PHILADELPHIA — Every year, October baseball is a treat, a hodgepodge of drama, intrigue, strategy, excitement and frayed nerves. Games 7 takes each of these elements and energizes them. Sports exist for series that go the distance. And this October offered a pair.
As little theater as the Wild Card and Division Series rounds provided this year, the LCS made up for it.
This is baseball at its best. Of course, games are always binary – win or lose – but 7 games offer a variation: win or go home. They’re not rare, exactly, but they’re rare enough that the Phillies, who played their first game in 1883 and have played more than 20,000 games in their history, have never been to a Game 7 — until now. headtopics.com
This is where Bruce Bochy solidified his case for the Hall of Fame. The Rangers manager, who came out of retirement to take over a team that lost 94 games last season and 102 the year before, is now 6-0 in winner-take-all games, including three games 7. He is the first manager to win an LCS with three different organizations.
Game 6 showed the Diamondbacks at their best: hitting home runs, stealing bases and getting five fantastic innings from the starter and four more from a once-maligned bullpen that came together when it mattered most. Tonight, the math for the Diamondbacks is simple: score early and neutralize the rowdy crowd at the Bank. headtopics.com
But this? This is the big leagues. It’s for a chance at the World Series. If stars are made in October, legends are made in game seven. No, Game 7 won’t prove anything concrete that the top six haven’t already. However, he will send one team to Arlington, Texas, for the first game of the World Series on Friday and the other home for the winter. The stakes are almost too colossal for a single game, and yet those stakes are precisely what makes Game 7 so exceptional.
