What I want to figure out is, how did a team like the
Washington Nationals lose a six-run lead at home in the deciding game of the
first playoff series in the history of their franchise (and the city’s first
since 1933). My friends who watch
baseball and I were watching the game that night, and later keeping tabs on it
from our phones at the bar, and as we were watching it- rooting for the Nats-
we felt this impending sense of doom that the Cardinals comeback was just
inevitable. In fact, I was sitting there
just before we were trying to leave for the bar (with our two other friends who
aren’t so big on sports), and I pretty much had to be dragged kicking and
screaming out of the house. The clincher
was Mike saying “Look, the Cardinals are going to come back, and you don’t want
to be here to watch the end of that.” I
knew it was true. The greater
knowledgeable world of baseball knew it was true. The biggest shock leading up to the last
inning was that the Nats had actually tacked on an extra run, which gave us
some fleeting hope. But is a two-run
lead safe when facing the Cardinals?
Nope. It’s like that team has the
collective knowledge and experience of their franchise’s entire history- from
the Gashouse Gang, to the Mad Dash, to Gibson, to Herzog and the Wizard, and
even last year with the Rally Squirrel and Happy Flight (which I guess was also
a thing).
I’ve always railed against those fans who say, “I
shouldn’t have gotten invested” because I feel like there’s a reason we get invested
in sports. Or at least if you’re not
then just don’t be a sports fan. But
I’ve also found that it helps the healing process a little to be able to
explain it. And maybe in the course of
the explanation, one says things like “I should have seen this coming” or “I
should have known”. But in wanting to believe that sports will continue to
surprise you, there’s a reason you didn’t let yourself know. That doesn’t always mean the surprise is
going to be a pleasant one. This whole
experience for fans of the Nats and just those rooting for them in the meantime
should not have been a huge surprise, as it seems like collapses like this do
happen in baseball, more than you might expect.
And so what I want to try to understand is why.
Part of it is just the odds involved in getting out to a
lead in the series. Baseball is a game
of inches, and when you get out to even a one game lead with 2 games to go,
simply by plugging away and hoping you can take one. But to settle at that would be to ignore just
how resilient this Cardinals team is.
They won Game 6 of the World Series last year down to their last out and
down two. They won the Play In Wild Card
Game on the road against an Atlanta team that finished five games ahead of them
and got the benefit of the worst baseball
call probably since 1985 (paging Don Denkinger). And then this. So they clearly know how to strike against
teams that aren’t going to put them away.
Trying not to completely ignore for a second that the
Nationals are relative newbies to the postseason, there’s a lot they did to
shoot themselves in the foot in Game 5.
Having gotten a six run lead in the early goings, the case could be made
that they didn’t do enough to extend their lead. They didn’t score again until the eighth, and
by that point the Cards had already made it a one-run game. Though there was a rally or two, the
Nationals’ hitters seemed a bit too easy on the St. Louis pitchers and seemed
to really get themselves out. But
Washington was playing at home and had the crowd and the momentum behind them. And I understand that it’s an easy pattern to
fall into, because when you’re that close to a series win, you just root for
the innings to go by faster, no matter what that means. Plus, if you’re the
Cardinals, it’s probably easier to pitch when your teams losing by a lot.
But I think the biggest mistake was in how the Nationals
pitched the Cardinals. Gio Gonzalez
could not seem to get a batter out, and needed to be relieved in the 6th. In that respect, they need to still treat
their starter like it’s the last game of the season and they need a win. That being said, he may have deserved
it. The Cards just kept putting it in
play and making things happen, and the Nationals played like they were going to
get themselves out. This was all capped
off by Ian Desmond’s just-miss of a grounder that would have ended the
game. Those are plays that just need to
be made in a championship season. Every
season has one, and last year it was Nelson Cruz not running through that fly
ball in St. Louis. If they’re made, you
have the Jeter Flip play or Kirby Puckett’s The Catch in Game Six of the 1991
Series. Even Willie Mays’s original The
Catch in the 1954 World Series. But
suffice it to say, sometimes not being able to make that play is where your
team is done in. There seemed to be just
too many plays the Cardinals made and that the Nationals didn’t.
