108, 5-3, and 0.5.
And maybe, just maybe, Prince.
(Awkward lede, perhaps, but it’ll look cool in the book, I think.)
The game pitted Cole Hamels against Scott Kazmir, who’d faced off twice before in their big league careers, once in Game 1 of the 2008 World Series (Philadelphia 3, Tampa Bay 2) and again in Game 5 (Philadelphia 4, Tampa Bay 3), minutes after which the Commissioner handed Hamels the World Series MVP hardware.
A little less at stake in this one, but my adrenaline and my heartbeat and my stomach didn’t really get that.
It was a beautiful and grotesque and exhilarating and frustrating and awful and awesome baseball game, and I was 100 percent locked in and at times almost unable to watch.
That’s what makes mid-September baseball games that matter the best and the worst and the reason we commit head-first.
Jon Heyman (CBS Sports) tweeted this morning that you best “watch out for Texas . . . no team was more underrated in pre-season predictions,” while Jon Morosi (Fox Sports) pointed out that the Rangers “have not had sole possession of first place in [the] AL West this year. Not once. They can change that on Tuesday.”
Anthony Bass (Texas Rangers bullpen) tweeted, to the fewer than 28,000 who sounded like twice that: “That was LOUD tonight! Keep it coming . . . . ”
After Jake Diekman and Keone Kela relieved Hamels and kept a tie game knotted up in the top of the eighth, and not without a little drama, Fielder did remotely familiar Fielder things to a Will Harris pitch with one out and one on in the bottom of the inning that maybe should have never happened — strike two looked like it should have been ball four — as he obliterated 92, middle-middle, 408 feet to straightaway center with exit velocity that registered in miles per hour at 108, which is the number of stitches on a baseball, though if you told me Prince unstitched a few on that swing I’d buy it.
A dozen pitches later it was time for Shawn Tolleson. Carlos Correa’s single to center brought Jonathan Villar to the plate as the tying run — only because Jed Lowrie had left the game four innings earlier with a shin bruise — and though Tolleson induced a 4-3 double play (that Correa could have executed better mentally) and proceeded to then get ahead of Colby Rasmus, 1-2, with a 5-3 lead and nobody on base, Angels closer Huston Street had Houston down to its final strike with the bases empty and a three-run cushion just a day earlier, after which he allowed five straight Astros to both reach and score.
If Street had managed to preserve a 3-0 lead on Sunday by throwing one more strike with the bases empty, Tolleson’s matchup with Rasmus would have been for the AL West lead.
But it wasn’t.
Ball two.
Strike three.
(Swinging, effectively taking Gerry Davis out of the equation.)
-3.5, -1.5, +0.5, or +2.5.
And yeah, if Street hadn’t violently spit the Angels-Astros game up Sunday afternoon, Texas would be ahead of everyone else in the AL West right now, for the first time all year.
Maybe, just maybe, tonight.
