On baseball's denial of a tomorrow
And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day of the offseason in Baltimore
Opening Day is about hope. A beginning to a journey.
A day of excitement for the fans of the contenders when their anticipation becomes actualization. And it is a day for fans of even the most woebegone of franchises to bask in the warmth of spring sunshine. While everyone ignores the literal chill of early spring that nips at their nose as if a reminder that for all but one fanbase a harsh reality will eventually smack them in the face this season.
Baltimore secured a one-run win at Boston on March 30 this year, tallying 10 runs on 15 hits with five stolen bases. There was optimism, there was a spark, and there was Adley Rutschman – the young catcher whose arrival at the big league level the season before energized a turn of fortune that ended Baltimore’s run of six-straight losing seasons – going 5-for-5 with a first-inning home run.
It was the first win of what would become one of the most surprising seasons in the history of the game. A team that was given less than a negligible chance at winning rattled off 101 wins and topped the game’s most competitive division.
The 162-game marathon provides an ample safety net for lumps to be taken in the early goings, April showers to wreck the schedule and dog day of summer slumps. Tomorrow offers a new day, a new opportunity and baseball season is chock full of tomorrows. The postseason has none of that. For a game that has no clock to govern the game’s length only its pace, time grows short now. It gets late early out there.
In the postseason, everything about the game other than the actual rules of play changes. The margins become finer, the consequences are more severe and the punishment comes more swiftly.
For fans, about 45 minutes before the first pitch of the opening series, a knot forms in your stomach. It settles in just to the left of your navel. It stays there all series.
Anticipation, excitement, fear, dread and the realization that all of this could end and end real soon feeds it. Every close strike call, every sharp liner, every full count adds another layer to it.
Baseball is the game of America’s summers. A leisure activity. But autumn is when things are decided. This is the business end of the season. This game’s fun, okay? Not anymore. Not now. This is a time for seriousness and stern intensity.
I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving.
The joy of sports only truly comes when the skin you put in the game comes at the cost of emotional well-being. This is the price of admission. This is your reward for a successful season. You are the envy of every other fanbase who missed out.
Over the 27 innings and 159 outs of the series, the knot will be constantly squeezed like a struggling pitcher deep in at-bat working over a fresh baseball.
One hundred ninety-four days after Opening Day, Texas ended Baltimore’s season with a three-game ALDS sweep in Arlington; it was the only time the Orioles were swept all year. A series in which the O’s scored just 11 runs on 25 hits and stole no bases, getting caught once.
The end came with a bang and a whimper. Texas’ bats provided the gut punches early scoring nine runs in the first three innings of Game 2 and six runs in the first two innings of the finale. Baltimore’s bats – outside a few singles here and there and one five-RBI game for Aaron Hicks – added the whimper.
The Rangers won by one run to open the series before a pair of blowouts means they are just four wins away from the World Series and banished the Orioles into the wilderness of the offseason.
A comprehensive defeat makes for a room full of scapegoats. Baltimore’s failure in this series is no orphan. All of the pitchers faltered save three out of the bullpen. The hits were sporadic, anything but timely and rarely struck firmly save Gunnar Henderson’s six-for-12 performance. The defense was admirable but played no factor.
The manager, Brandon Hyde, pushed every wrong button from putting his faith in Jacob Webb and Bryan Baker out of the bullpen to calling for an ill-fated hit-and-run with the tying run on first base and no outs in the ninth inning of the series’ only close ballgame.
Postseason baseball is cruel. Its challenge to fans is to not allow the excellence of the feast to be washed away by the bitter final bite.
Rutschman, the 25-year-old heartbeat of the club who hit 20 home runs with a .277 batting average and .809 OPS over 154 games, managed just one hit in 12 at-bats in the series.
Cedric Mullins, one of the longest-tenured Orioles who fought through ups and downs at the start of his career while enduring unrelenting losing, couldn't snap out of his late-season swoon and finished the series hitless in 12 times up.
Dean Kremer pitched to a 2.89 ERA in his last 10 starts but with his mind certainly elsewhere, surrendered six runs on seven hits and a walk while failing to get out of the second inning.
Grayson Rodriguez pitched to a 2.58 ERA in his last 13 starts and took 3.00 runs off his ERA over the second half of his debut season, but got just five outs when allowing five runs on six hits and four walks.
John Means lost all of last season to elbow surgery and came back to pitch well in his four starts after 517 days out of action, but was denied the chance to pitch due to arm soreness.
Tuesday night was the Orioles’ eighth-straight postseason defeat and the second–straight series to end in a sweep. The third game ended after 2 hours and 48 minutes but was over much earlier than that. Everyone saw the balloon would run out of air as Baltimore had no way to stop it from deflating.
There were no tears this time for O’s fans, only the empty feeling when your stomach hollows out. The knot, which you had grown used to and began to enjoy in a masochistic way, is gone. You poke around for it in the hopes of still being able to draw some blood from the fresh wound before the scab forms.
And after reliving the turning points and sliding doors moments of the series – 13 runs allowed over eight innings by the starting pitchers and 16 walks from the entire staff – and of the big plays that never came to be – going 4-for-18 with runners in scoring position with 21 left on base – you can still feel a bit of the knot down there.
You dig in again, seeking out that familiar torment hoping you can reseructe the stress as a way of delaying the onrushing pain that the sadness of it all coming to an end will bring. You want the season to still be alive. But soon, this knot will be gone for good.
By morning, heartache will have filled the void.
The pain comes from the realization that there will be no tomorrow. There is no immediate opportunity for you to wash away the bad taste. Baseball, a sport of endless tomorrows during the grind of the summer months, plays its most cruel trick in autumn in denying you one last tomorrow.
The heartache will linger as the wait till the next tomorrow begins. The wait will be one hundred sixty-nine days before it is once again Opening Day, a day about hope,
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives in New York.