Oh God, is baseball not the greatest game ever? Yes, a month or so after giving up all hope in my Cleveland Indians' surprise season, I've rebounded to take full part in the city's second favorite pastime: taking extreme pleasure in the sports heartbreaks of other cities. You'd think nothing could top this spring's LeBron-led Miami Heat's flame out in the NBA Finals, but really, that wonderful event pales in comparison to last night's baseball goings on in Baltimore and Tampa. LeBron, after all, is nothing but a misguided, fingernail-chomping, insecure kid. Sure it was great for us Clevelanders to see him lose, but it was strictly a one-man show. But Boston? Red Sox Nation? Good Bucky Dent to see it all collapse on the BeanTowners is nothing short of sports nirvana for this Cleveland fan.
Now it's true that my father was a native New Englander and a lifelong Red Sox fan. And it's true that when growing up in the fallow 70s when Cleveland Indians baseball was beyond lousy, I actively rooted against the Red Sox in both '75 and '78 while watching the games with my father. But it was never some antagonistic father-son psycho-drama--I just didn't like most of the Red Sox players then (and who wouldn't take the Big Red Machine or the Bronx Zoo Crazies over the Bosox in those years?) and through the years I have never much cared for their players. But as I grew older the whole force (farce) that is Red Sox Nation grew more and more tiresome. "Long-suffering (i.e. insufferable), rabid Red Sox fans"? Bah. They give both suffering and rabies a bad rap. Such Bosox fans (no need to forgive me, father; you liked them but never were obnoxious about it) are the stray strand of hair on the sumptuous plate of sports--joykillers in extremis. I'm on record as saying I'd rather see the Yankees win 10 straight championships than watch the Red Sox win anything. The Yankees are the devil, yes, but like the devil, they're kind of good to have around, if for nothing more than keeping one's faith life alive and kicking. Plus, their drama is fun, while Red Sox drama is just so much theatre of cruelty stuff.
But I digress. I also, it seems, am regressing. After growing up watching baseball on TV (anyone else remember Harry Jones and Mudcat Grant calling Tribe games on WJW-TV 8 or Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubeck on NBC's beloved Baseball Game of the Week? It's against all my instincts of being a gentleman to even mention Fox Sports and Joe Buck and Tim McCarver), over the last fifteen years or so, having eschewed much of TV, I have discovered the absolute pleasures of following baseball on the radio. But last night, during baseball's greatest night since at least Kurt Gibson's limp-off homerun in the '88 Series, I went back in time even further. Maybe, unbelievably, there's a latent Conserative (I can't even spell the word correctly) Republican lurking deep inside of me who wishes to experience a young Ronald Reagan re-creating Cubs games in a radio studio somewhere in the outback of the Midwest, because I absolutely delighted in following the simultaneous Oriole-Bosox, Yankee-Ray melodramas on ESPN.com's Gamecast.
Trust me baseball fans, you haven't lived until you've followed a game (or two) you really care about until you've stared at your computer screen and seen what ESPN does with a game. There's an (barely) animated diamond graphic (think the ancient video game Pong crossed with the cheap APBA-knockoff dice baseball game I used to play with a small cardboard ballpark and red plastic things representing baserunners), more stats than you could ever dream of, and an almost real-time pitch-by-pitch report popping up. You get each pitch's location on a strike zone graphic. You get pictures of the batter and pitcher. You get up-to-the-out-and-even-pitch probability percentages for runs scoring that inning and "projected winner" of the game. But the best--each pitch is depicted with a small white dot zooming from mound to plate. When a blue light comes on signifying that the pitch is "in play" the white dot slowly, torturously slowly, traces the path of the real-live ball thousands of miles away. I logged on just as Evan Longoria hit the three-run homer in the eighth last night that pulled the Rays, who were down 7-0 at the beginning of the inning, to within 7-6. In what must have taken fifteen excruciating seconds, the white dot lofted away from home plate and (I love this, you could see the ball's shadow on the field) slowly made its way to and beyond the left field fence. Of course, every mere pop out from then on started out looking like a homer, adding an incredible amount of suspense to the experience. My imagination, hopes and fears (and blood pressure) rose and sank, twisted and turned with each slow-moving white dot until finally I could read the result of "in play." I've ridden world-class rollercoasters whose thrills were nothing compared to charting the course of that white dot and waiting for the word on what just happened. Exuberance.
Now this is not the first time I've followed an inning or two on Gamecast, but since the last time I did, ESPN (but wait, there's more!) has added something more--real-time Tweets from various reporters on the scene. In my ethos, Twitter means less than the price of twine in Botswana, but I did get a kick out of reading these instant thoughts while waiting for that white dot to stop its crawl to the seats or somebody's glove. The best came in about the 11th inning in Tampa. A guy wrote, "when this game started, Tommy John still had feeling in his elbow." I hadn't laughed that hard with regard to baseball since Mark McGwire expressed his intention not to talk about the past in front of Congress. Little did I know at the time that in a few minutes, right 'round midnight, appropriately, would I be laughing ecstatically when in the span of about three minutes, my Gamecast recreations would show me Baltimore's two-out two-run walk-off win rally to KO the Bosox, then Evan Longoria's second homerun of the night, a walk-off solo shot in the bottom of the 12th that kicked the dirt onto the Bosox corpse.
But I digress again (funny how writing about Boston's historic, worst-ever September collapse just keeps intruding). That paragraph's real intention was to write about those Tweets. Besides the great Tommy John line, I must say I was distracted by the beguiling Twit-pic of Boston Globe reporter Amalie Benjamin (so not all things in Boston are cringe-worthy; I feel your pain, Amalie).
The great thing about Longo's walk off (well, great in proportion to the Rays, who I believe started the year with baseball's lowest payroll [or near the bottom, anyway], rallying so mightily [in all of September, in just this game] and obliterating the Red Sox, who were everybody's pick back in the spring to win not only the AL but the Series as well, after another off-season spending spree) was that instead of soaring high on the Gamecast screen, the white dot made a bee-line down the third base line (a dying, dilatory bee--the thing must have taken twenty seconds) all the way to the wall, leading me to believe, after first thinking it was a bunt, then a routine grounder to third, that Longo had doubled down the line. But the little (I don't know what color) blob signifying baserunning Longo didn't stop at second, so I'm thinking triple?, and then didn't stop at third, so I'm thinking, a
What more could I wish for? A perfect, thrill-filled ending to a glorious night of baseball. Introduction to a new technology that improbably helps me regress further in my love of baseball. A reason to finally follow someone on Twitter. And, best of all, the Boston Red Sox go down in a monumental victory manque.
What more? Well, maybe this as the new "Welcome To Boston" sign:
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