It seems like an unpopular thing to admit these days. I mean, nobody loves baseball anymore, do they? It's slow, it's boring, the overpaid players are juiced up six ways from Sunday on every chemical under the sun designed to build up bulk and fuel 'roid rages from here to Barry Bonds's locker stall. But I don't care.
I love baseball!
This passion of mine towards the great American pastime is, admittedly, a relatively recent turn of events. Great events in baseball's history seem to gain and lose its fans through the course of history. Baseball was king in the United States for much of the 20th century, until the lure of the NFL's new championship game, the Superbowl, was too much for sports fans to ignore upon the creation of the Superbowl in 1967. It's a shame, as some of the greatest teams in Major League Baseball history played during that era, teams like the three-time champion Oakland A's and the "Big Red Machine", the Cincinnati Reds.
Baseball slowly rebuilt its fan base, despite the 1981 season being chopped up due to a player strike. The 1986 World Series, or, more accurately, the bottom half of the ninth inning of Game 6 of that series, played between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox, was such an incredible moment in sports history. I vaguely remember the Toronto Blue Jays winning the American League East Pennant in 1985, but it was that conclusion of Game 6 in 1986 that sparked my interest in the sport. This was, of course, the infamous Bill Buckner play, where Mookie Wilson's harmless ground ball dribbled through Buckner's legs at first base, enabling Ray Knight to score from second base, giving the Mets a 6-5 win. That tied the series at 3-3, and the Mets won the series two nights later, but who remembers that?
I spent my childhood and....um....part of my adulthood building baseball parks out of Lego and re-enacting the Buckner play on my brick infested field of dreams. When the Blue Jays won those back-to-back World Series in 1992 and 1993, even the most steadfast of baseball decriers stood up and cheered. That sentiment ended with a thud for pretty much everyone I knew when a players' strike cancelled the 1994 World Series, a series that most of the country seemed convinced the Montreal Expos would win. (People forget that the New York Yankees were also enjoying their best season in years, and would have provided more than a stiff challenge for the Expos).
I didn't hate baseball after the strike, but I did become indifferent. Sure, I watched the World Series every year, on and off, but baseball had more or less fallen off my radar. Nobody outside of four of the five boroughs of New York wanted the Yankees to go on the run that they did in the late 1990's, winning the series four times in five years. Did that keep people from truly loving the sport, including me? Possibly. Even the underdog story of the Anaheim Angels and their "rally monkey" in 2002 filled me with intense apathy.
In 2003, things changed. Both the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs were in the playoffs. This was monumental. Neither team had won anything since before the Industrial Revolution, often losing spectacularly in the process. And they both did it again. Boston imploded in their series against the hated Yankees, and the Cubs, thanks to a Buckner-esque play on the part of one of their fans, blew it against the Florida Marlins.
The Cubs incident was remarkable. It illustrated how, for some reason, an inning, a game, a season of baseball, can all be decided on one little insignificant play. The play in question on this night occurred in the 8th inning of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. The Cubs were leading the series three games to two, and were leading the Marlins 3-0 in the top of the 8th. They were five outs away from winning the series, and it looked like they would be four outs away when the Marlins' Luis Castillo hit a harmless pop fly into foul territory, where the Cubs' Moises Alou made to catch it. That's when Cubs' fan Steve Bartman, sitting in the first row of the seats along the third base line, decided that this ball was going to be the one he kept as a souvenir, and reached out to grab it, thus knocking it out of Alou's outstretched glove. Alou was furious at Bartman, and, in those one or two seconds while Alou fumed, you could just sense it - the Cubs were going to lose.
Foreshadowing is almost part and parcel in baseball. English teachers should teach foreshadowing using examples of historic baseball games, instead of tired novels from long dead authors. Maybe if they had, I would have passed English 30. Twists like the Bartman/Cubs incident are almost so profound, you'd think the games were rigged. Cue the most theatric moment in baseball history, if not all of sports history, the 2004 American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.
As long as I live, and as long as I have lived, I will have never seen a more intense, amazing, and utterly incredible moment in sports than that series. I mean, there have been some great baseball movies made (Field of Dreams, The Natural), but the Red Sox-Yankees series defied all explanation. The Red Sox, suffering from the "curse" of trading the great Babe Ruth to the Yankees back in 1918, the same year as the last Sox' championship, could only win the World Series again, it would seem, if they went through both hell and New York. And they did, losing the first three games of the series. To fully push the Sox to the point of utter desperation, the Yankees beat them 19-8 in Game 3.
And then, the magic happened. The Sox staved off elimination in both Games 4 and 5 with extra inning wins. In Game 6, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, his tendon stitched together seemingly with duct tape, as evidenced by his blood soaked sock, led the Sox to a win to tie the series at 3-3. But the Red Sox always lose, right? They always have, and even after the Sox jumped out to a 6-0 lead in Game 7, I was just waiting for the collapse to happen, but it didn't. Somehow, it didn't, and the Red Sox had vanquished the Yankees. They then went on to win the most anticlimactic World Series ever played when they swept the St. Louis Cardinals, but, in keeping with the sheer magic of baseball, won the fourth and final game on the same night as a total lunar eclipse.
We're lucky we have video footage of all this, because I wouldn't believe some old codger in a retirement home if he spun me that yarn. And that's the magic of baseball. Unlike almost every other sport, time is not the enemy. No deficit is insurmountable, and no lead is safe. Anything is possible, and it is so intense to watch. Come playoff time, the game is almost tailor made for television. There seems to be time enough for five or six extreme close-ups in between each pitch to build up the tension...and then the batter fouls the pitch away, starting the whole pressure cooker again.
I never got into the Edmonton Trappers until it was far too late, and I now regret it. It will take me a while to drum up the enthusiasm to go to Cracker Cats games on a regular basis, but I will. There is no better way to spend a lazy afternoon than sitting in the sun watching a baseball game. Baseball seems to be an acquired taste, and my appreciation for it increases with age. With the 2006 MLB season starting up, I will watch and wait for baseball's next magical moment. I shouldn't have to wait too long.
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