Sox 4, Cards 0

Michael Bérubé asks: "Do we really want this?"

And surely some of you must regard victory itself as a prize of dubious worth. Until tonight, your team was legendary, and their legend shaped and defined your self-identification as fans. If you win the World Series, you win the World Series-- and you become kin to the 2002 Angels and the 1980 Phillies. You will be elated (and drunk!) for a couple of days, sure. But then the championship will begin to sink in, and while some of you will say, as did a New York Rangers fan in 1994, “now I can die in peace,” others among you will be plunged into existential crisis.

Heh. As a lifelong Cubs fan, I regard victory as a prize of substantial worth, now that I never have to listen to Bob Ryan or Peter Gammons ever tell me again about how I don't understand--having never grown up in the New England area--the abject misery of a team that has been consistently good but hasn't won the various Series it's been to. Because, you know, it's so much worse to come close and lose than to never come close at all. Why, it must be a curse!

By the end of last night, I actually got to feeling a little sorry for the Cards, whose Series drought (in terms of getting there) was only a little shorter than the Sox. I felt bad for Jason Marquis--Tim McCarver was talking about yanking him in the first inning, and yet he gutted it out for six innings, doing better than the other three Cards starters. I felt bad for Rolen, who was surely Mr. Sucktober. I felt bad for Larry Walker, who had finally made it to a contender.

All things considered, though, it wasn't that surprising to me. Last week, I mentioned that the Cards had good pitchers, but no aces, no stoppers, and that proved to be true. In a short series, if you can get 6 or 7 scoreless innings from your pitcher, you've just about got the game, and the Sox got it three times out of four. The Cards were built for the season, but the Sox were built for the Series. It'll be interesting to see whether the Sox can keep Martinez and Lowe--if not, it'll be a short reign on top.

Another prize of substantial worth: no longer having to watch FOX do cheesy videos for 80's music. After listening Joe Buck segue into Patty Smyth's "The Warrior" (in describing Schilling) or head shots of all the players accompanied by Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," I was just about ready to vomit. CBS always does this at the end of the NCAA b-ball tourney with "One Shining Moment," which is bad enough, but oh my god. And all those godawful puns headlining the stat sheets. Ugh. That, my friends, is the ESPNification of sports: the natural drama replaced by boo-yah. Note to FOX: we're already watching the games, and we don't watch them to see "Phat Albert" as the tagline for a summary of Pujols' impressive hitting numbers. I don't mind a little of that stuff--I know how desperate you are to show off how clever you are--but filling every second with that crap, running the commercials up to the second the first pitch of the inning is delivered, and getting sponsors for every frickin feature (The Polar Express Play of the Day?!?!)? That was a little much. I wanted to see the Series run longer, but I won't miss all the extra frosting FOX thinks it takes to make the cake taste better.