You only need to have a casual acquaintance with baseball mythology to realize exactly how historic an event it was that the Red Sox beat the Yankees 4-3, up from 0-3, this week.
If you like American culture, in particular American writing, you simply need to know a little bit about baseball, which is quite a chore. It's one thing to understand the enormous amounts of baseball derived idiom - but then you start reading Philip Roth and get to The Great American Novel and have to dig deeper.
The problem with that is that baseball is, as is well known by most every European, one of the most boring sports ever to get wildly popular. Games take forever and nothing really happens during the games. When I studied for half a year in Canada, I had to go to Toronto to see the Blue Jays play. This was back when they were champions in the early 90's, but as far as I recall they were reigning champions going into the great strike, and this was after the strike a good while since the last World Series, so their finest hour was a while back, and in fact in the game I went to in Toronto they sucked and lost big.