The Damndest Thing Everybody Has Ever Seen

And you thought Haloscan sucked.  I just finished off a long post on the Red Sox miracle win in Game 5 of the ALCS and lost it all when I kicked out the power cord.  Thanks, Windows Live Writer.  Nice auto-archive feature.

I just wanted to point out that what happened at Fenway tonight was the damndest thing I've ever seen.  In baseball, anyway.

I saw a graphic on the TV that said Boston's 8-7 comeback win -- they were down 7-0 in the bottom of the 7th inning and were only 7 outs away from having their season ended (and I'll tell you what, when the number of runs you trail by in a game equals or exceeds the number of outs you have left in that game you are in some kind of trouble) -- was the second-largest comeback in baseball's post-season history.

Right away I thought I knew what the biggest such comeback was.  From memory.  I thought it was Philadelphia (the American League A's) against Chicago around in a World Series around 1930. 

It turns out there is a pretty good memory on that baseball historian.

A check of the record book (it was in the retrieving of it from a nearby bookshelf that I kicked out that power cord and ruined my post) confirms that it was the A's and it was the Cubs, but it was 1929, not '30.  The Cubs, down two games to one, led Game Four 8-0 when Philly came to bat in the bottom of the 7 at Shibe Park and put a ten-spot on 'em to win 10-8 and go up 3-1 in a Series which Philadelphia took in 5 by winning the next game.  The stat that jumps out at you from the '29 World Series is that Philadelphia (aided, of course by that big rally in Game 4) outscored Chicago 19-2 from the 7th inning on in the five games.

I watched most of the fun from Fenway tonight on a computer feed which provided only ambient stadium sound and four fixed camera locations since I wanted to watch the episode of Countdown I'd recorded on the TV and, what the hell, it was, after all, 7-0 Rays by the time I got home from where ever it was that I had been this evening.

Whenever the ball was put in play, you couldn't follow it.  The cameras didn't move.  So, for example, I had to count how many men crossed the plate after Ortiz hit it out to know it was a 3-run homer.  And I only knew it was a homer from the roar of the crowd and the sight of said crowd going nuts.  And when Casey scored to tie the game, I saw him slide across home plate and saw the Rays start jogging off the field.  Since the crowd was going nuts again, I could only surmise that the run had counted and that the batter-runner had been subsequently retired on the base paths.  Which is exactly what happened, of course.

After that, I watched on TV like a normal person.  Quite a night.  The fans who were there will be talking about that game until the day they die.  Especially if Boston comes all the way back to defeat Tampa. 

They were dead, Boston.  Not merely moribund.  They were dead.  Like I said, I've never seen anything like it.  Only somebody who was old enough to be a fan in 1929 and who is still alive today has.