Let Them Play! Send the World Series to Japan

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The New York Sun

The World Series has been anticlimactic every year for years now. The 2002 edition was fun, 2001 saw a real thriller, and 1997 was a forgotten classic, but the fears of traditionalists that interleague play and the wild card would increase interest in and enthusiasm for baseball in general as much as they diminished interest in and enthusiasm for the World Series have been proved correct.


There isn’t much appeal in seeing two teams that met during the regular season meet in the Series. There isn’t much more appeal in seeing a team that wasn’t the best in its own division crowned as the best team in all of baseball. The playoffs have taken on the character of a lottery where matters of mere fortune, such as drawing an injury-afflicted opponent or a hot hand in the starting rotation, matter more than being the best in the game.


Reasoning backward from a given – the unappealing nature of the World Series in its present form – it’s easy to identify what’s wrong. It feels illegitimate, because the pennant winners aren’t the best in their leagues as often as they are. It also lacks any feeling of uniqueness, both because it often pits against one another teams that have already met during the season, and because the legues are now just organizational principles or administrative concepts, rather than distinct groups of teams with their own cultures and styles of play.


Former Mets manager (present manager of the Japanese champion Chiba Lotte Marines) Bobby Valentine’s renewed call, as reported by the Associated Press yesterday, for a true World Series, which would see the winner of the American version against the Japanese one, is thus not only welcome, but necessary. There can be no reasonable objection to it.


By making it happen, and by insisting that it be not an exhibition but a contest to determine which team is the best in the world, Major League Base ball would not be debasing itself by raising an inferior league up to its own level, but acknowledging that the World Series has become a stale ritual divorced from its original purpose, and solving the problem by adopting a radical solution.


Think of the two complaints outlined above. In a Japanese-American World Series, they would be null. Any team that not only makes its way through a tournament to crown the best team in its own country, but then beats the best from another country, cannot be plausibly called an illegitimate champion. As important for the health of the game, a true World Series would present unquestionable novelty every year – the Marines and the Chicago White Sox have never met in midsummer for a three-game set, and will presumably never do so.


As to objections to Valentine’s plan, I can think of only two that make any sense. The first is that the quality of play in MLB is too much higher than that found in Japan for such a series to be meaningful – if the American team won it would be merely expected, and if the Japanese team won it would be considered a fluke.


This is actually an argument in favor of a true World Series; one would expect that over time the caliber of Japanese play, which is already higher than that of Triple-A, is only going to rise. The moment when a decisive Japanese win over an American team announced that the leagues had reached rough parity would be a tremendous moment in baseball, analogous to the New York Jets’ 1969 win over the Baltimore Colts, which led to creation of the modern, unified NFL; MLB should have the vision to work toward the moment, and encourage it.


The other objection is that a Japanese-American World Series would deprive the American one of legitimacy and appeal. I’ll have none of it. When the Florida Marlins have won two world championships without winning a World Series; when two teams that have played in June can meet in the last week in October; when the World Series can, as it has been the last two years, be considered merely an amusing diversion in the aftermath of an ALCS that crowned a true champion, it’s clear that anyone arguing for the legitimacy and appeal and historical meaning of the World Series bears the burden of proof.


Is Valentine’s plan realistic? Of course not; egos and dollars stand in the way of what’s best for baseball, and anyone who would expect anything different is a fool. Still, I’ll predict that within 25 years, a genuine World Series will be played, and Valentine (who says that the best Japanese teams are now the equal of the best American clubs, and probably means it) will look like a visionary. That’s nothing new.


The New York Sun

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