Thankfully, there is still the World Series to keep Minnesota sports fans entertained for another week. That’s not completely true, because the Minnesota Wild have finally started to score a few goals, and they could save a lot of Minnesotans from spending a long, hard winter lamenting the horrible seasons for both the Twins and the Vikings.

The Twins were inept at the end of the season and face major rebuilding. The Vikings have been awful, and climaxed it by playing perhaps the worst game in franchise history Monday night, when they lost 23-7 to the previously winless New York Giants. Hiring Josh Freeman to crowd the quarterback scene already filled by Christian Ponder and Matt Cassels might have been a good move, but playing him all the way agains the Giants was a study in ineptitude by the coaching staff, as well as Freeman himself.

Because he hasn’t had time to learn the whole playbook, Freeman was limited to offensive plays that were more primitive than you drew up in the sand as kids in a neighborhood touch football game. The Giants, bad as they are, had little trouble solving the Vikings, who scored their only touchdown on a long kick return while their offense was shut out. Freeman, for his part, must have kept repeating “go long” in the huddle, and then he threw it longer. He threw it so far over the receivers’ heads and hands several times that I accused him of “Tarvarising” under pressure, in honor of former QB Tarvaris Jackson, who would get a receiver open and then fire the ball into Row 4, Section 103.
  
When the best coach in the county at that game was Jon Gruden, who was in the broadcast booth, you had to appreciate when he said, at the start of the second half, that the Vikings would clearly put Ponder in, just so they could execute some of their playbook and overcome a seriously vulnerable Giants team. But no, Leslie Frazier chose to keep Freeman in there all the way.

All three Vikings quarterbacks might be able to do the job and turn the team into a winner, but not this way, not right now, when none of the three looks impressive. And after losing to the previously-winless Giants all the Vikings have to do this weekend is face the Green Bay Packers. THEY’LL take it easy on the lads. But, the World Series can be the perfect diversion. We’ve all heard the claims about how starting pitching is the most important element a winning baseball team can have, and it makes great sense. Hitting, defense and pitching are all there is to baseball, and while good hitting is always fun to watch, good pitching beats good hitting any day.

Consider, however, that in the league championship series, nobody had pitching to match the Detroit Tigers. Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, and Anibel Sanchez all are artists on a pitching mound, and after the travails of the Minnesota Twins and their dearth of starting pitching, we could only imagine how much better things would be for the Twins if they had pitching like that, and how far away from being a contender they are because they don’t.
By the same token, the Los Angeles Dodgers appeared to have a clear pitching edge in the National League final over the St. Louis Cardinals, who have had injuries and other problems to the point where they went into the playoffs with six rookie pitchers on their staff.

So what happens? The Boston Red Sox were reduced to pop-gun hitters by those great Tiger starters, but after getting shut out and no-hit for six to eight innings, game after game, the Red Sox just waited for the bullpen door to swing open, then smacked the Boston relief pitcher around and won the best-of-seven series in six games. I was honestly hoping for Detroit to win Game 6 behind Scherzer so that we could see a Game 7 with Verlander on the mound.
Scherzer did a great job, as expected, but when Jim Leyland removed him after a couple guys got on, and Boston promptly won against the relievers. The Red Sox were the reverse. Their starters weren’t as heralded, but pitched well, and their relief pitching was outstanding. It was sad that Leyland decided to retire after eight years managing the Tigers. During the games, you could see on the many TBS closeups that his mind was whirling at high-RPM efficiency every minute, but he also looked every one of 78 years. Problem is, he’s only 68! That’s what managing a team at that level can do to a man.

Meanwhile, in the National League, those young Cardinal pitchers, led by Michael Wacha, took out the Dodgers in six games. That means Detroit with its great pitching staff, and Los Angeles with its skilled pitching, will be sitting at home watching on television as the youthful Cardinals take on the well-balanced Red Sox. So what does that mean? Maybe it means we’ve all been misled by the constant hype about how starting pitching is the most important single element to baseball success. The Cardinals, with their six rookies on the staff, have proven that if a franchise has drafted wisely and is bringing along its pitchers creatively, it can completely overhaul its entire pitching staff in one season.

Of course, it helps if the rookies are like Wacha, a 6-foot-6 prize who was pitching for Texas A&M last year. He got called up and blossomed as this season went along. I think you’d call it blossoming. He had a no-hitter for 8 2/3 innings in the final game of the regular season. Then he simply didn’t allow runs through the playoffs, going undefeated with a microscopic earned-run average.

If you watch the World Series -- and why wouldn’t you? -- look also for Joe Kelly, Trevor Rosenthal, Carlos Martinez, Kevin Siergrist, and Sera Maness. those are the other rookies on the Cardinal staff. Rosenthal, the closer, hits 100 mph with his fastball; Martinez was taken in the 41st round of the amateur draft; Siegrist has an 0.43 earned run average. That sort of thing. And Adam Wainright, who is not a rookie but is hardly a grizzled veteran, won 19 games as the staff ace. Perhaps the best thing about this World Series is that Boston and St. Louis are probably the best two baseball cities in the country. You’ll feel the energy, even through the television screen.