Game 7 Is the Whole Dang Point

Oh boy, are we ever going to learn a lot tonight. We’re going to learn, for example, how Bruce Bochy elects to use Madison Bumgarner. We’re going to learn about Bumgarner’s effectiveness out of the bullpen on short rest! We’ll learn about Ned Yost using and stretching out his big three relievers, and we’ll see how far Bochy and Yost are willing to go with Tim Hudson and Jeremy Guthrie. We’re going to learn how many runs the Giants score, and we’re going to learn how many runs the Royals score, and we’re going to learn the winner of the World Series. There aren’t a lot of situations where you know, absolutely, that a finish line will be reached. There’s nothing after this. Whenever Game 7 ends, there will be no more baseball, at least not for a few months, at least not as a part of this postseason.

We’ll learn about the game, and therefore the series. We’re not going to learn much of anything else. We’re not going to learn, conclusively, whether the Royals are better than the Giants, or vice versa. So we’re not going to learn whether one of these teams is the best team in baseball. What we get is hype and a show, with the stakes never higher. We’re going to get the most important baseball game of the whole seven months, and no matter what happens on the field, this is the point of the playoffs.

You love a Game 7. I love a Game 7! Everybody loves a Game 7. We know that, just intuitively, but we can also know that from looking at some recent TV ratings. I don’t really care about the ratings year-to-year, because they don’t mean much, but within a series they can be indicative of something. Let’s check out this Wikipedia page. The World Series went to seven games in 2011, 2002, 2001, and 1997. That’s just from the last two decades. Some facts:

• 1997: Ratings for Game 7 were 126% higher than ratings for Game 1, and 73% higher than the average of ratings from Games 1 – 6.
• 2001: Ratings for Game 7 were 137% higher than ratings for Game 1, and 79% higher than the average of ratings from Games 1 – 6.
• 2002: Ratings for Game 7 were 99% higher than ratings for Game 1, and 76% higher than the average of ratings from Games 1 – 6.
• 2011: Ratings for Game 7 were 79% higher than ratings for Game 1, and 69% higher than the average of ratings from Games 1 – 6.

There shouldn’t be anything surprising there. The sudden-death games pull in millions more people than the rest, because great significance is assured. You generally don’t see anything this dramatic with TV program ratings, because it doesn’t do much good to watch the finale if you haven’t watched the earlier bits of the season. With a baseball game, though, while Game 7 is a part of a series, each game is basically independent of the others, and you don’t need to know what’s happened to know that it doesn’t get bigger than the very very end.

And there’s this thing about Game 7. A lot of people like to say they wish the playoffs would reward the better teams. In order to proceed to a Game 7, a series has to be tied 3-3, and that’s as strong an indication as any that the series is a toss-up. When you see a series sweep, it’s reasonable to conclude that one team was better than the other. When you have a seventh game, it means the first six games weren’t sufficient, which means one more game can’t make much of a difference. Game 7 of a best-of-seven series is not unlike Game 1 of a one-game playoff. It’s a baseball game that means everything, in which anything can happen.

This is what the playoffs are all about. It’s not about some deeper significance. It’s all about high drama, and for all we know Game 7 of Giants/Royals could be determined by Brandon Belt making a bad defensive play at first. Or maybe a different ball squeaks just by Belt down the line, or maybe Eric Hosmer hits a double on an infield chopper that bounces right over Brandon Crawford’s head. Alternatively, maybe Juan Perez clobbers a ringing RBI double to center off Wade Davis. Game 7 is a small sample size that determines the champion of the year, and you know what happens over a small sample size. Or, actually, you don’t know at all, in terms of certain outcomes.

People aren’t excited for this because they’ll find out whether the Royals or Giants are better. People are excited for this in the same way people are excited for a movie or a TV finale. For seven months — 22 months, if you include spring training — baseball has been writing a story. Some of the chapters were gripping, and others were duds, but now we’ve finally reached the climax. We get to find out how the story ends, which is the very purpose of the American playoff system. This is the clearest possible example of sports as entertainment, and there’s no way for a game to achieve higher starting drama. Today, a year’s champion will be crowned. I don’t know what that means, but the point isn’t to overthink it. Why do teams play for the championship? To be champions. What’s it mean to be a champion? You won the championship. If you try to overthink the purpose of sports, the whole thing collapses. Try not to put yourself in that situation in the hours preceding the biggest game of the year.

There are ways for the playoffs to be improved. There are ways for the playoffs to better reflect how a roster is used during the season. It’s odd that everything’s coming down to an all-hands-on-deck full-roster Battle Royale, since this will resemble precisely none of the previous ballgames. But no matter what you do, the playoffs are always going to feature a hell of a lot of chance and randomness, because those go hand-in-hand with any playoff setup. And that means any outcome is possible, and that means the purpose is to put on a show more than the purpose is anything else.

I don’t know what a championship means. I don’t know what a 110-52 regular-season record means. I don’t know what my existence means. I know that I’m incredibly excited for tonight’s baseball game. To this point it’s been a fun script. I don’t know how baseball intends to resolve its final conflict, but I know that it’s going to before I go to bed. It’s going to be a long wait until the next episode after this one.