“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. “
A. Bartlett Giamatti
So the baseball season is over, and the Cardinals have prevailed. Volumes will be written in the next 24 hours about how “improbable” it was, and all of it will be true. There was no way to foresee this happening.
I counted at least three games that the Cubs just gave away to the Cardinals this year (on June 4, June 5, and September 24), and I’m sure there are several other games that the Cardinals won when they should have lost. But they found a way, and now they’re the champions, again.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but the decision to push Game 6 back by a day was a tremendous boon for the Cardinals, since it allowed Chris Carpenter to get the rest he needed to come back for Game 7. I would be surprised if Nolan Ryan and the Rangers organization don’t say something to Major League Baseball about this. What good can come from this I don’t know, but the Cardinals certainly did reap the benefits of this decision. But they won’t be giving the trophy back, either.
So we’ve reached the end of an outstanding season. And now is the time when we have to settle in to the offseason, which we haven’t seen for the past seven months. The 2011 season sure was a lot of fun while it lasted, though.
Blue Batting Helmet 