As a reborn sports fan — well, baseball fan — I’m now making like a color commentator, thinking back to the time that so-and-so did a similar thing decades ago. OK, so I do that on all subjects. But now I’m doing it with sports, or A sport, which indicates it’s really become a part of me.
It happened last night. Did you see the Red Sox game last night? Well, you should have. If you missed it, you can read about it in The Boston Globe this morning. They based their main game story on this one play that sparked the memory for me.
(By the way, yes: You can actually read this story about something that happened last night in the actual paper this morning. Like in the legendary days of newspapers. This is one of the things I love about The Globe. It’s why, after ending my subscription recently under various pecuniary pressures, I signed back up almost immediately when they offered me another sweet deal, bless them. I can now return to watching the game before I go to bed at night, and reading excellent analysis of it at breakfast when I get up. What a fascinating modern age we live in.)
What happened is this: I had been watching the game some time before dinner, and things were looking good. I think the Sox were ahead of Cleveland something like 4-1. When my iPad informed me at the table that the score was now 7-7 in the eighth, I got right up and went back to the game. I saw an inning and a half of excellent baseball.
But the main thing was this one play in the bottom of the eighth. Not a homerun, but a true baseball play, the kind worth remembering.
Here’s what happened:
There were 2 outs. The go-ahead run, Curaçaoan outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela, was on third. This was the Sox’s chance to go ahead and chalk up a win. But obviously a sacrifice fly wouldn’t bring in that run, with two outs. Alex Bregman, 31, steps up and hits with “the worst swing I took all night,” but pulls a grounder down the line. The Cleveland third-baseman has to lunge toward the line and snag it just as it’s getting by him, then somehow overcome his momentum to turn back for a long throw to first.
Meanwhile, Bregman is chugging. He knows he’s not exactly pinch-runner material at any time, and especially since his quad injury that put him out for a while in the last couple of months. Manager Alex Cora is quite frank with him about his lack of speed. But he knows the stakes, and he pushes with all he’s got, risking that quad.
And he makes it, and Rafaela goes home, and it’s 8-7. Before the inning ends, three more runs are scored, which might minimize the moment in your mind if you’re just looking at the final score. But those extra runs wouldn’t have come if Bregman had not beat out the throw to first. (Here’s video, although I couldn’t find an embed code.)
So of course, I immediately thought of The Slide — slowpoke 1st-baseman Sid Bream’s miraculous run home, just barely beating out Barry Bonds’ throw to the plate, in that instant winning the 1992 pennant for the Braves (you know, that team the MLB won’t let me watch any more). That night, Bream was a year older than Bregman is now.
OK, the stakes weren’t quite as high, but it felt a lot the same to me last night. And don’t dismiss it. It’s September, and that sprint to 1st kept the Sox a hair’s fraction behind the Yankees. They’re both 2.5 games from catching Toronto and leading the AL East (New York is a statistically behind Boston because while the Sox have won one more game, they’ve also lost one more; I don’t know what the Yankees have been doing instead of playing ball games). This is no time to be dropping one to Cleveland just because the usually infallible Garrett Crochet is having a bad night.
So that’s why Bregman ran so fast…
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I was driving into work and on the sports segment of the news, it was mentioned that Carlos Santana hit a home run. I emailed the radio station:
Oye Cómo Va. I didn’t know that Carlos Santana also played baseball.
He should stop. He could easily mess up his fingers doing that. And then where would we be? A guitarist has to keep his fingers healthy and nimble…
As for the Cubs’ first baseman, he should keep playing ball. I see he’s hit 335 home runs since 2010, and he won a Golden Glove last year with Cleveland…
Of course, after 15 years in the bigs, he’s close to having to stop himself. He’s 39, and not everyone can do what my wife’s cousin did — play in the MLB in four decades….
Guitarists can go on and on. Not so with ballplayers, alas…
Bream’s slide in the 1992 NLCS was one of those moments I remember perfectly. I was 11 years old and beginning my love affair with baseball. That was a great game. The Blue Jays went on to beat the Braves in the World Series that year, but man that NLCS was epic.
I went to the first game of that series. It was historic in one small respect: It was the first World Series game in history at which the Canadian national anthem was played.
Another minor detail about the experience to me (and only me) — outside there were Atlanta newspaper racks (the Constitution, I suppose) with coverage of the series, and the rack cards on the machines proclaimed, “WORLD SERIOUS.”
That means that somebody in the Circulation or Marketing divisions at that paper was a fan of Ring Lardner. Either that, or someone thought of it on his or her own, and thought it was original.
Either way, that evocation of Jack Keefe was fun to see…
Beyond that, there was the game itself, which was special because it is to date the only World Series game I’ve ever attended in person. Atlanta won, I’m happy to say. Never mind how the rest of the series came out…
You know, the internet knows nothing about those rack cards. When I search for “1992 ‘world serious”,’ I get nothing at all.
You’d think someone who was there would have mentioned it in a blog or something at some point over 33 years.
So that tiny thing fades, and exists only as a shared joke between whoever wrote it and me…
Of course, it worked at the time for people who knew nothing of Lardner, as a statement that hosting a Wolrd Series game was an important deal in Atlanta. I’m sure most people perceived the card that way…
Can you imagine the Conservatives (whatever that means these days) having to endure the Canadian National Anthem at the World Series this year on national television? That is after Trump has damaged the special relationship we’ve had with Canada?
Trump would be posting about how “their awful anthem” should never be played.
Good Christian Conservatives would suddenly be agreeing with Trump and attacking Canada as communist
Some Conservatives (like one that almost never posts on here anymore but did above) would be posting on X about some Democrat somewhere instead of calling out Donald Trump.
But in baseball we won’t have to worry about that this year.
Well, actually… The Toronto team is leading the AL East, and is a shoo-in to represent the division for the pennant, unless the Yankees or the Red Sox can knock them out of that position.
At this point, I would add a carefully reasoned assessment of the “wild card” process and how that means the Blue Jays are NOT a shoo-in, but I don’t understand the wild-card process. Maybe someone else can jump in and help us with that.
Which reminds me, I want to recommend a book: Summer of ’49, by David Halberstam. It’s about the monumental pennant race between the Red Sox and the Yankees that year, with Joe DiMaggio playing for the Yankees and his brother Dom with the Red Sox. It’s a great evocation of the heyday of baseball, when the team with the most victories in the league won the pennant, period.
We don’t have that anymore, and we’re not going back to it. The several-level playoffs going through October make so much money for the MLB, and even I am hooked on the excitement of those games.
And you still have to do well during the season to get a shot at those playoffs. And that speaks to the reason, as I’ve explained before, that I love baseball and do NOT love football. Baseball is about life, and it develops character. As in real life, you have to get up every day and go out and do your best, and sometimes you’re gonna win, and quite frequently you’re going to lose, and you have to learn to work your way through the pain of those defeats and keep going. In football, you are expected to be perfect. You are expected to win all your games to have a good shot at a championship. And even if you achieve that, you can lose it all in one game — not a series, but ONE game — as if none of that excellence and hard work mattered.
I don’t hold with that. You’ve gotta keep plugging, and baseball players do that, pretty much every day…
And when I say you have to learn how to deal with losing and still go on to succeed in baseball, I mean you have to lose at LOT. The best teams in the Major Leagues lose more than a third of their games in a season. Right now, the Milwaukee Brewers have the very best percentage in the MLB: .605. That means that so far they’ve lost 58 games this year. That’s almost five times the total of games football teams even PLAY in a season.
Toronto, which is three games ahead of the Yankees AND Red Sox, has a percentage of .572.
If you have access to it, there will be some great baseball to watch this weekend: The Red Sox begin a three-game series against the Yankees tomorrow night. Not exactly the same as Summer of ’49, but the closest thing to it we’re likely to see this regular season…
I was in Atlanta for a game earlier this season against San Diego.
it was easy to see how good Manny Machado is by simply watching him on the field. HUGE ARM. Incredible player.