How the West Was Lost

Eleven years and eleven days ago, the Lords of Baseball missed an opportunity to do something about the debacle that is this year's National League West.

I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but stick with me here. On August 12th, 1994, the Major League Baseball Players' Association went on strike. In response, the owners locked the players out for what would eventually become the longest strike in professional baseball history, and in doing so, they locked themselves away from addressing an issue that could have been dealt with in the very first season of three-division/wild-card play: What happens if a "Division Winner" isn't even, well, a winner? What do you do if a division is so weak that the best team in it doesn't even have a winning record?

Of course, as you know, there were no official "Division Winners announced for the strike-shortened 1994 season. ESPN's Rob Neyer has argued that this is an injustice to those teams that held the lead when the strike occurred. Every other award for players and teams was given: Cy Young Awards, MVPs, Silver Sluggers, Gold Gloves, and etc. Why not Division winners? For one thing, it would screw up the "XX consecutive division titles" mantra of both Atlanta Braves fans and enemies all over the world. Of course they couldn't possibly have known at the time that the Braves would reel off another ten (maybe eleven?) straight division titles after the 1994 season, so it's hard to imagine that this had anything to do with the decision not to name 1994 division champions.

Another possibility for this decision may have to do with Montreal. The Expos had the best record in baseball at the time the strike hit, 74-40, a healthy six-game lead on the Braves. However, even then, and even with their success, the Expos ownership was trying to find a way to get out of Montreal, and hanging a name like "Division Champion" on a team sure has a way of making it seem like such a move is unnecessary, you know? I can't say with any certainty that there was some sort of conspiracy here. Again, the owners and those in charge of MLB, including Acting-Commissioner-For-Life Bud Selig, couldn't have known exactly what a laughingstock the Expos franchise would eventually become. Nor could they have known just how severely the owners would screw up the situation before resolving it, if indeed moving the team to a city that has already lost two other franchises can be called a "resolution'. Still, it's worth considering the possibility that MLB had a vested interest in making sure that Montreal did not officially "win" its division, if only because it would make it that much harder to move the franchise later.

The most likely reason that MLB did not announce 1994 Division Champions is the most obvious, least subversive, and possibly the worst reason of all: Laziness. They had a big issue to address with the Texas Rangers, a bad team that "won" its division despite a losing record, and rather than deal with that issue by creating a rule stating that a team has to have a winning record to get into the playoffs or something like that, they simply brushed it off. They considered it a fluke, and joked, "When will that ever happen again?"

The answer to that question, of course, is "ten years later", in the 2005 NL West.

A quick perusal of the 1994 AL Division standings will show you that the Yankees led the East, the White Sox led the Central, and the Texas Rangers, with a 52-62 record, led the West. The Rangers held that lead very tenuously, with only a one-game margin over Oakland and two games over Seattle. Texas had played only 2-7 in August, so that bad stretch represented half of their sub-.500 deficit alone, and a decent finish to the month might have brought them back to respectability. But Oakland had also had a rough time in the dog days of summer, going 4-7 in August after two consecutive winning months, and Texas couldn't capitalize on Oakland's poor play. Seattle was red-hot in August of '94, with a 9-1 record, but that followed a seven-game losing streak, so it's hard to imagine that they would have put a run together. California had barely won 40% of its games, and would have been in last place in five of six divisions in major league baseball, so despite their relatively small 5.5 game deficit, they could not have been considered contenders in any sense of the word.

So it was Texas who was "winning" the American League West when disaster struck and thoughtless greed robbed us of lots and lots of baseball games, as well as pennants and pennant winners. The Rangers had a decent but flawed offense, with perennial All-Stars Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez, Jose Canseco, and other role players helping them score the 5th most runs in the American League. The pitching, however, was another story entirely, perhaps even another genre of story, though I can't decide whether it would be considered comedy or tragedy.

Kevin Brown and Kenny Rogers, both solid starters with roughly league-average ERAs, with a combined record of 18-17 and an ERA of almost 5.00, "anchored" the rotation, the rest of which was a mess. In their desperation, the Rangers turned to a lot of youngsters and rookies. Someone named Hector Fajardo (23) went 5-7 with a 6.91 ERA and 23-year old rookie Rick (s)Helling took a lot of them, as his 5.88 ERA, would attest. Rookie John Dettmer (24) posted an ERA half a run better than the AL average in nine starts, but somehow went 0-6. Steve Dryer (24) compiled a 5.71 ERA in his five games. Roger Pavlik (26) amazingly managed to stay in the rotation for 11 starts despite a 7.69 ERA. Brian Bohannon (25) posted a 7.23 ERA in five starts and six relief appearances, and was permitted to leave as a free agent after the '94 season despite his status as a former first-round pick for Texas.

They got starts from re-treads Rick Reed (5.94 ERA), Bruce Hurst (7.11), Jack Armstrong (3.60 in only two games), and even Tim Leary (8.14), who was dead at the time, I think. Leary, Dreyer, Hurst, and Armstrong never again pitched in the majors after 1994, and Fajardo and Dettmer were done after cups of coffee 1995. Rick Reed was desperate enough to cross the picket lines in 1995, and eventually fashioned himself a career as a "poor man's Greg Maddux", but could do little to help the '94 Rangers.

In the bullpen, closer Tom Henke was OK, and Darren Oliver was a decent reliever as a rookie, but Matt Whiteside, Cris Carpenter and Jay Howell all had ERAs over 5.00 while carrying the bulk of the bullpen workload, and 40-year old Rick Honeycutt was hardly the LOOGY the Rangers thought they were getting when they signed him in the off season. His ERA skyrocketed from 2.81 in 42 innings in 1993 to 7.20 in 25 innings in 1994. Not surprisingly, the Rangers allowed him to return to Oakland as a free agent after the season.

All of this is just a long-winded way of showing that the 1994 Texas Rangers, with the second to worst team ERA in the AL, were not a good team in any respect. Their decent offense and horrendous pitching put them in a category not unlike, well, this year's Texas Rangers. The 2005 version of the team is currently ranked 11th in team ERA and third in runs scored, which makes them slightly better than their ancestors of eleven seasons ago in both respects. But this year's team is 58-66, and rightfully sits well out of contention for anything, 13.5 games behind Anaheim for the AL West division lead and 11 games behind the Yankees and Indians for the Wild Card lead.

But the 2005 Padres? San Diego has not been above .500 since August 12th, eleven years to the day that the aforementioned strike began, when they were 58-57. They have not been more than two games over .500 since July 22, when they were in the midst of losing eight in a row and 12 of 13. It's not as though they've just had bad luck or lost a lot of close games. (In fact they're 22-12 in 1-run games.) But their expected win-loss record based on the runs they've scored and allowed is 58-66, three games worse than their actual record. So in a backwards sort of way, the Padres have actually been lucky, or at least fortunate.

They've also been lucky that all of their competition for the NL West division title has gone down the tubes. Barry Bonds has been hurt all season, and Jason Schmidt has not been himself when he has been healthy enough to pitch, so the Giants have not been above .500 since May 25th, when they were 23-22. The Dodgers have had numerous injuries as well, and have not see the mediocrity mark since mid-June. Arizona has improved tremendously since 2004, but is still five games behind the lackluster Padres. With a mediocre offense and terrible pitching, the Diamondbacks don't appear to have enough venom in their sac to really hurt anyone down the stretch, much less to win the division.

So it's up to San Diego, a team that can't win consistently. A team that would most appropriately be described as mediocre, at best. A team that might finish the regular season with a losing record and still win the World Series. Back when divisional play started in 1969, this was the argument of some of the old-school types who wanted to maintain the tradition of having only one team from each league get into the playoffs, which would guarantee that the League Champions would not have losing records. Similarly, when the three-division format was proposed for 1994, it was argued that the chances of a losing team entering the playoffs would be increased, and indeed they were.

That very first year, a bad Texas team was in fact winning its division when the strike hit in mid-August. And that team was not one or two games under .500 like the Padres are right now, but ten games under .500, and unlikely to improve much down the stretch. Of course, MLB had some pretty big problems on its hands already, namely how to get the players and owners to agree on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, and consequently, how to get the players to in fact play. To their credit, they resolved that issue, though it took them more than half a year to do so.

But they missed an opportunity to address the issue of a losing team winning its division. They could have, and certainly should have instituted a rule stating that if a team finishes atop its division without at least a .500 record, that team would not make the playoffs and would be replaced by the team with the best record that was not otherwise going to make the playoffs, either by winning its division or the Wild Card. It seems a little silly, I suppose, to say that a team can play an entire season, finish it with the best record among its divisional rivals, and not make the playoffs, but doesn't it seem even more silly to say that a team that lost more games than it won should get into the playoffs due to geography rather than baseball prowess, while teams with winning records watch the playoffs from home?

And if so, it would certainly be beyond silly, perhaps ridiculous, if that team were to happen to get hot in October and win the World Series. It's not out of the realm of possibility, either. Since the three-division format started, four of the ten World Series victories have gone to Wild Card teams, teams that did not win their own division, and two other Wild Card teams have gotten into the World Series. All it would take is to hot pitchers and a little luck, and we could be blessed with the first ever World Champion Loser.

We've got six weeks to see whether my suspicions are realized, but mark my words: if the Padres win the NL West with a losing record, there will be outrage among baseball fans, and not just the old-school and purists either. And if San Diego should catch lightning in a bottle for two weeks and end up winning the World Series, the Commissioner and his cronies will be forced to finally address the issue, lest they become irrelevant and baseball become, well, hockey.