Saturday, October 23, 2010

A Fairy Tale World Series!

The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! With a 3-2 strikeout of Ryan Howard, Brian Wilson has written a new good vibration and the improbable has actually happened. The Davids beat the Goliaths. How many cliches can a Fan write in one paragraph! What a game. What an absolute gem of a game. And with one last pitch by the Giants' closer, the last of the behemoths has fallen to the ground. The Phillies will miss the World Series for the first time in three years.

In two days, we have seen two flawed teams take on two flawed champions and beat them. The Rangers overwhelmed the Yankees like some horde of Franks while the Giants set siege on the Phillies and stayed their ground until the Phillies' wall fell in. This is why baseball is the best sport on earth. This is why money doesn't buy titles. This is why a salary cap isn't needed. Because winning is a combination of talent, heart and pure unadulterated luck. Juan Uribe? Come on. That isn't a quirk of fate?

And so the Yankees and the Phillies will take their equipment home and ponder next year. Does Werth get signed? Do the Yankees get Lee? What happens with Jeter, Pettitte, Rivera and Girardi? None of that matters right now except to Reuben Amaro and Brian Cashman. All that matters right now is that we are getting the Rangers against the Giants in one of the quirkiest and oddest World Series in years. Already we can start pondering Lincecum versus Lee and Wilson versus Cain and on and on. Can the Giants do something nobody else has done in shutting down Josh Hamilton? We can ponder a Giant team that can't seem to hit and has few batters that scare anyone and yet have won two playoff series in convincing fashion.

These are all new story lines (except for Lee). Posey faces Molina, whose career in San Francisco was ended by the phenom. Can Feliz stay strong as the Rangers' closer? Is Brian Wilson the next Mariano Rivera? All the new story lines are astounding. This Fan is pumped!

And somewhere, some place, a voice is shouting, "The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!" Unbelievable.

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