It breaks my heart to observe it...but that was an awful game.
Game 7 of a great World Series wasn't just devoid of drama, it was a showcase of why baseball is turning off a lot of people.
Talk about pace of play, this game loses a footrace to a sloth, a snail and Brian McCann.
The bottom of the 5th inning, in which Houston twice replaced the pitcher, and the catcher instigated roughly 11 visits to the mound, an inning that featured two hit batsmen but not a single run -- that half inning alone obliterated a half hour of your life. You can never get it back.
Ah, but it was heaven for advertisers. For that half inning alone, including just prior and just after the frame, you were subjected to twelve 30-second ads, not including all the announcer reads and the lovely innovation of short in-frame spots during lulls in the play.
Not to be outdone, the 6th inning, top and bottom, wasted away another half hour of your life. No pitchers were removed mid-inning and only one run scored.
There were 284 pitches thrown in a game that produced just six runs, two of them on a single swing. Lance McCullers recorded seven outs, held L.A. scoreless and needed 49 pitches.
Y-a-w-n.
I mean that literally: the game was nearly three hours old with a third of the way to go.
I went to bed. In the middle of Game 7 of the World Series. I have never done that before.
I would have stayed up all night to see the World Series play out. But it wasn't playing out; it was droning on, withering before our eyes. This was basically a series of advertisements punctuated by mound conferences.
Evidently I didn't miss a thing. The combined 14 innings of one-run ball pitched by the two teams' "relievers" would have been exciting to start the game, but with the score already 5-0 it was a snoozefest. So I decided to snooze for real.
There is plenty of time in the off-season for deeper thoughts on the underlying causes of this and how bad it is for baseball. I've long advocated for a rule preventing a pitching change if the pitcher on the mound hasn't yielded a run in that frame. But this isn't the time for that.
It should be the time to celebrate the Astros and their first World Championship in 56 years of existence. It's exhilarating to see a team dogpile in ecstasy at the conclusion.
But I was deep into REM sleep by then.
The Playoffs begin this week with Wild Card action between the Yankees and Twins, and the Diamondbacks and Rockies.
Jump in Dr. Emmet Brown's DeLorean DMC-12 and head forward to the past and see how that statement sounds. The Yankees were rebuilding. The Twins were woebegone. The Diamondbacks had been wracked by mismanagement and were coming off a 93-loss season. And Colorado continued to refuse the Rockies' plea to come down to sea level.
It's a most unlikely set of Wild Card match-ups.
Even more unlikely would be the Twins and Rocks making noise in the post-season. Each is a distant last team in. Minnesota, the last AL team over .500, trailed New York by seven games and Cleveland, the Wild Card winner's first round opponent, by 17.
The Rockies backed into the playoffs six games behind the coasting Dbacks. They finished 16 games worse than the Wild Card winner's reward, the L.A. Dodgers.
In case you missed it, here are the final standings.
I'd like the regular season to matter, so I find it hard to root for them to get beyond the Wild Card. But I'm certainly rooting for the Twins to defeat New York.
Go AstroNatIndianCubDbackDodgers!
As I always root for teams whose fan bases have suffered most, I'm thrilled to see Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington each win 97+ games and waltz to division titles by 20+ games. Cub fans would not be over-indulging to win a second championship in 109 years. And Arizona last ended in a dogpile 16 years ago in one of the most entertaining World Series ever. Go, all of them.
The only teams I could do without this post-season are New York and Boston. The Yankees need to go bereft for half a century before they stir my sympathy. New England has enjoyed sports superiority for a decade and could use a rest. They're still cleaning up the confetti from the last parade, whether that was the Red Sox, Celtics or Patriots.
Cleveland/Houston versus L.A./Washington would undoubtedly validate the regular season and present us with clashes of the titans. It'd be a fitting end to an historic season.
