The (poorly named) World Series starts tonight! If you love baseball, you already know that. But if you don’t love baseball (yet), perhaps it’s because you don’t have a full understanding of the game.
Well, I can’t fix that with a Web site, but, just in case, you might find one or more of the following interesting enough to encourage you to watch a few innings and maybe learn something (or at least have something to look for) as you watch the drama unfold.
First up, a site that is all about contemporary examples of “the code”--the so-called unwritten rules of baseball. If you don’t know what they are, you can get a quick primer on some of them here.
But that’s not all, there’s the pleasures of transgressing and defying authority, as well as occasional dissemblance in order to satisfy the demands of the audience, a kind of game within the game, as here where, according to the participants, there was more showmanship than argumentativeness. Trickery! Just in time for Halloween.
And, there’s always the human drama, as here, in the story of Thurman Munson. I remember when he died. I remember being kind of sad about it even though I wasn’t a Yankees fan and didn’t really know much about Munson or baseball. This summer, reading this, I came to think that I was right to be sad about his death way back then.
Enjoy the Series, if you watch sports. Give it a shot if you don’t.
The Harold Lounge 