Red October

BASEBALL, EVEN IN THE grotesquely mutated form that pervades today's game, remains capable of tugging at the heartstrings (and actually can be a joy to behold) if viewed from the right perspective--in this case, from the eyes of an eight-year-old boy whose favorite team just won the World Series.

"Dad," he said in the early innings of Game 7 of the National League Championship Series, "it's going to be really tough to go to school tomorrow if the Cardinals don't win. The guys have been razzing me pretty good." I knew from whence he spoke, having grown up a San Francisco Giants fan stranded in New York--still am, actually--left to fend off the barbs of Met and Yankee rooters whose clubs rang up championships while my team couldn't even reach the postseason. Somehow, though, I knew that, unlike his father--whose acid tongue and quick temper were a constant source of schoolyard troubles--he, being such a sweet kid (that's his mother's doing) would have the baseball gods smile kindly upon him, and they did with a ninth-inning home run that silenced Shea Stadium and catapulted St. Louis into the history books.

Of course, Alex never did get to see his Redbirds win their 17th pennant or 10th World Series live, the national pastime's greedmongers saw to that with their late-night starts and after-midnight finishes. Instead, I set the VCR tape each night and Alex would get up early the next morning to watch before school. Yet, even he couldn't rise early enough to see the entire contest, so I'd cue up the tape to a key spot late in the game and let him sweat out the last few frames. It was great to hear him come to the breakfast table, jabbering away in great detail about how his Cards had pulled off their latest conquest, as if I hadn't seen the game and had no idea what had happened. Even the losses commanded his attention to detail.

Having gone to college in Missouri, way back when my only ambition in life was to be a sportswriter--specifically, a baseball beat reporter, hopefully covering the Giants--I still have friends who are scribes for the Cardinals. They were only too glad to shower my son with pennants, souvenirs, newspaper clippings, victory parade tapes, and other assorted Redbird paraphernalia. In fact, Dan, my closest pal from those halcyon days at old Mizzou, acting like a favorite uncle, was in regular phone contact with my boy throughout the playoffs. It brought back a lot of wonderful memories, and Alex, reserved though he is, got a real kick out of talking shop with someone other than his father. He even enjoyed giving an uncharacteristic dig to both of us over our predictions. Dan, who writes for the St, Louis Post Dispatch, had told Alex that the Cardinals would not even get out of the best-of-five first round Division Series--the San Diego Padres would sweep them. Me? I made the grand prognostication that the World Series would be a 1965 rematch between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Minnesota Twins. (Neither team won a single playoff game, both getting swept in Round 1.) My son, meanwhile, showing that he's much too smart to be a sportswriter, gave the postseason picture some careful thought, declared that he did not want to rush to judgment, but that, if forced to make a pick, he thought the Cardinals would beat the Padres in four, take the NLCS from the Mets in six, and then top the Tigers in five for the world's championship. Three quick sidenotes: I guess he underestimated the Mets. How did he ever figure on Detroit copping the American League flag? And why didn't I go to Vegas with this exclusive information?

Much was made of St. Louis' unlikely title, in that the Cards became the National League club with the fewest victories (83) to win the pennant since the 1973 Mets (82) and the team with the fewest triumphs in history ever to capture the World Series. Alex's crystal ball aside, there was no great shock here. It was bound to happen, as the baseball postseason, by design, has become nothing more than a crapshoot, the same as all other sports that chase the all-powerful dollar through a watered-down playoff system. Baseball didn't use to crown "pretend" champions. World Series participants--including some surprise winners--had to finish first in their respective eight-team leagues, surviving a grueling 154-game (later, 162-game) schedule to do so. Then came expansion and divisions. Still, a team had to finish first in a six-team division to make the playoffs, and then win the League Championship Series to qualify for the World Series.

The beginning of the end, however, came in 1995 with the introduction of the wild card, the idea being threefold: it would guarantee that the team with the league's second-best record would not be excluded from the postseason (as happened to the 1993 Giants); more teams would stay in the playoff picture longer, generating more (fake) interest, ticket sales, and all the attendant revenue that is produced by a "contender," and there would be an extra round of playoffs for TV and the baseball moguls to cash in on.