Fans of my transportation pieces and followers of my Bulgarian sojourn will have to forgive me for writing about baseball again so soon. And I will have to forgive myself for being overseas during the most compelling World Series of my lifetime.

Red Sox-Dodgers: it doesn’t get any better than this.

My earliest memories of baseball fandom are of being a severely left-handed little kid, in an elementary school with many Jewish classmates, at a time when Sandy Koufax was the best pitcher on the planet. I didn’t see much baseball on TV, but I did watch the last game he ever pitched, when the Dodgers made six errors behind him and lost in the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles.

Koufax was to Jews what Muhammad Ali was to black Americans. He is also one of only two ballplayers (Babe Ruth is the other) whose name has become an adjective. When a pitcher is particularly unhittable, we say that he is “Koufaxian.” More than fifty years after his sudden and premature retirement, he remains the gold standard by which pitchers are measured.

The next year we moved to Maine, just in time for the Impossible Dream, the wild, multi-team pennant race won by the Red Sox on the last day of the season. I’ve been a Red Sox fan ever since.

For the first forty-two years of my life, the Dodgers had exactly two managers: Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. They were, of course, the first team to integrate (the Red Sox were the last). And they always had great starting pitching, from Koufax and Drysdale to Valenzuela and Hershiser, and now, Clayton Kershaw. They won 1-0 games with an infield hit, a stolen base, a bunt and a sacrifice fly, backed by a complete-game shutout from their ace of the moment.

Dave Roberts, the current Dodger manager, will deservedly get a lot of love from the Fenway crowd for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World in 2004. It’s the single most important baseball moment in the new millennium. For, like the first piece of concrete chiseled from the Berlin Wall, it was the first blow in bringing down an evil empire.

But Roberts lost me as a manager when he pulled a rookie pitcher from his first game with a no-hitter in progress. It’s never been done before: a no-hitter in a major league pitcher’s first game. In 1967, a Red Sox lefty named Billy Rohr came within one strike. Dick Williams, his manager, not only left him in the game until he gave up a hit with two out in the ninth, he let him retire the next batter to complete the shutout. I can’t even remember the name of the kid whom Roberts denied a shot at history. It’s a shame and a travesty.
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If Roberts had been managing the Yankees in 1956, he would have pulled Don Larsen after six perfect innings, and cobbled together the last nine outs with four relievers.

So it will be poetic justice if Kershaw pitches six or seven brilliant innings, and then the Red Sox jump all over the bullpen.

Then again, the Red Sox have looked like the best team in baseball all year long. Unlike the Yankees, who lived and died by the long ball, the Red Sox hit singles and doubles and triples, ran the bases, and got production from the whole lineup. Their worst hitter in April and May, Jackie Bradley Jr., was the star of the American League championship series. Even the substitutes contributed.

The Red Sox have always had great outfields: Yaz, Reggie Smith and Conigliaro; Rice, Lynn and Evans. But the current trio of Andrew Benintendi, Bradley, and Mookie Betts may be the best of them all. This may, in fact, be the best Red Sox team I’ve ever seen. Since blowing the first game of the season, as I watched with increasing disgust in Paddy Murphy’s Pub in Bangor, Maine, some seven months ago, they’ve won 115 times.

Though television has done its best to ruin the World Series, by shoehorning what should be America’s premier sporting event around the college and professional football schedules, I’m still sorry I won’t be able to watch. But I’ll be keeping close tabs on events at Fenway Park, where I saw my first big-league ballgame, and Dodger Stadium, where my two children saw theirs.

When I feel bleak about the world and my country, I’m grateful for the balm of baseball, the made-in-America game that’s still the best team sport ever invented.

And go Sox.

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