The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. – David Foster Wallace
Two days after I initially intended to, I watched Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS (or at least the iTunes store’s bowdlerized version of it, which chopped out the second, top of the third, fourth, fifth, bottom of the eighth, and top of the ninth innings). It was, in some ways, an absolute joy to watch for 80 minutes. It’s the only real way to see my favorite Pirates in real game action. There are always highlights and bloopers and clip shows, but nothing really captures the true joy or genius of baseball the way a live game does.
Take, for example, Damon Berryhill’s double off of Doug Drabek in the bottom of the third inning. Berryhill whacks the ball the other way into right center field. Andy Van Slyke trails it and looks like he’s going to follow it to the fence, but stops just short at the warning track. The ball bounces off of the wall and goes past him and from the live view, it looks like he’s misplayed the ball badly and fallen victim to either a misread of where the ball was going to hit or a strange fence. CBS then shows a replay from a camera behind the fence. Van Slyke doesn’t stop at the warning track, he reverses direction. When the ball caroms off the fence and in front of him, he’s suddenly got a running start to grab the ball come up throwing to third, should Berryhill try to stretch his hit into a triple. It almost worked; Berryhill was slow but it looked to everyone like Van Slyke misplayed the ball and he took a big turn at second. Maybe Van Slyke did misjudge the ball at first, but he wasn’t going to get to the fence in time to make the play and once that happened it was going to be a double for Berryhill no matter what; he managed to give himself a chance to make something out of the play anyways. Seeing the replay from the outfield camera immediately made me remember what a joy he was to watch patrol center field.
There are tons of little moments like that littered throughout the early part of the game for me that trigger memories for reasons I’m not sure I understand. Jay Bell and Orlando Merced and Mike LaValliere all wore white t-shirts under their jerseys and Merced even rolled his sleeves up so it looked like they had one white stripe instead of a black/gold/black pattern. Van Slyke and Doug Drabek both wore gold shirts under their jerseys. I used to emulate both styles when I was a little kid. LaValliere swung a huge, white bat that I always thought looked just like the long, thin, yellow wiffleball bat we used to play in the yard with. A camera shot of the dugout showed the trainer (Kent Biggerstaff!) standing nervously against the wall late in the game and seeing him there now provoked the same reaction that seeing him in the dugout used to trigger when I was seven: “Man, that guy looks just like Sid Bream.”
That’s not what watching this game was all about though. It was more about the feeling I got when I watched the top of the very first inning. Alex Cole drew a walk off of John Smoltz in just four pitches, then after Jay Bell failed to bunt him over, Andy Van Slyke doubled down the line, and Barry Bonds was intentionally walked. And though I was being honest when I claimed to have no memory of watching even the early parts of the game live, seeing Orlando Merced stand up at the plate with the bases loaded and one out suddenly transported me back to the living room of my childhood home, sitting in front of our big 27″ Zenith TV, staring at the bases loaded with one out and the sudden silence of an Atlanta crowd that was Tomahawk Chopping their hearts out seconds before, and thinking to myself, “We got this.”
We didn’t, though. Maybe we never had it. That’s the funny part of watching a game like this so far after the fact; it’s no longer drama, but it’s instead a historical narrative. It’s like reading Julius Caesar in tenth grade; you know Caesar is going to get stabbed to death and you know Brutus is going to thrust the killing blow, but your english teacher tells you the that the real beauty is in the foreshadowing and the dramatic set-up before the payoff.
Analyzing anything with the benefit of a healthy dose of hindsight is incredibly difficult, but doing it for this game is especially hard because of the way that it’s edited. The main highlights are there (the runs the Pirates score, the first inning, the Braves rally in the ninth), but everything else that’s shown seems to be shown explicitly to enhance that narrative. Take, for example, the curious inclusion of the bottom of the third inning. After the first inning ends, the only portion of the game that the iTunes cut includes before the Pirates score in the sixth is the bottom of the third. Why? It included Berryhill’s double, which was the Braves first and only hit for quite some time, but I think it’s in there because with Berryhill on second and one out, John Smoltz hits a little flare into very shallow left field and Chico Lind makes a nice running, lunging catch and the announcers (Sean McDonough and Tim McCarver) talk about what a good fielding second baseman he is.
Once the seventh inning starts, though, there’s no need for creative editing to foreshadow the inevitable. With one out and LaValliere on first, Doug Drabek bunts him to second so that Leyland can pinch hit for Alex Cole with Lloyd McClendon and McCarver reacts incredulously to Leyland choosing offense over defense with a two run lead in the seventh inning (McCarver, weirdly enough, is excellent as the color man in this game, pointing out things like Stan Belinda’s low ground ball rate after Ron Gant’s long sac fly keeps runners on first and second and McDonough says that the Pirates are just a double play away from the World Series). Would Cole have played Terry Pendelton’s leadoff double in the ninth inning better than Espy did? Maybe not — neither were really very good fielders — but who knows at this point?
In the seventh inning, the foreshadowing hit hyper-drive. Within seconds, Sid Bream’s bad knees and Jim Leyland’s tendency to over-manage everything except pulling his starter were mentioned. Chico Lind nearly booted a ball at second base. Drabek’s struggling, Leyland’s already making weird moves in the dugout (the McClendon thing), and the normally solid defense is falling apart. If this were a story, the reader would be rolling his eyes at how obviously the author has tipped his hand. The Pirates are going to lose, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
This is the problem with watching this game now, I think. The collapse is so preposterous, so surreal, that it seems like fiction. Just enough is different to make it seem like it takes place in another universe: the tight polyester uniforms, the huge mustaches on the Pirates’ players, the big MARLBORO ad in the outfield at Fulton County Stadium, the fact that a stadium like Fulton County Stadium still exists, the Clark Bar being the go-to place for the CBS camera crew as the token “bar in Pittsburgh,” all of these things make it feel like a scene from a movie that takes place in a world that’s almost just like ours, but not quite.
The most heartbreaking part of the whole broadcast isn’t Andy Van Slyke sitting in center field with his hat propped up on his head in disbelief. It’s not Ray Miller wearing the blank stare of a baseball man who’s seen a lot but never seen anything quite like that. It’s not the Braves dog-piling on home plate or Bonds looking off into the distance, pondering his future. It’s one lone Pirate fan sitting at the Clark Bar after Bream slides past LaValliere’s tag. He’s about the age I am now and the look on his face is disappointed but resolute. When you see him on the screen, you can tell he’s the guy at the bar telling his friends, “It’s OK. No one thought we’d be back here without Bonilla this year and here we are closer than ever. We’ll do it again and again until we get it right.”
I guess that’s the logical instinct in the aftermath of something as painful as Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS. To shrug and say “That sucks, but that’s baseball; these things happen.” That’s what I heard Rob Neyer say on the radio last night when asked to explain how Cody Ross hit two home runs off of the invincible Roy Halladay in Game 1 of this year’s NLCS. And it’s true, weird things happen in baseball, especially in the playoffs. But things like this? Plays that destroy a franchise? They don’t happen. Not to everyone. Maybe not to anyone but Pirate fans. Perhaps the weirdest thing about the whole experience of watching that game for me was that no one found it surprising that the Pirates were in the NLCS. It was part of the normal course of events. But that night was the last night that was true. All we can do now is hope that some day it’s true again.
