Angels, Dodgers prove its anyone's game

It's a funny game, baseball.

We don't mean "ha-ha" funny. We mean anyone can win. Just ask the Los Angeles Angels. Or don't. They surely aren't in the mood.

The Los Angeles Dodgers might be a little more accommodating, though, since they still are playing in this postseason, even though they won 16 fewer games than their cross-market brothers in Anaheim.

Let's pretend we're Joe Biden and let's say it again: Anyone can win.

The Dodgers have that baseball truism to thank for their postseason life, and the Angels have it to curse for their sudden demise.

Baseball, like most major team sports, has a full regular season -- 162 games from April through September -- to identify its class acts.

But unlike the rest, it then uses five games in early October to identify its charmed, seven more in mid-October to identify its blessed, and seven more in late October to identify the one that collected the most ounces of fairy dust.

OK, maybe the team that survives October also has the best pitching -- but probably just for that month.

Favorites overwhelmingly advance in football and basketball. Favorites are sitting ducks in baseball.

The most important thing in baseball is building a team that gets you to the postseason often, thus increasing your chances at winning the October lottery.

That's certainly what galls Angels fans the most about their quick exit from the playoffs. The Halo faithful root for an organization that does everything right and has won four division titles in five years. But their team hasn't put together a decent postseason run since winning the World Series in 2002.

Meanwhile, they have to watch the erratically organized Dodgers trip and stumble their way to their Manny Ramirez Moment, catch fire and leapfrog their team into the National League Championship Series against Philadelphia.

But that's baseball.

The sport may have its well-heeled bluebloods who are frequent attendants at the postseason cotillion -- the Angels, the Yankees, Boston, Atlanta, St. Louis, to name a few. But baseball has seven different champions in the past eight years, including three hobos who jumped off a freight train in the middle of the night and stole the crystal punch bowl -- Arizona, Florida and the Chicago White Sox.

Unless Boston wins again, another newbie -- Tampa Bay, Philadelphia or, yes, the Dodgers -- will spin its way out of baseball's slot machine to a championship.

Angels fans may hate it today, but it's what makes baseball such a wonderfully egalitarian sport.

You could put the worst team in baseball, by record the Seattle Mariners, into a best-of-five series against the best team, by record the Angels, and if Seattle came out on top, no one would consider it a cataclysmic event on the order of a Stanford-over-USC upset.

A surprise? Sure. Unthinkable? Not really.

A good pitcher having a good day is about all you really need to hike your chances in baseball. Toss in a couple of hard-hit balls on your side that elude fielders, and a couple of hard-hit balls on the other side that target your shortstop in the chest, and it's all yours.

Baseball winning percentages are bunched. Teams swim together like yellowfin tuna. Check the standings. The Angels were the best team in baseball this year with a .617 mark.

Last year, 11 of 32 NFL teams did better than that. In the NBA, 11 of 30 teams topped the Angels' mark.

Meanwhile, the woeful Mariners still won 37.7 percent of their games this past summer. As bad as they were, they were more fun to watch on any given day than eight NFL teams and seven NBA teams that couldn't even win one out of every three games they played.

Baseball is competitively balanced -- no matter what San Diego Padres fans are feeling today. In June, the National League-worst Padres swept four games from the New York Mets, and in August they swept three games from Arizona, helping to usher two much better teams out of the postseason.

The Phillies entered September in a tight pennant race, on their way to winning the NL East on the last weekend. During the month, they lost a three-game series to Atlanta, another to Washington and one more to Florida -- the division's three also-rans.

The Dodgers were a losing team entering September, five games under .500 as late as Aug. 29.

The postseason doesn't care.

Nor does the postseason care that the Dodgers finished the season on a 19-8 tear.

When the Angels began their series against Boston last week, veteran outfielder Garret Anderson threw out the first cliche when asked about the Angels' 8-1 dominance over the Red Sox in the regular season.

"In the postseason, everyone is 0-0," he said.

Now they're 1-3, and out.

The Dodgers are 3-0 and in.

And you know what Angels fans are thinking: Baseball is so darn fair, it's not fair at all.

(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton@PE.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)