added: Tom Verducci has words:
They will go down as the most thrilling 129 minutes in baseball history. Never before and likely never again -- if we even dare to assume anything else can be likely ever again -- will baseball captivate and exhilarate on so many fronts in so small a window the way it did September 28, 2011.
Starting at 9:56 PM Eastern, the grand old game, said to suffer by comparison from football's siren sisters of gambling and violence, and said to suffer from America's shrinking attention span and capacity to contemplate, rose up and fairly screamed, "Watch this!"
Tampa Bay scares me. I'm glad they start in Texas.
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ps - This was MAJOR coming out party for MLB Network. They juggled the games perfectly.
Ditto on the speechlessness. Those three games tonight, all of which involved a team being one out away from victory, and then the other team coming back to steal the win = why baseball is awesome.
ReplyDeleteWhat compares with bottom of the 9th hijinx? Along with a 3-pointer buzzer-beater and injury time goal in soccer, I think it is the most exciting moment in sports.
ReplyDeleteThis makes me so happy. I just wish I knew more Red Sox fans.
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ReplyDeleteDivision I college football overtime is incredibly exciting, probably just as much so as the 9th inning of a pennant race game (depending on the match-up).
And I'm a Red Sox fan, so there's that.
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I'm a Red Sox fan who can say with a straight face that last night is exactly why I watch baseball. Unbelievable.
ReplyDeleteBlerg.
ReplyDeleteGack. Here, as a Chicago fan, I was thinking I might not watch that much of the playoffs this year. As Kaylee say in Serenity, "To hell with that!"
ReplyDeleteThat was SO MUCH FUN.
ReplyDeleteMy husband, who doesn't much care for the wild card but likes even less the idea of adding more teams to the playoffs, says that last night was a message from the baseball gods to Bud Selig. "Bud, if you add more teams, you will take away the fun."
Bud, being Bud, will not listen, though, and will assume that adding teams will mean even more fun!
With the Giants whimpering their way through most of August and September and out of the playoff race, I hadn't been watching what was going on in the rest of the league. But that was a mighty fun bit of baseball last night.
ReplyDeleteJust an amazing night of baseball. Nate Silver's back-of-the-envelope calculation says that there was "a combined probability of about one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way."
ReplyDelete<span>What compares with bottom of the 9th hijinx? </span>
ReplyDeleteWell, the Mythbusters were playing with rocket-propelled grenades...
Greatness. I wish Napoli's top-of-the-9th 2-run jack that clinched home field for TEX AND sent DET to NYY got more play.
ReplyDeleteI don't have cable and there was no radio feed via the internet (that I could find). That being said, following it via my friends and sportscasters on Twitter, FB and MLB, I enjoyed the evening. Really bummed I wasn't watching, though.
ReplyDeleteI would say, in response to Verducci, it took baseball six months and 2415 preceeding games to create a scenario as exciting as this. Football manages to do it almost every Sunday for 21 weeks. I love baseball, but there's a lot of cruft and dead weight in the marathon of the season.
ReplyDeleteIt was captivating, if disappointing for me as a Sox fan. It was not, however, surprising to me as a Sox fan and what happened was really what I expected to happen. You never want to rely on the Yankees to help you out.
ReplyDeleteAt least it allows me to get fully behind my other hometown team. Go Phillies!
Good grief, how I loathe the fan-boy comment. If they take them out in 3, then they are the better team. So be it. I never even mentioned TB.
ReplyDeleteYour comment is illogical: so TEX should not have played for home field last night to avoid the possibility of playing TB?
Fair enough, I'll delete.
ReplyDeleteMy poor Red Sox loving husband and I were watching the game and when the announcer said "one strike away..." my spouse yelled "GAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!" and covered his face with a pillow.
ReplyDeleteOf course then, being a Red Sox fan, he had to rewind the DVR just so he could actually watch the pain.
I have big-time sleep issues, and I was deep in Dreamland by 10 PM. So, of course, I missed everything. Gah.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Al Gore, for inventing the Internet.
The reaction of MLB Network studio analysts Harold Reynolds and particularly Dan Plesac after the Longoria homer was rather amusing, even if Plesac's mouth should have been pixelated Real World Hawaii-style.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7og1K-FameQ
Yep, me too. When Boston went into rain delay I went to bed.
ReplyDeleteIt's a little odd to me that no one has been mentioning the call on Michael Bourn's (attempted) stolen base in any of the media reactions I've seen today. The angle on the replay showed that the call was badly blown -- he was safe easily -- and with him on base we would've had one more run when Dan Uggla hit his home run. So the game shouldn't really have gotten into extra innings. (99% of the time the play where Uggla got thrown out at home would've worked out for the Braves too, but that was an absolute perfect play by Hunter Pence. Credit where credit is due.)
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to get too worked up over it because it's hard for me to imagine us winning even a play-in game in our condition, let alone winning a game in a playoff series, let alone winning a whole series. Especially since they announced yesterday that Hanson would've been a no-go for the playoffs. But as far as blown calls go, that's a pretty consequential one.
In the replay I saw, Bourn absolutely beat the throw. But he also absolutely came off the bag, and was tagged in the process, and that's why he was called out. The call was right.
ReplyDeleteAhhhhh. That was not made clear on the SportSouth feed. I feel better now.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I saw too (what Adam said).
ReplyDeleteSo happy I get to watch Albert Pujols as a Cardinal just a little bit longer.....
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