SAN DIEGO–The New York Yankees, those imperial contenders in pin-stripes, bowed out in the division series, taking with them a significant slice of the crowd that was only consoled by Boston’s ample free-fall and collapse. Never mind: we had been hoisted by the most dazzling, 24-hour wild-card frenzy in the game’s history, a veritable Selig-storm, followed by two hard-fought pennant series featuring clubs from fresh and unlikely places like Milwaukee and Detroit.
The World Series was not only not anticlimactic—it was a noble, middle-of-the-country battle between Texas and St. Louis, a seven-game struggle of steers and beers, a satisfyingly nerve-wracking see-saw conflict with a sixth game linchpin that may have been the finest postseason game in recent memory. Or the sloppiest—depending on which side of the breathless debate you adopted.
The point is, you debated about it, even as you found the reality of a seventh, deciding game completely fortifying against the gathering gloom of November and a cold world without the national timepiece.
And now there is no baseball again till after the darkest solstice.
It occurred to me, as the comeback Cardinals won Game 7: if this was the last day of the baseball season, then the grasses of time will again fold under and freeze, the winds will howl away hope till the thaw and buds of next spring, and we will robotically pass away the frigid time under the gridiron charges of sinewy pigskin-men in helmets and our own driven holiday neuroses, till pitchers and catchers and blossoms report and soften our hearts again.
The NBA, when it plays (and it is decidedly not) is respectable enough entertainment, and everyone knows that football is what you watch to pass the long night between the World Series and spring training. Hockey, meanwhile, is some kind of refrigerated rink deal that melts outside of Canada and shamed itself anyway in this republic when it named one of its teams the Mighty Ducks.
Baseball is solar, clock-less, and remains the only game that celebrates a man’s ability to sacrifice and long for home. In no other sport does a team score even though the other team has the ball. Its rituals, superstitions, susceptibilities to rain and wind even in multimillion dollar stadiums, its men in soft caps—all speak to something deep within the bucolic essence in a way that no hyper-crushed goal line stand or methodical foul shot cycle or zipping puck can possibly replicate.
Baseball is memory and numbers and faces and cards and wood and something your Dad said to you that you never forgot. Light up the stove and let’s talk trades.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com