The Forlorn Four

No, it is not the Mad Magazine parody of The Fantastic Four. The Forlorn Four is the name Larry Stone of the Seattle Times has for the four current Major League teams that have never made it to the World Series. Those four teams are:

Tampa Bay Devil Rays
Texas Rangers
Washington Nationals
Seattle Mariners

Forlorn Four: M's are in unselect company

Those are the Forlorn Four (though perhaps a spot should be made for the Chicago Cubs, who have gone 62 seasons — longer than any of them — since their last World Series appearance in 1945. But the Cubbies don't get in on technicalities. )

The Rockies' World Series appearance this year, on top of the Astros' in 2005, on top of the Angels' in 2002, on top of the Diamondbacks' in 2001, on top of the Marlins' in 1997, shows that it's possible to vacate this club.

So today's question is this: Who will be next? I posed that very query, by e-mail, to 20 top baseball executives (none of them associated with any of the four teams).

Promising anonymity, I asked them which team — the Mariners, Devil Rays, Rangers or Nationals — is best positioned to get to the World Series first.

Since this is a Seattle paper, that may be giving away the answer to how this poll turned out:

I got 18 responses, and the results should encourage Mariners fans. By a wide margin, they felt the Mariners would be the next club to win their elusive first pennant. The Mariners got 10 votes, compared to four for Texas, two for Tampa Bay and two for Washington.

Many of the executives who voted for the Mariners pointed to their high payroll, the fact they were in contention for much of last season, and the fact they play in the only four-team division in baseball.

Since I've been thinking about this for about a year now and since this column gives a bit of a jumping off point, today seems to be a good time to do that series of posts called "How Close?"

This series of posts will look at how close each major league team has been to the a league pennant and a World Championship. This will either be since their last pennant and World Series Title (For example: Yankees: AL Pennant 2003; World Series Championship 2000. Cubs: NL Pennant 1945; World Series Championship 1908)

I'll start with the Forlorn Four.