*** CAUTION: This post contains content intended only for a mature audience. Parental Guidance is Suggested. ***
BY DC CUEVA
When you look at it, baseball is a sport that is rich in tradition and history, where this past season marked the 150th anniversary of professional baseball starting in this country when the Cincinnati Red Stockings (the present Reds) began play by the National Association in 1869. The sport is the true epitome of "old school" in American sport, from the Red Sox and Cubs playing in small & cozy ballparks that have been around for over 100 years, to the relative slow pace of games that take 3 hours to complete from first to last pitch. And it's a tradition every fall that baseball's best battle to make it to the
World Series and claim the championship of Major League Baseball.
Even though no team has been able to put together back-to-back championships for a longer spell than in the 150-year history of the Fall Classic, the past two decades have seen classic postseason battles, the crown being rotated among the Yankees, Cardinals, Phillies and modern-day expansion clubs. But the most notable headline has been of lengthy title droughts coming to an end with the Red Sox turning an 86-year championship drought into four titles in 15 years, the Giants winning three in five years after waiting 56 years for a ring, and the Cubs winning it all after a classic Game 7 in 2016 in snapping 108 years of futility as those Lovable Losers.
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| Sports Illustrated |
This year's World Series produced the fortieth Game 7 in the long history of the Fall Classic, and while it might not have clicked with the whole of the American sporting public - which echoes the relative drop of interest in the national pastime since the strike of twenty-five years ago, it once again put the nation's capital back in the sporting spotlight, as for the second time in 16 months a team from Washington, D.C. competed for a championship. The
Washington Nationals came to the World Series for the first time in their current iteration going back to being the Montreal Expos up until 2005, while the
Houston Astros looked to win a second World Series in three years after they won the 2017 crown and lifted the spirits of their hometown after Hurricane Harvey months before.
In the end, history was made: the Nationals won their first World Series title and gave the Capitol its second baseball championship after the Senators and legendary pitcher Warren Johnson upset a heavily favored New York Giants team in 1924. For the first time in the history of American sports, a best-of-seven postseason series was won by the visiting team, and for the first time since 2012 a team not seeded first won all four of the biggest sporting prizes in the continent. And on Saturday - for the second time in over a year, the District of Columbia had a victory parade in their city for a sports title, a year after the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup... and coupled with the WNBA's Mystics winning their 2nd title, it makes the nation's capital the City of Champions.
But until Daniel Hudson dealt the season's last pitch to Houston outfielder Michael Brantley who swung, missed and struck out for the last out, the most talked-about moment of this year's Fall Classic came not on the field, but in the stands in Nationals Park during Game 5 last Sunday. There - and similar to what happened at Madison Square Garden at UFC 254 a few days later, the President and his wife received an expectedly unwelcome welcome from the crowd just a year before what should be an intense reelection campaign amidst a divided America we are in now (and a capital that always goes blue on election night).
But that pregame moment paled in comparison to what happened during the game itself. There, two women sitting behind home plate decided to take advantage of the national spotlight of the grand old game's biggest showcase to do something that is as risque as it can get at a sporting event, and something that stole the spotlight on a night that, with momentum at stake heading back to Texas in what became a best-of-3 World Series, was THE big story on social media in the hours afterwards.
