Add a Season Trophy

Let’s not mention Wisconsin or Green Bay football right now. There’s enough ugliness in this world.

Instead let’s think about baseball. Yesterday the Milwaukee Brewers backed into their fourth NL Central Division title in five years. They backed in because they lost Sunday’s game, but so did the Cubs and so the Brewers captured the crown.

That doesn’t make it any less of an accomplishment, though. These guys are 95-61 with six games left to play. That means over 156 games they’ve won 60% of their games — better than anybody else in baseball.

But here’s the problem: baseball provides no real, lasting recognition for that accomplishment. It all comes down to the playoffs and the World Series. Let’s hear what Brewers’ skipper Pat Murphy has to say about that:

“[Critics say], ‘Well you’ve got to do it in the playoffs.’ Well, it’s different in baseball because baseball isn’t measured by one game, but often times in the playoffs, it comes down to one game,” Murphy said. “Your body of work is judged by what you’ve done in the regular season. Not advancing in the playoffs the last few years does not diminish what those teams were, and if you don’t understand that, then you should follow another sport because that’s how it is.

“When a team gets hot at the end and gets cruising and moves on — and we’ve faced some of those teams in the playoffs because of the format — there’s nothing you can do sometimes. Nobody’s that much better or that dominant in this game. That’s just the way this game is. So regular season is how you judge the body of work, and the postseason is fun but takes a lot of things to break and go your way. Sometimes having great talent helps that.

“I don’t worry about this team. Whatever anybody says about this team, I get to live it every day and see how special they are.”

Let me highlight the crucial line in all that wisdom: “So regular season is how you judge the body of work, and the postseason is fun but takes a lot of things to break and go your way.”

What’s unique and special about baseball is that it’s a 162 game season. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. The season spools out over a summer. It doesn’t have the do-or-die, breathless, testosterone-soaked drama of a 17 game professional football season. I love the way baseball managers (and I love the way they’re called managers and not coaches) have to think about how to, well, manage their rosters and especially their pitching staffs for the long haul. They have to balance resting players with playing them to keep them sharp. Injuries and slumps happen and so guys have to be sent up or down to the minors, complicated by limits on trips to the minors in the union contract. Guys can be “out of options.” How a team navigates this stuff off the field is as interesting as what happens on it.

But when the season ends nobody gets a trophy for winning the most games at the end of it. All the glory comes down to the breaks that happen in the playoffs. Over a brief series anything can happen. Somebody gets injured. Somebody falls into a slump. Somebody gets hot. A ball bounces the wrong way. Even a seven game series doesn’t mean much. Heck, the Rockies could beat the Brewers in a series. That doesn’t make the worst team over 162 games better than the best team over that span.

So, here’s my note to Rob Manfred: create a new trophy for the best record in baseball as well as one for the best record in each league. That’s the real honor. Then, as Murphy points out, we can have some fun with the playoffs, but that’s more like winning the lottery than it is the real test.

It’s not really about a few days in October. It’s about March through September.