I was half-heartedly pulling for the Royals, I guess, but mainly just enjoying the games, the ones I was able to watch anyway. The dominating performances by the Giants' Madison Bumgarner reminded me of something I think receives too little attention, which is that, in baseball, the post-season is a whole different ballgame. During the grip-and-slog of the long summer, when you're playing at least six games a week every week for more than twenty weeks, your final record depends a lot upon how good your fourth and fifth best starting pitchers are. But, if they are pretty good, and you win enough games to make it into the playoffs, these same guys hardly throw a pitch. It's all about your ace and the guy behind him. In this year's Series, Bumgarner got the Royals side out 21 times in the seven, 9-inning games, allowing just one run to score. That didn't leave the Royals much room for error in the forty or so innings that Bumgarner wasn't pitching. It's worked out in the past for my Twins, who, first time they won the World Series, had Viola, Blyleven, a good closer (Reardon), and hardly another pitcher deserving of an adjective pale as "serviceable." They weren't built for 100 regular-season wins. But they were hard to beat in a short series.
I woke my wife when, in the bottom of the ninth of this year's Game 7, I jerked up in bed the second a Giants' outfielder misplayed Alex Gordon's two-out hit, permitting it to skip past him to the fence, then let out a little shriek when another outfielder fumbled the ball on the warning track.
"Jeezus, don't shit yourself," she wearily advised.
"I thought he might be able to run around all the bases," I explained. And, considering it in the cold light of the next morning, he should have tried. Maybe the relay home would have been ten feet over the catcher's head. There was a better chance of that than of getting another hit off Bumgarner. The best description of the experience of watching the games that guy pitched has been supplied by Roger Angell, the redoubtable nonagenarian and poet laureate of baseball:
Watching Bumgarner, whose amazingly extended lefty delivery begins with the held ball detouring toward short center field, I decided that his great stuff is equalled by the calm and the air of mournful apology with which it’s delivered: Sorry, guys, but you’ve got no chance. It’s quiet when he’s pitching, with little to note beyond the flow of strikeouts or pop-ups or ground balls, delivered without gesture or a change of expression, and the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room.
Maybe he lost his way a little in the syntax of that last sentence, but hell, it was late, and it's great anyway. I hope Roger hasn't watched his last game. Soon it will be Christmas, and how long past that till pitchers and catchers report?
