King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Stumbling to glory: The Tigers and Cardinals ride banana peels into the playoffs. And it might not matter. Plus: NFL wisdom.
Read more: Sports, Baseball, Football, NFL, King Kaufman, Baseball Playoffs, Sports Daily, MLB
Oct. 2, 2006 | The 2006 baseball season: The year of the almost pratfall.
It probably won't go down in history because they made the playoffs as the wild card, but the Detroit Tigers completed a swan dive for the ages Sunday, losing the American League Central Division title on the last day of the season after having held a 10-game lead on the morning of Aug. 8.
That's a big lead to lose from such a late date. The team that won, the Minnesota Twins, actually came from 10 and a half back on that day of the Tigers' biggest lead.
Just by way of comparison, the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers were 13 games out on the morning of Aug. 12 and lost the pennant to the New York Giants. A bigger lead and a little later, but close enough to be notable considering people have been writing books about that season ever since.
The St. Louis Cardinals, the beneficiaries of the most picturesque late-season collapse in baseball history, the 10-game late-September losing streak by the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, almost added one of their own to the pantheon, blowing nearly all of a seven-game lead in the last week and a half but hanging on to win the National League Central on the last day of the season thanks to a loss by the Houston Astros.
The Cardinals' skid -- they lost seven straight starting Sept. 20 -- won't cost them anything except momentum entering the playoffs, and since momentum is that thing you have until you don't have it, it doesn't matter if you have it.
Bromides aside, writer Dave Studeman showed in the Hardball Times last year that how teams finish the regular season doesn't have much effect on how they do in the playoffs.
Cast your mind back to the 2000 New York Yankees if you need anecdotal convincing.
The Tigers will pay for their slide, or at least it looks like they will. If they'd hung on to win the division, they'd have opened the playoffs at home against the Oakland A's. Now they have to open in the Bronx against the Yankees.
The playoffs are a crapshoot, so it might end up not mattering, but going in it seems like it does. All you had to see to believe that was the devastated looks in the Tigers dugout Sunday after they lost in extra innings to the Kansas City Royals, handing the division to the Twins.
The Royals came to town Friday having already lost 100 games. The Tigers, as it turned out, just needed to win one game to take the division, and they got swept. If that's not a face-plant, I don't know what is.