THE FRONT ROW with Steve Cameron

“Baseball must be a great game to survive the fools who run it.”

Bill Terry

Hall of Famer

1941

The World Series starts tonight and I want to be excited.

I really do.

Think about the match-up: Here are the Cleveland Indians, who haven’t won this thing since 1948, facing off against the nation’s most famous lovable losers, the Chicago Cubs.

The Cubbies haven’t BEEN to the Series since 1945, and haven’t won it in 108 years.

No one alive has seen the Cubs hugging on the mound and then hoisting America’s most famous sports trophy.

As a guy who covered Major League Baseball for more two decades, who really, really gets it – and who, by the way, was in the midst of Kansas City’s madness when 800,000 people celebrated a Series title last year — I should be just quivering with anticipation for this World Series.

BUT I can’t, not entirely.

Oh, yeah, I’ll break down and my baseball DNA probably will force me to get interested.

Yet I can’t truly enjoy all this because the people who run this amazing sport, as Bill Terry put it so eloquently 75 years ago, are buffoons.

I mean, here you have a collision involving the two best teams in baseball, representing franchises who are starving for a title.

Yet as soon as you try thinking about strengths and match-ups on the field, you immediately run into the fact that this sport — for some totally idiotic reason — is played by two sets of rules.

So when the Series opens this evening in Cleveland, both teams will adhere to American League rules and use a designated hitter instead of the pitcher.

When the scene shifts to Chicago, it becomes National League regs and the pitchers must hit, as they did for about a century throughout all of baseball -- until the American League adopted the foolish, comical DH in 1972.

Why?

So paying fans could see more runs scored.

Imagine the Super Bowl, with the first half played with the usual 11 players on a side per NFL rules, and then switching to Canadian Football League rules in the second half?

Nuts, right?

BUT THE silliness doesn’t stop there.

Both the Cubs and Indians will be relying this Series on one of baseball’s most critical commodities, a shut-down closer to pitch the ninth inning and finish off a victory.

Chicago wheels out flame-throwing Aroldis Chapman (who regularly reaches 102 mph or more with his electric fastball), while Cleveland can counter with Andrew Miller, whose assortment of unhittable pitches made him the sport’s best closer this season.

What’s the problem, you ask?

Well, neither Chapman nor Miller were pitching for these teams for a good part of the year. In fact, they were teammates with the New York Yankees.

Chapman and Miller were acquired in mid-season trades, deals in which Cleveland and the Cubs gave up boatloads of young prospects to the Yanks, who have instantly rebuilt an aging team.

It’s crazy.

I was rooting for my hometown Royals a year ago, but honestly, I felt a little guilty because the Royals did the same thing — selling off a whole lot of their best minor-league prospects for pitcher Johnny Cueto and utility star Ben Zobrist.

Both were about to be free agents, so the Royals essentially rented them for two months and the postseason.

YES, IT worked, in terms of winning a World Series.

But now Cueto is flinging it for the San Francisco Giants and Zobrist... well, you can see him tonight, playing left field for the Cubs.

The issue isn’t whether or not teams who have ALMOST enough to win something ought to mortgage the future for a shot at glory.

No, the question is whether baseball itself should let this foolishness continue with a July 31 trade deadline.

For most of July each season, baseball stories aren’t about games or home runs or anything on the field. They’re about which teams will become buyers or sellers – like the damn sport has taken on the trappings of a late-season auction.

It’s just plain dumb, just like the designated hitter.

The people who run the sport need to get their act together, set a much, much earlier trade deadline (or none at all once the season starts), establish one set of rules for both leagues and act like this is a true major-league sport.

At the moment, it feels a little bit more like a game show.

You build up inventory in the minor leagues — in part to bring rising young stars to your club, but more often to use them as assets in case you need to shift eight or nine players with just two months left in the season.

It sounds more like something that should be handled by the U.S. Department of Commerce than anyone in baseball.

So...

Stop it.

Act like this is a real, grown-up professional sport.

Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press who covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades. Reach Steve at [email protected].