America’s Team
Intermission began and so did October baseball. I’ll write about the former in a little bit, but for now you need to know about America’s Team.
In 2015, the Kansas City Royals did well. They are not known for doing well. Baseball is a game of haves & have-nots, where two of its thirty teams have won two-fifths of its championships, most go many decades before a championship, and many haven’t won at all. The Royals are in that middle category: they’ve won once, in 1985. One does not think about them very much. And yet they went deep, and they were underdogs the whole way, so I kept calling them “America’s Team.”
The term America’s Team has since been applied to teams that do successfully, usually in October, and have cosmically no right being there. We have rules:
- America’s Team is usually young, containing few stars.
- America’s Team may have gotten to the postseason by highly improbable means, squeaking in by one game in the final week or some such.
- America’s Team is never the Yankees, Cardinals, Cubs, Red Sox, Giants, Astros, or Dodgers. Those seven teams alone make up something like 90% of MLB’s market cap.
- No eliminated team can be America’s Team.
- There can only be one America’s Team at any given time.
- America’s Team can change from team to team, but don’t do that, like, every week, or it ceases to have value.
In 2024, there have never been more candidates for America’s Team. We began the postseason with three underdogs, two teams that have never won it all, and both teams that spend intervention-grade levels of money on baseball. It’s a perfect David-and-Goliath story all around, and we love those around here.
It’s with all this in mind that I will now discuss who America’s Team is today.
I’m writing this on Friday, October 04, and America’s Team is the Detroit Tigers. Of course it’s the Tigers. The Tigers had an 0.4% chance of reaching the postseason on September 01, and they just swept the Astros at home. The Astros have been to the ALCS every year since 2017. Along the Tigers’ march to the postseason, the announcer said that a city that doesn’t care about the odds has a baseball team to match, which might be the defining call of the season.
They could, of course, get destroyed. All of the teams they’re playing henceforth are “better” than them. They’re playing Cleveland in a best-of-five series next, and the two cities are so close to one another that their crowds will all probably be 50/50. They shouldn’t even be here in the first place! But now they are America’s Team, and so we all must now root for them. It’s them against the world and we witness.