Congratulations to the not Brooklyn Dodgers on their victory.. I was pulling for Tampa Bay, since they’ve never won it, and what’s not to like about Mookie Betts. I can’t root for the not Brooklyn Dodgers unless they are playing the Yankees. Maybe the Dodgers will end this long road trip and come back home to Brooklyn. Maybe if they rebuild a modern version of Ebbetts Field. Yes, if they rebuild the temple, they will come. And the world will enter an infinite period of peace and tranquility.
It’s been almost as a strange year for baseball as it’s been for the country. But where the country feels hopeless these days, baseball, in giving us a at least a mirco-season has given us a welcome diversion and maybe a little hope that life just might get on again to something resembling normal as we start recovering from the Trump virus.
It was a strange season with it’s 60 game schedule. Sixty games is about where it usually starts feeling like baseball, around memorial day weekend. But when it got to that point, it was time for the post season. This season doesn’t seem real. It actually wouldn’t have bothered me if the Yankees had won it all, since it this season has a asterisk on it. Likewise, if my Red Sox had been in the hunt, and went all the way, I’d have been happy, but it just wouldn’t feel like the real thing. But the Red Sox were doomed to be the doormat this season after trading Mookie Betts to get something for him before losing him to free agency. And then our two best starting pitchers go down for the season, Eduardo Rodriguez due to an covid related enlarged heart, and Chris Sale for Tommy John surgery.
It appears we won’t have a normal season next year yet again, but as we’ve learned more about how to protect from the covid, they just might be able to pull of a 162 game season. We almost didn’t have a season at all when the union balked on a one time revenue sharing plan. Honoring the numbers on the existing contracts was a non-starter, since management didn’t have the revenue streams associated with full ball parks, and concessions. I can’t see the players opposition to revenue sharing, and the unofficial salary caps that if will force as long as an agreed portion of revenue is going to the player salaries, and must be spent on player salaries and nothing else. With all the teams with the same sort of money, it might hurt those on the very top that get the ridiculous guaranteed contracts for up to 10 years, but that means more ducats for the rest of the players. I do believe we would have a saner game with the small markets having the money to compete with the big markets, and fewer guaranteed contracts, since money played to guys who are not producing anymore, or worse, not playing at all, is money that could be paid to the players that are producing.
Let’s hear for you all on the World Series, or on baseball in general.