World Series

If you are anyone other than a Dodger fan this picture makes you hurt from head to toe. Not since the Yankees of the 80's and 90's has a team generated more hatred by fans around the world than this Dodgers team. That is great for baseball.

Sports needs heroes and villains, especially villains. We all love and are devoted to our favorite teams and players but when their season ends, and other teams are playing on, we need someone to cheer for and someone to root against. It is just human nature to pick sides.

When you have a team that spends money like rich drunken sailors on leave, they are easy to hate. Imagine Pirates fans watching the Dodgers and thinking that the Dodgers Betts and Freeman are paid as much as their entire twenty-five man roster in total. That will make you angry and upset at the unfairness of it all. How can they possibly compete against that?

The truth is that they can't. Oh, sure, on any given day any team can win, but the difference is that the teams with money can build depth that the other teams can't and when those teams lose a key player it devastates the team. The rich just keep on rolling on.

Anyway, this years World Series featured the number one payroll versus the number seven payroll so neither team was hurting for players and depth. What we the unconnected fans got was a series for the ages. Personally, nothing will ever beat the 2016 series won by the Cubs for me, but this one was pretty damn compelling.

Two very strong and deep teams traded punches for seven games and then two additional innings before only one was left standing. If you count the crazy eighteen inning marathon of game three, they actually played the equivalent of eight games plus.

If you are a fan of old time baseball then you likely weren't crazy about this series. Unlike the regular season this series featured no stealing, hit and running, bunting, or any other old school tactics teams used all season for the first time in ages. This was a slugfest. The only resemblance to old school was the strong pitching we saw.

This guy, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, was the series MVP, and deservedly so. He pitched a complete game, warmed up the next day to possibly go in, then went six innings in game six and followed it up with almost three innings of relief the next day to close out the game seven win for the Dodgers. He was the reason the Dodgers won this series. It was the kind of stuff we regularly saw in the 50's and 60's in baseball.

I live and die with the Cubs and that is a personal problem I have to live with. When I lived in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1980's I was a season ticket holder and fan of the Dodgers. Since moving to the desert I have become a follower of the Padres and have given up my allegiance to the dark force up north. However, the Jays and the Dodgers put on a terrific show to end a wonderfully exciting season.

They will be writing about this series for generations and if you didn't watch it, or if you missed some games, then I would tell you to seek out the hours of reruns that will be shown all winter and see for yourself how exciting it really was. Congratulations to both teams for putting on a great show.