Baseball 2007: a jumbled epilogue

... Run on sentences pulled from the realizations that the games are over...

...I am a little bit worried about what the World Series is becoming. Over the last 4 years of a possible minimum of 16 games, there has been 17 player ('04 Boston swept St. Louis, '05 Chicago swept Houston, '06 St. Louis beat Detroit in 5, and now in '07 Boston sweeps again). Now you can chalk this up to the American League being a better league over that last decade on paper. But we all know "on paper" is rarely the way the games play out.
I think that a huge part of what is effecting these lopsided WS is the damn extended layoff. I blame this largely on network television and MLB wanting the series to start midweek, so there are less weekend games and therefore more people watching... more ad dolllars... blah, blah, blah... I mean the Red Sox had a 2 day layoff before the series started! Why? This lets everyone get their pitching in line and although that maybe make it a bit more "fair" in theory... what it does is let you win relying on a few guys instead of going deep into your rotation... now this WS both teams used 4 different starters so that doesnt really come into play this year, but it could have. The Sox could have used Beckett 1, 4, 7 if they had to.
The big thing is the Layoff. It derailed Detroit last year and it Derailed Colorado this year... I am not sure that the Rockies would have beat Boston or not... but I would have love to see the team that won 21 of 22 play the red hot Red Sox instead of the tenative, free swinging bunch of Rockies that showed up. It wasnt even fair. Put it into perspective, these guys play for 6 months with on average a day off every week. 1 day off... sure there is the 3 day all star break, a mini-vacation, but that is factored in from the preseason and happens year after year... you even hear guys that are going good dreading the all star break, because they are afraid it will throw off their timing... Now take a team that is red hot and say, "Ok, you don't have a game for 8 days!" have fun in the batting cage and with the INNER SQUAD GAMES!!! it is ridiculous! I hate it! It makes me so mad! I am sure this has to do a bit with what happened to the Tigers last year, and that that wound hasn't totally healed yet... but I just want to see a competive World Series... I remember 2001 a 7 game world series! Louis Gonzalez blooping in the winning run! that is how it should be... that is the fall classic... it seems to me, that in the networks attempt to manipulate the Series, they are watering it down. They want more ad money, just let it be and let baseball bloom the magic that it is want to do... seems to me that have 5, 6, or 7 games would present more opportunity for ad revenue than your modern day 4 game sweep any how...

Also, as I routinely fell asleep on my couch in the 7th inning watching this World Series, I thought about the 8 year old kids. How the hell are they supposed to watch their heroes on the grand stage that is October? In the East it is past midnight when these games are over. Is it too much to ask to have the weekend games start in the afternoon? Everyone knows bunting looks better in natural sunlight anyhow. It would be a flashback to the way it "used" to be... which always seems to be better... but they didnt have the big TV contracts back then to overcome did they...

The memory of watching your favorite team win the World Series, that was a childhood memory that is carved in stone in my mind. A cornerstone of my youth. It saddens me that there will be a whole generation of youth that will have a memory of when their hometown team won the World Series how exciting it was to watch it all on SportsCenter the next morning. It's all so conveinent, so encapsulated, none of the suspense, none of the throws over to first base, none of the meetings on the mound, none of the strategy, none of the peaks and valleys that make the game great... just a 4 minute wrap up, this is some of what happened, back to you Bob. A text message to the written letter. The sad part is that so many of those kids will mistake that "some of what happened" for what happened. It's the decay of our society in the parlance of our times... and so it goes... riding the conveinence train, down the drain ...

...Scott Boras is an Ass!
One last thing, Jeanne Zelasko is absolutely terrible! Can anyone argue that?

This has been one small man's reaction to his first day without baseball in 8 months.
God Bless Ernie Harwell,
God Bless the Detroit Tigers,
and God Bless Baseball!