Bay Area, Baseball Capital West

The baseball season ended today with an outcome nobody was expecting, both Bay Area teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, winning their respective league’s West Divisions, finishing with identical records of 94 and 68. The Giants clinched their division a week and a half ago, having taken over the division lead about 40 games ago. The A’s path to their division championship was far more astonishing. On June 30th the A’s had a record of 37 and 42 and were 13 games back of the Texas Rangers. Since that time the A’s won 57 games and lost only 26. They finally caught and tied for first place the Rangers last night, and beat the Rangers this afternoon 12-5 to take the title in the last game of the season. In so doing the A’s just won six in a row and eight of the last nine. (For a nice graph showing divisional standings by date see here). The 2012 A’s are a perfect example of why baseball teams are not just the sum of their parts: the players for the A’s are barely known outside of the Bay Area, yet this has been an amazing season for the team.

Baseball has expanded the playoffs this season, adding on a second wildcard slot for each league to make 10 teams in the playoffs all told. The two wildcard teams from each league are to meet in a one-game playoff to determine which team advances to the best-of-five divisional series playoffs. Since one-game playoffs are practically flip-of-the-coin things, no team wants to go through one to reach the rest of the playoffs, so this format increases the importance of winning the division as opposed to settling for a wild card slot. I hope the baseball powers that be don’t further expand the playoffs (I don’t want to see baseball look like basketball where nearly half the teams end up in the playoffs) but this new format has made for an interesting season. Though it’s especially sweet now that our two local teams have made the playoffs without having to go the wildcard route!