Legends, legacies and Game 162

If you look at baseball from the rosy, plastic view of Ken Burns or producers those ridiculous aggrandizing odes to the game as if it is some sort of complex metaphor for life on the Upper East Side, the final day of the Major League Baseball season is nothing to get worked up over. No, that’s stuff is saved for Opening Day where they blather on wide-eyed and sappy-like as if they just walked out of the cornfield in Field of Dreams.

Look, that romanticizing about baseball is fine and it sells a lot of books, but for the hardcore baseball fan there is nothing like Game 162.

Opening Day is for renewal and hope and promise. It’s when everyone starts fresh and there are no limits on success. But rarely is Opening Day memorable or the purveyor of significant, meaningful action. It’s the first one of 162 and there will be another game in the days to follow.

Oh, but Game 162 is about blood and guts. It’s where heroes, goats and legends are made and where legacies are cast in concrete. Game 162 is about the pros even if the team is just playing out the string. There is a real dignity in seeing the race all the way to the end even if it was lost long before the trading deadline. A baseball season truly is like a marathon the ballplayers liken it to, and that being the case, Game 162 is like running the last 385 yards of the marathon. Anyone can do the first 26 miles, but it’s that last stretch that separates the champs from the chumps.

So with Sunday’s slate of Game 162s that last sprint for a bunch of teams, the final day of the season is shaping up to be one of the oddest in recent memory in the National League. Yes, the Phillies are in and will have home-field advantage the entire length of the postseason, but rarely is there an opportunity for the top-seeded team to also be the spoiler.

In fact, the Phillies have played that spoiler role perfectly during the first two games of the series in Atlanta where they have helped monkey wrench the entire season for the Braves, Padres and Giants simply by winning games. At 97-64 (the best record in the majors), the Phils sent Kyle Kendrick and Vance Worley to the mound against the Braves and walked away with lopsided victories. The strange part is that the Braves needed to win just one game to sew up the wild-card berth in the playoffs while the Padres would have to settle on sweeping away the Giants—in San Francisco—to force a one-game playoff on Monday.

But the Phillies’ victories and the Padres’ refusal to go away in San Francisco leaves the scenarios like this:

• Wins by the Phillies and Giants: The Giants get the NL West and the Padres and Braves tie for the wild card. The tie-breaker game would be played on Monday in Atlanta. If the Padres win, they get to fly to Philadelphia for Game 1 of the NLDS on Wednesday. If the Braves win, Cincinnati heads to Philly for the NLDS and the Braves go to San Francisco.

• Wins by the Phillies and Padres: The Braves are done and the Giants and Padres finish tied for the NL West. Based on the tie-breaker, the Padres become the NL West champs because they had a better record head-to-head against the Giants. It also means the Giants face the Phillies in the NLDS.

• Wins by the Braves and Giants: The Padres are done. The Giants win the NL West and the Braves get the wild card. The playoff matchups from this scenario are Reds vs. Phillies and Braves vs. Giants.

• Wins by the Braves and Padres: This is the oddest of all the circumstances. It means the Padres and Giants leave San Francisco to play one game in San Diego on Monday. The winner is champion of the NL West and the loser of that game jets to Atlanta for a one-game playoff on Tuesday to determine the wild-card winner.

If it were to come to this, and the Giants or Padres escaped with a win in Atlanta, they could play four games in four consecutive days in four different cities in two time zones.

The question that must be asked is if Game 162 ever presented so many different scenarios in baseball history and the knee-jerk answer has to be, no. The fates of five teams all come down to two games played on the very last day of the season and even then there’s a chance the picture will become even more muddied. However, before the advent of divisional play and the league championship series, the 1967 season came down to the very last day of the season where three teams—the Red Sox, Twins and Tigers—were separated by one game. And just to make it even more crowded, the White Sox came in fourth place just three games behind the Red Sox.

The final day of the 1967 saw the Red Sox beat the Twins to take a one-game lead while the Angels beat the Tigers in the second game of a doubleheader to give Boston the pennant. Game 162 of 1967 was most notable for the Tigers and Angels playing two doubleheaders on the last two days of the season, as well as Carl Yastrzemski’s 4-for-4 to cap off a 7-for-8 with six RBIs and a homer in the last two games to boost him to the Triple Crown.

Aside from the 1967 pennant race, the Padres’ run against the Giants most resembles the Orioles’ frantic comeback in the last four games of the 1982 season against the Brewers. Leading the AL East by three games with four to play, Milwaukee needed to win one game to sew it up and go to the playoffs for the first time. But in the opener, the Orioles won with Dennis and Tippy Martinez on the mound. Then the Orioles swept a Saturday doubleheader by a combined score of 18-4 to make the last game of the year a do-or-die situation.

Considering that the Orioles trailed the Brewers by four games with five to play, by seven games in late August and by 10 games in May, one had to wonder if the Orioles were surging or the Brewers were choking.

That was all settled on a sun-soaked Sunday afternoon at Memorial Stadium on 33^rd Street where future Hall-of-Famers Jim Palmer and Don Sutton took the mound with future Hall-of-Famers Cal Ripken Jr. and Robin Yount at shortstop.

But what any self-respecting Milwaukeean will tell you that it wasn’t so much Sutton’s solid eight-innings or Yount’s two homers and a triple (well, maybe it was Yount… he was pretty spectacular that day) as it was Ben Oglivie’s sliding catch on the gravel warning track in left field to end the eighth inning and ruin the Orioles’ last rally that could have tied the game.

Instead, the Brewers hung on in Game 162, rallied from a 2-0 deficit against the Angels in the ALCS and went to Game 7 of the World Series against the Cardinals in a season that was pushed to the limits. Better yet, it was because of Game 162 that Yaz, Sutton, Yount and even Ben Oglivie are discussed with reverence saved for TV documentaries so many years later.

You can have Opening Day, we’ll take Game 162. That’s baseball.

“Somebody's going down,” Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said about the odd final day of the season facing the National League. “There’s three teams in there. Somebody’s going down, man.”

Very true. But somebody is going up, too.

Phillies, Braves on a collision course

The silly, old adage with Major League Baseball is, “it’s a marathon,” and as a veteran of 14 competitive marathons (not bragging or anything), I would call the 162-game baseball season with its spring training and month long playoffs, the much more grueling sport to play and cover. For a good marathon a person is investing three to four months of focused training and then two-and-a-half to three hours of running on race day.

Plus, when broken down, running is just moving forward… one foot after the other. It's kind of simple when looked at that way.

Baseball is like that, too, only the training period never really ends. Sure, a lot of ballplayers will try to rest up during the month of November, but typically start working out for spring training and the season around Thanksgiving. Not including all the games, the travel, the sitting around and waiting and all of the late nights and early mornings, the self-respecting ballplayer and ballscribe look as if they have been put through a meat grinder when the playoffs roll around. Considering all the bad flights, bad food, lousy sleep patterns and no true semblance of a “real” life while friends and family are off enjoying the summer and vacations, the baseball lifers earn all those Marriott points they rack up during the season.

Respect? Well, someday… someday.

Nevertheless, over a 162-game season it often gets tough digging up a story idea. Sure, the news of the day always prevails, but with so much competition and so many different people disseminating it, a fresh angle is always the goal. So the search for an obtuse or acute angle brought us to the second game of Monday’s day-night doubleheader[1] led a lot of us to the same spot…

The race for the NL East is going to come down to that last weekend of the season in Atlanta.

Hey, it was a long day. Besides, sometimes the best story is the most obvious one. Other times it’s best to give credit to the schedule makers. After all, the past few years the Phillies had a way of wrapping up the season at home against Washington or Florida with a few days to rest the team’s big guns. In fact, last year, the Phillies had things sewn up with four games remaining in the season to reinforce the accepted fact that there is nothing worse than meaningless September baseball.

Obviously, the converse of that is also fact. There is nothing in sports more exciting than meaningful September and October baseball and it appears as if the Phillies and Braves are headed for a collision course.

“If I had my way we’d get a lead and be four up with three to play before we went in there,” manager Charlie Manuel said. “I don’t know, but it’s kind of traveling that way. It’s like a hurricane they’re predicting to go up the coast with the track it’s going to take.”

Yes, two hurricanes headed for the same spot at the same time. Meteorologists say this can’t happen in nature, but it seems as if the Phillies are resigned to let it happen. At least that’s the conventional wisdom. Publically, however, the ballplayers are still in the play-them-one-game-at-a-time mode. That makes sense considering the Phillies are at the most crucial stage of the marathon, well past the point where glycogen stores are depleted and the dreaded “wall” is staring them right in the face.

With a clubhouse full of seasoned, playoff veterans, the Phillies aren’t sizing up the Braves and calculating how it will go down during the final weekend of the season.

“Let’s not look too far ahead,” Shane Victorino said. “We’ll just keep playing. We worry about ourselves. We’re not worried about what [the Braves] are doing. We control our own destiny. We’ve got to go out there and play our baseball.”

Logically, Victorino is correct. If the Phillies keep winning ballgames a trip to the playoffs for a fourth season in a row is a virtual lock. The numbers crunchers at Baseball Prospectus put the odds for the Phillies to win the east at 29 percent, the wild card at 40 percent and a berth at the playoffs at 68 percent. Interestingly, the BP formula has the Phillies going 11-12 the rest of the way and a match up against the Cincinnati Reds in the NLDS with the Braves pared with the winner of the NL West.

Still, like in any marathon a mile in the beginning of the race logically carries the same importance as the last miles. But we know better. So too do they Phillies and every other ballclub in Major League Baseball. The example I like to cite is the end of the 1982 season where the Milwaukee Brewers went to Baltimore for four games in the final three days of the season. The Brewers needed one win to clinch the division, while the Orioles had to sweep all four to complete the improbable comeback to win the AL East.

The Orioles cruised in Friday night’s opener, 8-3, highlighted by a three-hit game from Rich Dauer and 2 2/3 of one-hit relief from closer Tippy Martinez. Storm Davis tossed a gem in Saturday’s first game as the Orioles rolled 7-1 and swept the doubleheader with 18 hits in an 11-3 laugher.

So with the season coming down to one final game on the last Sunday of the regular season, and aces Jim Palmer and Don Sutton on the mound, the Brewers regrouped to clinch the East with a 10-3 victory. Not only did the Brewers save themselves from the indignity of blowing a three-game lead with four to play, but the last game served as a signature game for 1982 AL MVP, Robin Yount, who led his team with two homers, a triple and scored four runs.

Not a bad afternoon, for Yount or the Brewers. For the Orioles, the one game proved to be the lasting image of the 1982 season.

And that’s what the Phillies (and every other team) is up against.

“I think our team will be remembered by how we finish,” Manuel said, astutely. “We’ve hung in there. Our starting pitching has kept us in there. We’re sitting in a good place, and now is a good time for us to pick it up and start putting some runs on the board consistently.”

As it shapes up now, Cole Hamels, Roy Halladay and Roy Oswalt (in that order) will pitch in the final series. The Braves will have Derek Lowe, Jair Jurrgens and Tim Hudson ready to go, too.

How can it not come down to that last weekend?

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[1] The doubleheader, especially the day-night doubleheader, is a phenomenon foreign to every pro sport aside from baseball. Yes, the physical tolls of the games on its participants aren’t as foreboding in baseball, but think about the scribes. Most folks got to the ballpark for Monday’s day-nighter before 10 a.m. and did not leave the park until after 11 p.m. That’s a long day no matter what the task.

Stay off the lawn!

A kid can learn a lot at a baseball game. The most important lesson, of course, is how to act—or not act—in social settings. 

Oh yes, you can see where this is going already, right? But guess what… forget it. We’re not going to even mention those knuckleheads that jumped on the field at Citizens Bank Park the past two nights and the criminal vomitter from a few weeks back. If there were a way to go back into a time machine and Photoshop them out of attendance at the ballpark, then yes, that would be infinitely better than taking a taser to their backsides.

Unfortunately there are no time machines except for in the movies and people can’t be Photoshopped out of existence. What a gyp.

Anyway, we try to focus on the positive here, so let’s just say that one has to work very hard to have a bad time at a ballpark or an arena. It happens sometimes, and based on the latest events reported out of Citizens Bank Park, it has been happening a lot. The shame of that is there are some really good fans that get out to games and it’s possible that the really good fans are being scared away from going to games.

And no, that fear does not come from the price of tickets.

I always relate going to games to the way it was when I was a kid. Frankly, there weren’t too many things that were more fun than the handful of games my family went to every year. Luckily, some of those games are burned in my brain like the time Larry Bird, at the height of his ability, dropped a triple-double on the Sixers at the Spectrum and used one ridiculous move that I hadn’t seen before or since.

Then there was the final game of the 1982 baseball season at Memorial Stadium where Robin Yount went 3-for-4 with two homers to overshadow a pitching matchup featuring future Hall-of-Famers Jim Palmer and Don Sutton. More notably, Yount’s heroics cinched the 1982 AL MVP Award for him and got the Brewers into the playoffs for the first time ever.

There were other events, too, like the beginning of the Red Sox swoon in 1978 that we saw from behind home plate at Memorial Stadium, which was the perfect vantage point to see a home run hit by Jim Rice that may have just landed. We were also there on a sun-drenched Sunday where Cal Ripken appeared in the very first game of his historical streak. The thing that made that day stand out was that Toronto pitchers Jim Gott and Roy Lee Jackson combined to one-hit the Orioles in one the most boring games I ever sat and watched. Rick Dempsey got a one-out single in the fifth, so there was no drama whatsoever. Worse, it was a combined one-hitter, which seems rather devious when you think about it.

Nevertheless, we were able to have fun at the games without being jerks about it. Sure, most of that has to do with the fact that we were really into the teams and the sports, but that didn’t seem so extraordinary at the time. We didn’t need dollar-dog nights or bobbleheads to get us out to the park. Maybe it was a different time or perhaps our senses weren’t numbed or dulled down by an over proliferation of media coming from all directions, but the game, a ticket stub and a program was enough.

Maybe because of our ability in interact or communicate with anyone (or anything), there is an attitude that the individual is part of the show, too. It wasn’t so much as we knew our place way back when, but maybe we had a little more respect for others’ property. The game and the field belonged to someone else and the only way to get the honor of running, hitting or shooting on it was by earning it.

True story: in 10 years of exclusively writing about baseball, I walked onto the actual playing surface just one time. It was to retrieve an errant baseball and then fire it back to the kid retrieving them, but even then I was told—under no uncertain terms—to get off the field.

That’s someone else’s work space, not mine.

From those days of going to games as a kid, there was one fan we saw as the ultimate booster of his team. He didn’t have a fancy job, or seats in a special box or anything, he was just a guy who liked to hang out with his friends in Section 34 at Memorial Stadium after finishing his shift as a cab driver in Baltimore.

Oh yes, we loved Wild Bill Hagy.

Wild Bill came from the Dundalk section of town and did nothing more than cheer for his team. In fact, he was so good at cheering for his team that everyone else followed his lead, which included his trademark of spelling out the world ORIOLES with his limbs and shouting, “Oh!” during the final stanza of the “Star Spangled Banner.” That was it. Wild Bill was just a fan—a genuine fan without any airs or pretension.

Better yet, Wild Bill didn’t have to run onto the field or break the law in order to get attention. He didn’t have fancy seats or have ins with any of the team’s brass. He was just a guy who liked the Orioles.

What’s wrong with that?