2012: The Year of the Playoff Flameout

Baseball season has officially come to a close with a sweep of Detroit by the oddly bearded San Francisco Giants. I admit I found the Giants to be somewhat entertaining in that they all had various hairdos and beards that made them look like a team from 1978 sans the bad polyester uniforms. Other than that, the playoffs have ended what was otherwise a very compelling regular season very anticlimactically.

I loved that teams like Washington and Baltimore put together teams that went the distance into the season; both were sadly eliminated in the first round. My Braves had a solid Wild Card season, only to flame out in the weird Wild Card playoff game marred by riots (I still can't believe good Southerners would do that) and Outfield Fly Rules. Cincinnati finally put together a good team, only to likewise flameout in the in the playoffs.

The Athletics came out of no where to knock out the Texas Rangers from first place on the last game of the regular season. The Rangers just had an epic second half collapse. Sadly, the A's magic didn't last too long in the playoffs.

Detroit I think should be referred to as the Werewolves and not the Tigers. They came out of nowhere to finally put together late in the season the team that we thought they were at the beginning of the season. They diddled around for most of the season, and neither they nor the White Sox seemed to want to win the AL Central. But then Detroit decided to start howling at the moon and ended up with a Triple Crown winner and torched a good Yankees team that likewise imploded in a sweep of the ALCS, only to see the sun come up and the team revert back to its pre-Werewolf state for an otherwise mediocre San Francisco team.

The Giants liked to live dangerously, being down 2-0 in the NL Division series and then down 3-1 to the Cardinals in the NLCS, only to run the tables both times. Then only to sweep the WereTigers out of nowhere. Congrats to the Giants. They proved to be the one team that would not completely collapse.

Sadly, though, I think Baseball suffered from the year of the all around playoff flame out.  

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