The best baseball games happen when whatever Higher Baseball Beings there are — if you believe in those sorts of things — treat a sold-out crowd like their personal snow globe. An unwitting fanbase sits on the edge of their seats, hoping for 27 easy outs and getting rammed by a blizzard along the way, to the point where pandemonium ensues and they can’t tell whether a flyball will end up over third base or in the third row of left field. As neutral observers of a World Series, that’s all we want, all we can hope for. Seven games of a violently shaken snow globe.
Game 5 of the 2017 World Series was more like if the Baseball Gods took the snow globe, shook it hard enough that everyone in the stadium and watching on TV was punch drunk and on the verge of a heart attack, and then smashed the snow globe on the ground just to see if we’d survive.
I can’t speak to whether or not the collective viewership survived it. Had that been the Mets, my team, I would have needed Vincent Vega to put a needle in my heart, pronto. I’m still somehow breathing, and so too, apparently, was Alex Bregman — at least enough to single over Corey Seager’s head and end a 13-12 rock fight of a game that brought both the Dodgers and the Astros to the end of the world and back again. This game stretched the idea of “having it all.” There was a World Series-record eight home runs combined in the game, including one from Astros center fielder George Springer that literally exploded on impact.
There were over five damn hours of baseball. There was a…laissez-faire, let’s say, interpretation of the strike zone from home plate umpire Bill Miller. There was endless talk of juiced, and now slick, balls. There was my mom texting me “holy shit.” There were a whole hell of a lot of whistles from the Astros train. And most of all, there was elation. Pure, unadulterated, elation.
The narrative to begin the game, if you can even remember a time before this game turned into Clash-of-the-Titans-Zeus-raining-thunderbolts meets live-tweeting, was two Cy Young Award Winners squaring up and hoping to go deep into the late innings to alleviate their ailing bullpens. But, the 2017 World Series doesn’t give a damn about narrative. Before Houston’s Dallas Keuchel, a command wizard who threw 86 pitches but only managed to throw 46 strikes, could even get out of the first inning, he had been touched up by a two-run single from his former University of Arkansas college teammate Logan Forsythe. For the first act of Game 5’s circus, Keuchel caught Forsythe leaning on a pickoff attempt, but Forsythe took off and Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel’s throw to second went wide, allowing Kike Hernandez to score from third. Before the game even devolved into madness, a Cy Young pitcher was done in by poor command and a successful (!!!) pickoff? We should have known.
With a four run lead and what looked to be, if not his best stuff, at least his decent stuff, the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw — Greatest Pitcher of a Generation, the rare man whose left arm has stunned sabermetricians and sour old men alike — took the mound in the bottom of the fourth inning. All hell broke loose. Springer coaxed a walk, followed by soon-to-be MVP second basemen Jose Altuve singling because the sun always rises and the earth keeps spinning. Bregman popped out, but super-duper-phenom shortstop Carlos Correa double to left field, scoring Springer and bringing up Gurriel, who should not have been playing in this game but promptly sat on a hanger from Kershaw and hit the life out of it into the Crawford Boxes anyway.
Then, the game went something like this, I’m told (I blacked out from utter disbelief and all I can remember is waking up with sweaty palms pacing the living room muttering “baseball is good”):
Dodgers’ first basemen Cody Bellinger hit a three-run home run in the top of the fifth. Altuve hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the fifth to match. Bellinger hit a triple that snuck under the glove of a diving Springer in the top of the seventh. Springer hit the exploding home run in the bottom of the seventh, followed by a Correa double and an Altuve two-run bomb that put the Astros up 11-8. Not to be outdone, Seager reminded everyone that he’s also a top-five player in baseball, doubling home Joc Pederson to narrow the gap. Everyone’s favorite Sheriff and apparent Babe Ruth impersonator Brian McCann homered in the bottom of the eighth to re-extend the lead to three. Then, like clockwork, human hot-take Yasiel Puig hit a pitch that was damn-near in the opposite batter’s box and at his shins just over the left field fence, cutting Houston’s lead to one. Astros reliever Chris Devenski, something of a superstar in the Relief Revolution, just needed to squeeze one more out in the bottom of the ninth to seal it. But, Chris Fucking Taylor, a reject of the Seattle Mariners, hit a picture perfect Devenski changeup straight back up the middle like he had been Pete Rose his whole life, tying the game at 12 (!!!) through nine.
If I had read that paragraph to anyone before this year’s playoffs, A) they would think that I just got a little too zealous and had recounted a Backyard Baseball play-by-play to them and B) their brain would melt and come out of their ears.
Then, finally, after it felt like this game was about to take on a life of its own, breach the fourth wall and start talking directly to us out of the TV, Bregman came to the rescue. He singled home Derek Fisher, who has apparenly become a white pinch runner for the Astros and not an annoyingly clutch guard for the Lakers. It’s almost too perfect and all too #Baseball that a game that suspended reality for over five hours and had eight home runs, ended in an instant with a walk-off single.
After his game-winning hit, Bregman was being interviewed on the field by Fox’s Ken Rosenthal. “As you stand here right now, what do you remember most about this game?” Bregman did his best to recap, but like all of us, it seemed like his memory trailed off when the mayhem started.
The best and worst part about baseball is the anxiety. When you’re watching, you feel everything and you feel nothing. Everything on the range of human emotions occurs to you between pitches, and your brain selects for one of those emotions in the nanoseconds from when the ball hits the bat to when your eyes can communicate what the hell is actually happening. Is it a ball? Is it a strike? Is it a home run? Did it come up short? (In 2017, it’s a home run. Default to that.) Should I scream? Should I cry? Am I here? Is this really happening? It is the sport that the visceral physical response of the fan’s body most closely lines up with that of the player. With the exception of the pitcher, hitter, and catcher, they all stand there not knowing what’s going to happen — just like us.
Baseball, at its best, is just life sped up. It’s a series of relatively unpredictable events that still, in the aggregate, feel so predictable. Of course the Dodgers are going to tie it in the top of the ninth. Of course Brandon Morrow’s dead arm is going to serve up meatballs to the heart of the Astros order. Of course Springer is going to atone for his error in the field.
Its so hard to judge on a game-by-game basis, yet we still try in futility to overanalyze it. And when you’re in the middle of it, every play feels like it takes a day. It may be life sped up, but in the moment, it sure does feel slow. It’s an anxious life, that of a baseball fan. It’s a slow death grind that usually forces viewers to hang in the balance along with the players. But Game 5 wasn’t a slow death grind. It was a fireworks show. A title fight. A game of Wizard’s chess played out with a Michael Bay explosions budget. It was beautiful and ugly, raw but still somehow displaying the most refined talent of the best players in the world. It was everything anyone could have ever dreamed for in the World Series. It was everything that is good about baseball. It does not exist on the scale of greatest games ever. It broke the scale.
It was perfect.
Tipping Pitches 