All-Star Americana in World Series

It’s America’s common denominator, the spectacle that binds.

Curiously, baseball’s best-of-seven-game World Series (which Saturday night ended in a four-game sweep for the Cincinnati Reds) never gets as much hype as that annual one-game artificial wonder, football’s Super Bowl. Yet few events are as indigenous to the contemporary United States and as nationally bonding as the Series.

There is something uniquely familial and familiar about the Series. The entire globe may be in chaos, to say nothing of the federal government and the stock market. But fall still brings that sinewy thread of continuity, the National League champion versus the American League champion.

Whereas you get the feeling that the Super Bowl was created on Madison Avenue to sell lite beer and Joe Montana, the Series is an elderly 87, born from a sport whose tradition is as interwoven with American culture as Old Glory. That recent PBS masterpiece “The Civil War” even showed photos of Union soldiers passing the time by playing ball, just as their descendants have done in military tours since.

Or if not playing the game themselves, hearing baseball on the radio and even watching it on TV.

Far, far away, the desert and Americana--sand dunes and sandlots--merged via the airwaves. That’s because the Series was available on TV and Armed Forces Radio to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Steve Futterman, a Los Angeles-based NBC/Mutual radio reporter now in Saudi Arabia, watched the first game of the Series with about 30 military personnel at a U.S. air base there.

That signified either addiction to baseball or extreme loneliness, for Series time was 3:30 a.m. Saudi time, providing a middle-of-the-night electronic wake-up call from home.

“Even a military mission thousands of miles away in the Arabian desert could not stop American troops from listening to the World Series,” Futterman reported last week on the radio. Or from watching it.

“I spent an evening with the boys watching the CBS feed that was set up by the military,” Futterman said by phone from Dhahran. “They could watch because they worked on shifts and they ended up with odd hours.”

Instead of the regular commercials in the telecast, the troops were shown video postcards from the U.S. that had been taped by CBS affiliates (including KCBS Channel 2 in Los Angeles).

Futterman had gone to the air base expecting only to get a story about watching the game with troops, but unexpected emotion surfaced when Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott opened the Series on TV by dedicating it to U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.

“They gave a huge scream and cheer inside the room when they heard that,” Futterman said. “And they were really moved by the flags the players were wearing on their uniforms (to honor the troops).”

Futterman had something else on his mind as he spoke on the phone, however, and it had nothing to do with the troops or the Middle East. In his hotel room in Dhahran, he, too, had been spending the wee hours in front of TV, watching Jose Canseco and his Oakland A’s flounder, Billy Hatcher blow huge bubbles and Chris Sabo become America’s most reluctant hero since Gary Cooper.

Far across the seas, a reporter covering gulf tensions wanted to talk baseball. “It’s been a good Series,” Futterman said before Saturday night’s finale.

Good telecasts, too.

In contrast to the Super Bowl, the Series itself usually gets a greater share of the spotlight than does the extravaganza surrounding the event. And it continued that way on CBS, whose coverage of this first Series under its $1.1-billion contract with baseball was mostly all-star, regardless of how the telecasts fared in the ratings.

Such a romantic and grandly all-American scenario the Series turned out to be: Just as the Colonials smote the mighty British more than 200 years ago, 1990 found the Cincinnati Underdogs rising up against the Oakland Godzillas. And CBS--with Jack Buck and Tim McCarver in the broadcast booth and Jim Kaat chipping in--rose to lofty heights with them.

Buck, you may recall, was upgraded before the baseball telecast season to replace the deposed Brent Musburger as CBS’ top baseball announcer. Not only was Buck’s work supremely efficient and economical, there was also something nice about having Series telecasts anchored by a white-haired 65-year-old whose baseball-announcing roots are traceable to Rochester and Columbus in the high minor leagues. That’s continuity, too. Even his name--Buck--somehow fits the game and the job.

McCarver, the former Cards’ catcher who switched from ABC after that network and NBC lost baseball to CBS and ESPN, showed that he is still the strongest baseball commentator in broadcasting. His ability to at once dissect a game, and repeatedly tell you something interesting you swear you haven’t heard before, is unrivaled in the broadcast booth. And CBS’ No. 2 team that helped work the playoffs--Kaat and Dick Stockton--is excellent, too.

Where CBS failed was around the edges, for example in only partially showing the most exciting ritual in all of baseball--the home run trot--in favor of interminable shots of crowds and the opposing tobacco-spattered dugouts. Just how and why a tobacco chaw has become standard equipment in baseball remains as much a mystery as why the chewers and spitters aren’t fined by the commissioner for conduct unbecoming a human. And to think that members of this subculture of juice-spewing wretches are role models for kids.

Well, you have to put the Series in perspective and take a world view. This one affirmed that baseball transcends geography and that, all in all, the Cincinnati Reds had a much better season than the Kremlin Reds.