Baseball is a sport of endurance. For 162 games over six months, the 30 teams in the major leagues struggle to survive the grueling campaign, leaving only eight teams standing when the postseason begins.
But every once in awhile, the baseball season for two of those teams will come down to the final weekend, with either a division or the wild card spot up for grabs. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, it will go down to the final day of the season.
And then there’s what happened with this year’s race for the American League Central title. The Detroit Tigers led by seven games at one point in September over the Minnesota Twins, and later led them by three games with four games to play. But the Twins managed to beat the Tigers last Thursday, and then swept their final three games with the Kansas City Royals. Meanwhile, the Tigers could only get one of their final three games, beating the Chicago White Sox Sunday afternoon, setting up the rarest of pleasures for a baseball fan: a one-game, winners-takes-all playoff game.
Does it get any better than that?
The Twins have long been one of baseball’s model franchises, a small market team that consistently manages to compete with the big boys by doing things the right way – through drafting and developing talent, as well as making shrewd decisions (most of the time) in trades and free agency. With a win last night, they would be gunning for their fifth AL Central title in eight seasons under manager Ron Gardenhire.
The Tigers, on the other hand, are one of the wealthier teams in baseball, with owner Mike Illitch using the wealth from his Little Caesars empire to fund expensive contracts for Miguel Cabrera, Magglio Ordonez and others. The game was a perfect dichotomy of the two halves of the baseball world – the rich teams that can afford to fill many of their holes through free agency and by taking on money in trades (like when Detroit accepted Dontrelle Willis’ albatross of a contract to help get Cabrera from the Marlins), and the small market teams that have to be smarter and more creative than everyone else to get the job done at the same level.
And if the game could have any more suspense than a 163rd game already has, this one did. Inning after inning, play after play, the game just became greater and greater. First there was Cabrera, fresh off a weekend where he got in a fight with his wife while drunk late at night while the Tigers were fighting for their lives, hitting a two-run home run to give Detroit a 3-0 lead. Then there was a comeback by the Twins, capped by another two-run homer by another Cabrera – Minnesota’s shortstop Orlando Cabrera, who came to the Twins in one of those savvy trades at midseason from Oakland.
The game continued in this back-and-forth manner, with great plays being made all over the place. Detroit third baseman Brandon Inge made a diving grab in the bottom of the ninth that almost certainly would have allowed the winning run to score from second base. Inge then knocked in the go-ahead run in the bottom of the inning, as his double down the left field line was able to score Don Kelly, who hustled hard all the way from first base, and whose feet first slide allowed him to blast through Joe Mauer’s block of home plate. After making a huge blunder by diving for a ball to lead off the inning (which led to the tying run scoring), Detroit left fielder Ryan Raburn caught a line drive and fired a strike to the plate to nail the Twins’ Alexi Casilla at the plate for the inning’s, preventing what would have been the game-winning run.
Those kinds of plays kept happening all the way until the bottom of the 12th inning, when Casilla bounced a single through the right side of Detroit’s infield, bringing around Carlos Gomez with the game’s deciding run, and handing the Twins a 6-5 win.
It was a classic game, the kind that any sports fan could become engrossed in without much effort. It was the kind of game that you didn’t want to see come to an end. Now the Twins, having beaten one of the higher-spending teams in the sport, flew last night to New York to take on the team with the highest payroll by far, the New York Yankees. Meanwhile, the Tigers will head home after choking their way through the final two weeks of the season.
That’s the beauty of this time of year in baseball. For six months, the baseball season seems like it’s never going to end. Then, all of a sudden, October is upon us, and each pitch takes on a life of its own.
That’s why, year after year, we get sucked into the baseball playoffs. It’s like watching a great play being performed by the greatest actors on the biggest stage, over and over again.
