CLAY HORNING: Baseball and the power of deliverance
Published 9:33 am Thursday, October 28, 2021
It feels like more than 20 years since I paid real attention, but it can’t quite be, because I remember getting excited about Jason Heyward and baseball-reference.com tells me he broke in with Atlanta in 2010.
Freddie Freeman broke in that year, too, and unlike Heyward, who got his World Series ring with the Cubs five years ago, Freeman, whose been terrific for ages, is a dynamite first baseman and has been a .295/.384/.503 batsman over 12 seasons, is still looking for his.
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He got off to a good start Tuesday, going 1 for 3 and driving in a run as Atlanta took Game 1 from Houston 6-2. He also had a hit and an RBI in Atlanta’s 7-2 Game 2 loss on Wednesday.
For reasons I can’t explain, focusing on baseball for the first time in a while this week took me back to Oct. 1, 1991, for one of those moments only baseball can provide.
I was in Cincinnati. The Braves entered one game behind the Dodgers in the National League West, despite having won four straight — three over the Astros, who were in the NL West at the time — and the day before over the Reds,
It was the ninth inning. The Reds had scored all of their runs in the first off crafty lefty Charlie Liebrandt. The Braves had brought it to 6-5. Infielder Mark Lemke opened the ninth with a single, He was quickly replaced by pinch-runner Deion Sanders, who’d suited up and started at cornerback for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons four days earlier and would again two days later — both victories.
Anyway, after Terry Pendleton made his first out after four straight hits, up came David Justice.
I was a Braves fan.
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Having al the games on TBS cable hooked me, yes, but they were my team all the way back to Bobby Cox managing them the first time, when they were terrible. That was before a young nucleus of Bob Horner, Dale Murphy and Bruce Benedict, along with old hands Claudell Washington and Chris Chambliss and fine up-the-middle defenders Rafael Ramirez and Glenn Hubbard, finally made them respectable, playing for Joe Torre, winning the division in 1982.
Yet, by ’91, they’d been terrible forever all over again, losing 96, 89, 92, 106, 97 and 97 games from ’85 to ’90.
But on this night, here they were, one back of Los Angeles, playing their 158th game of the season, trying to beat Rob Dibble, who was in there trying to save it for Jose Rijo.
Dibble, a righty, was the most intimidating reliever in the majors. His fastball had been clocked at 101, and I promise you he threw harder than everybody clocking in at 101, 102 or 103 today.
Justice, who hit lefty and had been Rookie of the Year the year before, was waiting on Dibble’s heat and turned on it.
“There’s a fly ball, deep right field, there goes [Paul] O’Neill, he’s back at the wall,” bellowed Skip Caray, son of Harry, father of Chip, who calls Atlanta games now. “Braves lead, Braves lead, Braves lead.”
As a 4-year-old — though maybe I heard it for the first time later — I got Howard Cosell’s “Down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier.”
At 10 1/2, I got Al Michaels’ USA Olympic hockey “Do you believe in Miracles? Yes.”
As a young man, barely 23, I got “Braves lead, Braves lead, Braves lead.”
I swear to God, as I type those words, there’s an embarrassing mist around the edges of my eyes.
Can football do that?
Can basketball?
Try as it might, the gridiron doesn’t build on itself. Nobody ever says, “I haven’t seen a play like that since …” in the middle of a football game and come up with a 35-year-old reference. You can love it, but history’s an NFL bystander.
Does basketball?
Magic was a Laker.
Dr. J, pre-Philly, a Net.
Jason Kidd a Mav.
Now?
Now, the Lakers are the team LeBron plays for, the Nets the team Kevin Durant and James Harden play for, the Mavs the team Luka Doncic plays for.
The NBA, more than anything, is immediate and fleeting.
Baseball?
I’ve watched more than a thousand Braves game, every out for many of them, yet almost none of them for most of the past 25 years.
But here they are and here I am, once more lost in Justice and Dibble 30 years ago, emotionally engaged in them winning it all after so much postseason disappointment.
Maybe next year it will be your team from years past and you’ll be delivered, too.
Baseball can do that.
Not the other sports.
