God Bless October: Baseball, Meritocracy, and the Last Honest Games in America

For the poly-sport, October is an embarrassment of riches. Whatever one’s favorite sports dish, it’s on the menu. All you can eat.

By October, the NFL has been in business for a month. There seem to be hundreds of college football games — America’s favorite — available daily. An insomniac checking into Lucky Sid’s Clean Motel in downtown Pagosa Springs on an October Wednesday can surely find a college football game replay on at 0300 on Sid’s Brand X cable package.

The baseball playoffs are underway with countless teams participating in the early rounds. The NBA and NHL are in the wings now and will be fully operational by Halloween. Then there’s high school football on Friday nights. Local sportscasters across the fruited plain are being treated for exhaustion from having to rattle off, at machine gun speed, all those game scores in the time-limited nightly sports block.

The games, at least for now, remain a meritocracy. Who you know or what your bank balance may be is of no utility between the lines.

For fans of multiple sports, the temptation is to spend extravagant amounts of time in the upright and locked position in front of a TV set. Chores go undone, honey-do lists and family matters are ignored, wives get annoyed. Domestic relations aren’t repaired until Christmas. (Heard in countless American homes on Nov. 1: He: “Who are these small people living in the house with us, Martha?” She: “They’re your children, Frank.” He: “Oh — yes. I remember now. The boy’s name is Justin, right?” She: “No, Jason.” He: “Close.”

I’ve been paying keen attention to the baseball playoffs, and been amply rewarded by the local Tampa Bay Rays, who will be ending their October in the third World Series of the team’s existence. They did this by sweeping the New York Yankees in the division series and beating the Cleveland Indians in a six-game league series. (Any true baseball fan who calls the Clevelands by the wimpy and nonsensical name forced on them by the woke mob doesn’t have a hair on his backside.) I’m pleased that the Rays are in the Showcase again, not just because they’re the locals, but because they’ve enjoyed this success, won so consistently, while striking out less than any Major League team, and laying down more bunts than any team. A middle finger to the homer-happy analytics drones.

I’ll stick mostly with baseball in this piece because, though I’m a poly-port, hardball has been my favorite since I was a lad and the Yankees had a promising young rookie named Mickey Mantle, facing the daunting task of replacing, or at least following, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio in center field. Talk about a tough act to follow. No pressure, Mick.

Those who’ve read my baseball columns in TAS of late might wonder that I’m spending so much time in my office before my 17-inch Toshiba watching baseball. I’ve been critical, as have other TAS writers, of changes in the game, most of the squirrely ones cooked up by the consensus worst baseball commissioner in history, Rob Manfred. (Charges and specifications found here, here, and here).

In a sensible world, Manfred’s hideous “ghost runner” rule alone would be enough to send him to the gallows. (The day after the computer-bound sabermetrics geeks, who’ve been leaching the charm out of baseball for decades, are all forced to walk the plank in shark-infested waters.) One is entitled to wonder if, before Manfred was made Commissioner of Baseball, he had ever been to a baseball game. He certainly has no feel or respect for the game’s charms, rhythms, and traditions.

Especially the traditions. The NFL changes a half dozen rules every year and hardly anyone minds or even notices. (I don’t know three people who understand the new NFL kickoff rule.) But baseball, like the Gospel, is supposed to stay the same. Manfred either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that clocks are for football and basketball. Field managers should not have to check with the commish’s office to see if his pitcher can throw to first to hold a runner on, or be required to produce a note from his mother allowing his catcher to make a visit to the mound.

But this is what MLB gets for appointing a Harvard Law grad to the job rather than a baseball man. Here’s a challenge: Name three good things in America that Harvard Law grads haven’t had a hand in damaging? — OK, name one.

Baseball has survived a fixed World Series in 1919, troglodyte owners, a Great Depression, strikes and rumors of strikes, and two world wars. By the end of World War “Eleven” (II), with almost every able-bodied man in uniform, Major League rosters were being filled by women, children, and the clergy. Hell, the game even survived Howard Cosell. (Did I mention I went to Yale?) But will it survive the current commissioner who seems not to know that his job is to protect and preserve the game, not smother it with a pillow?

So why continue to watch? Simple. For all the depredations out of the commissioner’s office, and all the distortions wrought by the evil sabermetric drones, baseball (as well as our other sports) still has its moments, though we have to wait longer for these in a game where every batter, even 180-pound second basemen, have been coached to swing for the fences at every at-bat, even when the game situation calls for a different and more entertaining approach.

The almost gone but not forgotten get-em-on, get-em-over, get-em-in chess match that baseball used to be, where even sluggers knew how to hit behind the runner, and a majority of players were capable of laying down a bunt when the occasion required, stirred baseball purists’ hearts. By contrast, today we’re too often “treated” to a game with seven home runs, accounting for all the runs scored, and fans are challenged to stay awake during 24 strikeouts, strikeouts being the most boring play in baseball.

But then there’s the slickly turned double play, the long throw from the outfield to the cut-off man who fires a one-bounce strike to the catcher to get the runner out at home, the fleet and sure-handed outfielder who covers two zips codes to turn a triple into an out, and the increasingly rare instance when a team attempts and the batter executes a perfect hit and run play. Other baseball dinosaurs like me can add to the list of things that remind us that baseball is still the Grand Old Game, and still has the power to move us. Damaged perhaps, and long ago knocked out of the sports pole position by football, but still very much alive. MLB’s average game attendance north of 29,000 in 2026 attests to this.

October is baseball’s final and showcase month (ask Reggie Jackson). For our post-Halloween viewing pleasure we can lavish our attention on football, a gladiatorial sport of some depths but numerous shallows. Then basketball, much damaged by the obsession with the three-point shot, which has spread the game out and slowed it down. Then there’s hockey, which I’m assured and do believe is a fine game, but one absent from my Southern upbringing. Not too many frozen lakes to puck around on in Florida. (Remind me again what icing and offsides are.)

One of my sports favorites has just about dropped out of sight. I’m a lifetime fan of the sweet science, but boxing has fallen on hard times. Hard to find a bout on television, even on better cable packages than I have. Boxing seems to have been replaced by the more atavistic cage-fighting, which has in common with a bar fight that there don’t seem to be any rules. I believe it’s frowned upon to bring a small-caliber handgun into the cage with you, but I’m not sure there’s a written stricture against it.

But in our perilous and contentious times, a larger question is: should we be spending large amounts of the limited time we have on Earth, regardless of the sport involved, watching men, and a smaller number of women (Is Sophie Cunningham a firecracker or what?) batting, throwing, and dunking balls of various shapes and sizes? And in the case of football, hockey, and the WNBA (aka Fight Night), knocking the stem-winding crap out of each other. Aren’t there more noble and socially useful things we could devote our finite hours to? Fair question. And the answer is possibly so. But I rise in defense of the games.

The games have not only provided me with endless entertainment — not to mention a significant ration of frustration when my teams languish — but have instilled in me a great appreciation for craft, of laboriously honed skills exercised under pressure, even when the skills have no value beyond themselves and leave the Cosmos unmoved. The estimable Chicago writer Joseph Epstein said it this way in the introduction to his 2015 book Masters of the Games: “That a game may have no consequences beyond itself — no effect on history, on one’s own life, on anything really — does not make it trivial but only makes the enjoyment of it all the purer. Art for art’s sake does not apply only to actual art.”

Well put. With Epstein’s latitudinal definition of art, I can confess that a list of my favorite artists would include figures such as Stan Musial, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, Brooks Robinson, Larry Bird, Ozzie Smith, Magic Johnson, and that Monster of the Midway, Dick Butkus.

Sports give us a clarity — at least on the field — that is increasingly hard to find elsewhere. Off the field, the sports-industrial complex is a moral and financial cesspool with players, unions, owners, agents, and media corporations all vying to set the NCAA record for greed, along the way shaking every possible dime out of the marks — i.e., sports fans. Skill and craftsmanship are still rewarded on the field, as is grace under pressure. But we have every right to wonder how long this will last now that sports leagues, in their latest money grab, have decided to get in bed with gambling interests, a poisonous lot that sports has had the intelligence to keep at arm’s length for at least the last century. Incentives for players, coaches, and game officials to fall in the way of temptation will surely grow.

The current on-field honesty and clarity in sports is all the more impressive as these virtues are so conspicuously rare in other phases of public life. Literary and entertainment prizes go to ideological hacks, academic promotions to toe-the-line humbugs, and, too often, big business scores go to sharpies. Don’t even get me started on politicians.

The games, at least for now, remain a meritocracy. Who you know or what your bank balance may be is of no utility between the lines. Athletes can only rely on their skill and their coolness and courage to bury the final seconds free throw with the game on the line, or to get the big hit against a flame-throwing closer in the ninth. As yet there are no affirmative action touchdowns (though I’m reliably informed that Al Sharpton is working on this). No social promotion three-pointers.

So if your chores are done, the honey-do list completed, there’s only one question remaining: What time does the game start?

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