“Troy Glaus! You’ve just been named Most Valuable Player of the
2002 World Series! What are you going to do now?!”
“I’m going to … DISNEYLAND?! Aw, c’mon. Surely you guys can
send me to Cabo. I mean, I can hit a Liván Hernández
slider over to Fantasyland from here! Been there. Done that.”
And he probably can and probably has. But before we exhaust the
Cinderella metaphors, let’s go back to the CNN Washington studio
earlier Sunday. Wolf Blitzer, the straightest-shooting anchor on
cable’s number two network, has asked his “McLaughlin Group”
wannabes about the World Series. He gets faux erudite ho-hums.
Donna Brazile likes the Giants because San Francisco elects
“good Democrats.” Ramesh Ponnuru, clueless, has obviously never
thought about baseball. The guy from the Washington Post’s
website loves Barry Bonds. And then ace conservative slugger
Christopher Caldwell, fresh from an astute but as-yet unproved
observation that the Moscow hostage-taking will shift Russia to our
side at the U.N., swings.
Baseball, he starts, is an early twentieth century enthusiasm of
white males, mostly attached to the Eastern states; it does not
transfer well to the West. America is little interested in it
anymore.
Swung on and missed!
Wolf nods, announcing he’ll be at the Redskins’ game as the
Angels and Giants battle out Game Seven.
Can anything be more ludicrous? Here’s the otherwise sensible
Caldwell trying to preserve baseball the sport in Cooperstown
amber. Out on the Coast, where the old white man’s game doesn’t
transfer well, everyone is positively electrified.
Maybe that’s because we’re not all white guys, either playing or
spectating. In fact, we haven’t been since the 1940s, which —
better period that it undoubtedly was, America being at its peak
and all — might be where Christopher’s mind remains.
True, you cannot raise your hand and swear anymore that baseball
holds on as the “national pastime.” The professional gridiron and
even NASCAR have eclipsed it in attendance and TV viewership. But
it has become a universal pastime, Americanizing the world faster
than Al Qaeda can terrorize it.
In much the same way, what we once called the Third World now
finds itself evangelized by charismatic Christians. Followers
proliferate throughout the southern hemisphere faster than radical
Islamists spread through Central Asia. Africa now sends
missionaries to us, trying to goose our tired clergy into finding
something, gasp, Christ-like to say.
The comparison is apt. Not that baseball has taken over the
worldwide appeal of soccer, which for a few weeks each year grips
hooligans from Thailand to Greece. But its fandom might just be
growing faster. What Caldwell and Blitzer’s other guests miss is
that televisions from the Dominican Republic to Cape Horn are tuned
into the World Series. And every shinbun in Nippon puts color pics
on its front page.
That’s because so many of these swarthy sovereignties have sent
players to our games. And, in off-seasons, why we send so many
Yankees — strike that, American players — over there. As Angel
catcher Benjie Molina was making himself a hero in Game Seven, his
father was being honored as Puerto Rican amateur player of the
year. Shortstop David Eckstein, than whom no baseball player plays
with more intensity, already is packing his champagne-soaked duds
for his season in Tokyo.
Overseas they love baseball because, precisely, it is American.
Even when Fidel Castro used to put on a baseball uniform and pitch
a few innings, at the height of the Cold War, you knew he was
perversely sending a valentine to the U.S. Baseball does trump
politics, which is why we Orange Countians allow Gov. Gray Davis to
sit in an Edison Field suite and cheer our team.
As you read this, Troy, Tim, Darin, Scott, Garret, Adam and the
boys will be parading through a sea of red from the Arrowhead Pond,
home of Disney’s other team, the Mighty Ducks, back to the Big A (I
can’t bring myself to call it “the Big Ed,” in protest of the
Edison Company’s complicity in Davis’s energy crisis). Manager Mike
Scioscia, who made the joy of the game the team’s winning X factor,
will make modest bows, and Jackie Autry will invoke the spirit of
Gene.
Angel lovers, draped in red, wielding their thunder sticks and
bouncing their rally monkeys, will send back to eastern eggheads
the message that “bowling alone” is passé. We are still a
nation of community, and advance. And victory.
Their Halos fought back amazingly against the Giants, a
Caldwellian-era team brought to the West by Horace Stoneham, a
great American ball club consigned by the expansion Angels to
Jurassic status. Their motto: “Never say ‘die.’”
You may be thinking of Wellstone and Mondale. I’m thinking of
Disney magic, another great American export. I’m thinking of how in
these very precincts, in Anaheim backyards three and a half decades
ago, we gave Ronald Reagan his political launch. (I’m also thinking
of how, not two decades ago, in Washington, some of Reagan’s most
fervent admirers pretended he didn’t come from California.)
Pardon me while I bask in another triumph in, and for, the West.
Coming back from sure defeat as they did in Game Six, and again in
Game Seven, the Angels were nothing less than Churchillian.
