End of the Season

Welcome, autumnal reader, because this week we celebrate one season ending and another one starting. As we move into October, it feels like we're getting into autumn proper (it's getting dark earlier now, and you even need a jumper when you go out in the evenings sometimes). Accompanying this, the summer sport, baseball, is reaching its end of season climax. And that's especially exciting here in the Bay Area, as the San Francisco Giants not only lead their division, but have had the best season of any baseball team in the country.

The baseball season is complex and unique in many ways. The thing that is very obviously unique about baseball is that there's so much of it - the teams are playing 162 games in the regular season this year, stretching from the beginning of April to the first weekend here in October. Yes, that means the teams are playing virtually every day. It's odd.

Of course, playing every day actually means that every club has a lot of players, with a lot of rotation through the team. It's also a comment on how, er, physically strenuous the game actually is (which isn't very, unless you're the starting pitcher, who usually only plays once every week or two).

Baseball games also can't be tied: if the scores are level after the regulation nine innings, they just keep playing until someone's ahead at the end of the innings. This means the league standings are decided simply by who has the most wins. The size of the country means the two main leagues are split into three roughly geographical divisions of five teams each; these teams play each other a lot. Just to complicate matters, there's also inter-league play, so as part of the main season you also play teams that aren't in your division at all sometimes. How this averages out into something that means the team's records are comparable somewhat eludes me, but given that the LA Dodgers have won the National League West for the last 8 seasons, I guess baseball is a game where you play a lot, and eventually the Dodgers win. Ho hum.

But maybe not this year, because in 2021 the Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants have both been on record-breaking form in terms of number of games won, with San Francisco ahead by two wins with just two more games to play as I write this. Winning the division isn't massively significant: it gives you a small advantage in the post-season playoffs, but the "real" prize appears to be becoming National League champions (which means winning the knockout games in the playoffs between the divisional champions and 'wildcard' runners-up that had the best records), then winning the World Series (which means winning the playoff games between the champions of the National League and the American League).

Playing a lot and rotating the players also means that the same team doesn't just win all the time: winning 2 games out of 3 will make you a champion, as it happens. So generally speaking, wins aren't amazing, and losses aren't disasters, except maybe when it comes to the playoffs. This too is strange.

The end of the baseball season means the start of the football season, and the local University team at Stanford has played a couple of home games already. Such is the turn of the seasons. As per this week's picture, the trees suddenly decided to start dumping their leaves here as soon as we passed the equinox; Autumn is definitely upon us.