Best ever, right before our eyes
By Jayson Stark - ESPN.com

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- A hundred baseball postseasons. All memorable, cool and historic.

But if the beauty, the never-ending drama and the monumental significance of this one hasn't swept you up in its tidal wave yet, then you're missing something special.

Because of all those 100 baseball postseasons, this one is the best.

We still have many games to play, of course. We still have heroes and goats, losers and winners to come. We still have champagne to spray and hearts to break.

But less than two weeks into October, baseball already has assembled every ingredient necessary for this postseason to go down as the greatest, most legendary of them all:
  • Storied teams with vast fan bases? Check.
  • Revered ballparks? Check.
  • Marquee names? Got 'em.
  • And best of all, sensational games? Games that keep you up past bedtime? Games that grab your eyeballs and won't let go? Games filled with mind-boggling finishes and crazy calls and plot twists you never saw coming?
Yes, yes, yes and yes.

So unless the next couple of weeks somehow turn into a gigantic sporting train wreck, it's time right now to stop and appreciate what we're in the midst of:

This won't be merely the best postseason in baseball history. It will be the best postseason in any sport's history. Because there is no postseason like baseball's postseason. And we can prove it.

Do the math
In just the first nine days of these baseball playoffs, we witnessed 14 games decided by one or two runs. Fourteen. That's 14 of the first 21 -- a rate of 67 percent.

That's the highest rate, at that 21-game milepost, of any postseason in the nine years since baseball added wild cards and a third round. But if you've paid attention at all over these last nine Octobers, you know that a succession of great games is practically regularly scheduled programming for this sport.

Through Wednesday, there had been 252 postseason baseball games played since 1995. An amazing 50 percent were decided by one or two runs. And there hasn't been a single October in which baseball failed to give us a postseason in which at least 40 percent of all playoff games were one- or two-run games.

Now stack that up against the other pro sports to which baseball is compared most -- football and basketball.

Think those NFL playoffs are must-see TV? Well, maybe -- if you're snowed in for two days. But only 35 percent of all NFL postseasons games over the last five years fit our definition of "close games" (decided by eight points or fewer).

And in only one of those last five NFL postseasons (the 1999-2000 edition) has the football playoffs exceeded baseball's lowest rate of close postseason games under the current format -- 40 percent. But in many years, it's literally no contest. Last season, just 27 percent of NFL playoff games were "close." In 2000-01, it was only 18 percent.

We grant you that football has fewer games. But the NBA -- which has far more playoff games -- does no better. If we define a "close game" in basketball to be a game decided by no more than six points (i.e., two three-pointers), then only 36 percent of all playoff games over the NBA's last five postseasons have been "close."

And like the NFL, only one NBA postseason in the last five years (2001-02) has cranked out "close games" in 40 percent of its whole playoff extravaganza -- while baseball has topped 40 percent every year.

So ... any more questions? You don't need to work for Bud Selig to see the truth: Baseball's postseason is the most underrated of any sport.

We're not sure why it's so underrated. Maybe it's because the wild-card concept outraged so many traditionalists when the commish dropped it on them.

But Steve Hirdt, the ever-astute historian and numbers wizard of the Elias Sports Bureau, theorizes that maybe the problem the first round has created is that there is "so much going on every day that it would take really intense concentration on every game to keep up with everything. A lot of great stuff happens in each individual series that gets forgotten later on because it gets eclipsed by what takes place in the later rounds."

Well, maybe that is the problem. But if it is, it's not a problem anyone seems to have with the first round in the other sports. In fact, in the closest sporting parallel to baseball's first round -- the opening two days of the NCAA basketball tournament -- the insanity of the first round is just about everybody's favorite feature of the entire event.

Is it impossible to watch and digest every minute of baseball's first round? Well, yeah -- at least if you want to stay married, or employed.

But if it causes some minor vertigo to find the Marlins rallying in the 11th to beat the Giants before dinner, and then the Braves fighting to preserve their dynasty at Wrigley later that evening, and then the A's running the bases like the Vito's Pizza T-ball team deep into "Saturday Night Live" territory, so what?

If you're a fan, the goal of the first round ought to be to come out of it as dizzy and sleepless as possible. And this year, we sure fulfilled that mission. We also got ...

Our cast of characters
Even better than Ivan Rodriguez's plate block, or Trot Nixon's midnight homer, or Kerry Wood's sheer unhittability in the biggest game of his life is that the first round produced more than simply real-life masterpiece theater. It produced just about the perfect group of four survivors: Cubs, Red Sox, Yankees, Marlins.

"You've got the three most historic stadiums in baseball -- Wrigley, Fenway and Yankee Stadium -- still in play," Hirdt said. "And if you asked people before the season what teams they'd like to see in the postseason, those teams -- Cubs, Red Sox and Yankees -- would probably finish 1-2-3."

As for the fourth team, don't even ask where the Marlins would have finished in that survey, because the answer might have been 46th. But they're a tremendous story in their own right, because of where they've come from (10 games under .500), who manages them (a 72-year-old baseball lifer, Jack McKeon), their reinvented superstar (Rodriguez) and their apparently incurable addiction to frenetic postseason finishes.

So why has the first chapter of this postseason gotten its highest TV ratings in history? Why did the early games in the baseball playoffs outrate the finals of the NBA playoffs? Why was the New York Times actually editorializing this week that America needs a Cubs-Red Sox World Series?

Because, if you discount the Marlins and their bizarre history, the teams still playing are teams that have imbedded themselves in more souls than maybe any combination of franchises in any sport's Final Four.

Last year this time, it was just about impossible to find any Angels fan outside the Orange County line. But there are Cubs fans, Red Sox fans and Yankees fans in all 50 states, in about 182 countries and, according to a NASA study, on at least six planets.

So to fulfill its appointment with greatness, all this postseason has to do from here is play itself out.

Cubs against anybody is a classic World Series. Red Sox against anybody is a classic World Series. Yankees against anybody is a classic clash of $180-million conglomerate vs. a lovable little underdog.

And if it's Cubs-Red Sox? Then we've left the sports pages and landed this flight in the center of Main Street. We don't know who would win. But we'd sure set an all-time World Series record for poetry, street parties and tales of woe-is-us history lessons.