Reusse: Baseball’s beauty is its long, winding regular season. Make it matter. Shrink the playoffs.

Mary McGrory was an editorialist and a reporter who was part of the greatness of the Washington Post with the Graham family. She was a New Englander and avowed Red Sox fan, which wasn’t much of an issue in D.C. after Bob Short moved the expansion Washington Senators to Arlington, Texas, in 1972.

There was a McGrory column dated Oct. 26, 1986, under the headline “Baseball’s Civilizing Spirit” that opened as follows:

“I don’t know about you tonight, but I’ll be glued to the screen, watching ‘The Natural’ — unless, of course, the World Series has gone to a seventh game.

“But the real reason I would give the film, as I have learned to call a movie, my total attention is that it strikes a blow for baseball, that lovely game that I think should be America’s national sport.”

As it turned out, McGrory received an opportunity to do both — watch Robert Redford hit his explosive home run in the film on Sunday night, since the World Series had a rainout at Shea Stadium, and then watch her Red Sox get beat in Game 7 on Monday.

Sadly, McGrory died at age 85 on April 20, 2004, early in a baseball season that concluded with the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 years. She had been a three-week-old when the Red Sox won their previous title in September 1918.

A number of years after McGrory’s gentle plea to make baseball America’s official sport, she made a concession that it wasn’t going to happen with a quote that has led innumerable essays on baseball’s decline here in the 21st Century:

“Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.”

There is no state among the 50 where that is truer than in Minnesota. Even as a few teams disappear every year, we remain home to more small-town baseball teams than anywhere in the country.

The Minnesota Baseball Association held its 100th state tournament in 2023, and it seems certain to go on for few more decades, even as those “two bars, one church and a ballpark” villages become tinier.

And town baseball is definitely what we were, although not quite with today’s political acrimony.

As for current major league baseball, it could be playing a fifth game of a tied World Series and getting beat in TV viewers by the 3-6 Tennessee Titans playing the 2-7 Cleveland Browns in a Thursday night game.

We have become football: violent, strutting, abusive, wronged, impatient.

Baseball has been left far behind in a society that covets instantaneous results — from TikToking to watching a moment in an athletic contest. Almost every play in football reveals something; 70% of plays in baseball reveal nothing.

All of which brings us to a theory:

Baseball has given away any advantage in tradition it had by trying to duplicate the NFL, NBA and NHL in diminishing the importance of the regular season. And with a schedule twice as long as every other sport, that is absurd.

MLB should be celebrating this difference, not running away from it.

When the World Series was the No. 1 sports event in this country, the American League and National League champions went directly to the World Series. No prelims; golden fall days and a winner crowned before mid-October.

There was a second wave of expansion in 1969 creating best-of-five league championship series. OK, win seven games, win the World Series.

Those championship series went to best-of-seven in 1985. Now you had to win eight, as our Twins did in 1987 and 1991, finishing off those seven-gamers on Oct. 25 and Oct. 27.

OK, that was pushing it. But MLB couldn’t stop … adding a third round in what became 1995 (after the players strike finished the 1994 season on Aug. 11).

Now it would be 11 games to win a World Series. That was pushing top starting pitchers and reliable relievers to the brink, and beyond.

Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner who hates baseball, wouldn’t stop. Now there are 12 playoff teams, and two-thirds would have to win 13 games to claim a World Series.

You expect that out of the top portion of a pitching staff that just made it through six months and 162 games? Worse yet, you expect a U.S. television audience to wait three weeks through October for the World Series to start?

By then, it’s full-on football and you have bored the Hades out of fans who don’t cheer for the Yankees or Dodgers … meaning true Americans.

Do this, dummies.

Eight playoff teams: best-of-five ALDS and NLDS, best-of-five ALCS and NLCS, best-of-seven World Series, because it’s special.

Ten wins to claim a World Series, done by Oct. 25.

Major League Baseball: The Civilizing Sport Where the Regular Season Matters.