One World of a Series

Jason Michael Barker

Something isn't quite right, but I can't seem to put my finger on it.

The Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that has been around for all of six months, won the World Series Monday night. That in itself is strange enough, but then factor in that they beat the New York Yankees, who had won the thing three years in a row. There are people out there who probably can't even remember the last time the Yankees didn't win the World Series, and roughly 50% of them are Diamondbacks fans, which only adds to this great irony.

But oh no, we're not done there. Not only did Colangelo's crew beat the Yankees, but they did so by scoring two runs in the bottom of the ninth off Mariano Rivera, who was to that point The Greatest Pitcher in Post-Season History (tm). And heck, he might still be, despite Monday night's collapse, but we'll leave that for another time. My vote is now in for Randy Johnson, but like I said, that's for another time.

There are so many side stories to this World Series that I don't even know where to begin, but I'll try nonetheless.

But first, a confession: I didn't watch every inning of every game, because this series honestly didn't interest me all that much when it first began. As it went on, of course, it became progressively more enthralling, and by the middle innings of Game Seven I was more nervous than I've ever been for a game involving two teams I don't care about.

Now back to those stories.

Perhaps most interesting for a baseball geek such as myself is that with the Diamondbacks winning the series, a pair of baseball's greatest curses -- neither of which compare with that of the Bambino, of course, but bear with me -- have come to an improbable end.

The first is the Curse of Balboni, which was so eloquently explained by Rany Jazayerli over at Baseball Prospectus earlier this post-season. Basically, since the Kansas City Royals and Steve Balboni won the World Series in 1985 with Balboni hitting 36 homers during the regular season, no team with a slugger who hit more than 35 homers has won the World Series.

Entering this post-season, the Yankees were the only club of the eight not to feature a slugger of Balbonic (Balbonistic?) proportions, making them the clear favorite to win the World Series. And yet, in perhaps one of the greatest curse breakings of all time, not only did the Diamondbacks win the World Series, but their Balboni -- Luis Gonzalez and his 57 homers -- got the series-winning hit. Amazing.

The second curse is the better known of the two: the Ex-Cub Factor. Through some strange twist of fate, teams with players who once played for the Cubs are destined to fail, while those with several ex-Cubs (or prominent ex-Cubs) are destined to go down -- with apologies to Johnny Cash -- in a burning ring of fire.

Yet this year, however, the Diamondbacks said "not so fast!" (If you slow the replay way down, you can actually see Bob Brenly say this as Jay Bell crosses the plate.) Pitchers Miguel Batista (1997), Mike Morgan (1992-95), outfielder Luis Gonzalez (1995-96), and of course Mark Grace (1988-00) all spent time with the Cubs at some point in their careers, with Grace the most prominent and longest, with nearly 2000 games logged in the Windy City.

This World Series also featured a number of great individual stories, the most striking of which, to me, was the great Randy Johnson bucking his reputation as a post-season flop and pitching as only he could. In Game One, he tossed nine shutout innings. In Game Six, he allowed two runs over seven, and could have gone longer if the score wasn't so lopsided in favor of his club. As if that weren't enough, he pitched another inning and one-third of relief the very next day to earn his third win of the series. In a game where Bob Brenly had no confidence in his bullpen, the four batters Johnson faced to keep the game close were huge.

Elsewhere in the bullpen you had Mike Morgan, one of the few players left today who laced up his spikes before I was born. And yet, despite his 21 years in the majors with 12 different clubs, this was Morgan's first trip to the World Series. He made the most of it, pitching four and one-third innings of scoreless relief against the Yankees, the team he played with back in 1982.

At one point during the broadcast of Game Seven, Fox showed a shot of Morgan and the much-maligned Byung-Hyun Kim warming up side by side in the bullpen, with the former old enough to be the latter's father. It would have been nice to see Kim get a shot at redemption, but at least his club got him off the proverbial hook by winning the series. If they hadn't, he would have gone down in history as one of baseball's biggest chokers, and all at the tender age of 22.

At some point during Game Seven -- I think it was the bottom of the eighth, after Mariano Rivera set down the Diamondbacks and a New York win seemed inevitable -- I stopped rooting for Arizona and started rooting for baseball. It sounds silly, but I just didn't want the season to end. It seems like only days ago I was sitting in the Arizona sun watching spring training, and now the entire thing was just a few outs away from being over. A 25-inning marathon would have been fine with me, so long as it prolonged the baseball season just a bit.

At the same time, I was still pulling for Arizona in that "good vs. evil" sense of things. I know the Diamondbacks haven't been around very long, and no, their fans and the franchise probably don't "deserve" to win it when you consider all those long-suffering cities like Boston and Chicago. But by the same token, there's no way I could ever bring myself to root for the Yankees, for a variety of reasons that don't need to be spelled out in this space.

I'll admit it -- when Tony Womack came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with one out and two on, I figured the game was over. I believe my exact words to the people I was watching the game with were: "Tony Womack is such a freaking hack." That didn't stop me from jumping up when he hit the double, of course, just as the double itself doesn't chance the fact that he is, in fact, not a good baseball player.

From there: Rivera hits Counsell, Torre brings in his infield, Gonzalez lifts one over Jeter, Bell comes in to score and the series is over. I write it like that because to me, it really did happen that quickly. There was hardly time to react to the game being tied before Counsell took one for the team, and there was hardly time to react to that before Gonzalez dunked one into center.

All in all it was an amazing, amazing game. Better than the seventh game in 1997, though I liked that one. It's hard for me to choose between Sunday night and the seventh game in 1991, because of course Sunday is so much fresher in my mind. There's also that I was rooting for the Braves back then, for reasons that can only be explained as "I was young and stupid." It happens to the best of us, or so I'm told.

And so it begins -- the off-season, that is. Games like last night are a great reminder of why baseball is so great, and why it'll be so, so, so awful (this cannot be emphasized enough) if the powers that be can't get their collective heads together to avoid another work stoppage.

Pitchers and catchers report in... well, you get the drill.

about the author

Jason Michael Barker promises not to cry this winter at the lack of baseball, so long as you promise not to send mp3's of Tim McCarver to jmb@strikethree.com.

Custom Search