I'm trying to stick to my goal of posting classic baseball moments leading up to Opening Day, though it hasn't been as easy as I thought it would be to find vintage clips on YouTube. While I continue fishing for good oldies, here's a much more recent moment. It would've helped its legacy if the Mets had won, but this catch by Endy Chavez in Game 7 of last year's NLCS is the best big-moment defensive play I've ever seen:
As the baseball season approaches, I'm going to post classic moments from time to time, to get us all in the mood. (I might dim the lighting at some point, too, and throw on a Marvin Gaye record. Get ready.)
I'll kick it off with the "pine tar incident," which I was thrilled to find in full, in which George Brett of the Royals has a two-run homer nullified because he used too much pine tar on his bat. It was an insane call, even if it was technically right, because that just never happens. One of the many reasons I like baseball more than football (though I like football, which I have to say partly so that my football-playing friends, of whom I have surprisingly many, won't pulverize me) is the certainty that an unfolding play is going to stand. Yes, balls and strikes are subjective, much like spotting the football after a play is subjective, and I'm fine with both. But every year, there are dozens of exciting plays (many of them touchdowns) called back because of highly subjective decisions by the refs. This is the only really similar moment I can remember in baseball -- it happened nearly a quarter of a century ago, and it almost led Brett to commit homicide, as you'll see.
The clip contains a lot of Proustian details for me, seeing as how I was watching this game (and many others) on TV on Long Island at the time. Yankees manager Billy Martin makes an appearance, as do two great closers -- Rich "Goose" Gossage, who serves up the pitch to Brett, and later, in a cameo milling around the field, Dan "Quiz" Quisenberry, one of those relief pitchers from that era who looked like he could double as a high school physics teacher. (The most obvious other example of this species being Kent Tekulve.) On another anachronistic note, Quisenberry wrote three books of poetry. Sadly, he died in 1998, at 45, of cancer.
I also love the fact that one of the announcers says, "Bobby, let me say this to you. The fact that they tried to take the bat away and secrete the bat lends credence to the umpire's call in my estimation." You don't hear this often, but I miss 1983. Enjoy:
