The Moment

Major League Baseball executives must have been crying into their beers after the Red Sox and the Dodgers both failed to make the World Series. Instead of a marquee matchup featuring two of the most storied franchises in the game, baseball has the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies. That would be 2007's worst team in baseball vs. a franchise that recently lost its 10,000th game. The sound you hear is the country flipping the channel en masse to America's Next Top Model.

It makes sense though. Amid market turmoil, job losses, a discredited Administration and foreign policy meltdown, what could be a better symbol for our depressed and divided nation? Two legendarily awful clubs from economically hurting swing states, battling it out for the championship of a past-its-prime sport while the rest of us watch football highlights. Philadelphia--my city--hasn't won a championship of any kind for 25 years, a record for a four-sport town. Tampa Bay has a shorter history of woe, but this is a city (well, technically, a body of water) whose football team, the Buccaneers, lost the first 26 games of its existence. If history is any indicator, neither team will win: the Rays and the Phillies will be swept from the field in a freak hurricane, and Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz will have a home-run derby to decide the title, as Abner Doubleday no doubt would have intended.

So this is the World Series we deserve, if not the one we want. Both Philadelphia and Tampa have done their time enduring bad teams and worse luck. But for the rest of the country, idly wondering where the Yankees are, there's a lesson to be had. If Tampa Bay can survive the indignity of changing its name from the Devil Rays to exorcise the stink of failure, and Philadelphia can bounce back from the shame of losing the 1993 World Series to Canadians, there's promise for our subprime nation. Rooting for these teams represents the triumph of hope over experience--and that's as American as baseball.