Red Sox Knock Off Dodgers 5-1 In Game 5 To Win National Title With Ease, World Series Magnifies Glaring Issues In Baseball [VIDEO]

The Boston Red Sox celebrated their fourth World Series title since 2004 with a 5-1 victory over the Dodgers in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

Red Sox Dominate Dodgers in Game 5, Win World Series

A series that was undeniably loaded with big names and stock with talent, however, failed to deliver a potent viewing experience, and instead raised more questions regarding the cohesiveness of these playoffs and the sport altogether.

It was evident that the Boston Red Sox of 2018 were special from the jump. Winning a cool 119 games and the biggest four games of the season in October, there will be no questions going forward about their legacy, especially considering their opponents leading up to the win. But that’s where the questions about the sport begin.

With a plethora of stars on display, (although several of them underperformed severely) and games that were destined for classic postseason games, baseball fans were instead treated to a laborious, taxing postseason and an even more mundane World Series.

If a five-game series win wasn’t telling enough, the Dodgers’ underperformed their run differential by a majors-leading ten games, meaning the talent simply laid an egg (again) in the World Series. To make matters worse, the games of the series were dreadfully long and devoid of many thrills during the long innings, a trend that preceded this series during the regular season.

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Three hours and four minutes is more than a third of the typical 9-5 shift, and its also the average length of a baseball game this season, ten minutes longer than it was at the beginning of the Wild Card era. The Sox and Dodgers managed to top that rather decidedly, with their games lasting an average of three hours and thirteen minutes. With a seven-hour, 20-minute Game three, the teams dismounted with an emphatic statement on the state of the MLB.

The numbers following Game one weren’t exactly advanced analytics, but they indicated a deficiency in the market of baseball; the opener of the Boston-Los Angeles series should have boasted explosive numbers, but instead ended up with the fourth-fewest viewers for any World Series opener on record. Regular-season fan attendance was no better: it plummeted to a 14-year low, ten million less than 2007, when attendance saw its peak.

Major League Baseball’s state of uncertainty in 2018 will continue past this season if improvements aren’t made to supplement a hemorrhaging sport ingrained in America’s quilt of culture. Baseball can’t save itself, but it has to try harder.

The Boston Red Sox are World Series champions, anyhow.