DENVER — As the Boston Red Sox celebrated on the Colorado Rockies' infield Sunday night, thousands of Boston fans, far from home, filled the lower stands of Coors Field, chanting in unison.
But one homemade sign in the midst of the throng summed up this baseball postseason: "Red Sox Domi-Nation."
That's where we are now. It's a disorienting development to many lifelong fans, like me, for whom the Red Sox's collective personality - that dysfunction deep in their franchise DNA - has been an unvarying plotline linking all of baseball's decades. Sure, the Curse was reversed in 2004 and it might take baseball a generation to produce another story that good.
Now, a new era has officially begun in baseball. In the past month, it's become too clear to deny. The Red Sox, not the New York Yankees, led baseball in road attendance this season. More people want to see Manny being Manny (Ramirez), Jonathan Papelbon doing his Riverdance prance, Daisuke Matsuzaka swiveling his hips for a Gyroball, David Ortiz slugging and hugging, plus all those rookies, than want to pay to watch the worn out, pathetic dregs of the Yankees' all-star circus.
The center of gravity in baseball is now Fenway Park, not Yankee Stadium. And that is good, very good for baseball.
Some people around baseball have gotten the bizarre idea this month thatthe Red Sox are somehow "the new Yankees." You know, the team to be hated by right-thinking fans simply because Boston has a $145 million budget.
Two World Series victories in four seasons do not mean that it's time for an off-Broadway production of Damn Red Sox. Lets enjoy what we've got. In time, no doubt, the Red Sox will become an old, tired story, too.
Make no mistake, the Red Sox are going to need plenty of good ideas, and soon, to stay where they are. Boston is rightfully proud of its handful of homegrown young prospects. It's the Red Sox's badge of honor that they haven't just bought a title. But for every under-30 Kevin Youkilis or Josh Beckett, Boston has several core players who are ancient: Curt Schilling (40), 17-game winner Tim Wakefield (41), Mike Timlin (41), Jason Varitek (35, old for a catcher).
Before this World Series, I mentioned how few World Series have been duds since Carlton Fisk hit his foul-pole home run in 1975. But that is changing. And baseball should start to be concerned. Three of the past four World Series have been sweeps while the other was the St. Louis Cardinals' victory in five games in 2006. The sweeps by the Red Sox and Chicago White Sox were easy to swallow. If the drama was scant, the history was sublime with those champions breaking droughts of 86 and 88 years between World Series victories. And the Cardinals' victory last year was a major upset by an injured, scrappy and nationally popular team.
But ugly October patterns are emerging. The American League has become too superior for the World Series' good. The AL has swept five of the past 10 World Series and the overall superiority, 34-16 in games, is embarrassing. Baseball can't control the relative strength of its leagues. But the game must realize that, when competition seems imbalanced, fans simply will not tolerate a postseason filled with games that average more than 1 3/2 hours.
Game 3 took 4 hours, 14 minutes, the longest nine-inning game in a World Series. Game 2 of the American League Championship Series, however, is the poster child for everything that is wrong with lugubrious, self-indulgent October baseball. The Cleveland Indians and Red Sox required 5 hours, 14 minutes to play 11 innings.
Baseball purists say that games now start too late at night for children to watch. So, how will the sport cultivate new fans? I say that baseball is lucky the games are too late for kids. Children see the tolerable 2:45 version of the sport during the regular season. It's better they aren't exposed to the virtually unwatchable October games which average almost an hour longer.
Baseball's biggest problem isn't steroids. With tougher drug-testing rules and enforcement, that will pass. The game can cope with high salaries thanks to increased revenue sharing and new revenue streams. Even high ticket prices can't stop the sport from setting attendance records year after year. Gorgeous new ballpark palaces make people want to pay the freight. The quality of playon the field is excellent. The balance between offense and defense, while still tilted too far toward offense, is tolerable.
However, time-of-game, which is still too long during the regular season, is an absolute killer in October. To watch games of this length, you don't have to be a fan, you have to be a certifiable fanatic. And it is a problem that can be cured. The few minutes added to postseason games by long and lucrative commercials is not the problem. Every business has to make a buck.
The problem is the players. The pressure of playoff baseball freezes them. They don't realize it, but almost everybody moves in slow motion between pitches. The reason is simple. Every innocuous at-bat, from the first pitch of the game, is filled with such intensity in the players' minds that they react as if it is the bottom of the ninth, bases-loaded, game on the line.
This simply can't be allowed to continue. It's killing the sport's showcase month. Umpires are the only cure; but, luckily, they're also the perfect instruments for the remedy. With the threat of calling a ball on a dawdling pitcher or a strike on a human-rain-delay hitter, they have more than enough muscle to cut 30 minutes off the current obscene length of October games.
When this World Series ended, it was 12:05 a.m. in Boston, thanks to an entirely typical postseason game that took 3:35.
No doubt every Red Sox fan was still awake to watch. But, baseball needs to ask, who else was?
Sports, Pages 22 on 10/31/2007