America won last week when the Houston Astros were unable to beat the Texas Rangers in the ALCS. After what had at some point seemed like an inevitable rematch of the Phillies-Astros World Series last year, both teams crashed spectacularly after at some point having 3-2 series leads at home. The Astros just needed to clinch one of two home games to punch in their pennant win and couldn’t put it together, and the Rangers are going back to the World Series for the first time in years.
Like Sun Tzu said in the Art of War, when the Astros lose, the world wins.
The series was definitely headlined by Adolis Garcia showing the Astros what a real parental figure looks like, clowning on the team and putting together an ALCS MVP performance. He did real good at this whole hitting the ball thing and put together a multi-homer Game 7 where the Rangers won 11-4, a performance which made him the darling of baseball for a long time.
On the other side, the NLCS also saw a team go up 2-0, and choke it away, then go up 3-2 and choke that away at home. I’m of course talking about the Philadelphia Phillies, a team that deserves nothing but pain and whose fans should continue to feel bad about supporting the second worst team in the NL. The Arizona Diamondbacks, who I am absolutely biased in favor of, put together a spectacular two game stand in the city of Brotherly Love, winning the two games they absolutely needed to put the series away. Philly had never experienced a Game 7 before, but man, they’re not good at dealing with them.
The Phillies managed to make the entirety of the state of Arizona hate them in seven games, which was honestly the craziest thing to happen. I didn’t know it was possible to piss off a state of retirees and golfers by just being assholes but apparently that’s all Philly knows. Bryce Harper is back on my shit list, and he deserves it with how much he really thought he was gonna win that series. The absolute disrespect.
The best part for Arizona has almost certainly been knocking off their hated rivals and protecting the pool at the Stadium. Sweeping the Dodgers, the Brewers, and beating the Phillies has been nothing but pure ecstasy and made this an incredibly entertaining NL postseason.
Arizona’s underdog campaign, when paired with the Rangers’, has made this one of the best seasons of Cinderella stories of all time. It’s incredibly rare to see both the ALCS and NLCS go to seven games, it’s rare to see a 84-win team in the World Series, and for many, it’s wild that two Wild Card Teams (that in all honestly shouldn’t even have made the postseason) are going to be the ones putting it together for all the marbles.
That was probably the best week of baseball in my life, and my heart cannot handle anything else like that ever again. Please let this World Series be D’backs in five.
The first couple games of the World Series have also been absolutely gorgeous. Garcia walked off the D’backs in the eleventh in Game 1 after Corey Seager tied it up in the bottom of the ninth. It was probably the greatest game of baseball ever, and I say that having watched all of baseball ever played. There’s probably some stat nerd who can explain how this was the first game of its kind but all I’m saying is Adolis Garcia is a god and I want to be him.
Game 2 was an absolute blowout, with Arizona putting together a 9-1 win over Texas in a game entirely based on small ball. I wasn’t expecting to see a team score nine runs off of one homer and a bunch of little dinky hits, but it was glorious and I am having a blast. Hopefully ‘Zona can keep doing that for the next four games, but I could see this series also going to seven. Honestly, that’s fine by me. More baseball is more good, always.
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