Happy New Year from us!

Then, I started thinking about the kinds of exhibits and activities an educational conference would have, especially if the conference were aimed at non-educators. My favorite idea was  the Classroom Management Simulator. Participants can step in so that kids yell and throw things at them. You would have to process paperwork in the Bureaucratic Reenactment. Try to teach and deal with biohazards while being ignored by maintenance/facilities. Experience the joys of arriving on a Monday to find that the trash has still not emptied. Fight in the Parking Lot Wars, where you try to obtain the optimal parking space that lets you arrive late and leave early. Fighting with colleagues. Not knowing itinerant schedules. Etc.

Happy Halloween from us!

Anyway, RubyVader asked me for my opinion and I wrote him an email containing my arguments for and against expanding the postseason. He suggested I share the email and, since I haven’t updated since the Flyers defeated the Bruins in the playoffs, I decided to take his advice since I am not a teenager and understand that it is ok to do that. What do you think about the postseason expansion idea?

Season Length/Playoff Representation Ratio

Forget the 8 out of 30 teams in MLB vs 12 out of 32 in NFL stat. For me, the more important stat is the length of the season.

• NFL teams play a paltry 16 games, and then nearly 50% qualify for postseason play.
• NBA and NHL teams play 82 games, and then over 50% qualify for postseason play.
• MLB teams play a marathon 162 games, and then barely over 25% qualify for postseason play.

Sympathy for the outsiders
On one hand, I feel that it must be very disappointing to play 162 games and find yourself on the outside because you finished with one less win than another team (see: San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants, 2010) or because you lost a one game play-in despite winning 103 of those games (see: San Francisco Giants and Atlanta Braves, 1993). Baseball players must be so pissed when they win 90+ games and miss the postseason, and then watch an 8-8 NFL team qualify for the postseason. When looked at this way, it seems like it would only be fair to ‘reward’ more teams after the marathon season by granting them an opportunity to win a championship.

No love for the Boo-Hoo Jays (and other losers!)
On the other hand, the NFL’s 16 game season leaves a wide margin for error — one mistake, like a missed FG at the end of the game — has much more significance for playoff implications. The 8-8 playoff team may have been one or two plays away from being 10-6, and a 10-6 team may have been only one or two plays away from being 8-8. Because 16 games is such a small sample size to determine a team’s true worth, it almost becomes necessary to let more teams join the playoffs. By the same token, after 162 games, you know whether a baseball team is good or not.

The Phillies did not win 97 games this season because of a few lucky plays, just as the Pirates did not lose 105 games because of a few flukes. After 162 games, you can safely say the Phillies are a good team that deserved the #1 playoff seed, and the Pirates are a terrible team that deserves the #1 or 2 draft pick in 2011. It would be heartbreaking for the #1 seeded Phillies to lose to the St. Louis Cardinals, who would have entered the playoffs as the #5 seed and did not prove over 162 games to be a top contender in their league. This is in stark contrast to teams like the 2006 Steelers or 2007 NY Giants who won the Super Bowl as #6 seeds but, given the argument above, could have won one or two more games based on luck and ended up as a higher seed anyway.

It’s a Beautiful Day (or not) in your Divisional Neighborhood

Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
On the third hand, what about a team that plays in the “wrong” division? How many times has a baseball team missed the playoffs because they finished in 3rd place in their division, despite having more wins than a playoff team who qualified because they play in a weak division. This did not happen in 2010 because the eight playoff teams had the top four records in their respective divisions — all eight teams had 90+ wins (has that ever happened before?)! A team missing the playoffs because they play in the “wrong” division last happened in 2008, when the NY Mets (89 wins), Houston Astros (86 wins), St Louis Cardinals (86 wins), and Florida Marlins (84 wins) all had more or equal wins as the Los Angeles Dodgers (84 wins), but missed the playoffs because they did not play in a division as weak as the NL West.

Then again, Mr. Rogers is for toddlers and not adults
On the fourth hand, adding two more teams would take away much of the magic and stories of the past few years. Remember how awesome it was when the Phillies stole the division and playoff opportunity away from the Mets in 2007 and 2008, thanks to their epic and historical chokes? Well, in 2008 the Mets would have qualified as the #5 seed, eliminating that fun story. The Mets still would have missed out in 2007 (they had 88 wins against the Padres 89), but having a 5th seed also would have eliminated the craziness and fun that would have occurred if the Phillies, Mets, Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Padres had all tied with 89 wins. Remember when they were talking about their being a three-tiered post-regular season ‘tournament’ to determine the National League’s playoff teams? Using NFL-style tiebreakers, as the article discusses, would eliminate that fun as well.

My final word on the final herd

Overall, I’m against expanding the MLB postseason format to include 10 teams. I know that the thrilling pennant race still exists despite adding two more teams via wild card in the mid-90s, but I think adding even more teams would cheapen the system a little by making the races between even lower-quality teams. I also think 162 games is adequate time to prove you are a top team that deserves a playoff berth. If you can’t win enough games during that grind, you don’t deserve a chance at the World Series.

Just for fun…

By the way, if you added one more team from each league in 2010, the Padres (90 wins, NL West) and Boston Red Sox (89 wins, AL East) would have joined the postseason party.

With that in mind, here is an excellent screenshot of ESPN’s website after the latest playoff success:

Screenshot of ESPN.com main page

I’ll spare you his thoughts on the Phillies, Yankees, and Drexel in the interest of sharing an eloquent, interesting excerpt. It’s OK to think deeply on a Sunday…

“The great American poet Robert Frost writes, ‘Nothing in life runs unmixed.’ The challenge of living comes from its complexity, its multiple perspectives and possibilities for interpretation, its uncertainties. Solving an equation correctly is satisfying; it provides closure. A really good movie or novel or poem — or a complex scientific or engineering problem — prompts more questions than it answers, poses challenges that are not resolved easily or perhaps at all. Friendships and relationships do not run unmixed. Major life decisions do not run unmixed. The great art of living well involves learning to live with uncertainty, becoming comfortable with conflict, even becoming able to balance two competing theories or perspectives at once — or affiliations to two sports teams locked in fierce competition. That’s why it’s an art and not an exact science.”

– Mark Greenberg, Drexel University

I dropped my wife off at work this morning and then headed to the neighborhood Wawa for a coffee during the busy morning rush hour.  I was about three people deep in the cashier line when a very confused-looking man walked in.  He removed his  old fashioned sunglasses from a head covered with a full-blown mullet, and revealed an expression suggesting that whatever was on his mind was the most important thing in the world.  It wasn’t so much a panicked look as it was a “caught up in his own situation” look.

The cashier was in the process of accepting payment from a customer when Very Confused Looking Man glanced at a paper in his hand, looked in her direction, and blurted out, “Can you tell me where the nearest payphone is?”  My initial reaction was, “Huh? Did he just interrupt her to ask for a payphone?” I first obtained a cell phone for work purposes in 1998 and, without finding any definitive data online, recall them exploding in popularity about 2-3 years after that.  I also recall reading and hearing news stories at that time that more and more companies were removing pay phones from public facilities since they were no longer producing enough income to justify the hassle of maintaining them.

The cashier, who appeared just old enough to legally work, had a blank look on her face as she handed change to the customer in line. Her quiet reply to Very Confused Looking Man was, “Honestly, I have no idea where that would be.” Since the cashier is young enough to have never even manually rolled up a car window, she could have just as easily said, “Honestly, I have no idea what a payphone is.”  Very Confused Looking Man looked very disappointed and resumed a hurried pace through the store.

I was not the only person in disbelief of Very Confused Looking Man’s question.  The customer who had just received his change was an elderly man, old enough to still have a ‘new’ rotary phone, but even he looked at the cashier and asked, “Did he just ask for a payphone?”  The elderly man asked this in a hushed tone, careful to preserve Very Confused Looking Man’s dignity after asking such a ridiculous question.  The cashier nodded and then let out a nervous laugh, which made me smile.  We were all temporarily lost in our own thoughts when Very Confused Looking Man asked the question, but now realized that we had shared this moment of anachronistic realization together. Today, in this age of cell phones, someone asked for the location of the nearest payphone and none of us could provide an answer. 10 years ago, my answer would have been, “Gee, did you look right outside Wawa?” but obviously not anymore.

It wasn’t until I got home that I properly processed the details of the situation and realized the truth. Think about it: a preoccupied outsider, the old fashioned sunglasses, the full-blown mullet, the bizarre request for a payphone. This man was clearly a time traveler from the past! And we had all laughed at him, instead of recognizing the awesomeness of the experience!

I leave you with two very important questions:

1. Why is Very Confused Looking Man here in the future?
2. Do you know where you can find a pay phone?

Feel free to share your ideas for a topic you’d like to see us debate in this space.  We plan on getting a little more philosophical and provocative than “Best time to have a Birthday.”  We are also debating whether or not to adapt Twitter’s 140 character limit by limiting ourselves to 140 words instead of 240. If so, would this format be called Twlogging? Twentries?