The initial and obvious target were the American League games with their infernal, damnable Designated Hitter:
The sweet spot for 9-inning MLB games is +/- 3 hours. Longer if it's a warm, sunny "Business Day Special" in June, more brief when it's a cold, rainy night game early in the month of April. Likewise, the National Anthem should not last longer than 1 minute 20 seconds just as God and John Phillip Sousa intended. It's the National Anthem, not an operetta or a Broadway tryout.
Intelligent baseball cognoscenti shared my sentiment:
Regrettably, the epic-length playoff game malaise was not restricted to the Junior Circuit:
Watching Cubs' playoff games approaches war crimes-level of torture under the best of circumstances.
MLB does itself and its next-generation of baseball fans no favors by scheduling the start time for playoff games at 8:20pm in the Cincinnati Time Zone, Cincinnati being the ancestral home of professional baseball. MLB should re-institute day games for the World Series. My proposal is that each participating team host one day game, Games 2 and 4. This allows each city to host at least one primetime World Series game with all the pomp and circumstance of player introductions, fly-overs, etc and provides MLB with their requisite TV viewership and lucrative commercial revenue from advertisers while still ensuring the youthful fans in those same host cities the opportunity to watch their home team play (daytime) World Series games in their entirety.
The glacial rate of playoff games inspired me to write poetry:
Haiku fits perfectly within the visual limitation of smartphone screen size.
I was unstoppable. As were, seemingly, the playoff games.
All was not playoff doom and gloom and the poetry inspired thereof:
One-upmanship at its barroom finest.
Along with MLB payoff games, October ushers in the fall racing meet at Keeneland:
The World Series presented America with the too-cool for cheering fans of the N.L. Champion L.A. Dodgers:
Being a Senior Circuit fan, I was forced to root for the Dodgers..... painful as that always is. At least my boy Joc Pederson was crushing the ball.
A World Series Game 7 is a world-stopping event, or at least it once was long ago in Pax Americana. I headed down to Lou's palatial estate with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos to watch the spectacle unfold in his baseball museum. Rocking out in the Jeep Main Battle Tank to satellite radio, the foreboding musical selections foreshadowed the looming Dodger demise soon to befall L.A.:
I hope somebody alerted the Z-list celebs stuck in traffic on the 405! A fire of a different sort was bearing down on Chavez Ravine!
Another wrong turn on MLB's own I-405 traffic jam to irrelevancy is November baseball. The World Series is and should always be an October event and preferably it should conclude no later than the middle of the month. The red line was crossed before out of necessity. Anything short of a national catastrophe should preclude November baseball. Yet there we were, again, this year and the satellite radio immediately followed Chuck D's Game 7 warning with another prescient alert:
Indeed, it was a cold November rain in the lead-up to Game 7:
You will note in the somewhat blurry photo above, from the helm of the Jeep Main Battle Tank, the rain-drenched street, GNR "November Rain" [talk about interminable!] on the radio and the 46-degree temperature indicated in the instrument panel.
A more-blurry version of the photo above makes for better art:
In the aftermath of the Dodgers Game 7 defeat, interminable playoff games and interminable songs on the radio, for my early-morning drive back to The Ranch I was treated to an epic-length performance done right!
I caught all 20 minutes!
Turning onto Curve Road, shortly after 1am (thanks, MLB!), I was gently serenaded by satellite radio's most-played song:
Roll the credits!
