The World Series starts this week, in which the Houston Astros will face the Washington Nationals, formerly the Montreal Expos.
Neither team existed in the year I was born, though Washington had a team in the American League, the Senators, whose single World Series victory occurred in the 1920s. Two incarnations of the Senators abandoned the capital city to become the Minnesota Twins (in 1961) and the Texas Rangers (in 1972). No more major league baseball was played in Washington until the Expos immigrated in 2005.
Baseball, like no other sport, marks our national history. It provides, in my editor’s words, “a lot to chew on.” In a week where Downeast Transportation launched regular weekday bus service between Bar Harbor and Bangor, and Downeaster passenger rail officials floated the idea of commuter service between Maine and Boston, you will perhaps forgive me for writing about it.
I celebrated Yankee Elimination Day for the tenth time in the last ten years. It came late, in a ridiculous parade of relief pitchers I refused to watch, but the World Series will once again be enjoyably Yankee-free. I find it hard to watch a game in which the Yankees are involved, because I just want them to be annihilated. You might think that after four Red Sox championships this century I’d be able to let go of my hatred for the Yankees, and it’s probably a personality flaw that I can’t. But I have suffered too much at their hands. I don’t hate the individual players, mind you, but I don’t want to see them in the Series, either.
Justin Verlander, the Astros’ co-ace, bears a passing resemblance to the actor George Clooney, which is nice, because starting pitchers are the leading men of sports. In no other team sport does an individual player get his name in the next day’s schedule. But the opening game of the Series will be listed as: Washington (Scherzer 11-7) at Houston (Cole 20-5). No one in football (world or American version), hockey, or basketball gets that kind of star billing.
Thus it was especially pleasing to see the Yankees, a team built around its bullpen, lose to the Astros and their marquee starting pitchers. Baseball marginalizes starting pitching at its peril. A good starting pitcher is a painter or an author, and the best part of being a fan is to watch the composition of a masterpiece. (To further belabor this metaphor, some games devolve into collage or pop art, and that’s okay, too – but it is the masterpieces that become memorable.)
Detroit Tigers fans may watch this World Series with a sense of ennui. Their former pitchers continue to enjoy success with other teams. This season, Verlander pitched his third career no-hitter; his first two came with the Tigers. The 2014 Detroit team also featured David Price and Rick Porcello, who won with the Red Sox in last year’s Series, and Max Scherzer and Anibal Sanchez, who led the Nationals to this one. The Tigers lost 114 games this season. Perhaps there is some poetic justice that a city built on cars should be abandoned by the baseball gods in the Late Automobile Age.
Or perhaps this sort of symbolism is just so much crap, made up by romantic writers who couldn’t hit a curveball to save their lives. Maybe the inability of the Atlanta Braves to beat any team but the Cleveland Indians in the Series had nothing to do with karma related to the teams’ offensive cheers and mascots. It could have been pure coincidence that the deadliest earthquake to hit the Bay Area since 1906 occurred during the only World Series played between San Francisco and Oakland. Not since 1958 have the Yankees won a World Series with a Republican president in office – is that a panacea or a punishment? We can only hope that the long-awaited Cubs victory in 2016 did not mark the end of 108 years of American prosperity and respect in the world – though the jury is still out on that one.
The games are too long, too slow, and too late at night. Television has done its best to kill interest in the sublime sport of baseball, with the help of bullpen-besotted managers and number crunchers addicted to strikeouts and home runs. But the World Series still merits my attention. The Bacchanalian celebration of violence and marketing that is the Super Bowl is forgotten the next day. Baseball endures.
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