Baseball Season

For Valentine's Day, Beth surprised me with a gift of tickets for the Indians' final spring training games, when the play the Astros in Houston. And now that spring training has officially begun, I'm in a baseball kind of mood, for sure. There is a lot of hope in the air; A&M baseball began their season as the number one ranked team in the nation, the Indians have made some calculated risks on smart bargains bringing in Kerry Wood and Carl Pavano, and a slimmed-down Travis Hafner thinks he can steal a minimum of thirty bases this season.

Presumably to bring me down a couple of notches in terms of baseball spiritedness, ESPN Classic offered up this past week a replay of the memorable Game 7, extra-inning affair from the '97 World Series, pitting the Florida Marlins against my beloved Indians. I remember very well watching that game with my dad on a late October night. It was a very exciting game to watch but had an extremely disappointing ending.

My morbid curiousity got the better of me, so I started watching the replay. I even went so far as to call my dad and let him know that Jose Mesa was about to blow the save when the ninth inning came around. I was especially interested to see if I could identify the same scared, no-confidence look on Mesa's face as he entered the game that Omar Vizquel remebered seeing as described in his biography. When Mesa came in the Tribe had a slim 2-1 lead. I really didn't notice a lack of swagger, but it was immediately apparent that he was in for a rough time as he immediately surrendered a single to Moises Alou. He recovered though and got Bobby Bonilla out on strikes. Next came up the weak-hitting Charles Johnson, but he managed to put a good bat on the ball for a single, which advanced Alou to third. Mesa was now in a very tight spot, but with skinny, rookie infielder Craig Counsell coming to the plate; there was much reason to keep hope. As his long flyball fell into the mitt of Manny Ramirez, my heart sank once again as Alou crossed the plate to score the tying run.

Mesa got out of that inning, but the Indians' offense failed to muster any sort of scoring opportunity. The Indians would go on to lose in the 11th after the Marlins loaded up the bases, due in large part to a costly error by Tony Fernandez on an easily playable ball. Edgar Renteria famously bounced a ball over the pitcher and through a drawn-in infield to drive in the winning run.

Perhaps it would have been better to watch something else.