O fabulous day! The SF Giants won the World Series!

No, they did not defeat every team in the whole wide world. So why is it the World Series? After all, professional baseball is played in dozens of countries.  The sport is immensely popular in Japan and throughout Central and South America. And although Major League Baseball’s teams are from both the US and Canada, and those teams field players of various nationalities, the competition is obviously limited to North America.

Is it fair to call the championship a World Series?

Watching Wednesday’s victory parade in San Francisco, I contemplated this question and answered myself with a enthusiastic “Youbetcha!”

We baseball fans aren’t using world in the sense of planet earth. We mean our world. Our sports world. Our community. Even our family. Me, I will always have a soft spot for the Red Sox because my grandfather was a fan.

Did you hear people during the parade saying things such as, “I wish my dad had lived to see this!” The world to a baseball fan is not limited to geography. Time comes within its dimensions. That’s why Willie Mays and Willie Mac were part of the parade. They didn’t play on this World Series winning team, but are they part of the Giant’s world? Absolutely.

We constantly use words slightly skewed from their usual definitions. Are all highways high? When you cc someone on email, are you creating a carbon copy? Cheerful people can be called gay, yet so can homosexuals, even the ones who are grumpy.

It’s essentially an American baseball championship, but I’ve got no problem calling it “the World Series,”  especially not this week, when the Bay Area is the best of all possible worlds, as we celebrate the Giant’s win.