Sportsball

One "good" thing about the current COVID situation is that professional sports have been shoved into the background, which (IMO) is where all of it belongs.

Don't get me wrong, I love those silly games. There's greatness in sport that's important as a way to learn and reinforce life-lessons for us.

But when it becomes an obsession, or we substitute a game for our actual lived experience, then we lose perspective and it becomes a real problem. Bread-n-circus and all that.

So anyway, we've crowned an NBA champion, and a hockey champion, and now a baseball champion - all of which has gone almost unnoticed, and the unnoticing of which I think is an OK thing. 

It's still there. The scribes have written it all down. It's just that there's no great chunk of intellectual or spiritual real estate being occupied as team owners and TV executives demand we pay billions of dollars just to watch grown men chasing small inanimate objects around.

I'm just sayin' - anyway:

Dodgers top Rays in Game 6, claim their first World Series title since 1988

ARLINGTON, Tex. — Validation came at 10:37 p.m. Central time, wearing the classic home whites of the Los Angeles Dodgers and streaming out of the first base dugout for a dogpile near the pitcher’s mound of Globe Life Field. The World Series was over. The Dodgers’ tortuous, 32-year wait for another championship was over. The 2020 baseball season, bent and misshapen by a global pandemic, was over. And validation had arrived to drape itself on each and every one of them.

“This is our year!” Manager Dave Roberts roared at the trophy presentation.

The line for validation was long and illustrious in the wake of the Dodgers’ 3-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 6 of the 116th World Series, and all of them — the players, the manager, the brain trust, the franchise and the sport itself — would get their turn.

But before that could happen, there were other matters to deal with — this being a baseball season being played in a pandemic. As the Dodgers celebrated their championship on the field, many of them wearing masks, one key figure was missing: Third baseman Justin Turner, the longest-tenured Dodgers position player, had been pulled before the seventh inning after his latest coronavirus test came back positive, a result that arrived midgame. He was immediately put in isolation but was later spotted on the field celebrating with his teammates.

“It’s a bittersweet night for us,” Commissioner Rob Manfred told Fox Sports on the field. “ … We learned during the game that Justin was a positive. He was immediately isolated to prevent spread.”

It was the first positive test for a player in more than six weeks, and coming in the middle of the final game of the World Series — it was perhaps a fitting conclusion to a season that at times seemed endangered by the spread of the virus. It also appears baseball barely avoided a messy outcome had the series been extended to a seventh game.

And for a while Tuesday night, Game 7 seemed to be a strong possibility. The fact the series never got there was due in large part to the stunning and highly questionable pitching move the Rays made in the bottom of the sixth inning, when they pulled ace Blake Snell from a magnificent performance — a move that backfired immediately when the next two Dodgers hitters, Mookie Betts and Corey Seager, gave Los Angeles the lead.

“I’m not going to ask any questions,” Betts said of the Rays’ pitching change. “[Snell] was pitching a great game … They made a pitching change. It seems like that’s all we needed.”

Maybe the Dodgers would have won anyway if the Rays — who make no apologies for their analytic bent and data-driven decision-making — had left Snell alone. But no one will ever know.

“Analytics is a huge part of our success,” Rays center fielder Kevin Kiermaier said. “And sometimes it can bite you in the butt.”

In any case, few who watched this series could walk away with any other conclusion than the better team prevailed in the end — an outcome that itself provided a measure of validation for the legitimacy of the 60-game regular season and 16-team postseason, both of which were dominated by the Dodgers.

“This team has been incredible all throughout the season. … We never stopped,” said shortstop Corey Seager, who was named World Series MVP, adding that trophy to the one he earned as MVP of the National League Championship Series. “You can’t say enough about what we did this year.”