Baseball is Important

The biggest knock on professional baseball is that, due to the lack of revenue sharing among teams/markets, money equals success. I wholeheartedly agree with this complaint and am eager to see what the newly approved plan to share profits will look like in implementation next year. However, there are some magical years that restore your hope in the game and bring back the October excitement you felt as a child. This is one of those years.

The Angels play the game of baseball better as a team than any I have ever seen. They hustle. They manufacture runs. They hit line drives, not homeruns. There are no stars (or even well-known players) among them and therefore they have no individual or collective ego, only the will to win the only way they know how (and the only way they can)--as a team.

Since there is no revenue sharing, baseball models the business world more closely than any other sport. The Angels defeating the Yankees in the divisional series in akin to David defeating Goliath, Opera defeating Internet Explorer, Linux defeating Windows. Imagine a world in which doing things the right way not only meant something but actually guaranteed success. This is the world that we baseball fans have been living in for the past few weeks. Every favored team has lost. Money has been taken out of the equation and everything is left to desire.

Even though fans did a horrible job of picking "baseball's most memorable moment" (Ripken? Please. Mastercard did the best job...) and this year's series might garner the lowest ratings ever, baseball still is important and will continue to be if this year is any indication of the direction in which the game is heading.