Last month, we saw the World Series and another set of debates in the presidential election.

In the World Series, fair-minded umpires let the players play. They called balls and strikes the way they saw them. The best team won.

In the debates, the umpires cheated. Under the guise of moderators, they didn’t just call the balls and strikes — they delivered the pitches. They delivered pitch after pitch for the Democrats and called strike after strike against the Republicans.

And those pitches were not just any kind of pitch. Not confident of their ability to get fastballs past the Republican candidates, the moderators doctored the ball by smearing their questions with bias and smirk. They threw spitballs.

Their goal was not to ask hard policy questions that might inform viewers as to which GOP candidate would be the best president. It was to name-call them, mock them and strike them out.

In contrast, the moderators in the one Dem debate served up not spitballs but softballs, and invited the Dem candidates to participate in a home-run derby.

The moderators assumed they would get away with bending the rules because they always had.

And so in a scene right out of a Saturday Night Live skit, one “question” early in the Republican debate compared a candidate who is a successful businessman to a comic book villain.

Another “question” was directed to the Republican candidate who currently leads the polls. To the media’s annoyance, he doesn’t fit their comic book image of Republicans because he’d been the African-American head of pediatric neurosurgery at the country’s leading medical school. In a snarky effort to chain him back onto the Dem plantation, the moderator asked him whether he was able to do math.

And so it went. Biased moderators taunted conservatives under bright lights with insults prepared by group-thinking drones in their blandly liberal newsrooms who treasure diversity so long as it falls within the spectrum that ranges from moderately leftish to outright Maoist.

Even the rest of the media thought it was a sorry spectacle of unprofessionalism. Major League organizations such as The Washington Post and The New York Times cried foul.

It looked like the moderators would nonetheless get away with it, as they always do. But then a funny thing happened.

A candidate called them out on it. The candidate was one who, like the black former pediatric neurosurgeon, doesn’t fit the media’s caricature of Republicans.

He started life as the son of a Hispanic immigrant. He graduated from Princeton and then Harvard Law School magna cum laude. His liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz called him “off-the-charts brilliant.” He served as a clerk to the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, worked as a Supreme Court appellate lawyer and was elected a United States senator.

His name is Ted Cruz, and he’s a natural. He wasn’t about to be shut out by a Little League journo major. So when the next spitter came at him, high and inside, he was ready.

With the perfect recall and consummate skill of the Supreme Court advocate that he is, Cruz first methodically recapped the previous half hour: “You look at the questions — ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’”

And then he whacked the question right back at the moderator, where it ripped him a new one on its way over the center-field fence: “How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”

The crowd erupted. The moderators cowered. Debates will never be the same.

As the moderator dusted himself off and tried to interrupt, Cruz stated calmly but definitively: “I’m not done.”

He then declared to the world what everyone knew about these media morons but had avoided saying for fear of incurring even more of their bias: “Nobody believes that the moderators have any intention of voting in a Republican primary.”

He’s right. The moderators are in the bag for the Dems. And it’s been that way for a long time. Over two-thirds of leading reporters voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan. Three-quarters of them voted for Michael Dukakis over George Bush Sr. Nine-tenths of them voted for Bill Clinton over Bush Sr. More than 80 percent of the White House Press Corp votes Dem.

Now the charade is over. Ted Cruz stood up to the liberal establishment — he stood up to The Man — and that changes things forever.

In the eyes of the public it’s supposed to serve, the liberal media has now become its own comic book caricature. They aren’t seen as players or umpires. They’re seen as what they are — ridiculous mascots cheering for one team and against the other.

(Published Nov. 8, 2015 in the Aspen Times at http://www.aspentimes.com/opinion/18929569-113/beaton-the-liberal-media-gets-crushed)