Word: pennants
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There is no pennant race in Boston...
...precisely what this twisted baseball season needed. Just when fans thought the game would never be the same, when the bogus second-season pennant races were making a mockery of won-lost records, when the strike-broken season had robbed every asterisked statistic of meaning, New York Yankee Principal Owner George Steinbrenner returned the national pastime to normal: he fired his manager. Steinbrenner changes managers about as often as most fans change underwear, though he does it with more anguish and bigger headlines. The latest victim was Gene Michael, the eighth Yankee manager in as many years to succumb...
...other side of the table, the owners' claims were ludicrous. They tried to damp down an inflationary spiral they themselves had created; and a mere glance at the pennant races when the strike began exposes the "competitive balance problem" as specious...
...weeks since Krukow's lead-off gaffe, the rest of baseball has gone blundering in his footsteps, devising a "second season" of artificial pennant races that promised to reward bad teams and penalize good ones, and prompted some players and managers to threaten openly that they would throw games if they would benefit by doing so under the screwy new rules. Under a lame-brain plan devised by league officials, the four teams leading their divisions when the strike started June 12 (the New York Yankees, Oakland A's, Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers) were declared "first...
...crime would be compounded under this format if the same club won both halves of the pennant. It would still have to win a best-of-five playoff with the team sporting the second best record over the full season. And by using overall records to determine the other playoff team, baseball left itself open to all sorts of shenanigans. Say the A's and Kansas City Royals are fighting for first place in September, with the Chicago White Sox close on their heels. If the White Sox contrived to lose their final series against Oakland...