Hand it to Rob Manfred. Baseball's commissioner certainly found a way to soil or at least cloud our World Series pleasure. The Blue Jays bludgeoned the Dodgers in Game 1; Yoshinobu Yamamoto put restraints on almost all the Blue Jays to even it up in Game 2. Nothing but fun.
That'd teach us. Baseball's lessons include periodic reminders that Murphy's Law includes a clause about no good deed going unpunished. We just couldn't be allowed to love this Series without Manfred invited to spread a little fertilizer across the field.
We couldn't be allowed to enjoy Blue Jays outfielder Addison Barger becoming history's first pitch hitter to step up with the bases loaded and send one into the seats. We couldn't be allowed to enjoy Barger plus Dominic Varsho and Alejandro Kirk going long in the middle of the Jays making life miserable for Dodger starter Blake Snell and a few other starters-turned-bullpen bulls, to the tune of a 11-4 Game 1 blowout.
We couldn't be allowed enjoy Yoshinobu Yamamoto carving the Blue Jays like Thanksgiving turkeys in Game 2, going the distance for a second straight postseason start, the first Dodger to do that since Orel Hershiser in 1988 and the first anyone to do that since Curt Schilling in 2001. Not to mention the Dodgers making a nice mix of small and tall ball — an RBI single here, a pair of solo homers there, a bases-loaded wild pitch, and a run-scoring force out yonder, to beat the Jays in Game 2, 5-1.
No, that pleasure was just too much, wasn't it? We couldn't even enjoy the pleasure of calling out the cone-head contingency in Rogers Centre chanting, "We don't need you! We don't need you!" whenever Shohei Ohtani strode to the plate, Ohtani having spurned a Jays offer on behalf of staying in southern California even if it meant switching leagues.
It wasn't quite as contemptibly disgusting as the notorious AI-generated feces flyer his apparent pal in the White House dreamed up a weekend ago. No one that I know of is rushing to strap Manfred into the cockpit of a Boeing Shitterfortress yet. But if reporters who spotted and buttonholed him before World Series Game 2 had premeditated it, they couldn't have done a better job of getting Manfred to put his foot in his mouth. Yet again.
With a gambling scandal battering the NBA, Manfred was asked whether baseball remains vigilant in protecting the game's integrity from gambling infestations. After all, two Guardians pitchers (Emmanuel Clase, Luis Ortiz) remain in drydock while investigations continue into whether they accommodated suspicious microbets while pitching in June.
"We didn't ask to have legalized sports betting," Manfred said Saturday night. "It kind of came, and that's the environment in which we operate. Now we don't have a lot of choice about that, and if it's going to change — broadly change — probably the only way it would happen is the federal government."
The federal government.
The one whose chief executive may have strong-armed Manfred into declaring, whoops, the "permanent" banishment mandated for violating Rule 21(d) didn't mean "permanent," after all, meaning the end of the late Pete Rose's exile from baseball and blockage from the appropriate Hall of Fame ballot.
The one whose chief executive conducts a dog-ate-my-homework presidency with more glee than his predecessors ever showed, while threatening the long tentacles of the law upon people in and out of government, for no crime other than disagreeing that he can do as he damn well pleases, indeed, the Constitution (which says otherwise) and the law be damned. And, with more glee than his worst such predecessors ever allowed themselves.
Manfred also said he didn't want to discuss baseball's pending labour issues right now ("I want to get seven exciting [World Series] games. A year from now, we'll have plenty of time to talk about labor"), but boy have we had great postseasons since the 12-team system with wild card rounds, haven't we?
If anyone put in front of Manfred the thought that this postseason has actually seen nothing but first-place teams in both the League Championship Series and the World Series, I haven't been able to spot it yet.
Perhaps the commissioner wishes to fix things that might actually be broken. How about negotiating a salary floor, not a salary cap, with reasonable penalties for falling short of the floor, the better to get those billionaires' boys' club members who refuse to invest in their teams to either invest or divest?
How about expanding to two more major league teams, one for each league? Then, how about rebuilding baseball's leagues and divisions thus:
1) Two conferences in each league. We'll argue over naming them later.
2) Two divisions per conference. We'll argue over naming them later, too.
Then, we move toward restoring genuine championship play:
3) No more wild card nonsense. If you didn't finish the regular season with your butts parked in first place, you get to wait till next year. (A properly instituted and enforced salary floor may also stop Reds, White Sox, Rockies, and Pirates fans from awakening on Opening Day thinking, "This year is next year," but I'd rather sacrifice a great if sad saying on behalf of up-and-down league competitiveness.)
4) No more regular season interleague play. Save it for the All-Star Game. And, while we're at it, be done at last with those fakakta All-Star and City Connect uniforms that run the gamut from ugly to disgusting and back to repulsive. Let the players wear their proper team uniforms for the All-Star Game again. (And, for the Home Run Derby, if it must continue and for those invited to swing. Which reminds me: only bona-fide All-Stars shall be considered for Home Run Derby participation.)
5) Best-of-three division series, featuring none but the regular season division winners.
6) Best-of-five League Championship Series — the way it was from the 1969 birth of divisional play through 1984.
7) The World Series shall remain a best-of-seven, and thus have its absolute primacy restored.
Last but not least: 8) The foregoing will prevent postseason saturation, while 9) still providing plenty of postseason games. At maximum, there would be (count them!) 29 games. Even if every such series ends in a sweep (remember, baseball is the sport where anything can happen — and usually does), you'd still have 20 games.
Now, back to our World Series fun. Let's get back to determining whether ancient Max Scherzer, the Blue Jays's planned Game 3 starter at this writing, can summon up the old Max the Knife one more time. Or, whether the Dodgers help him decide the hard way whether it's time to think about having his glove bronzed and letting those great seasons past make his Cooperstown case.
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