From the cheap seats

It’s all over.

This year’s fall classic will forever be remembered as one of the greatest World Series that nobody watched.

For two years in a row Major League Baseball has played host to great World Series match-ups. Coincidentally, for the last two years the ratings for the World Series have dropped.

Last year, everyone was saying that ‘the World Series was too predictable and everyone knew that the New York Yankees were going to win.’ This year the Yankees didn’t even make it past the first round of the playoffs.

The San Francisco Giants and the Anaheim Angels Series played seven good games. Only two of the games were decided by more than three runs. So why wasn’t anyone watching?

I’ve heard a lot of excuses; some of them were valid points. The first
being that it was two West Coast teams. Although for California natives, the Series held a lot of potential and excitement, for those of us on the East Coast, we really diidn’t care.

The West Coast teams also pushed the starting time of each World Series game to 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This was great for the West Coast, it meant that the games would start around 5:30 p.m. and end around 9 p.m. Here on the East Coast the games would rarely end before midnight.

At the risk of sounding biased. I wold have liked to think that if the Atlanta Braves had made it to the World Series, the ratings would have been higher.

The Braves are known as America’s team. That’s because most of their games are not broadcast on regional television, but instead they are broadcast nationwide on Turner Broadcasting Station (TBS).

Many cities that have MLB teams still root for the Braves. Most cities that don’t have a MLB team root for the Braves because they do win a lot, just not in October.

The 2002 Series seemingly had everything. It had Giants’ slugger Barry Bonds, who had more post-season and World Series homeruns than anyone in the history of baseball. The Series also featured Francisco Rodriguez, a sensational pitcher for the Angels.

Rodriguez is only 20-years-old and hasn’t won a regular season Major League game, but has five post-season wins under his belt already.

The series went seven games complete with a dramatic sixth game comeback in the late innings to force a game seven.

The Angels finished 41 games out of first place last year. They started this season 6-14 in their first 20 games. They were underdogs in both playoff series with the Yankees and the Minnesota Twins. For them to comeback and win the World Series is like culmination of every baseball movie ever made.

Finally, the World Series had the single greatest factor that any World Series or sports championship could have. That being, of course, ‘the Rally Monkey.’

True, the monkey has had its fair share of criticism. Some say that the exploitation of the monkey grew to be too much in the World Series.

Some say that the monkey may have, in fact, been two monkeys posing as one (like those dang Olsen twins). Regardless, I think that Major League Baseball should hand out one more Championship Ring to the
greatest inspiration to grace the West Coast since Tu-Pac.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 30 2002. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry