Joe Posnanski on a famous last day of the season...

[Blue_Tires]

Baseball Night in America
Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That in many ways is the beauty of it. I realize that's a hard thing to explain to someone who doesn't love baseball, no, more than hard, it's an impossible thing to explain because many people want sports to be more than life, they follow sports to jolt them out of the steady rhythms of the shriek of alarm clocks, the monotony of morning meetings, the rush to get our kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m. They want sports to be bigger than life. What's the point, otherwise? There is nothing in baseball as jarring as a blind-side hit, as jaw-dropping as a perfect alley-oop, as tense and heart-pounding as a breakaway.

And the hard thing to explain, the impossible thing, is that many of us love baseball not in spite of these failings but because of them.


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There was a moment on this crazy night -- the craziest, most absurd, most wonderful (and horrible) baseball night I can remember -- when Boston pitcher Alfredo Aceves refused to throw a pitch. He just refused, time and again, he kept shaking off his rookie catcher Ryan Lavarnay, once, twice, three times, four, the player strike must have lasted two minutes, three minutes, it was exactly the sort of moment that people who don't get baseball point out. Nothing was happening. The Baltimore Orioles had two runners on base -- both had been plunked by Alfredo Aceves. The fans wailing in Baltimore were mostly from Boston -- Orioles fans were in bed, and had been since July. The baseball world was collapsing and detonating all around. And Alfredo Aceves, a 28-year-old pitcher from a small city in Mexico more famous for fighters than baseball players, just kept staring at his catcher with disdain, as if he was a child being told to take out the garbage or practice piano when he would rather be playing with his friends somewhere far away.

http://joeposnanski.blogspot.com/2011/09/baseball-night-in-america.html