Here Comes The Fun Part

Like a tuna fish sandwich, quaint has a shelf life. Also like a tuna fish sandwich, it's definitely shorter than four days. All the charms of two teams meeting in the World Series that have never won a championship before have played themselves out in the time between the last playoff game and the next one. The amusements that come with two lower-half payrolls making baseball's radicalized reigning billionaires look like the amoral sludge smugglers they are are pretty much done, too. To put it as simply as possible, our culture doesn't have four days of anticipation in it before boredom starts to creep into emotional ennui. Replacing all that abstracted fussing with some actual baseball is a good deal for all involved. The World Series starts tonight, and the field has been cleared of distractions. The Tampa Bay "Once Again" Devil Rays and Milwaukee "Used To Be Seattle Pilots" Brewers are now down to work, and those games will constitute a final plebiscite on How To Play The Game. The Rays and Brewers have made use of defense and speed and even bunting in ways that have lately fallen out of fashion. It's as if they found a dusty box in the attic with some ominous scrolls in it, but so far the incantations have worked like a dream. They are thin on power but generate plenty of runs; they both are pitching-rich, and make deft and still slightly unconventional use of the when-in-doubt-use-an-opener maneuver that dominates postseason baseball. In other words, they will give the baseball public all the things it says it wants: movement, dexterity, the art of the game, pitching changes and discussions about pitching changes, not being the Dodgers or the Mets or any of the other high-payroll teams, and also not being the teams that don't try and don't want to. The element of novelty is all well and good, and the styles-make-fights aspect of the matchup suggests that these games will also offer something for the purists and true heads. If you're lucky, Pat Murphy might say something pithier than "Goddamnit, Merrill," and a Junior Caminero home run moonwalk might take three minutes. Now the issue becomes whether that—crackerjack baseball played by people whose names even most casual fans might not know—is actually what you want. That, ultimately, is between you and your landlord.

Read it at Defector ↗

← Front page