Sunday Night Baseball on Five – ALCS Game Seven

Six complete innings into game five of the ALCS, it looked as though this week’s Sunday night game would be a damp squib.  The World Series entrants would already have been decided and Five would have resorted to showing a replay of one of the ALCS games.

Not now.  Boston’s 4-2 victory last night/this morning ensured that the ALCS heads to a game seven decider.  It’s a game that doesn’t need much building up.  The Red Sox are on a roll, the Rays are at home and there’s little to choose between the two teams.  All we can be sure of is that it’s going to be a great contest.  Five’s coverage begins at 01.05, with first pitch scheduled for a few minutes later. 

Boston are evoking the spirit of 2004.  This series cannot quite match up to the ALCS of that year (3-0 down against the Yankees and with a 86 year World Series drought weighing heavy on their shoulders), but it comes pretty close.  In both cases, their opponent had them on the ropes and didn’t put them away when they had the chance.  I don’t believe that the Rays players will be thinking back to game five when they take the field for the finale.  They will win or lose this game solely on the basis of what happens tonight, just as they did in game six.  However, there’s no escaping the fact that the Rays had an incredible opportunity to send the Red Sox off to their off-season homes when they were 7-0 up in game five.  Should the Rays lose this series, they will look back at that game with regret.

The prospect of a long winter thinking ‘if only’ will be a strong motivator for Tampa Bay tonight.  Yes they let a great chance pass them by, as they did again last night, but they still have another shot at making the World Series. 

Game seven will see a repeat of the starting pitcher match-up from game three.  The Red Sox went into that tie in confident mood because Jon Lester had been their go-to guy all season.  There were few occasions during the preceding months that Lester made two mistakes like the pitches he threw to B.J. Upton and Evan Longoria.  Both players took advantage be taking him over the Green Monster and Lester ended up with the loss as his counterpart Matt Garza pitched effectively over six innings to lead the Rays to a comfortable 9-1 victory.

Lester has stressed that he didn’t suffer from a sudden downturn in form, just that he made two mistakes and was punished for them.  These sort of comments can sometimes sound hopelessly optimistic, a bit like saying ‘if I hadn’t hit those two pedestrians I would have passed my driving test’, but in this case the lefty does have a valid point.  The Rays certainly won’t be thinking they’ve got his number now and it would be no surprise if game seven is a tense, low-scoring affair.

The Red Sox and Rays offenses combined for only six runs in game six, two of which came from unlikely sources.  Jason Varitek has had a miserable year at the plate and his struggles have continued in the ALCS.  He broke out of a 0 for 14 slump by hitting a two-out solo home run to give the Red Sox a 3-2 lead.  This followed a similarly unexpected homer by Jason Bartlett.  The slick-fielding shortstop’s career home run log doesn’t stretch too far down your monitor: he has managed just eleven big flies in four seasons, only one of which came in 2008 prior to his four-bagger last night.  However, it was perhaps even more surprising to see Bartlett commit a throwing error in the sixth inning which eventually led to the Red Sox scoring their fourth run of the night.

You can’t write about home run hitting feats without giving B.J. Upton a mention.  After logging twenty-four round-trippers in 2007, Upton hit just nine during the regular season in ’08 but he has now added seven postseason shots to his total for the year.  That’s the sort of power outage that gains players the reputation of coming up big when it matters most in October.

And that’s one of the features of postseason baseball that never fails to capture the imagination.  Whether it’s the big stars living up to their billing or lesser lights grabbing the attention, October is the stage where heroes are born. 

The team that goes on to face the Phillies in the World Series will have their name across the chest of the hero from game seven tonight.