Experts Look Foolish As World Series Ends

The Cardinals beat the Tigers last night 4-2 to win the World Series four games to one. It may seem odd for a Cubs fan to say this, but I’m happy the Cardinals won.

First, I’ve never had the hatred for the Cardinals that a lot of Cubs fans have. Growing up, the Mets were always the arch enemy, not the Cards. Second, my main reason for being happy is that the Cardinals WS victory flies right in the face of all of the supposed experts who said not only that the Cardinals couldn’t beat the Tigers, but that no team coming out of the NL could beat the Tigers.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who believe their opinions are infallible. In fact, they don’t consider their opinions to be opinions. They consider their opinions to be fact. These “experts” said that the Tigers would win the WS and that they would do it in four or five games (depending on who made the prognostication). They were wrong about the WS and they were wrong in a big way.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not talking about everyone who had an opinion on the WS. Heck, I predicted that the Cardinals would lose the NLDS to the Padres, then I picked the Mets in the NLCS. Being wrong isn’t a crime. But these experts I’m talking about acted as if the game on the field didn’t matter. They pointed to stats as “proof” that the Tigers would win the WS. By doing this, at least in my mind, they were being disrespectful to the game. They didn’t recognize that baseball is one of the hardest games to predict and that things like heart and determination and grit and attitude mean more than statistics, especially when it comes to the post-season.

Now the spotlight turns to the off-season. Jim Hendry has his work cut out for him, but I’m hopeful that he will have the best off-season of his career. There’s a lot of work to be done, but as the WS proved, you never can tell what will happen.