Odd facts about baseball

This was completed, to the final keystroke, as Lidge went into his windup against Pojols in the 9th ... posted for your amusement! Now I may need to rewrite it for later inclusion, since the Cards could now just as easily run three in a row and go back themselves ...

Anyway ...

First off, it is actually almost MORE fun to watch playoff games when you are not emotionally (co-)dependent on the outcome. I had forgotten that, from all those years in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and even early 90s ... when my beloved Red Sox (Flip Flops or Flop Sox, as we often called them) managed only once a decade or so to do more than show up on time for the first half of the season, and then go meekly by late August.

There was '67 of course which was aptly labeled "impossible" ... and then a near-miss in 72 (Aparicio of all people tripping over third?) ... and the 75 super Series (where someone had to end up winning it just wasn't quite Boston) ... and 77 and then 70-bleepin'-8 ... and then not much until 86 (and the dadgum Gerbil's failure to put Stapleton in as "caddy" like he usually did) ... and then several years of nothing, and then the mid-90s through present, when they kept finishing second, more often than not either the wild card or close to it ... and these last three years when they finally caught the Spankees, only to fade to WC on a technicality ...

Anyway, a lot of those years, there was no chance, and even if there was, you ended up seeing some other teams in the final rounds, playing better and more deserving. This is one of those years: All four teams belong there -- you might wonder about LAA and its Halos, but they just ran into the hottest team out there this year, running away from everyone for the first four months of the season, taking a deep breath in August and part of September -- and then rising to the occasion when the Indians closed to scary proximity, and just STUFFING them ...

But I was going to talk about "odd facts" ... Sorry for the digression ...

Odd fact #1: If it's White Sox/Astros, it will be a showdown between a team that has never been to the World Series, against one that has not been there since before their opponent even existed (Astros began, along with the Mets of Casey Stengel, in 1961; Chicago played LA Dodgers in 1959, last time they got there.);

Odd fact #2: If the White Sox win the Series, it would be their first win since 1917, the year before the Red Sox last won in before last year ... and as they noted on the game coverage tonight, the odds against that double back-to-back pairing of wins, 86 and 88 years apart, respectively, are ... 18.1 million to one -- meaning that if I had been whimsical enough a year ago, found a willing bookie, and had even 50 cents to spare ... I could have become a very rich man sometime about a week or so from now.

Odd fact #3: The Houston Astros are led by two pitchers who each won Series rings with the Yankees, and came close several other times, before moving their lockers to Texas, both for family reasons. (Much as I was never a Clemens fan, even when he WAS wearing white with red piping, at this stage in his career it is impossible not to acknowledge how good the egotistical bastard still is ...) Now they have a chance to have it all, leading a team that nobody thought would be here now ...

Odd fact #4: With Ozzie Guillen and Phil Garner, there will be two managers who were only mostly marginally good, scrappy-shortstop utility players, but obviously knew a lot more about the game than was noticed at the time. I love seeing that!

Odd fact #5: The chance to Pettitte/Clemens/Oswalt/Backe face off against Contreras/Buehrle/Garland/Garcia ... with good middle relief on both sides ... and then Lidge vs. Jenks (or even Hermanson?) at the end, when needed.

Odd facts 6 and 7: Contreras ... and El Duque Hernandez .. both castoffs from the Yankees ... both instrumental in getting Chicago here in their own ways.

And the fact that both teams can play percentage and play-for-one baseball, and yet also can bang the gong when they need to. And all these cool longtime players like Bagwell and Biggio and so on, there for the first time ever ...

I am really enjoying this, and either one winning will be great for baseball!