I don't know if any of you were paying attention to what was happening in major league baseball Wednesday night.....but many pundits, fans, fellow players and coaches have called it possibly the best night in the history of baseball. Certainly, if not the best night ever for the sport......it was at least the best night of the year so far for the sport. 6 games, which directly had some influence in what the playoff landscape looked like this year. I have blogged in the past about my love for the St. Louis Cardinals. As a Cardinal fan, I owe a great big thank you to the Philadelphia Phillies, who we play in the first round of the playoffs this year. The Phillies played the Atlanta Braves wednesday night. The Atlanta Braves were in control of the wild card spot in the National League, until this particular night. The Braves held a 9.5 game lead about a week into September. The Cardinals were dead in the water, a week into September. The Cardinals held a players only meeting around that time and since then have won 19 of the last 23 games of the year. With the Phillies win, it marked the biggest collapse of a team that held a playoff position in the history of the game. The history of the game! Baseball dates back to the late 1800's. What was so special about this night, was the fact that it was a record the Braves were able to hold for about 2 hours. About 2 hours after the game between the Phillies and Braves, the Red Sox followed the epic collapse of the Braves with one of their own. The Red Sox had over a 10 game lead in the wild card spot in the American League with less than a month to go in the season. The collapsed and the Tampa Bay Rays took advantage of it. In addition to the games between the Red Sox and Orioles (who beat the Red Sox in the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs!), the Cardinals and Astros, the Yankees and the Rays (the Rays won in 11 innings on a walk off homer, after they were getting beat as bad as 7-0 in the 8th inning), the Phillies and the Braves......there were also games played by the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers, that had heavy playoff implications. If both of those teams won, they would start at their respective stadiums in the first round of the playoffs. Actually, Arizona needed to win and Milwaukee needed to lose, in order for the Diamondbacks to get home field advantage.
I told you about these games and situations to illustrate a point. All of these games took place on the last day of the regular season. It's my prerogative, that when the game of baseball has moments like this, in games like this....it is unrivaled by any other sport. I know some of you may be saying, "Hey, isn't NFL football king of the sports world now?". And the answer is yes, to that question. However, how many times in the past 10 years have we had meaningless games the last game of the regular season in the NFL. Where teams that have locked up their playoff spot, don't even try to win.....or even play their regular starters to keep them from getting injured. How would you like to be the person who buys a ticket to the game where you don't get to see your favorite player, because he is being benched to stay fresh for a playoff game, you aren't going to go to. In basketball and hockey both, 8 teams from each conference make the playoffs. So, at the end of the year, there never seems to be any drama. What baseball lacks in excitement, in the course of play by play action....it makes up for in intrigue, history, and sportsmanship. If you saw the way the players in each of their respective dugouts were hanging on the guard rails, hanging on every pitch......so much drama, so much tension. Nothing could beat it. I can't wait to see what the playoffs have in store.
No comments:
Post a Comment