October 09, 2005
Baseball eschatology
A reader writes:
"NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE!! Chicago is a wonderful baseball town that hasn't had a team in the Series since 1959. The Red Sox, of course, won it all just last year. It's Chicago's turn."
Chicago???!!! Let me explain. Baseball is a great ongoing drama in which a cast of minor players provide background for action among a single villainous gang and two heroic and righteous armies. The heroes have azure hats (royal and navy respectively) with the noble device B (argent, and gules with a border argent, respectively) on the front. The villains wear striped suits like convicts, or vicious extortionate oppressive bloodsucking plutocrat bankers, pant pant pant, but I digress. [The White Sox, who are among the minor characters, wear striped suits like a mattress, no taint of evil about them. They are in the ALCS only because they played a lot better than the Red Sox for three straight games, but that has no larger moral significance.]
The heroes with the royal blue hats disappeared completely and without a trace between the 1957 and 1958 seasons, two years after their 1955 apotheosis, and it's not known where they abide. Perhaps they sailed with the elves, perhaps they are with The Angels. Great was the woe and rending of garments and cries of the faithful at the time, let me tell you, a whole generation disillusioned and blighted, very dark days.
So it's possible that baseball will finally come to an end in a sort of Götterdämmerung after next season, two years after the red-B heroes' triumph over the evil spell "w..t t.ll n.xt y..r" with the more powerful magic "...bunch of idiots". It's likely we will see the departure from our world of the remaining good guys, leaving only bit players wandering around engaged in trivial games, certainly not baseball. Alternatively, the departed white-B heroes might return from whatever alternate reality they have occupied for almost fifty years, and usher in a new age of greatness.
Either way, prepare for awesome days of great events.
You read it here first.
