I Guess I Have Been Missing Baseball More Than I Thought

People have asked how I am doing with no baseball.  I thought I was doing pretty well – until recently.  Recently, I have noticed feeling a little down, now and then.  I thought it was because politics is horrible.  We have a terrible president, but the people running to replace him aren’t much better, if any.  I don’t want the current person to be reelected, but the alternative could easily be just as bad. 

And then there are the riots accompanying the peaceful protests that we have had.  I’m not really sure how tearing down a statue of George Washington does any good.  Sure, he had slaves, but he was also, in the title of James Thomas Flexner’s book, The Indispensable Man.  Without George Washington, there is no United States.  Maybe the people pulling down his statue think that would be good.

As for the people who pulled down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant because he owned a slave between the time his father-in-law gave the slave to him and the time he gave the man his freedom (about a year¹), well fine.  If you think the general who won the Civil War, who crushed the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1870s and sent federal troops into the south to protect the rights of Black people should have his statue torn down, go for it.

But then I realized there have been other times almost this bad.  For example, the 2016 “Presidential Election from He**” and others.  But they didn’t seem to bother me as much.  And then several things came together to make me realize why.  First, there was the video on the Chicago Cubs YouTube channel about the Sandberg game.  Which is a fantastic video – about a fantastic game.  It was, as I tell Jennie, the first game she and I ever watched together.  Which we did when her mother went out that afternoon, for the first time since Jennie was born, and left Jennie to watch the game with me.

And then, there was the fifth anniversary of my first World Series championship.  I posted about that here.  But there was more than I posted about because the games were fantastic.  The third game, in a best two-out-of-three series, was great.  Obviously.  But the second game may have been even better.  Because of injuries to its pitching staff, the University of Virginia was basically going with two good starters and a reliever in the CWS.  After losing game one on Monday, UVa was in a position where one of its good starters had lost on Monday and the other had pitched (and won) on Saturday.  That guy could start on Wednesday, but they needed to get to Wednesday.  So, they took their regular centerfielder and started him – even though he had not pitched in a month.  But now they needed a centerfielder.  They moved the guy who normally played right to center and put a fourth-year senior, who had never started an NCAA tournament game before, in right field.  The center fielder pitched five shutout innings, and that fourth-year senior went three for four and drove in two of UVa’s three runs in a 3 to 0 win.  That is what baseball is about.  That is what makes you excited and happy regardless of what is going on in the rest of the world.

Number three was different.  It wasn’t a championship game or a nationally broadcast game that created a star.  It was just a Tuesday night game in August of 2006.²  The Cubs were terrible, and they were playing the Houston Astros.  The Astros’ starter was Roger Clemons, who had 345 career wins.  The Cubs starter was Juan Mateo, who had one career win.  The Cubs scored early, leading 2 to 0 and 5 to 2, but the Astros caught up and took a 6 to 5 lead into the ninth.  Matt Murton, who was my favorite Cubs player at the time, was leading off (he had come into the game in the seventh or eighth inning in a double switch).  He smashed a home run into the left field stands to tie the game.  Which meant, after the Astros didn’t score in the bottom of the ninth, we were going to have an extra inning game.  And boy did we have one.  Goose egg after goose egg. 

By the top of the seventeenth inning, Ross came home and asked how the Cubs had done.  I said it was tied in the seventeenth.  The problem for the Cubs, by the seventeenth inning, was that they only had one pitcher left³: Rich Hill, and he was supposed to start Wednesday afternoon’s game.  Actually, Hill was the last player of any type the Cubs had, so in he came.  It was unclear what was going to happen Wednesday afternoon, but we were still playing Wednesday morning. 

Finally, in the top of the eighteenth, Aramis Ramirez led off with a double and Jacques Jones singled.  We had runners on first and third with nobody out, but the next batters did nothing.  The Astros then walked Michael Barrett intentionally to load the bases.  Which brought up – Matt Murton.  With a two-ball and one-strike count, he singled to right.  Two runs scored.  Rich Hill pitched a 1-2-3 bottom of the eighteenth, and the Cubs won, 8 to 6.  The game finished at 12:41 a.m.  I had to go to work the next day (or, rather, later that morning), but who cared.  The Cubs won.⁴

It got even better the next day.  The Cubs literally had nobody to pitch Wednesday afternoon, but their Triple AAA farm team was playing in Round Rock, Texas, near Austin, so they sent a limo to pick up the kid who was supposed to start for Iowa that day and brought him to Houston to pitch for the Cubs.  Not only did he pitch for the Cubs, he threw eight shutout innings in the first game he ever pitched in the majors.  Michael Barrett hit a home run, and Bobby Howry pitched a scoreless ninth.  The Cubs won again; this time 1 to 0.⁵

But it’s not just games like this.  It’s really any game the Cubs win.  If the Cubs win, things are just better (especially if you went to the game but even if you only watched on the radio).  And with baseball, they play every day, so there is always another game coming up and another chance to win.  Even the worst teams usually win at least two out of five.  So there really is another win just around the corner.

But there hasn’t been a win around the corner for a long time, and I guess I missed it more than I realized.  Well, virus willing, the games (even if they are just playing Manfred-Ball) will be starting in a month or so.  Hey Hey, Holy Mackerel.
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¹ Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (2016), p. 128, 130.
² I originally thought about this game because, under the rules of “Manfred-Ball” that are going to be used this year, each extra inning will start with a runner on second.  This game won’t happen this year.  Sigh.
³ Of the other eleven Cubs pitchers, nine had pitched and two had pinch hit.
⁴ One of the amazing things about the game was how excited the Cubs players were.  Aramis Ramirez was pumping his fist, really psyched up, as he ran in from third on Murton’s hit in the eighteenth.  Guys in the dugout (like Big Z and others) had rally caps on.  They were like a bunch of Little Leaguers.
     Another amazing about the game, which Jason Stark, then at ESPN.com and now at The Athletic, was about the only one to notice was that the Cubs had used all 25 of their players.  It apparently was the only time in National League history that a team had used 25 players in a game that wasn’t either (i) suspended or (ii) played in September/October or April (back in the days when they had 28-man roster in April).
⁵ Following on pattern of Tuesday’s game, the Cubs starter was making his major league debut.  The Astros’ starter was Andy Pettitte.  I wrote about this game here, too.