Why Baseball Matters by Susan Jacoby

Author:Susan Jacoby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

*You may recall that Baseball-Reference.com declared the average to be three hours, four minutes for regular-season games. Never mind.

I never tuned out one minute of the best, most thrilling game I have ever seen, which lasted four hours and forty-two minutes and took sixteen innings to determine the winner of the 1986 National League pennant. It was played in Houston on Wednesday, October 15, 1986, between the Houston Astros and the Mets—the sixth and what turned out to be decisive game in the League Championship Series. The unusual weekday afternoon start was mandated by M.L.B. because the game had to be finished before 8 p.m. in the East to make way for the American League contest scheduled in Boston, between the Red Sox and the California Angels. New York fans unlucky enough to be stuck in their offices followed the first half of the marathon through surreptitious phone calls to friends who happened to be at home. When it grew late enough in the day to leave work, many people looked for television sets—whether in the windows of stores or in bars—instead of heading straight home. (This was, of course, before smartphones, which would have rendered all of the torturous efforts to keep in touch with the action unnecessary.) I was working (to use the term loosely) at home that day, but my partner Luke (whose name has been changed in the interest of privacy) was in his office until around five o’clock. His bosses had been inconsiderate enough to schedule a meeting with out-of-town clients before anyone knew that there would be an important ballgame that day. Nevertheless, we were on the phone every twenty minutes, as I reported the mainly bad news about the Mets during the first eight innings. I told him not to worry about missing this game, because the Mets had been behind 3–0 since the first inning. We had already made plans to watch the seventh, deciding game together the next day, and no one was more surprised than Luke when he walked through my door at some point between 5:30 and 6 o’clock and found me watching the tenth inning of a tie game. Between the time he had left his office and taken the subway to the stop near my apartment, the Mets had scored three runs in the ninth inning. We would watch the last six innings together.

It was awful, it was wonderful, I will never forget that time out of time as long as I live.

Although the Mets were leading the series three games to two, the pressure was on them, because the Astros’ starting pitcher the next day would be Mike Scott, a right-handed master of the split-fingered fastball. Suspicions that he scuffed the ball with sandpaper had been voiced by many players and managers. He had been the master of the Mets, and, as every fan knew, the looming presence of Scott made game 6 seem like game 7 to the New York team. Wally Backman, the Mets

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