MLB: Three Teams to Love in the Pennant Race (Part I)

The Tigers, Phillies and Dodgers make baseball’s final in-season week worth watching

Say what you will about the Yankees. A lot of people like them, and perhaps a lot more hate them. They are guaranteed the AL East crown and a spot in postseason. Their Queens counterparts, the Mets, took the first playoff berth, as they are guaranteed home field advantage until the World Series. Until Sunday night, these were the only two teams guaranteed a spot in the playoffs.

Until Sunday night…

Most likely, no baseball fan younger than 25 can remember ever seeing Detroit good enough to be in postseason. The Tigers have been perennial punch-lines who were better suited for attacking performer Roy Horn (see what I mean? Punch-lines, I tell you.) than winning any significant amount of baseball games. The Cecil Fielder era came and went with little success, and after he left the team sank deeper and deeper into the quicksand until impaling themselves on rock bottom in 2003 with 119 losses.

After a while, that drab, old-school style uniform with the archaic English D on the chest represents losing to a generation of baseball fans. We simply could not fathom the idea of the team being competent, let alone standing as one of baseball’s final eight.

And yet after that 2003 season, general manager Dave Dombrowski began to lure one big-name free agent after another to the Motor City. This began with star catcher Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, fresh off a stellar World Series run with Florida, and culminated with pitcher Kenny Rogers, who has provided the 2006 edition with needed veteran leadership on a pitching staff loaded with young talent. Rookies Jeremy Bonderman, Justin Verlander and Nate Robertson (not to be confused with this year’s NBA Slam Dunk Champion) have contributed 17, 13 and 13 wins respectively.

At the helm was manager Jim Leyland, who seemed to be finding his second wind as a skipper while helping his growing players find their first. By the All-Star Break, he had piloted the Tigers to an MLB-best 58-25 record. All of the regular starting pitchers had ERAs under 4, with rookie of the year candidate Justin Verlander’s at 3.01 by the break.

It didn’t hurt of course that this young staff was handled by catcher Ivan Rodriguez, quite possibly the heart and soul of the team. The leadership of Pudge, along with outfielder Magglio Ordonez, has eased the transition for young emerging stars such as Curtis Granderson and Craig Monroe, who have no shortage of clutch hits between them over the course of this season.

As the Tigers tore through their weak first-half schedule and stunned all the game’s followers as their names got printed at the top of all baseball standings, some began to doubt if the young team could hold together over the less forgiving stretches of August and September and continue their winning ways. Sure enough, they appeared to be right, as the Tigers, much like the White Sox in the same division a year earlier, began to lose games and lose ground. They have essentially been a .500 team since the all-star break, and had both the White Sox and Twins breathing down their necks for the past two months, but Sunday night the Tigers put all doubts to rest in emphatic fashion with a strong 11-4 road victory over the Kansas City Royals and a raucous clubhouse celebration as they had clinched, at worst, an American League playoff berth.

The Twins are still a mere game and a half behind them in the division, and they have now locked into an American League postseason berth as well. Yet the Tigers are playing for not only a chance to win the division, but are also battling for the AL’s best record with the perennial power New York Yankees. Yet regardless of how these games turn out, for the first time in many years, the little team from Detroit, and their fans, will finally get a chance to move on to October, and maybe just maybe, give the city a World Series on top of their Super Bowl for 2006.

And when you’re young like the Tigers, all you really ever hope for is a chance.

The Philadelphia Phillies have not had anywhere near the kind of recent futility as the aforementioned Tigers, however despite being a contender in many seasons, the Phillies were last seen in October when Joe Carter was driving a three-run stake through Mitch Williams, Lenny Dykstra, John Kruk and any fan who cheered on that 1993 team. Since then in Philadelphia, the Flyers, 76ers, and Eagles have all taken shots at championships in their respective sports, only for each one to fall short. Perhaps, for the first time in thirteen years, it’s the Phillies turn.

Philadelphia has spent the last few years developing a solid young nucleus that has grown together over the years. Names like Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Pat Burrell…basically the entire infield has treated fans to solid, consistent hitting (as exhibited by hitting streaks of over 30 games by both Utley and Rollins throughout this and last season).

For 9 years, it had been Bobby Abreu as their franchise player in right field. Abreu clubbed nearly 200 homeruns for them in that time and batted .300 six of those years, and seldom disappointed with his solid defense and rocket arm in right field. Many saw Abreu’s deadline trade to the Yankees as a waving of the white flag by the Phillies front office, signaling they would not contend this year, but Philly had a backup plan.

Second year outfielder Ryan Howard had shown some promise in 2005 but few could have predicted his 58-plus homerun rampage he would go on this year. Thanks to the emergence of Howard, the Phillies, who were given up for dead not long ago, never missed a beat. Since the July 31 trade deadline, the Phillies have gone 33-19 and won 10 of their last 13 to find themselves in a tie with the Dodgers for the NL Wildcard.

Their final two series of the season come against the Nationals and then the Marlins, both on the road, in the hopes of gaining an edge against Los Angeles, San Diego, or whoever else challenges them for what may ultimately become baseball’s final golden ticket.

If the Phillies continue to play at this rate, there may finally be an injection of brotherly love into the month of October.

Different from these two unlikely postseason crusaders are the Dodgers, a perennial spender, a perennial power, and yet a perennial underachiever of a franchise. So what could possibly make them the “darlings” of 2006? Well they may be in the running to earn official “team of destiny” status for this year. The Dodgers had a ho-hum feel to them for the first half of the season, then promptly fell on their face after the all star break, going 1-13 and by July 26, they were in the NL West cellar, over 7 games out of first place. Yet somehow, they followed that massive losing streak with a winning streak that reached 17 out of 18 and vaulted to the top of the division by two and a half games.

Riding the wave of this momentum, the Dodgers swung a big time move at the trading deadline and landed Greg Maddux as the sudden new ace of the pitching staff. While many thought Maddux was past his prime, pitching’s professor managed to turn his own disappointing season around along with the Dodgers, posting a surprising (until you remember who we’re talking about here) 3.26 ERA over 10 starts in Dodger blue. Mad Dog Maddux figures to play a prominent role in the season’s final week, where he is scheduled to make two starts, as well as in the postseason, should LA reach their promised land.

Over the past week and presumably for the next one, the Dodgers battle in a dogfight for both the division as well as the wildcard, one of which they trail by one game (the Phillies for the wildcard), the other by two games (the Padres for the division).

It was a week ago where the Dodgers truly became a likable as well as a probable playoff team. They trailed the Padres by half a game in the standings and at home, they trailed them by the depressing score of 9-5 going into the bottom of the 9th inning at Dodger Stadium. It appeared that they had already used up all their energy in coming back from an earlier 4-0 deficit the Padres pasted on them back in the first inning.

Padres reliever Jon Adkins started the 9th against first-year Dodger Jeff Kent, who homered to center. 9-6. Adkins then faced outfielder J.D. Drew, who homered to right. 9-7, and in came closer Trevor Hoffman (to call him no ordinary closer is an understatement, as he would become the all-time saves leader within the week). Suddenly a now-famous phenomenon occurred at Dodger Stadium that hadn’t happened since a nearly-crippled Kirk Gibson gimped around the bases with his signature double fist pump?the parking lot and surrounding roads beyond Chavez-Ravine became a sea of brake-lights and U-turns as fans migrated back to the game like a flock of seagulls in the winter. The Dodgers stadium ushers even relaxed a strict rule that says fans can’t re-enter the stadium once they’ve left in order for the fans to see this momentous event.

Sure enough, these born-again fans were rewarded instantly even despite Hoffman’s entrance. Russell Martin greeted the beleaguered reliever with a homerun to left field making the score 9-8 and completing a left-center-right tri-fecta of sorts. The sequence was finally capped however, when Marlon Anderson, by no means a power hitter, launched a homerun to right, tying the game and marking only the third time in baseball history that a team nailed four consecutive homeruns.

The game would move on to the 10th inning where San Diego then re-asserted its grip on the game when Josh Bard hit a soft, silencing single to right scoring the go-ahead run yet again, to put the Padres up 10-9 and enrage all the fans who wasted their gas money for another look at the game. (continued on Part II)

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