Series over, election is next show

The recently concluded World Series, won by the underdog Anaheim Angels in a most inspirational manner, featured some pretty decent baseball. As well, it provided the bonus of putting on hold the news media’s fawning canonization of humorless Barry Bonds, the rival San Francisco Giants’ pre-eminent egomaniac, and that, right there, was worth staying up half the night to witness.

There were the usual number of inane baseball records tied or broken in the matchup of two long-shot wild-card teams: most home runs in a seven-game series by a left-handed batter on a Tuesday night with a full count and the wind blowing in; most consecutive close-up shots of a rookie pitcher spitting into the camera before throwing the ball; most 3-year old batboys saved from getting flattened by a baserunner while retrieving a bat from home plate.

That sort of thing.

All milestones except one were duly noted by the television and radio play-by-play guys describing the games. Pity was that the one record they overlooked pretty much said it all in terms of how things are going to hell in a handbasket in baseball as well as in the real world.

The record, set by the San Francisco Giants battery of pitcher Livan Hernandez and catcher Benito Santiago, marked the first time in World Series history that pitcher and catcher had worn matching diamond earrings and they made simply an adorable couple to behold, easily upstaging the aforementioned nouveau riche boor, Barry Bonds, and his more ostentatious dangling three-pound solid gold earrings. (Where is Cleveland Indians shortstop Omar Vizquel when we need him? When Vizquel complained that the light shining off the diamond earrings worn by Boston Red Sox batter Manny Ramirez was blinding him in the field the umpire ordered Ramirez de-earringed on the spot.)

But enough, already. We are not gathered on this early November Saturday morning to discuss World Series unisex fashion plates and trend setters. Not when we are faced on Tuesday next with our periodic trek to the polls for the completion of our appointed Election Day duties.

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Fail to exercise your responsibility to vote and you have no business whining about the outcome. Vote early and often and you can whine all you want. Not that anyone, including probably most of the people elected to office, will pay the slightest heed.

Still, it’s the right thing to do, as that mustachioed old goat in those television commercials used to advise wherein it pertained to eating oatmeal for breakfast. You really ought to make the effort, if for no other reason than to agitate the hovering partisans of the opposite party assigned to monitor the competition’s Election Day turnout. Plus you can take great pleasure, as well, in canceling the vote of that flaming screamer who lives down the street and can always be counted on to vote the wrong way.

To be sure, the temptation may be strong to vote for None Of The Above, considering the negative advertising that has dominated most top-of-the-ticket races in this particular election. But wasting your vote in such a manner would be pretty dumb, all things considered. Hold your nose, if you must, while voting for one or another of the candidates in any given matchup. But, as a ballot clerk from Down East wrote in a recent letter to the editor of this newspaper, spare us the Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck write-ins. Ballot counters have seen quite enough of that nonsense in their careers, thank you very much, she suggested. Amen, sister. This, after all, is not an election for sophomore class president back at good old Hooterville High. This is Serious Stuff.

If a late-hour statewide poll is accurate, your next governor will likely be Democrat John Baldacci; your next United States senator the incumbent Republican, Susan Collins; your 1st District Congressman the incumbent Democrat, Tom Allen; and your 2nd District congressman either Democrat Mike Michaud or Republican. Kevin Raye. Can’t say yet. Too close to call. Possibly the excessive negative advertising in both campaigns has provoked potential voters to wish a pox on the houses of both candidates.

Predictably, candidates shown to be coming up short claim the poll conducted by a Portland outfit for Maine media outfits was bogus. When one or more of them inevitably utters the clunker, “The only poll I pay attention to is the one taken on Election Day,” you may feel free to turn out the lights, because the party will be officially over.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.