One writer’s plan to rescue baseball from itself

On Saturday night, Oct. 25, my husband managed to pry me away from the second game of the World Series to see a movie at a local funplex. In each of the cavernous bars, there was a massive square of four giant televisions, all tuned to various sports games. Perhaps not surprisingly, in a city dominated by a state university, nearly all were college football games. Not one of them was showing the World Series, which featured the Toronto Blue Jays taking on baseball’s reigning champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Shocked as I was — “It’s the bloody World Series!” I wanted to scream — I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Long gone are the sellout baseball games of my childhood, when I sat behind the Cincinnati Reds dugout at Riverfront Stadium (RIP) alongside my father with glove, ball a