The Women of September

 The first expansion team I remember was the New York Mets.  I turned 16 the summer they started playing in 1962.  They were terrible. They went 40-120, setting the record for the worst losing season that stood for decades.  Their manager was the famous Yankee skipper, Casey Stengel.  Yogi Berra signed on as a coach.  The great Duke Snyder was on the team.  But their glory days were over. The Mets stayed terrible for most of the 60s.

What I remember most about them was not their losing but their basic incompetence.  Casey Stengel's most famous quote of the time was, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

The WNBA added an expansion team this year, the Golden State Valkyries. They were very much not terrible. They very much could play this game. Now they are the first expansion team in league history--and in many other leagues--to make the playoffs their first year of play.

This was supposed to be the year of Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever.  But Clark has been out with injuries most of the season, and the team announced she wasn't coming back this year.  Minneapolis dominated and Las Vegas has a long winning streak to end the season.  But this was the year of the Valkyries, who sold out every home game at the huge Chase Center in San Francisco, where the Golden State Warriors play.  With a roster of mostly unknowns, they've developed a style--like the Warriors, a lot of defense and a lot of three pointers.  In monetary terms they are already the most valuable franchise in the league.

As for the Fever, despite a series of devastating injuries, they've made the playoffs anyway.  They've still got at least two stars on the floor, and they are an heroically cohesive group.  Neither the Fever nor the Valkyries are expected to go very far in the upcoming playoffs, but to me they are the two teams that are the most fun to watch.

Meanwhile, the MLB teams I watch and root for, my old hometown Pittsburgh Pirates and my "new" home team the San Francisco Giants, have had some very entertaining moments the second half of the season.  

After a terrible post-All Star break losing streak that plummeted them out of contention, the Giants came alive, especially in August.  They had the longest streak of the year in consecutive games with at least one home run.  They surprised a lot of teams that thought they'd be an easy victim.

So did the Pirates, in streaks.  For example, the LA Dodgers went into Pittsburgh hoping to get well from a rough patch--playing a weaker team would be just the ticket.  Instead the Pirates beat them three games in a row, blanking them in the middle game--which was one of those pitching by committee games yet.  They had a couple of streaks like this, confounding teams actually in contention, some when they really needed the wins.

But of course by now the Pirates and the Giants have started losing again (though the Giants just won another high scoring game against Arizona.)  But they both certainly had some fun moments to watch this summer.