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This year’s baseball playoffs lasted the minimum number of days – the World Series, obviously, couldn’t have ended any earlier – and consisted of 28 games, only four above the minimum of 24. Moments of high drama, like Yadier Molina’s home run last year or Dave Roberts’ stolen base in 2004, were few and far between. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t plenty for us to absorb on our path to baseball education nirvana. Herewith, a list of the nine lessons — one per inning — the 2007 baseball postseason taught us.

1.The Cubs, Phillies and Angels were in the playoffs. Seriously, they were. You might not have noticed, but let the historical record show they were there, however briefly. Don’t expect their fans to purchase many 2007 postseason videos, unless they hate themselves. That is to say, only the Phillies fans will.

2.Canadian Soldiers are a type of bug. We found out later that the nasty critters that took up residence on the neck fat of rookie reliever Joba Chamberlain, perhaps costing the Yankees a pivotal Game 2 victory, were “midges” rather than “Canadian Soldiers,” the bugs that usually plague Jacobs Field in Cleveland. The unleashing of insects on unsuspecting road opponents is one I hope becomes commonplace in major league baseball; it certainly would make Devil Rays games more compelling. It is worth noting that one of the final images of Alex Rodriguez in a Yankees uniform is of him doingthis.

3.Manny Ramirez is not paid to talk. If you were interviewing, say, a 10-year-old piano prodigy, you would not ask his (or her) thoughts on quasars and asteroid belts. So why, then, do reporters continue to ask Manny Ramirez about anything other than hitting a baseball? It’s clear that worldly pursuits outside the realm of pounding baseballs deep into the Yawkey night are helplessly foreign to Manny; they only serve to confuse him. If Manny Ramirez one day claims that Queen Elizabeth is actually an eight-foot-tall African warlord who can juggle chainsaws with her feet, it’s probably best to just nod along with him,Yes, Manny, I understand, then turn off the tape recorder and enjoy the show.

So here’s a question: is it better to win your championship in the most dramatic, unlikely fashion imaginable, or to dominate so comprehensively that the final pitch is an anticlimactic afterthought? Should a World Series title be won with a period, or an exclamation point? Do you want the last out to be a release, or a simple coronation?

This might seem like asking a billionaire whether it’s more fun to buy his first yacht or his sixth one, but when the World Series has ended in a sweep for the third time in four years, it is one of the few questions left to ask. As a Cardinals fan, I can tell you that I’ll always remember Adam Wainwright’s strikeout of Carlos Beltran to win the NLCS last season more vividly than his strikeout of Brandon Inge to win the World Series. The former was with the bases loaded in Game 7; the other was in a more comfortable Game 5. They were both euphoric, but one steered away from the precipice; the other confirmed what we had already suspected. There’s a difference.

The Red Sox have now won two World Series in four years, both of which were on the opposing team’s field. (The last time they won one at home was in 1918, in front of 15,238 fans. I suspect there were few pink hats.) In this way, the Red Sox keep winning too quickly. One doubts fans mind all that much. And I guarantee those charged with policing Fenway Park don’t mind.

The contrast between last night’s title and 2004’s title is palpable . . . and probably irrelevant. The major difference will be that the Red Sox fans in your office today will be hungover, bleary-eyed and very likely sporting a Mike Lowell tattoo above their left eye, but they will be in the office. In 2004, they probably took a week off and returned still screaming, and likely naked.

This is progress, as far as it goes. Boston fans know how this feels now; the glory is rapturous, but familiar. It’s always nice when glory is familiar; it doesn’t happen often.

The Rockies finally gave their fans something to cheer about last night. Sure, they still lost 10-5 to the Red Sox and are now one game from elimination at the hands of a team that would by then have won seven in a row . . . but hey, sometimes, in the postseason, you have to take your tiny victories where you can get them.

This postseason has featured four series sweeps and appears on the verge of five, which is a shame; a playoffs sweep is deflating to anyone who doesn’t happen to be a fan of the winning team.

One of baseball’s charms is its inherent parity; more than in any other sport, the worst team has a reasonable chance to beat the best team on any given day. Excellence is mostly determined over a span of time, and the small sample size of one game, three games, five games or seven should theoretically allow for random madness.

No matter how good a team is, a sweep is – and should be – an anomaly. You cheer for your team for six months, watching the occasional meaningless August tilt out of loyalty and habit, and are rewarded with the intensity of the postseason. Suddenly, every game is vital. To then see your team swept aside, casually and cruelly, is against the natural order of the universe.

A sweep in baseball requires a certain amount of luck. This makes sweeps all the more frustrating; when your team is in the midst of being swept, the world is conspiring against you. Though you have watched them succeed all season, prosper in stressful situations and emerge victorious, suddenly, everything is collapsing around you, and it almost seems planned.

When your team is swept in the World Series, it’s legitimately embarrassing; you want to grab the attention of the rest of the baseball planet and scream, “No, seriously, they were good this year! You can’t tell it now, but they were! I don’t know what’s going on, either!”

As a Cardinals fan, I remember this vividly the last time the Red Sox were in the World Series, when Boston tossed aside a St. Louis team that had won 105 games in the regular season and had just outlasted an Astros team in the best postseason series I’d ever seen.

In this space earlier this week, I referred to Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling as “likable.” This was obviously a joke, albeit a poorly rendered one; of all the adjectives one might use to describe Schilling, “likable” would rank down there with “svelte,” “shy” and “Japanese.”

This sounds harsher than I mean it; in an age of cliché-spouting automatons, Schilling’s self-aggrandizing instincts are a splash of cool air. Well, if you could make cool air from hot gas.

The word “blowhard” would seem to have been invented for Schilling . . . and I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult, either. Earlier this season, Baltimore announcer Gary Thorne claimed, on live television, that Schilling painted on the famous “bloody sock” as a “PR move.”

Schilling vehemently denied it, and it’s almost certainly not true, but to anyone who has ever heard Schilling talk, itsounded true. Schilling isn’t an expert in his own myth-making – most people see through his act – but he certainly thinks he is. To Schilling, the rest of the planet is a supporting character in the ongoing legend of Curt Schilling. This makes him incredibly entertaining, and kind of charming.

One almost expects Schilling to start selling a monorail. He is a throwback to the days of players personally attempting to manipulate media members – rather than having publicity wizards (or Scott Boras) do it – into spreading the word of their own heroism.

About a year ago, Schilling actually emailed me after I had written a short piece joking about his “naturally self-effacing manner.” I had never met him, and I’m pretty sure I never will, yet he still felt compelled to spend 1,200 words of energy to defend himself to this nameless Internet dork with no influence and no real axe to grind in the first place.

He didn’t convince me, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t impressed and amazed. Schilling is the type of guy who will tell someone with a camera that steroids are ruining the beautiful game he loves, and then, when he’s called before Congress to testify on that very issue just two months later, will clam up and says that baseball has made “great strides” in fixing the problem. (At least he didn’t claim he couldn’t speak English.)

I once wrote an article for a magazine aboutballpark etiquette, do’s and don’ts for fans when they headed to the ballpark. Some rules were helpful (wait until between innings to take your seat), some weren’t (you can’t slap children, even when they’re kicking your chair all game). But the No. 1, most important rule: never leave a game early.

It’s my father’s signature maxim and has been the founding principle, perhaps the organizing tenet, of the Leitch family structure. It doesn’t matter how well things are going — or how much they’re falling apart — you always follow everything through to the end. If you’re succeeding, you can never let up until you are certain the job is done. If you’re failing (particularly when you’re failing in a dramatic, definitive fashion), you pay attention to what you’re doing wrong so it won’t happen again.

Leaving early implies that you’ve learned all you need to learn, which is never, ever true. You can teach a kid a lot through baseball, even if your kid never learns to hit a curve ball.

I suspect that even my father might have had trouble with Game 1 of the World Series, though, mercifully, he’s not a Rockies fan. By the fifth inning, the Red Sox had their 13-1 lead, but the game lurched on, zombie-like, to its conclusion three-and-a-half hours after first pitch.

Three-and-a-half hours is a long time to sit through a game that was decided an hour-and-a-half in, particularly on a school night. After a certain point, even the Red Sox faithful in the stands, many of whom had paid upwards of $1,000 for their tickets, looked ready for the gruesomeness to end. If it were a fight, the doctor not only would have stopped it, but the losing boxer would have already been on the flight home by the time last night’s debacle ended.

The World Series hasn’t been close in a while. Over the last three, the losing team has won only one game, the infamous Kenny Rogers smudge-gate. (Last year we had smudge-gate; this year, midge-gate. I’m classifying this as progress.) It’s a bit early to dismiss hopes that this year’s Series will be a tense, seven-game spine-wrecker. But signs are ominous.

The World Series has one clear advantage over the Super Bowl, its main competition as the premier American sports spectacle: the focus is entirely on the games themselves. The Super Bowl, on the other hand, is so focused on the casual observer just dropping in for his or her yearly dabbling in the world of large sweaty men that the actual on-field action is secondary; it’s the only piece of cultural entertainment we have in which people leave the room during the event and sprint back in to watch the commercials.

In the World Series, the game itself is the star – if you can actually stay up late enough to finish watching one. And unlike football, the participants are up close and personal; prepare yourself for extreme-high-definition close-ups of Jonathan Papelbon’s nose hair. You’re going to be closer to some Red Sox and Rockies over the next week than you will be to members of your own family; the only way you won’t know them is in the Biblical sense.

Here’s a guide to the key personalities who will invade your homes for the next 7-10 days.

Manny Ramirez. The Red Sox’s resident space cadet is proof that the act of hitting a baseball – which he does better than almost anyone else on the planet – requires such single-minded determination that you don’t really have much mental space to be able to do anything else. Ramirez is as smart a baseball player as he is a doofus at normal human activities. When they say “Manny Being Manny,” what they mean is “Manny is An Alien Life Form Unfamiliar With the Mores and Vagaries of Earth.” Someday he’s going hit a game-winning grand slam and, when he flips his helmet off to run the bases, it will be revealed that he has antennae, and these antennae are draped in a feather boa.

Jonathan Papelbon. Much has been made of the Red Sox closer’s intense, intimidating glare toward home plate, but his Scary Angry Closer face is belied by the fact that he’s a complete goofball off the field. The 26-year-old Louisiana native is nearly as famous for his postgame celebrations, which have includeddoing the Riverdance andpouring beer on the American League championship trophy. It reminds one of Cardinals outfielder Chris Duncan, who, after winning the World Series last year, apparently attempted to copulate with the Commissioner’s Trophy.

Through it all, almost every Red Sox fan I’ve ever met has just wanted to be normal.

I’m not talking about the bandwagon jumpers of the last few years, the so-called “Pink Hat” fans who think Luis Tiant is the name of an ocean liner, treat Yawkey Way merely as a place to meet particularly inebriated coeds and totally understand how Jimmy Fallon feels, man.

I’m talking about the lifers, the ones who have surrendered their summer New England nights to the rhythms of Troy O’Leary and Lou Merloni. These are not fans who ever believed in the stupid “Curse of the Bambino” or held the fatalistic notion that their team was some sort of doomed stepsister of history. They were not interested in dopey, staged promotions like “President of Red Sox Nation.” They grimaced when Ben Affleck, Tim Russert and Renee Zellweger started showing up at games and giving between-innings interviews. None of that ever meant anything to them. They just wanted to watch their team win, because that’s what fans do.

The history of the Boston Red Sox has always been so fraught with high-minded, scholarly dissertations on what the Red Sox “mean” that the pure joy of being a fan of the best team in baseball has almost been lost. I suspect last night’s Game 7 victory over the Indians, clinching the Red Sox’ second World Series trip in four years, will help change that.

Red Sox fans have taken to calling the 2007 season “The Possible Dream,” as opposed to the unofficial “Impossible Dream” moniker of 1967. This is telling; the Red Sox are no longer the scrappy underdogs attempting to overcome the evil empire of the Yankees. They are no longer measured by their relation to a rival, or to history. They are simply the most well-run, successful franchise in baseball right now, a team that wins through heart, determination and relentless talent.

The truest fans do not care about anything but their team winning; another World Series victory wouldn’t erase the memories of 2004 (not that anyone would want it to), but it will be one final step to finally burying that overblown classification of a condemned franchise. The Red Sox will simply be champions, and that will be more than enough.

Red Sox fans don’t have to be participants in some sort of Greek tragedy anymore. Being a fan is not a three-act play. To win via magic is glorious. To win via sustained, lasting dominance is sublime. The Red Sox might win the World Series, and they might not, but now they’re just another outstanding baseball team, rather than epic heroes in some sort of Sisyphean quest.

They’re a great baseball team. This is what real Red Sox fans have wanted all along.

J.D. Drew made his major league debut on September 8, 1998, playing left field for the St. Louis Cardinals. Drew had been hyped as one of the best five-tool prospects scouts had seen in years, but his unveiling was hardly the biggest news of the night; two innings before Drew’s first at-bat, Mark McGwire hit his 62nd homer of the season, breaking Roger Maris’s record. Drew could have stripped naked as he walked to the plate and it’s possible no one would have noticed.

In the nine years since, Drew has played for four teams. He is disliked by five.

It’s difficult to find much that unites the divergent fanbases of the Cardinals, Braves, Dodgers, Red Sox and Phillies (who drafted him but with whom he refused to sign), but they can all agree on a mutual disdain for J.D. Drew. My fellow Cardinals fans, friendly and affable to a fault, are prone to cheering excellent defensive plays by opposing players, but when Drew comes to Busch Stadium, he is booed.

I can only remember one other player – other than Barry Bonds, of course, for whom booing is a contractual obligation once you buy your ticket – being booed at Busch Stadium: Garry Templeton, whom the Cardinals traded for Ozzie Smith after he made an obscene hand gesture to the crowd and then tried to fight manager Whitey Herzog. He couldn’t have raised the ire of Cardinals fans more if he had tried to grill Fredbird.

It’s strange to think of just how unpopular Drew is with baseball fans; Drew’s offenses are far less sinister than attacking managers. He’s hardly the Terrell Owens type; he’s a quiet, reserved, devout Christian, polite in interviews and notoriously camera-shy. Drew’s actually had a pretty solid career, too; his lifetime slugging percentage is dramatically better than Derek Jeter’s, .500 to .462.

He also is blessed with as beautiful a swing as you’ll ever see; he clearly was born to be a ballplayer. If you hadn’t watched baseball in a decade and then turned on a Red Sox game, and someone asked you to point out the player on the field most despised by fans, Drew would likely be the last guy you’d pick.

About 94 seconds after his team had staved off elimination by beating the Cleveland Indians 7-1 in front of a suddenly sparse Jacobs Field crowd, Red Sox first baseman Kevin Youkilis, the pride of Jewish Midwesterners everywhere, did his best to quell any tendencies toward mass suicide. This was awfully sweet of him.

Interviewed by Peter Gammons on ESPN Radio, Youkilis said (and I’m paraphrasing here), essentially,Our fans can come back from off the bridge now. Such are the extremes of the postseason. It’s not enough for fans to be sad if their team loses; a real fan realizes self-immolation is the only rational reaction to the cold winter that comes with defeat.

Last night, Josh Beckett helped put the razors and sleeping pills away, for a little while. Beckett is becoming a serious postseason legend, with four consecutive postseason wins and a general air of quiet, confident menace. If he could somehow figure out a way to bloody a piece of his equipment while clinching a Game 7 victory, his ridiculous soul patch goatee could replace the hated pink hats as the next Fenway Park fashion trend. And not only did his dominance secure at least one more day of New England baseball, he erased a wave of bad feeling that threatened to destroy everything his team had worked for all season.

It had been a stressful 40 hours in Red Sox Nation. Not only was the team on the precipice of seasonal extinction, but dingbat slugger Manny Ramirez had committed the one sin baseball fans cannot forgive: he’d implied that he didn’t care whether his team won or not.

When the gaggle of media folk talk about the integrity of baseball and the true threats to the great game, the usual suspects are gambling and steroids. But the average fan has, at this point, mostly made his or her peace with those.

Anyone who gambles on their sport is an anomaly to be dealt with fiercely. Anyone who doesn’t do steroids is a similar anomaly, to be dealt with by not being offered a multi-year contract. We’ve been through the wringer on both issues, and whatever our thoughts on the degrees of each offense, we accept them as mostly out of our control and just hopeour favorite player isn’t involved. We can handle that type of scandal; the last decade has opened our eyes.

If there has been one motif to this postseason so far, it’s that when your team looks like they’re done … they are.

Think back to the truly great postseason series of the last few seasons. The 2001 Diamondbacks-Yankees World Series. The 2002 Angels-Giants World Series. The 2003 Cubs-Marlins NLCS. The 2003 Red Sox-Yankees ALCS. The 2004 Cardinals-Astros NLCS. (Truly, the best series I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it was going on as the same time as the epic 2004 Red Sox-Yankees series, which means no one had any idea the Cardinals and Astros were playing.) The 2006 Cardinals-Mets NLCS. Each one of the losing teams in these series felt, at one point, that they had victory firmly in hand. The series winners were vaunted for their ability to peer over the precipice and return, triumphant. By the end of these series, we were collectively wrung out; postseason baseball seems to have the unique ability to make us believe that seismic shifts can occur every minute, and we react accordingly.

This has not been a problem this postseason, and, save for that Cardinals-Mets series last year – which, until the decisive Game 7, had been sloppily played by both sides — it hasn’t been a problem for a couple of years now. The White Sox cruised to the World Series title in 2005, losing just one postseason game, and the Tigers’ amusing pratfalls last October led to an easy Cardinals victory as well. I hesitate to say this, considering these are columns about playoff baseball, but we’re in danger of our third comparatively dull postseason in a row.

I say this because last night, in their most important game since winning the World Series, the Red Sox showed all the life of beached dolphin. In their offseason nightmares, Red Sox fans will see the 11th inning of Game 2 and the fifth inning of Game 4 on an endless loop. (While taking a test naked and being chased by a snake in a vest.) The Cleveland Indians, with their measured and sustained four-game bashings of both the Yankees and the Red Sox, have, hopefully, laid waste to the notion that teams do not beat the Big East Coast Powers as much as those Powers allow themselves to be beaten. If you believe the Red Sox or Yankees are legitimately better than the Indians, and are merely “choking” in the clutch or some such nonsense, you haven’t been watching.

One of the more sublime and lasting pleasures of following a Major League Baseball franchise is looking forward to your young stars of tomorrow. As much fun as it might be to speculate on your team’s offseason free agent signings, nothing can quite match the excitement of watching a rookie grow up from an undisciplined raw talent to a linchpin of decades to come. We Cardinals fans saw this with Albert Pujols; out of nowhere, a man-child was dropped into our laps. He was unexpected, he was revelatory and he was ours, and only ours. One feels honored to be part of the fan base to introduce such a talent to the world.

Boston’s Daisuke Matsuzaka broke this mold in a way that seems unnatural. He was ushered into the major leagues shrouded in mystery, a man who once threw 250 pitches in a game and who came armed with a brand new pitch — the “gyroball” — that no one had seen and that was sold to us as if it had been brewed up in the same Japanese lab that produced Godzilla. Few, if any, baseball fans had even seen him pitch, but before you knew it he’d been signed for $52 million (the Red Sox ponied up $51 million just for the right to talk to him).

He was followed by media of every language and persuasion throughout spring training and featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Much of this interest revolved around the gyroball; we were all entranced by the idea of a secret pitch that, supposedly, no one could hit. It was a magic pitch, and he was a magic pitcher. Even if the most avid Red Sox loyalists had absolutely no idea who Daisuke Matsuzaka was. It was like having a stranger move into your home because people you don’t know have told you he’s a great cook; even if that’s true, man, you better hope you like the same foods.

This is not to imply that Dice-K was a bad signing for the Red Sox, but it’s clear at this point that the anticipation far exceeded what was coming. Matsuzaka has been an above-average pitcher this season and was decent Monday night, but for nearly $102 million, Red Sox fans expect a right bit more than decent. Cleveland starter Jake Westbrook made $6.1 million this season, and though his relentless sinkerballing has less mystery than the gyroball – which, it turns out, is a pitch Matsuzaka hasn’t thrown in months – it caused so many double plays last night that I think I hit into one.

We are in the midst of a stretch of, frankly, rather dull World Series. The losing team over the last four years has won a total of three games — two for the Yankees in 2003 and one for the Tigers last year — and the outcomes never seemed remotely in doubt. The casual fan, or even a fan without an inherent rooting interest, might find this a disappointment. Marlins, Red Sox, White Sox and Cardinals fans have a different opinion.

Last year’s 4-1 Cardinals win over the Tigers was sloppily played, a series decided more by the inability of Detroit pitchers to throw the ball to first base than the clutch hitting of stars Albert Pujols and Jim Edmonds. The series was muddy and ugly, with sleet, freezing temperatures and few moments of high drama.

Unless, of course, you were a Cardinals fan like me.

For the winning fans, no moment in the postseason is anything other than electric. I was at the decisive Game 5 with my parents last year, and though you at home might have turned the game off in the seventh inning, believing the outcome to be assured, we Cardinals fans were gnashing our teeth until the very last out, when, of course, we exploded into an orgy of joy, jubilation and Anheuser Busch products.

It is all a matter of perspective. When you’re in the middle of it, and every fiber of your happiness rests on each pitch, no lead is safe and nothing is assured. Before Game 5 last year, a friend asked me what the ideal outcome would be — what would make the most dramatic, historic impact? I told him I wanted the Cardinals to score 15 runs in the first inning and the Tigers to subsequently forfeit. It might not have been much for FOX’s ratings, but that’s their problem; I just wanted a title. I got it, and the 2006 World Series remains the most fun I’ve ever had as a baseball fan. I know that if you’re not a Cardinals fan you feel otherwise. You’re right, and so am I.

The 11th inning of last night’s/this morning’s — heavens, is this thingstill going on? — Indians’ victory over the Red Sox was gruesome for Boston fans, but even for those of us without a particular rooting interest, it was just as grisly.

Imagine for a moment that you, a lifelong Red Sox fan eager to see your beloved nine in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series, decided that you and your son, a spritely sort eager to share the New England passion with his father, absolutely had to have second row dugout seats. You hop on eBay, and you findthis pair for the bargain price of $1,500. (This is not a World Series game, or even a deciding ALCS contest; it’s just Game 2.) You decide to plunk down the cash; postseason baseball is a rarity and hey, the kid’s so excited, and what’s a second mortgage when you’re trying to keep your child happy?

You stand, jaw agape, as one of the most charged, back-and-forth games of this postseason unfolds, with Manny Ramirez continuing his October rampage, Jonathan Papelbon sprinting and screaming off the mound after zipping through his second inning of dominant work and, amazingly, David Ortiz beating out a play at first base. (At that point — only the fifth inning, but still later than your kid has stayed up since he was colicky — Red Sox fans must have assumed they were already hallucinating.) You have watched a five-hour game, and your reward, along with the 40,000 other devoted and sleepy fans, is obviously pending, any minute now.

And then Eric Gagne comes in for the 11th inning, and suddenly the Indians have scored seven runs. You stayed up that long and paid that much … only to be handed a soulless battering about the head and neck. Hopefully your son fell asleep in the seventh.

Watching the faces of young Red Sox fans, loyally hanging in until 1:30 only to be treated to the comedic stylings of Gagne, was like seeing the family dog attack and devour a group of cute baby rabbits. Talk about a lack of return on investment; it’s difficult to imagine aworse way to drop $1,500. You just spent a grand and a half to be accused of child abuse by obnoxious, equally tired fans sitting on their couches at home, wondering how you could do this to your child. I’d say those families are in serious danger of missing church today.

Depending on your theology, Colorado Rockies fans can either thank The Magic Humidor for their amazing run of the last month, or God. One is a container for cigars or other preparations of tobacco, fitted with means for keeping the tobacco suitably moist. The other is the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe. You make the call.

For a team that was born just two and a half months after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, the Rockies have gone through a seemingly endless cycle of incarnations; they have tried everything. The pinball machine that is Coors Field has proven more confusing than exciting; the game played in Denver is a different one than the one played anywhere else. They tried packing their lineup with sluggers. They tried stacking their rotation with sinkerballers. Masochists may recall the curious “eight gentlemen who often forget their bat on the way to the plate” period of a couple of years ago. The Colorado Rockies have been trying to figure out how to play baseball for a decade-plus, and until September of this year, one wondered if they were farther away than when they started.

And then came the humidor. In 2002, in an effort to make the experience at Coors Field no longer resemble a baseball game played on the moon, the team began storing baseballs in a humidor so they would no longer dry up and travel farther in the Mile High air. The result was immediate: home runs dropped dramatically, which might have made the games less entertaining to the plebeians but at least allowed the Rockies to build a team that, finally, played the same sport as the rest of the planet. It took a while, but the Rockies are now vaguely normal. This makes a difference.

Or, you know, it’s just that God cares more about the Rockies, as general manager Dan O’Dowd famously implied in an interview last year, emphasizing the team’s Christian-based approach to roster construction and locker room etiquette. If you play for the Rockies, you are not allowed to have a Playboy in your locker. (Because that’s what we all should be doing: encouraging baseball players to read less.) We are learning now, after one game of the NLCS, that the Diamondbacks are as sinful as the Phillies were. They have only their hedonistic lifestyles to blame, far more than Jeff Francis’ curveball.

During the 2007 Major League Baseball season, the 30 franchises brought in 79.5 million fans, an all-time high. Of those 79.5 million people, 71.9 million of them attended games at stadiums other than Fenway Park, Coors Field, Jacobs Field and Chase Field, the home parks of the four remaining playoff teams. That adds up to a heckuva lot of people left with no rabid rooting interest from here on out.

Sure, you could try to appreciate and absorb each League Championship Series on a purely intellectual, aesthetic level, and let the beauties of the national pastime wash over you, reveling in Americana, poetic rhythms and the beauty of a well-placed grounder to the second baseman. But what’s the fun in that? Who are you, George Will? No, we need someone topullfor. The glories of sports are not in their grays, only black and white. If my team wins, I am happy. If they lose, I am sad.

So, who’s your team? If you can’t decide, perhaps I can be of some assistance.As we did with college basketball’s Sweet 16, I herewith present the Right-Thinking, Good-Hearted, Pure-of-Spirit Human Being’s Guide to Whom to Root for in the League Championship Series.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Arizona Diamondbacks vs. Colorado Rockies

Arizona
The Case For: The Rockies beat the Diamondbacks in their first ever game, way back in the halcyon days of 1998; clearly, this defeat still burns the Diamondbacks’ collective bellies. First baseman Conor Jackson’s dad is an actor on “J.A.G.” Left fielder Eric Byrnes resembles a young Brendan Fraser in the Oscar-winning “Encino Man.”

The Case Against: Beat the Yankees in the 2001 World Series, a series in which, if you believe that silly “Nine Innings from Ground Zero” movie, all we New Yorkers were counting on to serve as the fulcrum of our healing experience. Therefore, the Diamondbacks hate America. In 10 years of existence, the D-Backs have been to the playoffs four times and won a World Series. In the last 53 years, the Chicago Cubs, whom the D-Backs swept in the NLDS, have been to the playoffs five times, without so much as a World Series appearance. You know how Cubs fans talk about their grandparents going their lifetimes without a championship? Arizona fans won’t be able to say this until 2077. Their general manager is 35 and therefore a constant reminder that you have wasted your life. If a Diamondback stings you, you will die.