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Grab Your Pajamas, It's World Series
Time
 BY DAVE BARRY
The Miami Herald,
October 21, 2001
This is the time of year when Americans make a sincere
effort to care about the World Series, which determines which baseball
team will be the champion of the entire world, except for the part of the
world located outside the United States and southeastern Canada.
But the heck with that part. This is OUR national pastime,
and that's why the World Series arouses our passion, even if we stopped
paying attention to pro baseball some years ago, when it started adding
mutant teams with names like the Tampa Bay Area Fighting Seaweeds.
Why is baseball our national pastime? Because it is a
metaphor for life itself. As George Will put it: ''In life, as in
baseball, we must leave the dugout of complacency, step up to the home
plate of opportunity, adjust the protective groin cup of caution and
swing the bat of hope at the curve ball of fate, hoping that we can hit a
line drive of success past the shortstop of misfortune, then sprint down
the basepath of chance, knowing that at any moment we may pull the
hamstring muscle of inadequacy and fall face-first onto the field of
failure, where the chinch bugs of broken dreams will crawl into our
nose.''
Yes, baseball is very deep, although this is not obvious
from looking at it. If you don't grasp the nuances, baseball appears to
be a group of large, unshaven men standing around in their pajamas and
frowning, as if thinking: ''My arms are so big that I can no longer groom
myself!'' Yet show the same scene to serious baseball fans, and they will
see a complex, fascinating, almost artistic tableau. Why? Because they
have consumed huge quantities of the drug ''Ecstasy.''
No, seriously, it's because these fans appreciate the
subtleties of baseball. To help you perceive these subtleties during the
World Series, here's a quick ''refresher course,'' starting with:
THE ORIGINS OF BASEBALL: Mankind has played games involving
sticks and balls for hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, Womankind
had her hands full raising Childrenkind, but whenever she asked Mankind
to lend a hand, he'd answer, ''Not now! We have a no-hitter going!'' That
was true, because numbers had not been invented yet.
Then, in 1839, along came a man named Abner Doubleday, who
as you can imagine took a lot of ribbing because his name could be
rearranged to spell not only ''A Barely Nude Bod'' but also ''Lure Dad By
A Bone.'' Nevertheless, he invented a game that included virtually all of
the elements of modern-day baseball, including Bob Costas and the song Who
Let the Dogs Out. This led to the Civil War.
BASEBALL TODAY: Baseball today is very much the same as it
was 150 years ago, except that, for security reasons, the games take
place after the public has gone to bed. The rules are simple: Each team
sends nine players onto the field, except for one team, which sends one
-- the ''batter'' -- plus two elderly retired players called ''coaches,''
who constantly touch themselves on various parts of their bodies to
communicate, via Secret Code, the message: ''Tobacco juice has corroded
my brain into a lump of dead tissue the size of a grape.''
The object of baseball is for the ''pitcher'' to throw the
''ball'' into the ''strike zone.'' This is almost impossible, because the
only person who knows the location of the strike zone is the ''umpire,''
and he refuses to reveal it because of a bitter, decades-old labor
dispute between his union and Major League Baseball. On any given day,
the strike zone may not even be in the stadium; there's simply no way to
tell. The umpire communicates solely by making ambiguous hand gestures
and shouting something that sounds like ''HROOOOT!'', which he refuses to
explain.
Eventually, the pitcher throws the ball at the batter, in
case the strike zone is located somewhere on his body. This is the signal
for all the players to run to the middle of the field and engage in a
form of combat similar to professional wrestling, except that sometimes
professional wrestlers, by accident, actually hit each other. This never
happens in baseball, where the last player to land a punch was Babe Ruth,
who in the 1921 World Series, knocked out his own self. Instead of
punching, baseball players fight by grabbing each other's shirts and
exchanging fierce glares, as if to say: ''You're gonna get a PERMANENT
WRINKLE IN YOUR PAJAMAS, BUSTER!''
After nine ''innings'' of this, the team with the most
''runs'' wins. I don't know how the runs happen, because by then I'm
asleep. But I sleep in front of the TV, in a rooting position. My body
language clearly says: ''I may not know who's playing, but if they don't
win, it's a shame.''
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