HoraceClarke66: Baseball Götterdämmerung

 From the computerized quill of Hoss...

“What an exciting game!” Paul O’Neill told us somewhere from the wilds of Florida, before signing off Friday night after the Yanks’ 2-1 win over Chicago.

 

Indeed! Um, sort of. 

 

What more could we ask for? A one-run game that featured a home run by a player who is showing signs of life for the first time in two years. A triple play in the ninth inning—a walk-off slide (a slide-off?) for the winning run in the bottom of the ninth.

 

What’s not to like???

 

Well, just the fact that until we got to the end of the game, the Yankees and ChiSox gave us some of the most somnolent baseball I’ve ever seen. When it wasn’t completely incompetent.

 

A combined four errors and 26 strikeouts. Nearly three hours of swing and miss, boot and bobble.

 

I know baseball works in mysterious ways. I know it is a game that, by its very nature, often builds slowly, often deceptively to moments of incredible excitement and tension.

 

Not so much the other night. More like numbing boredom and ineptitude, followed by a couple of surprises.

 

I then switched over to watch the Mets, who were still playing in the 12^th inning in Miami. The Marlins were dressed in what looked like the uniforms of an especially poor community college team.

 

On the mound was one Adam Cimber (NOT pictured above. Apparently he looked too weird to get past the MLB censors.). He seemed to be wearing kneepads and had his socks pulled up so high he looked almost as if he were wearing shorts.

 

The whole image was so bizarre I thought the problem must have been the pot gummy I’d popped a few minutes before. But no. It really did look that crazy—almost as if the Marlins had a mechanical man, or some fantasy creation out on the mound. As if all of this were happening in an alternate reality.

 

The Mets sent up Kahlil Lee, a rookie pinch-hitter who had just set a record by striking out his first eight times up in the majors (The announcers informed us that he had not even made contact in those eight at-bats.)

 

Lee, who was playing because almost half the Mets’ roster was hurt, managed an opposite-field double. Hooray! Then the next replacement player, Joneshwy Fargas, came up and hit a dying quail to right field that the Marlins rightfielder dived for and missed. He chased the ball into the corner—where he fell and sat on it. Finally, he threw the ball in—where he managed to cut down Fargas trying for an inside-the-park home run.

 

Wow! Whoee! I hadn’t seen a play quite like that since Little League.

 

The Mets held on to win, 6-5, and it was all so exciting. The whole effort featured a combined 18 pitchers, striking out a total of 25 batters.

 

That’s right: two games, 51 strikeouts. Five errors, all kinds of stumbling and bumbling. But what an ending, huh?

 

I’m sorry, people, but that’s not baseball—at least not as I know it.

 

Half the roster injured—on every team. As usual.

 

Endless pitch-and-catch, a bunch of stumble-bumbling…and then a boffo ending.

 

It’s not enough.

 

Over seven-and-a-half hours of snoresville, much of it played by guys in clown suits, who themselves have been put half-to-sleep by how slow and dull their game has become.

 

I don’t care how good the ending is. That’s not the game I came to love.