Game 4 Rained Out: Pansies
Dean
As is well-known, I am not a major sports fan. 11.5 months go past on Dean's World and we rarely comment upon sports. But when the Fall Classic comes around I am generally interested enough to comment. Plus, intellectually I love baseball as the most interesting of all North American sports. I honestly believe it is the only athletic game that approaches the complexity of Chess. American baseball is a highly mathematical sport, and I love that about it.
Plus I grew up in Chicago, trying to love both the Cubbies and the Sox and getting used to both of them losing. I idled away more than one of my teen years in the 1980s in Wrigley Park and Comiskey Park. The Cubbies always had the better ballpark but the Sox had more fun.
I meet the occasional White Sox or Cubs fan who hates the other team, but the ones with the long memories remember: Bill Veeck (pronounced "Veck" was a Chicago icon who once owned both teams, and who changed the nature of the sport. He planted the ivy that still graces Wrigley Field, and at Comiskey park he was the one who introduced the organ player and things like seat night and the 7th-inning shower on a hot summer afternoon.
But I am reminded now that, even though I don't watch much football, of another Chicago icon: George Halas. He was a great player, but an even greater coach and owner: we don't care how cold, wet, slippery, and awful it is. We don't care how miserable the players or the fans are--we play God damn it.
There would never be a snowed-out, rained-out, or otherwise uncomfortable game for the Chicago Bears. The game would be played even in the middle of a blizzard or hurricane.
For all the brutality that I might complain about in American football, I must say this:
A Chicago football game against the Packers or the Lions or the Browns in the old days might well go with a final score of 2-3 after four quarters in the mud and sleet and sweat. Real old-school fans would call that a great game.
Which it damn well would be an amazing game.
Rained out? What's that?
But let's be fair, Dean. When the rain lowers visibility and makes the football too slippery to throw or catch properly, you can always fall back on your running game. It even adds to the drama and the tension and the spontaneity, as a team is forced to adapt their tactics to the elements.
But baseball has no equivalent to the running game. The ball has to spend most of the action in the air. So a slippery wet ball just makes for a lousy game.
If the Tigers were winning this series in four straight games, you'd be crowing about Detroit to the whole world.
But that's okay. You're only human, just like the rest of us.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sure enough, I was running the board (radio broadcast across the state) when the rain started one day, the roof was needed... and it didn't move. Rained out. (They fixed the problem— part not oiled— later.)