Late in the classic film Patton starring George C. Scott, after the Second World War has ended, the following exchange occurs between General George S. Patton (Scott) and a war correspondent:
Correspondent: "General, we're told of wonder weapons the Germans were working on: Long-range rockets, push-button bombing weapons that don't need soldiers. What's your take on that?"
Patton: "Wonder weapons? My God, I don't see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics. Nothing is glorified, nothing is reaffirmed. No heroes, no cowards, no troops. No generals. Only those that are left alive and those that are left... dead. I'm glad I won't live to see it."
I slept in until nearly 7:30 this morning here in Tbilisi. I had trouble getting to sleep last night, so I popped a couple of Optimal around 11:30, read in Boswell's Life of Johnson for a while, (which would put anybody down) and finally got to sleep some time after midnight. But my older sister called me from California at 7:25 a.m. (8:25 p.m. where she was) with big news: The St. Louis Cardinals had won the World Series! This after trailing the Texas Rangers three games to two earlier this week.
Well, yesterday's game was something of a miracle, which will go into the baseball history books as a never-before: The Texas Rangers, by rights, should have sent the Cardinals home to bed. St. Louis trailed five times in Game Six yesterday, but kept coming back. In fact the Cardinals forced the game into extra innings by repeatedly tying the score, and then in the top of the 11th, third-baseman David Freese made history by clouting a single shot to center field which gave St. Louis a 10-9 victory.
No team in World Series history had ever rallied to overcome, first a ninth-inning deficit (7-5) and then an extra-innings deficit (9-7) to win a World Series game.
Then last night, in Game 7, Chris Carpenter held the Rangers to two runs, both of which they scored in the first inning. The same David Freese who was the hero of Game Six hit a two-run double in the bottom of the first, and then the Cardinals went on to score four more runs later in the game, one in the bottom of the third inning, two in the fifth and one more in the seventh. Final score of the 2011 World Series: Cardinals 6, Rangers 2.
So the St. Louis Cardinals have won their 11th World Series championship, and the Texas Rangers, who have made back-to-back Series appearances, last year and this, go home disappointed again.
Why am I not more exultant? Since childhood I've been a National League partisan. I always root for the NL in the All-Star game (which they always won in my youth, and now almost never do), and usually root for the National League team in the Series, if I root at all.
And I was pulling for St. Louis this year, for reasons explained in my last blog entry. But I'm not really what you'd call a Cardinals fan; I'm merely a Cardinals partisan, and I do have some mixed feelings about all of this.
It all gets back to the complications of modern baseball, which I acknowledge to have been unavoidable. It's a more complicated world now than it was in 1945. We all had to adjust, and baseball had to adjust too. There are 30 teams in MLB now, not the 16 there were when Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg and Joe DiMaggio came home from fighting World War II.
In 1945 there was no team further south than Washington, D.C. and no team further west than St. Louis. Baseball was strictly an affair of the northeast and the midwest. And radio. And as we all know, in 1945 there were as yet no black players in MLB.
The newly-affluent America of post-1945 had to, and did, change all of that. Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey ended baseball's segregation in 1947. Young black players streamed to the major leagues, and the legendary "negro leagues" died. We all know that story, now. (The Dodgers, first out of the gate at bringing up black players, also brought up Don Newcombe, the first black pitcher ever to start a World Series game, in 1949 against the Yankees. The Yankees, by the way, did not integrate until they brought up catcher Elston Howard in 1955.)
And teams moved around, as they always had. Franchises were added. The game expanded to accommodate an expanding America. By the turn of the 21st century there were teams in Miami, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, Houston, Arlington, TX, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, Seattle and even Toronto.
With 30 teams now, and the greed of both the owners and players to deal with, baseball now plays in muddy waters, not the clearer waters of my childhood, when at the end of September you had two teams staring at each other: the National League Champ and the American League champ. And during the first week of October they squared off in the World Series. And we ALL paid attention, as few do now.
It's a more complicated world now. Ambiguities have overpowered clarities.
Look at this season for example.
We no longer live in a world in which the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees have a breathtaking "pennant race" as they did in 1949, with the winner going on to face the Brooklyn Dodgers. Nope. Now, with 15 or 16 teams in each league, we have a two-tiered "playoff" system which eats up more than half of October before you even get to the "World Series." Regular-season interleague play, a by-product of owner greed which I have always hated, waters this picture down still further because chances are that the two teams squaring off in the "World Series" have already faced each other four or five times during the regular season. Where did the mystery go, the mystery of "This is the NL's best and this is AL's best -- who's the best?" If they've already played each other five times during the regular season, we already know the answer to that question. The "mystery" of the World Series is gone.
But dammit, where's the mystery, where's the magic and what's affirmed, as Patton asked in the movie?
I like the Cardinals. I always have.
But they finished the season a full six games behind the division-winning Milwaukee Brewers.
Milwaukee won the NL Central, the Philadelphia Phillies the
NL East and the Arizona Diamondbacks (whom, as a San Diego Padres fan, I dearly hate because they always beat us) the NL West.
In the National League, St. Louis got the so-called "wild card," something Major League Baseball borrowed from the NCAA. The non-division-winner with the best won-lost numbers gets to go to the first tier of the playoffs. Well, okay, you need four teams to have a playoff. Three divisions, three winners, one "wild card."
In the American League, the division winners were the Yankees, the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers, with the Tampa Bay Rays clinching the wild card to make a four-team playoff.
The Yankees, Tigers and Rays all got eliminated in the American League Divisional Series and subsequent Championship Series.
When the dust had settled, Texas went to the World Series. So it goes nowadays.
The Cardinals were the wild-card team in the National League, as were the Rays in the American. Like the Rays, the Cardinals did not win their division title.
But unlike the Rays, the Cardinals ended up winning the World Series.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
As I said, I like the Cardinals, and have since childhood. But I feel a bit sorry for the Rangers. They earned their berth in the Series; the Cards were merely there because they jumped on the caboose as the train was leaving the station and then got lucky in the playoffs. They were ten and a half games out of first place in August, finished the season six games back, but won the World Series.
Why do I have a problem with this? I don't know, but I do. What happened to the moral clarities of my childhood? When I was ten, the best team in the American League played the best team in the National League, and the whole thing was over in time for my birthday on October 12. There was no ambiguity there. Now the waters are all muddy, you can't see bottom, the Series doesn't end until almost Halloween, and some mediocre team that ended the season six games out in its division can walk off with the World Series trophy.
No more "pennant races;" now it's just penny-pitching and poker. Third-best (or fourth-best) can take it all. I'm not sure I like it. Where's the honor? What's affirmed? Why not do away with the regular season altogether and just proceed straight to the penny-pitching and poker? I have heard football fans, here in our eight-second-sound-bite culture, complain that the baseball season is too long anyway. NFL buffs love their season precisely because it only consists of 16 games, they're played on 16 consecutive Sundays, and the whole thing is over by January. Eat the candy bar and throw away the wrapper. Fun, fun, fun, but don't try my patience, and I don't have much, by the way. Or much attention span, anymore.
My sister even suggested shortening the season. "Look at the crowd at a World Series game," she said on the phone yesterday. "Some of them are bundled up like they're at a football game."
She means the season is too long, especially now that the multiple tiers of playoffs have pushed the World Series back from the Indian Summer of my childhood, (when games were played in the afternoon anyway) to prime-time under-the-lights evenings when the frost is on the pumpkin.
Well, Carla had an idea there, but I quickly pointed out that Moloch would not allow it. Go back to a 154-game schedule, as in the days of Babe Ruth? Not likely. Not with the Fox Network, the owners and the players all splitting $450,000,000,000,000 a thousand ways. Too much at stake there to radically change anything. To lose all that advertising revenue? No no no. And besides, the owners would jump on a shortened season as an excuse to reduce salaries, and the players would never go along with that.
So there you have it. We live in a world now where children's games are being played so that there are no winners or losers -- can't have the little tykes feeling "bad" about themselves, despite what life will teach them anyway later on. And baseball is no longer A versus B, but A, B, C and D throwing dice, with "D" only there because he had enough bonus points to get into the room.
Welcome to my watered-down world. Well, it's the only world I have. But whatever it may have in store 50 years from now -- who knows? Maybe the World Series will be decided by a lottery? I can only say with George C. Scott as George S. Patton, "I'm glad I won't live to see it."
Correspondent: "General, we're told of wonder weapons the Germans were working on: Long-range rockets, push-button bombing weapons that don't need soldiers. What's your take on that?"
Patton: "Wonder weapons? My God, I don't see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics. Nothing is glorified, nothing is reaffirmed. No heroes, no cowards, no troops. No generals. Only those that are left alive and those that are left... dead. I'm glad I won't live to see it."
 |
| St. Louis Cardinal third baseman David Freese clouts the eleventh-inning home run that won Game Six of the 2011 World Series for the Cardinals. Should the Cardinals have even been there? Well... |
I slept in until nearly 7:30 this morning here in Tbilisi. I had trouble getting to sleep last night, so I popped a couple of Optimal around 11:30, read in Boswell's Life of Johnson for a while, (which would put anybody down) and finally got to sleep some time after midnight. But my older sister called me from California at 7:25 a.m. (8:25 p.m. where she was) with big news: The St. Louis Cardinals had won the World Series! This after trailing the Texas Rangers three games to two earlier this week.
Well, yesterday's game was something of a miracle, which will go into the baseball history books as a never-before: The Texas Rangers, by rights, should have sent the Cardinals home to bed. St. Louis trailed five times in Game Six yesterday, but kept coming back. In fact the Cardinals forced the game into extra innings by repeatedly tying the score, and then in the top of the 11th, third-baseman David Freese made history by clouting a single shot to center field which gave St. Louis a 10-9 victory.
No team in World Series history had ever rallied to overcome, first a ninth-inning deficit (7-5) and then an extra-innings deficit (9-7) to win a World Series game.
Then last night, in Game 7, Chris Carpenter held the Rangers to two runs, both of which they scored in the first inning. The same David Freese who was the hero of Game Six hit a two-run double in the bottom of the first, and then the Cardinals went on to score four more runs later in the game, one in the bottom of the third inning, two in the fifth and one more in the seventh. Final score of the 2011 World Series: Cardinals 6, Rangers 2.
So the St. Louis Cardinals have won their 11th World Series championship, and the Texas Rangers, who have made back-to-back Series appearances, last year and this, go home disappointed again.
Why am I not more exultant? Since childhood I've been a National League partisan. I always root for the NL in the All-Star game (which they always won in my youth, and now almost never do), and usually root for the National League team in the Series, if I root at all.
And I was pulling for St. Louis this year, for reasons explained in my last blog entry. But I'm not really what you'd call a Cardinals fan; I'm merely a Cardinals partisan, and I do have some mixed feelings about all of this.
In 1945 there was no team further south than Washington, D.C. and no team further west than St. Louis. Baseball was strictly an affair of the northeast and the midwest. And radio. And as we all know, in 1945 there were as yet no black players in MLB.
The newly-affluent America of post-1945 had to, and did, change all of that. Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey ended baseball's segregation in 1947. Young black players streamed to the major leagues, and the legendary "negro leagues" died. We all know that story, now. (The Dodgers, first out of the gate at bringing up black players, also brought up Don Newcombe, the first black pitcher ever to start a World Series game, in 1949 against the Yankees. The Yankees, by the way, did not integrate until they brought up catcher Elston Howard in 1955.)
And teams moved around, as they always had. Franchises were added. The game expanded to accommodate an expanding America. By the turn of the 21st century there were teams in Miami, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, Houston, Arlington, TX, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, Seattle and even Toronto.
With 30 teams now, and the greed of both the owners and players to deal with, baseball now plays in muddy waters, not the clearer waters of my childhood, when at the end of September you had two teams staring at each other: the National League Champ and the American League champ. And during the first week of October they squared off in the World Series. And we ALL paid attention, as few do now.
It's a more complicated world now. Ambiguities have overpowered clarities.
Look at this season for example.
We no longer live in a world in which the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees have a breathtaking "pennant race" as they did in 1949, with the winner going on to face the Brooklyn Dodgers. Nope. Now, with 15 or 16 teams in each league, we have a two-tiered "playoff" system which eats up more than half of October before you even get to the "World Series." Regular-season interleague play, a by-product of owner greed which I have always hated, waters this picture down still further because chances are that the two teams squaring off in the "World Series" have already faced each other four or five times during the regular season. Where did the mystery go, the mystery of "This is the NL's best and this is AL's best -- who's the best?" If they've already played each other five times during the regular season, we already know the answer to that question. The "mystery" of the World Series is gone.
 |
The 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers exult over
their World Series win, having just vanquished
the New York Yankees in the fall classic for the first time.
This happened one week before I was born.
But I fear the "fall classic"
is not a "classic" anymore,
and hasn't been for years.
|
But setting that existential question aside, the tiers of playoffs have devalued everything further. I realize that divisional play and playoffs were, and are, unavoidable. Baseball had to borrow a couple of pages from football's playbook -- there are just too many teams now. You couldn't very well leave things the way they were in '45 -- if it got to be late August, and your team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, and they were in 13th place, you would neither go to the ballpark nor tune in on TV. With all these teams now, the divisional stuff and the playoff structure were unavoidable. I acknowledge that.
But dammit, where's the mystery, where's the magic and what's affirmed, as Patton asked in the movie?
I like the Cardinals. I always have.
But they finished the season a full six games behind the division-winning Milwaukee Brewers.
Milwaukee won the NL Central, the Philadelphia Phillies the
NL East and the Arizona Diamondbacks (whom, as a San Diego Padres fan, I dearly hate because they always beat us) the NL West.
In the National League, St. Louis got the so-called "wild card," something Major League Baseball borrowed from the NCAA. The non-division-winner with the best won-lost numbers gets to go to the first tier of the playoffs. Well, okay, you need four teams to have a playoff. Three divisions, three winners, one "wild card."
In the American League, the division winners were the Yankees, the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers, with the Tampa Bay Rays clinching the wild card to make a four-team playoff.
The Yankees, Tigers and Rays all got eliminated in the American League Divisional Series and subsequent Championship Series.
When the dust had settled, Texas went to the World Series. So it goes nowadays.
The Cardinals were the wild-card team in the National League, as were the Rays in the American. Like the Rays, the Cardinals did not win their division title.
But unlike the Rays, the Cardinals ended up winning the World Series.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
As I said, I like the Cardinals, and have since childhood. But I feel a bit sorry for the Rangers. They earned their berth in the Series; the Cards were merely there because they jumped on the caboose as the train was leaving the station and then got lucky in the playoffs. They were ten and a half games out of first place in August, finished the season six games back, but won the World Series.
Why do I have a problem with this? I don't know, but I do. What happened to the moral clarities of my childhood? When I was ten, the best team in the American League played the best team in the National League, and the whole thing was over in time for my birthday on October 12. There was no ambiguity there. Now the waters are all muddy, you can't see bottom, the Series doesn't end until almost Halloween, and some mediocre team that ended the season six games out in its division can walk off with the World Series trophy.
No more "pennant races;" now it's just penny-pitching and poker. Third-best (or fourth-best) can take it all. I'm not sure I like it. Where's the honor? What's affirmed? Why not do away with the regular season altogether and just proceed straight to the penny-pitching and poker? I have heard football fans, here in our eight-second-sound-bite culture, complain that the baseball season is too long anyway. NFL buffs love their season precisely because it only consists of 16 games, they're played on 16 consecutive Sundays, and the whole thing is over by January. Eat the candy bar and throw away the wrapper. Fun, fun, fun, but don't try my patience, and I don't have much, by the way. Or much attention span, anymore.
My sister even suggested shortening the season. "Look at the crowd at a World Series game," she said on the phone yesterday. "Some of them are bundled up like they're at a football game."
She means the season is too long, especially now that the multiple tiers of playoffs have pushed the World Series back from the Indian Summer of my childhood, (when games were played in the afternoon anyway) to prime-time under-the-lights evenings when the frost is on the pumpkin.
Well, Carla had an idea there, but I quickly pointed out that Moloch would not allow it. Go back to a 154-game schedule, as in the days of Babe Ruth? Not likely. Not with the Fox Network, the owners and the players all splitting $450,000,000,000,000 a thousand ways. Too much at stake there to radically change anything. To lose all that advertising revenue? No no no. And besides, the owners would jump on a shortened season as an excuse to reduce salaries, and the players would never go along with that.
So there you have it. We live in a world now where children's games are being played so that there are no winners or losers -- can't have the little tykes feeling "bad" about themselves, despite what life will teach them anyway later on. And baseball is no longer A versus B, but A, B, C and D throwing dice, with "D" only there because he had enough bonus points to get into the room.
Welcome to my watered-down world. Well, it's the only world I have. But whatever it may have in store 50 years from now -- who knows? Maybe the World Series will be decided by a lottery? I can only say with George C. Scott as George S. Patton, "I'm glad I won't live to see it."
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