The Makin's

"This one's got the makin's!"
-Natalie, "Sports Night"

Apologies if the quote isn't precise -- many people have noted the final-episode quote 'if you can't make money off of Sports Night, you should get out of the money-making business', but nobody seems to have the quote from a far earlier episode when assistant director Natalie notes that things are about to go haywire on the set of the nightly fictional sports show.

In this case, though, I'm not talking about something going haywire, but rather something going well -- in this case, a pennant race.

Let me lead off by saying that, when we talk about a 'pennant race' today, we're simply not talking about the same thing that baseball fans prior to 1969 were talking about. In pre-divisional days, you won the pennant when you won the regular season race to finish at the top of your league, and from that won the right to participate in the World Series.

Starting in 1969, baseball broke into divisions, and the winners of each division met in a Championship Series to determine which team would represent the league in the World Series. Though winning a 6- or 7-team division is easier than winning an 8- or 10-team league, it's not so much easier that using the word 'pennant' to describe a divisional championship was really degrading the value of the term.

Since baseball broke into three divisions per league, however, it's become increasingly difficult to really identify what a 'pennant' refers to. Do you win a pennant if you win your division? Do you win a pennant only if you win your League Championship Series and go to the World Series? The real bubble in the definitional pie-crust is the introduction of the Wild Card -- because of it, if you go by the first definition of 'pennant' in this paragraph, you have teams that have now won World Series without winning pennants in the same season, which seems silly. If you only go by the latter definition, though, then there's really no such thing as a 'pennant race' anymore, since you don't decide the pennant until after two series of baseball following the 'championship season', with a caveat made for runs like that of the Colorado Rockies last year that forced an additional game to the season just to determine who got into the playoffs.

The Wild Card also adds another wrinkle into modern 'pennant races', in that you can have two teams battling for a divisional title who aren't really battling for playoff spots, because they know very well that whomever doesn't win the division will get the Wild Card. While each team will dutifully say that the title is important and that they're doing their best to win, historically those teams have still set up their pitching rotations and starting lineups in the final week of the season with more of an eye toward the start of playoff baseball than any result in the final days of the now-irrelevant regular season.

Nevertheless, let's not be too picky about this -- modern baseball has many other ways of taking the fun out of the game for its fans as it is, so let's continue to use 'pennant race' to talk about the marathon 162-game chase for playoff spots.

When most folks talk about 'great pennant races', in this sense, they're talking about races in which one team overcame a tremendous deficit to catch (and usually pass) another team -- the Rockies' 2007 season certainly qualifies, as does the Phillies' 2007 season. There are plenty of other examples that could be used, such as the 1969 Miracle Mets in the first ever 'divisional pennant race'. Yet something about this definition of 'great' pennant races leaves me cold -- for each team that made up a tremendous deficit, there's a team that lost a seemingly commanding lead, and it could be argued that the result was as significant or more significant for the teams that lost the chase (or 'choked', in the preferred parlance). Very few Met fans will agree that the 2007 race was as exciting at the 1969 race, even if most baseball fans do think so.

My own feeling is that a 'great' pennant race should feature two (or if possible, more) teams, each of whom has a legitimate shot of winning the race, running neck-and-neck for as far as the season will allow. Winning such a race is still tremendously satisfying, and losing such a race feels much less like EPIC FAIL.

One good example of such a race happened in the Central in 2003 - the Twins, White Sox, and Royals were engaged in an exciting three-way race that, while it could be argued that it started as early as mid-June, really heated up in August as the Twins forged their way up from .500 to insert themselves into what looked like a two-team race, then beat both the Royals and the Sox in different series to pull away in the final two weeks of the season.

You may not have heard about it on SportsCenter, or on your nationally-syndicated sports talk-show, but the 2008 Central race has all the makin's of a classic and then some.

In early 2008, the division didn't have that 'classic' air about it; no team broke more than 4 games above .500 for the entire first month-and-a-half of the season, and four of the five teams in the division held first place for at least three days during that span (yes, the Royals were actually in first by a full two games on April 9, and held onto the lead through the start of play on the 12th, and the Indians took over first on May 14 and held a game-and-a-half lead by the end of play the next day -- only the Tigers have never been in first place in the Central in 2008).

On May 18, however, the White Sox took over the division lead. It probably didn't seem like such a big deal at the time, given that they were only two games above .500, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see that the Sox would put together enough stretches of good play that they managed to hold the lead for much of the summer.

I say 'much', because no matter how well the Sox have played in an attempt to put the division away (much like the Angels have put away the AL West), they simply haven't been able to shake the Twins.

The Sox first took the division lead on May 18, grabbing a half-game lead over the Indians, a one-game edge over the Twins, and a two-game advantage on the Royals. Both the Indians and the Royals folded pretty much at that point -- the Indians, who were three games over .500 when they held their biggest lead (the high-water mark of 2008), quickly lost games afterward to fall to five games below .500 in about a week-and-a-half. The Royals, meanwhile, who looked to be forging their way back up to .500 immediately went on a 12-game losing streak that all but ended their relevance to the 2008 divisional race.

The Twins, at first, seemed to be following the general trend, falling back below .500 after briefly holding their own share of the lead, and dropping six-and-a-half games off the pace by June 9. (It certainly didn't help that the Sox swept them in a brutal four-game series in which they were outscored 40-14.) Then, they rallied, and closed the margin to just a half-game on June 27. By this time, the Twins were eight games over .500.

Again the Sox tried to gain some separation, pushing up their level of play and increasing their lead to three-and-a-half games by July 9. The Twins again rallied, pushing the margin back to a half-game by July 21. At this time, the Twins were eleven games over .500.

The Sox, by this time probably feeling like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the classic William Goldman screenplay, pushed forward again, regaining their three-and-a-half game lead by July 26. Then the Sox went to Minnesota for a four-game series and were themselves outscored 26-19 while losing three of four games, allowing the Twins to climb back to a half-game deficit by the end of July.

The Twins took their first divisional lead since April on August 3, promptly fell back into a tie with the Sox the next day with an 11-6 loss in Seattle while the Sox had an off-day, then fell back a game in losing again in Seattle while the Sox defeated the Tigers.

The Twins rebounded and recaptured the lead on August 9, then immediately lost it the next day, then recaptured it again the day after that, then lost it again the day after that, in each case by only a half-game. A Twins' off-day on August 14 paired with a Sox win over Kansas City put the Minnesotans down a game, which they immediately made up the next day as the Sox lost to Oakland and the Twins beat Seattle, forcing a tie.

At this point, the Twins and the Sox were both 15 games over .500.

The tie lasted until August 18 as both teams nursed winning streaks until the Twins were beaten in a close game at home against Oakland. The Sox kept their own win streak going for two more days until an off-day, but the Twins went on a streak of their own, and their fourth-straight win coincided with a Sox loss at home to Tampa Bay, giving the Twins yet another half-game lead.

At this point, the Twins were 20 games over .500. I remind the reader that the Twins were below .500 in early June, which means that both teams have played tremendous baseball since then.

The Twins held the lead for just two days, losing two to the Angels to split that series while the Sox split the final two of their series with the Rays. The Sox again hold a half-game advantage.

Let's recap this chase:

The Sox took over the division lead on May 18. However...

- Since June 20, the Sox have not led the division by even as many as four games -- the Twins moved 3.5 games back on that day and have not trailed by more than that since.
- Since July 31, a span of over three weeks, neither team has had more than a single-game lead in the division.

If you're not enjoying this chase, being played out at a very high level of baseball, I'd argue that you're not really a baseball fan.

The great question now is, how long can this chase last, and how long will it stay this close?

At first I'd have expected the Twins to fall a bit off the pace given their 2008 road record thus far and that they've got another ten games to go before they get home. Then I checked the Sox's schedule and noted that they, too, have a long road trip ahead, sandwiching seemingly easy series against the Orioles and Indians around a three-game set with the Boston Red Sox, who may be fighting for their playoff lives despite having the second-highest payroll in the AL. The Twins, meanwhile, have already played their toughest opponent of the trip on paper, and now face the Mariners, A's, and Blue Jays before returning home on September 5.

If the Twins are still only a game or less off the pace by September 5, then this race really does have the makin's, and the three-game set between the Sox and the Twins at the Metrodome starting September 23 may end up being the most important series either team plays all season.