Serious About the Series

Washington Post headline for an opinion column by John Feinstein: “Don’t like baseball’s postseason format? Get over it.”

Get over it? Get over it?!?

Let’s not even discuss the fact that this format requires that the Championship of major league baseball, our beloved National Pastime,  the game of the “boys of summer,” be decided in November. Two warm climate teams will play this year, so the Series will take place in the arid part of the southwest.  But I’m just waiting for the first Minnesota-Milwaukee World Series, which would be played near the Great Lakes. That’s where the ferocious “gales of November” sank a famous huge freighter, the Edmund Fitzgerald:

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered.

 Not.  Baseball.  Weather.

The World Series evolved out of a late-19^th to early 20^th century custom wherein famous and successful teams from the top of the standings would go on barnstorming exhibition tours after the league season was over.  When the first official World Series was played in 1903, the champions of the older National League and the newer American League duked it out, with the “upstart” Boston Americans beating the Pittsburgh Pirates 5 games to 3 after being down 3 games to 1.  The final game took place on October 13.  (Attendance was a bit over 7000 that day.  The game took 1 hour, 35 minutes.  There was one umpire.  In the whole series Bill Dinneen and Cy Young pitched all but 2 innings for Boston.  The players each received slightly over $1,000, which was a lot of money in those days.)

Bill Dinneen as a Boston American

Things fairly quickly got regularized to a best-of-seven series, and other parameters, such as the umpiring crew, shifted with time.  Then, for about half a century, the Series capped the season.  It was a measure of the true single champion of baseball, though  the best team in each league “won the Pennant” by winning the most games.  In cases of a season-ending tie, a one-game playoff generally decided it.  The Pennant was a true honor, coming as it did at the end of a long season of 154 games.  Winning the Series was a really fancy icing on the cake.  Teams played to win the League Championship, but only in part because it was the only way to get to the Series.

But then America changed, and baseball changed too.  Salaries no longer reflected the doggedly blue-collar backgrounds of most players; they started to rise.  Television came along, and with it a huge new revenue source.  More cities wanted teams, and baseball expanded.   With “divisions” within each “league,” the Pennant itself was no longer a reward for being league best in the regular season.  At first it was a sure admission into a series for the League Championship, the winner of which played in the World Series.  With each expansion the format changed, until today there are three preliminary series–Wild Card, Division, and League–before the World Series.  No “Pennant winner” is even assured of making it to the League Championship Series.  And since the regular season was lengthened to 162 games, the regular season squeezes farther into October, helping to relegate the World Series to post-Halloween play.

But what about this year? A couple of non-division-winners, the Rangers and the Diamondbacks, who won a cumulative 22 more games than they lost out of 324 games they played, will duke it out starting tonight.   They are both “wild card” teams, a situation abetted by short three-game and five-game series in the first two postseason rounds.  Meanwhile, the Atlanta Braves, who won 20 more regular-season games than Arizona, and the Baltimore Orioles, who won 11 games more than Texas, are spectators.  Worse, neither of those teams nor its fans get enough credit for the team’s impressive regular-season accomplishments.   While some sports are configured to emphasize the “playoffs,” baseball is still configured for the regular season (the World Series Most Valuable Player, for example, does not carry the prestige of the regular-season MVP).  But the Series, which in the barnstorming days and early league times was a showcase for the best teams, is no longer that.  Does anyone doubt that an Atlanta-Baltimore Series would be more exciting and better-played?

Baseball should do more to assure that its best teams are showcased in the World Series.  Maybe it should revert to the levels of a two-team League Championship and then a World Series, the former featuring the best two teams in each league by overall winning percentage.  I myself would be happy with just a World Series featuring the best winning percentage team in each league.  The old way; the purer way.

But those revisions will never be made.

Not because of sporting principles.

Because money.

(Disclaimer:  The author of this blog has been, since about 1947, a Braves fan.)

©Arnold J. Bradford, 2023

Cycling Log

For most of my active cycling years, I kept a Cycling Log, in Excel format.  I also kept an Exercise Log for riding the stationary bike inside, but the one that records my outdoor rides is the one I can review to reconstruct a sense of what it was I did in my cycling life.  The Log begins in 2004, March 11, when I was 64 years old.   It ends on June 24, 2021, when I was 81.  But the heart of it is from 2005 through 2012, during which time I was riding about 120 days a year, and averaging just about 3,000 annual miles.

My log records the date, the bike I rode (I always had at least three in the mix), the odometer reading, time, distance, average and maximum speeds, my weight (post-ride), and then the “comments,” which always recorded the weather, the temperature, the direction and speed of the wind, and the route I took.  Often there was a cryptic comment if something unusual happened on the ride.  What a welter of information!  I recently printed out these logs on 25 sheets of paper, small print.

Sample page showing activity in one of the “Peak Years”

Looking back over it, I can see several things.  First, the Cycling Log probably starts shortly after I committed to a heavy schedule of riding.  But it may have been about a year after I really got started.  I had had a Specialized Hardrock hybrid bike since 1995, but I got a Fuji Supreme, similar but somewhat faster and lighter, in March 2003.  I’m pretty sure I was riding that one pretty regularly in 2003.  The Log has one missing gap, thanks to a computer crash that wiped out all of the data for 2006 and more than half of 2007.  So I can gather a pretty good perspective on my riding, which shows that the core years were from 2005 to 2012 inclusive.  During that time I averaged just about 120 rides a year (peak of 127 in 2010), and my average yearly distance was just about 3,000 miles (peak of 3203 in 2009).  Over the course of those years I always missed about three or four spring and midsummer weeks for travel, but I rode year-round.  When we visited family in Old Saybrook, CT, I rode there and included the data in the Log.

The kinds of days I rode were fairly consistently chosen.  I had a general rule of 35˚ minimum for sunny days, and 45˚ minimum for cloudy days.  I violated the latter occasionally, but the lowest recorded temperature in my log is 34˚.  I swear I remember starting out one day for a run around the neighborhood (“Tour de Nabes”: the whole regular route I took was 14 miles) when it was 26˚.  At the other extreme, I tried never to begin a regular-length trip (22-30 miles) when it was over 80˚.  It might get that warm before I got home, but I did not like to be out on the road very far from home when it was over 85˚.  The temperature at which I switched from leggings to bib shorts was 55˚.  The temperature at which I switched from long sleeves to short sleeves was about 67˚, depending on wind and sun conditions.  On days it might rain, I looked at the weather map to see if a rain cell was likely over the route I would be on for the next hour or two.  Only two or three times did I read it wrong and get home soaked.  I disliked wet weather largely because water is hard on the bike, and (especially with thin 21mm road-bike tires) the asphalt can get dangerously slippery.

My routes, as reflected in my brief notations, were a healthy mixture of paved trail and road.  I started off riding on 35mm tires, but by the peak years I preferred the standard 21mm road tire or the 28 mm hybrid, reflecting the surfaces of my rides.  The W&OD Trail goes near our house, and it was the core of most of my travels.  I could go inbound to the trailhead at Shirlington, or inbound to the junction with the Custis Trail, and thence into Rosslyn, where the Key Bridge crosses from Arlington to Georgetown.  Or I could go outbound, to Herndon, Ashburn Road, or Leesburg itself, 25 miles distant. 

But the trails, though they do have a few hills, do not develop one’s climbing skills well, nor do they go everywhere.  So I developed a number of standard “loops” in my itineraries—jaunts through (mostly hilly) neighborhoods to complement and supplement the trails.  One favorite was the “Tour de Nabes” (see above), which encompassed every cul-de-sac and hill in the subdivision.  The whole thing included a 2-mile excursion down Cottage Street to Vienna, and back up Park Street or Cottage, depending on how I wanted to finish up.  Another, which soon became a mandatory feature of any westbound ride, was off the W&OD at Hunter Mill Road, up the leg-breaker hill that is Hunter Station Road, and back to the trail via Sunrise Valley Road.  Another leg-breaker took me along Sunrise Valley to Brown’s Ferry Road, down to Beulah Road, and up the steep curvy hill to rejoin the trail around Meadowlark Park.  Almost every eastbound ride included the Arlington Loop (“Arloop”), which began at the junction with the Custis Trail and toured North Arlington, rejoining the trail at Little Falls Street.  Sometimes on the westbound ride I rode north along the Fairfax County Parkway’s trail, in on the trail along Route 7, and back on Reston Parkway to the Trail.  I also had some hill rides around Meadowlark Park, and a nice loop west of Herndon that I could take to the Corwins’ home when Jane was there caring for Ben and Emma as babies.  Eastbound, I could continue inbound past the W&OD trailhead to the Mt. Vernon Trail, ride along the Potomac to Rosslyn, and take the Custis and W&OD westbound home.

Overall, these logs record 1166 rides.  They also reveal, contrary to my perception, that it was not my prostate cancer diagnosis in early 2015 (age 76)  that made my riding basically untenable.  The cancer didn’t help, but my distance, average ride length, and number of rides began to decline distinctly after 2012 (age 73).  The culprit?  Old age, I think.  I never rode a century (a 100-mile ride), but I rode several “metric centuries” (that’s 62.2 miles but 100 kilometers) annually until 2010.  That year I turned 71.  I used to joke that if I just added a single mile a year on my annual long ride, I’d ride a century at age 100.  But stamina and motivation drop.  Cold weather seems not so much a challenge as a turn-off.  One is less inclined to do the extra 6-mile loop on a ride, so average ride length shortens.  In 2014 (age 75) I rode barely half the miles I had ridden in 2012.  Perhaps the undiagnosed cancer I surely had then was a factor, but the real medical inhibitors came later during post-cancer rehabilitation in the form of drugs.  (Talkin’ about you, Lupron.)  I recently erased my Cycling Log from the computer.  No use taking up disk space with inactive files.  Yet that printout Log means a lot to me, as a record of a beloved pastime.  How glad I am that I made the most of those years!

© Arnold Bradford, 2023