Clarion Content

A few quick baseball notes as another regular season comes to a close, perhaps the first regular season in what will come to be thought of as the post-steroid era. It was a wonderful and memorable regular season in many ways. The baseball regular season used to be the gem of American sports. The World Series was an interesting duel to the death after the climax for the real survivors. The '51 Giants won the pennant, not the World Series. The '64 Phils didn't have the Wild Card to bail them out and the legendary curses of the Cubs and Red Sox were built on their inability to even get to the post season for decades of futility.

This regular season hasn't been quite legendary, but it has been notable for a number of reasons: the Rays breaking through and making the playoffs for the first time in franchise history, the Cubs season long domination of the Central and their fans hopes of finally breaking the curse, the irony of the Dodgers rise in the West behind Manny Ramirez and Joe Torre. On the individual performance side, the remarkable future Hall of Famer, Ichiro Suziki had his 8th straight 200 hit season since coming to America. Despite the Mariners horrific train wreck season, Ichiro got his hits and now has 16 straight 200 hit seasons included his Japanese League experience. And how about the Twins Joe Mauer trying to win a second batting title as a catcher! He's already the only A.L. catcher to win a batting title in the last fifty years. The only other two time batting champion as a catcher is legendary Hall of Famer Ernie Lombardi, who caught Johnny Van Deer Meer's back-to-back no hitters, and led the Cincinnati Reds to the 1940 World Series title.

Finally, the Clarion is oh so glad to look at the list of home run leaders for the majors this year and only see one number over 40. Sanity and the glory of George Foster restored.

Labels: baseball, sports