The spotlight, good or bad, can last a lifetime
KANSAS CITY— There are players who draw the fickle finger of fate award in crucial games, critical moments, and have to wear it for a lifetime.
Bill Buckner, for instance, whose name morphed into a verb — as in “to get Buckner-ed’’ — for his through-the-wickets gaffe on Mookie Wilson’s dribbler in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which allowed the Mets to score their winning run over Boston, force a Game 7 and ultimately waltz off with an improbable championship.
To his credit or for his sins, the first baseman reached the point where he was willing to take the mickey out of his own bonehead mistake because Lord knows he wasn’t allowed to forget it.
Recall that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Buckner, playing himself, makes a heroic catch on a baby thrown from the window of a burning building. More of a football catch than a reprise — reversed, destiny rolled back — of the ball that skittered through his legs years before. In the fantasyland of TV, he was carried off on the shoulders of bystanders.
Another “goat’’ comes to mind: Lonnie Smith bamboozled in the eighth inning of Game 7 in the 1991 World Series, tip-toeing into second after Atlanta teammate Terry Pendleton smacked a ball that bounced off the wall and was still rattling around in the outfield vicinity. But Smith fell for a decoy — I’d call it a deke, except that’s language reserved for hockey — with Minnesota infielders Chuck Knoblauch and Greg Gagne pantomiming a catch and throw double-play, empty-handed. Smith, who has always denied falling for the ploy, got to third when the penny dropped but should have scored the go-ahead run. Jack Morris pitched out of the men-on-base jam, and the Twins won the game in the 10th.
See, that’s the capriciousness of all sports. It’s why we watch, because anything can happen and often does happen.
The high and mighty can be brought down low. The so-so can be elevated to demigod-dom.
Who would have predicted that, in 2015, Daniel Murphy would turn into a home run rocket-propelled grenade for the Mets, setting a major-league record by homering in six straight post-season games?
“I can’t explain why the balls keep going out of the ballpark,’’ said Murphy, after winning MVP chops in the National League Championship Series. “But they do.’’ Some are blessed. Some are cursed. Will R.A. Dickey, whose 8-1 record in the second half helped mightily in propelling the Blue Jays into the playoffs, see his career defined by a Game 4 start of epically awful proportions in this pennant series with the Royals? That would be such an unkind coda to a moundsman who picked his sorry self off the ash-heap and reinvented himself as a knuckleballer with a Cy Young in his future. But that future is now the past. And in less than two innings of work last Tuesday, the 40-year-old with the inspirational baseball narrative put his team up against the wall, needing only a blindfold and a cigarette. Except the Marlboro Man turned out to be Marco Estrada, again, sling-shooting the series back to K.C.
So, in the playoffs to date — as dusk descended towards opening pitch at Kauffman Stadium, Toronto quivering on the cusp of another elimination game — Estrada has arguably been the central character in post-season melodrama, having similarly defied doom when the Jays were down 2-0 against Texas in their division series. “Our MVP,” Jose Bautista said the other night.
The weirdness, the joke’s-on-you mutability of it, is that the MVP aura had so presumptively been invested on David Price. And why not? The best arm out there, reeled in to Toronto at the trade deadline, exactly as advertised through the last two months of the season, except for that final wonky win versus Tampa Bay, with Price almost apologetic for a saggy (cheesy, he suggested) fiveinnings-and-out victory.
Just as he was so evidently not proud of taking a long-relief inning win off Dickey — manager’s decision — against the Rangers, the only win that Price has been able to claim in this post-season.
He has lost when he pitched badly and he’s lost, as in this series’ second game, when he pitched brilliantly — until, abruptly, he didn’t, in the seventh, and folded up like a cardboard suitcase. Perhaps that was his Buckner moment.
Not hubris, exactly, because Price isn’t a vainglorious man. But he doesn’t indulge in false modesty either. He knows what he is, what he brings: a pitching virtuoso, shortly to become the prize free agent in baseball — and a playoff bust, 0-for-7 in his career post-season starts.
Unless . . . unless Game 6, Friday night, afforded him reparation and atonement.
A couple of weeks ago, Price was philosophical about a poor start against the Rangers. He’s been commendably un-bitchy about his relief assignment, the up-and-downs in the bullpen. Consummate teamplayer, without ego or vanity. But stunned, too, at the reputation that’s been accruing.
Yet Friday night, as the world turned, it was down to him again.
It shouldn’t have been a twitchy scenario, with your rent-an-ace on the hill. And maybe it wasn’t. Said manager John Gibbons, a couple of hours before game time: “I think Dave’s gonna be real good tonight.’’
Prophecy or famous last words? Dud or stud? The last judgment of David Price.