Wait till.... (you know the rest)

Baseball season is over. At least for us loyalist Cubs fans that could care less who wins the WS now that we are out of the running. Of course, we are also happy to see that the Cardinals and Yankees also won't be winning it this year.

I don't feel like going through all the gory details of the Cubs series against the Diamondbacks. It can be summed up in two numbers. 2 and 23. The first number is the number of hits the Cubs had with runners in scoring position. The second number is the number of times the Cubs had a chance to get a hit with runners in scoring position. That is a success rate of 8.7%, or rather a failure rate of 91.3%. You don't win series with a stat like that.

So, even though I won't watch another game this year, here are the only interesting stories I can come up with for the remaining playoff teams.

If the Indians win the AL, this World Series will have the worst television ratings since.....well, since the television was invented. It doesn't even matter who wins the NL, not a lot of interest in either Arizona or Colorado teams.

The only thing I am rooting for is to have the Rockies sweep every series they are in. They already have gone 17-1 over their last 18 games. If they can sweep the Diamondbacks and sweep the World Series, they will have finished the season 25-1, going 14-1 in their last 2 weeks of the regular season just to make it into the playoffs. That would be pretty cool.

* * *

I always like a good baseball movie. Field of Dreams, The Natural, Bull Durham are a few of the all-time greats. This weekend is the premiere of The Final Season. Based on the lack of hype I am hearing about this, it probably won't challenge those others in commercial success. But, I will definitely go see it as soon as possible (might be tough with a new baby in the house) because it is a story told about a team from the county where I grew up in Iowa.

The state folded the Norway high school into my high school (Benton Community) in the fall of 1991 (beginning of my junior year). This movie is the story of the summer of 1991 and the last season of baseball for the Norway high school, a team that had won 19 state titles before that year.

I am a little concerned that my school will come off looking like the villains. My concern was obviously shared by the current administrators that would not allow the name Benton Community to be used in the film. But, I obviously had nothing to do with the consolidation, so I don't care too much if Benton looks bad.

I will say that the Benton baseball team got much better in 1992 when the Norway boys joined our group. We didn't win state, but we at least got closer. I was relegated to the bench so that our school's quarterback could take my rightful place in right field. Maybe I should blame the Norway boys for that because if they hadn't been there, the QB may have played the infield, which was dominated by the Norway players.

Anyway, I encourage people to see it. Two of my Norway baseball buddies, Tim Arp and Jim Schulte, are portrayed in the movie, at 3B and 2B respectively. They may have been better ballplayers than me, but I could dominate them when it came to throwing the APBA dice.