Cardinal Rules
I was rooting for the Rangers, using the "team that has gone the longest without winning" factor, for the Rangers, in fifty years of existence, have never won it. It must be dawning on their brass, though, including the grim-faced team president Nolan Ryan, that they may have inherited the Red Sox mantel. For on Thursday night, the Rangers endured the most excruciating loss in World Series history. Yes, we know about the Bill Buckner game in 1986, but at least the Red Sox were only one strike from victory in that game once, the Rangers managed to do it twice. They gave away five leads, and blew three saves.
This series will go down as one of the more entertaining in history, despite the calm of gave seven. For a while it looked like a couple of games, now afterthoughts, would register strongly in history. Game 2, in which the Rangers scored twice in the top of the ninth with the some base-running wizardry by Ian Kinsler and Elvis Andrus, prevented the Cards from going up 2-0 in the series. Game 3 was the Albert Pujols story, in which he compiled the best hitting stats for a player in any World Series game in history, going 5 for 6 with three home runs and six RBI (tying records) and 14 total bases (establishing a record). Derek Holland pitched a gem in game 4, and then came the crazy nightmare of game 5 and the inability of Tony LaRussa to properly communicate with his bullpen, with the stunning spectacle of being greeted at the mound by a different pitcher than he expected, and once again reminded us all how baseball clings to Luddite practices such as using an old-fashioned bullpen phone.
LaRussa, the resident genius of baseball (see my previous post) took a big hit after that game. Some excused the bullpen problems, and instead focused on bizarre base-running decisions, such as Pujols calling for a hit and run and then not swinging at the ball, leaving Allen Craig out to dry at second. A rain out allowed the press to fixate on these mistakes for an extra day.
But game 6 washed all that away. The game, which is certainly one of the top five in Series history, played out like a Rocky Balboa-Apollo Creed fight, which each side taking turns battering the other. Early on the game was a comedy of errors, with two pop-ups dropped and Michael Young looking like a Little Leaguer at first, but all the unearned runs balanced out and it was a 5-5 tie. A pair of back-to-back homers by Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz, plus an extra run, made it 7-4 Rangers, and it seemed that a championship would finally come to Texas.
But a home run by Craig made it 7-5, and then, in the bottom of the ninth, Neftali Perez would allow two runners on but got David Freese to his last strike. Freese then lined a ball to right. Cruz, playing too shallow, seemed to freeze on the ball, and then looked hapless trying to corral it. The play he made wasn't as nakedly awful as Buckner's 25 years ago, but it was bad enough, and almost any other decent outfielder in baseball makes the catch. Instead, Cruz futilely leaped for the ball, missed it by about two feet, and Freese had a two-run game-tying triple.
The Rangers struck back though, with Josh Hamilton hitting a God-called two run dinger. Time for another chance for the Rangers to get within one strike of a title. Darren Oliver, 41 years old, allowed two singles. After a sacrifice both runners were in scoring position. The Rangers intentionally-walked Pujols (after this series I'm joining the opinion by some, including Rob Neyer, that the intentional walk is one of the worst plays in baseball) and Lance Berkman lined a two-strike single off Scott Feldman to tie it.
Ranger fans must have been sick. One the precipice of greatness twice, the champagne being readied twice, Joe Buck reminding us all of how they started as the replacement Washington Senators and their first manager in Texas was Ted Williams. Sick. The kind of sick that scours the soul and leaves one unable to get out of bed. As Hamilton later said, God told him that he would hit a home run, He didn't tell him that the Rangers would win. God can be a sadistic bastard.
Rangers manager Ron Washington brought in the little used Mark Lowe to pitch the ninth, leaving C.J. Wilson behind and inviting second-guessing. Lowe hadn't been used in weeks, and was kind of like the Pat Darcy of this series (he, of course, was the Red who gave up Carlton Fisk's 12th-inning foul pole shot in 1975). Lowe promptly allowed Freese to hit one deep onto the centerfield berm, and a classic game was over.
It was a lot of fun the next day for sportswriters and fans to compare this game to others in the pantheon. Certainly it ranks up there with game 6 of '75, game 7 of '91 (the Morris-Smoltz classic), or the Buckner game. But baseball fans have short memories, or at least are unwilling to do the research. Even the august New York Times, in their slide show of great Series games, only went back as far as 1947, when Cookie Lavagetto broke up Bill Bevins no-hitter, forgetting about 45 previous Series. Of course, not many are left that can vividly recall game 7 of the 1924 Series, when two bad-hop grounders bounced over Giant Freddy Lindstrom's head, and the Senators came back to win in walk off fashion, and I dare say no one is alive who even saw the last game of the 1912 series, when the Red Sox won when Fred Snodgrass made his famous muff and the Giants lost. And, of course, there are no videotapes of those series. Thus, we only know what we've seen.
I rooted for the Rangers, but I enjoyed watching the Cardinals' celebration, even as I did in 2006, when they beat my beloved Tigers. St. Louis is a great baseball town, and their crowd, awash in carmine, were boisterous, appreciate and knowledgeable. Even the insufferable LaRussa looked humble being interviewed, where he provided some great inside stuff, such as Yadier Molina telling him that Chris Carpenter had plenty left in the tank, or that pitching coach Dave Duncan hung up on him when he suggested another starter besides Carpenter. I loved Carpenter giving an interview with his tow-headed daughter riding his shoulders, and David Freese accepting the MVP award with a deer in the headlights look, as if he were afraid it was a dream that he was about to awaken from.
It was a great series, it was the essence of what makes baseball great. I can't wait until next season.
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