Another season of Major League Baseball concluded last week, with a closely fought seven-game World Series that came down to the final out. It sounds nice enough on the surface; one of the teams was a scrappy underdog that won the heart of the nation, and the playoffs were marked with exceptional and memorable performances. Then baseball went ahead and blew it by rounding out the season with the most boring team prevailing, like it has each of the last several years. Here’s a rundown if you don’t remember (I wouldn’t blame you):
2010, Giants win: Okay, they hadn’t won in a while, and they had some cool players you could rally behind, and okay, whatever. It’s still boring because the alternative was the Rangers winning, and their coach tested positive for cocaine once, which is at least exciting. Who knew they test coaches for drugs? Not me. If you ask this humble observer, it’s probably because the bigwigs at MLB don’t want you to know that managers don’t really matter. An opium addict could pop up in a major-league clubhouse, learn some hand signals, jog out to argue occasionally, and show up to all the games, and that guy could win the World Series if he had a bunch of guys who could play. The MLB wanted to nip this issue in the bud, before anyone gets the idea. Managers don’t really do anything.
Pete Rose is STILL banned from baseball because he gambled FOR the Reds in games while he was their manager, when, in reality, he probably had as much effect on who won as I do when I’m at home at home, doing something more productive and exciting than watching baseball (watching Netflix documentaries, like Ken Burns’ Baseball). How could he have thrown a game? Red flags would have come up if like, somehow, his talentless son was on the team and allowed to play, but a thing like that would never fly. Oh, wait. Free Pete.
2011, Cardinals win: This time the Cardinals, the blandest team in all of professional sports, again defeated the Rangers, who we’ve already established to be interesting, by baseball standards. They even had Josh Hamilton; that guy’s story is so uplifting. When’s the last time the Cardinals did anything uplifting? Mark McGwire? He was on ROIDS. His bad influence could very well have led me into a swift downward spiral of steroid abuse and grimacing at myself in mirrors while flexing. I was at an impressionable age in 1998. I can’t think of anything else exciting that they ever did, they just win World Series all the time. They’re the equivalent of the boring-looking greyhound thing winning the dog show that goes on after the Macy’s parade every Thanksgiving. People want to see the weird looking Basenji or Boykin Terrier or Borzoi win, but then the Cardinals win again and you’re only watching because football hasn’t really started yet, like on Thanksgiving.
2012, Giants win (again): Remember when “Family Guy” got cancelled, and the reruns were really popular on Adult Swim, and the public outcry for more Family Guy was so loud and widespread that Fox’s hand was forced and they brought back new episodes of Family Guy that continue to this day? Except the new episodes were kind of increasingly crappy and made you wonder whether the earlier ones were actually good or if it was just that you were in middle school back then and would have found any joke about genitalia or farts funny. That’s what the 2012 Giants winning again was like. You’d already seen it all before, except this time you saw it coming, and you couldn’t really rouse yourself to any level of excitement. They beat Detroit, which, come on Giants, let Detroit have one thing.
2013, Red Sox win: The World Series that, hopefully, made the Illuminati assemble to rig the next 100 World Series so that the Red Sox would have another nice long drought. The unleashing of Boston sports fans over their last 15 years of near-universal success is like a “nice guy” getting the girl of his dreams to date him after he woos her in public with an acoustic guitar or something. You think it’s endearing, because when’s the last time something good happened to that guy? But then it becomes annoying as he makes daily Instagram posts about apple-picking excursions or hot-air balloon rides in the country. We get it: all your teams win stuff. Jesus, Boston. I will be very dead in 2114, so I won’t care when they break the second curse. Thx, Illuminati.
Stay tuned for Part II, in which some SOLUTIONS will be proposed.
