go birds wrote:I really wish I could relive that whole playoff experience just one more time.
Starting with the last day of the regular season.
Me to but it will never happen. Not like that. That was a 1x in a life deal. I was in St. Louis for the parade and that weekend before, and the buzz around the city was unbelievable.
Didn't the cards come back from an obscene amount of games behind and go on to win the series in the 60's? Similar to last year?
But yea prolly once in a lifetime for me....I can't imagine such a perfect storm of events ever happening again.
go birds wrote:I really wish I could relive that whole playoff experience just one more time.
Starting with the last day of the regular season.
Me to but it will never happen. Not like that. That was a 1x in a life deal. I was in St. Louis for the parade and that weekend before, and the buzz around the city was unbelievable.
Didn't the cards come back from an obscene amount of games behind and go on to win the series in the 60's? Similar to last year?
But yea prolly once in a lifetime for me....I can't imagine such a perfect storm of events ever happening again.
1964. Pick up a copy of "October 1964" by Halberstam.
Watching again tonight for the first time in a while. Holiday's slide into Andrus in the bottom of the 4th is really similar to the slide in to Scutaro in the NLCS. Andrus was athletic enough to get out of the way, but it could have been bad news for him.
This picture is my background image so I look at it everyday. Can anyone tell me who the guy on the far right is? The one next to Riot with half his face cut off. It's bugging the crap out of me.
On the bottom floor of the stadium, Rangers team president Nolan Ryan walked down the corridor and past the closed doors of the Cardinals' clubhouse, where you could hear the faint thumping of music and the occasional scream of happiness. Ryan, whose dark scowl matched the color of his black overcoat, didn't break stride.
What began as a disjointed, error-filled game, ended as something historic. You knew this by the look on the Cardinals' -- and the Rangers' -- faces.
And this led to David Freese and the Cardinals last hope. Soon, as announcers like to say, he was down to his last strike, and then he hit a 98-mph fastball hard to right field. And the beauty of it was that in the instant after the ball was hit, it had a chance to be anything. He had obviously hit it well -- the ball cracked off the bat -- but there was no telling how well. It had a chance to be a home run. It had a chance to be an out. I have written before that there is nothing in sports like the successful football Hail Mary pass, and the main reason I think that is that no two Hail Mary passes are alike. Sometimes they deflect from one receiver to another. Sometimes, they bounce off the defenders hands and back to a waiting receiver. Sometimes, the pass just drops into a pile and just sticks in a receiver's hands. Really, there are countless geometrical possibilities. Baseball doesn't usually have that kind of geometry. Home runs are home runs. Singles are singles. Pop-outs are pop-outs.
But Freese's fly was something like a Hail Mary, there was just no telling how it would end while the ball was in the air. Cruz went back on it with the cautious nature of an outfielder who is about to make a catch. This is the thing that baseball people told me and I have told countless people -- watch the outfielder. They will usually tell you the story. Cruz seemed ready to catch the ball. But this time Cruz's apparent calm was an illusion -- Cruz had misread the wall. He thought he was a lot closer to it. I have seen the replay a dozen times now, and it seems to me that he could have caught that ball, should have caught that ball, that the wall and the moment conquered him. He leaped for the ball but awkwardly and meagerly, like someone descending stairs in the dark who doesn't realize that there is one more step. The ball crashed off the wall, bounced by him, and the Cardinals scored two runs to tie the game and the St. Louis crowd transformed into a jet engine.
