St. Louis
When baseball gets its freak on, something happens.
It’s strange. It’s inexplicable. The game goes batty every October. But seldom more stark raving mad than what’s happening now.
Are you telling me the St. Louis Cardinals – with a munchkin playing shortstop, their lone superstar in a hitting slump, a lineup held together with duct tape and a closer who saved a grand total of three games during the regular season – can win the World Series? Get out. I don’t believe it. America covers its eyes and refuses to watch.
“It’s kind of a freak thing,” Detroit manager Jim Leyland said Thursday, trying to explain how his Tigers lost 5-4 to the Cardinals. “But that’s just baseball.”
Over and over again, Leyland used the word “freak.” It was freaky. So is this World Series.
The pleasures of baseball are generally as slow and lazy as sipping lemonade on a summer afternoon.
But everything changes in October. The game’s blood pressure goes up. Way up. The anticipation for every pitch goes higher than a harvest moon.
The playoffs move to an irregular heartbeat. Millionaires choke. Grown men hug like Little Leaguers. More than 45,000 fans stand together, every last one of them afraid to sit down.
“You’re thinking like you’re playing the seventh game of the World Series every game,” St. Louis manager Tony La Russa said.
St. Louis beat Detroit. Again. How? The Cards went for broke. The Tigers choked.
A National League team that stumbled to the finish of the regular season, finishing a modest five games above .500, is now ahead 3-1 in this best-of-seven series, and needs only one more victory to be an improbable champion.
This baseball is gut-turning to watch, not because St. Louis is less than deserving or the Tigers are unraveling, but because the Cardinals’ margin for error is so thin that every inning, every out and every at-bat has the urgency of a desperate prayer.
Every baseball dream begins with a game of catch in the yard, which might explain why love for the game is passed down from father to son.
So nobody in Busch Stadium was more on edge than Mookie Wilson, owner of a World Series ring, but now wishing to see his son win one.
“Watching your son play in the World Series is much tougher than playing in the World Series,” said the elder Wilson, whose name has been integral to Fall Classic lore since 1986, when the New York Mets went through Billy Buckner and Boston to win it all.
“When my son is at the plate, I can sit up in the stands and yell, ‘Look for the slider!’ But he can’t hear me.”
With the score tied at 3 and stomachs in knots during the seventh inning, St. Louis outfielder, Preston Wilson, cast aside earlier this year by Houston after playing 102 games for the Astros, delivered a single in the name of his father and every card-carrying member of Redbird Nation.
But that clutch hit would not be enough for St. Louis to win. The Cards needed help, in almost unimaginable forms.
Tigers center fielder Curtis Granderson would fall down on a routine fly ball, his pratfall ending in a key double for the Cards.
A third strike would bounce between the legs of Detroit catcher Pudge Rodriguez, a certain Hall of Famer. Freaky.
A Tigers pitcher would field a bunt and air-mail the easy toss to first base. Freaky.
And, in the eighth inning, St. Louis shortstop David Eckstein, who’s no taller than a Cub Scout, came up with the game- winning hit with two outs.
Is it freaky? A fluke? Or is something else at work for the Cardinals?
“We went through a lot of issues this year. It was a very difficult year in a lot of ways,” said La Russa, who has admitted that during September, he allowed himself to doubt if his ballclub would be fit for the rigors that awaited in the postseason.
“But the biggest thing, the most consistent thing we had was heart.”
And the beat goes on.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
