Facebook vs. Google

The World Series starts tonight, and I'm oddly not really interested. This despite the prospect of a very good series; both of these teams are very good and there's little to separate them. They are both the league leaders in wins, which means they would have been in the Series even in the old days, when there were no playoffs.

Once my team, the Detroit Tigers, is out, I usually shift to another team to root for. Often it's the American League, but it might be a team that is a decided underdog (I'm a good bleeding heart liberal, after all), or a team that hasn't won in years. But this year, it's a tough call, because both of these teams have little to inspire my allegiance.

Once upon a time, comedian Joe E. Lewis said rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel. Well, neither the Yankees nor U.S. Steel are in the position they once were. Instead, it's corporations like Facebook and Google that dominate the business world, and teams like the Red Sox and Cardinals that dominate baseball. Each of them has won two titles in the last ten years, and one of them will be the first to win three this century.

Both of them also have insufferable fan bases, the kind of fans who think their team does things "the right way." That they are right is beside the point. Red Sox fans used to be the tortured poets of New England, the kind that wouldn't root for the Yankees because that would be too easy, and rooting for a perennial loser was the flinty thing to do. Now, they have become monsters, the kid who loses some weight and whose acne clears up, and is all of sudden dating beautiful girls and spurning his former nerd friends.

Cardinal fans are a different story. They are the kind of fans who have a kind of baseball purity that they think is special. St. Louis is a great baseball town, and these are devoted fans, but they can get awfully self-righteous about it. They are that family down the street that are so perfect you can't help but hope they suffer some sort of tragedy, like a flesh-eating virus.

So, Facebook vs. Google, who do you root for? I honestly don't know. I suppose the Red Sox have more personality, if only because of those god-awful mountain man beards. It's hard to hate David Ortiz, Dustin Pedroia is kind of a throwback player, and they have bounced back quickly from the Bobby Valentine nightmare season. So I guess I'll root for them.

I have even less idea who will win. Both teams are well balanced, but I think Boston has an edge. They have a better lineup and a deeper pitching staff. The key player may be Koji Uehara, who looks as dominant a relief pitcher as anyone since, well, Mariano Rivera. If the Cards are going to win, they'd better get a lead. I'll pick the Sox in seven.