The excellent thing about baseball’s postseason will always be the inaccuracies that bring poetic endings. No one would believe the amount of incredible catches, seeing-eye singles and thrifty trips around the base paths the Kansas City Royals enjoyed en route to their first Fall Classic in 29 years.
It's beautiful and lively. The home run hitters aren’t who you normally expect, and the ones you count on sometimes find a well that’s run dry. Most of the country waited with baited breath to see if Kansas City can pull off a stunner in an all-wild card World Series.
As we learned on Tuesday, the mountain may be too tall to climb. The mountain doesn’t move. The mountain remains as tall as it’s ever been — especially in even-numbered years — and then it simply becomes taller.
Scan down the list of teams in our major sports. There are the Chicago Blackhawks, Boston Bruins and Los Angeles Kings on ice. The San Antonio Spurs stand on the hardwood. A superstitious being within myself also points to the Duke (Dook) Blue Devils in the college game. Alabama on the college gridiron. The New England Patriots, Denver Broncos and arguments can be made for Seattle Seahawks or Green Bay Packers in the NFL.
In baseball, it’s the San Francisco Giants and the team they just dispatched, the St. Louis Cardinals.
These teams share something. It’s as simple in definition as it has been in years before with other top-of-the mountain clubs: They are the teams that you simply don’t believe are done until the final out is recorded in an elimination game or 0:00 sits within the clock.
They are the zombies of sports, and while the Royals have a Swiss Army knife of tactics, a little luck and the piece of chewing gum in their mouths than can be used for any particular reason, they aren’t MacGyver.
Zombies tend to win and these particular undead foes are draped black and orange, and it just wouldn’t quite feel like autumn without them. It’s spooky and decorated appropriately. A haunted house is October and Bruce Bochy’s team holds a standing invitation to scare. They found ways to win just like Kansas City, but they seem to have found them easier.
An 8-0 record in the postseason impressed, but could a team with little playoff experience really snap to after a long layoff? Or what would happen if the streak ended and a loss became something to overcome? When the snowball stops, who pushes it forward again? And whoever pushes it, where do they find the snow?
One of two Royals with World Series experience hit the mound on Tuesday and abruptly found his bullpen jacket. The walking, running, hitting and fielding dead simply stepped on the field and found the next soon-to-be carcass to surround.
Hunter Pence, the once kind and innocent-looking fella who’s still probably kind and innocent but now resembles the 17-year-old who smokes a cigarette without a sniff of an inhale, took Shields yard early. The rest of the Giants continued to feed, and that’s where we are now.
A sold-out Kauffman Stadium crowd went home likely feeling a dose of reality. The Royals might well come back and take the 2014 title. But, the Series will most definitely come alive when San Francisco gets its touch at hosting and the seats are filled with the radicals and hipsters and those who remember the days when their city welcomed Willie Mays to the Bay.
They support the zombies for what they are, and it grows eerier as you can start to hear the witches. They might even bring their broomsticks to the park.
If Kansas City doesn’t get a win out of its first two home games, it’s unlikely the Royals come back alive. That glorious stadium, with its fantastically built crown, will sit empty and alone awaiting a Game 6 that will never come. It will look more like the mausoleum it resembled for nearly three decades.
Because that’s what the Giants and other teams of their ilk do. They simply suck out whatever life’s left. And then, they come back for more.
