The season has ended. People are sick of the repetition, but I’ll say it again: every year it goes faster. No bats are hitting baseballs, neither are they swinging and missing. The television stays cool now except for night time streaming or maybe some futbol. Baseball in 2023 was pretty interesting and the post season, as we call it, was a lot of fun. Some of us like to poke fun at Texas but the state produced two of the the best this year and they both might stay that way for a while.

There were names prominent near the end that were new to the big stage: Adolis Garcia, Zac Gallen,Ketel Marte, Corbin Carroll, Kevin Ginkel, Merrill Kelly, Gabriel Moreno, Mitch Garver,Leody Taveras, Jon Gray, Jonah Heim, Josh Jung all became familiar to us as Halloween drew near. Other names were more familiar in the spotlight, like Corey Seager, Max Scherzer, Marcus Semien, Nathan Eovoldi, and Aroldis Chapman.

The best “new” name in the World Series was Bruce Bochy. After he was dumped as New York Yankees manager when they lost the 1960 World Series to a slightly better Pittsburgh Pirates team, Casey Stengel remarked that he had made the mistake of becoming 70 years old and many of us who were quite a bit younger at the time felt like it was time for senior citizens to step aside. Bochy won the World Series for the fourth time as a manager at the age of 68 after taking three years off from the game. Coupled with rule changes that invigorated the game and got games moving at a faster pace and resurrected “small ball” by increasing the use of sacrifice bunts and stolen bases and eliminating defensive shifts, the success of senior citizen managers like Bochy and Dusty Baker may have started a new trend that, while accepting what is called analytics, recognizes as well the value of veteran experience and human instincts. Now the Santa Ana Angels have hired 71 year old Ron Washington to try to right that floundering ship and it will be interesting to see how that works out as the career of Mike Trout enters its final phase and Shohei Ohtani decides whose checks he will cash next.

So it is time to rest the weary eyeballs and the worn eardrums that absorbed endless, repetitive commercials for insurance, new cars, and countless ads for pharmaceutical remedies for previously unmentionable ailments. That’s not to mention the ceaseless analysis of each and every pitch by John Smoltz, who is a good guy and was a great pitcher but still needs help in using the English language paired with non stop yakking by Joe Davis, who apparently thinks we like hearing the same stories over and over. The TBS coverage was so much better. But no more complaints, it’s great to be able to witness good ball, and we had a great lot of that. Thanks to the Baltimore Orioles, Arizona Diamondbacks, Houston Astros ,Philadelphia Phillies and the Minnesota Twins for a really fun adventure. Okay, Los Angeles Dodgers too.