Baseball’s too late
Game 5 finish misses audience
HOUSTON — On a late night and early morning when home runs were flying out of Minute Maid Park and straight into the history books, it was a standard-issue, garden-variety base hit by Alex Bregman that sent jubilant Astros fans spilling into the streets outside Minute Maid Park.
Bregman’s hit — again, a single! — had lifted the long-suffering ’Stros to their wild 10-inning, 13-12 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the World Series. The game had ended at 12:39 a.m. Central Time. Bregman now sat at the postgame interview table, shiny World Series logos hanging behind him like posters for blockbuster Hollywood movies, and tried to make sense of it all.
The third baseman read from the usual postgame cue cards, noting the veteran presence of guys like Carlos Beltran, Brian McCann and Josh Reddick, and how the Astros play with confidence. He talked about work ethic, about continuing to fight, about how these Astros were “never out of the game” even though they trailed Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers, 3-0, after just half an inning, and 4-0 in the fourth.
And then, almost to himself, Bregman said, “And now look at us — we’re one win away from being World Series champions.”
That, alas, was a very big problem with Game 5 of the World Series — the “look at us” part.
Game 5 ended at 1:39 a.m. on the East Coast. So when Bregman says, “Now look at us,” how many people, particularly in the eastern half of the country, were actually looking?
Sure, the TV ratings, which peaked around 11:45 p.m. Eastern Time, were good. But a 1:39 a.m. finish doesn’t rate quite as highly.
For those who reached a point when they could not or would not keep looking, be advised that Game 5 was one of the most entertaining World Series games ever played. We need to stop here, though, and note that it was not a “great” game. This is probably splitting hairs and taking a deep dive into a death pit of semantics, but there was no great pitching to admire, no great catches to watch and rewatch.
There was no Dwight Evans twisting his body to rob Joe Morgan of a home run in the 11th inning of Game 5, 1975. No Willie Mays going say-hey-all-the-way to deep center field at the Polo Grounds to pull in that deep drive by Vic Wertz in the eighth inning of Game 1, 1954.
Yes, we did see Dodgers first baseman Cody Bellinger make an impressive arm extension into the stands to catch a ninth-inning foul pop off the bat of Carlos Correa. But that was about it.
Dewey Evans and Willie Mays were not shoved aside Sunday night.
A game pitting the Astros’ Dallas Keuchel and Kershaw as starting pitchers held the promise of batters swinging at air, of fastballs zipping into mitts. That would have been fun. That did not happen. And yet . . .
What did happen was all those home runs, seven in all. And even that wasn’t as impressive as what those home runs meant. For this was a game in which the Astros came back, and then came back again, and came back once more. And they broke a 12-12 tie to win it.
Trailing 4-0 in the fourth, the Astros tied the game. The big blow was a threerun homer by Yuli Gurriel, as the Cuban first baseman drilled a fat Kershaw slider to left. Imagine: The first big blow of the game was provided by a man who owes his standing in this World Series to commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision to postpone until next April punishment for Gurriel’s racially insensitive gesture directed at Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish.
Trailing 7-4 in the fifth, the Astros again tied it on a three-run homer by future Hall of Famer Jose Altuve, and maybe this is when people should have settled in and realized this is the way the game was going to go, that something special was happening, right here, right now.
It became a high-stakes basketball game in which the two sides trade baskets right down to the whistle. It became a patented Patriots comeback, Tom Brady at the plate, swinging for the fences. It was a Rocky Balboa fight, only real.
It became the Dodgers going ahead 8-7 in the seventh, partly because George Springer, a fine center fielder, misplayed a Bellinger liner into a triple to allow the go-ahead run to score.
It became the Astros roaring back with four runs in the bottom of the inning, including a game-tying homer . . . by Springer.
It became the Dodgers staging a comeback of their own, tying the game with three runs in the ninth.
It became all that and more.
“These games are hard on me,” said Correa, the great Houston shortstop, when it was over. “I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack out there every single time. It’s high pressure out there. The game is going back and forth.”
That’s exactly how it felt. That’s how postseason baseball is supposed to feel. That’s how postseason anything is supposed to feel. Problems? Sure. This brings us right back to Alex Bregman and his look-at-us comment, because a lot of people who were looking early in the evening were not looking early in the morning. But that wasn’t so much a product of the seven home runs as it was yet another example of MLB’s ongoing head-in-the-sand approach to speeding the damned games up.
Take away the interminable time between pitches, the trips to the mound, the long commercial breaks, and maybe we’re talking about a game that isn’t ending a few hours before the onset of morning drive time.
Then, too, there’s the issue of the baseballs being used. Sorry, Mr. Manfred, if a Hall of Fame-caliber pitcher named Justin Verlander is questioning the slickness of the baseballs being used, then maybe take a look at the baseballs being used.
But Game 5, as a standalone, played by two evenly matched teams using the same equipment, had me on the edge of my seat all night.
It bums me out, though, and it should bum MLB out, that your seat may have been empty.