It can take a long time, a number of years, before the true becomes obvious. And only then, once sufficient agreement on the proposition is reached, can debate about its merits finally be opened between critics and the holdouts for the old received wisdom.
Baseball fans have it easy in this regard, because there's never been a time when most haven't noticed the game isn't what it used to be. But now there's consensus concerning the way baseball isn't what it used to be. Sometimes it takes the right kind of World Series to bring the consensus into focus.
Now we have it. This year's World Series will be contested between the New York Yankees, the Great American Dynasty -- who, despite reputation, built themselves the old way -- and the Arizona Diamondbacks, brought together rotisserie style from the prizes of the free agent market to win a National League pennant in their fourth year.
The evidence that baseball isn't what it used to be flooded to the headlines in 1997 and 1998, when the five-year-old Florida Marlins parlayed a wildcard playoff berth into a World Championship and a 70-year-old measure of the human capacity for home run hitting, which had seldom even been challenged, suddenly was obliterated in the same year by two different men. Concurrent with these developments came interleague play, which -- along with expanded playoffs, increasing payroll disparity among clubs, home run inflation and rapid expansion -- destroyed the proportions of a game once lauded for its timelessness and symmetry.
On reaching agreement about the way baseball isn't what it used to be, the lines of debate have been established. Is baseball better off for all this change, or not? Better or worse off, compared with what?
And, as is often the case in this type of discussion, the choices to be posed are mostly false. It's nearly insensible to say baseball is better or worse off in total, while it's entirely sensible, even correct, to say baseball is better off in some ways and worse off in others.
In the sense that the mystique of baseball once was defined by the game's connection with its history, which was sacrificed for pump priming after the 1994 players' strike posed economic disaster, the game is worse off. But the old ways weren't entirely good, nor could their maintenance ensure the game's viability in light of America's changing demographics.
Deep into this year's playoffs, we've been entertained by clubs from Seattle, once the province of ragamuffins who got lost on their way to Alaska, and Phoenix, where old Midwesterners once went to die. Once upon a time, any club from outside New York could just about forget about playing in the World Series. But when the Yankees and New York Mets met in the World Series last year, it was an anomaly. Despite wide payroll disparities, good management prevails.
The arguments can go on endlessly and reasonable people can disagree, but the discussion can't be more entertaining than the World Series to come between two clubs of such divergent background. Change will clash with status quo and old will spar with new as the Yankees and Diamondbacks fight for the World Championship.
But we can be assured that once this series is completed, all of that will be recontextualized except for baseball's one eternal verity: pitching.
The Diamondbacks are, at once, a very new and a very old baseball club. They came to us in 1998, after Phoenix sports impresario Jerry Colangelo contributed $130 million to an expansion fund for the benefit of existing Major League club owners. Soon enough after their first pitch, the Diamondbacks had assembled the best club money could buy, leading to a playoff in their second season and financial difficulties in their third.
At the trading deadline last year, the Diamondbacks dealt for right-hander Curt Schilling, one of the game's very best pitchers. In tandem with lefty Randy Johnson, another of the game's very best, Schilling has led a group of 11 players in their thirties to their first World Series. Among them are ex-Reds Reggie Sanders, Greg Swindell and Mike Morgan, none of whom is younger than 33.
Though the Diamondbacks were no more than pretty good during the regular season, they've been deadly during the postseason simply because no one can top Schilling and Johnson in the front two slots of the pitching rotation. But the Diamondbacks will bring little pitching behind Schilling and Johnson, and they don't carry a lot of offense beyond Sanders and their hitting star, Luis Gonzalez.
The Diamondbacks are a smart, experienced ball club. But no club is as smart or experienced this late into October as the Yankees, who won their 38th American League pennant after staring down elimination against the Oakland Athletics in the divisional playoffs. And the Yankees don't hurt for pitching, either. They start with Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina and Andy Pettitte, whose 10-5 postseason record would make him the best October pitcher of our time if closer Mariano Rivera's October numbers weren't 5-0 with a 0.74 ERA and 23 saves in 24 opportunities.
With its deep wardrobe inspired by merchandising and its roster of millionaire mercenaries, the still-new club from Arizona is the face of baseball that isn't what it used to be. They're like the Yankees in their reliance on older players, but that's all. The Diamondbacks are a creation of the National League, which has served up a variety of World Series opposition for the Yankees.
The Yankees are what they've always been, except, some say, maybe in better form than ever. The Yanks have won almost half of the American League pennants since 1920, and this iteration could be the third to win four consecutive World Series. But the other two didn't deal with playoffs.
These Yankees have won 11 consecutive postseason series. The 1949-53 team, which won five consecutive World Series, played five postseason series in total.
Outside Mussina, the Yankees weren't built through free agency, though their high revenues ensure they don't have to lose free agents, either. The Yankees, winning as usual, are our last link to historical baseball. They're baseball as it has always been, except they've passed more tests.
Elderly and limping, the Yankees are four wins short of their fifth World Championship in the last six years. Despite their dynastic privileges, the Yanks are something of a sympathetic defending champion since a little incident that ravaged New York on Sept. 11. A subsequent outpouring of support for all things New York has heightened the zeal of Yankee-haters, exasperated that the Bronx Bunters have survived the Seattle Mariners of 116 wins and the Athletics of 102 wins.
Spicing up the American League Championship Series a little more was the Yankees' opposition from Billy Martin's managerial protégé, our old friend Lou Piniella, who made a bid to become the second manager ever to win the World Series from each league. The first, of course, was Sparky Anderson, who, like Piniella, won his World Championship from the National League with the Reds.
Immediately after the Yankees won the first two games of the ALCS in Seattle, Piniella contracted the veins in his neck long enough to tell all the world his Mariners would survive the next three games in New York and bring the series back to the Northwest for Game 6. New Yorkers feigned outrage but actually loved it, for they could now justly paint the series as a contrast between today's low-key Yankees and the Bronx Zoo Yankees of 20 years ago, when Piniella was one of their most combustible and popular players. New Yorkers loved it even more that the Yankees won two of three at home to make Piniella eat his words.
While Piniella's present club caught lightning in a bottle this year, the present day Yankees are aging to the core and their manager, Joe Torre, has been at wit's end trying to manage four weeks of championship baseball out of Scott Brosius, Chuck Knoblauch, Tino Martinez and Paul O'Neill. But we know Torre can do it, because he basically won the last two World Series on pitching, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams and fumes.
It's foolish to write off the Yankees in October, when their best four pitchers are more than enough and a couple days off every week enable them to stretch their old players, who make up in wiles what they lack in youthful vigor. It seems that every October begins with accounts of O'Neill running out of gas and ends with O'Neill delivering key hits. This year, Torre has taken to sitting O'Neill a couple times during the playoffs, just to maximize the right fielder's production when he does play.
It's called managing, and no one has done it better than Torre in the past six years. Since taking over the Yankees in 1996, his postseason record is 49-19. Of all the managers to wear the Yankee uniform since the early 1970s, only Torre has established and maintained the leverage to keep George Steinbrenner out of his shirt.
At the end of the season, Torre will be up for renewal, and his price increases with every series the Yankees win. It could be interesting if the Yanks fall short and Steinbrenner sees a chance to regain his stranglehold on that franchise.
The crowning moment of this season had to be Oct. 15, when the Yankees beat the Oakland Athletics for the third straight game to capture a divisional series that had almost certainly been lost. It set the stage for all that's followed because, without it, the Yankees would have been finished.
Now, as throughout the 20th Century, they're anything but.
