Bye-Bye, Baseball; Hello, Football Play-Offs
Wrapping the World Series and Previewing High School Gridiron Matchups
Before moving on to the most exciting time of the football season, I must look back on a fantastic year for baseball. It included UCSB’s first appearance in the College World Series (a quest of 69 years since the college tournament was started in 1947), and it ended last week in a most dramatic fashion. After 108 years, seven games, and an extra inning, the Chicago Cubs terminated the granddaddy of all championship droughts at the World Series.
Game 7 — the Cubs outlasting the Cleveland Indians, 8-7 — was a lavish feast for baseball fans. It was full of twists and turns, blunders and heroics. No less an observer than Roger Angell, who has written brilliantly about baseball for decades, expressed “never-before” wonderment at several instances in the game: Chicago’s Kris Bryant sprinting from first to home on a single, and two Cleveland runs scoring after a wild pitch caromed off the face mask of catcher David Ross (who later hit a home run in the last game of his career). As for Rajai Davis’s stunning two-run homer that tied the score 6-6 in the eighth inning, though, Angell made a rare boast: He saw it coming.
Angell, whose account appeared on the New Yorker website, is Vin Scully at a keyboard. He was a longtime editor at the magazine, and his articulate sensibility shines in his baseball writing. He is 96 years old, which, he pointed out, is the combined age of the Cubs’ four infielders.
