Let’s give the 2014 MLB season a Viking funeral

Let’s give the 2014 major league baseball season a Viking funeral. If you’ve ever been to one of the Disney parks and tried out their famously confused “Vikings of the Caribbean” ride, you will recall the climactic tableau in which horn-helmeted, realistically-bearded animatronic Norsemen load the body of a deceased comrade onto a longboat, pile all his possessions on top of him (consisting of a sword, a towel, and a servant boy named “Olaf,” and set the lot on fire.

That isn’t remotely the way the Vikings did it, actually, but it makes for a good show and an even more appropriate ending for the highly mediocre 2014 season. Burn it, let the ashes be dispersed upon the tides, and the whole thing forgotten about. “All hail Uspak Tanglebeard, a great Viking.” “Who?” “Exactly.” Now, I know that those of you who are Royals and Orioles fans and have been waiting awhile to celebrate a championship -- as well as those fans of all the teams still in it -- may not be first in line to put the 2014 season to the torch, and I’m not asking them. The postseason, as Gertrude Stein often said, is the postseason, is the postseason. Call it a new chapter, and a good one. The Yankees and the Red Sox have gone home. The king is dead, long live the king -- whoever that turns out to be.

To dwell on the wonderfulness of the 2014 postseason for just one moment more before returning to the grotesquely stillborn 2014 regular season, there is a good chance that whichever team dog-piles on the field roughly a month from now will be doing so for the first time in 25 or 30 years or more. Start with the Pirates (1979), Orioles (1983), Tigers (1984), and Dodgers (1988) and you might imagine we were back in the age of Reagan (when trees caused pollution; good times). Look at the Pirates, the “We Are Family” champions of 35 years ago. You know how long 35 years is? It’s about one-third the time the Cubs have been waiting. It’s been 12 years for the Angels, a long enough interval for that category of teams that makes a consistent effort. Then there is the Washington Nationals, a team that has never even been to a World Series, “never” being defined as 10 years or 46 years, depending on how you want to count things.

Only a championship by the Cardinals (2011) or Giants (2012) would represent an extension of the status quo rather than a kind of rebirth.

Getting here, though, was kind of a drag. I say that not as a fan of a particular team -- I don’t have one, in or out of the postseason -- but as a fan of greatness, be it of the very good or the very bad variety. No team won 100 games. No team lost 100. There were some outstanding individual seasons by position players even amidst reduced offensive levels, but none of them (by the lights of Baseball-Reference’s formulation of Wins Above Replacement) rank among the top 10 seasons of the last five years (Mike Trout’s season checks in at No. 12, Josh Donaldson at No. 19, Adrian Beltre at No. 31, and so on). If we take defense out the equation, then Trout’s is the third-best offensive season of the last five years, Andrew McCutchen’s the eighth-best.

It seems odd to celebrate Trout’s season as something special given that he morphed into a low-average power-hitter in the second half, slugging .506 but averaging only .259.

If you want to look at offense in terms of a stat like park- and league-adjusted OPS (OPS+) then no hitter receiving 450 or more plate appearances ranked in the top 10 for the last five years. Joe Abreu, Victor Martinez, and Andrew McCutchen rank 12-14, in that order. Trout checks in at No. 17 behind Chris Davis’s (remember him?) 2013 season and Trout’s own 2012.

We saw more that was memorable on the pitching side. Clayton Kershaw had the seventh-best season of the last five years, and it was just a hair off of the top five. WAR doesn’t quite do him justice given his relative lack of innings; it’s more meaningful that he had the best ERA+ (park- and league-adjusted ERA this time) of the last half-decade, his 197 just edging his 194 of last year. Chris Sale’s 178 also ranks in the top five. Returning to WAR, Corey Kluber of the Indians snuck into the top 10 at the bottom at 7.3.

On the relief side, the best WAR season by a reliever from 2010 to present remains David Robertson’s 4 of 2011, but the Royals’ Wade Davis (3.8) and the Yankees’ Dellin Betances (3.7) check in at No. 2 and No. 4, respectively. Aroldis Chapman struck out 17.7 batters per nine innings, not only the best rate of the last five years, but the best ever by any pitcher throwing 50 or more innings. Andrew Miller of the Red Sox/Orioles and Brad Boxberger of the Rays were seventh and ninth, respectively.

None of this is to say that we didn’t have some exciting performances within the context of the 2014 season, and if you want to take a picture of Nelson Cruz in an Orioles uniform and put it on your wall, I can’t blame you and will in fact help pick out a frame given that his league-leading 40 home runs, a career high by seven, puts the lie to all the Biogenesis/PEDs hysteria. As far as the all-time yearbook, though? As far as seasons that stand out in any sense relative to history? There’s Kershaw.

Given the lackluster nature of the season -- and it was sometimes so dry that the media got confused as to what was good, what was bad, and what was merely transient and did brilliant things like suggest Yasiel Puig be benched. In other words, we weren’t very good at celebrating the living, so the season became a lot about the dying and the disappointing. Derek Jeter retired and retired and retired. Bud Selig retired and retired and retired. Paul Konerko merely retired and retired. To my knowledge, Raul Ibanez didn’t retire at all. Jason Giambi is still thinking it over.

Jose Altuve won a batting title, bringing a little hope to a downtrodden franchise. Justin Morneau won a batting title, bringing nothing at all except questions about what the hell he was doing still playing for the Colorado Rockies after the trading deadline.

The A’s played like the 1927 Yankees and then nearly died. The Brewers did die. The latter spent 159 days in first place and then parachuted out of the playoffs. The A’s were in first for 140 days and settled for a wild card. The Blue Jays spent 61 days leading the AL East and finished where the Jays always finish. The Braves, Diamondbacks, and Padres terminated their general managers. The Astros and Diamondbacks fired their managers, and the Twins wasted no time firing their own. Ron Washington was unfaithful to his wife and fired himself. That last doesn’t necessarily make sense, but I guess we all pick our personal penance. Ned Yost, who continues to let Nori Aoki bunt in the first inning, remains employed. Every pitcher in baseball up to and including Christy Mathewson underwent Tommy John surgery.

Several elderly ex-managers making the Hall of Fame was a highlight of the summer. The best rookie position player in baseball, Jose Abreu of the White Sox, is a 27-year-old veteran. The best rookie pitcher in baseball, Collin McHugh of the Astros, is also 27. The second-best, Betances, is 26. The third-best, Masahiro Tanaka, who was the big offseason story of last winter, was mostly great and is a relatively youthful 25, but missed a good chunk of the season with arm miseries. Three possible game-163 tiebreakers failed to materialize on the last day of the regular season. We’re already talking about next season’s Alex Rodriguez comeback -- yes, concurrent with the postseason because New York didn’t show up for baseball this year and something New York must always be on the agenda.

In summary, it truly was a drab, miserable season. Perhaps the postseason will be as compelling as the April-September marathon was not, but as I said, that’s a different book, another chapter. Bring on the Nationals and their starting pitchers. Bring on the Royals, their bullpen, and Lorenzo Cain. Give us the Pirates and Andrew McCutchen, the Giants and Buster Posey, the Dodgers and Kershaw striking out 20 batters in an October start. Give us anything but what we just had.

As soon as all of that is done, the baseball world will not only be talking A-Rod (earplugs, please), but shaving time off of games -- another negative dwelt upon this summer -- ways to restore offense -- ditto -- and a free-agent list that is depressingly thin. We’ll be right back to what ailed us this year. So if you’re into praying, beseeching Divine Providence, or any other form of begging the cosmos for favors, please, look to the sky and cry out that October be King.

And once you’re done with that, please join me over here on the beach, where I’ll be toasting marshmallows over a burning, inverted kayak on which I’ve scrawled “S.S. 2014” in Sharpie. Best I could do on short notice.