Fall Classics

Soup, apple-flavored cocktails, jangly guitar rock and more. It's Friday, pals!

Well, folks, it's World Series time.

Starting tonight, the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays will face off in a fairly unique edition of baseball's Fall Classic. For the first time since 1980 and only the second time in over a century, we are guaranteed a brand-new World Series champion, as neither franchise has ever won a title.

As a fan of a team with a title drought preceding the existence of either franchise by several decades, I am of course handling this with grace and magnaminity.

(Okay, fine, I'm exceptionally grumpy about it and I will take any opportunity over the next week to point out that the city of Milwaukee has celebrated a World Series more recently than Cleveland.)

Nevertheless!

I retain a healthy obsession with baseball, despite its steadfast refusal to allow me an October happy ending. I've spent most of my life poring over the game's statistics and stories, absorbing all the mythos and lore and wonderful nonsense that a strange sport with a century and a half of history has to offer. I've read countless books on the subject and spent an embarrassing amount of my life flipping through random pages on Baseball Reference and playing games like Immaculate Grid and Chasin' Base.

With all that said, I'm genuinely surprised when a good baseball story has escaped my notice–but I had such a moment just yesterday.

The untimely passing of former MLB player Todd Benzinger–who caught the final out of the Cincinnati Reds' 1990 World Series win–spurred a conversation between several friends that tipped me off to the existence of this Baseball Almanac page listing each player responsible for the final out (or final run) of every World Series since 1903. There's a lot of groundouts and the like, but a few interesting outliers.

Most notably: I had no idea that the 1926 World Series ended on a player being caught stealing.

More to the point, I had no idea that the pivotal seventh game of the 1926 World Series ended with the potential tying runner WHO HAD BEEN THROWN OUT IN HALF OF HIS STOLEN BASE ATTEMPTS GETTING THROWN OUT ON THE FIRST PITCH AFTER WALKING AND IT WAS BABE RUTH.

"Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?"

(I apologize for the formatting in the prior paragraph but it was the best way for me to represent the Vince McMahon Meme progression that I went through in learning about this.)

Now, this is where I say that I generally abhor the current state of television sports coverage. ESPN–once an outlet with some pretty solid journalism underpinning its sillier aspects–has chosen of late to build the entire plane out of blowhards like Pat McAfee and/or Stephen A. Smith reacting in indignation to everything that happens (or could potentially have happened) in the day of sports.

It's all discourse, and it's exhausting and terrible.

BUT

If I had a time machine

AND

I'd already done the other important stuff like killing Baby Hitler and investing in Apple stock and betting on Leicester City to win the Premier League

WELL THEN

I would like to drop McAfee and/or Smith off in October 1926 and watch them react to the most celebrated Major League Baseball player of his generation ending a World Series by getting thrown out on the basepaths like a nincompoop.

I think it would be really special to see.

(Also, I would leave them there.)

We are in the most perfect time of fall right now; my dazzling array of modest light jackets has been called back into action and the perpetual darkness of Standard Time is still a week away from descending over us.

It's a time to savor–and it's a time to make soup.

I've also got an autumnal spin on a classic cocktail, some terrific new music, and much more!