Halloween baseball pain.

That chicken suit man, a favorite fun face in the Mets crowd, is the face of New York suffering when this happens.

ADDED: When things go bad for the home team in baseball, the fans often look like they are praying.

"An hour before the start of Game 1 of the World Series, the first report about the death of Royals starting pitcher Edinson Volquez’s father Daniel began circulating."

"It came courtesy of a radio station sports director in Volquez’s native Dominican Republic. Shortly afterwards it was confirmed by two ESPN Deportes reporters. But as Volquez threw the first pitch of the game, it was still unclear whether or not he actually knew about his father’s death...."

"To top it off, in the seventh inning, a trumpeter stood on the sidewalk at Waveland and Sheffield and played 'Taps.'"

"Musical arrangements — as well as the body language of dejected fans — took queues from a scoreboard that went lopsided early and completed a four-game Mets sweep of the Cubs..."

Cubs fan Scott Jastram... got a tear in his eye when, as the game concluded, fans chanted: “Let’s go Cubbies!” “I’d say 70 percent of the fans stayed to the end,” said Jastram, 48, who attended the game with Tom Pirone, a pal from New York who supports the Mets.

“I just texted a buddy back in Queens: ‘Classiest fans I’ve ever been around,’ ” Pirone said after the game.

"I have so far resisted writing 'the baseball gods' in here but now give up."

"The baseball gods don’t toy with the players, but they enjoy writing tough little S.A.T.s on the odd evening."

Writes Roger Angell, who's written about baseball for a very long time. "I’ve been watching baseball since 1930 and have never seen...." What was it that he'd never seen that broke his career long silence about the baseball gods? Perhaps you were watching the other night.

Obama's wan approval of the Cubs.

Congrats @Cubs - even @whitesox fans are rooting for you!

— President Obama (@POTUS) October 14, 2015

Wow. I can't believe a Chicagoan isn't thrilled about the Cubs. Once your favorite team is eliminated, don't you just lock on to a post-season team to love? We've adopted the Cubs from up here in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin normally regards Chicago as the enemy. By "we," I mean, Meade and me. I haven't talked to everyone. I have heard at least one person say that the Cubs winning is shaking up his world. The Cubs are supposed to be ever the losers. I'd thought, that's why it's so cool when they win at long last. (Did you notice the sign in the crowd last night that read "Party like it's 1908?" (1908 was the last time the Cubs won the World Series.)) But apparently some people want the Cubs to retain their lovable-loser vibe. It's a theme in the music of the Midwest.

Kansas City Royals...

... cartoons.

"The slide was late. The slide was high. The slide was questionably legal and arguably dirty."

"Even if you were watching it through blue-colored glasses, you had to admit that the slide was recklessly dangerous, so much that it broke another man's leg."

But after 27 years of frustration, the Dodgers will accept reckless, embrace dangerous, and so on Saturday night they uncomfortably celebrated a slide that won a game, altered a series and may have saved a season.

Writes Bill Plaschke, at the L.A. Times, presumably through blue-colored glasses.

ADDED: There's bad logic embedded in the phrase: "recklessly dangerous, so much that it broke another man's leg." A leg is not a calibrator of reckless dangerousness. A more dangerous, reckless slide might have hit a leg in a different way and not broken the leg, and a less reckless, dangerous slide might have hit in a precisely unlucky way that snaps the leg.

AND: "Blue-colored glasses? Both teams are blue," said Meade, aptly. (Too bad there's not more variety in team colors. I had a hell of a time trying to watch the Nebraska-Wisconsin game yesterday, both teams in red and white. After the game was over, and Meade switched to the Cubs game, the screen filled with a player's dark blue shirt, bathing my eyeballs with cooling relief.)

ALSO: I put up with Meade playing lots of sports on the television, and he puts up with me making an inordinate number of comments about what I like to call the "costumes."

"You are invited to the young and wonderful town of Brooklyn in 1857... watch them play their bright, sunshiny game of ball called 'base'..."

That's an ad that appeared in The New York Times on June 11, 1950, right under a review of another book about Brooklyn (called "Brooklyn Is America").



I arrived there searching the NYT archive for the word "politicize." That use of "politicize" is the older meaning — to talk about politics. It's similar to "philosophize." It's a style of talking.

I was interested in going back to the past and then, once there, seeing how they talked about their past. Brooklyn has changed a lot since 1950, 65 years ago, and back then, there was a novel that was supposed to entertain you with what Brooklyn was like a century before that, before baseball was called "baseball," and it was a game of ball called "base." Is that even right? I'm checking "Origins of baseball":
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