World Series Is Over: Redemption; Regional Sweets; Chavez Ravine; Third-Game Marathon. Now What Do I Do?

David Price: The face of redemption

Monday Morning: My wife asked, “Well, what are you going to do now?”
La guerre est finie.

Well, I said, family, friends, chores, read a book, get to sleep earlier. 

The better team won, of course. That is what experts seemed to be saying about the Red Sox weeks ago, and it was obvious throughout.

Who doesn’t like redemption? I’ve witnessed two great Dodger pitchers, Don Newcombe and Bob Welch, both of whom I got to know, not win a World Series game, and that is no fun.

It wasn’t fun trying to pick between Clayton Kershaw and David Price, two left-handers in search of redemption, but I have never met Kershaw and I did encounter Price during the 2008 post-season when he was a thoughtful kid out of Vanderbilt, coming on for the Rays. So, in a way, I was rooting. His redemption was magnificent, on the tube, Sunday night.

So was post-season baseball because it allowed me to purge more of the Mets out of my tormented system. Better baseball. One play exemplifies: In the third desperate game, the Dodgers’ versatile Cody Bellinger, son of a former Yankee, wearing my good friend Bob Welch’s old No. 35, and wearing it well, was in center field, trying to avert what would be a devastating run.

Fly ball to medium center field. Bellinger backed up with those long legs of his and took a running start inward toward the descending ball, caught it and heaved it on a fly near home, just in time to cut off a runner trying to score from third.
https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2018/10/27/18031312/world-series-dodgers-cody-bellinger-throw-ian-kinsler-home

Just the way the game ought to be taught. But after watching the Mets (except when the brittle Juan Lagares could play center) I forgot how people like Bradley, Jr., and Betts and Bellinger and Hernández and all the rest could play center field.

So a dose of much better baseball sends us off to the winter.

Early Monday morning, I had time and brain width to read two stirring obituaries, one on the playwright Ntozake Shange and one on the contemplative monk, the Rev. Thomas Keating, both exquisitely written. (My  Appalachian pal, Randolph, now occasionally commenting on this little therapy web site, had sent me the link with a comment:

“I feel a sadness. He was such a good man. He really understood that religion was secondary and he tried to bridge the gap between Christianity, Buddhism and all religions: we are all humans....” Randy

The two obits: what a start to the off-season.
And don’t forget to vote next week.

EARLIER WORLD SERIES ARTICLES: 

Date shake -- or Necco wafers?

This was the cryptic note from my older daughter, a recovering newspaper columnist, just like her dad.

Knowing that she is also a poet (a good one), I knew this was a simile or allegory or symbol, one of those things.

I got it. Southern California vs. Boston. The World Series matchup. Sweet tooth and clashing baseball instincts. 

This was before the first two games in chilly, quivering Fenway Park. 

On a clean slate, this Met fan pondered the two delicacies -- the sweet, freeze-your-brain specialty of Southern California or the traditional New England circular treat that fits right on your tongue. (The chocolate one!)

I flashed upon the great post-season games that Laura Vecsey and I covered.
https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/my-favorite-columnist-and-her-baseball-career
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​Laura would place a fresh Necco package on my press-box table -- straight from the New England factory. (The company has since gone down, but an Ohio company seems to have rescued it.)
thetakeout.com/necco-wafers-and-sweetheart-candies-saved-from-dusty-ex-1829300533

But then I thought about being a young baseball reporter in the mid-60s, night games in Anaheim, mornings driving out to Laguna Beach, swimming with the seals, (ruining my skin for decades later) and then searching the coastal highway for a utilitarian shack producing that thick substance laced with bits of chewy dates. 

The Beach Boys on the car radio. 
A date shake in my hand. 
No brainer. I vote for date shakes.

The World Series is a different flavor altogether. The Mets are a distant horrible memory. I watch the three Boston outfielders and the Dodger center fielders, changing by the inning, all running down shots into the alleys. Good baseball, so rich, so filling, making the masochistic Mets fillings in my teeth ache.

I have to choose? Normally, I'd be partial to the team of my childhood, Brooklyn Dodgers, and even in the 80s I was doing a book with Bob Welch and became friendly with Al Campanis and renewed my admiration for Don Newcombe, still with them.

But it's a different age. I don't like rent-a-star Manny Machado, even with that magnificent arm and all the other skills. As a guy with a formerly red beard, now trimmed tight, I think Justin Turner's beard is, well, over the top. All I'm saying is, not my team.

I have never rooted for the Red Sox (well, maybe when they played the Yankees in the 70s), and I still do not, but I love Fenway Park and I love Boston, deeply love visiting there. And David Price was such a nice young guy in 2008 with Tampa Bay, not long from Vanderbilt, smart, open. I have been happy that he finally won a post-season game and now has won a World Series game.

That isn't rooting. It's just appreciation. None of this fits my Mets, need-to-suffer, pathology. 

Plus, my agent is a fervent Red Sox fan. I always want her to be happy.

But in the scenario posted by my older daughter, I would choose a date shake -- Beach Boys on the radio -- coastal highway -- anytime.

Enjoy the rest of the series. 

THEN THERE'S THIS: 
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It took a health walk on Friday with my head-set – listening to one of my all-time top-ten CDs, Ry Cooder’s epic “Chavez Ravine” -- to make me question my knee-jerk feelings about this World Series.

The album is a highly pointed look at the “acquisition” of the land for the Dodgers’ home park since 1962. As a Brooklyn fan, I hated the Dodgers’ move (and Walter O’Malley.)  But the first time I saw the transplanted Dodgers in their pastel playpen, 1964, on a gorgeous spring evening, I shook my head and thought, “Hmmm.”

As a Queens-Brooklyn guy, I could understand, if not forgive.

Ry Cooder’s masterpiece talks about the people who lived in the ravine, and the establishment’s “UFO” that warned them to evacuate their homes. He wrote songs about the campesinos who lived there, but also the truck drivers and urban planners and red-scare politicians who were part of it.

And after all the disruption, Cooder presents a sweet song about the ghosts who inhabit the ball park:

2nd base, right over there. I see grandma in her rocking chair
Watching linens flapping in the breeze,
And all the fellows choosing up their teams….

The man parks cars outside the ball park and he concludes, “Yes, I’m a baseball man myself.”

I love that album. Play it all the time. (check out the beautiful Costa Rican poem, “Soy Luz y Sombra” at the end.)

So my question for the day, after my health walk: is, isn’t that beautiful and enduring place, even with its brutal beginnings, a worthy bookend to Boston and Fenway? 

Friday Night's Marathon: Yes, I Went the Distance

Well, with a brief excursion to watch Burt Reynolds flirt with a blonde and out-drive Ned Beatty in "White Lightning." It had to be done. These post-season games, with their commercial breaks, make me crave a moonshiner in a car chase. Action.

Plus, I find the network broadcast to be hopelessly saccharine after a season of Gary, Ron, Keith, Howie and Josh on Mets broadcasts. I'm sorry. I am reminded of Mario Cuomo's description of Walter Mondale's candidacy in 1984: "Polenta." (Look it up.) Mario laid the observation off on his mom. Nice going. 

The Fox crew deserves credit for stamina, as does the umpiring crew.

The game got better and better as the hours went on, and any fan had to wonder when position players would start pitching. All the front-office-driven analytics mandating pitching changes (and locked-in power arc swings) run through entire pitching staffs in extra innings. 

Then Nate Eovaldi performed one of the great World Series relief performances -- 6 innings, 3 hits, 5 strikeouts, one game-ending home run by Max Muncy. His work should be a wakeup call to managers and general managers and analytics geeks everywhere that pitchers can still go multiple innings, getting into a routine, learning as much about the hitters as the hitters are learning about them.

The game lasted 7 hours and 20 minutes, took 18 innings, and became an instant classic. 
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I am wondering if some of our friends in far-flung time zones like Israel, Italy, Rio, Japan, etc. were watching or following on the web. 

That game will blend right into Saturday's game, with the depletion of pitching staffs -- and stresses and strains on players' bodies -- having a major impact. 
Rest up, you all.