Last night’s National League championship series game showed once again why baseball is the supreme sport.
Every other sport requires a clock. The game is played on a rectangular field with the goal of getting the ball or whatever into a goal at the respective ends of the field within a defined time. Fun, but overall pretty derivative.
Baseball is over when a certain number of tasks have been completed, not when the clock strikes twelve. In theory, any team has a chance to win as long as 27 outs haven’t been recorded yet. Last night, the Cardinals showed why. Two outs, top of the ninth, down by two runs, one out away from packing for the winter … and they win the game. Sudden, shocking and unexpected, the very definition of drama. It just couldn’t be better.
This isn’t to say that other sports aren’t exciting. In football, a team down by a score or two –races- the clock to score. I still watch the
Is it any wonder it’s still the national pastime?
Which brings me to my seven rules of “If I Were Commissioner” baseball:
1. No team except the Yankees can wear pinstripes. They set the standard, let everyone else enjoy them. Everyone else just looks like pitiful wannabes.
2. No network is allowed to show two games at the same time, as Fox did a couple of nights ago, putting one on broadcast, the other on deep cable. This unfairly discriminates against obsessive types like me who want and need to tank out in front of the tube or radio during playoff season, and are only given three hours out of a possible six to do ir.
3. No shots of famous people attending a ballgame. This goes for ex-presidents and actors alike. No one cares and it takes away from shots of attractive women, which is what the cameramen and the fans would prefer to see anyway. The only exception are shots of former ‘Niner QB Steve Young at SBC. That’s okay. After all, what other good Mormon boy could enjoy such success in San Francisco, of all places?
4. Maintain the current practice of not showing televised scenes from bars in the road team’s hometown through a formal ban. “Hi, we’re drunk and loud and watching teevee!!” If I want that, I can invite friends over. Stay on the game.
5. Place a ban on any more wildcard teams in the US Constitution. This is critical because greedy owners just don’t know when to stop. Baseball commish Bud Selig was reportedly close to adding a second wild card team a couple of years ago. The two wildcard teams would play a one game playoff to see who’d get to go to the real playoffs. Even -more- excitement, and spinning turnstiles, after the All-Star Game. No, no, no. The current setup is fine. This year, so many teams were "on the bubble" it looked like the MBA. The wildcard works because it –is- “in or go home.” Keep that tension. It makes the wildcard a valid contender.
6. It’s funny to see “This day in 1967” featuring a World Series game while current division playoffs are going on. Shorten the season. This is baseball. It shouldn’t begin and end in a snowstorm. When the last game of the Series inevitably does, some idiot will propose a Super Bowl-style of rotation among warm wintered cities, passing the Series audience off to the same corporate pigs who fill a typical SB stadium, not real people.
7. Get rid of the silly All Star rule giving home field advantage to the league who wins the game. It’s not made the game any more intriguing and punishes a good team from a weaker league in the Series. I say, mix up the game even more. Play Red states vs. Blue states. Or US vs. the World, given all of the foreign-born players currently blessing the game. Or have each league WS manager draft their respective teams. Turn it into a big fantasy game.
I’m still hoping for a Cards – White Sox Classic. If nothing else, last night I got something I cherish greatly, thousands of miserable pathetic Texans. That alone was worth the price of admission.
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