Written by For as long as I can remember, I have loved the game of baseball. I still do. I don’t just love the game play, but I love the strategy, the gamesmanship, the personal effect, the unwritten rules, and perhaps most of all, the measurement by which all eras can correlate with one another.
I watched last night as the San Francisco Giants punched their ticket to the World Series by ousting the St. Louis Cardinals in five wonderful games. (Yes, I watched the Bruins and the Patriots too. Sometimes technology is my friend.) During the series, and last night’s broadcast, history was made. Things that I love about the game like…SF Giants starting pitcher Madison Bumgarner joined Bob Gibson and Mike Mussina as the only pitchers ever to submit five consecutive playoff starts of at least seven innings with seven or fewer base-runners…
Or perhaps it was the ties to history such as…the Giants advanced to the World Series by way of a walk-off home run for the first time since Bobby Thomson’s unforgettable ‘Shot Heard Round the World’ in 1951…
Then there was the mention of Bumgarner and Carl Hubbell in the same sentence…Bumgarner is just the fourth Giant to toss at least seven innings in four straight postseason starts, the first since Carl Hubbell between 1933 and 1936…
I know a lot of things are different about the game now than they were then. Then again, with each moment bigger than the last, a pitcher holds the ball while a batter waits. The battles are won and lost pitch by pitch. It’s a beautiful thing.