One Last Look Back at Baseball in 2015

And so we bury another summer.

It sounds dramatic, I know. It's actually still quite seasonable on the Eastern Seaboard, where the Kansas City Royals defeated the New York Mets to win the 2015 World Series on Sunday night, the first of November. But the weather will turn soon, and we've already turned back the clocks. In that same spirit, let's reflect on the glories of the year gone by, and postpone the winter as long as possible—only a miserable person would readily look forward to stressing out over qualifying offer minutiae and Hall of Fame hot takes. Let's talk baseball for as long as we can, please.

Did you know we saw the greatest team pitching performance in post-integration baseball history this year, and it had nothing to do with the process mavens of Chicago and Houston, or the otherworldly pitching development of the New York Mets? It happened on the St. Louis Cardinals, and it happened almost quietly, because we've become used to that team winning 90-plus games a year the same way we've become used to sunrises and bad network television.

The Cardinals don't have quite the claim to being a dynasty that the San Francisco Giants do—and most people will already brush off the Giants' claim, because three World Series victories in six years is apparently not enough if they aren't consecutive—but St. Louis has been the most consistently excellent baseball club of the past 15 years, notching only one sub-.500 performance (2007) and three seasons with a winning percentage of .600 or better (2004, 2005, and 2015).

The reason for their stellar, and yet almost ho-hum domination of the NL Central this year was a pitching staff that put up a team ERA+ of 135, anchored by 36-year-old makeshift staff ace John Lackey (career 110 ERA+, 143 ERA+ in 2015), 28-year-old Lance Lynn (career 112 ERA+, 131 ERA+ in 2015), and 28-year-old Jaime Garcia (career 116 ERA+, 163 ERA+ in 2015). Sure, the Cardinals' 23-year-old aces-in-waiting, Michael Wacha and Carlos Martinez, both put up fine seasons as well (117 ERA+ and 132 ERA+, respectively), but both were highly touted prospects with this kind of pedigree and potential. Lackey, Lynn, and Garcia were all supposed to be known quantities—known, specifically, to not be this.

It's perhaps the most amazing confluence of career years in a rotation that baseball has ever seen—made all the more amazing that it was done with the team's ace, Adam Wainwright, lost for the regular season to injury. Naturally, the Cardinals' brilliance spent most of the year being overshadowed by the meteoric rise of the Chicago Cubs to, um, third place. Which, fair enough: the Cubs had the kind of turnaround from their previous season not seen since the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays, and the Cardinals are perennial contenders that most everyone is at least a little tired of talking about. It was those same Cubs who knocked that vaunted, insanely good, career-year-confluence-having and beloved-by-fate Cardinals team right the hell out of the playoffs, so who's to say they weren't the better story to start with?

The Cubs weren't the only team to pull a huge turnaround. Remember this?

Note: the date of the Taylor Swift 1989 tour show at — Houston Astros (@astros)December 11, 2014

Remember how much instant, universal derision (from this author included) it got? And yet, here we are. Houston's 16-win improvement over last season was a bit more modest than the Cubs' turnaround, but it was done without anything close to the same spending. Chicago added Jon Lester to its rotation; the Astros' glitziest offseason pickup was either Scott Kazmir, on a one-year, $13 million deal (if you prefer AAV), or Jed Lowrie, on a three-year deal with $23 million guaranteed (if you prefer total contract outlay). It could be argued that both of those signings mainly helped to keep the Players' Union off the team's back about running out another sub-$60 million payroll in a financial environment where media deals are making money for teams hand over fist.

Were the Astros helped by a weak AL West? Sure they were. That's how the Texas Rangers—without ace Yu Darvish, and despite down years from a number of their lineup mainstays, and while running Yovani Gallardo out there as the staff ace for much of the year—stormed back the way they did after a horrific start to the year and ended up winning the division; to be fair, adding Cole Hamels at the deadline helped, too.

Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be the Astros year, according to the Process: that window was supposed to open next year, or perhaps in 2017. What this year did was prove that Dallas Keuchel was not a one-year fluke but one of the premier pitchers in the American League. It also showed that whatever pitching development process they've got going works terrifically: it's also turned scrapheap Collin McHugh into a good middle-of-the-rotation arm for over a year now, and has Lance McCullers maturing nicely into next year's No. 2 starter.

This was also the year we remembered that there's a Canadian team in Major League Baseball, and acted accordingly: namely, we started to bring American flags to games and chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!" like some half-hearted milquetoast parody of the Miracle on Ice crowd. That's perfectly fine, too, because it's almost certain that a large part of the Blue Jays' attendance and ratings boost late in the year—after their acquisition of ace David Price, elite shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, Ben Revere, and ancient and unkillable baseball golem LaTroy Hawkins—was due not to a sudden, marked increase in Canada's interest in baseball but a longstanding interest in seeing those fucking Americans taken down a peg in their national sport, for once. It was entirely appropriate, then, that the Blue Jays paved their path to the postseason by steamrolling a team calling itself the Yankees.

It all ended, for the Blue Jays and for everyone else, with the Kansas City Royals, but the World Series champions were fascinating enough to deserve the many words that have already been spent on them, and to warrant a few more here. The Royals are an elite defensive team at every position, with a legendary bullpen; they ruled the AL Central this year because a couple of those elite defenders' replacement-level bats became All-Star-level bats. They marched through the playoffs with both the blind luck of Mr. Magoo and the implacable ruthlessness of The Terminator.

The Royals were great, and seemingly never in doubt, but spare a moment in your mind for the New York Mets, the team that followed a perfect tragic narrative arc: the tense, gut-churning Act I, where due to circumstance (injuries) and deep personal flaws (ownership), our heroes fielded a minor-league lineup for much of the first half of the season, squandering excellent start after excellent start by the team's amazing young arms; the triumphal Act II, which started with shortstop Wilmer Flores crying on the field and thereby becoming an eternal avatar of Mets baseball, and then concluding with the Mets storming into the playoffs, taking a division championship and postseason berth that basically already had the Washington Nationals' name on it, written in ink, and ending Matt Williams's major league managerial career. And then Act III, wherein we, the audience, are reminded that this is in fact a tragedy, and our heroes are struck down by their hamartia (being the Mets, playing the Royals). The outcome was preordained, but it was still quite a show, the likes of which we may not see again for quite some time.

Oh, and since it was an odd-numbered year, the Los Angeles Dodgers were this season's sole NL West entrant into the postseason picture, per the terms of the agreement the San Francisco Giants made with the other four teams in the division and the Devil himself. People will continue to point to the Dodgers as an example that money can't buy championships, which is a fair cop—Satan distributes those personally. But money can certainly get a team good players, assuming there's a smart guy spending it. And what is it that gets you such a smart guy? Why that, too, is money. The Dodgers have won more than 90 games each season since the ownership handoff and there's no particular reason to think that trend will change, even if the Giants are going to win the World Series next year.

We're still waiting on the BBWAA individual player awards—they've moved those to a primetime awards show as of last year, broadcast on a cable specialty channel, and we won't get the privilege of tuning into that overproduced madness until November 19th—but you don't need baseball writers to tell you how fun it was to watch Josh Donaldson, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Jake Arrieta, Zack Greinke, or Clayton Kershaw this year. Or Nelson Cruz, or Max Scherzer, or A.J. Pollock, Manny Machado, Kris Bryant, Lorenzo Cain, even goddamn Evan Gattis with his 11 triples, or Rich Hill with his 280 ERA+ in September. You remember. You were there, or something close enough.

Now it's over. So we will wait, and hunger, and read very, very stupid things on the internet to try and recapture what you felt when you watched them play on those warmer nights. Four months will feel like forever but will actually only be slightly more than 120 days. It happens every year.

And then baseball will be back; that happens every year, too. The media will unjustifiably fawn over your team's rivals. Your best young starting pitcher will need Tommy John surgery out of camp. Your big free-agent pickup will hit .220 in April. All will be right with the world again.