Tag Archives: 2023 World Series

Not now, Snakes

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Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks fell in this World Series, and losing the final three at their own Chase Field really stings. But . . .

Stop right there. I mean you, everyone who thought “Bill Buckner” the moment Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas over-ran Jonah Heim’s top of the ninth RBI single into an extra Rangers run, two outs before Marcus Semien slammed an exclamation point down upon the season and the Diamondbacks’ fate.

For one thing, the Diamondbacks still had three outs to play with coming at the plate. For another thing, these Snakes were that resilient bunch who usually found ways to overcome when absolutely necessary, no?

Not this time. Just as they couldn’t quite close a Game Four blowout into a possible tie and overthrow, they couldn’t turn a near-eleventh hour Game Five deficit into another tie or overthrow. It hurt even more losing the World Series with a three-sweep at home after splitting the first pair in Arlington.

At last, as Semien’s two-run homer off Diamondbacks finisher Paul Sewald disappeared over the left center field fence in the top of the ninth, that Diamondbacks resiliency failed them even as the Rangers’ equal resiliency hurtled them to the Promised Land in five arduous World Series games.

“I definitely could have done a better job of getting in front of the [Heim] and calming down and just fielding it,” Thomas said postgame, refusing to shrink away, “but I think I rushed it and just didn’t get the glove down. I think I made an error on that two times last year and this year, and I think by now I should learn my lesson on how to go about that ball. But definitely gonna work on that in the offseason, make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Long before Thomas had his moment of ill fate, the Diamondbacks failed to rise to several occasions. Their gallant starting pitcher Zac Gallen took a no-hitter through six innings while his Rangers counterpart Nathan Eovaldi pitched into and out of heavy traffic yet refused to surrender so much as a single run.

They loaded the bases on Eovaldi in the first and the fifth and left them that way. They had to know Eovaldi didn’t have his best stuff to throw and couldn’t do more than four hits despite also drawing five walks on the veteran righthander.

Then the most they could do against the Ranger bullpen was a seventh-inning walk, an eighth-inning base hit, and nothing else to show for it while that pen struck them out five times, including Ketel Marte looking at strike three from Josh Sborz to end Game Five and the Series whole.

“To get a taste of postseason baseball and the World Series,” said veteran Snakes designated hitter Tommy Pham, “if this doesn’t motivate you, I don’t know what will. This is a young team. There’s a core you can build around. And now everybody knows what it takes to get here.”

Pham surely didn’t mean backing into the postseason in the first place, as the Diamondbacks did claiming a wild card slot after finishing well back of the National League West-owning Dodgers on the regular season. Once they got there, though, they swept two division winners (the Brewers, the Dodgers) out of the wild card and division series rounds, then fought the Phillies to a seven-game National League Championship Series conquest.

Then they ran into the Rangers. Except for their 9-1 Game Two win, for the Diamondbacks this was like running into a pack of snake hunters unwilling to show much in the way of mercy. Even when they fought back from a 10-1 blowout in the making to make it 11-7 in Game Three, the Rangers were too much for the Diamondbacks to handle.

These Snakes didn’t have the star power of their 2001 World Series-winning predecessors. They kind of liked it that way, too. “I felt like we’re definitely a bunch of misfits,” said relief pitcher Ryan Thompson after Game Five ended.

That’s what makes us special. We got a bunch of young guys who are hungry, doing it for the first time. We got a bunch of veterans who have been there, done that, but not quite won the whole thing. It’s awesome being able to put our names on the map.

Gangs of misfits have won World Series in the past, with or without star power. The 1934 Cardinals, that shameless brawling Gas House Gang, was one. The Bronx Zoo Yankees of 1977-78 were another. The 2004 Red Sox called themselves the Idiots as though it were a badge of high honour. The 2010 Giants—managed by now-triumphant Rangers manager Bruce Bochy—thought of themselves as a bunch of morons.

What these Diamondbacks had was future star power. Corbin Carroll, Gabriel Moreno, Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly, and Thomas himself. You could say it wasn’t their fault the Rangers hunted, pecked, pounded, pricked, and pulverised them. But you’d also have to say these Diamondbacks made enough of their own mistakes to enable that Ranger romp, too.

You credit the Rangers for such seizures. But you hand it to the Diamondbacks for making a showing for themselves before the World Series arrived. In a sane world, ruled by a sane commissioner and group of owners, they wouldn’t have reached the postseason in the first place.

But under the way things are set now, the Diamondbacks made the most of their entry. They left the Brewers looking brewed to a fare-thee-well. They left the Dodgers to a winter of self-re-examination. Then they ran into a Texas chainsaw massacre, more or less. There was no shame in that.

Oh, sure, they looked foolish a few times. Especially when manager Torey Lovullo talked early in the postseason about all those “receipts” the Diamondbacks kept to stick right back up the rears of those who doubted, the cynics who figured they were due for an early and painful postseason exit, the snorters who figured the big bad Phillies would make rattlesnake stew out of them.

They outlasted the Phillies. It wasn’t really easy to do. But the Rangers were another proposition entirely. The Diamondbacks really didn’t stand much of a chance no matter how bravely they hung in for five games, no matter that this Series matched two of baseball’s best defensive teams on the season.

The Rangers were only too happy to stuff those Diamondbacks receipts right back where they came from. But the Diamondbacks have no reason for shame otherwise.

“I’m so proud of what they’ve done,” Lovullo said. “And we have to step back for a minute and tell ourselves that we’ve done a lot of really amazing things this year. And then we got on this really fun ride through the course of the postseason. You just never want it to stop.”

But that’s the problem. They can never rescind the rule that somebody has to lose games.  The good news further is that the Diamondbacks are a comparatively young franchise and lack the kind of snake-bitten history that once plagued such antiquities as the Cubs, the Red Sox, and even the 63-year-old Rangers. And still plagues the Guardians, who haven’t won a World Series since the Berlin Airlift.

Barring unforeseen calamity or brain damage, the Diamondbacks will be back soon enough. For now, let them mourn lost opportunity while celebrating how they got to have the chance in the first place.

WS Game One: But of course

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Adolis García

The Cuban defector who rocked a pitcher named Castro for the World Series Game One-winning bomb he’s hitting here . . .

In a more just and far more sane world, this World Series would not feature baseball’s eight-best team (the Rangers) hosting baseball’s twelfth-best (the Diamondbacks). No matter how much fun it was to watch the games by which they got here. This, folks, is Commissioner Pepperwinkle World.

It’s a world where the fun in watching baseball’s Davids slay its Goliaths, as happens often enough, is perverted into a premeditated dilution of the championship race. Where teams who dissipate down the stretch can still sneak into a postseason and trash the joint.

Commissioner Pepperwinkle didn’t create today’s championship dilution, he simply finished and metastasised what his predecessor/former employer began. And while he now says he’s willing to “discuss” this format and that dilution after hearing “enough complaints and chatter” around it, don’t wait in line too long expecting him to heed and adjust.

Unless you count whether their owners voted yay or nay upon Pepperwinkle’s perversion, it’s hardly the Rangers’ or the Diamondbacks’ fault that they could and did ride to this Series while leaving the bigger teams to the winters of their malcontent. “If the die was cast—meaning, that if I win 100 in the regular season, I’m going to win the World Series—I don’t think that’s as interesting as what we have witnessed over the last month,” he added.

Well, just as it couldn’t hurt to watch the earlier wild card, division, and League Championship Series anyhow, it can’t hurt to watch this half-serious World Serious anyhow.

Say what you must about how they got here. These Rangers (who did tie for a division title) and these Diamondbacks (who finished a well-distant second in their division) are having fun while being deadly serious. The Diamondbacks didn’t let bother them that they weren’t supposed to survive the Brewers, the Dodgers, or the Phillies. The Rangers didn’t let bother them that they weren’t supposed to shove their fellow Texans from Houston to one side.

Come Friday night, until Rangers shortstop Corey Seager sent the game to extras with a mammoth two-run homer, it looked as though the Diamondbacks might open by doing to the Rangers what they’d done well enough entering the Series: pitching, pecking, picking, and occasionally pounding their way to a win.

Then a Cuban defector hit a Game One-winning home run off a pitcher named [Miguel] Castro in the bottom of the eleventh.

That won it for the Rangers, 6-5. It also gave Adolis García eight bombs for this postseason and left him one shy of Daniel Murphy’s record of homering in six consecutive postseason games. It should also have sent the Diamondbacks pitching staff a rudely-awakening message: Thou shalt not plunk Adolis García and expect to live.

First, after Seager tied the game off Paul Sewald with Leodys Taveras aboard and a parabola to the rear of the right field seats in the ninth, García was hit on the hand by a Sewald pitch. Late Rangers insertion Austin Hedges struck out for the side. But two innings later, with one out, García hit a 3-1 sinker the opposite way over the right field fence.

Twelve years to the day earlier, the Cardinals’ David Freese wrecked the Rangers when the Rangers were a strike away from winning the 2011 World Series in six games—first with a game-tying triple in the ninth; then, after the game was re-tied in the top of the eleventh, with a full-count leadoff shot over the center field fence.

Figure this if you can: García’s Game One winner Friday night sent him right past Freese himself for the most runs batted in (22) in a single postseason. It might not have happened had García not made a spectacular course correction on Diamondbacks rookie star Corbin Carroll’s two-out, ninth-inning drive to right, overcoming a bad first step to run the ball down and snatch it at the wall.

That might have given these relentless enough Diamondbacks a final lease on Game One life. But no. Then Seager unloaded in the bottom of that inning off Diamondbacks finisher Paul Sewald, the first genuine dent in a Diamondbacks bullpen that was postseason excellent entering the Series and worked three scoreless among three relievers Friday night. Setting the extra-inning stage for García to do what hasn’t been done since Kirk Gibson in the 1988 World Series—win Game One with a walkoff homer.

Maybe doing it on the twelfth anniversary of Freese’s jolts means these Rangers might find the mojo those Rangers lost so horrifically?

In a game where the Rangers took an early 2-0 lead (Evan Carter’s first inning RBI double and García singling him home immediately to follow) but the Diamondbacks bit Rangers starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi hard for a three-run third and five runs in four and two-thirds innings; where the Rangers went 1-for-7 with men in scoring position to the Snakes going two-for-8; and, where the Ranger bullpen pitched six and a third innings’ two-hit, shutout relief, Seager and García’s late explosions will be what’s remembered the most.

Kind of a shame, too. In the top of the third, Diamondbacks shorstop Geraldo Perdomo finally dropped a bunt you couldn’t call a wasted out. Remember: In six known “bunt situations,” only one leaves you a better chance to score after than before the bunt: first and second, nobody out. That’s what Perdomo had when he dropped one back to the box and pushed Alek Thomas (leadoff infield single) and Evan Longoria (immediate followup single) to third and second, respectively.

Carroll followed and hit a two-strike, two-run triple to the absolute back of center field, then scored the third Snakes run while Ketel Marte grounded out to first base. The Rangers took one back to re-tie in the bottom of the third when Mitch Garver wrung a bases-loaded walk out of Diamondbacks starter Zac Gallen, but Tommy Pham re-snatched the lead when he unloaded on Eovaldi to open the top of the fourth, sending one  over the left field fence. An inning later, Marte sent Perdomo (leadoff single) home with a double, and 5-3 it stayed until Seager in the ninth.

Seager may not mind playing second banana to García even if his handiwork set García’s up. He hollered out uncharacteristically in his joy after he launched his bomb. But after the game, he preferred not to think about that again. “You never think about your own success,” he said. “You think about how that team came together, how that team performed.”

In the American League Championship Series, remember, García unloaded a three-run homer in Game Five and got drilled by a pitch his next time up. All that did was jolt him into the Games Six and Seven bombings that helped yank the Rangers here in the first place. Two batters after Seager unloaded, García was hit by a pitch again, on his hand.

He shook it off. He stole second but was stranded. He bided his time. Then came the eleventh. He didn’t answer the bell, he rang it. Ask him now what the biggest bomb of his life is, and he’ll tell you. “We’re in the World Series,” he said. “I think, honestly, this is the first.”

Unless there’s a more absurdist Elysian Fields script to be delivered later in this Series (put nothing past that heavenly troupe of stinkers), and García finds himself hitting the Series winner, it may yet prove to be the loudest home run in Rangers history.