Baseball is one of those Grand Old Traditions

Baseball is one of those Grand Old Traditions, like the gold standard or segregated water fountains, whose popular decline is matched by a corresponding surge in allegorical weight. It's a kind of balancing act: as the general public acclimates itself to the sped-up, branding frenzy of football and basketball, a small but diverse cadre of intellectual desperadoes labors to keep the spirit of Cooperstown alive. 

Stephen Jay Gould recasts Dimaggio's streak as the Cambrian Explosion of the hardball era. David Halberstam tethers the '64 World Series to the Civil Rights Act of that year. George Will campaigns to add Cal Ripken's receded hairline to Mt. Rushmore. Sure, it's a formidable bunch as far as IQs go, but they're not exactly the sort you'd want batting cleanup for you down the September stretch. And don't even get us started on Kevin Costner.

Still, the emergence of the highbrow bleacher seat -- where Ken Burns plays left field, and a teary-eyed Bob Costas is the stadium announcer -- shouldn't discourage other quests for "social metaphors" in the national pastime. One unlikely place to start might be the usually sports-averse front page of Monday's Wall Street Journal, where four management consultants provided the color commentary for the Journal's Series coverage. The result was a lesson in both the inane platitudes of new-age capitalism, and the mixed signals of WSJ irony.

"Name the business buzzword -- restructuring, teamwork, empowerment, risk-taking, skill-based pay -- and the consultants found at least one ballpark comparison for each," staff reporter Timothy Schellhardt wrote. Like most of the Journal's forays into pop culture, the article seemed deliberately crafted to baffle the irony detectors of its readership. (It's such a thin line between tongue-in-cheek and cheek-and-gum.)

Was Schellhardt dissing the corporate gurus, with their touchy-feely businesspeak, or the Pat Riley figures, coaches who have parlayed their courtside manner into Fortune 500 lecture tours? Or was it a jab at the Goulds and the Wills and the Halberstams of the world, endlessly fashioning the sport in the image of their respective disciplines?

Or was, god forbid, the allegory intended to be taken with a straight face? Consider Maureen O'Brien's ruminations on the collision between two Braves outfielders in Game Five:

Of course, it's not a Journal piece without the requisite dig at the antitrust division: "Few similarities escaped the consultants," Schellhardt explained. "The umpires, for example, were analogous to government regulators." For those of you scoring at home, this makes Bill Gates the Roberto Alomar of the information age. (You spit on the authorities time and time again, and all you get are more at-bats in the post-season.)

As it turns out, though, the World Series generated a handful of more plausible "strong readings." There were the public redemption stories: the institution of baseball revitalized after its post-strike malaise. There were the personal redemptions of Gooden, Strawberry, and Cone: the wayward former Mets, carryovers from the dangerous highs of Manhattan's go-go eighties, now healthy and fighting the good fight for a safer, more suburbanized New York.

The Series could also been seen as a clash between two media epochs. The Yankees represented the old regime of centralized, East Coast broadcasting. The classic Bronx Bombers -- the teams of Ruth, Dimaggio, and Mantle -- coincided perfectly with the half-century dominance of Manhattan-based networks: radio and television scattering their signals from the Big Apple out across the heartland.

The Braves, on the other hand, are a dynasty of the Cable Era: a small-market team projected onto a national stage by the vanity channel of Turner Broadcasting: Atlanta's formerly local station, WTBS.

That's one reason why it made sense that Fox -- itself the unholy offspring of old-style network and cable panoply -- won the right to broadcast the Series. Knowing Rupert Murdoch's personal animus towards Braves owner Ted Turner, and knowing Murdoch's penchant for meddling with the editorial of his "content providers," it was heartening to see the Fox crew refrain from libelous references to Hanoi Jane or Terrible Ted's Zoloft habit.

In fact, the media's obsession with the Turner-Murdoch feud suggested nothing so much as a Dick-Morris-style triangulation strategy in which the Braves struggle against both the Yankee's deep bench and the Aussie aggressions of the Fox Network. No wonder Joe Torre's team fared so well in the Deep South this series. They had the medium working in their favor.

In all this interpretive frenzy, you might ask, where was the rising star of cyberspace? On the sidelines, for the most part. Despite the prodigious hit counts of ESPN Sportzone, the world of professional athletics -- like the world of Presidential campaigns -- remains under the sway of television. But there was hope on the horizon, literally. Hovering above Yankee Stadium for game six of the Series was the newly christened "Alta Vista" blimp,

promoting the popular Web search engine. In terms of audience reach, the blimp made sense as a media buy, given Fox's ratings for the week. But what with the market "correction" in net-related stocks over the past month, it was hard not to think of another blimp that once floated, years ago, over the canyons of Wall Street. We assume Alta Vista was aiming for associations of Goodyear reliability, "where the rubber meets the road on the infohighway." Too bad we kept thinking of the Hindenburg instead.