MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
It’s always sad (depressing, actually) once the final out of the final game of the baseball season is in the books, even when it sets off a deserved World Series celebration.
For even when our team wins it all, while we are justifiably thrilled and delighted, it doesn’t take long for the melancholy to set in over the completion of our great projects, as the beauty is in the journey and not the destination, particularly in baseball.
In the words of the late, great A. Bartlett Giamatti, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
This year there is an even larger factor in play, as the 2024 baseball season and the just completed playoffs and World Series have given many of us a much-needed distraction from the stress that most of the country is experiencing over the upcoming election.
As Thomas Boswell said, “(Baseball is) one of those forms of gentle poetry that runs through our lives and makes the more important issues of living bearable. You have to have moments that give you pleasure with your children or your hobbies or your games. Life can’t all be big issues and heart surgery. Something has to bring joy into the day.”
The joy is in Los Angeles, as the Dodgers are just the best team in baseball and have been all season. They finally worked through some traffic jams along the way to answer that claim with all the marbles.
As a fan who follows baseball through an American League team, the feeling here all season has been the National League is the better league because it has better teams than the American League has. That is what the eye test showed through all of the interleague games this year.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who proved himself to be a winner when he was playing for the Boston Red Sox, is a treat to watch manage, as he goes against the book, which is now analytics. He manages old school – hunches, feel and trust in his players. That was never more evident than when he paid the mound visit to reliever Blake Treinen in the eighth inning in Game 5, left him in to finish the inning and then went to starter Walker Buehler on two days’ rest to close it down.
As for the Yankees, this is not a cut, but I still don’t believe they’re the best team in the American League East, but they certainly deserved to be in the World Series. They earned it from September through the playoffs, but then showed who they were over 162 in the World Series.
This Yankees team had the big two – Aaron Judge and Juan Soto (make that the enormous two) – but other than that they were a flawed team. While Giancarlo Stanton again hit like Reggie Jackson in the postseason, it was Judge who turned into Janet Jackson until Game 5 of the World Series.
These Yankees are not a smart or well-drilled team. They play terrible defense and make the most ridiculous mistakes, which played to form in the World Series.
Forget for a moment the Yankees could have easily been up 2-0 coming back to New York; how about the fifth inning of Game 5 after they had cut the Dodgers’ series lead to 3-1 and were leading 5-0?
Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rizzo being on Planet Nitwit when it was time for one of them to cover first base was the difference between the Dodgers winning the title on Wednesday night and the series going back to Los Angeles for Game 6.
The screw-up plated one run and led to four more Dodgers runs in the inning on two more New York errors, with all five runs being unearned. That is not what championship teams do.
Then, of course, there were the Yankee fans, but, of course, such loutish behavior is celebrated in New York, as the Yankees were going to allow the two thugs who tried to rip Mookie Betts’ arm out of socket to come back to their seats for Game 5, until Major League Baseball finally developed some stones to tell the Yankees, no, they will be nowhere near Yankee Stadium for Game 5.
The same thing happened in 1996 when Jeffrey Maier interfered with Game 1 of the ALCS, helping to change the outcome of the game and the series, yet was hailed the conquering hero the following day at Yankee Stadium as he was the guest in the first-base dugout box of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Of course, maybe that was the little cretin’s punishment.
That said, it still seems very sad that the World Series games are played so late at night that so many people are unable to watch it. That just doesn’t seem like a great strategy to me for an industry that is trying to attract a younger crowd. But greed, apparently, will do that to your decision-making. I just haven’t been smart enough in my time to realize that.
Sadder still, though, is the baseball season is over. The joy is over and the companion is gone for the winter. Time to look down the barrel and focus on our own – and, most importantly, vote.
Then, as the great Rogers Hornsby said, “People ask me what I do when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT