Good Baseball Isn’t Necessarily Beautiful

The American League Championship Series is every bit an American League production, which is to say that it is not for the dilettante, or anything close to an easy watch. It is for people who choose to view sports in their leisure time as penance for past misdeeds rather than as a reward for past service. You don't sit back and enjoy it passively; you may not enjoy it at all. Instead you lean in with clenched fists and teeth in full-lock grind, because this is the business that you and they have chosen, and the aesthetic you and they have embraced. One of these teams is going to play in the World Series, and far more concerning for you lightweights, it could still be the Cleveland Guardians. The American League, you see, is not the Tampa Bay Rays, the perennially competitive team defined by pluck, platooning, and small contracts. Their calling card is more than those low payrolls and zeal for doing the things everyone else dismisses as Little League nonsense. They have been the fourth-best team in the sport over the last two decades, and this may well be their most complete team yet. They win because of their seemingly indomitable pitching, a roster full of opportunistic multi-tool players whose talents mesh delightfully and whose shortcomings somehow do not clump up in unsightly blobs, and perhaps also due to the cool multi-colored Devil Rays jerseys they wear sometimes, which recall their franchise origins, and specifically to the part when religious groups claimed they were honoring Satanic influences and were taken seriously enough that the franchise dropped the Devil for good. They are the best team in the American League, but they are their own thing. The American League, this year, is actually much closer to Cleveland, a sometimes-hard-to-watch surprise team that really isn't that surprising. They won 13 fewer regular-season games in winning their benighted division but, like Tampa, Cleveland got a first-round bye and all the advantages that come with it. They are in the ALCS after having earned it—inelegantly, perhaps, and in uniforms that hearken back to a time when the only colors in the world were navy blue and red and fonts were something only runty graphic designers understood. But they earned it all the same.

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