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The Spectacle Blog

In media terms the Major League Baseball season ended last night. New York's Yankees were eliminated, several days after the same fate befell Boston's Red Sox, their only legitimate rival. The Powers That Be will have the off season to figure out how to have the Yanks and Sox not only open and close the regular season against each other, as occurred this past season, but also meet in each round of the postseason. Those with a somewhat less parochial, non-northeastern perspective might counter by suggesting that maybe the reason the two teams were eliminated in round one this year is that they maybe were never allowed to focus on anyone but each other. Baseball has many worthy franchises, and some of them are located in places like Chicago, St. Louis, even Houston and Disneyland.

I confess I'm partial to the Angels, a team I've followed with secondary devotion since their founding in 1961. It helps now that they're managed by one of the vintage Dodgers -- my primary team which has been missing in action ever since the O'Malley family sold it off. Mike Scioscia is his name. He manages the way he played catcher: he's steady, solid, stolid, and gentleman. His demeanor is as typical of good baseball as the bang-bang plays that snuffed out the Yankees in their final at-bat.

No doubt the New York press will spend the next week or two kvetching about what went wrong and figuring out who to blame. I half-expected some of their other players to rise to the occasion late in the game in the manner of Derek Jeter, who smashed the ball twice his last two times up. It wasn't to be. If nothing else, Jeter proved once again that he's one of a kind.