The Pecan Park Eagle

How Game Four of the 2017 World Series Played Out in the Mind’s Eye.

How Game Five of the 2017 World Series Played Out in the Mind’s Eye.

After seventy years of attentive focus upon how the professional game of baseball is played, I had never seen anything like Game Five of the 2017  World Series in my life. Ever.

Oh yeah, as Post-WW2 kids, we did this sort of the thing on the Houston sandlots on a daily basis, but, jeez, these were the heavyweights of professional baseball in 2017, playing on the highest, brightest, most respected, tradition-rich stage that baseball has to offer. It isn’t supposed to work out that this way. Good pitching is supposed to stop good hitting, and this game featured two former Cy Young starters, one of whom (Kershaw) is still regarded as the greatest starter in the game today.

Neither Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers or Dallas Keuchel of the Astros got through the first 5 innings; both were bombed; and both suffered from poor defense. It was an ebb and flood evening of hitting monsters, ones who had come to the park this night to do bad things to good people on the other side who entered this battle with the small case “p” printed at the end of their last names in the box score. It was a night that could have shifted easily to the Halloween date. These monsters had shown up early to capitalize on the endless stream of uncapitalized “p” bodies that zombied their over-worked arms through the pit of misery that the MMP pitching mound had become for their kind this haunting night in baseball history.

Pressure and over-use sucked energy from pitchers like the bite of the vampire sucks blood from the living. The big-boppers-of-baseball-bashing then monstered their ways over pitchers whose low energy and high anxiety served up home run pitches like grab-and-go doughnuts from the Shipley’s drive-by window.  Less favored, but last resort pitchers began to parade into the game from the pens like so many mummy-paced zombies and – as for any real closers – they were only present as invisible men among the house of many wolfman-maned batters. And the scruffiest of those was both scraggly redheaded and all decked out in Dodger blue. What a cast – and it only missed Halloween by a couple of earlier time days.

The malevolent baseball gods were equivalently undermining to the large and small “p” men this night. Orange. Blue. It didn’t seem to matter. If a “p” man could throw a baseball, he could hit a bat in motion that would turn that baby around and send it soaring into the farthest home run regions of Minute Maid Park.

Three times in Game Five, twice for the Astros and once for the Dodgers, teams drew back into ties on the heels of 3-run homers.

In the end, it was the sound of Alex Bregman’s bat in the bottom of the 10th with two outs. A single to left center was in motion and pinch runner Derek Fisher was well into the final 180 feet run that would end the blood spilling, at least, for this game. Around third came Fisher, sliding easily into home long before the ball arrived for a no-chance play.

Game over. Astros, win 13-12, in a five plus hours game. Astros now lead the 2017 World Series pursuit, 3 games to 2, over the LA Dodgers.

We take nothing for granted, but we raise our cups in a toast of hope!

Dilly! Dilly!

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