Second Chance World Series

Elite 8 results

Spoiler

(No. 12) 1993 Philadelphia Phillies beat (No. 1) 1998 Houston Astros 4-1

There are any number of players who bob up to become the best at something for a short period of time in baseball. If their time at the pinnacle is brief, it's easy to eventually forget just how good that player was, even if only for a little while. An example: There were a couple of years in the early '90s, including the 1993 season represented here by the Phillies, in which Dave Hollins was maybe the best third baseman in the National League.

According to Baseball-Reference.com, Hollins's 9.6 bWAR over the 1992-93 seasons were a full two wins better than the Giants' Matt Williams (7.6) and Atlanta's Terry Pendleton (7.3). In the 1993 NLCS, Hollins hit a two-run homer off Greg Maddux during the Phillies' pennant-clinching win over the Braves, which is about as good as it gets. Hollins played in the majors until 2002, but he couldn't retain his place atop the hot corner pecking order.

Hollins has keyed the Phillies' run so far in the Second-Chance World Series derby, taking MVP honors as Philadelphia knocked out the NL's top-seeded Astros in the elite eight. His six homers are tied for second among all players in the simulation, and his 16 RBI are tied for fourth. It's not real, we know. But it does help remind us that at one time, Hollins was a really good major leaguer.

Game 1: Astros 9, Phillies 7. Craig Biggio stroked a go-ahead, two-run single in the eighth and scored an insurance run on Derek Bell's single.

Game 2: Phillies 9, Astros 1. Hollins and Darren Daulton homered to back Danny Jackson's 7 ⅓ solid innings.

Game 3: Phillies 8, Astros 1. Philly broke it open with a five-run eighth, capped by Wes Chamberlain's bases-loaded triple.

Game 4: Phillies 6, Astros 4. Phils starter Tommy Greene slammed the door after giving up four runs in the first, and Hollins capped a five-run seventh with a two-run double.

Game 5: Phillies 4, Astros 3. Hollins' three-run homer in the first gave the Phillies a lead they never relinquished.

MVP: Hollins, Phillies (.358, 3 HR, 10 RBI, .947 slugging percentage)

Key stat: Starting only against left-handers, Pete Incaviglia has 16 RBI in 29 plate appearances during the tournament.

 

Round 3 (sorry...out of order)

Spoiler

(No. 3) 1994 Montreal Expos beat (No. 6) 2009 Colorado Rockies 4-3

If the real Pedro Martinez is out there following this, the sequence of events here might look very familiar. As with his '04 Red Sox, his '94 Expos fell into an 0-3 hole in a playoff series. This time, rather than the hated Yankees, it was the Cinderella Rockies who had Pedro's team in a stranglehold, only to allow it to escape and ultimately roar back with four straight wins. Just like that, the unrequited Expos gain a berth in the NLCS against the '93 Phillies. We'll never know what would have really happened for the '94 Expos, had they gotten to play that October in a strike-free universe. If this is any indication, we might have missed out on even more than we realized.

Game 1: Rockies 5, Expos 4. Larry Walker's two-run homer in the ninth chased Rockies closer Huston Street, but Franklin Morales got Mitch Webster on a grounder with two on to end it.

Game 2: Rockies 11, Expos 3. Troy Tulowitzki continued his hot tournament with two doubles and three RBIs as the Rockies headed back to Coors Field with a 2-0 lead.

Game 3: Rockies 8, Expos 4. Chris Iannetta homered twice, drove in six runs and hit a grand slam to cap a six-run fifth that helped Colorado put an apparent hammerlock on the series.

Game 4: Expos 3, Rockies 0. Butch Henry, Jeff Shaw and John Wetteland combined on a five-hit shutout to keep the Expos alive.

Game 5: Expos 11, Rockies 5. Walker crushed a three-run homer, scored three runs, and stole a base as Montreal sent the series back to Olympic Stadium.

Game 6: Expos 2, Rockies 1. Montreal forced a seventh game, getting seven strong innings from Ken Hill and Marquis Grissom's tie-breaking solo homer in the seventh.

Game 7: Expos 7, Rockies 2. Montreal jumped on Jorge de la Rosa for six runs early behind two-run homers from Walker and Sean Berry, as the Expos completed their stunning comeback.

MVP: Larry Walker Expos (.258, 3 HRs, 7 RBIs, 8 runs scored)

Key stat: After falling behind three games to none, the Expos never trailed over the last four games of the series.

 

Round 1:

Spoiler

(No. 3) 1994 Montreal Expos beat (No. 14) 2011 Arizona Diamondbacks 4-1
While few mourn the loss of Olympic Stadium in the majors, the sight of the old Expos logo is a little bittersweet. This virtual tournament berth is the latest of countless times someone has simulated the fate of the '94 Expos, whose shot at a World Series was stamped out by the strike that ended that season. While the Expos never did land a pennant in Montreal, the Diamondbacks, of course, captured a World Series in just their fourth season. So while karma would seem to favor Montreal, that had less to do with the Expos' five-game romp over Arizona than with Larry Walker's hitting and Pedro Martinez's pitching.

Game 1: Expos 9, Diamondbacks 5. Larry Walker went 5-for-5 with a double, a homer and three RBIs, backing Pedro Martinez in a Game 1 win.

Game 2: Expos 3, Diamondbacks 1. Ken Hill tossed 6⅔ shutout innings, and John Wetteland retired the last five Arizona hitters to pick up the save.

Game 3: Diamondbacks 6, Expos 2. Joe Saunders throttled the Expos for eight innings, while Justin Upton and Ryan Roberts both drove in a pair of runs for the D-backs.

Game 4: Expos 11, Diamondbacks 10, 11 innings. Rondell White's RBI single in the ninth tied it, and Montreal won on Darrin Fletcher's sacrifice fly in the 11th.

Game 5: Expos 2, Diamondbacks 1. Martinez held Arizona to one run over 7⅔ innings, while Wetteland and Mel Rojas finished up to close out the series.

MVP: Larry Walker, Expos (.500, 2 HRs, 4 2Bs, 1 3B, 6 RBIs)

Key stat: The Expos became the first team in the tournament to go through an entire series without committing an error.

 

Round 2

Spoiler

(No. 3) 1994 Montreal Expos beat (No. 6) 1962 San Francisco Giants 4-0
Felipe Alou, the manager, led the Expos to a sweep against the team for which he played in 1962, the Willie Mays-led Giants. Alou went easy on himself, as his younger self hit .368 in the series. Alou's brother, Matty, played on those '62 Giants as well, though he wasn't a regular and went 1-for-3 in the series. And Alou's nephew, Moises, helped the Expos with an MVP-worthy performance in the series, hitting .375 with a homer and four RBIs (though he didn't actually get MVP honors). There's still a chance for even more Alou vs. Alou action: Moises is still alive on the other half of the NL bracket with the 1998 Astros. The Expos' 8-1 mark over the first two rounds is the best of any team thus far in the tournament. For a sweep, this was a close series: Montreal outscored the Giants by just five runs.


Game 1: Expos 5, Giants 4. Moises Alou homered for and against his uncle's teams, but it was Wil Cordero's eighth-inning sac fly that provided the winning margin against Giants lefty Billy Pierce.

Game 2: Expos 6, Giants 4. Cliff Floyd had four hits in support of Pedro Martinez, who pitched into the eighth and picked up his third win of the tournament.

Game 3: Expos 6, Giants 5, 10 innings. Montreal plated three runs in the top of the 10th, then the Giants answered with two. Mel Rojas struck out Jim Davenport with a runner on second to end it.

Game 4: Expos 5, Giants 4, 11 innings. Cordero's 11th-inning single put the Expos ahead, then John Wetteland set down three straight for this fourth save of the tournament, striking out Willie McCovey to clinch it.

MVP: John Wetteland, Expos (two wins and two saves in four appearances, one run allowed over six innings)

Key stat: Larry Walker had just one RBI in the series, but he hit .412 and is now at .462 for the tourney with a 1.321 OPS.

 

If I forget to post tomorrow....remind me

 

@fadeaway

Spoiler

(No. 3) 1994 Montreal Expos vs. (No. 12) 1993 Philadelphia Phillies

Game 1: Best-laid plans

The schedule for the simulation is attached to a calendar, which makes a difference in how starting rotations are set for any given series. In this case, while the Phillies zipped through their Elite Eight win over the '98 Astros in five games, the Expos needed all seven games to outlast the '09 Rockies. Thus Philly had everything lined up for Game 1, with big-game legend Curt Schilling getting the call. Had Felipe Alou been able to set his own ideal rotation, Schilling would have faced future Red Sox teammate Pedro Martinez in the opener. But with an exhausted pitching staff, Alou turned to lefty Butch Henry. In terms of historical status, it was an on-paper mismatch, though Henry's best season in the majors was 1994, when he went 8-3 as a swingman.

As happens so often in baseball, how things look on paper is not how things play out on the (computer-simulated) field. Schilling went seven but gave up solo homers to Marquis Grissom (to lead off the Expos' first), Cliff Floyd and Moises Alou. Henry scattered seven hits and held the Phillies to Wes Chamberlain's second-inning homer. Henry went six before turning it over to Alou's high-power bullpen. Mel Rojas gave up a couple of runs in the eighth, one on a solo shot by red-hot Pete Incaviglia, but John Wetteland retired Philly in order for his seventh save of the tournament. Final: Expos 5, Phillies 3

Game 2: Before Pedro became Pedro

With a 1-0 series lead, home-field advantage and Martinez getting the start, everything lined up nicely for Alou. Alas, the final notes of "O Canada" had barely stopped reverberating around Olympic Stadium (and, yes, the simulation really did play "O Canada"), when Lenny Dykstra drew a leadoff walk, stole second and scored on Dave Hollins' 17th RBI of the tournament. The Phillies jumped on Pedro for six runs and sent him to the showers in the fifth.

Martinez was in his first season as a big league starter in 1994 after working out of the Dodgers' bullpen during his first two seasons. He wasn't Alou's ace that year. In fact, he started the campaign as the Expos' fourth starter behind Jeff Fassero, Ken Hill and Kirk Rueter. By the time the strike began, he was on his way to becoming the Pedro Martinez we now know as one of the game's greatest pitchers.

The timing of the strike coincided perfectly with a point of the season during which Martinez was dominating. Over his last two starts before the stoppage, he threw eight shutout innings against the defending NL champion Phillies and 8⅔ scoreless frames at Pittsburgh. There are so many what-ifs about the '94 Expos, but one of them is whether Pedro was on a run that could have carried into October.

In faux reality, Martinez faltered, as the Phillies eventually built a 10-2 lead and held on as Montreal strung together a five-run rally in the seventh. Mitch Williams pitched a scoreless ninth for his sixth save of the tournament. He has yet to allow a run during the proceedings. Final: Phillies 10, Expos 7

Game 3: Wild Thing

Mitch Williams came by his nickname the honest way. His famous quote was, "I pitch like my hair's on fire." Seldom has a ballplayer's biography been summed up as succinctly by a single, poetic quotation. Williams -- "Wild Thing," as he was called -- walked 7.1 batters for every nine innings he pitched in the majors. He struck out 8.6 batters per nine and somehow rode that combination to 192 career saves.

In Philadelphia, Williams will always be remembered for giving up Joe Carter's home run for the ages in the 1993 World Series. Wild Thing's struggles in that Fall Classic went deeper than that. He lost two games to the Blue Jays. He faced 15 batters, five of whom got hits and another four who walked. Still, as it is with all of baseball's great goats, there was a reason Williams was out there in the first place. You have to be good to fail in a big spot, and Jim Fregosi's Phillies would never have gotten to the World Series if not for Williams' 43 saves. Then again, if not for his World Series showing, the Phils probably wouldn't have shipped him to Houston after the season for Doug Jones. And, perhaps, Williams' big league career wouldn't have gone into a permanent tailspin.

This fantasy tournament asks: What if some of baseball's most tortured teams -- and the aggrieved souls who played for them -- got a second chance at glory? If it could really happen, maybe their pain could be eased, as that of Shoeless Joe in "Field of Dreams." Or, maybe, it could go bad all over again.

Williams had been dazzling throughout the tournament, with six saves and a spotless ERA. That is until Game 3 against Montreal. Starters Ken Hill of Montreal and Danny Jackson of Philly were both outstanding, holding their opponent to one run into the seventh inning. The bullpens got things to the ninth with the game still knotted at 1. Though it wasn't a save spot, Fregosi called on Wild Thing. And he promptly walked Mike Lansing. Lansing went to second on a grounder and scored on Grissom's base hit. Wetteland retired the Phillies in order, and Montreal grabbed the series lead. Just like that.

For the first time in the tournament, Wild Thing had fallen off the tightrope he walked through his entire career. That scent you imagine might be that of singed hair. Final: Expos 2, Phillies 1

Game 4: Booger

The narrative thrust behind including the '94 Expos in our bracket was among the most obvious of the tournament. A team that eventually left its city -- and country -- had its best season in the first year that baseball didn't have a postseason in 90 years. That great Montreal club was gradually dismantled, with Martinez going on to greater glory with the Red Sox and Larry Walker moving on the very next season to the Colorado Rockies.

Walker, a native of British Columbia, will enter the Hall of Fame wearing a Rockies cap. You can't blame him. As good as he was during his time in Montreal, he was next-level good in Colorado. He only got into one postseason with the Rockies and later played into October twice during his time with the Cardinals. He finally got to the World Series in 2004, when he hit two homers in a losing cause as the Redbirds were swept by Martinez's Red Sox. Walker never got a ring.

The best team he was on was probably the '94 Expos. As if his virtual counterpart could know this, he has perhaps been the MVP of the tournament so far. In Game 4 against the Phillies, he propelled Montreal to a commanding 3-1 series lead with a monster performance. Walker broke open the game in the fifth with a bases-clearing double and added a three-run homer in the ninth off Mike Williams. He's now hitting .330 with six homers and a tournament-best 21 RBIs. Final: Expos 12, Phillies 2

Game 5: Unlikely Hero

With the Phillies down 3-1, they could not have picked a better pitcher to try to save their season than the one who started Game 5: Schilling. We have a few times referred to him as a premier postseason pitcher, and it's not mere hype. During a career that will probably land him in Cooperstown one of these years, Schilling went 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA over 19 postseason starts. He won four times during Arizona's run to the 2001 championship. He won three times each in October for Boston's title teams in 2004 and 2007. For the '93 Phillies, he went 1-1 but put up a sterling 2.59 ERA over four October outings.

On the other hand, his opponent in Game 5 was again the lefty Henry, who never threw a postseason pitch in real life, though he would have if fortune had been kinder to the '94 Expos. Among the things the internet tells us about Henry are that he's a member of the El Paso Athletic Hall of Fame and that he has an IMDB page because apparently you get one if you pitch on Sunday Night Baseball. The internet tells us a lot of things about Schilling.

Schilling lost only twice in the postseason during his actual career, but in this series he lost twice to Butch Henry. And, yeah, that seems crazy, but the list of unlikely postseason heroes through baseball history is long ... Brian Doyle, Howard Ehmke, Kurt Bevacqua, Pat Borders. Heck, Don Larsen went 3-21 for the Orioles two years before he threw a perfect game in the World Series for the Yankees.

Henry again held Philly to one run over six innings and had plenty of offensive support, getting homers from Alou and Rondell White. History prevented the 1994 Montreal Expos from playing in the World Series. Given a virtual second chance, they are going to do just that. Final: Expos 7, Phillies 1 (Expos win series 4-1)

MVP: Butch Henry, Expos (2-0, 1.50 ERA)

Key stat: After rolling up 10 runs in their Game 2 win, the Phillies managed just four total runs over the last three games of the series.

 

Get plenty of rest tonight. Could be a big day tomorrow

 

@fadeaway - PART 1

Spoiler

Before we unfold the results of our Second-Chance World Series simulation, let's muse a bit about what might have been had either, or both, of our finalists -- the '94 Montreal Expos and '77 Kansas City Royals -- gone on to win the World Series with what, for both clubs, were the best regular-season rosters in the history of big-league baseball in those cities.

Montreal's what-if scenario is one that has been speculated about many times over the past quarter century. Mainly, the big question that we will never be able to truly answer is whether the Expos would still be playing in Quebec had the 1994 season played out with a Montreal win in the World Series.

The Expos' attendance at the time was climbing. Montreal was in its third straight season of contention and drew 24,543 fans per game to Olympic Stadium in 1994. That was their highest average since 1983 and almost certainly would have gone up by the end of the season, as the Expos not only stood in first place in the NL East when the 1994 strike began, but had won 20 of their last 23 games. Over their final seven home dates, the Expos drew more than 34,000 fans per game.

If that momentum had carried all the way through the 1994 Fall Classic, culminating with a celebration on the turf at Olympic Stadium after a title-clinching win over the New York Yankees, would that still-young Expos team have stayed together? Would ownership have ponied up to re-sign pending free agent Larry Walker, their highest-paid player? Would they have held onto Marquis Grissom, Ken Hill and John Wetteland, their next three highest-paid players, who were all traded before the start of the 1995 season?

What's clear is that the Expos' franchise never recovered from the 1994 strike. Ten years after what should have been their pinnacle in Montreal was instead their last season there. What we can't know is whether the Expos could have remained competitive under the economic system that was in place before 1994, the one that changed and evolved after that catastrophic work stoppage.

If the owners and players had been able to come to an accord back then -- without a strike, while still addressing a system that was leaving small-market franchises in the dust -- then the Expos might have made it. But of all the what-if scenarios, that's the one that might be the most far-fetched.

As for the Royals, the chief what-if question about the '77 team regards the fate of manager Whitey Herzog. Herzog lasted two more seasons in Kansas City and after a second-place finish in 1979 that ended the Royals' streak of three straight AL West titles, the White Rat got the boot. Herzog's frankness and confrontational style had grated on the nerves of Kansas City owner Ewing Kauffman, so the down season presented the excuse to make a change.

Would that change have been made had the Royals won the title in 1977? And if Herzog stayed in Kansas City, what would have become of the 1980s-era St. Louis Cardinals? For that matter, would the "Bronx Zoo" Yankees have completely come apart had they not gone on to win it all in 1977?

While the Expos' fate makes their case a sad one, it's hard to feel the same level of regret about the Whitey-era Royals. They won two pennants after Herzog left and beat Whitey's St. Louis team in the 1985 World Series. Several holdovers from the three-time division champs -- the ones who lost three straight times in the ALCS to the Yankees -- hung around long enough to win rings with Kansas City in 1985.

That group was composed of George Brett, Willie Wilson, Frank White, Hal McRae and John Wathan. Still, most of the '77 team had moved on. Eight years is a long time. The majority of those players never got as close to a title as they did in the late '70s. And the entire Expos franchise never again got as close as they did in 1994, unless you want to count what's happened to the team since it moved to Washington. It's hard to imagine there are many Expos fans out there who want to do that.

That's really the double-edged feeling that has come out of this project. It has been great to remember how fun, and how good, many of these teams really were. But it has also been bittersweet to recall the pain that always comes from a near miss.