Well, everything just went lovely yesterday, with Jonathan Papelbon finally being publicly humiliated, and the Yankees closing down the Metrodome with a whimper. The Yankees swept, the Red Sox were swept, and all was right with the universe. Except, uh … hey, there’s no baseball to watch all of a sudden!
The division series this year are similar to 2007’s, when three of the series were sweeps and a fourth went just four games. (That would be the Yankees-Indians series.) The NLCS and the World Series were both sweeps that year, too, and the whole postseason totaled just four games more than the minimum 24. There was a lot of downtime.
The freezing Phillies-Rockies NLDS Game 4 begins in a few hours, but if the Phillies win, there will be no more baseball until Thursday. And the highly anticipated ALCS between the Yankees and the Angels — rather inarguably the best two teams in baseball through the season — doesn’t begin at the Stadium until Friday. Baseball is a game that doesn’t do days off well. It messes with the natural order and rhythm of things. It seems wrong for players to shake off rust right before playing the most important games of the season.
So expect oodles of stories this week about the Yanks’ two postseason losses to the Angels, or A-Rod’s resurgence — as we like to call it, his Peek-a-Boo Resurgence — or the First Big Series in the New Place, or Hey, the Yankees Might Play Joe Torre in the World Series Whoa!, because no one’s going to have much else to talk about, because there is no baseball. Four perfectly good days in the middle of October, and no games to play on them. It feels like a waste. Sweeps suck.