In Praise of the Rays
2011-09-30 - by
Today this blog is Talking About Baseball.
My son James and I are Tampa Bay Rays fans. We saw a lot of their players come up with the Durham Bulls. We’ve been to a couple of spring training games.
So I forgive him for calling me after midnight the other night. (One day he’ll learn why parents dread nothing more than a phone ringing after midnight.)
But it was good news. In two dramatic, last-second games – ending within minutes of each other – the Red Sox lost, the Rays won and the Rays were in the playoffs.
James figured I’d given up and gone to bed when the Rays fell behind 7-0 in the eighth inning. He was right.
How was I to know the Rays would come back to tie the game on a pinch-hit home run by a .108 hitter? With two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth. And win in the 12th with a walk-off home run that hooked just inside the left-field foul pole.
Or that the Red Sox – leading 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth, within one strike of a win – would lose when former Ray Carl Crawford couldn’t prevent a single.
The AP had a great account of “baseball’s night to remember.” Read it here.
Baseball may not have the constant action of basketball and football. But it’s a lot like politics: endless tedium interspersed with teeth-gnashing tension, epic collapses and heart-stopping endings – the agony of defeat and the ecstasy of victory.
Posted in General
In Praise of the Rays
2011-09-30/
Today this blog is Talking About Baseball.
My son James and I are Tampa Bay Rays fans. We saw a lot of their players come up with the Durham Bulls. We’ve been to a couple of spring training games.
So I forgive him for calling me after midnight the other night. (One day he’ll learn why parents dread nothing more than a phone ringing after midnight.)
But it was good news. In two dramatic, last-second games – ending within minutes of each other – the Red Sox lost, the Rays won and the Rays were in the playoffs.
James figured I’d given up and gone to bed when the Rays fell behind 7-0 in the eighth inning. He was right.
How was I to know the Rays would come back to tie the game on a pinch-hit home run by a .108 hitter? With two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth. And win in the 12th with a walk-off home run that hooked just inside the left-field foul pole.
Or that the Red Sox – leading 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth, within one strike of a win – would lose when former Ray Carl Crawford couldn’t prevent a single.
The AP had a great account of “baseball’s night to remember.” Read it here.
Baseball may not have the constant action of basketball and football. But it’s a lot like politics: endless tedium interspersed with teeth-gnashing tension, epic collapses and heart-stopping endings – the agony of defeat and the ecstasy of victory.
Posted in General