Baseball’s new parity

For the past five or six years, Major League Baseball’s postseason has been reserved for a select few franchises. It appeared as if October baseball required some sort of secret pass that only a select few franchises were given. Teams like the Tigers, Giants, and Cardinals were consistent playoff contenders each and every year, as those three have combined for three of the last four championships.

However, this season, if you have been paying attention, has allowed us to witness the resurgence of clubs that appeared to be far from contention at season’s beginning. Experts did not expect anything. Yet now teams such as the Rangers, Mets, and Bluejays, control their own destiny and look primed for a postion in the postseason.

In 2014, eight out of the ten teams to reach the postseason had been there in one of the previous two seasons. This year we have seen far more of a variety. If the season were to have ended on the first of September, seven teams that failed to qualify for the postseason last year would be competing in the postseason this time.

This is a remarkable trend when you consider that if you take out the historically-dominant New York Yankees from the group of seven, the last time any of these postseason newcomers won the World Series was in 1993. That is a combined 297 years of championship drought from those six, averaging nearly 50 years for each team.

Then if you factor in teams like the Royals and Dodgers who were in the playoffs last year but have not won a title since Saved by the Bell was popular, you have an astouding 352 years of World Series drought. There is an extremely likely scenario that we see the crown go to one of these upstart teams.

This incoming parity is tremendous for the game itself. At a time when football dominates the sports scene combined with a surging basketball and soccer fanhood across the country, baseball really needs to step up its game to maintain itself as one of the premier entertainment industries in the U.S.

Major League Baseball has made waves of improvements for the quality of the game, but it now is relying on different markets to support their teams. With a plethora of new teams in the mix, as well as major franchises like the Cubs and Mets revitalized, baseball’s viewership could be at an all-time high this season. With more of a variety, more fan bases are more interested throughout the stretch of the entire season. Even the most hardcore of fans get exhausted after riding six months on the rollercoaster ride that is the season, but more success equals more attention in this day and age.

So as more teams remain in the hunt, the league gets larger draw to the world outside of baseball, which can be especially beneficial to markets like the DFW Metroplex, the North side of Chicago, and the Houston area. It has been 108 seasons since any of these cities have seen their beloved teams win the World Series.

Who would have guessed the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros, and New York Mets would all be contenders in 2015? I certainly would not have. But that is the beauty of baseball that just about anything could happen, and this year just about everything has happened.