The best second-place team in the history of the National League was the 1993 San Francisco Giants. That's a declarative statement about a debatable point, but it's made with this in mind: The team that finishes second in this year's National League West might be able to stake a claim for that crown.
The problem, if you see it as a problem, is that, whether it's the Giants or the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of these two high-powered clubs, who have owned the two-best winning percentages in baseball for much of the season, is going to have to play a coin-flip, anything-can-happen, winner-take-all wild-card game. How unjust.
That's one way to look at it. The other is to consider this stretch run between two ancient rivals as a feature, not a bug, of the current playoff format. When you do, you can spend the next two-plus weeks reveling in a great race, rather than stewing over a perceived injustice that is nothing but a byproduct of the contemporary mindset about sports.
This feature is not only not a bug, but we should all rejoice that it exists.
Whether it's Brooklyn and New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, National League or National League West, these franchises have been obstacles to each other's hopes for first place in every season since 1890, when the Bridegrooms moved over from the American Association. But the rivalry began even before that: In 1889, when they staged an early version of the World Series between the AA and NL champs, the Giants beat Brooklyn six games to three.
During their eons of rivalry, there have been 19 times in which the Dodgers/Robins/Superbas/Bridegrooms and Giants have occupied the top two spots in their league or division, including this season: 1920, 1924, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1971, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2021. The frequency of this occurrence has risen in inverse proportion to the size of the leagues and divisions.
If the current pace holds, it would be the ninth time the Dodgers and Giants have held the top two spots while finishing within two games of each other. It would also be the ninth time they've been the top two teams in the National League, but the first time since the divisional era began in 1969.
Just five times, prior to 2021, have these two factors overlapped, where the Giants and Dodgers have been the top two teams in the National League and also within two games of each other in the standings. Those years were 1924, 1951, 1962, 1965 and 1966.
In other words, fans of one of baseball's greatest and oldest rivalries haven't seen anything like this in 55 years, dating back to Sandy Koufax's brilliant last big league season, when his counterpart on the Giants, Juan Marichal, was every bit as prominent.
The stakes are high, too. One team will be able to line up its best pitcher -- likely Kevin Gausman for San Francisco, or Max Scherzer for Los Angeles, in a home game against a No. 2 starter in the first game of the NLDS round. That opponent might well be the Giants or Dodgers, but only if that bitter foe has survived the wild-card game.
In that wild-card game, whether it's the Giants or Dodgers hosting it, they'll face an opponent they finished at least 15 games ahead of during the regular season, depending on how things shake out between the Cardinals, Padres, Reds, Phillies and Mets.
Obviously, the Giants or Dodgers would be favored as a club that won more than 100 games, a barrier both teams are likely to clear, but it's one game and it's baseball. Anything can happen. If the Giants or Dodgers were to lose that game, there would be much hand-wringing.
It doesn't have to be that way. Even if an eventual Giants-Dodgers showdown in the NLDS doesn't come to pass, we can get our kicks from that rivalry right now, and enjoy it every day until one of the teams clinches the division. They don't play again head-to-head, which is shame, but many of the great pennant races in history played out with the primary combatants following each other on the scoreboard.
Don't wait until Oct. 3 to wail about the loser of this Giants-Dodgers race. Instead, revel in a classic, old-fashioned pennant race between two rivals enjoying powerhouse seasons, who are squaring off for high stakes.
This is a competition that is a gift of the current playoff format, where finishing first matters. That it has taken on this dynamic with these teams isn't a problem, it's a gift, one that National League fans have not been given in more than a half century.
What would be the better alternative? No divisions, or seeding that doesn't consider divisions? Fine. You might line up the Giants and Dodgers for the top two seeds in a postseason bracket, but you've taken the drama out of the regular-season race. And the playoff showdown you might hope for would only happen if both teams survive the earlier rounds.
This postseason-is-everything mindset is a byproduct of a modern sports fan perspective, an NBA-esque notion that all that really matters is the playoffs. And to be sure, such a dynamic works fine in basketball, where the best team in a head-to-head series can be established in a handful of games.
We know that's not the case in baseball, where the six-month marathon of a regular season is just barely long enough to give us a mostly accurate sorting of the teams. The expansion of the playoffs over time has been an economic boon to the sport, but it has come with a cost to the preeminence of the regular season.
During the period between 1994 and 2011, when baseball employed the eight-team playoff format with one wild card in each league, the possibility of a Giants-Dodgers kind of race was eliminated. If the two best teams in a league happened to be in the same division, the identity of the division winner scarcely mattered.
That changed with the advent of the second wild card in 2012. Say what you will about the pernicious nature of a one-and-done game in baseball with actual stakes at play, but its presence accomplishes some important things.
First, it restores the importance of first place. The Giants and Dodgers can't cruise to the finish in 2021, safe in the knowledge that it's more important to line up and rest their pitching staffs than to sweat out the extra home game that would come with a division title. No, there's that coin-flip game to consider, and to avoid. This is good.
Also, there is the often-overlooked fact that the wild-card games themselves are inherently dramatic. Since they came into being, each postseason begins with two elimination games, and there have been some doozies, like the Royals-A's classic in 2014.
You don't want to take part in that drama? Then finish in first place. If you are going to have divisions, and thus create a step-by-step structure to win a championship, make them meaningful. These are the races fans focus upon most over the glorious six months of regular-season baseball. Where is my team in the division? How many games back? What is the magic number?
That's the good stuff in baseball. Whatever happens, the postseason is going to be just fine. The games are great, the competition is fierce, the memories are indelible. Those things will be there no matter who ends up playing in those games. October will not suffer one iota from whatever happens in the wild-card contests.
On the other hand, what the current format gives us is crucial: A reward for investing ourselves in the season from the months of April through September. Those rewards vary by season, but once in a while, it's substantial, as it is with the current Dodgers-Giants sprint to the finish.
Did that initial wild-card period, the eight-team postseason era, shift the mainstream baseball fan to an October mindset, rather than one of April to September?
If so, we need to shift it back. Baseball in general would be better off it veered off the path on which everything is about the playoffs.
There is one more thing to consider. For that, we'll return to history and those five seasons in which the Giants and Dodgers squared off for the National League pennant in neck-and-neck races that went to the finish. Let's consider those races with some thumbnail summaries:
1924: The Brooklyn Robins of Zack Wheat, Burleigh Grimes and Dazzy Vance were tied with the Giants of Ross Youngs, Travis Jackson and Frankie Frisch as late as Sept. 22. They didn't play head-to-head during the waning days of the season, but the Giants seized control by sweeping a four-game series against the Pirates at the Polo Grounds. Pittsburgh entered that series only 1½ games back of Brooklyn and New York. The Giants won the pennant by 1½ games over the Robins. They went on to the World Series, while Brooklyn and Pittsburgh went home for the winter.
1951: The most famous pennant race in baseball history. The Giants went from 13 games back in August to a first-place tie with the Dodgers by the end of the season. New York won its final seven regular-season games and 12 of its last 13. That set up a best-of-three tiebreaker, won in the decisive game by Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard Around the World" off Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds. The Giants went to the World Series, while the Dodgers went home for the winter
1962: With the rivalry now shifted to California, the Giants hovered within a few games of the Dodgers all summer, before catching them on the final day of the regular season on a go-ahead homer from Willie Mays in a 2-1 win over Houston. Los Angeles and San Francisco both finished with 101 wins, setting up another classic three-game tiebreaker. The Giants won the decider 6-4, scoring four ninth-inning runs off Ed Roebuck and two relievers at Dodger Stadium. The Giants went on to the World Series, the Dodgers went home for the winter.
1965: The Dodgers led the NL for most of the season, but once again, the Giants overcame a slow start with a blistering second-half run. San Francisco won 14 in a row and 17 of 18 during one September stretch, catching and passing the Dodgers while establishing a four-game edge with two weeks to play. But this time, it was the Dodgers who finished with a flourish, 13 in a row at one point as part of 15 wins in 16 games to finish the season. L.A. clinched the pennant on the next-to-last day of the season, when Koufax struck out 13 against Milwaukee to win his 26th game. The Giants finished two back, and while the Dodgers went on to the World Series, San Francisco went home for the winter.
1966: For much of the season, the race was more between the Giants and Pirates, with the Dodgers hanging around. But L.A. caught fire in September to overtake San Francisco and Pittsburgh, with the Giants slipping past the Pirates for second place by sweeping a three-game series between them to close the season. The Giants finished 1½ games back and while the Dodgers went on to the World Series, the Giants went home for the winter.
With no real distinction between first and second place, none of these great races would be remembered. Even the historic tiebreaker series of 1951 and 1962 would not have happened, as the Giants and Dodgers would instead have been prepping for the postseason, during which they may or may not have met head-to-head.
While this season, or any season for that matter, can't generate the true day-by-day drama of the classic pennant races when the postseason consisted of two pennant winners and nobody else, the Giants-Dodgers derby is the closest we can get to that lost dynamic in today's game. And we can only get that much because of the presence of that nasty, unfair exercise in randomness known as the winner-take-all wild-card game.
One of the Dodgers or Giants is going to play in that game, even though they will have more than 100 wins on their resume. And they'll play a team that was at least 15 or so games separated from them in the standings. That stinks, but the flip side of that outcome is the fact that the other team won't have to play in that game, because they've best traversed the perilous challenge that is the MLB regular season.
Besides, the second-place team has only to look to history for solace. Because for most of baseball history, finishing a strong second meant you got an early start to the winter. Now, you get to play in a wild-card game. Is that really so bad?