Game 6

I missed last night what might have been the best World Series game in a generation. Or at least I missed the last few innings, which made it perhaps the best World Series game in a generation. Up until that point, the 6^th game between the St. Louis Cardinals (my team, if only by proximity) and the Texas Rangers (not my team, if only because they were once owned by George W. Bush) was, unlike the previous five games, sloppy, and suspenseful only in the sense of wondering who would fuck up last and lose it. (St. Louis had three errors that should have been five, and Texas had two that should have been three.) But in the top of the 7^th, Texas took a 7-4 lead on back-to-back home runs, and it was nearing my old-man bedtime of 10:00 p.m., so I decided St. Louis didn’t have a chance and went to bed. But the Cardinal Allen Craig hit a homerun in the bottom of the 8^th, and then in the bottom of the 9th, with two outs and two strikes, third baseman David Freese (who had had a routine pop fly bounce of his glove, then his head in an early inning) hit a triple, scoring two runs to tie the game, taking it into extra innings. In the top of the 10^th, the Rangers went ahead again with a two-run homer form Josh Hamilton. If I would have still been up, I would have gone to bed then. But in the bottom of the 10^th, the Cardinals’ Lance Berkman, again with two strikes and two outs, drove a single to score two runs and tie the game again. The Rangers didn’t score in the top of the 11^th. But Freese came up again and, with a full count, hit a line-drive homerun into straight-away center to win the game. Pandemonium greeted him as he touched home plate, the crowd was hysterical, his teammates ripped his jersey off him.

But I was asleep through all of this. I recount it only from what I’ve read in the papers and seen on TV today. This is another price of being old. But I doubt I was the only one. The game didn’t end until 11:40 CDT (12:40 EDT). It will be interesting to see how this game goes down in World Series history. If the Cardinals lose game 7 tonight, then it will probably fade into an afterthought. But if they win, it will no doubt go down as one of the best games in World Series history. And being over 60, retired, and having no shame, I’ll claim in my limited future to have stayed up for every thrilling moment of it.