Parity comes to baseball?

Has parity come to professional baseball?

Parity is a term that comes up once in a while referring to professional sports and to a lesser extent, to intercollegiate athletics. Parity is the situation whereby most or all of the teams in a given sport and organization have programs that are roughly as good as their competition.

In collegiate basketball, there still are the teams like Dukes and Kansas who are almost always in the mix for national championship aspirations but in the past few years, a lot of lesser known programs have made waves and become known out of seemingly nowhere. Butler University and Gonzaga University were once considered mid-major teams that have become national players in recent years. Butler has been to the NCAA finals twice, for example.

Colleges can't offer more money (well, they are not SUPPOSED to) for athletes to play there with scholarships the coin of the realm. A team's reputation, fan base or facilities are often the deciding factor. In the pros, money has been the most important commodity when building teams.

When pro baseball instituted the salary cap, the playing field began becoming more even. That things are more level has never been truer than this year in the American league with no team having played themselves out of a chance to make the playoffs. The Oakland As are the farthest out but they are only eight games back and with 75 games, roughly, left in the season, they could get hot and make a run. Teams in the playoff hunt generate more income than those that aren't (with the exception of the Cubs who have a strong fan base and they haven't had much success in 100 years).

The National League is a different story with a few teams pretty much having no chance of post season play. Philadelphia has lost 30 more games than they have won with Miami losing 16 more than .500, Colorado 12 under with Milwaukee getting on a hot streak to rally to 11 games under. In contrast, no American League team is in double digits with their losses more than wins column.

St. Louis continues to lead all of major league baseball in spite of their offense drying nearly completely up. They lost two important starters when they got hurt while running (Matt Adams and Matt Holliday) and lost two of their pitchers while running the bases, and just when Jason Hayward had gotten his fifth hit Saturday last, quite an accomplishment for one game, he gets hurt running to first base and he's out now for awhile. What has saved the Cards' season is outstanding pitching staff which has an earned runs per game average at around 2.50. There are some teams with no one having an ERA that good. The lack of offense hurts when the Cards lose a game in the 18th inning Sunday when they could only score a single run for what amounted to two games in one.

Hopefully, the Cards will get their offense going again and since they, after all, are still four and a half games ahead of the best division in baseball, things bode well for post season success. The top three teams this year in the National League and outside the Kansas City Royals, may be the best three teams in the majors include division foes Pittsburgh and Chicago. It looks like the NL Central may have three qualifiers for the playoffs if the trend continues.

On a note of interest, the Cards are celebrating the 70th year in uniform of Red Schendienst, a Cards player, coach, manager and special assistant who broke in with the team in 1945 and is still active. Schoendienst was the manager for the World Series bound Cardinals in 1967 and 1968, the years I really became a fan of the team listening to most of their games on the radio. The near 90-year-old still gets around well and looks good in the uniform.

Oops, I made a mistake

I mentioned in a previous column, the pole vaulting exploits of the Cabot twins Lexi and Tori Weeks who were the two best girl vaulters in the U.S. this year. I thought that Lexi held both the indoor and outdoor pole vault records, but I was mistaken. Tori holds the national indoor record with her twin Lexi holding the national outdoor record. That's quite a family. Their mother was a 57.0 400-meter runner in high school, so you know where the speed comes from.

Interesting facts

Babe Ruth was a dominating player when he was in the Yankees uniform, and I always kind of thought that they were World Series dominant during his tenure, but the fact is, they only won four World Series titles with him on the field. In contrast, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra played on 13 World Series championship teams. He played on five other Yankee teams that made the World Series but lost.

The most World Series championships won by a National League team is 11, a record owned by St. Louis.

Another interesting fact is that USA Today did a study of baseball games and tried to determine how much time in the 2- hour plus contests is there actually action on the field. It turns out that only 18 minutes of the game has action in it.

Maybe that is why it is a good game to watch. You can talk to your friends between plays, get refreshments and not miss too much, or be otherwise engaged. Personally, I have watched many a Cardinal game on TV while doing other things at the same time, and still keep up with what was going on. That's something you can't do in football, for example, for something important might happen at any time.

Did you know that Greece, the founder of the Olympics, is the only country that has been in every Olympiad ever held? They might not do very well, but at least they are always there. The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games (thanks Jimmy Carter) and we have been to all the others.

I read where the highest fighter pilot test score on record (measuring quickness, thinking skills, dexterity and ability to adapt) was achieved by Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams during World War II.

I also read where the term "winning hands down" is a horse racing term, referring to a race that you win so easily that you don't have to raise your hand to use the whip or jostle the reins.

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Editor's note: John McGee is an award-winning columnist and sports writer. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].