Tonight is a very special night, because tonight of all nights of the year is the night upon which Game 1 of the 2009 World Series will be played out between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies at the Yankees’ brand-new, ritzy stadium. It is the culmination of a long 162-game, six-month season in which the field of contention was whittled down to just eight playoff teams – four each from the National and American Leagues. Then the Division Series whittled that down further to just two teams from each league, who battled it out in the League Championship Series. And now there are two, and we all know there can be only one champion.
The World Series is made up of seven games, and the first team to win four of them takes home the title of World Champion of Baseball (for instance, if the Phillies were to win the first four games, the next three would be irrelevant and thus never played). America is not the only country that plays baseball, but we invented it and have christened it as our national pastime – thus our championship series is the best and most closely watched in the world, and thus it is the World Series.
It is a magical time of year. Anything can happen in a baseball game in late October (although this will be only the second time that a World Series will have been played in the month of November; the first was in 2001, when the terrorist attacks delayed the season), and it usually does. One only needs to look back on the history of our World Series to see how exciting it can be.
The World Series has been played in one form or another for over a hundred years, since 1903. In 1904, the American League came into existence and the National League champion refused to play the AL champion because the former thought the latter inferior. Thus there was no World Series that year, and it only happened again once, in 1994, when pouty players went on strike in the summer, cutting short what would have been a fabulous season. But other than that, nothing – not even two world wars, economic and political unrest, and terrorism – has been able to strike out a World Series. We have almost always set our calendars for October, when the world stops (or should) to sit down and watch the World Series.
My fellow Houstonians know how exciting it is when the World Series finally comes to your town and your team. The Astros got there in 2005, and even though we got swept by Chicago’s White Sox, it was a ride of a lifetime for many of us fans. That’s the feeling that the New York and Philadelphia fans are cherishing right now (and the Philly fans are experiencing it for the second straight year).
You ask for exciting moments? None are more exciting than when the Series goes to a full seven games. The last time that happened was in 2001, when the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the Yankees with a base hit in their very final at-bat of the game. Since then, we’ve had mostly four-game sweeps and five-game outcomes – but it’s still exciting, because you never know.
There have been other dramatic moments. In 1993, the Toronto Blue Jays won the Series over the Phillies with a home run in Game 6 by Joe Carter – that hasn’t happened very often. Drama takes other forms, like when Yankees (and later Astros) pitcher Roger Clemens picked up a broken piece of bat and chunked it at New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza (neither liked the other very much) during a game in the 2000 All-New York City “Subway Series”. It snowed in a World Series, in Cleveland in 1997. More frighteningly, there was an earthquake in the 1989 World Series between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants – the big Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco. The quake struck just as the teams were about to start playing, and the drama was caught on live national television.
There were other great moments in the days before any television cameras could picked them up. In 1932, Babe Ruth, the greatest ballplayer of them all, called, as legend would have it, his own home run before he hit it at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. I say “legend” because the stories of the event vary. I personally believe he did, because the Babe was that kind of a ballplayer. His equally legendary teammate Lou Gehrig hit a home run immediately after that, but no one remembered because they were too busy talking about the “called shot”.
I have some history in the World Series. No, I’ve never played in one, though I would have liked to. My great-grandfather, Joe Boley, a light-hitting, slick-fielding shortstop for the Philadelphia Athletics, went along for the ride as his team went to every World Series from 1929 to 1931, winning it twice. In 1929, he singled and scored a run in a furious 10-runs-in-one-inning Athletics comeback over the Cubs. Those A’s teams were some of the best you never hear about, with such greats on them as Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Lefty Grove, Mickey Cochrane, and manager Connie Mack.
There are other moments I’m thinking of. In 1956, pitcher Don Larsen of the Yankees did what nobody else has ever done in a World Series – limit the opposing team to exactly no hits, no runs, and no bases reached on fielding errors. In baseball nomenclature they call this a “perfect game”, and Don did it in ’56 to the crosstown rival Brooklyn Dodgers.
What magical moments await us this year? Nobody knows for sure. What I do know is that I will planted firmly in front of my television set, watching this year’s World Series from start to finish. Why don’t you join me, in spirit if not in person? It’s televised on a national network, as it always is. Oh, and by the way – I’m rooting for the Phillies.
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