It’s World Series Time—And Why It Matters to Me
The results of American baseball games began appearing in daily newspapers more than 150 years ago. Beginning with the simplest data, the winning team and the score, news reports quickly evolved into a thorough breakdown of each game, including the names of every player, and how each player performed (e.g., number of times at bat, number of hits, number of runs, etc.; for pitchers, the number of innings pitched, the number of strikeouts, etc.).
Fans of the game want to know much more than who won each game; they want, and for most of their history newspapers provided, enormous quantities of data at the level of the individual player. Each team's performance is also reported in the form of won-lost records and standings, a running account of the ranking of the teams based on wins and losses.
Throughout the 162 games of the regular season and the 13 to 19 games of the playoff rounds leading to the World Series, individual player statistics pile up like tractor trailers on an icy interstate in Illinois. Scrolling through the compilations of compilations, fans, writers, managers, owners, players and their families, bookies and television executives can find the answers to every question they may have or the other patrons at the sports bar may have.
Who hit the most triples?
Which first baseman made the most errors?
Then there are the newer, more complex questions, like Which player was responsible for the most wins when compared to the hypothetical average replacement player?
As interesting as the individual statistics may be, not one of those questions even comes close to the essence of the game. Baseball is a team sport. And while there may be interest and value in knowing, for example, which player was caught stealing most often, the broader significance in knowing the best team in baseball is only answered when the World Series champion is determined with the final out of the final game, when one team wins four of a possible seven games in the World Series.
In 1976, on the TV in my dad’s hospital room, we watched the Yankees in the World Series for what we knew would be our last time. Both of us were more emotionally subdued than usual, he because of cancer and heavy pain medication; and I because while watching the game I was watching my dad slip away.
At such a time, who cared about baseball? Actually, we both did, but at a subconscious level.
We were quiet during the games, just as we had been back in his younger, healthier years when we had quietly watched baseball together at home. He would recline in his recliner and because he typically had just come home from work, he might snooze a little. He may have had a glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
I would stretch out on the sofa, only sitting up to mark my improvised scorecard or to take a between-innings break and head for the kitchen to get us more Planters peanuts from the big blue can in the kitchen.
Our team, the New York Yankees (see Ghosts in the Stadium), dominated Major League Baseball for the first ten years of my watching. Between my age 5 and 14, the Yankees appeared in 7 out of 10 World Series and won 4 of them. As I slouched into adolescence, the Yankees entered a similar period of decline that lasted until 1976 when they returned to the World Series and were trounced by Cincinnati as cancer was trouncing my father.
October is my month of remembrance and reflection: my wedding anniversary, my parents' wedding anniversary, my last World Series with Daddy. In the film “Field of Dreams,” Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) declares "baseball has marked the time" and I couldn't agree more.
Quite often, the supreme Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur occurs in October. We gather with family, reflect on the year just past, and retell the stories of Yom Kippur from childhood. With pleasure I recall the World Series games played in the daytime when a transistor radio provided my friends and me the briefest but oh-so-satisfying connection with baseball in the midst of the depressing liturgy of sins and atonement.
The ultimate World Series and Yom Kippur story is from 1965 when star Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax (along with his manager and all the Jewish people in Los Angeles) prayed for rain so the first game of the World Series would not occur on Yom Kippur, when the Jewish Koufax would decline to pitch.
The Dodgers have won eight World Series. But if I were sitting in a bar in L.A., I would bet that all the Jewish guys at the bar would recall the '65 series because of the Yom Kippur connection. Most if not all of them would also recall that in 1955 they won the series for the first time in Brooklyn.
And no one would remember who hit the most triples.