...as frozen as Ted's head...

September 29, 1954:

For any baseball fan, the 1954 World Series is known for 1 thing.  The series was a bit of a shocker - a 4 game sweep by the New York Giants over the Cleveland Indians, who had won 111 games that year for the league's best record and one of the highest win totals of all time (especially for 154 game season).

The one thing that everyone remembers is "The Catch", an over-the-shoulder full sprint marvel by Willie Mays off of a long drive by the Indians Vic Wertz.  The game was played at the Polo Grounds, an amazing spectacle of a park, nearly 500 feet to the center field wall and less than 300 down it's lines - the horseshoe shaped stadium will never have an equal, and it probably shouldn't given the ease by which the current batch of over-roided, over-lifted, over-blown ballplayers that exist now.

For a baseball fan, and speaking personally as someone who grew up watching every minute of baseball I could get my eyes on (yes, the Atlanta Braves on TBS provided a special treat for me, despite the fact that Ozzie Virgil and Co. could never produce runs the way their lone star, Dale Murphy, could), the amazing catch by Mays is something I can picture in my head with ease.

By memory, I can picture the 24 on Mays' back being the only thing that remains in focus as he is in a full sprint, and seeing the ball drop down from the top of the screen into his glove, as he turns and throws a mammoth cannon back into the infield, he falls, his hat hits the ground - and the crowd is amazed. I can also picture the 15 foot high wall with the fans leaning over it, and I remember the time of day. I can see the shadows in my minds eye, the late afternoon, late summer/early fall shadows that tell you that the season is winding down.

And that's where I get derailed.  My romanticism for baseball crashes headfirst into the reality of what the game has become - it is almost as if Mays didn't catch it, and in true Canseco fashion, the ball bounced off his head and caromed up over the wall for a Vic Wertz HR.   The World Series, an afternoon/early evening game played in a packed ballpark, broadcast over NBC TV and radio, in late September.  

We are a full month away from that at this point - the delay between the Divisional Series (Why, WHY IN THE WORLD, is it called the Divisional Series...by tne nature of the rules, you cannot play someone in your Division in this series. Can you imagine being in the room for this naming decision?) and the League Championship Series (Now that's a name, that's what I'm talking about!) is eternal. The Sox were swept on Sunday, the Yankees won on Monday - and game 1 isn't until Friday.

We aren't talking semantics here, think back to last weekend and how cold it was, and how cold it felt, and how new that cold felt, how we all felt ourselves cross the tipping point from summer to fall - we all know we aren't looking back at this point, the short sleeves and mesh shorts are long gone.  But for baseball, a sport meant to be played in fair, if not good, conditions, is putting the most important 8-14 games into a deep freeze.  A sport that plays nearly all of its games in cool to hot conditions, but mostly during amazing summer nights across this country, has chosen to refrigerate itself - games played into the wee hours of the morning on a frigid November night. Is that baseball? 

Sadly, to a new generation of fans, it is.  There is no romanticism in the cold, and without romanticism, baseball is just a bunch of frat boys playing the world's laziest sport.  World Series games during the day, in the shadows, are no more.  Mays may as well have let that thing drop.