MEASURING THE DECLINE OF THE 7-GAME WORLD SERIES

We don't want to disturb the Occupy Wall Street efforts or anything, but baseball has been squeezing its fans over the past thirty years in a way that, chart-wise at any rate, resembles the reprehensible efforts of the "trickle-down" crowd.

What's the beef? The decline and the downright dearth of seven-game World Series. There ought to be some Keynesian principle that could prop up this particular crisis--but, frankly, short of packing the Supreme Court we can't think of how to manage it.

The chart, which recycles our favorite motif in this timespan of the baseball season (the coin-flip), tells all. The golden age of 7-game World Series occurred in the first thirty years of the Boomer generation, and since then everything has gone into the crapper.

Little did any twenty-something know back in the mid-70s that the seven-game World Series would need to be placed upon the Endangered Species List along with big hair, bell-bottoms, and a metric ton's worth of other dubious cultural artifacts that Dan Epstein is still trying to turn into a reality series. (It seems as though big hair is not quite out of fashion, especially down on the Jersey shore.)

Some salient facts regarding this urgent crisis:

"Actually, it was all Bob Haldeman's idea!!"

--We have not had a seven-game Series since 2002, the same year that Dick Cheney became the sole member of the Trilateral Commission.

--The last time we had three 7-game series in a row was in 1985-1986-1987--a blatant effort on the part of the Reagan administration to divert our attention from Iran-Contra.

--Prior to that, the next trio of 7-game series, from 1971-73, was tied into the various phases of the Watergate break-in: the bungled planning, the bungled operation, the lack of concern on the part of a war-dazed electorate in the '72 election, and the invention of the designated hitter (first thought up by that arch-fiend John Ehrlichman).

--The great four-year run of 7-game World Series, from 1955 to 1958, coincided with the greatest as-yet-unrevealed covert operation in American history: the painstaking, systematic replacement of health-challenged President Dwight D. Eisenhower with a robot. (The robot exhibited a number of glaring speech deficiencies, but neither the public nor any of the various members of the branches of government were able to tell the difference.)

"Aw, sh*tf*ck, folks, there's no reason that
those Red Sox pitchers should lay off the Budweiser!!
After watching my Pilots play, I say: keep 'em comin'!!"

Conspiracy theorists are hard at work concocting lurid scenarios for the two other 7-game threepeats in 1945-46-47 and 1925-26-27, and we'll pass these along to you just as soon as these folks have been returned to the appropriate mental care facilities. (Wait, you mean to tell me that there are no mental care facilities for them to go to? Jeez, we know exactly what Joe Schultz would say about this!!)

The great run of seven-game World Series occurred in a twenty-four year period from 1952 to 1975, in which there were fifteen to-the-limit Fall Classics. That's fifteen out of a grand total of thirty-three. How could we know that we'd peaked as a nation?

Man those barricades, boys and girls!!