Phinally, The Baseball Season Is Over

Before the Major League Baseball playoffs began, everybody assumed that a certain franchise with a history of losing would finally break through and win a championship. And that's exactly what happened, though it wasn't the team everyone thought it would be.

The Philadelphia Phillies, the only American sports team to lose 10,000 games in its history, are this year's World Series champions. They defeated the Tampa Bay Rays, another perennial sad sack franchise (though they've only been around for ten seasons), in five games. The only other time the Phillies stood on top of the mountain was in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president.

This was not a flawless World Series by any means. The umpires blew some calls, the play was erratic, and the weather in Philadelphia was better suited to an NFL game between the Eagles and the Buccaneers.

Game 3 on Saturday was delayed for two hours by rain. It started at 10 p.m. in the East, and ended at close to 2 a.m. By the time the game ended, Fox's only competition was infomercials and reruns of Larry King Live.

It was nothing compared to Game 5, which began on Monday evening. By the sixth inning, the rain was making play hazardous. If B.J. Upton of the Rays hadn't scored the tying run, Major League Baseball and its commissioner Bud Selig would have been scorched for awarding the Phillies the title in a rain-shortened game. Wisely, they chose to make this the first suspended game in World Series history.

Two days, 46 hours and one Barack Obama infomercial later, the game resumed in the bottom of the sixth, and Philadelphia went on to win the game 4-3.

Thanks to the lousy weather conditions (which wasn't a problem when the first two games were played in St. Petersburg, Florida. In a domed stadium.), sports pundits have been advocating that MLB should go the way of the Super Bowl and the college basketball Final Four and play the World Series at a neutral site. Purists say no way. But as the Series creeps closer to Thanksgiving, and there's no chance the regular season or playoffs will be shortened (too much money involved), MLB may have to seriously consider the idea.

Philadelphia fans had better enjoy this championship. Who knows when there will be another one?