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A problem with
regularity
Posted: Wed August 12,
1998
Early on, the season was referred to as: "the
season." I do not know exactly when, but at some
point, "the season" became: "the regular
season."
While I don't know exactly when this was, it was obviously
at a time when regular had very positive, even superior
meanings. You could not say anything better about a fellow
than that he was "a regular guy." The people who
defended us were "the regular
army." The regular season was a fine thing, something
to
admire.
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Unfortunately, David Wells and the Yankees will be remembered more for what they do in the playoffs than for their splendid regular season.
(David Seelig)
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All this has changed, of course. Whatever the sport, with
the proliferation of playoffs, the regular season has
become only a necessary evil for teams, sort of an extended
first round of the playoffs. "Regular" itself has
come to mean ordinary or
typical, more than anything else—"you want your coffee
regular, hon?"—except in its most common usage,
which is in commercials for
laxatives.
This has become especially important this baseball regular
season, because the Yankees have turned out to be a
veritable juggernaut, absolutely on a roll, where they are
winning almost three games out of every four. This is an
extraordinary performance
in the sport of baseball—so good, in fact, that the
Yankees could very well put up the best major league record
in 92 years, since the Chicago Cubs of l906 (116-36). This
has not only caught everybody by surprise—most of the
experts didn't even expect
New York to win its division, let alone contrive to dance with
history—but also it confuses everybody, even the
Yankees
themselves.
Nobody, you see, can any longer take anything that occurs
in the regular season altogether seriously. For that
matter, it's almost a jinx to talk about how good the
Yankees may be, because no matter how good their
regular-season record, what does that
matter if they lose in the playoffs?
This happens rather often, too. Those l906 Cubbies, for
example, lost decisively in the World Series and are now
known only in poetry, inasmuch as their double-play
combination was Tinker to Evers to Chance. The Cleveland
Indians of l954 had the best
postwar regular-season record (111-43), and were clobbered in
the Series. Likewise the Baltimore Orioles of l969, who had
109 wins, the most since division play began. In the '90s,
year in and year out, the class of baseball has been the
Atlanta Braves,
who invariably blow it in
October.
In other team sports, there is a greater correlation
between the regular season and the playoffs. In baseball,
though, because there is a rotation of pitchers, every game
is different. Did you really think that there was going,
for example, to be a
whole lot of variety in any game the Chicago Bulls played in the
postseason? Michael Jordan was either going to be a little
better or a little worse than usual. But that was the
extent of it. Ron Harper or Luc Longley weren't suddenly
going to be the
dominating
players.
But in baseball, it is quite possible that some fringe
nobody will become a star. After all, every batter
gets the same number of chances. The beautiful irony of baseball is that, if the Yankees do get to the World Series, they might very well win then because of a starring performance by somebody ordinary like Joe Girardi or Chuck Knoblauch. It happens most every fall. We would understand baseball better, in fact, if we called the playoffs the "irregular season," and simply let ourselves admire the regular-season Yankees for being a beautiful piece of work.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National
Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by
CNN/SI.
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