Mediocre team wins the World Series.

The St. Louis Cardianals won the Baseball World Series on Friday night, beating the Detroit Tigers 4-1 in the best of 7 series.

Somehow their victory is just wrong. I say this even though I consider the Cardinals to be a great baseball organization. They have with proud history of winning and player development, play old school baseball, have classic uniforms and great.. No, make that good and knowledgeable... fans. The problem is that they only won 83 games in the regular season, losing 78. Twelve (12!) teams (The Mets, Yankees, Twins, Tigers, Athletics, White Sox, Angels, Dodgers, Padres, Blue Jays, Red Sox and Phillies), won more games than the Cardinals!

The extended postseason makes baseball seem more and more like Hockey and Basketball, where half the teams make the playoffs and the regular season is just a kind of unimportant warm-up tournament. Baseball used to be like European football where the winner of he league actually becomes the champion. Winning the Pennant used to off great importance, with the World Series being a contest of champions. Now the Pennant hardly matters.

Baseball is, in my opinion, very ill suited for playoffs because the game is intrinsically different than other sports. Baseball, unlike football (be it American football, Association football, Aussie rules football or Rugby Union football), is not a game where a few games will clearly determine which is the best team. There's actually a reason the regular season being 162 games long. That's the length needed to divided the sheep from the goats, the good teams from the mediocre ones. Single games, or even series of 5-7 games, are just not enough to show one team is better that the other. The Cardinals just aren't the best team in baseball.

The bottom line for the 2006 season is, however, that the Cardinals are champions, the Designated Hitter still stinks and my White Sox just didn't have enough pitching. Yet, in spite of this I already miss baseball and can't wait for March!