The Seven Teams of the Beast

I have this theory -- well, it's more of an outright fantasy -- that there are certain teams whose winning of World Championships constitutes the opening of the "Seven Seals" -- you know, the seals whose opening has something to do with the Antichrist and Armageddon and the Book of Revelation and all that stuff. (I'll know more about this stuff in a year or so, but for now, my project of reading the Bible cover-to-cover is only up to the last couple chapters of Genesis.) Those teams are:

Denver Broncos (1997 Super Bowl Champions)
Boston Red Sox (2004 World Series Champions)
Chicago White Sox (2005 World Series Champions)
Los Angeles Clippers
Minnesota Vikings
Chicago Cubs
Buffalo Bills

As we now know, three of the Seven Seals have been opened. I expect at least a good plague or two, right? But hey, as long as the Bills are the last of the Seven Teams of the Beast to win their championship, I'll be a happy guy when the world ends. Right?

OK, I didn't watch much of this year's World Series at all. In fact, I don't think I watched a single inning in its entirety. Fact is, for one reason or another, I just wasn't that interested this year, even though the White Sox and Astros both had compelling stories behind them. I was nominally more in favor of the White Sox winning, if only because I'm still sore with Texas over the whole "Hey, howzabout two Presidents named Bush!" thing, but an Astros victory wouldn't have really bugged me that much, mainly because I like the name "Astros". It's cool that there's a team that takes its name from the space program.

But I've generally been fairly bored with baseball the last few years. Part of that is probably because my team, the Pirates, are rebuilding yet again (although their current crop of young talent on the rise seems to be more promising than the previous two or three youth movements they've had, depending on what you consider to be a "youth movement"), and part of it is because baseball itself doesn't seem to give a shit. No real effort is made to speed up the games, no real effort is made to make the game's economics more equitable, no real effort is made to make the game more accessible, really. I'm sorry, but the NFL gets it: except for two prime-time games each week, just about everybody has seen their team either win or lose by seven o'clock on Sunday night, and even the Super Bowl with its inflated halftime is over by ten. But there's the World Series, cranking away in the seventh inning while David Letterman is finishing up his monologue.

I found it disturbing to note that the Astros roster has no black players. It's important to note that this is almost certainly not an instance of the Astros being a racist organization, but rather that black athletes in general are turning away from baseball to such a degree that the sport's talent pool in black athletes is getting smaller and smaller to the point where teams are finding themselves in situations where none of the best players in their organizations, the guys they're promoting to the Major Leagues, are black. That's a pretty disturbing structural problem for the game, I think.

It's also telling to me that the TV networks no longer see the World Series as a threat to ratings. I remember how, not too long ago, networks wouldn't schedule new episodes of their top shows on the week of the World Series. But now, every show I watch -- except for the ones on FOX, which actually hosts the World Series -- had a new episode this week, World Series or no.

Finally, I see that Rox is asking people to name the best outfield ever. Well, I'm not sure about the best ever, but the Pirates outfield of the early 1990s -- Barry Bonds, Andy Van Slyke, and Bobby Bonilla -- was a kick-ass outfield. Those guys constituted the heart of the batting order, and Bonds and Van Slyke were Gold Glovers while Bonilla was no slouch in right.

So there you go. Bring on Spring Training, I guess.