A scene from an old WWII movie (can't remember which one), popped into my head the other day. The scene featured two U.S. MPs guarding an Army base somewhere in Europe during the war. Their job was to screen out enemy spies posing as American servicemen and officers. In order to do that they asked the following question: "Who won the World Series last year?"
The assumption of course, understood by anyone watching the movie, was that any red-blooded American male would be able to answer that question in a heartbeat.
I'm guessing that may have been a fairly safe assumption when the movie was made, probably sometime in the fifties or early sixties, the apogee of baseball's popularity, when in any given year of that period, if the answer didn't immediately come to your head, you could simply say "The Yankees", and have at least a seventy percent chance of being right.
During the actual war however I'm not so sure that would have been a safe assumption as while baseball continued to be played professionally on orders from President Roosevelt, most of the players in the Major Leagues were themselves participating in the war effort*, leaving their teams filled with men who were ineligible to serve in the armed services. Two of the most famous of these were Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds, a 16-year-old left-handed pitcher too young to serve, and Pete Gray, a one-armed right fielder who played one season for the St. Louis Browns.
Would soldiers engaged in the business of fighting a World War in two fronts on opposite sides of the planet have been fixated on the exploits of these "4F" replacement players back home? I'm not so sure.
But you get the point, baseball was the most popular sport in the U.S. once, with its only real competition being prizefighting.
Today it's another story with several sports competing with and often beating baseball, at least where it really matters, in TV ratings. I'd be surprised if one in twenty Americans today could tell you who won the World Series last year. Which is why MLB is loathe to schedule its playoff games to compete with the NFL, even though the professional football season is still only in its first half.
Sometimes it's unavoidable however, such as this past Monday when the Seattle Mariners faced the Toronto Blue Jays in the decisive game seven of the American League Championship Series, a game I might add, which will be remembered for a long time. More on that later. But suffice it to say, the two Monday Night Football mid-season games that took place that night, considerably outdrew a vastly more significant baseball game. In the United States that is.
Not in Canada for obvious reasons.
It's too bad because this year especially, Major League Baseball's post season has been tremendously entertaining, featuring some magnificent performances by superstars as well as heretofore unknown players, extremely competitive games and series, and wacky plays that no one has ever seen the likes of.
And we haven't even gotten to the World Series yet!
This year's roster of twelve teams in the playoffs included several teams known for their long histories of futility. This included my hometown Chicago Cubs who still hold the record for the longest World Series drought, 108 years. Of course, they broke that sorry string back in 2016, beating the team that currently holds the title of longest ongoing string without winning a World Series, the Cleveland Guardians,. Then there are the expansion teams that have never won a World Series, three of the five, the San Diego Padres, Milwaukee Brewers and Seattle Mariners were included in the mix this year.
Unfortunately, all those strings of futility will have to live at least another year as none of those teams are still playing.
Neither is the losingest team in MLB history, the Philadelphia Phillies, also knocked out of this year's playoffs.
And I'd be remiss not to mention the Boston Red Sox who despite being tied for third place in all time World Series titles, had an impressive drought of their own, 84 years, which many blame on the "Curse of the Bambino", after their owner sold their star pitcher who wasn't all that bad with the bat, a guy named Babe Ruth, to the Yankees in order to finance a Broadway show.
After that whopper of a deal, the Yankees would go on to become baseball's most successful team in terms of championships, and all Boston would get in return is "No No, Nanette", the off-Broadway version of course.
But in the end, it all balances out as the Yankees didn't survive the playoffs either this year.
The playoff system in MLB has been in place since 1969. Before then, dating back to the formation of the American League in 1901, the team with the best regular season record in each league would win its league's championship or "pennant" and would face the winner of the other league in the World Series. In 1969, which happened to be the year I started paying attention to baseball standings, the leagues were divided into two divisions consisting of six teams each, and the winner of each league's division would face the other in a best of five series league championship series, which would determine the team that would move on to the World Series.
As expansion teams kept coming on the scene, the leagues divided up again to three divisions in 1994. To achieve even numbers for the playoffs, a "wild card" team, the non-division winner with the best record in each league was added to the mix.
This is all hooey to the purists of the game who would say what's the point of playing a grueling 162 game season when in the end all you get for winning the most games in your respective league is the chance to compete with lesser teams to possibly move on. Or to put it another way, isn't it more of an accomplishment to be the best team over a long, grueling season, than to be the best team over a one month season, which is essentially what the playoffs are?
The purists have a point.
On the other hand, back when post-season baseball meant the World Series and nothing else, until expansion began in 1960, there were only eight teams in each of two leagues, a total of sixteen teams, And those sixteen teams only represented ten different cities as four cities had two teams each and New York City had three. So barring a "subway series" which New York saw a number of in the fifties, only fourteen teams representing eight cites would be left out in the cold come post season time.
Today there are thirty MLB teams. If the old system were still in place, fans of twenty eight teams would have little to root for, especially after July when it becomes painfully obvious to many that their team doesn't stand a chance to be the best of the fifteen teams of its league. With more chances to qualify for the post season, that pain can be delayed in some cases all the way to September.
As a lifelong Chicago baseball fan, I've been there and done that far too often.
With the current system, instead of there being one pennant race in each League come late August and September, now there are several.
MLB has been tweaking the playoff structure since 1994, trying to strike a balance between keeping the competition interesting and making sure the teams that win championships deserve it.
The current system still has three divisions in each league, as well as three wild card teams, resulting in twelve teams making it into the playoffs. To give the best teams an advantage, the two division champions in each league with the best records get to sit out the first round of playoffs, known as the "Wild Card Series", which are now a best-of-three game series.
An example of how the current playoff system dramatically invigorates the season: this year in the American League, the pairings for two of the three divisions, the East and the Central, had yet to be decided until the final game of the season. In the National League, two teams, the Mets and the Reds, fought for the last spot in the Wild Card race on the last day of the regular season. Fittingly perhaps, both those teams lost their final game meaning the Reds got the chance to be swept by the Dodgers (the answer to the question of who won the World Series last year) in their Wild Card Series.
That series may have been a bit of a wash but the other three went the full three game distance. The series I paid closest attention to, the Cubs versus the Padres, wasn't settled until the last out of the ninth inning of the decisive third game. Before that moment, any Cubs fan who is old enough certainly had flashbacks of the dreadful 1984 National League Championship Series when the Cubs took the first two games in the best of five series in Chicago, only to lose the series being swept the next three games by the Padres in San Diego.
So what went through this old White Sox fan's mind when with two outs in the top of the ninth, the tying and go ahead runs on base and Padre's catcher Freddie Fermin hitting a fly ball deep to center field?
Why of course, hoist the "W" flag and cue the Steve Goodman. "Go Cubs Go!" As a Chicago fan, beggars can't be choosers.
In the American League, Detroit beat their division rival Cleveland, and the Yankees snuck by their own bitter rival the Red Sox, while the Seattle Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays were waiting in the wings.
Before the wild card came around in baseball, these exciting win-or-go-home series pitting division rivals against each other only occurred in the case of season ending in a tie for first place, a bit of a rarity. Today they happen virtually every year.
The two National League teams that got to sit out the Wild Card series this year were the Phillies and the team with the best record in the majors this year, the Milwaukee Brewers, who ended up playing their division rivals the Cubs in the best of five National League Divisional Series. Meanwhile the Phillies took on the Dodgers.
In the American League, it was the Tigers vs. the Mariners and the Yankees taking on another division rival, the Blue Jays. Those two teams finished the season with identical records, but the Jays got the nod as division champs as they edged out the Yanks in head to head competition this year.
That series seemed to be the one with real barn burner potential but Toronto handily beat the Yanks in the first two games in Toronto, 10-1 and 13-7.
Game three in the Bronx seemed like icing on the cake for the Jays when they took an early 6-1 lead in the third and it looked as if the game and series would be over in a Toronto sweep. But in the bottom of the third,, the Yanks put up a two spot. In the next inning an error and a walk put two runners on base for Yankee superstar Aaron Judge who represented the tying run. Off an 0-2 Louis Varland inside fastball, with the crowd chanting MVP, MVP, Judge slammed a massive drive that hit high off the left field foul pole. The Yankees scraped together three more runs while holding the Jays scoreless for the rest of the game. The momentum had shifted.
Meanwhile the Brewers were having their way with the Cubs, having taken the first two games of their series up in Milwaukee. The sudden turn of events thanks to Judge's heroics gave me hope that something similar might happen for the Cubs and they'd be able to turn their series around when they returned to the Friendly Confines. Well, it took no Herculean (or Judgeian?) effort for the hometown team, just good solid baseball, no doubt with the support of their loyal fans most of whom reportedly spent the entire two games in Chicago on their feet. The Cubs ended up sending the series back to Milwaukee for a decisive game five.
As for the Yankees well, as they say in baseball, momentum is everything, until it isn't. (Hey someone must have said that some time). They went down quietly at home in Yankee Stadium in game four, sending Toronto on to the American League Championship.
Toronto's next opponent wouldn't be decided until two days later in a series that went the distance and then some. The Wild Card Tigers stole game one of their ALDS from the Division Champion Mariners in Seattle, but the Mariners came back to win the next two games, one at home, the other in Detroit, setting up a do-or-die game four for Detroit. By the fifth inning of that game, the Tigers were down 3-0. But the Detroit bats came alive in the bottom of that inning with three runs, four more in the sixth, and one in each of the subsequent innings, while their pitchers held Seattle scoreless. Final score 9-3, which sent the series back to Seattle for a decisive game five.
In that game, the Mariners manufactured a run off a double, a stolen base and a sac fly. In the top of the sixth, former Cub Javy Baez doubled for the Tigers. With the left handed hitting Kerry Carpenter due up, Seattle manager Don Wilson chose to "go with the averages" and pull his starter George Kirby who was pitching well, in favor of lefty reliever Gabe Spencer. That move backfired as Carpenter put one in the seats to put Detroit ahead 2-1. The other starter. Tiger ace and Cy Young Award candidate Turk Skubal, was pulled in the seventh after pitching a gem, allowing only one run and two hits while striking out thirteen in six innings. The same fate happened to Detroit as their relievers gave up the tying run that inning.
But then crickets, the pitchers on both teams held their opponents scoreless, but not without drama, for the next seven and one half innings. That streak came to an end in the bottom of the fifteenth when the Mariners manufactured yet another run with a little help from the Tigers, off a single, a hit by pitch, an error allowing the runners to advance, and an intentional walk which loaded the bases for Seattle second baseman Jorge Polanco. On a 3-2 pitch, Polanco singled to right, driving in the game and series winning run.
Expressing the frustration of Tiger Nation after that tough loss, Dan Dickerson, the voice of Tiger radio, blurted out:
I don't have to do a game recap, ah fuck. Fuck this game recap!
Dickerson thought he was off the air at the time but...
He apologized the next day for the outburst but I'm sure that wasn't necessary, most of the fans listening to the game could relate.
As the late great Harry Caray used to always say:
Ah, you can't beat fun at the ol' ballpark!
I mentioned above that the Phillies are the team with the most losses in baseball. A couple things about that, first of all, someone has to have more losses than anybody else and the Phillies have been around longer than just about any other MLB team, so they've had more chances to lose. After being a truly awful team for their first one hundred or so years of existence, in recent memory, they've had several good, even some great teams that have been contenders for the big prize, More often than not however, they've come up short. In 1993, they lost the World Series in the most dramatic fashion possible to something that happens all the time in story books and little children's fantasies, but has only happened once in history. They lost on a come-from-behind walk off championship home run. It came off the bat of Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays, the last time the team from up north made it to the Big Dance.
This year, the Phillies' dreams of a third World Series Championship (they actually have even fewer of those than the Cubs), came to an end in the most dreadful fashion, they gave up a walk off, series ending run on an error. It wasn't just an error, but a mistake of judgement to be generous, or to be less generous, a boneheaded play.
The Phillies dropped their first two games to the Dodgers in Philadelphia, but won game three in LA. In do-or-die game four at Dodger Stadium, the game was scoreless until the top of the seventh when Philly Max Kepler scored off a Nick Castellanos double. That run was answered in the bottom of the inning when Dodger Mookie Betts walked with the bases loaded.
Both teams then went down 1-2-3 every inning until the 11th. The Phillies failed to score leaving a man on base in their half of the inning. In the bottom of the 11th, off a couple of singles and a walk, the Dodgers loaded the bases with two outs when Philly reliever Orion Kerkering faced LA outfielder Andy Pages. On an 0-1 pitch, Pages hit a sharp comebacker to Kerkering's left. It was a tough play but Kerkering managed to field the ball. Despite his catcher pointing for him to throw to first base, the pitcher came home with the ball but threw it wide of the plate.
Run scores, game and series over.
Now if you're at all familiar with the rules of baseball, the problem with this scenario should be obvious. Had Kerkerling done what his catcher asked him to do, that is throw to first base, assuming he had made a clean throw and the first baseman cleanly fielded it before the runner reached the base (which video replay confirms he had plenty of time to do), the Phillies would have been out of the inning as with two outs, a runner safely crossing home plate is not awarded a run if there is a force out on that play at any base, regardless of the timing of the two events.
Kerkerling was devastated after the play and any reasonable human being has to have tremendous empathy for him as he will likely, at least in Philadelphia, join the ranks of players like Fred Merkel, Fred Snodgrass and of course Bill Buckner to name a few, who went to their graves remembered for an unfortunate mistake in a pivotal game rather than for their otherwise successful careers.
On the other hand, the biggest bonehead play in baseball history took place at Yankee Stadium on October 10, 1926.. It was in the bottom of the ninth of game seven of the World Series with the Yankees trailing the Cardinals, 3-2. With two outs in the inning, Babe Ruth walked bringing his teammate Bob Meusel up to the plate. On the first pitch to Meusel, Ruth attempted to steal second base.
When asked after the game why he tried to steal second in that situation, Ruth, known as the Sultan of Swat, not the Sultan of Swift said: "because I thought they wouldn't expect me to do it."
He was right, they didn't, but they threw him out anyway.
Well it just so happened that the following year was 1927, and to anyone with any sense of baseball history, the words "1927 Yankees" have a certain magic to them, as that perhaps was the greatest Major League Baseball team to ever take the field, and Babe Ruth was certainly at the center of that magic.
So all was forgiven.
One can only wish, unlikely as it may be, that the same fate awaits Orion Kerkering.
On to the Championship Series.
Oh wait you say, what ever happened with the Cubs and the Brewers? Well let's just say the Wrigley magic didn't transfer well to Milwaukee and the stadium formerly known as Miller Park. As in games one and two, the Cubs bats came up strong early, but not often, and the Brewers won game five, moving on to face the Dodgers.
Unfortunately for them.
Maybe it was sheer comeuppance for the Brewers' players' truly bush move of taunting their just vanquished opponents by posing with a Wrigley Field style "L"(for loser) flag in their on field portrait after the game. More likely it was that they were outmatched by a far better team. I like to think it was a little of both, but in any case, the Dodgers trashed the Brewers in the NLCS, sweeping the series in four games.
That's not to say the series wasn't interesting. In the fourth inning of game one, the Dodgers loaded the bases with one out. Max Muncy hit a deep drive to center field. Brewer center fielder Sal Frelick tracked the ball down and at the wall made a spectacular leap, snagging the ball as it was about to go over the fence, preventing a grand slam. But the ball popped out of his glove and hit the wall. Frelick was somehow able to grab the ball before it touched the ground. He then made a perfect throw to Brewer short stop Joey Ortiz who in turn made a perfect relay throw to catcher William Contreras which beat the runner, Dodger Teoscar Hernández by a whisker.
That was the second out of the inning.
Then Contraras, who apparently was the only player on the field who understood what really happened on the play, calmly jogged over to third base with the ball and touched the bag, while Will Smith, the lead LA baserunner was standing on second and Freddie Freeman and Muncy who was robbed of the grand slam were on first.
Three outs.
So what happened?
Well I have to plead ignorance of a certain baseball rule as at the time I didn't realize that a ball hitting the wall is considered the same as a ball hitting the ground. In other words, catching a ball after it hits the wall, something that doesn't happen all that often, is not recorded as an out and has to be played just as if it hit the ground before being fielded. My son, a former umpire, had to teach me this. Regardless, Frelick did the right thing and hit his cutoff man as quickly as possible.
But the play happened so quickly that even Frelick didn't realize the ball hit the wall, he assumed he had made a put out for the second out of the inning. Unfortunately for them, so did the baserunners who stayed on base, assuming a catch had been made. Hernández, the runner at third, confused as his teammates, hesitated tagging up before heading for home. That unnecessary action of tagging up, especially the hesitation, made the difference between his being safe and out at the plate.
To sum it all up, as a catch had not been made, the runners needed to advance as the bases were loaded and there was no place to put the batter Max Muncy who was not out, and headed for first.
So Contreras stepping on third forced out Will Smith, who by that time should have been standing on third.
Got all that?
I wasn't watching the game live but hear that the review of the play took quite some time as there were so many parts to it. The most amazing thing to me is that the replays proved without question that the the umpires involved, namely the outfield umpire who immediately called no catch on the part of Frelick, and the home plate umpire who called the baserunner out at the plate without a tag (as it was a force play), both nailed their calls on the field.
Believe it or not, that wasn't the craziest baserunning faux pas in Dodger lore. When the team was still in Brooklyn, there was a famous play (in a relatively insignificant game) where three Dodger baserunners all found themselves standing on third base.
In case you don't know, you can't do that.
This led to a long time joke where a cab driver pulls up to Ebbets Field during a game and asks an usher how the Dodgers are doing. "They have three runners on base!" says the usher. To which the driver responds: "Which base?"
Baseball humor.
That great heads up fielding play was far and away the highlight of the series for the Brewers, they simply had no answer for the Dodgers' pitching. The Brewers scored only one run in each of the four games and had a team batting average of .118 in the series, which turns out to be the lowest team average ever in a post season series. That Dodger pitching staff includes the most dominant player in baseball today, and perhaps when all is said and done, forever, Shohei Ohtani.
Ohtani you see, just like a certain Yankee from 100 years ago (whom I've brought up ad nauseam in this post), in addition to being a lights out pitcher, can also hit with the best of them. In game four of the National League Championship Series with the Dodgers up three games to none on the Brewers, the first inning alone was the stuff of legend. In the top of that inning, Ohtani struck out the top of the Milwaukee order. Then, thanks to a new rule made up solely for him, as designated hitter for himself, Ohtani, the leadoff hitter in the Dodger lineup, hit a massive home run to right center field, estimated to have traveled 446 feet.
Of course he wasn't done, He ended up pitching six scoreless innings giving up only two hits. And he hit two more home runs, the second, more than twenty feet longer than the first.
They say it was the single greatest performance in a post season game.
I'm not going to argue with that.
But as my friend Steve pointed out, what about Don Larsen's World Series 1956 perfect game against the Dodgers? After all, how can you beat perfection?
Well I suppose it's something that will be argued for as long as people are arguing about baseball. My take is this, a perfect game is a little bit of a freak of nature, in order for one to take place, the stars have to all be aligned just right. Yes perfect games require a tremendous pitching performance, that much is certain. But they also require, unless the pitcher strikes out everybody, the contribution of all the teammates in the field to make clean plays. And yes, perfect games also require a certain amount of luck, especially involving balls that have to be hit to players giving them the chance to make plays on them. One bloop single and there goes the perfect game.
There was no luck in Ohtani's performance that night, it was sheer dominance by one player.
.
And like that Yankee of old who defined the era in which he played, barring catastrophic injury, we may be living now in what one day will be defined as "The Ohtani Era."
Yes baseball fans, he's that good.
That brings us to what was perhaps the most exciting series this year (out of many) played up to this point, the American League Championship Series between the Mariners and the Blue Jays, the two highest seeded teams in the American League, and two teams that came into existence in the same year, 1977.
It wasn't looking very promising at the start, The Blue Jays, the odds on favorite to win the series, dropped the first two games at home to the Mariners. They'd have to win two games in Seattle in order to bring the series back to Toronto, no small task.
Now the Mariners are the poster child for the opinion that the team with the best record over the regular season deserves to be in the World Series. In the 2001 season the Mariners posted a record of 116-46. No team since, wait for it, the 1906 Chicago Cubs had won as many games in one season. But that year the Mariners lost in the ALCS to the Yankees who won twenty one fewer games in the regular season. I suspect part of the reason why hardly anyone makes much of a case about it, is the fact that that series was played barely one month after the September 11th attacks and understandably hardly anyone cared about baseball that year, and those who did, like me, were rooting for the Yankees.
Had the Mariners won that series, it would have resulted in their first trip to the Fall Classic. They haven't made it since, making them the only team in the Majors who have never made an appearance in a World Series.
Perhaps this was to be their year.
But The Blue Jays did exactly what they had to do in Seattle, winning games three and four in the Pacific Northwest, making sure that the series, win or lose would finish in Canada.
Seattle did salvage their homestand by taking game five 6-2, giving them a 3-2 advantage in the series.
Back at the Rogers Center in downtown Toronto, the Blue Jays took game six by the same score, 6-2, setting up yet again, a decisive game seven (the sweetest words to any sports fan), as I mentioned above, played last Monday night.
George Kirby would start his second decisive game of a series for the Mariners, this time facing Shane Bieber for the Blue Jays. Both teams scored one run in the first. Kirby settled down after that, allowing no runs and two hits in the next three innings while Bieber gave up another run in the second. Then after giving up a double and a walk in the fourth, Bieber was relieved by Louis Varland who got the Jays out of the inning. But the first batter he faced in the fifth, Cal Raleigh hit a solo home run to right, putting the Mariners up 3-1.
Another Mariner starter, Brian Woo came in for Kirby in the bottom of the fifth and he pitched two solid, scoreless innings.
Going into the bottom of the seventh, things were looking pretty good for the Mariners to make their first trip to the Big Dance. On the Baseball Reference win probability chart for that game, they were well into the eighty percent range at that point. Still in the game, Brian Woo walked Addison Berger to lead off the seventh. Then he gave up a single to Isiah Kiner-Falifa. Next up was Andrés Giménez who did something that we haven't seen much in recent years, he sacrifice bunted to advance the runners to second and third. Next up was George Springer who was still smarting after being hit in the knee by a Brian Woo pitch in gave five. But he wouldn't face Woo in this at bat as the Mariners brought in Edward Bazardo to face him.
And now a word from our sponsor...
You know folks, if you've been reading my baseball posts over the years, you've seen this quote countless times. There's no shame in that for me as these words more than any describe the game I love so much. So once again, here they are:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. -The first paragraph of "The Green Field of the Mind" a story by A. Bartlett Giamatti
It all stopped for the Seattle Mariners and their fans when eight outs away from their first World Series, on a 1-0 two seam fastball that Edward Bazardo left over the plate, George Springer parked the ball into the left field stands. To the joy of the 44,770 fans in the ballpark who saw it happen in person, to the all the Blue Jays fans living in the city the team represents, and to the fans of the team all over the country the Blue Jays represent, that was a moment they will never forget.
The Seattle fans will never forget it either. I know, I've experienced those chill rains quite a number of times in my life as well, and have not forgotten.
Springer's was a home run for the ages, an instant classic immediately compared to Joe Carter's blast over thirty years ago. And because he did while hurt and considered unlikely to play,, it was also compared to Kirk Gibson's iconic come-from-behind walk off home run for the Dodgers in game one of the 1988 World Series.
So now the World Series is set, the Toronto Blue Jays vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Dodgers will be heavy favorites to win, mostly because this team has plenty of playoff experience. Strangely enough, the Blue Jays finished in last place in their division last year.
But they've shown great resilience as we've seen in the playoffs as well as in the regular season. Let by their superstar Vladmir Guerrero Jr. they posted an impressive 20 home runs this post season.
But the Dodgers bats aren't too shabby and they definitively have the edge when it comes to starting pitching. Their relief pitching is perhaps another story. As my resident baseball expert, my son tells me, if the Blue Jays can get the Dodgers starters to throw a lot of pitches, forcing them out of the game, perhaps they have a chance.
We'll see.
As far as picking a team to root for well, that's a little complicated for me. As a great lover of baseball history, I'd say there is no team with a more interesting history than the Dodgers. And like the city they represent, there's a lot to love about them, they are the team after all who integrated baseball. Unfortunately, also like the city they represent, there's also a lot to not love. It's complicated.
Toronto on the other hand is a city I love unconditionally and as I usually pick teams to root for more for the city they represent, than for the team itself, in that vein it would be a no brainer for me to root for the Blue Jays.
On the other hand, the city of Los Angeles suffered a series of devastating fires this year so as I did in 2001, maybe I'll route for the team out of solidarity for the city and its people.
On the other hand, the Blue Jays not only represent a city, but an entire country, a proud nation that is seen by the current president as nothing more than our 51st state. I'd love to see them win just to be able to say to Canada that we Americans proudly stand with you.
Anyway, two things are certain, I'm going to root for the series to go the distance and baseball gods willing, then some.
And I'm going to root for the team wearing blue.
It's been a great ride so far.
,