Who do you want to see meet in the World Series?
I know, anyone but the Yankees. I’d like to the Yanks face the Phils again. But I still want revenge on the Reds for ruining my 7th year on this planet. And it’s been forty-eight years since the classic Yanks-Giants series that ended on a Game 7 Willie McCovey screamer that was caught be Bobby Richardson at second base.
As long as the Braves aren’t in the series, I’ll be happy. Go Yanks!!
Booman, we’re the same age. I too was 7 when the Big Red Machine swept the Yankees. My Dad took me to game four and the Yankees jumped out to a 2-0 lead. My Dad then told me, to enjoy it while it lasted because it wouldn’t last long. And Johnny Bench saw to that.
Thankfully, my Dad was lucky enough to get tickets for game six of the ’77 World Series when Reggie hit three.
You’re a lucky man. I watched Reggie’s 3-homer night from home, up way past my bedtime. I finally forgave him that night. Kinda.
Ha! When Chambliss hit his walk off homer against the Royals in ’76 I let out a scream and my Mom scolded me for staying up late.
Alas, it is more fun to reminisce about baseball than pondering the state of our country, the world and politics.
Ah, but it was the Yankees who ruined my eighth year on the planet in 1961 when they beat the REDS. 1976 was such sweet revenge!
Now, I haven’t lived in Cincinnati for decades and actually spent as much of my life in Manhattan as I did along the banks of the Ohio, yet I still root for the REDS and despise the Yankees. No wonder the Jewish/Palestinian issue can’t be resolved.
I’m hoping for the REDS to win the NL pennant, and if not the REDS, the Giants. In the AL my first choice is Tampa Bay (anything that will help baseball vacate that horrendous facility in St. Petersburg), and my second choice is the Twins.
As much as I loathe the Yankees, I still would prefer them over the Rangers. I mean, who could ever root for a team so closely associated with George W. Bush?
It doesn’t feel like a World Series when Tampa is in it. It feels like Canadian Football or something.
The difference in majesty between the the Phils-Rays World Series and the Phils-Yanks World Series was enormous.
Other teams that ruin the World Series: Marlins, Rockies, and yes, the Rangers (should that ever happen).
I like tradition. Expansion teams annoy me.
You elitist! How unprogressive of you!
I agree and the cowbells annoy me. Beating the Yankees is a greater accomplishment. I want Phillies and Yankees again. chance to avenge last year and the sweep in 1950.
I think this year’s Phillies team is the best version of the team ever, and the Yanks are sketchy in their starting pitching. I think the Phils would probably beat the Yanks in five or six games. But I am up for the challenge.
I still think a Yanks-Giants matchup would be pretty awesome, too.
Yeah .. the Yankees pitching really looked sketchy tonight!! 😉
Traditionalist here too, and agree about expansion teams sullying the grandeur of the WS. Iirc, it took the once-expansion Angels 4 decades or so before making it to the finals. That’s the way it should be. MLB should institute a rule to enforce such a comparable waiting period — in the best interests of the game, of course.
As for the Reds, I might get more interested in seeing them in the Series if they’d go back to calling themselves the Redlegs, as they did in defensive reaction to the McCarthyism of the 50s, and if they’d return to wearing those nifty sleeveless uniforms of that period. I do like their HoF greats Frank Robinson and Joe Morgan — but not all the Reds greats from that period …
Re the Rangers, I’m against them, not just for the usual reasons about being tarnished by ex-co-owner George W. Bush, but for being from such a sucky state politically. Only way I might consider whooping it up for them is if they’re bought out by a group of antiwar hippie-musicians from Austin and change the team’s name from the law-enforcement-worshipping one they have now to something a little less fascistic. Texas Tejanos would be acceptable.
Many today refer to the Reds as the Redlegs, as do I on most occasions. In fact, one of the prominent local Reds blogs is called Redleg Nation. http://redlegnation.com/2010/10/10/this-day-in-reds-history-expansion-and-the-invisible-tag/
Like you and Booman, I was perfectly contented with two, eight-team leagues, but I suspect that had expansion not taken place teams such as the Reds, Pirates and Indians would have been moved by now to larger markets.
I remain impressed with the ability of small markets such as Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cincinnati and St. Louis to sustain viable teams. I do fear for Pittsburgh’s future only because ownership does not seem committed to competing.
What I find most amazing is the horrendous attendance in both Miami and Tampa Bay. You’d think that given all the years of hosting Spring Training in Florida that there’d be a strong market for baseball. On the other hand I’ve been reminded by aging relatives who’ve moved to Florida that they remain loyal to their local teams and never attend a game unless their local team is visiting.
Well, I don’t mind the current playoff system, what with so many more teams, much larger US population now, etc. I do think it’s stupid to have pushed back the WS so late in October, when the weather plays a greater factor and it’s more suitable for football not baseball, and stupid too to have all the playoff games at night, where they go on and on until midnight in the east. Not a smart way to get younger fans and grow the fan base for the future.
Also, while I’m at it — shorten the season, and shorten the game length (seems like they’re about 3 1/2 hrs on avg now, compared to maybe 2h15m back then) and I might become a regular fan again.
As for FL, it’s one of the most transitory population states of all, the way CA used to be for most of the 20th C, and so it’s harder to build a steady, loyal fan base. But, otoh, LA adopted the Dodgers quickly back in the 50s, and that org has never struggled to get fans in the ballpark (though once there, they are among the quietest fans of any major sport anywhere, and you can get a lot of good reading done at Chavez Ravine …).
Might have had something to do with the fact that they were not expansion but a long-established team that had moved west, while in FL you have expansion teams. Or perhaps because football reigns supreme in that state, unlike in CA which is more wide open to accepting various sports.
I suspect that regarding the Dodgers you might be correct, especially since so many Angelenos of the era of the transplant hailed originally from New York.
There is something to be said for the old 154 game season which ended with an immediate transition to the World Series with no intervening playoff series to determine the pennant winners.
As for the length of the games, I believe that is driven as much by advertising breaks in a media dominated environment than by anything happening on the field, and as players’ salaries continue to climb we’re likely to see even more demand for thirty and sixty second spots.
Also, might I observe that the switch of the Milwaukee Brewers to the National League in 1994 when expansion created three divisions per league and added a third playoff series, has always pissed me off. It creates an unequal playing field having six teams in the NL Central and only four in the AL West. I do understand the move was made to accommodate the inter-league regular season games, which incidentally I detest almost as much as the American League having adopted the designated hitter.
It wasn’t just to accommodate interleague play. It was because you can’t have an odd-number of teams in each league and have every team playing when there isn’t interleague play.
Easy solution. Eliminate the two Florida teams and return to two divisions per league, each with seven teams. 🙂
That would reduce the number of playoff games necessary as well, and could reduce the season to 156 games instead of 162, with each team playing each other team in their respective leagues 12 times annually.
Good point about Angelenos. Back then, probably half the population was made up of recent transplants from NY and Iowa.
On the other issues we mostly agree, except as I’ve come to accept post-season playoffs preceding the Series. But not interleague, which again tends to diminish what used to be the special uniqueness of the WS matchup.
Length of games, and player salaries: there I’m a bit of a radical. Much easier back then to identify with and emotionally invest in players and a team which stayed in town and largely stayed intact from year to year. You built wide and deep fan loyalty in that system. Of course, the drawback was the reserve-clause-driven system that produced Master-Servant owner-player relationships, with only a handful of superstars being paid near what they deserved.
That needed to change — thanks to Curt Flood — but now it’s swung wildly to the other extreme. Sorry, but I can’t identify with an average non-star player making $3.5 mil/per annum, especially when after a few yrs he decides he can make a little more playing elsewhere. Dunno if things will change, but in Hollywood, they’re paying big stars far far less per movie than just 10 yrs ago, and that has also probably caused overall diminution in salaries in the tier below that.
A few more bad years with the economy, or another major downturn, with a corresponding dropoff in MLB attendance or with tv viewership, then you might see the long-overdue salary correction.
On length of games, if I were Commish of MLB, I’d bring back the old 60-second tv breaks (not the 2-3 minutes, or whatever, of today) even if that meant a smaller MLB tv contract. Do it in the best interests of the game and for the fan. Strictly and ruthlessly enforce the 15-sec (?) rule between pitches. Order umpires to come down hard on batters constantly calling time to step out and adjust their equipment/check 3B coach for signs — once per at-bat would be a good limit.
Shortened season (154) and shortened games, with smaller paychecks and more affordable ticket prices — those are some of the ways you get baseball back to competing with football as the country’s top sport.
lol baseball.
Since baseball sucks so much, I guess my preference would be whichever 2 teams are from the smallest markets and have the smallest fan following. So the world series would be a complete failure, and wouldn’t pre-empt important stuff, like football.
Don’t even get me started on the relative merits of baseball and football. Baseball is like Mozart, football like Tug McGraw. Baseball is cerebral, requiring infinite finesse, whereas football is brutal, demanding only a deep reservoir of testosterone.
Now, of course, I concede that my views have largely been formed by having grown up in an area (Cincinnati) that’s never fielded a professional football team and which offers as its best known manufactured products, Pampers, Downy, and Scope – and even its Tide is hardly Crimson.
you don’t have to get started about diffs between baseball and football… George Carlin (that Manhattan boy) did the definitive/Classic run-down of differences some years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_yq4L3M_I
Well, Carlin’s brilliant riff about all the militaristic terminology in football is spot on, as is his take on bball that it’s a gentle 19th C pastoral game.
Football is also about possessing territory and managing the clock, so hardcore capitalists and control freaks are all the more attracted to the sport.
Yet hippie peace freak that I am, like John Lennon I still somehow prefer the brutal action on the gridiron to that glacial-paced other sport that involves so much downtime and players scratchin’ theyselfs in funny places and otherwise trying to look busy and focused in between pitches — you know, trying to look like they’re actually working to deserve the $3.5mil the average player gets in salary.
Well, the hippie freak that I am prefers the pastoral and abhors the disparity in salaries. The REDS, for example, pay their players an average salary of $2.7 million, yet only 8 of the players on the roster earn $1 million or more, with 15 players on the roster of 25 earning less than $500,000 annually.
The player who earned the most for the REDS this year is Aaron Harang at a salary in excess of $17 million, even though he didn’t make the final cut for the playoff roster.
Obvious from out here in the Bay Area… The Giants! And anyone from the AL if they get this far.
Damn straight, Bob! Viva the Left Coast!
No love for the Rays here? I grew up in Tampa, and I was there when the Buccaneers started in 1976 in the Big Sombrero (I remember the renovation project of the old stadium from a small college facility, as well as the 0-14 record). Besides, the Rays are still alive after today’s win, and they are only one road win from forcing a decisive Game 5 at Tropicana. I certainly wouldn’t rule it out (I would also like to see TB and NYY fight it out in the ALCS)! For my money, a Braves – Rays series would be fabulous!
“like to see TB and NYY fight it out in the ALCS.” Me too.
If the Rays and the Yanks do not meet again in the ALCS, there is little point in watching the World Series because of doubts about who was the best team to represent the ALC, even though either one of them is able to take the Phillies in five.
http://30for30.espn.com/film/four-days-in-october.html
this was a better time.
who do I want to see in the WS? anybody but the MFYs. But you knew that.
Ditto. I’m so upset my Twins didn’t show up for the playoffs. Mauer had an awful 3 games just hitting 3 singles and then making an error last night. For a team that had a record of just one more loss than the Yankees in the regular season, it sucked to see them get swept. And it pisses me off that NY is already talking about a parade. (Although someone tells me Bloomberg is a Mets fan and may have done it to jinx them?)
I can’t deal with a Texas team in the playoffs and I really like all the Rays – particularly Carl Crawford and Joe Maddon so go Rays!!! I like all the NL teams but Dusty Baker’s (CANNOT STAND him having watched him screw up the Cubs playoff games against the Marlins) so I’m fine with any of the other 3 against the Rays in the WS.
San Francisco vs Texas, or Tampa. Even though they demolished my Padres, it would be nice to see an NL West team top anyone in the AL–especially if that AL team ain’t from the east.
Another Philly/Yanks series would bore me to death.
Yankees v Phils. Piss off almost the entire country. Everyone on Jersey is happy (except Mets fans who never have a legit expectation to be happy anyway) 🙂