MLB teamThe two best teams in the majors are each two losses from postseason elimination, a year after each was swept out of the first round. In Anaheim, the Angels lost 4-1 to the defending champion Boston Red Sox. And in Chicago, Cubs fans saw their MLB team take a step toward 101 years without a World Series title by losing, 7-2, to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Angels were baseball’s only 100-game winner this season, but their record was deceptive. They outscored opponents by just 68 runs, a smaller margin than every other AL playoff MLB team (the Red Sox were +151) and three teams that didn’t make the playoffs: the Blue Jays, Mets and Twins. They ranked in the bottom half in the AL in runs, and their offensive failings remained more pronounced in the playoffs.
Bad baserunning can undo both, as Vladimir Guerrero demonstrated in being thrown out by 15 feet at third base in the eighth inning, helping to kill a nascent rally. “The Angels are a dervish of a MLB team, loaded with free swingers and breakneck baserunners,” Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins writes. “From the minor leagues on up, coaches in the organization preach the importance of taking the extra base. If a runner gets thrown out once in a while, it’s OK, as long as he was hustling. But in the playoffs, where each miscue is magnified, getting thrown out at third base is not OK.”

The Cubs MLB team, meanwhile, lost their seventh consecutive playoff game thanks to Ryan Dempster’s wild performance. “Dempster walked seven over 4 2/3 innings,” Jeff Passan writes on Yahoo Sports. “The last time his control failed him so was Aug. 20, 1999. He was 22. And he looked nothing like the prime starter he had proven himself this season. Actually, Derek Lowe took that mantel on Thursday. Over the last six weeks, Lowe has been the best pitcher in baseball, his 1.27 earned-run average better than CC Sabathia’s, Johan Santana’s, everyone’s. His pitches cut and sunk and slid through the chill, and after the DeRosa home run, the Cubs mustered nothing.”

But Cubs MLB team fans will endure, as they’ve always done since 1908. “We share Cubdom with people we spot with Cubs caps on the beach in Florida and with Cubs stickers on their California bumpers and with Cubs shirts in the stands at Turner Field in Atlanta (our super station can beat yours!),” Joe Distelheim writes on Hardball Times. “We have nothing else in common with the bearers, but we are extended family, serfs performing the duties of our station in life. We are those who, through good fortune of birth, were spared these old agonies and first felt the lash in October 2003, in an eighth inning that will hurt as long as anyone can remember the names of the fan who turned one maybe-out into none and the shortstop who turned a sure two into none.”