You can search every page on baseball-reference.com. You can go back through every issue of the Sporting News, from the days when it was "the bible of baseball." Yet it would be impossible to ever find a night in baseball history—or day, before artificial light made night baseball possible—that was better than Wednesday evening. No way. No how. Just couldn't have happened, even keeping in mind that the 200,000th regular-season game in major-league history was played last Saturday.
Those who sat in front of their televisions or laptops or iPads—or however you watch baseball in these days of constantly evolving technology—saw drama at the highest level. It was reality TV at its best, even without people living on islands and subsisting on goat intestines or shooting ping-pong balls out of their nostrils.
It was a truly amazing night, one so magic that it's hard to know where to start other than to set the stage for the evening. The Rays and Red Sox came in tied for the wild card in the American League, and the Braves and Cardinals were knotted for the wild card in the National League.
The ties were untied by the end of the evening, with the Rays and Cardinals rising from the baseball dead to qualify for the playoffs. How it happened stretches the bounds of imagination beyond the Cardinals’ Chris Carpenter's two-hit, 11-strikeout shutout victory over the Astros at Houston, a brilliant performance that turned out to be mundane in light of what happened afterward.
The Braves were three outs away from forcing a tiebreaker game against the Cardinals on Thursday night as they sent Craig Kimbrel, holder of the record for most saves by a rookie, to the mound to close out what they hoped would be a 3-2 victory over the Phillies. Instead, Kimbrel blew the save by giving up a sacrifice fly to Chase Utley.
The Braves' fate was sealed. The game was tied, but Atlanta had the look of a beaten team. It took a while, but Hunter Pence ended the Braves' season with a flare RBI single in the top of the 13th inning off Scott Linebrink to give the NL East champions a 4-3 win.
Thus ended a collapse for the ages. The Braves held a 10 ½-game lead in the wild-card race on August 26. The Cardinals were still 8 ½ games behind on September 6. Yet that was just part of the drama. Another collapse was about to occur in Baltimore where the Red Sox, after sitting out a long rain delay, took a 3-2 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning against the cellar-dwelling Orioles. Closer Jonathan Papelbon struck out the first two batters and the Red Sox seemed, at worst, in line to play the Rays in a tiebreaker game in St. Petersburg on Thursday afternoon.
But like Kimbrel, Papelbon couldn't get the last out in what could be his last Red Sox appearance; he is eligible for free agency after the World Series. Chris Davis and Nolan Reimold hit back-to-back doubles to tie the game, and Robert Andino followed with a game-winning single.
The Red Sox hadn't been eliminated when Andino sealed the Orioles’ victory, but their situation was perilous, as the Rays were tied with the Yankees in extra innings. They didn’t have to wait long for fate, though. Three minutes later, the Rays broke through against the Yankees, and the Red Sox were eliminated. Tampa Bay joined St. Louis as two of the great comeback stories in baseball history.
Evan Longoria led off the bottom of the 12th by lining a Scott Proctor pitch over the left-field fence—just inside the foul pole—to give the Rays an 8-7 victory. That capped the biggest September comeback in major-league history; the Rays had trailed the Red Sox by nine games three days into the season's final month.
So while Red Sox Nation headed to the winter to bemoan their team's fate, call for the head of manager Terry Francona, and put Robert "Bleeping" Andino just a notch below Bucky "Bleeping" Dent on their list of angst-causing light-hitting infielders, Rays Township was jubilant about one of the greatest comebacks in baseball history—and we're just talking about Wednesday's game.
The Rays were down 7-0 going into the eighth inning, but they scored six runs in the frame, making it a one-run game. Down to their last strike in the ninth, Dan Johnson saved the Rays' season with a pinch-hit home run to make it 7-7. Once the Yankees failed to cash in on a first-and-third, no-out situation in the top of the 12th, it seemed inevitable that the Rays would win. Longoria delivered.
With that, the Division Series matchups were set. It will be Yankees-Tigers and Rangers-Rays in the AL, and Phillies-Cardinals and Brewers-Diamondbacks in the NL. As we head into the postseason, we can be assured of one thing: October will have the impossible task of attempting to trump the magic of September 28, 2011, a night that reaffirmed that no sport offers nearly as much drama as baseball.
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One correction BJ Upton was the leadoff batter for the Rays in the 12th. Death was quick or the Sox once they held up their side of the (loss) bargain. Proctor kept Sox hope alive only 3 minutes after the embedded Ray and purported defensive genius, Carl Crawford, failed to come up with a sliding catch.
It all added up to just make the Sox loss and the Yankee contribution (and that of the embedded Ray) all the more bitter.
I live in Atlanta, by route of Rhode Island, and days like today are why I love baseball. Honest. Now it's time to start thing playoffs and the WS and next Spring -- but all the newspapers and talk radio cover is football. Ugh. (Or should I say UGa?)
Proctor giveth and then giveth away again.
Who needs a second wild card team in each league to manufacture more drama? And thank goodness this day was on a stage by itself - no football competition at any level.
Now, on to the analysis of why it wasn't Mo Rivera pitching to Dan Johnson, or why the Yankees were playing the C-Team in a meaningful game, etc. Would love to hear Mr. Goldman's Yankee-centric analysis on what appeared to be a three game Yankee effort to stick it to the Red Sox.
Not sure pitching a bullpen game is a way to to stick it to the Red Sox. They shut them out for most of the game.
What manager in their right mind would pitch their aging closer in a meaningless game?
The blame for the Red Sox not being in the playoffs rests squarely on their own failures. Pointing fingers at others is silly; no one else lost all those games in September for them. Like the Braves, they did it to themselves.
I wouldn't have believed that both teams would, or could, choke that terribly. One, maybe, but both? I would have lost a fortune on that bet.
On the one hand, it was really exciting baseball. On the other hand, watching two famed franchises both choke and flush their seasons down the toilet was really hard to watch.
But congratulations to the Cards and the Rays, who earned their playoff spots by bearing down and playing baseball when they needed to play baseball. Unlike their competition.
And it is sad to me, because you posted exactly what I was thinking last night. If there were already 1-game wild-card playoff games scheduled for today, then the games yesterday would have been next to irrelevant. To me, last night was one of the best nights I ever spent watching baseball, and they're planning to take that away.
You can't give specific examples and say "Well this season would have been better if there was an additional wild card" because all seasons play out the same way. There are some where it might be more exciting, and some, like 2011, where the ending didn't need an excitement boost.
Stupid idea, Bud. If you have to expand the playoffs then make it a real 5-game series. A 1-game baseball playoff would be like an NFL playoff game where each team only gets one possession.
As a baseball fan I enjoyed it but as a Tigers fan, I wish the Sox would have held on because I would rather have faced their weakened pitching that the Rays, perhaps the only team in the AL the Tigers' won't have a pitching edge against. Of course my real disappointment was they finished one win short of being able to face the wildcard instead of the Yankees in the first round. (another interesting race that got buried by the wild wildcard races)
Incredible night!
Baseball, bringing families together.
Also, if the Wild-card rules become different, we will get an entirely different set of drama. The difference between 1st and 2nd place would become huge, and the race for the 5t slot could get intense and involve more than just 2 teams. Change can be healthy, dudes.
Plus, is anyone considering how we tiebreak 2 wildcard teams per league. When you start scraping up mediocrities from the 80-90 win teams to hand out a lottery ticket for a chance at calling yourself "World Champs" then you are increasing the chances a lot of a 3 or 4 way tie for one of those spots... what do we do then? Arcane NFL style tiebreakers?
The only thing that could've been better was to be in a Boston sports bar 3 minutes later.
"Our comment policy is four words long: Don't. Be. An. Asshole."
FAIL.
I'm a Red Sox fan - very brutal month, didn’t sleep last night. Totally unfathomable chain of events – I’ve never seen a team so talented play that poorly. The wheels came off completely. Even my friends that are Yankee fans aren’t bragging to me about it; they were shocked, I’ve been getting “sorry, you feeling okay?†messages from them all morning.
The media will be reminding us of this month for years to come.
It hurts now, but try to put it into context – in the last 9 years, we’ve made the playoffs 6 times, and won two World Series titles. There are franchises (like the O’s, Royals, and Pirates) whose fans have watched them lose over and over, and basically fall out of contention by late July, during that entire 9 year period. That, to me, is the definition of suffering. We’re pretty fortunate. And we’ll be back in the thick of it in 2012.
There were complaints during Spring Training that the Sox had too many starters and needed to jettison one. I think they added another data point, to their regret, to the notion that there's no such thing as too much pitching.
The Mets also blew two playoff spots. When they were up 7 with 17 left against the Phillies, they were 4.5 up over the wild card leader at the time, and they were also up 7 against the Rockies, who eventually won the wild card.