BCB After Dark: Pick the Fall Classic

It’s another Tuesday evening here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We are so glad to see you stop by this evening. If you were cheering for Arizona, come in and celebrate. If you wanted Philadelphia, commiserate with friends. There are still a few good tables available. There’s no cover charge. Bring your own beverage.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

Tonight we didn’t get a great Game 7, but we got a pretty good one as the Diamondbacks topped the Phillies, 4-2 to win their first National League pennant since 2001. I feel really bad for Philadelphia fans, who have had a rough run of results in the playoffs in several different sports over the past year. But I was mildly cheering for Arizona, and a lot of that was simply because I had several Diamondbacks on my fantasy team, including Ketel Marte and Corbin Carroll. So this past season, when the Cubs game was over I would often flip on the D-Backs game and I grew to really appreciate this team. I hope some of you have come to appreciate them this postseason like I have.

Last night I asked you who was the Cubs MVP for the 2023 season. I hope all of you got a chance to vote as the site was down for several hours today. If you were frustrated by that, trust me, we were a lot more frustrated than you were.

But among those of you who got your votes in, there was a clear winner. With 61 percent of the vote, you picked Cody Bellinger as the Cubs’ Most Valuable Player. Justin Steele was second with 24 percent.

On Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I don’t normally do a movie essay. But if site problems (or just a lack of time) prevented you from looking at what I wrote about the 1960 horror movie Eyes Without a Face, you can go back and look at that tonight and comment on it here if you wish. But I always have time for jazz so if you want to skip that, you can do so now. You won’t hurt my feelings.

Continuing with our Halloween-themed jazz, we have Anita O’Day and the Oscar Peterson Quartet performing “Old Devil Moon.”

Welcome back to everyone who skips all that jazz.

Tonight we have two questions and they’re both easy ones. With the World Series set and ready for Game 1 on Friday, I’m just going to ask you “Who will win?” and “Who are you cheering for?”

Who is going to win? I don’t know. I suspect that the Rangers are the better team and if you made me chose, I’d pick them. (I normally don’t vote in these polls except to break ties. Also sometimes I give a player at the bottom of the poll a pity vote. But I haven’t done that for some time.)

But I’m cheering for Arizona. As I wrote earlier, I had several Diamondbacks on my Fantasy team and while the postseason clearly doesn’t count (the title has already been awarded and I finished 3rd out of 10) I did really enjoy watching this D-Backs team play this year. I suppose that if I had a lot of Rangers on my team, I might be cheering for them. I also would have been disqualified since this was an NL-only league.

So who is going to win the 2023 World Series? (Also, thank God MLB doesn’t do that pretentious Roman numeral stuff that the NFL does. I guess this would be World Series CXIX in that case. And no one would know what that meant.)

And

Thanks for stopping in this evening. I hope you found it as enjoyable to be here as we did to have you here. If you checked anything, give us your ticket and we’ll retrieve it. Recycle any cans or bottles you may have brought. Get home safely. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.