This World Series ended the only way it could, which was frenzied and late. The clocks turned back just a few hours after that; the next day was in another season, shorter and darker. The day after that, basically every MLB player eligible to do so, with all due respect to Tyler O’Neill, opted for free agency. It was instantly and overwhelmingly the offseason, and where once there had been a baseball season there was another sunny parade in Los Angeles, the spectacle of a sauced and puffy Blake Snell saying “6-7” on a stage 31 days before his 33rd birthday, and a sun that was already on the way down again. Soon, and for some time, there will be nothing left of baseball but Discourse.
A World Series as great as the one that ended over the weekend throws off enough light to reveal the relative shabbiness and artifice of its staging; the things that it was supposed to Be About naturally look small and dull relative to what it actually was. Before the National League Championship Series, the matchup between the Dodgers and Brewers was framed as a battle for baseball’s future. The Dodgers are rich and spend a lot of money, and so stood for a future that was comparatively cold and small for how readily it could be bought; the Brewers won 97 games in simultaneously confounding and convincing fashion with a roster of players available on the waiver wires of most 10-team fantasy leagues, and so were the avatar for the belief that anything really could happen, up to and including that a team of Caleb Durbins and Sal Frelicks really could add up to much more than the sum of those humble and inexpensive parts. It’s not a complicated binary. It’s more or less the grim inevitability of what can be bought against the unquantifiable possibility of everything that exists outside of that.
