Celia Downes: Strong stats game, playoff update give pro baseball new appeal

If I’m being honest, it’s been tough over the past year for me to stay up-to-date on the sports world. Losses in my family and my husband’s family, as well as raising a rambunctious toddler, have occupied much of my available brain space.

And when there has been time to check in on the sports world, professional baseball’s never been my first, second or even fifth choice. It might be America’s pastime, but not mine.

But this year, at this moment, I feel drawn to follow Major League Baseball’s postseason — and it’s not just seeing my baseball-fanatic friends and their jubilant or crestfallen social media posts, or because I need a distraction from the daily grind.

You see, I may not be a baseball fan, but I’m a sports-statistics fiend, and if there ever was a sport that offered endless ways to crunch numbers, baseball is it.

Aspects of both the MLB regular season and postseason caught my attention recently, so now — even though I’ve never been a fan of a specific team — I feel more invested in the eventual world champion outcome.

I’ll start with the postseason, which has something even I can appreciate: a brand-new feature.

Thanks to a collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its players’ union, the old one-and-done wild-card format was tossed in favor of an expanded playoff system. Instead of a single game this year, teams in the running played a short, best-of-three wild-card series to determine who advances to division series.

The result is a multitude of extra games and intriguing matchups filled with the potential to produce new numbers, new biggests, new bests, and so on.

Check out this bit from ESPN.com previewing this week’s division series between the Seattle Mariners and Houston Astros: “The Astros won 12 of 19 games against the Mariners, but they outscored Seattle by only eight runs. In the six games started by Justin Verlander, however, the Astros outscored their division rivals 30-11. Houston won five of those starts. In his past three outings against Seattle, Verlander allowed three runs in 212⁄3 innings. In other words — it’s going to be crucial for Seattle to take advantage on the days Verlander doesn’t pitch.”

I have no idea what I just read — something about the Mariners leaving Stadium X at 8:30 and Justin Verlander leaving Houston at 9:15? — but now I’m excited to see how this series plays out.

(In Tuesday’s Game 1 the Mariners surprised Verlander with a hot start, but a three-run, walk-off homer by the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez in the ninth inning helped Houston stun Seattle 8-7.)

The only thing baseball fans like more than statistics is arguing over them. And in the regular season, the number that captured the most attention was the ever-elusive regular-season home run record.

Just days before the season wrapped up, the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge hammered his 62nd home run, which definitely broke Roger Maris’ American League record of 61.

What is less certain is if Judge now holds the overall home-run record, even though it’s 12 short of surpassing Barry Bonds’ mark of 73.

Many people would assert, like I do, that records from professional baseball’s so-called steroid era don’t count; Judge, therefore, is the proud owner of the new MLB record. However, an equal number of folks would say Bonds’ record is still valid, because 73 is an amazing feat regardless of how juiced a player is.

I can’t go along with that, though, because a cheat is still a cheat no matter how impressively he plays. Bonds was impressive because he was taking substances to get that way.

Would Bonds have been a good player without the steroids? Of course — you don’t get drafted to a professional team of any kind if you’re not good. Would he have been able to hit 73 home runs without assistance? We’ll never know for sure, but that doesn’t matter now that kids have Judge to look up to (figuratively and literally; he’s 6 feet, 7 inches tall).

Lucky for me the Yankees are competing in the postseason, so I still get a chance to see Judge play.

The Yankees were also one of my mom’s favorite teams — well, Derek Jeter was her favorite player. I never talked to Mom much about baseball before she died early this year, but at least for now, when I look up to say hi I’ll have plenty to gab with her about.