With both league championship series well under way, here are some reflections on the major league's divisional playoffs.
• Anyone else notice that the two teams that had their postseason spots sewn up for a while looked flat as a pancake?
The Angels won 100 games — never an easy feat — and were so dominant in the AL West that the race there was over by the All-Star break. But a club widely considered the most fundamentally sound in the majors couldn't hit with men in scoring position, or execute a suicide squeeze with their season on the line.
The National League's best team almost from Day One this year, the Cubs produced 97 victories and looked to be in a strong position to end their century-old championship drought. But they weren't sharp the last few weeks of the regular season, and that cost them dearly in the playoffs.
Historically at least, the Angels' defeat isn't really a surprise. Since 1990, only the 1998 Yankees and 2007 Red Sox finished with the best record in baseball and won the World Series.
• Everyone is rightly talking about how the trade deadline acquisition of Manny Ramirez is a big key to the Dodgers' postseason run. But what really gets me is how Los Angeles managed to pull that off without giving up anything.
The Red Sox received Jason Bay from the Pirates in the three-team transaction, so they came out of this in pretty good shape, too. However, all the Dodgers had to part with was light-hitting third baseman Andy LaRoche, who'll probably never be an everyday player with the Pirates, and pitcher Bryan Norris, a 2006 late-first-round draft pick who missed all of last season after undergoing Tommy John surgery.
And while the Ramirez deal gets all the hoopla, the Dodgers' trade for Indians third baseman Casey Blake was no slouch, either. Acquired for two minor leaguers, Blake drove in 81 runs with Cleveland and Los Angeles in the regular season, 23 more than the Phillies' Pedro Feliz.
• The best story so far this baseball season has to be the success of Tampa Bay. To have a franchise that's never even been close to a winning record go 97-65 and capture first place in the very competitive AL East — over the World Series champion Red Sox, no less — seems stunning.
But then again, maybe not.
For years, Tampa Bay has been accumulating young talent, through trades and high draft picks. And over the past few seasons, some of those players, like left-handed starter Scott Kazmir (I'll bet the Mets would love to have him back), have really started to blossom.
So perhaps the Rays' emergence isn't such a shock after all. But in a sport where small-market teams seem to be at a perpetual disadvantage, it's pretty cool to see a club with a $44 million payroll — second-lowest in baseball — do so well.
By the way, no team has ever won the World Series after having the major leagues' worst record the previous season, so Tampa Bay's trying to make some history here.
• For any Phillies fans wondering who that guy was doing play by play for the Philadelphia-Milwaukee games on TBS, he's Brian Anderson, a Brewers broadcaster.
Anderson was contacted about the job back in August, well before anyone knew Milwaukee would make the playoffs, so it wasn't as if TBS tried to find the most biased announcer possible.
Truth be told, I thought Anderson did fine under the circumstances. But I had to laugh when I read this comment from the Philadelphia Daily News' Tom Mahon. Noting that Anderson worked on the Golf Channel before joining the Brewers' broadcast team, Mahon wrote:
"Maybe that's why he called each Phillies home run as if he were describing a bogey putt by Fuzzy Zoeller."
Paula Wolf, a sports enthusiast who uses a wheelchair because of rheumatoid arthritis, is a staff writer for the Sunday News. E-mail her at pwolf@lnpnews.com.
