Baseball is infinite. The baseball season isn't. I think most baseball fans know that at some level, even if it doesn't get said out loud very often.
But each baseball game is infinite in theory. Think about it. A batter can keep batting until he uses up his strikes. A team can keep hitting until it uses up its outs in an inning. And a game keeps going on as long as it takes for one team to finish ahead.
Obviously, this is because baseball games have no time limits. No clocks ticking inexorably down to zero. Or virtual zero, that point in a game like football or basketball where the laws of time and space (or at the very least, the rules of the game) have to be repealed in order for your favorite team to be able to have a chance to win.
Baseball games always have that chance, no matter how ludicrous the score, no matter how late in the game.
People talk about football becoming the American national pasttime. Or that one day soccer will rule. But for my money, nothing is more innately American than baseball and its infinite opportunity.
The baseball season has a time limit, though. Expressed in games remaining until a team cannot comeback. Baseball nomenclature refers to this as "methematical elimination" echoing the purity of the game. Oh, sure, a team may go into training camp or into a series looking like long shots, thoroughly outmatched through and through. But they get to play -they get to have their chance at the infinite- just like everyone else until they are... mathematically eliminated.
The Yankees were teetering on the brink of losing game four of the World Series. Heck, you don't get much closer to the brink than two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and two strikes on the batter. But close doesn't matter in an infinite game. Possibility is what counts. Then, in game five, they were only marginally further from that same chasm of loss, but possibility prevailed and they wound up winning the game.
Much has been made out of the greater meaning of this World Series in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies. How the idea that New York winning the series will restore balance, and help healing take place in the city that never sleeps, and a bunch of other malarkey. I've not heard anyone suggest that the Yankees winning will help find Osama bin Laden, but I confess to not following talk radio.
Anyway, world crises aside, I think the meaning of this World Series is the same as every other baseball game. A bunch of people playing a game of infinite possibilities. A game that ignores time.
The Yankees are up three games to two and need only one more win to emerge victorious, as the saying goes.
I'd remind everyone that two games in a row, the Yankees were one out from losing those games.
But don't mind me. I'm just noodling.
This noodle dedicated to Byung-Hyun Kim, several Ex-Cubs, and other members of the 2001 World Champion Arizona Diamondbacks.