Does the AL Central even deserve a playoff team?
By Josh Hill
No.
A common cliche used by fans hoping their team makes a surge towards the playoffs is that there’s still a lot of season left. October is four months away, but frustrations are already starting to bubble beneath the surface when it comes to what American League teams will make the postseason and what ones will be left out.
Specifically, which team will be proverbially breaking a lockerroom whiteboard as they watch an AL Central team march into the postseason fog?
For those not yet paying full attention to baseball, the AL Central sucks; there’s no flowery way to say it other than that. A division that once looked like it would, at the bare minimum, produce two strong playoff teams will now probably only produce one ‘meh’ division champion.
That’s going to piss off a lot of baseball fans on the West Coast.
A preseason prophecy by pundits was a formidable Wild Card foe for either Boston or New York would emerge from the Central. It now appears that team will come from the West, as it should. The problem isn’t in weeding out the AL Central’s Wild Card prospects, it’s that the winner of the division is going to take a spot of a team more deserving.
It’s very reminiscent of that year that NFC West was a tire fire (2010, for those who don’t know), with the Seattle Seahawks making the playoffs with a 7-9 record. The last game of the season was a nationally televised alley dash between Seattle and St. Louis to see what team would defy the gods and punch a playoff ticket without enough cash to pay for it. Seattle won and then hosted the Wild Card game as a division winner (a game it won over the reigning Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints, a game that gave birth to Beast Mode). That year the Buccaneers and Giants — both teams with records good enough to have won the West by three games — missed the playoffs.
That’s a frustration that fans in Seattle or Los Angeles might be feeling this year if things don’t turn around in the Central. As it stands now, 85-games seems like a pretty solid estimation of how many games it will take to win the division, a win-total that both the Angels and Mariners are on pace to surpass. Either the Indians, Tigers, or Twins winning the division with an 85-77 record isn’t as egregious as a 7-9 team hosting a playoff game, but it’ll sting.
Mike Trout needs to be under postseason lights for casual baseball fans to finally fawn over him the way die-hards have been this entire decade. His stardom is assumed and not experience; he’s the best player no one ever watches. Meanwhile, the Mariners haven’t made the postseason since their infamous 116-win season in 2001. Ending that drought — even if it results in a one-and-done appearance in October — is important to fans in Seattle.
That’s what is at stake. That’s why it would sting to see both of those teams do enough to get into the playoffs but get boxed out by someone from the AL Central.
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And this isn’t a call to realign the league or restructure how the playoffs should be seeded. It’s just to give context as to why there’s so much frustration in a few months when good teams miss the playoffs for slightly less good teams.