Nows and Forevers

When I was covering TV in the early 2000s for The Hollywood Reporter, one of the annual storylines was the Major League Baseball postseason. And one of the things I learned early was a seven-game championship series and World Series was the holy grail.
Baseball was in the midst of a long, slow decline, having long ago given up space on the American hearth to the National Football League. Baseball was still No. 2 in professional sports, to be sure. But the country didn’t live or die on who was in the World Series every year.
Fox, then and now, held the rights to the World Series with the classic team of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. Sometimes there were seven-game championship series, but seven-game World Series were pretty rare in those times. The 2002 World Series between the Angels and the Giants went seven games. Then the next seven-game World Series wasn’t until 2011, although there were plenty of dramatic seven-game championships in between, including my favorite, the 2004 American League Championship Series where the Red Sox overcame a three-game deficit against the Yankees on the way to a four-game sweep of another historical nemesis, the Cardinals.
I was thinking of this all this week with both championship series going to seven games, Monday night for the Rangers-Astros and Tuesday night for the Phillies-Diamondbacks. It’s the first time since 2020 both the ALCS and NLCS went to seven games.
I watched some of the ALCS on Monday night. It’s only the second baseball I’ve seen this postseason although not the first in October: I was in person for the final game of the National League team in the city I live in. My kid’s a big fan.
Game sevens are pretty awesome. As I write this, it’s 3-1 with the Rangers, who haven’t lost on the road yet this postseason, ahead of the Astros. To quote Depeche Mode, everything counts, in large amounts.
‘Course, I’m not the best baseball fan. I’m going to bed long before this one is over, and I won’t check until tomorrow. But I know Fox is rooting for an exciting game 7, all the way.