Debating Nothing

I'll make another full Cubs post at some point in the near future, but for now I feel the need to rant about something which comes up every baseball season and is starting to crop up again now that we're through the All-Star break and down the backstretch. There's a whole lot of conventional wisdom held by sports fans, and a lot of sports commentators as well, that's just completely odd. For example, turn on any sports radio station at pretty much any time, and regardless of what sport is being talked about, at some point you'll probably hear someone saying, "Look at their home record! You can't win in this league if you can't win on your own park/field/court!" Oft times later in the same conversation you'll hear "Look at their road record! Sure they can win at home, but if they can't win on the road, how good are they really?" Look, a team only ever plays home games or road games and they count exactly the same in the standings. Ideally you want to win every game. If your team is either like 8-16 at home or 8-16 on the road, chances are your team is bad, not because of some mythical importance in winning one of those subcategories of games, but because if your record is that bad in the one case then it has to be 16-8 in the other just to get you back to .500. That's just how math works. Obviously winning on the road is harder because of the nation of playing on the road, but winning is always going to make your team's situation somewhat better and losing is always going to make it somewhat worse. That's the nature of playing a sport with a league schedule.

But the debate that I'm talking about is a different one, and one that's exclusive to baseball, though it bothers me for exactly the same reason. Every once in a while, when a team is trailing in both their division and in the wild card by a roughly equal number of games, you'll start hearing people give their opinions on whether they should "focus-on" winning the division or the wild-card. Obviously, its a legitimate debate to ask whether or not the team is more likely to win either the division or the wild-card. They may have to jump over more teams one way or the other, one might feel that the current leader in either the team's division or its league's wild card race is overachieving, etc., etc. But framing the discussion that way isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when people are lamenting their team's situation in a pennant race and say either, "I tell you what, I think these boys have to keep their eyes on the big prize! They can't just settle for the wild card, they have to keep focusing on winning the division!" or "I tell you what, I think this division is probably out of reach, I think they just have to do everything they can to focus in on getting in by way of the wild card." This isn't just a phenomenon of talk radio, or a random group of people standing around the proverbial water cooler, but you'll actually hear it asked of players in locker room interviews whether their team is "focused" on winning either the division or the wild-card.

Here's my question: how the hell does a baseball team focus on winning only one or the other?? If this was people watching competitive Starcraft or something, and they were advocating that a guy focus only on taking out the base of what they considered to be the weaker player, that would make perfect sense to me. In baseball, I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. In the MLB you have a set schedule. You can't call up the team leading your division and say "Guess what? We're gonna play you 10 times in a row so we can instantly gain 10 games on you in the standings and talk over the division!" Nor does a team have separate win and loss records for purposes of the division and wild card standings that are somehow calculated differently. You can't "win" a game for purposes of competing in the division and somehow "lose" the same game for purposes of the wild card. Like the home-road debate, people are completely overcomplicating the simple truth, that winning will always put your team in a situation better than before the game, and losing will always put them in a worse situation. Whether you want to try and win the division or the wild card, the way you get there is exactly the same: you win more than the other teams. I dunno, its just something I've always found incredibly bizarre.