FanPost

A Totally Biased Giants Fan's Opinion on the Idea of No Divisions in Baseball

Due to the fact that the three best teams in the National League all exist in the same division -- Cardinals, Pirates, and Cubs, all in order -- there have been complaints that only two of these teams even have the chance to be in the division series while only one of them has a chance to play in the National League Championship Series. This has led to people (mainly NL Central fans) to call for a division less league where there is just one big National League Division instead of the NL West, Central, and East. Dave Cameron from Fangraphs highlights some great reasons about why not to get rid of the division in this article right here. He points out that having the 3 best teams in the same division really doesn’t happen all the time. He also mentions the difficulties to the traveling schedule if every team has to play each other the same amount of times. However, I'd like to add my own input. Logistics can come and go. But at its core, baseball is just a game. It’s for entertainment. With the end of the division, rivalries will be lost amidst 3 playoff races becoming just one; therefore, losing the competitive edge that comes with hating another team. And as always:

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Being the son of a lifelong Giants fan, all I’ve really known is orange and black. So from the time I was born I was taught to hate the Dodgers. This is a rivalry steeped in history. Jackie Robinson was rumored to have wanted to retire instead of being traded to the Giants. Juan Marichal knocked the Dodgers catcher, Johnny Roseboro, twice against his head with a wooden bat during a heated pennant race between the Dodgers and the Giants in the summer of 1965. And who can not remember one of the most famous calls in baseball history, the "Shot Heard ‘Round the World, by Russ Hodges as Bobby Thompson hit a 3-run jack that sent the Giants over the Dodgers to the 1951 World Series. Oh man, we could have used one of those the other night against Clayton Kershaw. But me, personally, some of my favorite moments in the rivalry were the epic matchups between Eric Gagne and Barry Bonds. You know the old saying "if you can’t beat them, just join them." And to truly face the greatest slugger in the PED era, you had to juice yourself up as well. Battles between these two were as if you had not one but two Mountains from "Game of Thrones" going against each other in a battle to the death. Just watch as these two giants shake the Earth beneath them.

Rivalries in baseball help place greater weight and tension into a game for the players but especially for the fans. As seen by Dodger/Giant tickets that can cost more than playoff games, fans love being apart of this rivalry. Because it is just plain fun being apart of something that is bigger than yourself and the 9 players on the field. But at the same time it is still just a game at the end of the day. The whole Dodger/Giant conflict sort of reminds me of the blood-feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons from the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. Buck Grangerford tries to explain how the conflict began to Huck Finn:

"Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they don't know now what the row was about in the first place."

Nobody really knows how the Grangerford/Shepherdson rivalry really began. Nobody really knows how the Giant/Dodger rivalry began. Think Blue LA attempts to search through history to find the answer but does anyone really know? Or rather does anybody really care? The only thing that matters is the Giants hate the Dodgers and the Dodgers hate them right back.

A division series makes these rivalries so much more intense than if this was just a division-less era where there would be only one true playoff race. With the Giants winning 3 World Series in the past 5 years, and the Dodgers having basically accomplished nothing since 1988, this has been the San Francisco era. But even when the Dodgers went on a tremendous second-half tear through the West in 2013, the odd year curse was playing its toll and the Giants were nowhere to be seen. Just recently in 2014 and 2015 we have seen the Giants and Dodgers at the top of their games to establish themselves as the titans of the West . While I love seeing the Dodgers suffer and the Giants succeed, this past three game series represented some of the best baseball played between these two teams. Even though it was a three-game sweep, they were all one-run games featuring some of the best baseball ever, albeit neither team was completely healthy, between these two teams.

The series began with a fourteen-inning long epic that nobody expected was going to end until things would get extremely weird with Scott van Slyke pitching and Mat Latos in right field.

This game featured Brian Sabean's black devil magic at its finest with newly acquired Marlon Byrd trying to join Scutaro and Ross as he tries to ascend into San Francisco postseason legends by poking a grounder through the right side of the infield to score two runs for the Giants. Then of course the usual suspects, Adrian Gonzalez and Andre Ethier, end up homering off a Jake Peavy who stayed in just a few batters too long. The Giants could have won this game so many different times and the Dodgers could have won this game so many different times. In fact, the Dodgers almost won it in the ninth on a bawk call that could have been called but it wasn’t. However, the torture wanted to continue, and just like any typical Dodger/Giant game when Bumgarner, Greinke, and Kershaw aren’t pitching, the game became a bullpen game where it seemed as if the bullpen mound was in a perpetual state of warming up pitchers. In the end, the Giants ended up losing in the 14th inning as the Dodgers walked right down Broadway to home plate.

The next game featured a pitching match of epic proportions where the two hitters that the fans wanted to see the most were both pitching on the mound:

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Every duel between these two involved a back and forth that saw each pitcher come up in dire situations at the plate. Greinke almost won one of those matches but thankfully for Bumgarner and especially his teammates, who would have to deal with Bumgarner’s pride shrinking a little bit if he lost to another pitcher, Matt Duffy showed the reflexes that Skeeter taught him so well to catch a flaring line drive hit by Greinke down the 3rd base line.

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But in the end, the deciding run was off the bat of a rookie who reached an all time high by going to the All Star game, then lost the starting job in centerfield, and then becoming the only lefty to hit a home run off Bumgarner all season other than Bryce Harper. All of this happening in only a matter of months.

Now for the last game in the series, Grant Brisbee talked endlessly about the one pitch that could have been. He exhausted all the hope I wanted to believe in so I’m just going to say this. For the past eight years, Kershaw has dominated the highlight reels on ESPN. People around the world have followed his starts here and there. Other than Dodger fans, Giants fans have had the closest seat in the house to the show. We’ve seen Kershaw grow up learning how to develop his arrow-like fastball, his wicked slider that whacks through bats like a lawnmower through grass, and of course his curveball that Vin Scully has coined as "Public Enemy Number One". He is the child that we saw grow up right before our very own eyes only to turn his weapons against us. And now we have come to that point where he has become so great that our only hope is to wait for that once in a million chance where Kershaw slips up . But let’s face it, as of now, we are only witnessing the 999,999 ways that Kershaw can tear our lineup apart. However, Giants fans, let’s just appreciate the fact that even though we are facing the full force of it, we are indeed experiencing greatness.

This three game series turned out to be the epic it was born to be. Sometimes you just gotta give it to Kershaw, Greinke, and the Dodgers though. They got the better of us in some close games. But who knows what will happen with this team? There is still one more month of baseball left, and the Giants have proven once and once again that they can accomplish riduclous feats. Plus, we still have 4 more games against the Dodgers, and regardless of whether we are contending or not, we know those games will matter as long as the rivalry stays strong and the division remains the same.

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