Pain and Baseball
Ah, so it finally happened again. The zombie corpse of Kirk Gibson has arisen from a traffic and smog filled L.A. cemetary to haunt baseball once more, this time coming in the form of Albert Pujols.
I watched the conclusion of Game 5 the other night, and it was the kind of drama that makes baseball (and sports in general) so exciting. You can't sit there and say "Eh, seen it before" or "Oh, this plot is soooooo predictable." There is no plot. Just the sight of David Ecksteins slapping a ball into leftfield with two strikes and two outs. In Houston, I'm sure it looked more like the wheels coming off a big-rig at 80 mph. Then the walk to Edmonds. The big-rig is now jack-knifing. And then Pujols hit the gigantic-est homerun I have seen since Jose Canseco's moon-shot in the Skydome during the '89 ALCS. The big-rig is now engulfed in flames, rolling end-over-end, crushing all in its path.
And the stadium went silent.
And somewhere in Houston, a 9-year-old's childhood ended. Replaced with the pain and suffering that come with your team's failure on an epic scale. It's one thing to be bad year-in and year-out. But to get so close and then to fail so spectacularly can mean only one thing: God hates you. Not dislikes. Hates.
And I know. I can still vividly remember the arc of that ball off of Kirk Gibson's bat. I can remember my little 9-year-old heart hoping and praying that it would land harmlessly in Canseco's glove. But instead, it landed 20 rows up in the rightfield bleachers. And the A's lost the Series right there and then. There was no coming back. And it continued to haunt them - even their win the next year was tainted by the earthquake and Gibson.
Gibson!!!
They haulted that motherfucker out the ICU and put him right onto the field, didn't they? He was on crutches, bandaged head-to-toe, barely able to lift his arms. His homerun can be explained only by steroids, bionics, and a corked bat. I can't be the only one who remembers his bat exploding in a shower of cork and superballs, can I? Others remember the spent syringes falling from his pockets as he rounded second base, right? I mean, I shit you not, the man had to be rebooted at home plate.
That's who we got beat by. So I totally understand, Astros fans, if you're sitting around thinking "Best hitter in the game, sure, but you mean we got beat by a guy named Poo Holes? What the fuck?"
4 comments:
A lot of White Sox fans hoped that somehow we could find a way to get Frank Thomas healthy enough to have a Kirk Gibson moment in the series, but it seems like it's not to be. That's ok, because we're in the series and nothing can upset me. Also, your wife is the best person in the whole wide world, in case you didn't know.
I should probably point out that you deserve to be smacked for the line "And it continued to haunt them - even their win the next year was tainted by the earthquake and Gibson." How many teams in baseball would do anything for a World Series win, "tainted" or no? It's like the annoying person on WhiteSoxInteractive complaining because he got Club Level tickets for the World Series instead of Lower Deck. Did he expect sympathy?
If the White Sox won the World Series, but Chicago burned down, don't you think that would *sorta* take the fun out of it? My point is that the one year the A's won, it was totally overshadowed by a far more important real-life event, which made celebrating impossible.
If they had won in '88 (or '90, for that matter), there would have been a victory parade and much rejoicing throughout the Bay Area. But winning in '89, against the Giants and in the shadow of the earthquake, meant that there were a handful of lower-case "yays" and then everyone forgot.
Bah, fire doesn't bother me, as long as we win. No real-life event is more important than your team winning the World Series!
Anyway, Oakland won plenty in the 70s, decades after we last won the series (*), so no sympathy here. Besides, it would be tained in retrospect anyway, being that the whole team was on steroids.
(*) - I originaly typed "last won anything", but, wow, that's not true anymore. If we win the championship this year, I might just explode.
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