The second was this exchange. When asked, “Are you driven to take the next step and win one?,” he responded:
“Yeah, one is sort of driven to get back, but it’s not that easy to do. Kansas City did it, and some teams have done it. I don’t know that any team has gone to the World Series three years in a row since the A’s did it in ’88, ’89, ’90. It’s tough to do. It’s tougher to do now because you have more layers of competition. You’ve got the wild card, and then the division series and then the league series before you get to the World Series. Back in those late ’80s, you only played a league championship series and that was it.”
Hmmm. There is one team that not just made it to the World Series three years in a row (actually four years in a row) since the A’s in the 80s. And this team won three years in a row, when Oakland only won one title in those three years. And finally, this team won in the wild card era. And that team would be…drum roll please…the 1998/1999/2000/2001 New York Yankees!
Did Alderson simply forget the Yankees? Is he throwing shade at his team’s crosstown rivals? I don’t know. But this simply amuses me for some strange reason! Heh.
About the running reference: Alderson said he has “been a runner for a long time” and has run several marathons. He told Serby:
“What you realize like in a long-distance race is that there are these stress points that you hit where you really want to quit. You just want to stop. But if you get through them, then the stress dissipates, and you go on for a while longer until you get to another point where it gets stressful — it might be a hill, it might just be distance, it could be anything. But if you do that a couple of times, you realize that, ‘I can get through this.’ And so, over time, you do get through them and you get through those points with less stress than you originally experienced not having done it before.
“And so, in some ways, that’s the way I approach baseball, the team, the season, is that you have to be aware that those difficult points will arise, and you have to be prepared to deal with them. But they’re manageable, and you’ll get through them. But you can’t be paralyzed by the stress or the losses or the difficulties.”
He is dead on in this comparison. I did a 10-mile race yesterday that ebbed and flowed, to say the least. You can read my report about this epic race here. I am resurrecting my personal Swan Squawking blog to put things that don’t really neatly “fit” in the Squawkers, and that is one of the articles I have published there.
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