So the World Series is over. Four months until the boys of spring, summer, and fall converge on Florida and Arizona to prepare themselves for the 2010 season. That’s a lot of days to trade stories and speculate about the future around the hot stove in the general store.

Personally, I was rooting for the Phillies, as was most of the American sporting public, largely because the Yankees are a team more purchased than developed and also, maybe, because a lot of those pin-stripers seem like such assholes. Maybe I’m wrong about that part.

But at least there are some good things about skipping a seventh game, not the least being I don’t have to hear Tim McCarver run his mouth before next September. Also: the incessant camera shots of ‘celebrities’, at least a few of whom belong behind bars instead of the camera railing at Yankee Stadium. Kate Hudson had an excuse of sorts, being the amorous partner of New York third baseman Alex Rodriguez, but who is Kurt Russell dating? And then Donald Trump, and that putz Rudy Giuliani, you see what I mean by the prison reference.

And the commercials, even with the sound muted I know what those sleazebags are saying, the insurance companies like Allstate and State Farm, not to mention the dingbat for Progressive, all of these being people you might want to shoot just because they’re so offensive to humanity. Sigh. Hell, I don’t really want to shoot them, although, to paraphrase what Mort Sahl once said about Woody Allen, I’d like to slap that Progressive ditz silly except it looks like someone already has.

As my friend JBD is fond of noting, the guys who run the major league game have done what they can to ruin it. It used to mean something, the World Series. Hard to credit now.

The Yanks and Phillies were worthy participants, that’s something. Not like one of those seasons, 162 games where the best teams are eliminated in fluke ‘playoffs’ by ‘wild-card’ teams and we’re treated to bad exhibitions with squads like Colorado, no, at least not that.

But thanks to the Lords of baseball, Bud Selig and his boys, what was once a final, ultimate showdown, a clash of cities and personalities on a great stage, has been reduced to just another corporate product, a game as the draw for selling shit instead of a main event.

Baseball is meant to be played in the sunshine. That is its nature. Before the greedheads got their paws on it, when there was still a real Commissioner who took only limited shit from the owners, the World Series was played between the best teams, in the sunshine, the first week of October.

Once in a while, it rained. Hard as it is to visualize for those of us living in paradise, it sometimes rains in early October back east. That’s okay. A game could be postponed to the next day. It did not snow or sleet. Players’ lips were rarely blue. Under these conditions, one could say it was a fair test of skill, a match played in an arena and in weather which respected the game.

But thanks to Bud Selig and the other toads who run professional baseball, those days are gone, literally.

When rot sets in it’s usually incremental. At first, there were a few night games, during the week. Weekends remained daytime affairs. The argument ran, it gave working people and kids a chance to see games on television they’d otherwise miss.

However, it was not about the children. It never is when you get right down to it (memo to the trustees in the Tam Union High School District: go fuck yourselves). It was about money.

It was about money, too, when it was decided that weekend games should be played at night; can’t have broadcasts competing with football, can we? It was about money when the seasons were extended, when interleague play was begun, when everything became about licensing and contracts.

It was about money when the playoffs were not the World Series but ‘divisional’ matches, and there were more rounds invented to “keep it interesting”, although baseball never did need gimmicks to “keep it interesting” for people who cared about it. Even the promos now, the slogans that Major League Baseball runs at us, claim that it is about “more than baseball.”

Bulletin to Selig: only an ignoramus would devalue baseball by claiming it needed anything more.

Walt Whitman once said that baseball was a blessing which could redeem the national soul. Don’t know if it’s still true... it’s a magnificent game, but we’ve got a serious deficit in the redemption department. Last time I checked, the kids still played it with joy, the stuff the grown-ups have clearly traded for cash. Might be a close call.