Nothing in sports marks time better than baseball, the game without a clock.
Baseball is calibrated by calendars, not watches, which span parts of three centuries. Which is why, following the World Series triumph by the Boston Red Sox, it is difficult for the aficionado to construct a conversation about the astonishing feat that does not emphasize the phrase, "For the first time since (insert year here) "
Much is made, justifiably, about the Red Sox not having won a World Series since the War to End All Wars (which is now joined by "Curse of the Bambino" as phrases too silly for human consumption).
Romantic as was the distant history, the immediate past was what left my jaw dragging the floor: Over 11 days, the Red Sox put together the most remarkable sequence of events in the annals of sports.
What enhances its uniqueness is the fact that none of it was an upset.
When most of us recall spectacular sports events, we think of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, or Ali-Liston, or the Jets' win in the 1969 Super Bowl. All were unforgettable because the results were so profoundly unexpected.
But from a purely baseball standpoint, a Red Sox triumph this postseason was a sensible outcome. They were slight favorites over the Angels in the Division Series, as well as the Yankees in the AL Championship Series and the Cardinals in the World Series.
The Red Sox had two stud-hoss starting pitchers, a killer closer and a potent offense -- all standard features of postseason success. They even traded for defense at midseason. For a championship team with a US$125 million payroll, what's not to like?
So much treacle was disgorged about curses that the notion apparently occurred to few that these Red Sox had little to do with what had gone before. In fact, 16 players on the 25-man Red Sox roster for the Series had arrived last season or this season, a time that coincided with the arrival of new ownership as well as a brilliant young general manager, Theo Epstein.
Throughout the organization, there was little connection to the Red Sox litany of collapse. Independent of the nonsense surrounding it, this was a very good baseball team, even if it entered the playoffs via the wild card with fewer regular-season wins (98) than the Yankees (101) or Cardinals (105). But after a freakish first three games against the Yankees, including a 19-8 thrashing in ALCS Game 3, and being down in the ninth inning of Game 4, they were perilously close to fulfilling what others perceived to be their historic fate. Instead, the Red Sox won out. It wasn't what they did -- it was the way they did it.
That way was explained in logical simplicity by backup first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz to ESPN.com: "We had the right guy in the right place to do exactly what he was capable of doing."
Big baseball truth rests in that statement. To climb back from cliff's edge against the Yankees, everything had to go right for the Red Sox. Every pitching change, sacrifice and stolen base had to work exactly as it did, or the Yankees would have broken through to win the series.
To render a team as powerful as the Cardinals the first in World Series history to trail at some point in every inning of every game requires the same sequence of players doing what they do best at exactly the right time.
That's a hard thing to do in one game, let alone the eight most important games of the year, each with consecutively increasing significance.
RSS