If trend continues, don’t expect high drama in Series

BOSTON – No one has won World Series jewelry yet. The event doesn’t start until tonight.

It just feels like it’s already over.

For a variety of reasons, including the calendar and the strength of the two teams, it feels like it is already over, like it wrapped up with the Boston Red Sox’s inevitable, inexorable victory over the Cleveland Indians in the A.L. Championship Series.

This isn’t meant as a slight toward the Colorado Rockies, who have won 21 of their last 22 games, but it’s going to be hard to top the 10 days of hardball just staged between the American League’s two best teams.

Josh Beckett’s dominating victory in Game 5, combined with the early pounding of Cleveland’s Fausto Carmona in Game 6, swung a roller-coaster contest back toward the Red Sox, who have been baseball’s best team all season.

The seven-game series salvaged a postseason that otherwise has been completely devoid of drama.

Four of the other five series ended in sweeps. Before Sunday, the last win-or-go-home game was played on Oct. 2 – the one-game playoff between Colorado and San Diego for the National League’s wild-card spot.

It was no surprise that the ALCS provided so much energy. Since the playoffs were expanded from two rounds to three in 1995, the World Series has often become an anticlimax.

If the Red Sox and Rockies fail to deliver a mother lode of drama this year, they’ll be following the recent example.

Since the Los Angeles Angels got off the canvas to beat San Francisco in seven games in 2002, four World Series have produced only three games more than the minimum. Florida beat the New York Yankees in six games in ‘03, Boston swept St. Louis in ‘04, the Chicago White Sox swept Houston in ‘05 and St. Louis beat Detroit in five games in ‘06.

By contrast, six of the last 10 championship series have gone the distance. That list includes some classics: the Red Sox over the Yankees in 2004, Florida over the Chicago Cubs in ‘03, the Yankees over the Red Sox in ‘03 and St. Louis over the New York Mets in ‘06.

Those four MLB semifinals gave us the Bartman game, Endy Chavez’s are-you-kidding-me catch, the Don Zimmer-Pedro Martinez brawl and Dave Roberts’ catch-me-if-you-can steal of second base.

The six-game NLCS in 2005 had Albert Pujols driving a game-winning homer off Brad Lidge to stop Houston from clinching in Game 5; the NLCS between the same two teams in 2004 saw Jeff Suppan outpitching Roger Clemens in Game 7.

The World Series hasn’t produced that level of dramatics since the magnificent Game 7 in 2001, when Arizona rallied in the ninth inning against Mariano Rivera to stop the Yankees from winning their fourth Series in a row.

If there’s an explanation, it’s that the deeper teams play into the autumn, the more injuries and fatigue expose the cracks in teams. Despite the high stakes, it has to become tougher to stay mentally sharp, too, especially once a team has fallen into a hole.

There’s a huge difference between winning the World Series and losing it. But there’s still honor in going to the Series, so it could be that the pride of teams is more on the line in the effort to avoid losing one step short of every team’s goal.

Here’s hoping that the Rockies and Red Sox can produce a World Series worthy of two that the Red Sox played in the era of two divisions per league – that wondrous seven-game struggle with Cincinnati in 1975, when Carlton Fisk waved his game-winning homer fair, and Bill Buckner’s error in 1986, which gave the Mets a chance to start the young Dwight Gooden in Game 7.

But don’t count on it.