I actually wrote the following at about this time last year, but anyone who follows these things knows this morning how relevant it still is, even in its sorry unfinished state:
Ten years from now I doubt I’ll remember exactly how it was that I managed to miss practically all of the Red Sox’s clinching victory and a full lunar eclipse on the same night—I just hope I remember that it was for a very good reason. As it was, the Red Sox’s four-game sweep of the Series came as an anticlimax after all the years of haplessness, so much so that the fourth game was barely over before the announcers were asking, “Which is the next cursed team?”
I wish I could claim something so redolent with mystery as a curse for my Astros. Everyone seemed happy that by dispatching the Braves in five games they finally managed to win a postseason series for the first time in the franchise’s 43-year history. The Astros’ problem, though, isn’t just winning any series, but the LCS in particular. They’ve been there twice, in ’80 against the Phillies and in ’86 against the Mets, and both times they were mercilessly mangled and ridiculed before being rejected by the mirthless gods of baseball. It doesn’t matter that in both cases their opponents went on to win the World Series; nor does it matter that both series (still in the old five-game format) were memorable for their high-anxiety theatrics. Game Four of the ’80 NLCS was a baseball anti-gravity house, rife with slapstick adventures on the basepaths, a momentum-turning play which, although it could only have been a single out or a triple-play, was instead deemed a double-play by the umps after they huddled for a 15-minute strange interlude, and a play in which the Astros leftfielder, rearing back to throw the ball, had it roll through his fingers behind his head before completing his full-armed throw to the infield, like a Little Leaguer faking out his teammates. (It was at this point that my buddy threw up his hands and yelled, “Do these jokers even want to win this game?”) Despite their own miscues and the calls against them, the Astros held a two-run, eighth inning lead with Nolan Ryan on the mound in Game Five, and still found a way to lose.
Against all odds, 1986 was even more painful. The Mets, a team just bursting with talent, had squashed their opponents all year long as they rolled toward what seemed like a predestined coronation. I was living in San Francisco by then and had become entranced by the young Giants, now under the tutelage of Roger Craig. The Giants had lost exactly 100 games in ’85 (I was there for Loss #100 on the last day of the season, when they’d gone down flailing at Dwight Goodin’s fastballs); Craig, sensing nothing to lose, loaded his lineup with rookies from the minor leagues, including Will Clark, who in his first major league at-bat lived up to his nickname “The Natural” by redirecting a Ryan fastball over the Astrodome’s centerfield fence. As it turned out the Astros and Giants, neither of whom anyone had picked in the preseason, battled it out for NL West title until a late September meeting between the teams at the Dome. Ryan threw a one-hitter to put the Astros within a game of clinching, leaving it to Mike Scott to finish things for the hometeam. Scott had been a journeyman pitcher until joining the Astros, where none other than Roger Craig, then the Houston pitching coach, had taught him the split-fingered fastball, and practically overnight the splitter turned Scott into a 20-game winner and the league’s most imposing pitcher. There was only one way Scott could top Ryan’s one-hitter, but by God he did it, throwing a completely dominating no-hitter that clinched the division. Suddenly it looked like the Mets had met their match...
[Insert sound of gunshot here.]