Are You Entertained Yet?

OK, so, wait, what’s happening now?

The four best teams in the National League — including the team with the best regular-season run differential in 85 years — are out. The New York Yankees are on the brink after blowing a ninth-inning lead on Saturday night with some pitcher named Clarke Schmidt. The Astros and Mariners played a 359-inning scoreless game only a few days after Cleveland and Tampa Bay played a 337-inning scoreless game.

What in the world is going on in baseball?

Chaos. That’s what’s going on. Are you not entertained? For decades, baseball represented the closest thing to order that American sports had to offer. The teams played the most regular-season games, by far, and that long season was sacrosanct; it was meant to determine the two best teams. Those teams played in the World Series.

Later it was four teams. Then eight. Then 10. The regular season didn’t get shorter. It just grew less important.

And now, for the first time, it’s 12 teams playing short-series free-for-alls on a frenzied march to the World Series, and the system has worked precisely as it was designed. The system has given us a dizzying March Madness parade of Cinderellas and underdog stories and super-teams going on winter vacation early.

And … it’s fun. Of course, it’s fun. Upsets are fun. Surprises are fun. New teams in the mix are fun. The Phillies are fun. They’re going loopy with joy in Philadelphia, where the Phillies — a team that would not have been in the playoffs last year or in any other full season — utterly destroyed a 101-win Atlanta team, thanks in large part to a soaring Bryce Harper and Aaron Nola and a bullpen that did the most un-Philadelphia sort of thing: get outs when they needed them.

The Padres are fun. They’re going loopy with joy in San Diego, where the Padres — a team that has never won the World Series and had not won a playoff series in almost 25 years — first took out the New York Mets before doing the unthinkable: Slaying the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games. All anyone could talk about with this Padres team during the season was their superstar makeup. Machado! Soto! Tatis! Darvish! Hader! And all those guys were good.

But the Padres’ heroes for the most part have been guys without exclamation points after their names. Grisham. Cronenworth. Nola (the other one). And that suddenly unhittable bullpen. Tim Hill? Pierce Johnson? Nick Martinez? Robert Suarez?* The Dodgers couldn’t touch any of them.

*Holy cow, Robert Suarez! Maybe he does deserve an exclamation point after his name. He’s a 31-year-old Venezuelan who had spent his entire career playing in Mexico and Japan. Nobody really noticed when the Padres signed him. The first time he pitched in a big-league game, he entered with a two-run lead against Arizona. He walked the first batter he faced, walked the second batter he faced, threw a wild pitch, and then hit the third batter he faced. Now, he just comes in, throws 99-mph fastballs, and the occasional 88-mph change-up and nobody seems to stand a chance.

The Guardians are so much fun. This team cannot hit a lick. I haven’t looked this up to verify, but I believe they set a major league record this year by finishing sixth in the league in runs scored despite the fact that Jose Ramirez was the only player on the team to get a hit all season.

But this team just keeps going, pushing forward, pitching their hearts out, putting the ball in play, taking the extra base whenever possible, catching every ball that stays in the ballpark and, most of all, coming back when all seems lost. The Guardiac Kids. That’s what a few of my Cleveland friends started calling them. On Saturday, with the series locked at 1-1, the Yankees did what the Yankees do — they hit a bunch of home runs, Aaron Judge hit one, Oswaldo Cabrera hit one, Harrison Bader hit one — and they led 5-3 going into the ninth inning.

The Yankees had never once blown a multiple-run lead entering the ninth inning of a playoff game. Never once. They were 167-0, according to our Joel Sherman.

Then, New York manager Aaron Boone — in what could be one of his last moves as Yankees manager if things don’t turn around — decided not to bring in Clay Holmes to finish things off. Holmes, admittedly, had a weird year. Until July 9, he was about as unhittable as a pitcher can be — he’d allowed only two earned runs in 39 innings pitched. He had not allowed a single home run. He had a 40-to-6 strikeout-to-walk.

And after July 9? Blech. He gave up 16 earned runs in 24 innings, he couldn’t find the plate, no, it wasn’t great.

Still, you gotta dance with the one you brung with or whatever that goofy expression is, no? But Boone said that Holmes was dealing with some soreness and declared him available only in an emergency situation. And, I suspect, he did not think a two-run lead against this Cleveland team qualified as an emergency.

Only, then it became an emergency. One thing about this Cleveland team is that being overlooked is one of their most powerful weapons. Myles Straw, who had a .564 OPS this year, stepped up with one out against Yankees pitcher Wandy Peralta and lifted a fly ball to leftfield. It bounced inches in front of a diving Cabrera (who had been playing quite deep, considering Straw has hit exactly zero home runs this year). Then, the Yankees shortstop, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, for reasons that will never be clear, decided to casually and aimlessly loft the ball back toward the infield.

Straw took advantage and raced to second base.

That’s as Guardians a play as you will ever see — a fly-ball double because of two poor Yankee defensive plays.

Up stepped rookie Steven Kwan, who blooped and chopped and punched and slapped his way to a .298 batting average during the year. And sure enough, he took a half-swing and blooped a ball to leftfield, perfectly placed between Kiner-Falefa and Peralta. That put runners on first and third.

This is how Cleveland plays baseball.

Gonzalez has emerged as an unexpected postseason hero in Cleveland. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

That’s when Boone made the fateful decision to go with Clarke Schmidt, a 2017 first-round pick out of the University of South Carolina. Schmidt is unlike the hard-throwing relievers who have dominated the postseason; he doesn’t even have a fastball. Well, OK, he does have a mid-90s fastball, but he rarely throws it.

In fact, he threw one fastball in this game. He started off Cleveland’s Amed Rosario with a couple of sliders — his top pitch — and then did try to sneak the fastball by. He didn’t come close; Rosario ripped it to leftfield, scoring Straw and making the score 5-4.

Schmidt didn’t throw another fastball. Instead, he fed Jose Ramirez a couple of knuckle curves, and on the second one Ramirez his a little bloop — it wasn’t even a full bloop — that didn’t make it out of the infield. But it was hit to the perfect spot, it was a single, that loaded the bases. The Cleveland crowd was going crazy, as you might expect, though they were also really cold because it’s October in Cleveland.

In my entire childhood, I don’t believe anyone ever saw the Halloween costume I was wearing because I always had to wear a coat over it. Instead, all they saw was the little plastic mask that was supposed to be held on my face by the incredibly cheap little rubber band. Obviously that rubber band would break two seconds after you opened the box, so my Halloweens were spent wearing costumes covered by my coat and a mask that I had to physically hold on my face because the rubber band broke and, oh, wait, the game is still going on, sorry …

Clarke Schmidt threw a flurry of three knuckle curves at Josh Naylor, who struck out swinging, making the situation bases loaded, two outs, Yankees up by one run. Up stepped Oscar Gonzalez, who a week ago had sent Cleveland into this series with his walk-off, 15th-inning home run against Tampa Bay. You couldn’t expect more heroics from a rookie, could you?

Schmidt threw Gonzalez four sliders. Gonzalez fouled off two of them. Then, down to his last strike, Schmidt throw a pretty solid slider that looked to be just off the plate, and Gonzalez reached out and poked it up the middle, where there were no fielders. Kwan scored. Rosario scored. Madness in Cleveland. And fury in New York.

All the while, the Astros and Mariners were busy striking out and striking out more and bringing in people from the stands to pitch and that game went 18 innings and 6 hours and 22 minutes and finally Houston won it on a Jeremy Peña home run and I saw it again: Are you not entertained?