Banjo Concert

Cue the tympani. The regular baseball season came to a crashing crescendo night before last. The symphony played in parks under the stars soared to a final note almost simultaneously. No sooner had Carl Crawford failed to snag a sinking line drive in Baltimore than Evan Longoria launched a game-winning shot in Tampa Bay.

Have Boston fans started grumbling that Yankees manager Joe Girardi doomed their wicked awesome team by not inserting savior Mariano Rivera on the hill? If so, they haven’t read the script. The put-upon Sawks thought that their legacy of heartbreak had been repudiated in 2004. But no! The bloody ankles and tomahawk choppers join the 1951 Dodgers, the 1964 Phillies, the 1969 Cubs and the Metropolitans (pick a year) in the line of folding furniture that litters the baseball firmament like the empty collapsible chairs at the end of a wedding reception as the band is packing up to go.

What’s more remarkable is that even though our beloved St. Louie ball club managed to catch and surpass the lost continent of Atlantans, we identify more with the losers than the odds-beating winners. Just as we always felt sorry for the hare in Aesop’s fable. To have everything going for you and still come up short must mean there is more going on in the cosmos than simpletons like homo sapiens can fathom. The mills of the gods grind exceedingly slow but very fine.

How else to explain the heroics of light-hitting Dan Johnson. Why, the fellow doesn’t even qualify as wielding a banjo at the plate. Nevertheless, down to the last strike for the Rays, Johnson smote the spheroid out of the Trop to set up teammate Longoria’s long ball in extra innings.

How many extra innings and two-strike, two-out hits do we have left in our banjoes? All death is sudden, not just in the NFL.

Here’s our World Series pick: St. Louis vs. Detroit in a replay of 1968. Cardinals win it this time in seven games. For entertainment purposes only, 100 pujols on the Redbirds at 15 to 1.