twinsfan
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MIKE LUPICA
FALL FOR BASEBALL
So much of the conversation is about football at this time of year -- college and pro, real and fantasy -- a few weeks before baseball's October season begins. There was all this hype the week before last about the best opening weekend ever in college football, only then it wasn't hype at all, and big teams lost, and Texas and Notre Dame played the kind of game they did on a Sunday night, a game that ended 50-47 in two overtimes and made you feel like you were watching a tournament game in college basketball.
Now the pros are back, and Jimmy Garoppolo plays the way he does as he subs in for Tom Brady, and the Raiders go for a two-point conversion on the road against the Saints and make it, and the Broncos do everything except try to hit Cam Newton in the head with a hammer. Colin Kaepernick took another knee, but became a sidebar to the way the 49ers, without his help, took it to the Rams. All the Chiefs did in their opener was provide the greatest comeback in franchise history.
And with all that, guess what? For me, baseball has it all beat right now.
Baseball has it all beat even before the first pitch is thrown in a Wild Card Game, with good stories going on all over the MLB map, even in Minnesota, where the Twins' season was over in April, but where Brian Dozier now becomes just the fourth second baseman in history to hit 40 home runs in a season.
You can start almost anywhere. No one in the world thought the Yankees and Red Sox would play big baseball games in September this year. Only now they do, at old Fenway over the weekend. The Yankees were supposed to have given up on this season when they traded Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller and Carlos Beltran, their best hitter, and Ivan Nova at the Trade Deadline. The Yanks needed to get younger, we heard. They needed to start looking to the future, you heard that. You saw them tell 41-year-old Alex Rodriguez, who had hit like a scrub all season, to hit the road even when he was just four home runs short of 700.
Only then the Yankees started to make their run in August, and continued it into September, even though they have finally lost a couple of games, first to the Rays and then to the Dodgers, at Yankee Stadium on Sunday and Monday, before rebounding on Tuesday to beat L.A. behind a strong outing from CC Sabathia. The offense, without Beltran, is organized around a kid catcher named Gary Sanchez, who started hitting home runs for them and wouldn't stop. Suddenly Sanchez and his teammates have played as if they didn't care that Brian Cashman, the team's general manager, had traded everything except some of the plaques in Monument Park at the end of July.
There they are in the American League East, but the Yanks have the Red Sox and Blue Jays and Orioles ahead of them. The Red Sox can mash with anybody right now, but their chance of going from last place to first place again may ride on whether Brad Ziegler and Koji Uehara can somehow get enough games to Craig Kimbrel. You have to know that if the Red Sox had gotten decent relief pitching all season, they might have run away with the AL East already.
Once, 13 years ago, in the October when Aaron Boone ruined things for the Red Sox in Game 7 at old Yankee Stadium and Steve Bartman seemed to reach out of the stands and try to grab a World Series away from the Cubs, we wondered what it would be like to have a Red Sox-Cubs Series, Fenway vs. Wrigley. Now there's at least a chance it could happen this time.
Or maybe Terry Francona, who once managed the greatest comeback in history, Red Sox against the Yankees, 2004 AL Championship Series, will be standing in the way, looking to find his own old magic at Fenway, just with the Indians now. The whole world knows what happened in Cleveland in June, because of LeBron and Kyrie Irving and the way the Cavaliers came from 1-3 down in the NBA Finals and took the title from the 73-win Warriors, and gave Cleveland its first title since the Browns in 1964.
But what if Francona's Indians can give the city its first World Series champion since 1948? An Indians fan I know put it this way the other day:
"Could we possibly lose our minds twice in the same year?"
You have the Indians playing the way they've played. You have the Texas Rangers, right there with the Indians for the best record in the league. You remember how their second baseman, Rougned Odor, got into it with Jose Bautista at the beginning of the year. Now Odor is swinging away for the Rangers in the best possible way. The Rangers: Who believe that this is finally their time after coming as close as they did five years ago against the Cardinals, as close as you could ever come -- a ball in the air that Nelson Cruz should have caught -- to being World Series champions.
And guess what? That is just the AL. In the National League, you have the Dodgers, managed by an old Boston baseball hero named Dave Roberts, who had the steal heard 'round the world in October 2004. Roberts' Dodgers did not just survive the loss of Clayton Kershaw the way they did, but managed to flourish in his absence. They went flying past the Giants, who had the best record in baseball at the All-Star break and have stumbled around since like, well, Ryan Lochte at a Rio rest stop.
Forget about the division leaders in the NL. Just look at the Wild Card leaders right now. You know what the Giants are thinking, that if it comes down to a one-game season, they will once again take their chances with Madison Bumgarner, thank you very much. You have the Cardinals, who have been as much of a class machine in this generation as the Giants have been.
The Giants won another World Series in 2014. The Cardinals were in the Series the year before that against the Red Sox. Last year, it was the Mets repping the NL. This year, the Mets have lost Matt Harvey and David Wright and Lucas Duda. Jacob deGrom has been hurt, and less than he was a year ago. Steven Matz has been hurt. Somehow, though, the Mets found themselves in August the way the Yankees did, and ripped off 15 of 19 at one point, and played their way right to the front of the line in their league's Wild Card race.
After baseball's long season, now we get this kind of season with fewer than 20 games left. We get a September like this, and after talking about so many other storylines, we save the best for last. That means the Cubbies, trying to win their first World Series since Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States. Of course the Cubs are run by Theo Epstein, who is trying to pull off the greatest double in the history of his sport: a World Series for the Red Sox, after 86 years of waiting, and a World Series for the Cubs, after what feels like a thousand years of waiting. It wouldn't make Theo the LeBron of baseball executives. But he would be close enough.
Pro football is big, huge, on Thursday and Sunday and Monday night. College football, even with its own games on weekday nights, still exists in the wonderful and mythical place that the great Dan Jenkins has always called Saturday's America. But there is action every night in baseball.
Every night, there are a half-dozen games that matter, and mightily. Dodgers at Yankees again on Wednesday. Orioles vs. Red Sox in Boston. Mets against the Nationals in Washington, trying not to let the Nats hit them this season the way the Mets hit them last season.
And there is a big series wrapping up in Texas between the Rangers and the Astros, as Houston tries to hang on in the AL Wild Card race. And Justin Verlander is back in Detroit. Maybe we get a rematch in October between the Rangers and the bat-flipping Blue Jays. The Orioles of Buck Showalter, the best manager in baseball, the one with the quiet swagger, keep hitting home runs the way the Warriors hit 3-point jumpers.
Maybe you are getting my drift here. Football season is still baseball season.
http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/201153406/baseball-vs-football-in-september-and-october?partnerId=ed-10830470-658620023
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