"World" Series, Their Ass! Major League Baseball commences its 2006 "World Series" tonite, between the Detroit Tigers and Saint Louis Cardinals. As I rode in a car-service Lincoln Towncar from the office to the PATH station in Downtown Manhattan to go home last nite, I listened, somewhat to my surprise, to the sports-talk program the driver had playing on the radio. Ordinarily, if the driver has the radio on, I ask him to turn it off. Last nite, however, WFAN was discussing the debacle that sent New Yorkers' heady confidence about a "subway series" two months ago into the dumper. Both New York teams, Yankees right away and Mets only much later, fell by the wayside, due to the intrusion of a playoff series between the regular season and the 'World' Series. Had it not been for the playoff series, which I believe is a relatively recent invention — I certainly don't recall any such event in my youth (I am 61½ ) — the Yankees and Mets might very well have faced each other in a Subway Series. But life is unfair, and a whole season of contests can be wiped out in four games of a playoff series. It's like the TV game show Jeopardy, in which you can be thousands of dollars ahead of your competitors, having answered 70% more questions right, but if you miss one question at the end, or don't bet enuf on a winning answer, you're out. If there weren't people starving to death by the millions all across the Third World, such injustice would warrant real indignation.
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The result, this year, of our having playoffs is that two teams in the Midwest face off against each other, in what national advertisers dread: a contest almost nobody cares about, between two teams in the same region of the country. Detroit and Saint Louis are both depressed metropolises whose central cities are largely black and poor, tho some of their suburbs are lush enclaves of the moneyed class. Unlike the great cities of the East and West Coasts (New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami; Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego), or the titan of the Midwest, Chicago, Detroit and Saint Louis are not centers of in-migration from other parts of the country and never had enuf people that the out-migrants to other parts of the country would create a major audience for a sporting event. This World Series thus has almost as little interest for outsiders as had the all-Missouri World Series of 1985, played by the Saint Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals. Even a New York Subway Series has more interest for fans, because there are so many people who were born in or near New York and moved elsewhere, or passed thru New York at some time in life, that tens of millions of people care about the outcome — especially people who hate the Yankees.
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In any case, baseball has been played in a number of countries beyond the United States for many decades, popularized in part by GIs abroad in World War II. But it had been played in Japan since the 1870s. Major League teams in the U.S. employ a horde of foreign players, mostly from Latin America and Japan. Japanese leagues have developed major stars, some of whom have found rich rewards and successful careers in American teams. Why, then, is the "World Series" not a genuine world event, open to the champions of all the major baseball leagues on the planet?
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I asked this question of Major League Baseball in 1987, and urged MLB to grant expansion franchises to cities outside existing states, as in Mexico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and to include the winner of Japan's interleague series in a playoff for a true World Series.
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In reply, I got this letter from Robert W. Brown, M.D., then President of The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, dated September 2, 1987 (which I ran across among my papers a few months ago).

Thank you for including me with your observations on international expansion. Without trying to argue the pros and cons of your suggestions, I will just say that international competition is always under constant consideration. Perhaps in due time it will come. I appreciate your interest.

That was written 19 years ago. There is still no MLB team in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Caracas, Santo Domingo, or San Juan, and the winner of Japan's interleague championship still does not play in playoffs for the World Series.
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Instead, a number of national baseball leagues organized, this year, something called the "World Baseball Classic", which is to be held once every four years, not every year. They've had one tournament by that name. The United States wasn't even in the finals, which were played by Cuba (which I would preclude until its Communist government is ousted) and Japan. Japan won. In the U.S., we heard almost nothing of that tournament, and nobody cared about the outcome.
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One might think hubris and defensive nationalism are in play here. More likely it is isolationism and Think-Smallism. There were, after all, two World Series — in a row — won by the Toronto Blue Jays of Canada, and nobody seemed to feel national disgrace. That was a long time ago (1992 and 1993), and the only other MLB team that had played in Canada, the Montreal Expos, lost their franchise and were sent to become the Washington Nationals. (When Washington balked at building a new stadium, I suggested that the business community of my city, Newark, should bid for the team, but that hasn't (yet) happened.)
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The United States is in various ways a very peculiar country. Sports is one. Our baseball "American League" includes a team from Canada. Our"National Basketball Association" also includes a team from Canada. And a whole bunch of American cities play in the "National Hockey League". But the "nation" of the NHL is Canada!, and the League is headquartered in Montreal. Still, 24 of its 30 teams are located in the United States. Bizarre.
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Governments and media in the United States have been pushing soccer, a profoundly foreign game, upon Americans for at least 50 years, but we still hate it. That doesn't stop advertisers from intruding soccer images and the term "soccer mom" into commercials for every single product or service of any and every description. This past World Cup, posters were displayed in subways talking about what a good chance the U.S. had to win the Cup. The U.S. team was ousted very early on. And nobody here cared.
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Nor, however, do we push for international expansion of our games, particularly baseball, the "national pastime" —. American "football", a game in which the ball is mostly carried, not kicked, has become the true national game, if there be any. Few Americans even know which sports originated in which country, nor that the third major ball-game in the U.S., basketball, was invented by a Canadian immigrant, tho in the United States (Springfield, Massachusetts, to be more precise), at the bidding of an American athletic director.
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Volleyball is American; rugby and soccer British; tennis French; bowling German, tho formalized in its present rules in the United States; skiing Norwegian; snowboarding and skateboarding American; windsurfing/sailboarding primarily American, improving on a Briton's invention. Skydiving is identified with the United States but originated in parachuting, and the parachute was invented in France. Rollerskating started in Britain, was somewhat improved in France, but achieved its present form in the United States. Inline skating ("Rollerblading") arose in the United States. Ice skating originated so very long ago, and was practiced in so many (northern) places, that no specific place of origin can be cited, tho the Netherlands produced the first steel ice skating blades. Hockey is Canadian. Polo, Persian (modern-day Iran). Surfing originated in Hawaii but was popularized by Americans, especially after Hawaii became a State of the Union in 1959. Bungee jumping originated in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, but was popularized by Britons, who brought it to the United States, from which it spread.
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The point of all this (and much more that could be said about the foreign origins of lots of the sports we participate in as individuals for recreation or as competitors in organized teams, such as pole vaulting (horizontally: the Netherlands and Britain; vertically: Germany) that nobody does for recreation), is that when we have a large, pre-existing community of interest that can be drawn into our civilization by organized sports, why not use the dynamics of sport to bring us closer?
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It is long past time for Major League Baseball to expand into Latin America and Japan, and to create the presently misnamed 'World' Series into a genuine World Series, and do away with the poorly conceived and too-infrequent World Baseball Classic. Next year would not be too soon.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,788 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:07 AM