates.
     The upgrading of the American League from minor- to major-league status
in 1901 made a return to interleague World Series play theoretically possible,
but it was not until after the NL and AL had made peace in 1903 that the first
modern Series was contested. The owners of NL champion Pittsburgh and AL
champion Boston arranged a best-of-nine postseason Series in 1903, which
proved both popular and financially successful--a firm foundation for future
Series. When the NL pennant-winning Giants refused to meet repeating AL
titlist Boston in 1904, press and fan disappointment led baseball's National
Commission to establish the World Series officially and permanently in 1905.
     The end of the 1903 season saw not only the first modern World Series,
but also a revival of city and regional series (which had lapsed when the AA
folded) in Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Ohio. In 1905 the National
Commission offered to oversee these series, too, and give them the stability
of official sanction. Until the manpower needs of the World War halted the
1918 season a month early (discouraging postseason play apart from the World
Series), most of the city and regional series--and occasional series between
other clubs, like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and the Boston Red Sox and New
York Giants--were played under National Commission auspices.
     After the war's end, only Chicago's Cubs and White Sox resumed a city
series; they played 16 series between 1921 and 1942, when World War II
intervened. For 26 years thereafter the World Series alone remained of the
once multifaceted major-league postseason--until the AL and NL split into two
divisions each in 1969 and ushered in a new layer of playoffs: the League
Championship Series. (In 1981, to recoup some of the money and fan interest
lost during a midseason players' strike that split the season in half, a
one-time third layer of postseason playoffs was added, pitting the first-half
and second-half winners in each division against each other for the division
titles--an aberration that made even more of a mockery of the divisional races
than the strike itself had done.) From 1969 through 1984 the LCS were played
as best-of-five series, but in 1985 they were expanded to match the
best-of-seven World Series.
     In 1993, the club owners voted to realign each league into three
divisions--East, Central, and West--and to install a preliminary layer of
playoffs for each league. The three divisional champions and the second-place
team with the best record would determine, through a pair of best-of-three
series, which two teams would compete for the pennant in the League
Championship Series.

Key to the Statistics

     The statistics in this section of Total Baseball are standard--there is
little point in applying newer analytical measures to performances that run to
seven games or fewer. We do offer, however, stats that were not standard at
the time, such as earned run averages for years before 1912 and runs batted in
before 1920 (which were determined from box scores and play-by-plays) and
saves before 1969. Beyond our powers of reconstruction were the following:
runs batted in for the World Series of 1884 and 1885; stolen bases for 1884
and 1885; and batter strikeouts for 1885.
     Ignoring the odd 1887 custom of counting walks as base hits, we present
the cumulative box score for that year's World Series in accordance with
modern practice. Other curiosities of early postseason play include the use
of neutral sites for some games in 1885 and 1888 and for the majority of games
in 1887, and the use of players who did not appear in so much as an inning for
that team during the regular season (Tom Forster, New York Mets, 1884; Bug
Holliday, Chicago, 1885; Sy Sutcliffe, Detroit, 1887; Jumbo Davis, Brooklyn
1889).
     The length of the World Series varied from three games in 1884 all the
way up to fifteen in 1887 and ten the following year. The best-of-seven
format came in with the Temple Cup Series of 1894 and has been the norm for
World Series ever since (excepting 1900, 1903, and 1919-1921). In recent
years this format has become the norm for League Championship Series as well.
     If a player appeared at more than one position during the Series, the
number of games he played at each is noted (for example, a man who divided
seven games at shortstop and third base would carry the notation ss-4, 3b-3).
Other abbreviations are as follows:

POS  Position                      SB   Stolen Bases
AVG  Batting average               W    Wins
G    Games                         L    Losses
AB   At bats                       ERA  Earned run average
R    Runs                          GS   Games started
H    Hits                          CG   Complete games
2B   Doubles                       SHO  Shutouts
3B   Triples                       SV   Saves
HR   Home runs                     IP   Innings pitched
RB   Runs batted in                ER   Earned runs
BB   Bases on Balls                SO   Strikeouts