Playoff Musings from the Armchair
by Bill Ribas
I’ll confess I missed the end of game 2 between the Cardinals and Dodgers (I had band practice if you’re keeping score), but when I heard what happened, and then saw the clips on Sportscenter, well, I felt bad for Matt Holliday. And while it was no ’86 game 6, where Bill Buckner did his best imitation of a croquet hoop (and as a lifelong Mets fan, I can’t thank him enough for that), it could still serve as the nail in the coffin for St. Louis this year as they try to make it to the World Series. Holliday’s attempt to catch the ball with his gut may not have been the worst error in the game, as earlier, a Cardinal runner committed a cardinal sin of making the first out at 3rd (and if you stuck your head out the window, you could have easily heard Tony LaRussa screaming from his dugout steps). But then again, that’s what playoff games do, they magnify errors, make heroes out of .225 hitters, and give announcers something to pontificate about.
One of Holliday’s teammate’s gave a good interview after the game, insinuating that part of the blame should be applied to the “homer hankies” given out to fans at the game. And certainly he has a point, as a waving field of white cotton serves as perhaps the worst backdrop for trying to catch a ball. Add to that a late afternoon sun and stadium lights, and you might as well call the game. My advice though, to the Cardinals, is disposable flash camera day for game 3, with seasons tickets awarded to whoever captures the best fumbled ball by the Dodgers. Yeah, you know what they say about payback, right?
And speaking of the playoffs, it is a time of love and hate for many (and by many I mean me, at least as far as I know). Why? First off, imagine the Stanley Cup Playoffs at an outdoor rink in Miami. Even the least interested puckhead would say, what, are you stupid? You can’t play hockey in the Florida sun. And that person would be right. Now look at the forecast for Saturday night’s game in Denver, and I quote – “Saturday Night: A slight chance of snow and freezing drizzle. Patchy fog. Otherwise, mostly cloudy, with a low around 19.” You know you’re going to just love taking your ten year old kid to the game, after paying several hundred dollars for tickets, the same amount for hot dogs and sodas, only to have the whole game obstructed from your view as your breath creates a cumulus cloud in front of your face. And of course, the announcers will shine at this point, saying idiotic things like, “Whoo boy, it is cold down there on the field,” while the players in the dugout are huddling around a 55 gallon drum burning anything they can get their hands on to add to the fire. Do bats burn? I think they do.
While I have nothing to advise about botched plays, I will suggest this – make the World Series a single location event. Heresy? Nah, they do it for kids in Williamsport, don’t they? Pick a town below the Mason-Dixon line, heck, make it outside of Las Vegas, since they don’t have a team there, and have all the games played in one location. It’s not like major league cities don’t make enough money off ball games already. The big advantage would be the stability of the weather. You want to see a game played in all sorts of weather conditions? Watch football, that’s what they do. Baseball, America’s pastime, the Boys of Summer? What’s the point? You won’t see the best the athletes can do, because they can’t do their best when they’re wearing mittens. And it’s no picnic for fans either. Ever sat through 9 innings with the temperature below 50? I did a Red Wings game many moons ago, temps in the 40’s, drizzling all the time. I had a choice between shelling out ridiculous money for a sweatshirt or becoming a corpse, and I chose the former (although in retrospect, I might have made the wrong choice).
October isn’t the time for baseball, unless it’s in the middle of the day. Yet since MLB has chosen to squeeze as much money out of the fans as possible, you won’t see a game like that, or at least not many. That’s right, kill your fan base, kids getting home from school and turning on the game, and instead, let them see a few innings right before bedtime, and catch up on Sportscenter in the morning before they grab the bus to school. At least cigarette makers are smart enough to lure kids in with cartoon characters. You’d think MLB would get it, but they don’t, and the real proof of that will be in Denver Saturday night. Funny thing is, we’ll all be laughing at them. Maybe I’ll even hook up the teevee outside, where it’ll be a balmy 40 degrees at night, and laugh at those suckers in Colorado. My Coors will be at room temperature, while out in Denver, they’ll have to heat up the beer to get it to flow. Play Ball!
I know nothing about baseball so help me here: why is Holliday getting so much of the attention? Didn’t the catcher also make a critical error? And didn’t the pitcher play any part in giving away a 2:1, bottom of the ninth, two outs, two strikes (i.e., only one more to go) game? If I didn’t prefer the Dodgers, my bleeding heart would cry for the Cardinals.
Just want to point out that Holliday didn’t try to catch the ball with his gut. Instead, as was aptly pointed out by Scott Van Pelt on the ESPN highlights, the error was doubly painful given the ball actually hit him in “the man region”. That was good … I busted out laughing.
So far, the Cardinals are making the fielding mistakes that Detroit made in the WS a couple years ago enabling the Cards to win.
Hope the Twins bounce back today!
It was pretty amusing as they kept showing the replay all the while avoiding the obvious and referring to the ball hitting Holliday in the stomach. Somewhere, a producer was feverishly working to keep everyone in line.
On another note – either Holliday got really lucky as to the exact location of impact, or he has brass for part of his anatomy. The guy barely flinched. Any other red-blooded American male would have been down for the count.
Yeah, I saw the clip on ESPN, but Gotham tells me to keep content family oriented, and somehow Holliday catching a ball with his “frank and beans” didn’t have the zing I was looking for.
Well, he got hit towards the bottom of his belly, which isn’t a bad place to get tagged. You can trust me on this one, since, as the dad of two boys, I have taken more shots to the groin than two seasons of Jackass on MTV. And it just hit me that I could have used a “Holiday Yule Log” joke as a location reference for where the ball was caught, but that’s the way it goes in this writer business. GO TWINS!
I prefer “twig and berries,” but that’s beside the point…
World Series in November? Great marketing indeed. It is quite ridiculous that we watch the game’s best player duke it out with, as Bill said, mittens to go along with ear muffs. As I read this, I couldn’t help think of a “Real Men of Genius” parody on the powers that be deciding that the world series would be okay as “Baseball’s Winter Classic.”
Today we salute you oh frozen forefathers of our beloved past time. Because as the competition heats up, you’re determined to cool it down – and freeze all passion for acceptable baseball weather.
Great stuff as always, Bill
They talked about the neutral site for the World Series last year as a result of that suspended game that was finished like 2-3 days later. The only problem is, it’s not one big game like the Super Bowl, and it’s not the huge weekend-long event that the Super Bowl is. Hold seven games in a neutral city and MLB would be praying that either the Yankees or Red Sox make it. Otherwise, attendance at the games would suffer.