ESPN MLB Playoffs 2008

The vertical signpost marking the corner of 15th and Market Streets still lays horizontal, confirmation that even after four days the Philadelphia Phillies are still world champions.

For the title-starved, there were many October moments to savor, culminating with the Phillies' five-game vanquishing of the Tampa Bay Rays: Matt Stairs' inking himself into the lifetime free-drink club with his Game 4 homer against the Dodgers, Shane Victorino's grand slam against CC Sabathia and the Brewers, and, of course, the entirety of the World Series, in which the Phillies rendered the championship utterly without suspense, squeezing the air out of the soaring Rays by always having an answer -- seemingly immediately -- for every imminent threat.

It was the ease of the Phillies' championship road that for me will always remain. In a bandbox that indiscriminately serves up home runs, the Phillies went 7-0 at Citizens Bank Park during the postseason. The Phillies needed just 14 playoff games to emerge as the Series winner -- the same number as the 2007 Boston Red Sox and two more than the 2005 Chicago White Sox (11-1), but both faced more peril than did Philadelphia. By contrast, the Red Sox swept the Los Angeles Angels and the Colorado Rockies to win the World Series, but they had to overcome a monstrous 3-1 deficit against Cleveland in the American League Championship Series. The White Sox of three years ago were nearly perfect, sweeping the Red Sox to begin the postseason and the Astros to end it, but in between they lost the ALCS opener to the Angels at home, and in the second game, they were one controversial play away from extra innings, which potentially could have resulted in their going to California down 2-0. Philadelphia's run seems even more impressive than Chicago's because the Phillies did not appear to have the White Sox's caliber of starting pitching and yet were nearly as dominant.

In four Series wins, Philadelphia did not trail for even a single half-inning. Even the 125-win New York Yankees of 1998, the gold standard of dominance, were made to sweat when the Indians led two games to one (with the next two games in Cleveland) before the great El Duque saved the season in an epic Game 4 performance.

Like life, however, baseball is never clean. The Phillies and their fans do stand on top of the world, but it was not a great week for baseball. The Phillies won the worst -- but also the most significant -- World Series in recent memory, but during a historic championship week, the sport's rawest nerves of money, race and power were painfully exposed.

MONEY

ON OCT. 15 at Hofstra University, Barack Obama and John McCain engaged in their final presidential debate, centered on which candidate was better suited to save an economy in ruins. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 773 points earlier in the day, the ninth-worst percentage change in the history of the stock market. Both candidates made mention of nationwide housing foreclosures, and the appositive "the worst since the Great Depression" was affixed to every sentence not related to Joe the Plumber. That afternoon, as the Red Sox and Rays took ground balls during their day off between Games 4 and 5, a Red Sox executive told me his belief that sports are not recession-proof, and even the Red Sox -- who have sold out every regular season game at Fenway Park for the past 5½ years, even with bleacher tickets costing upward of $25 -- expect to see that vaunted streak end in 2009. The Yankees open a billion-dollar stadium next season, with tickets ranging up to $2,500 per seat and luxury boxes demanding commitments of $800,000. Both venues are designed to perform at capacity, and the big spenders may not be there.

The Rays' position as baseball's next dynasty was a subtext that ran throughout the postseason, but the club's willingness to spend the money to keep the glittering pieces together may be another story. During the ALCS, Rays owner Stu Sternberg said he believes the Tampa Bay area will support baseball in a way that his neighbors to the south -- the Florida Marlins -- have not enjoyed. Rays president Matt Silverman told me that the Rays are better insulated than their big-money counterparts because of low ticket prices and moderate skybox rates, combined with -- at long last -- success. He said that sports are an "emotional buy" and such purchases are a bit closer to impenetrable particularly during difficult economic times because "people need to feel good about something."

Each conversation dances around the elephant in the room: a new ballpark, for Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg is ridiculed even by the leaders of its own sport. The Rays are correct in seeking support for a new facility because the franchise will never have more emotional leverage than it has right now. Even if the Rays win the World Series in 2009, a title would not be accompanied by the surprise and joy of the unexpected 2008 title run. From this day forward, Tampa Bay is the hunted.

Yet, in the middle of a national economic meltdown, it is the game's commissioner, Bud Selig, who continues to pressure the Tampa Bay fans for more, to support a new stadium for a franchise suddenly on the upswing but that had left the region cold in the Rays' first decade of existence.

"Anyone who's been there knows they need a new facility in order to compete," Selig says.

As the offseason progresses, Selig will repeat this theme and its unsentimental undercurrent without placing responsibility on the Rays' management to build its own park with its own money; Selig will say it is the public that needs to pony up more. It is an attitude that was not lost upon baseball fans weary of injecting public money into private enterprise, and it reflects just how tone-deaf baseball can be, even in the face of people across the country who are losing their homes.

"As I understand, there are several teams with recently built, privately financed or mostly privately financed stadiums -- the Braves, the Cardinals, the Giants and the Reds," Jake Clark, a baseball fan in Georgia, wrote me. "Correct me if I'm wrong about those, but according to Wikipedia (I know, the most reliable source in the world, right?), The Great American [Ball Park] used the most public funding of that bunch, accounting for 17 [percent] of the stadium's total cost. So obviously, Sternberg doesn't have to have a publicly financed stadium. I just feel like a lot of the team owners are dirtbags, and that's my least favorite thing about baseball. I think that sports journalists, such as yourself, who write articles that are read by so many sports fans could really do a lot to set this shady side of the business right."

Privately, another Rays executive told me the club is happy the public will not vote on any stadium issues this year because any ballot measure asking for public funds -- despite the magic of Joe Maddon and James Shields and Carlos Pena -- would certainly fail.

Still, Matt Silverman was vindicated. The financial markets may be collapsing, but the "impulse buy" lives on. An hour before the presidential debate, Jimmy Rollins led off Game 5 of the National League Championship Series with a home run off Chad Billingsley. The Phillies won the game going away 5-1 and were headed to the World Series for the first time since 1993, and two friends of mine ignored all economic indicators and went nuts. The first, Kevin J. Hogan -- Philadelphia-born and raised, Temple University-educated, married father of three -- assumed the Rays would hold on to their 3-1 series lead and booked US Airways flight 1023 to Tampa, price $400. He would fly to Tampa with only the clothes on his back and a bright red Phillies cap on his head. He would carry no bags, no toothbrush, no backpack. He would have no hotel room, content to watch Game 1 at Tropicana Field, sleep at the Tampa airport and return to Philly on a 6 a.m. flight. He said this would soothe his unique Philadelphia baseball-watching pain.

He would make the pilgrimage despite being one of those people both political parties covet: the family man who paid his bills on time, stayed within his means and yet will most likely watch his mortgage turn upside down.

The other friend, diehard Jeff Scott (who as a financial analyst for Vanguard is witnessing the financial collapse of retirement funds up close), fronted a posse of title-thirsty Philadelphians who would purchase eight tickets to Games 1 and 2 and another 12 for Games 3, 4 and 5 at home in Philly. The total cost of the 20 tickets would be $4,600, not including airfare, parking, lodging, gas, souvenirs, food, etc.

"I was fulfilling a promise I made to myself a long time ago," Hogan said, recalling being a 14-year-old watching the Phillies lose Game 5 to Baltimore in the 1983 World Series, and living in San Francisco in 1993 and not having the money to fly back for the games. "You wait for this for years. Maybe you have to wait another 28 years for it to happen. No question about it: If the Phils got to the World Series, I was going. I was going to make it work."

RACIAL MATTERS

"HEY CLIFF," I call out to Cliff Floyd before Game 1 of the World Series. He is standing at the batting cage, along the first-base side, watching B.J. Upton stroke consecutive line drives into left field. "How come baseball keeps talking about the lack of African-American players in the game but you guys have so many? How can Tampa Bay find black players but no one else can?"

Floyd is animated about the subject. "Willpower," he says. "And you know what else? These guys realized it was all going to come back around. You can't play to hit nothing but home runs and compete with the Yankees and the Red Sox, so they knew they had to compete a different way. Look at B.J. And CC [Rays left fielder Carl Crawford]? He's still learning the game and look what he's doing. B.J. doesn't even use the whole field yet."

The return of the black player on the October stage -- from Upton's grace to Rollins' speed and swagger to Ryan Howard's power -- was like visiting some uninhabited region of the earth and discovering an exotic fruit long thought to be extinct. Watching Crawford run gave the same feeling.

On the eve of the Series, race was the natural topic. David Price and Edwin Jackson, the Rays' African-American pitchers, were peppered with questions regarding the significance of talented black players playing in autumn. Both answered the questions politely, and correctly, saying they hoped their presence in the game would inspire younger kids to take up the sport.

The real significance, of course, is inside the game, where baseball executives have so distanced themselves from their athletic roots, but Tampa Bay has given them reason for rediscovery.

The Rays did not win the World Series, but Upton used October to serve notice that he is a star, and during his signature moment -- single-handedly tying Game 3 in the eighth inning when he got an infield hit, stole second and third and finally scored on Carlos Ruiz's wild throw -- I immediately thought of Billy Beane, the Oakland general manager made famous for "Moneyball" and his playoff teams earlier in the decade.

The Beane theory, that less wealthy clubs that cannot afford the quintessential five-tool player must decide which tools represent the best value, is an important one, except that Beane's orthodoxy has been bastardized by executives who have chosen to pit on-base percentage against speed. This, Beane told me during the Series, was never his intention, and yet it is how his positions have been interpreted. "The fact is," he told me, "that the combination of speed, power and selectivity is the most expensive commodity in the sport. We couldn't have both, so we had to choose. Those other guys were always out of our price range. That's Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds you're talking about."

It also struck me that some baseball executives are caught in the bizarre orthodoxy that speed and selectivity are mutually exclusive, that one must be sacrificed for the other. This, of course, is preposterous and may underscore a level of unconscious, institutional racism: It could suggest that the raw athlete (read: black players) is too undisciplined to learn the nuances of the sport. Upton is a perfect example to disprove this misguided notion. In his first full season, he struck out 154 times and walked 65. In 2008, his second full season, he cut his strikeouts by 20 and increased his walks by 32. Besides, if a player possesses the physical tools and the interest in the sport, why can't he be taught how to play it? Isn't that what coaching is for?

The Rays stole 24 bases during the postseason and seemed to provide the first market correction of the ponderous patience-and-power approach that has defined baseball over the past decade, and a reminder that it is fatal for the sport to abandon its athleticism.

Crawford, for example, was a highly coveted player in basketball, football and baseball. On the basketball court, Carl Crawford is a fast and quick -- if undersized -- point guard. On the football field, he is a defensive back or running back: quick, strong, powerful, but of no greater distinction than the other products of the football factories across the country.

But on the baseball diamond, as he has proven over his six full seasons, Carl Crawford is a superathlete, perhaps the best defensive left fielder in the sport, and easily one of the two or three fastest players in the league. He is the five-tool player who could have easily drifted to another sport but is a star in baseball. He played this postseason with a debilitating hand injury that threatened to keep him out of the playoffs altogether, and hit two home runs in the World Series. He and Upton were electrifying in the Rays' outfield.

"If I ran baseball, I'd have Carl Crawford's picture plastered everywhere," Floyd told me. "He should be the face of the game."

Still, two off-field components of the Moneyball rubric -- the search for college players who are very near the finished product in order to reach the majors faster, and the heavy investment in draft-exempt Latin America for unfinished prospects -- have helped to virtually eliminate black players from the game.

The notion that black athletes are too bored or too impatient for baseball is an oft-repeated one, but I do not believe it. Black baseball talent exists. Less obvious is whether the sport has had the desire to cultivate it and compete with other sports for it. If you look for talent, you will find it, and for nearly 30 years baseball has directed its scouts and resources to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela -- talent-rich regions naturally devoid of black players and not subject to the draft -- as well as to college, where less than 2 percent of the players are African-American.

And it was during the Series, while I was watching Crawford and Upton and Rollins especially, when it suddenly dawned on me that baseball has treated the decline of black players in the sport as a social problem instead of a competitive one. If baseball truly wants to attract the country's best athletes as it once did, it must eliminate or refine the parameters of the draft to include Latin American players (which would create cost parity with American players) and provide real incentives for big league clubs such as Oakland and Detroit and the New York teams to develop the athletes who are playing other sports right under their noses. As long as programs such as Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) belong to community relations instead of scouting and development, they will never produce much impact.

Over five games, the World Series served not only as a reminder of how diverse the sport must be, not simply in complexion but in style, attitude, approach, and perspective, but also of what has been missing in the game for so many years. The athletes are there. The salaries are better in baseball, as is the security. There are many reasons, but no good reasons, why more black athletes do not wear baseball uniforms. It is, after all, the American game, with participation from all. At least it used to be.

POWER

This year's playing conditions were the worst in Series history, but in recent years a considerable number of Series games have been played in icy winds or daunting storms because these are perfectly normal mid-evening, mid-autumn conditions in much of the country. For years baseball has been vulnerable to this chronic disaster because the commissioner and the owners insist on maintaining a season that runs a week or 10 days too late into the fall, and because they are willing captives of network television, which wants the Series games to be played at night during the week … since this schedule will draw the highest ratings. The nabobs of baseball could alter all this in a moment, if they had the desire to do so, by scheduling World Series games on afternoons in early October. But they are not so inclined, and it clearly doesn't matter to them that their famous showcase now offers a truly inferior version of the pastime, played under conditions that demean and endanger the contestants and punish the local fans. Thousands of fans keep asking why something isn't being done about it. But nothing will be done, because the ratings are right. They want it this way.

These words have nothing to do with the Philadelphia Phillies, the Tampa Bay Rays or the unconscionable Philadelphia weather under which two of the final three games of the 2008 World Series were played. When those words were written, Jimmy Carter was president and I was 10 years old. They are the words of Roger Angell, describing in The New Yorker the frigid conditions of the 1979 Pittsburgh-Baltimore World Series.

Thirty years later, conditions have only worsened -- the punishment of the fans harsher despite higher prices, the addiction to the heroin of ratings only more pronounced, the proactive responses from the commissioner's office still nonexistent. Game 3 began ridiculously at 10:06 p.m. ET after an icy monsoon. Game 5, famously, was suspended for 46 hours amid confusion regarding the rules (would baseball actually allow a postseason game to be rain-shortened?), and it had never been more obvious that television -- and not the leaders of the sport -- controlled baseball. At long last, it was clear: Baseball had given the sport away.

In the middle of a deluge on Oct. 25, before the Phillies' 5-4 victory in Game 3, Selig met with television executives, league officials and the owners and management of both clubs to discuss the viability of playing. The considerations were myriad: horrible forecasts in the upcoming days, especially Tuesday; the outside possibility of moving a Phillies home game to St. Petersburg. And the whopper that singed the touch: the rumor that Fox did not want to reschedule Game 3 because the network did not want to pre-empt the highly rated program "House."

The final decision to start a Series game after 10 p.m., one Rays executive told me, was made because 45,000 fans were already seated, ready for action. There was no reason to empty the stadium.

Whether or not the network and baseball actually allowed "House" to dictate when a World Series game would be played, the damage had already been done. The World Series offered an unfriendly reminder to the baseball hierarchy that its sport is too bloated, and that its leaders lack control and common sense, having mortgaged the product for -- surprise! -- the TV money.

And it was clear that this World Series forced baseball to again employ serious self-assessment. Before the resumption of Game 5, some team executives discussed the possibility of "squeezing in" the original Game 5 before the rain, as if a World Series game could be "squeezed in" at all, no different from a Thursday night Royals-Twins game in June. That is how little they think of their showcase. Something needs to change, and in a big way, whether it's the union and management agreeing to re-implement scheduled doubleheaders, shortening the season to 150 or 154 games, or, yes, even considering an annual, neutral-site World Series in a dome or warm-weather venue. Or all of the above. The current system is not working.

In the end, the game won out, and Selig & Co. were saved by the very phenomenon that saves them through strikes and steroids and often-nonexistent leadership. The fans suffered but did not lose, for they have made the deal baseball has always counted upon. They love their team. It is at once the singular power of the sport and precisely the reason things never change.

"You felt like you were being cheated because the Series wasn't being played the way baseball should be played. It was looking ridiculous," Jeff Scott, the Vanguard financial analyst, told me. Scott estimated his price tag for three games to be roughly $3,000. "The players were looking at each other like, 'What are we doing?' You didn't mind the sacrifice but you didn't get the payoff. Then they said it was suspended. It was like, 'Go home.'

"But the thing that was most impressive to me, it was Game 3. It was 1:30 in the morning and from our seats you could see the parking lot, and there wasn't one tail light. Nobody was leaving," he said. "Game 5 was absolutely miserable, and if [the Phillies] had lost, I might have a completely different answer. The same four people who went with me for the first half saw it through two nights later. I mean, nobody even considered giving up their tickets. If it happens this way next year, absolutely, I'd be right back there."

Howard Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He is the author of "Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball" and of "Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston." He can be reached at Howard.Bryant@espn3.com.