The World Series has just concluded, and some parting words at the close of yet another baseball season. I tend to follow the league throughout the year at a very surface level, looking over the standings a few times a week, catching the odd Jays or Mariners game during the week, and Sunday nights on ESPN when you’d get a good match up from different parts of the league. My interest peaks as September begins to cool down a bit and the races for the wild card heat up.
This year was no different. As September gave way to October we saw the mighty Mets crumble yet again under the pressure of, well, pressure. We watched as the upstart Tampa Bay Rays defied all odds and took the almost impossibly competitive American League East. We witnessed a surging Milwaukee club ride the coat tails of C.C. Sabathia and as Manny drove the Dodgers into the lead in the continually underperforming National League West. Overall, a very good draw of talented teams, all with good stories.
And isn’t that what the playoffs are all about? The odyssey of the underdog, of the wily old veteran making his first start, of a young fireballer come straight up from Single A to now pitch in the Big Show. The narrative is integral to the drama that surrounds each pitch, each ground ball up the middle, each towering pop fly, each out as we are carried through a game, each inning a microcosm of the greater whole, of the soul of the game. We stand and cheer as the closer stares down at the catcher, those glaring, intense eyes burning, checks the runner over his shoulder for the last time, winds up, and….STEE-RIIIICK THREE!! And then, it is all over.
We watched this autumn as Tampa Bay pushed aside a strong Chisox team, then taking a three to one games lead against Boston in the League Championship Series, seemed to fall asleep for just a moment, an inning or two, just enough time for an always powerful and never-quite-dead Red Sox team, as dangerous as a cornered badger with an ice pick, to make the greatest single-game comeback in two generations. Backs broken, the Rays went into game seven clearly underdogs again. A team full of untested youngsters, with no real experience to speak of, with their backs up pressed up against the wall facing a battle hardened club who’d most definitely been there and done that.
Baseball, like most other sports, is game that any team can win on any given night. But the nature of the game itself, the one-on-one confrontations that take place between hitters and pitchers, the thin line that even the greatest of sluggers walk when the difference between going one for three and falling flat one your face with an o-fer night at the plate is a mere fraction of a second and quarter of an inch, lends itself to huge, oppressive and explosive shifts in momentum, and so as Tampa entered the seventh and decisive game of the series, all bets had to be on the team from Beantown.
But, as the great Yoggi Berra, that Bard of Baseball, once said, “It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings.” And so it was not. The greenhorns from Florida came out swinging, with energy and flash, and made the Sox look like the tired, old men that they were. Suddenly, there was a new American League champ, and neither New York and Boston was anywhere to be seen.
In the National League, we saw a resurgent Dodgers team, a veritable roster of all-stars headed by the legendary Joe Torri of Yankee lore and backed by the Bad Boy of Baseball, the man who need only be introduced by one name, Manny. Up against another powerhouse, the David to New York’s Goliath, the Philadelphia Phillies were backed by outstanding pitching, from front to back, from starters to a perfect(!) closer, and an offense not to turn your back on lest they pull out a shive and shank you from behind like some sort of jailhouse assassin. (They are from Philadelphia as you know!)
Los Angeles’ starters wilted under the lights and the offense, Manny, who hit over five hundred in the series, excluded, chose golf over the World Series, and good riddance! An ignominious end to a truly underperfoming team from the most disrespected, and rightly so, division in professional baseball.
And so the Phillies were through. The Phillies, who in their one hundred and thirty year record as a franchise had won ONE World Series, that back in 1980, and had only been to the finals once since to face a glorious defeat at the hands of the almighty Blue Jays in ‘93. All you Canucks fans, you somewhat lovable duffusses who continually grip about the losing tradition here in Vancouver, please shut it! Baseball has far greater tales of woe and defeat than you can every, however cleverly, craft from the thirty or so lowly years of incompetence.
The Phillies were up against a Tampa Bay team that had the worst record in baseball last year, who’d spent the past seven years of their forgettable existence at or near the bottom of not only their division, but of the entire league.
Oh, the Drama. What a story.
The World Series started off in Tampa as the American League had won the AllStar game in July. You see, as some cleverly engineered ploy to make the Allstar game relevant (but truly, why need it be relevant?) the league that wins this game of beer-soaked slowpitch, gets homefield advantage, and so Brad Lidge, the perfect reliever, the Phillie Phenom, came in to close the Allstar game with the National league ahead for the first time in living memory. He proceeded to blow his only save of the year (a stat not recorded in the records, because as I stated before, the game is however hard they try to make it meaningful, essentially meaningless…or why else would they not count stats from that game), and so, the American League, with its dastardly Designated Hitter, was once again the Home Team.
Tropicana Field, so eloquently named after a brand, nonetheless tasty, of orange juice is a covered dome, a throwback to the rage that swept through sports in general to disconnect the game from it roots, to sanitize and basically kill the spirit of sport itself on the alter of “perfect” conditions, to remove Mother Nature and essentially the variables of weather from the equation, and to have athletes play on cement as opposed to grass and dirt. The world, or at least those of us who watch The World Series, witnessed the blistering power and speed of B.J. Upton in centre field for Tampa, one of the most relaxed and flowing centre fielders in the game, reminiscent of a younger Devon White as he floats back on a soaring fly ball, nonchalantly, and effortlessly tracking down and almost lazily catching balls that no one had right to catch. The defense of the Tampa infield with the cat-like Longoria on third and that wily Japanese import, Iwamura on second was spectacular, ranging this way and that, knocking down screamers up the middle to make impossible double plays. And on the bases, speed, unprecedented, with the Rays stealing far more bases than any team in history.
Philadelphia offered its own swagger. Although, we weren’t witness to the hitting prowess of the Phillies until they returned home to Citizens Bank Park(?), they somehow managed, however self-defeatingly to push over at least a couple of runs. We left Tampa with a split, and the stage was set for a showdown in the City of Brotherly Love.
Coming alive at home, the Phillies’ were finally able to hit with runners in scoringposition after having gone something like two for forty on previous nights, and no matter what the young Rays did, the Phillie bested them by at least one in the next three games. A highlight was when the forty-two year old Jamie Moyer, beaten like the proverbial dead horse in his previous post season starts, made his first World Series appearance and proceeded to throw 82 mph fastballs and 79 mph breaking balls with such grace and perfection that all the Rays batters could do was tip their hat to the old man, and wander on back to the dugout.
And, their bullpen did not disappoint. With a regular season undefeated record when winning going into the ninth, the Phillies bullpen was again perfect, and Lidge, that drunken Allstar, did not blemish his pristine record as closer.
Just before embarking on this exercise in descriptive writing, a stat appeared on the tv screen in which seventy percent of respondents believed this was the most unfulfilling World Series ever, but I wonder why this was so. We had two teams with extraordinary power and skill, two teams known for futility, two teams of relative unknowns showing the way forward in Baseball. While both teams relied on the long ball to score many of their runs, there was an awesome display of speed and ingenuity on the base paths, with some very creative play calling; there was even a squeeze play!! Fuck ya! A squeeze play! This was the new face of baseball, post steroid scandal, post Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, post Yankees and Bosox steamrollers. The most unsatisfying World Series ever was last year, a four game sweep by Boston against a sleepy team from Colorado in which it was never even close. This year, almost every game was close, and while it went only the now regulation five games, I think that Baseball, professionally, is entering a new era and has the new heroes to prove it.
And so we bid farewell to yet another year of the Great American Pastime, and look forward fondly to the spring when yet again that wonderful sound of wood meeting leather, of roaring crowds, the smell of fresh cut lawns and hotdogs, return and we can, for at least a few hours forget our worries, sit back, grab an overpriced beer, and strike up a casual conversation with the stranger next to us about that bum behind the plate and how he can’t even catch a curve ball.
Remember, Baseball is not only, if not even primarily, about the action on the field. It involves a whole orbit of stories and characters, of pasts and futures, of disappointment (see Cubs fans) and failures. Baseball is a game of statistics. But more importantly, baseball is a game of drama. It is slow enough that even the drunk can follow along, but complex enough to keep the sober thinking about what’s next, and gives you a chance to fully absorb the totality of the game itself, not just the homerun, touchdown, or breakaway.
