With 2011 World Series and MLB playoffs, baseball hits it over the fence

St. Louis

Early Saturday morning, there was a “room service” knock on my door at a hotel two blocks from Busch Stadium where many out of town Cardinals fans stay, then party the World Series nights away. The man bringing up breakfast assumed I was one of the Redbirds faithful, too.

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“I was up late with the Cards but couldn’t sleep much so I ordered breakfast,” I said. With that, my new friend raised his hand for a high-five.

“If anybody said at the end of August that we would even be in the playoffs, you’d have been committed. And now look!” said the middle-aged man. Then, sweeping his hand as if serving a banquet, he intoned, “Scrambled, bacon, wheat toast, coffee. Enjoy your breakfast. Enjoy our championship!”

In St. Louis, baseball never goes away. After air to breathe, a slathered rack of ribs and a beer, it’s life’s next essential element here. But elsewhere, passion for the game fluctuates a bit, oscillating around a healthy median.

For example, in 1975, the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox played what was widely considered, at the time, to be the best World Series ever with a Game 6 that has provided replays for a generation.

Baseball was in a soft spot then. A game for April-to-September nights when you can talk to your neighbors between pitches, maybe even commit the sin of leaving an inning early, lacked the electric riff and rebelliousness of the era. But, as always, the times swung too far and had to recalibrate.

The game, just hanging around, being itself, slow at times but also exciting enough to glue you to a home team for months of a pennant race, was ready for a new romance with those who weren’t its permanent suitors. That affair, begun in ’75, lasted until the murdered World Series of ’94.

This season, the sport once again set revenue records, had its fifth-highest attendance (73.5 million, plus another 50 million in the minor leagues) and continued to explode across new media and marketing platforms while making billions in its latest round of local cable television deals. The game is indisputably robust. But it’s nice to be loved, too. That next era of passion, a period when the temper of the game suits the tenor of the times, may be coming ’round again.

Long ago, one Carlton Fisk home run in one exceptional World Series was enough to shift the national sports focus in a narrow three-network universe. Now it takes a whole lot more. So for the last 31 solid days, baseball has delivered the kind of 24-7, sensory-overload, tweet-this-sucker reintroduction of itself that’s required these days if you want to grab millions of people by the lapels and shake them out of their distracted disaffection.

On Friday before Game 7, you could tell that Commissioner Bud Selig was truly gratified that the game — which he, his owners, agents, the players union and 20 years of blind-eye steroids abuse tried to debase — has come up gleaming and glowing again.

At most, baseball can have 41 postseason games if every series goes the maximum, and October excitement is proportional to length. On that score, baseball’s been coming up short the last six years, averaging just 30 games spread over far too many days with games starting too late at night. Cause? A sport that’s often tone-deaf to its public but eventually gets the message.