World Series 2017

If game 2 of this year's World Series represents the present and future of baseball please count me out.  All my comments about home runs (see my posting of Sept. 22) apply:  baseball is becoming a game where each team strikes out and hits home runs until the game is over; there were eight home runs in game 2.  Whatever happened to stolen bases, sacrifice bunts (forget bunts for hits, which one may think should be more common in this era of the shift; will there ever be another Rod Carew?), the hit-and-run play and the many other nuances of the game that once made baseball so beautiful ?  Will there ever be another Billy Martin? Other comments on the Series:

CGI commercials have so taken over that they now even cover up players making a catch!

There are more shots of the dugouts than of the field and even when there is a shift on you seldom see it and only rarely do the announcers mention it.

The announcers have no idea about basic rules of grammar:  they don't understand tenses, they can't tell adverbs from adjectives, they can't match subjects and verbs correctly, they don't know the difference between comparative and superlative, etc.  During the playoffs I tried to keep a record of all the grammatical mistakes made by the announcers but they made them faster than I could record them!  The announcers continue to celebrate home runs and never explain what, for instance, ERA and slugging percentage mean, probably because some of them don't know.  But everyone understands a home run.

There has not been a day World Series game since 1987,  Networks claim they want to have as many viewers as possible and they don't want to have to compete against football.  Both these arguments are dubious:  most football fans don't care much about baseball and night games lose the younger audience (which, of course, does not buy beer and motorcars).  See stuffnobodycaresabout.com for a detailed discussion of this question.

As statisticians continue to analyze every pitch and every swing there are still many things that can't be explained by numbers, such as why the Yankees won three playoff games in New York but could not win in Houston and what happened to the Cubs. Meanwhile, I am going off to learn about cricket.