There are two types of 'Best of the Rest' posts, the likes of which I make to celebrate the eliminated teams with superlatives upon the end of the regular season. There are the ones which I can handily prep a week before posting due to the settled-in quality of the playoff races, or there are the ones where I have to work in contingencies and backups due to the ongoing playoff matches til literally the final moments of the season.
This is...one of the latter.
It's not that I don't enjoy an exciting finish to the season, as I routinely do. But it makes a post like this so hard to prep because I have to prepare for teams that may at the last second make the leap to suddenly not be in this post. In this case, the NL Wild Card race left essentially three spots up in the air til today. I worked in enough alts to have superlatives if the D-Backs, Braves or somehow the Mets missed it, but it was a lot to prepare for.
Still, these are eighteen teams that fought hard [well...seventeen of them fought hard], and want to walk away with at least something, and I enjoy making these posts because I get to give them little superlatives and awards just for making an amusing, entertaining season for me.
So, let's get on with this year's Best of the Rest post, already in progress:
Most Likely to Succeed [According to the Sportswriters in January]: San Francisco Giants
Team That Peaked Too Early: St. Louis Cardinals
Team That Peaked Too Late: Oakland Athletics
Best Squanderer of Hopes Their Fans Had in 2023: Miami Marlins, no contest
Best Squanderer of Hopes Their Fans Had in June: Minnesota Twins
Best Squanderer of Any Hope That Has Ever Existed: Chicago White Sox
Best Pitching Staff for a Team That Didn't Make the Playoffs: THE SEATTLE MARINERS.
Worst Pitching: Colorado Rockies
Most Willing to Settle: Los Angeles Angels
Worst Trade Deadline Luck: Pittsburgh Pirates
Most Depressing Team to Talk About Every Few Weeks: Tampa Bay Rays, somehow beating the White Sox by just boring the shit out of me.
Biggest Anticlimax: Chicago Cubs
Most Likely to Kneecap Their Own Few Successes: Washington Nationals
Most Comically-Timed Injuries: TIE: Texas Rangers & Cincinnati Reds
Best Backfiring of 'Titanic' Will Never Sink Logic: Arizona Diamondbacks
Most Reluctant to Actually Hit: Seattle Mariners
Most Inopportune Time to Completely Run Out of Gas: Minnesota Twins
Most Fun Last Place Team: Miami Marlins
Most Unwilling to Recapture the Lighting in the Bottle: Toronto Blue Jays
Team That Has No Idea What It Wants: St. Louis Cardinals
Best Overall Team That Didn't Make the Playoffs: Boston Red Sox
Most Likely Not to End Up on This List in 2025: Chicago Cubs & Texas Rangers
So, that's everything. Eighteen seasons that didn't amount to anything but laying future groundwork. As for the other twelve? Tomorrow, we're gonna find out how much mileage they've got left this year.
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