The Postponed 2020 Season May Be Exactly What Baseball Needs

Baseball is nothing without fans. That's both obvious and not at the same time. Sure baseball is speed and power, leather and wood, grass and dirt. It's the hit and run, stretching a double to a triple, and the play at the plate. It's a frozen rope, high cheese, and the big fly. But unless millions of fans were willing to show up to their favorite team's home stadium or watch them on TV, it would just be a fun game that people played in their spare time, like horse shoes or bocce.

As the biggest contributor to keeping the baseball train chugging, it's safe to say we had lost our way a bit as baseball fans before the pandemic hit. The coverage of the Astros cheating scandal this off-season was certainly exhausting and understandably took its toll on the MLB fanbase, but for years now we as fans have complained an awful lot about baseball. Just as we started to get over the black mark that steroid use left on the game, the pendulum swung the other way. The grumble du jour of the early 2010's was that not enough runs were being scored and pitching was too dominant. When that waned, and baseball began to gravitate towards the three true outcome extremes (walks, strikeouts, home runs), the griping from fans got even worse. Analytics are ruining the game, nobody puts the ball in play anymore, teams rely too heavily on the home run...These have become the greatest hits of push-button baseball complaints in recent years. Let's not forget everyone's favorite: The games are too damn long!

Aaron Judge embodies baseball trending towards its three true outcomes.

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What baseball fan wouldn't give their right arm to attend a 4-hour baseball game right now? I know I would. We've spent so much time complaining that we've lost sight of the fact that baseball is a wonderful and resilient game that perpetually changes while remaining timeless. If you don't like the way baseball looks or feels in a given moment, you're in luck. In just a few years, what you don't like about the game will likely evolve in ways you never saw coming without any rule changes needed. That's all good and well until a strange virus stops baseball in its tracks and stops that evolution. If we weren't so sad about not having baseball to watch, we'd probably complain about it. In short, Joni Mitchell was right.

There's a silver lining here, though. Like most baseball fans I know, I've been filling the baseball void with a DVR full of classic games that networks are airing in lieu of new baseball. In my experience, these games are reminding me of why I loved baseball in the first place and I'm hoping that it's doing the same for fans everywhere. To watch them without the clutter of a 24-hour baseball news cycle saturated with the latest scandal or hair-brained scheme to "fix" the game has been remarkably refreshing. It doesn't hurt that some of them have been all-time greats.

My journey back through the classics started with opening an old wound. In 1995 the Yankees' rebuild finally yielded fruit after years of frustration by making it back the playoffs as the first ever AL Wild Card team. They traded blows with Seattle as the home team won each of the first four games in a best-of-five series. I was 12 years old, which is the perfect age to be a baseball fan. Truly though, my fanhood had become a full-blown obsession and I felt like I knew every player on the team personally. None better than Don Mattingly, who was shining in his first taste of playoff baseball after being the poster boy of the aforementioned frustration in Yankeeland.

Everything was set up for the fairy tale to continue. David Cone - the hired gun that legitimized the Yankees as contenders - was on the mound in Seattle for Game Five. From the comfort of my grown-up living room I was able to be 12 again and hang on Cone's every pitch while he trudged through without his best stuff. In the top of the sixth inning, the Yankees had an opportunity to break through against Seattle starter Andy Benes - a solid pitcher, but not exactly an ace. With the score tied 2-2, the bases were loaded for Mattingly who delivered as the great ones tend to do. He roped the first pitch he saw down the left field line for a ground rule double. Suddenly, the Yankees had a two-run lead and in 2020 I was as excited watching as I was when it was live 25 years prior. Donnie Baseball had exorcised 14 years' worth of Yankee demons and they were primed to advance to the ALCS.

Or so it seemed. This was a time in baseball before managers were quick to yank a starting pitcher in the playoffs, especially an ace like David Cone. In the bottom of the eighth he surrendered a bases loaded walk on his 147th pitch of the game, which tied everything up. Manager Buck Showalter then brought in rookie Mariano Rivera about three batters too late. To Showalter's credit, nobody knew that he was the greatest relief pitcher of all-time yet.

With the game still tied in the eleventh inning, the Yankees scratched a go-ahead run off of Cy Young winner Randy Johnson thanks to a Randy Velarde single. That just made the bottom of the inning sting even worse. Jack McDowell allowed a pair of singles to set the stage for Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez - a hitter so good that Rivera refers to him as the toughest hitter he ever faced. He promptly laced a double to roughly the same area that Mattingly had five innings prior. Running with the excitement of a little leaguer, Ken Griffey Jr. scored the series-winning run from first base, crushing my 12-year old soul and the hopes that Don Mattingly would finally win a World Series.

Despite having a great series, Don Mattingly left Seattle with his head hanging in 1995.

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Watching it all over again, part of me wanted to go back in time to give my younger self a hug and tell him that everything's going to be OK. You may not see Mattingly win a World Series, but the Yankees are about to bring you more joy than you ever imagined, just hang on and enjoy the ride. But even now, I can look back fondly at the most crushing loss that exists in my memory as a Yankee fan. I learned from this series how exciting playoff baseball can be, but also more importantly, that your heroes can be just as heroic in defeat as they are in victory. Don Mattingly had hit over .400 with a home run and 6 RBI's in the series, doing everything he possibly could to help the Yankees win. In baseball, as in life, sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Next up on the DVR was Game 163 of the 1978 season, the Yankees at Fenway for all the marbles after a thrilling division race to close the regular year. While this game occurred before my time, I've learned a lot about the Bronx Zoo Yankees over the years from my dad and uncles. Not to mention the gobs of research I did for a certain book that came out last year. It's one thing to hear and read about a team that accomplished great things, but it's another thing entirely to watch them at their best. What will always be known as the Bucky Dent game - and that moment was truly great - was actually a representative display of the relentlessness and depth of those Yankees.

After having one of the greatest pitching seasons in baseball history, Ron Guidry took the mound for the Yankees and he was the obvious choice with the season on the line. While he pitched admirably through six innings, he was still down 2-0 in enemy territory. Just as he had picked up his teammates all year, the Yankee lineup came through for their star pitcher in the seventh. Facing a tired Mike Torrez - a pitcher who had won the World Series clinching game as a Yankee just a season prior - they put on a clinic for how a veteran team should handle late inning pressure in October.

With one out Chris Chambliss kicked things off with an opposite field base hit. It was only the third hit of the game for the Yankees. The longest tenured member of the team, Roy White, then followed that up with another single up the middle. Those two seemingly innocuous hits proved to be huge when Bucky Dent subsequently hit one of the most talked about home runs in Yankee history to put them up by a run.

The Yankees weren't done there, though. Mickey Rivers, ever the agitator, drew a walk after Dent's unlikely bomb and stole second base without hesitation after a pitching change. When Thurman Munson doubled to deep left field on the next pitch, Rivers scored easily for a much needed insurance run. An inning later, Reggie Jackson led off by depositing a pitch into the stands in the deepest part of Fenway Park for what would be the deciding run of the game. A half dozen Yankees had successfully stunned the Boston faithful with a game-altering rally.

By the ninth inning, Goose Gossage was into his third inning of work and had already squandered all but one of the three runs the Yankees had spotted him. Before he was able to squander that one as well, right fielder Lou Piniella conjured some additional magic. A line drive off the bat of Jerry Remy headed in Piniella's direction, but with the sun in his eyes he couldn't see a thing. Just as Rick Burleson, who had been on first, was looking to take third on the sure base hit, Piniella suddenly found the ball bouncing in front of him and snagged it on a big hop with ninja-like reflexes and fired in a relay throw. The play stopped Burleson in his tracks and he stayed at second on the single.

Right fielder Lou Piniella was an unsung hero of the 1978 play-in game against the Red Sox.

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A batter later Jim Rice hit a deep fly ball to right that Piniella made another fine play on. It would have scored Burleson on a sacrifice had he been at third base. Instead, Piniella's heads-up play meant that Boston would need a two-out hit to tie the game. That opportunity fell at the hands of Carl Yastrzemski, already a living legend in Boston who had homered earlier for the first run of the game. He wouldn't be the hero this time. A soft pop-up to the most hardened veteran of the Yankees' deep crop of them, third baseman Graig Nettles, secured the monumental victory.

For a team whose calling card was zany, conflicting personalities, it was refreshing and somewhat unexpected to see how well they played together as a team in this moment. They clinically wore down their competition and relied on each other to come through - much like the late 1990's Yankees that I grew up watching - and that's something the Bronx Zoo Yankees rarely, if ever, get credit for.

Furthering my education on the great Yankee teams of the past was a string of World Series highlights that the MLB Network aired from their match-ups with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1940's and 50's. Those Yankee teams could score in bunches at any moment thanks to either Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle anchoring lineups filled with other strong hitters. That much was evident in the highlights. In fact, it was clear that in 1955 - the only one of the six match-ups that the Yankees lost - their loss was due to an ailing Mickey Mantle only playing three games in the series.

While Yankee pitching may have paled in comparison to those legendary bats, what I found most interesting from these highlights was a 1947 game that featured a relatively unknown pitcher named Bill Bevens. His performance in Game Four is worthy of a deep dive as it highlights how razor-thin the difference can be between not just victory and defeat, but also legendary status and anonymity.

For seven years after being signed by the Yankees, Bevens jumped between various minor leagues before he got his first big league shot in 1944. His career up to that point could best be described as uneven. He showed flashes of brilliance - as evidenced by a pair of no-hitters he threw for the Wenatchee Chiefs in 1938 and 1939 - but never consistently enough to be considered a real prospect.

Bevens' major league career followed that same trend and he had by far the worst season of his career in 1947. Nonetheless, Yankee manager Bucky Harris handed him the ball with a two games to one lead in the World Series for a showdown at Ebbets Field. Despite struggling mightily with his control, Bevens held the Dodgers scoreless until the fifth. He opened the inning by issuing a pair of walks - already his fifth and sixth of the game - followed by a sacrifice bunt from Eddie Stanky. A groundout to shortstop from Pee Wee Reese scored a seemingly innocent run before he struck out Jackie Robinson to end the inning. The Yankees still held a slim 2-1 lead.

The score remained unchanged until the bottom of the ninth. Bevens returned to the mound with a shot at making baseball history. He had already surrendered eight walks and a run scored, but to that point no Dodger had registered a hit against the 30-year old righty. After sandwiching another walk between two fly balls, he was one out away from the first no-hitter in World Series history. A stolen base and one more walk later - this one intentional - Brooklyn manager Burt Shotton sent up Cookie Lavagetto to pinch hit for Stanky in a last ditch effort to get something going. Lavagetto lined the second pitch he saw over rightfielder Tommy Henrich's head for a double. Two runs scored on the play, spoiling the no-hitter for Bevens and the game for his team.

In 1947 relatively unknown pitcher Bill Bevens came up one out shy of baseball immortality.

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The Yankee loss evened the series at two games apiece. In the decisive Game Seven, Bevens would get some semblance of vindication as he pitched two and two-thirds innings of scoreless relief as part of a Yankee victory. However, that was the last action Bevens would see in a major league uniform. He suffered the ever-mysterious "dead arm" after his work in the 1947 Fall Classic and was never able to recover. Just as soon as he bumped elbows with immortality he scurried back to obscurity, but man, what could have been for Bevens?

Take the case of Don Larsen. Like Bevens, he was in the fourth season of a major league career that lacked distinction when he got the start in a big World Series game against the Dodgers in 1956. Also like Bevens, the stars aligned for Larsen to stare down baseball history by the ninth inning of his start. As we all know, Larsen hung on to complete the first and only no-hit game - actually a perfect game - in World Series history. Even though he spent the rest of his career in mediocrity, pitching for six different teams over another 10 seasons, his status as a Yankee legend was sealed. His perfect game remains one of the most significant moments in the storied history of the franchise. So much so that his death earlier this year at age 90 was national news.

Had Bevens hung on to preserve his no-hitter nine years prior to Larsen, there's no doubt that he would have been a celebrated Yankee figure for the rest of his life no matter what he did after that. As far as great moments in Yankee history go, his would have been right up there with Larsen's perfect game. Instead, he's relegated to a footnote in the story of the 1947 World Series. As noted with the 1995 Yankees, sometimes things just don't work out.

On top of immersing myself in classic games from the past I've found other ways keep baseball alive during this downtime. One is re-discovering my Starting Lineup collection. Stay tuned for a separate post on that. The other is pondering the outside-the-box scenarios we may see with whatever major league baseball season happens this year. There's the Arizona Plan which would drastically change what each team would call a "home" park. There's also the Realignment Plan which would blur the lines of American vs. National leagues in favor of geography based divisions. Over at Baseball America they're even talking about an extremely abbreviated 44-game season with a radically expanded playoff format.

Under the Realignment Plan for 2020, the Yankees and Phillies would be in the same division.

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Only once before have we seen a one-time reformatting of the MLB regular season and playoffs. In 1981 MLB got creative in order to handle a mid-season strike. Whatever happens in 2020 will be far more radical than that. It will be the type of thing I've only been able to create in video games like Earl Weaver Baseball (for those of us old enough to remember PC games before the Pentium processor was available) and the thought of seeing one of these crazy scenarios play out in real life is an exciting one. Every team will have a chance. Any player can get red hot for the entirety of an abbreviated season. Baseball will be as unpredictable as it's ever been and maybe we need a little of that in the game right now.

No matter what plan MLB owners and the Players Association land on (fingers crossed), there will be a strong stable of fans griping about it as soon as it's announced. That's a given, so let this serve as a reminder that there's time right now to go back and watch some games from your youth to help remind you of what drew you in at first. Better yet, watch some games that are even older than that and learn something new. Then ponder the possibilities of how baseball will continue to grow and change. Anyone who follows baseball these days does so because at one point they thought it was a great game, and they were right and still are. But baseball's greatness is only able to shine when players are able to take the field. Let the lesson of this pandemic be for us to not take that for granted and truly enjoy baseball again when it starts back up.