(Wade Austin Ellis/Unsplash)

For more than 20 years, WSIU Reading Baseball commentator Pete Peterson has been offering us season’s greetings just before Christmas.

This year, Pete tells us how baseball delivered an early Christmas present in the way teams played the game during the playoffs and World Series.

Reading Baseball is a series of essays and commentaries by Richard “Pete” Peterson, co-author with his son Stephen, of The Slide: Leyland, Bonds and the Star-Crossed Pittsburgh Pirates and the editor of The St. Louis Baseball Reader.