As fall draws to a close and winter term looms, those students interested in football can take solace in the fact that their holiday vacation will end on a positive note—the commencement of NFL playoff action. With only five more weeks left in the regular season, there is still quite a bit of room left for some upsets and unpredictable divisional showdowns.
I wrote extensively about the role of rookies in the 2012 Major League Baseball season in a previous Between the Horns piece entitled “Year of the Rookie.” I highlighted the accomplishments of Yu Darvish, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout and a few others, but perhaps I didn’t go into enough detail about their youth, or their nascent potential.
This was supposed to be the year Los Angeles dominated the sports world.
The Dodgers, who were bought out by a team of investors (including NBA legend Magic Johnson) for an insane $2.15 billion back in March, had all the money they needed to purchase top-ranked prospects and sign (and resign) star players. Many thought the team was a shoo-in for the playoffs, especially when they acquired Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford near the end of the season. Instead, their Northern California rivals, the San Francisco Giants, took the division, and the St. Louis Cardinals jumped ahead and knocked them out of wild card contention.
Seeing the San Francisco Giants win the World Series was tough for me. As an Oakland A’s fan, I’ve always maintained a healthy ire toward the Athletics’ crosstown rivals, though I’ve never publicly expressed it. It’s a reaction similar to Giants supporters constantly ripping on the Los Angeles Dodgers—you just get inundated with a biased view as soon as you choose sides. There’s always an element of schadenfreude motivating a fan’s response to other teams, and I didn’t want to have to hear my friends (99 percent of whom are Giants fans) gloat about sweeping the Detroit Tigers for the next five months.
And so it begins.
The San Francisco Giants have reached the World Series for the second time in three years. They will now face off against the Detroit Tigers, who are fresh off a four-game sweep of the New York Yankees, in a best-of-seven showdown. Regardless of your team affiliation, there is no denying that the matchup this year boasts some heavy hitters and some of the best pitching in all of baseball. Each team has displayed their supremacy in the regular season and carried that momentum into the playoffs. The Fall Classic will now determine who lives on in glory and who is remembered as the team that couldn’t quite reach the top—or isn’t remembered at all.
“Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?”—the rallying cry of New Orleans and Louisiana.
Its resonant echo in the Superdome has been a mainstay, and has become slightly deafening these past few years. It doesn’t seem to carry the same tone of confidence, however, that it did during the postseason years, and four out of the five teams the New Orleans Saints have faced so far this year have answered the question with a resounding, “OUR TEAM.”
This is the first year that the Major League Baseball playoff race expanded to four wild card teams reaching the postseason—two from each league set to play a single game against each other. The announcement in 2011 by MLB Commissioner Bud Selig was met with a wide range of emotions from fans—some angry that their beloved sport was being robbed of its traditional roots and others elated that their team had a better shot at competing in the playoffs.
It’s postseason time for baseball, and if you’re a fan who’s lucky enough to have a team in the playoffs, then you’ve probably blown all your vacation time on the upcoming weeks. If you happen to live in Washington, D.C., you’ve most likely quit your job and applied to peddle kettle corn at Nationals Park just so you can watch the Nationals play for the first time ever in postseason action.
The fans of the NFL are voracious. The Oakland Raiders—who haven’t made the post-season since their Super Bowl loss to the Bucs and epically busted on 2007 first-round draft pick JaMarcus Russell—have legions of fans who still mob the Oakland Coliseum.
Their tenacity isn’t an anomaly. Across the country, the die-hards for the Miami Dolphins are still living in the glory days of Marino and currently have a quarterback that recently admitted he doesn’t know which teams go in which division.
After witnessing a disappointing start this season, I was surprised to watch the Oakland Athletics crush both the Minnesota Twins and the Boston Red Sox. But after seeing them sweep the New York Yankees, I’m simply astonished. How does a team with the worst total batting average in Major League Baseball beat three hitting juggernauts in one month?
It’s tough to be a Mariners fan this year. At last place in the American League Western Division with only two batters hitting above a .250 batting average, it’s safe to say that the Mariners are struggling. Their shining-star pitcher and 2010 Cy Young Award winner, “King” Félix Hernández, may keep the opposing team run count to a minimum, but their lackluster offense continually fails to capitalize on it.