SEATTLE — As Saturday was just beginning, fans thirsty for playoff baseball and hungry for Seattle dogs — hot dog, cream cheese, sauteed onions — were already snaking around T-Mobile Park in anticipation of what was to come. The Seattle Mariners were down 2-0 in their American League Division Series against the Houston Astros, an obstacle only one in 10 teams historically have overcome. And yet that fact did nothing to dissuade those lined up from believing they were about to witness something memorable. Two decades of postseason absence can normalize a sense of pessimism, but Seattle fans preferred on Saturday to be dreamers, to embrace the special sort of magic this sport lives to foment.
“Baseball’s just a really funny game,” Trey Mancini said about nine hours later, headed for a bus that would begin the Astros’ journey home for their sixth straight AL Championship Series. What had occurred in the time since was a one-of-a-kind game: 6 hours, 22 minutes, with 42 strikeouts against four walks, where hits were sparse and runs nonexistent until the 18th inning, when a rookie whacked a home run to win it.
Mancini is 30, in his sixth year in the majors. He lived through the leanest of lean years with the Baltimore Orioles and came to the Astros at the trade deadline. He has beaten cancer. He knows that “funny” can mean the sad-funny of rebuilding or the we-really-don’t-know-anything funny of this division series weekend, and particularly of Saturday, when across the country four games of varying incarnations played out in what would be the last busy day of the baseball calendar this season. Mancini loves the game because of days like Saturday.
As this weekend’s division series proved, baseball in October is something different. It’s not always about who’s better. Sometimes what matters is who happens to get hot….
Source : espn
