The Perfect Start to October

Tonight, the 1-game playoff to decide the NL Wild Card between the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres was the perfect exclamation point to an incredibly exciting September in Major League Baseball. It was also a superb kickoff to an October that will likely prove to raise interest and, as a result, increase attendance to set another new record in 2008.

The poetry of the game was almost too much to take. The Rockies fielded a team with 6 position players who were brought up in their own farm system, and the Padres had just one. The Padres’ recent play had served only to help the Cubs clinch the NL Central, but was otherwise perfectly-suited for being taken over by an upstart team. The Rockies had won 12 of their last 13, playing like the young and wreckless newbies who just couldn’t be conviced of what they were really involved in.

The Mark Ecko convolution of the Bonds’ ball and its fate, providing the surrealistically “Kato Kalen” punctuation to the end of the steroid era, gives the game its next opportunity to revive itself after scandal. Just as after the Black Sox Scandal, The Great Depression, WWII, and the strikes, the game will need something to correct the errors of those magnates who control the game and turned a blind eye to the steroids when it made them rich (you, too, President Bush).

That opportunity is here. With traditional powers like the Yankees and Red Sox, the “lovable losers” of Chicago, the young upstart Rockies, the walking-wounded Angels, the overachieving Diamondbacks, the Indians whose fans couldn’t see home games at the start of the season because of snow, and the hard-charging Phillies, this post-season is set to be magical. The National Pastime is ready again to be the nation’s favorite game. To quote the conservative George Will, "Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society; violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

And so, as this year’s NFL and college seasons become more and more disappointing (unless you’re a South Florida fan, who shouldn’t get too comfortable in that #6 spot) with unreasonable upsets, accusations of cheating, stars taken down by scandal or suddenly unwilling to get into their familiarly scandalous character (TO), and foreseeable poor play on the part of some key players, the stage is set for baseball to regain its place atop American sports.

So let’s sit back and enjoy the fact that TBS/TNT has taken some of the load off Fox, enabling us to see every game this post-season. Let us cherish the last hints of summer that games in Arizona will give (slight as they’ll be in that air-conditioned can), as we await in fear of the snow and sleet in Boston and Cleveland. Let’s all get into it, whether our teams are in it or not, as the story to be told this fall simply warrants our attention. Let us get reacquainted with the greatest game ever created, not just as fans, but as a nation, that played the game on Civil War fields and gave it back to Japan after our troops arrived.

Our relationship with the game is essential, believe it or not, to our national identity. It’s not possible to be the America of its longest-held values, without being the America that loves and respects its original game. So find a part of this story to identify with, and follow it. It has set up too perfectly to simply let us down, now. The next baseball renaissance is here, my fellow Americans, and it is your duty to your future offspring, or their future offspring, to be able to recount what happened this October.

"I see great things in baseball. It’s our game- the American game.” -Walt Whitman