Adam Lindner | Sports Editor
11/02/2017
Admittedly, I’m not the Chicago Cubs’ biggest fan, so I was glad that I could watch the World Series in objective peace this year when they were bounced in the N.L.C.S. in Game 5 by the Dodgers.
I’m not the world’s biggest baseball fan, either, and I haven’t paid the game too much attention ever since I became enamored with basketball in middle school. It’s not that the two sports’ schedules conflict — baseball just isn’t my passion. However, it’s not the passion of many of my peers, either. As social media, technology and the like began to permeate in our culture like never before, impressionable children with increasingly shorter attention spans grew to love short, action-filled highlight videos of basketball stars dunking, football players celebrating in the end zone, and of talk show hosts yelling at each other in debate.
Somewhere in the world’s new entertainment order, baseball became lost, as younger generations didn’t find any intrigue in nine-inning long and sometimes mundane games. Even for someone who appreciates the sport for what it is, I struggle to watch it on television unless I’m either doing something else simultaneously or it’s playoff time.
With that being said, I’d like to extend a sincere ‘Thank you’ to both the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers.
I enjoyed Game 5 more than any other sporting event that I’ve watched in recent memory, and though I was preoccupied on Halloween night, I was overjoyed to hear that the Dodgers won to force a Game 7 on Nov. 1. Regardless of the outcome of the night’s game, baseball has been really fun to witness lately, as there’s nothing to relish more as a sports fan than the knowledge that what you’re watching is history in the making. While the only major history that the Series’ teams have rewritten is the number of total home runs hit in a World Series, this World Series will not be forgotten any time soon, largely thanks to its rich entertainment
value.
If the emergence of the steroid era threatened to kill baseball, the idea that baseballs might be “juiced” saved this year’s World Series. All respect to L.A. reliever Brandon Morrow — who pitched in Games 1 through 5 after not pitching in even three consecutive games during the regular-season — but I was dumbfounded watching the Astros rock seemingly every single one of his pitches in the seventh inning.
Regardless of the outcome of Game 7, I’m optimistic for baseball’s future. While children in lower-income environments will always have much more access to a basketball or a football than they will to all of the equipment that baseball requires and although the attention span of our world’s younger generations continues to grow shorter and shorter, baseball will have no problem promoting its product if the game continues to be played like this.
It goes without saying that regular-season baseball is nowhere near this competitive or captivating, but if the game’s key moments continue to inspire like they have in this season’s World Series championship, people will always be around to witness its magic.
Or, perhaps — The game is fine. The problem is with us demented Pirates fans.
Adam Lindner is an undeclared sophomore and can be reached lindnera1@duq.edu.
