Going wild again in Colorado

Some people still long for the good old days, when baseball was the only major pro sports league that didn't reward second-place teams. But that ship sailed in 1994, and history shows that if baseball wants to crown the best team at the end of the season, it was a very good move.

In the 13 postseasons since adding the wild-card qualifier from each league, four teams have won the title that didn't win their division, including three in a row from 2002 through 2004. Without the wild card, we don't get the 2004 Red Sox, or the 2002 Angels, or either of the Marlins' championship teams in 1997 or 2003.

And we don't get perhaps the greatest baseball story of this season, the Colorado Rockies, who won their first National League pennant on Tuesday night in Denver with a 6-4 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The wild card was made for the teams like the Rockies, who lost 10-2 on Sept. 15 in front of 26,079 at Coors Field, falling 6.5 games behind the first-place Diamondbacks in the NL West with two weeks to play. They won the next day, and in the next 20 of the next 21 games after that, to win the pennant. They won an extra-inning tiebreaker game just to make the playoffs. They needed the just-eliminated Brewers to beat the Padres in the last two days of the season. They needed so many things to happen, and now they're the first team since the current playoff system was adopted to ever sweep their way to the World Series by winning seven in a row. They're the first team to win their first seven playoff games since the 1976 Reds. Now that's wild.

And you gamblers out there: Don't you wish you could go back in time and put a bet down? From Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star:

In late August and early September, you could have had the Rockies at 250-1 in some places.

“Well, at that point you’re looking at a team that realistically at that point was still a considerable long shot to make the postseason,” says Chuck Esposito, who runs the sports book at Caesar’s Palace. “And to get there they still needed the Mets to have that collapse, the Padres to lose the last two games of the season, plus the one-game playoff. There was so much that had to happen.”

Just for fun — again, entertainment purposes only, people — a measly $10 bet on the Rockies could be potentially worth $2,000. That’s a new plasma TV.

You know, if the Rockies owners had some faith in their team — and a disregard for baseball’s anti-gambling laws — they could have placed $272,120 on their team and covered this year’s $54.4 million payroll this year.

“Some of the books do have a lot of liability on Colorado,” says Mike Seba of the Las Vegas Sports Consultants. “The books really want the Red Sox to win, I’ll say that.”

The oddsmaker goes on to say that if the Red Sox win the AL pennant, they would still be a favorite over the Rockies. But if Cleveland wins two more games, the Rockies would enter the World Series as a slight favorite, even though the AL team will have home-field advantage.