The windows one floor up and diagonal from the living room window were illuminated shortly past midnight. We’ve all been there: A child wails, an animal skedaddles, a stomach growls, a phone rings, a bladder pleads, and suddenly you’re ambulant when the rest of the home is prone, wondering why nature won’t let you be, and you use one finger to flip on the lights and another to flip off the world.
Then there are the times you are awakened by the summons of playoff baseball, which often ends too late and still never goes long enough. The visiting Houston Astros trailed Los Angeles 3-2 at the top of the ninth inning and ended the inning tied; they began the 10th by seizing a 5-3 lead and surrendered it minutes later to go 5-all; then Astros outfielder George Springer sprung a line-drive home run to give his team a 7-5 advantage at the outset of the 11th. This is the part when your phone starts glowing: “Are you seeing this?” As Jayson Stark wrote in the wee hours Thursday morning, “There had been 17 extra-inning HRs in World Series history before tonight. There have been 4 in the last half hour.” At minute 30, second 1, the neighbors woke, and it wasn’t because of a crying baby.
“I can’t find an open bar,” texted a friend who recently moved and hadn’t gotten his cable hooked up yet. “I don’t even know how to get back home.” The Astros and Dodgers rounding the bases did.
Imagine the Fourth of July with your family, and that proud but old “William Tell Overture” is blaring as the coda of fireworks bursts in the sky. Now envision the fireworks are so numerous that you no longer see red wisps drooping, concentric circles of cream dots expanding, blue sparks tasseling to the earth. Everything booms at once, and the heavens are filled with this brilliant and blinding color that appears white but is too overwhelming to discern. That is what it’s like to watch Houston’s Marwin Gonzalez loft a dinger to tie a Fall Classic contest in the ninth;
And his teammate Jose Altuve crack one to put his team in front in the 10th;
And his fellow Astro Carlos Correa to follow it immediately with a long-ball of his own;
And Dodger Yasiel Puig bash one to set up the tying run in the bottom half of the inning;
And Houston’s Springer send a dart to right-center in the 11th to regain the lead his team had lost after gaining it for the first time. Gain with a homer, obviously.
“You can watch at my place!” another friend texted the first one—the one without cable, a sense of direction, or a place to witness this insanity. “I don’t have a great TV yet, but I’m a block away.”
“Don’t care. Give me an address.”
It’s 12:22 on the east coast. The Dodgers finally get out of the top half of the 11th and get a chance to answer. Their wünderkind shortstop Corey Seager laces one straight to center for an out that would’ve been a double had it been struck a couple of degrees to either side of the fielder’s position. The amply bearded Justin Turner, still awaiting a call to star in the next Hobbit adaptation, slaps a fairly well-hit liner to third for the second out. One to go, and it’d be 1-1 in the series headed back to the Lone Star State. Light-hitting defensive replacement Charlie Culberson—six career home runs at age 28—steps into the batter’s box, so the bus ride to the airport should be expedited. And then Joe Buck makes the call:
“Here’s a high fly ball into left . . . back at the wall . . . it is gone! Seven to six!”
Yes, Culberson homers. Jayson Stark comes back online: “OK, make that 5 in the last 42 minutes!”
“With 8 HRs, that’s the most in a single World Series game,” the site baseball-reference.com observes. Using that website’s database, Doug Kern notes that Wednesday’s World Series tilt is the “first game in MLB history with 5 extra-inning homers. [The] last with 4 was actually earlier this year.”
The first game. Not just the first postseason one.
“I mean, this game is crazy,” Buck says. It’s lit. And so are the neighbors’ lights.
Puig, L.A.’s vigorous outfielder, steps in with two outs and his team down one. Remember that he’s hit one round-tripper tonight already—in his last at bat, no less. “The ball is jumpin’,” color commentator and Hall of Fame-bound pitcher John Smoltz warns. Puig and Houston’s stud reliever Chris Devenski battle after quickly reaching an 0-2 count. The tension builds over a three-minute at-bat that features Puig flirting with a 2-2 breaking ball the umpire rules a check-swing, and a lifeless offspeed pitch up and a little outside that could have escaped gravity with a little luck. Instead, Puig fouls it off. If Devenski “throws a changeup over the middle of the plate down, Puig will swing at it,” Smoltz says. “He leaves it up, he’s playing with fire.” Puig fights off another one.
“What a game. What a battle,” Buck says. He knows what he’s talking about—he was there in St. Louis in 2011 when the Cardinals, a team that he said wouldn’t “go away,” fought off elimination down to their last strike over and over until third baseman David Freese striped a straightaway shot to center to force a game seven.
Puig is just as game as Freese was. But he swings and misses on a 3-2 breaking pitch—down, as Smoltz warned, as well as away, to end it.
I often think of “Dandy” Don Meredith singing, Turn out the lights / The party’s over at such moments. I looked up through the window, and the place diagonal one floor up went dark.
