World Series: 'This is the pure game, the right game, the irresistible game'

Comedian Rodney Dangerfield had a line about how he went to the fights one night and a hockey game broke out. That quip has been on my mind as I delight in this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs while thinking, “I watched a baseball game tonight, and an actual baseball game broke out!”

The difference between how the game of baseball is played during the regular season and during the playoffs is a telling one, with no better time to issue a plea to MLB than at the start of the World Series.

I’m a Red Sox fan, and thus a little crestfallen of late, but I love any baseball game that is played well and smartly. It’s the sport of cognition, but with the added, glorious wrinkle of premier athleticism, which is largely obscured during the regular season.

During said season, you have guys doing what I call the “large things.” Swinging from their rear ends on every pitch like you do during backyard whiffle ball. The game becomes chunky, slow, muscle bound. There are no smaller building blocks that add up to helping the team. The sport stagnates. There’s no rhythm, no emphasis on execution. It’s all brawn. And it can even seem like no one is trying to win. They’re just trying to “out big” everyone else.

Then you get to the playoffs and the sport lights up, strobes. You get the rhythms of a Count Basie band, or a Rolling Stones, in their prime. Plays that hardly exist at all for six months come out to flourish, enlivening the proceedings.

There are steals, batters hit behind the runner, hit-and-runs are put in motion. There is the nobility of sacrifice. Every last inch of base paths matters. Everything is contested. We can feel the teams trying to outthink each other as we also watch guys you might not have known were amazing athletes dazzle your eyes with what they can do. These contests offer baseball's true self. And there’s nothing better, sports-wise.

This will sound silly, but when winning matters more now, the players go for an entirely different approach. The regular season aim seems to be “eh, let’s just win enough,” whereas in the playoffs – and certainly the World Series – the drive to win at all costs produces a product that is also a veritable symposium in the art of winning well.

You don’t notice the length of the games as much, because you’re too immersed in what is happening as a viewer. You don’t want to miss a pitch. A pick-off attempt. Batters fly out of the box, keen to stretch a gap single into a hustle double. Whereas in the regular season, they’d be jogging down to first, easy as you please.

This isn’t just the game I love the most, it’s the version of baseball that would make people care a lot more about what happens pre-October, obviating that oft-interminable six-month stretch of yawn-inducing tilts. This is the pure game, the right game, the irresistible game. It’s also a different game. It doesn’t have to be, though.

Baseball’s big “fix” need not be a pitch clock (though it sure wouldn’t hurt) or outlawing this or grandfathering out that. The real fix is ironically no more than the legit, purely-infused game of baseball. If only it actually got played before that time of year when kids have Halloween on the brain and fans like me didn’t have their one opportunity to stock up on their treats.

Colin Fleming's work appears in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter: @colinfleminglit

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: World Series: Premium baseball that is 'the irresistible game'