Let’s check the old ruck sack. Long johns. Muffs. Wool cap. Mittens. Hail protector. Thermos full of jalapeno. Check and double check. Ready for the World Series. Play ball.
Purists disgusted with good baseball in paradise got their wish Tuesday night–bad baseball in an igloo.
None of that 80-degree sauna stuff, with tank tops and cutoffs and mosquito spray. Enough of those silly offshore breezes wafting through pliant palms. What we need are raw lake winds that snake inside turtlenecks and blow your bun off your hot dog, hot if held inside the parka.
Don’t demand tradition unless you want the Fall Classic played in wind chills lower than the shortstop’s age and at temperatures that would freeze your basic daiquiri.
“Hey,” said Miami manager Jim Leyland, “it’s going to be cold in October.”
Game 3 of the World Series felt a lot like Opening Day at Comiskey Park. The visiting team won, the home team pitchers gave up 14 runs and the thing lasted more than four hours.
Foul weather is as obvious as anything to blame for six errors, 17 bases on balls and 25 runs in one of the longest, sloppiest, weirdest World Series games ever, though it could just be that these are two incomplete baseball teams bringing out the worst in each other.
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“The poor play wasn’t due to the bad weather,” Indians manager Mike Hargrove, “it was just poor play. We haven’t had a game like that for a while and I bet they haven’t either.”
For a place so earnestly seeking the good opinion of strangers, the worst possible thing happened. Cleveland was caught being Cleveland.
The skies were bleak, the streets were coarse, the air was dank and the nearest thing to baseball fever were the spices on the world’s worst curly fries.
None of this was imagined to be to the advantage of the visiting Marlins.
Reasoned Indian shortstop Omar Vizquel, “Fish go south in cold weather.”
Mr. Vizquel should spend less time with ESPN and a little more time with the Discovery Channel.
Lightning, thunder and hail the size of raisins pelted fans on the way to Jacobs Field, or the Jake, as it is otherwise known.
The Marlins’ park, Pro Player Stadium, is known as The Pro, the shortening of stadium names being a trend in sports. Chicagoans will just have to get used to going to The Wrig and The Comsk, the Solj and the Unt, though I think the Horizon will take a little more thought.
By game time, the wind chill was 29 and dropped to 21 by the endless 11-run ninth inning that began with the score tied. The colder and later it got, the uglier and shoddier it got.
Cleveland’s fan involvement is the example of what Indians pitcher Orel Hershiser calls “live baseball,” a slap at the Jumbotron-led fans of South Florida, who need mascots and digital cheerleaders to know what is exciting, who leave early whether the home team is up or down.
No one leaves early in Cleveland, but if they did, of course, the only place they have to go is Cleveland. Might as well stay.
Now down two games to one, Cleveland will have to win the Series in tropical Florida to win it, and Cleveland needs to win this World Series simply because it matters more.
Florida has its climate and its happy apathy, plus another 40 years to endure in order to match Cleveland’s wait for a baseball championship. This is a town aching desperately for a sports success to confirm its urban renaissance, a revival centered around the new sports facilities downtown.
The town does have a place to bring guests, now, invariably using the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where baseball held its Series Gala Monday night, where the guardians of the grand old game grazed on puff pastry.
It was either there or the National Polka Hall of Fame, which would have been my choice since at least fewer of the musicians enshrined there were found dead in their own vomit, to say nothing of Frankie Yankovic’s rendition of Stairway to Heaven on the accordion, the only way it should be played.