“MLB's Changing of the Guard: Why This World Series Is Good for Baseball - Bleacherreport.com” plus 2 more |
- MLB's Changing of the Guard: Why This World Series Is Good for Baseball - Bleacherreport.com
- San Francisco Giants beat Philadelphia Phillies 3-2 in NLCS Game 6, advance to World Series - St. Petersburg Times
- POSTGAME NOTES: Uribe goes POW, Bochy makes all the right moves, Wilson closes it out ... - San Jose Mercury News (blog)
| MLB's Changing of the Guard: Why This World Series Is Good for Baseball - Bleacherreport.com Posted: 24 Oct 2010 03:51 PM PDT  Ranger's SS Elvis Andrus Celebrates With Fans After a Series Clinching Game 6 Win.Stephen Dunn/Getty Images Almost seven months, 2,430 regular season games, an entire postseason completed and it all almost ended exactly where we were a year ago. Almost. With this past weekend's games resulting in the conclusion of both the ALCS and NLCS series, baseball fans worldwide were almost faced with a Yankees versus Phillies rematch for the World Series. It also would have marked the third straight season the Phils reached baseball's most coveted destination. We almost watched as the Yankees competed for their 27th World Series title. Almost. We almost ended the season following those ever so familiar faces of postseason heroes, who have made a living crushing the competition when the season mattered the most. The likes of Derek Jeter, Cole Hamels, Ryan Howard, Alex Rodriguez...the list goes on and on. Almost. Instead this year baseball fans will be tuning in to a series so new, for once, they really do not know what to expect. Sure the ratings certainly won't be as high. How could they be? The Yankees and Phillies are located in two of America's largest sports markets with fanbases of unmeasurable quantities. Sure it would have been exciting to see CC Sabathia take on a Phillies lineup chock-full of talent, again. Sure it would be exciting to see if Cole Hamels and the rest of the Phillies All-Star rotation could hold off the Yankees erasing last season's shortcomings. Sure it would be exciting to see if A-Rod, Jeter, Posada and company could do it again. Who Will Win This Year's World Series?However, what is more exciting is the unknown this year's Series most certainly presents. With the stage set and the world of baseball tuned in, we turn the focus not to the ever so recognizable faces of the New York and Philadelphia ball clubs, but to the faces of baseballs new generation. With a sport already widely considered "boring" or "too slow" it surely does not help when the same faces pop up every fall. In a sports world where the call for youth and personality has never been stronger, isn't it time baseball got with the program? Look at hockey with the emergence of Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby and Steven Stamkos in recent years. Basketball? Try Kevin Durant, Tyreke Evans and even LeBron James. Even football with the likes of Chris Johnson, DeSean Jackson and company has seen a shift to focusing on the players of the "new school." Finally we have not only a series featuring a Giants club who has not reached a World Series since 2002, where they infamously choked away a 5-0 lead in Game 6 eventually leading to a championship for the Angels, but a series featuring a Ranger's club who has previously never won a single playoff series. That, ladies and gentleman, is excitement. Along with the change of teams and scenery comes that calling for the new "era" of baseball. Replace CC Sabathia and Cole Hamels with two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum and the Rangers young ace C.J. Wilson. Derek Jeter for Elvis Andrus, A-Rod for Pablo "Kung-Fu Panda" Sandoval, Posada for Buster Posey. What are you left with? A Series full of under-25 players starving for their first taste of postseason glory. One thing is for sure, for the first time in a while, nothing is for sure. Baseball finally got the facelift that has been needed for years. A changing of the guard that not only shook up this season, but will have implications on many seasons to come. Don't let the ratings fool you, this World Series will be the best one played in recent memory. And to think we almost had a repeat season. Almost. This article is What is the duplicate article? Why is this article offensive? Where is this article plagiarized from? Why is this article poorly edited? This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php | ||||
| Posted: 24 Oct 2010 04:48 PM PDT By Marc Topkin, Times Staff Writer
PHILADELPHIA — They're quite a band of characters these Giants, their own manager routinely referring to them as castoffs and misfits and comparing them to the motley crew of the movie The Dirty Dozen. Well, now there's something else to call ex-Rays Pat Burrell and Aubrey Huff and the rest of them, and that's National League champs. Oh, and World Series hosts, starting Wednesday in San Francisco in a most unlikely pairing with the Texas Rangers. "There's no better feeling in the world," Huff said amid an extremely wild and wet celebration in the Giants clubhouse. "And it's not over yet. We've got a big series against the Rangers. I know America probably wanted to see the Yankees and Phillies but, you know what, it's time for some new blood." The Giants are going to the World Series, and the Phillies, who won more games than any team during the season, are going home after a 3-2 Game 6 win that, typical of the Giants' amazing season, featured an unlikely star. Veteran infielder Juan Uribe, hitting .080 for the postseason coming into Saturday, delivered a two-out opposite-field home run in the eighth to provide the difference. Then the Giants hung on as the Phillies got two on in the eighth and ninth before closer Brian Wilson got Ryan Howard looking at strike three, the raucous Citizens Bank Park crowd of 46,062 falling silent as the Giants started the celebration on the infield then took it inside. "We get a lot of family and friends telling us we give them heart attacks with these games. But I think we've been prepared for these games, we had them all year," Giants second baseman Freddy Sanchez said. "We have a lot of heroes, a lot of guys that just want to win and everyone steps up." The game was tense throughout, tied at 2 from the third inning on, with the benches and bullpens emptying — though with little more than milling about in a scrum near first base — after an odd exchange in the bottom of the third when Philadelphia's Chase Utley was hit by a pitch from Jonathan Sanchez and flipped the ball back to the mound. Uribe, 31, had an eventful series, forced out of the Game 2 lineup due to a bruised left wrist that required an MRI exam then delivering the Game 4-winning run with a walkoff sac fly. Outfielder Cody Ross was named MVP of the series. Huff played a big part in the win, singling in the Giants' first run and scoring the second on an errant throw, then starting a game-saving double play when he snared Carlos Ruiz's eighth-inning liner and doubled Shane Victorino off second. "Nine years of getting killed (on the Rays and other losing teams) and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat to get to do this again," Huff said, escaping the beer and champagne showers to grab and kiss the NL championship trophy. The Giants got to the World Series for the fourth time since moving west but are still seeking their first San Francisco treat, having lost in 1962 to the Yankees, in the 1989 earthquake series to the A's and in 2002 to the Angels (and bench coach Joe Maddon). Having missed a chance to clinch at home in Thursday's Game 5, the Giants were treating Saturday as a must-win, with manager Bruce Bochy pulling Sanchez in the third and bringing in three consecutive lefties then ace starter Tim Lincecum — on one day's rest — to start the eighth before turning it over to bearded closer Wilson. The Phillies got six effective six innings from Roy Oswalt, who allowed nine hits but only the two runs, but as was the case much of the series, they failed to deliver the hits when they needed them. Two tosses and a few choice words led to the benches and bullpens clearing in the third inning. Utley was hit in the back by a 2-and-0 pitch from Sanchez and as the ball bounced to him, Utley flipped it to the back of the mound and headed to first. Sanchez took exception, yelling something at Utley. Utley didn't like that, taking a couple of steps off first and gesturing with his hands, then turning back. But that was enough action to rile the rest of them, as both benches and bullpens emptied, with no real action. "They deserve to move on and I hope they go and win it," Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said. "I felt like it was a good series but they played us real tough and they earned everything they got and I want to congratulate them." The Phillies took a 2-0 lead in the first, but the Giants tied it with a bit of an odd rally in the third, taking advantage of an errant throw from third by Placido Polanco. [Last modified: Oct 24, 2010 01:05 AM]
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| Posted: 24 Oct 2010 12:09 PM PDT Before we start anywhere else, I want to tell you about an honest-to-goodness conversation I had with Juan Uribe in the dugout a few hours before the first pitch Saturday night. It began with a running joke. I asked Uribe if Philly was his town. "Oh yeah," he said, squinting and nodding. "This is my town." He said it with absolute assurance. Almost like he was delivering a line in a TV commercial. He said it the way he always says it, no matter where we are. Every town is Uribe's town. We could be in Chicago, where he played with the White Sox. We could be in Denver, where he broke in with the Rockies. We could be in Taiwan next March. And Uribe would say it's his town. I asked Uribe one more question. Do you feel good about tonight? "I'll do something, you'll see," he said. I held out my palms, in Uribe's signature "jazz hands" home run pose. "Yeah, like that," he said. "POWW!" I suppose it was fitting that Uribe cracked the home run that broke a tie in the eighth inning and sent the Giants to the World Series. Two springs ago, he was a non-roster free agent. So you could call him the original member of Bruce Bochy's "Dirty Dozen." And he's the nephew of a beloved former Giant, late shortstop Jose Uribe, who played a quietly vital role on the 1989 pennant-winning squad. Juan has talked of his uncle many times, mostly about the lessons he learned whenever Jose would come back to the Dominican Republic and tell stories of the major leagues. "He said your team is like your family," Juan Uribe said. "You are all together. Just like a family." Well, not every team is like that. But these 2010 World Series-bound Giants certainly are. POWW!! – It was appropriate that they used three-quarters of their playoff rotation to win a game in which they didn't even face elimination. What manager even conceives of doing something that? Well, Bruce Bochy. That's who. Cody Ross was the MVP of this series, but Bochy deserves a big hunk of crystal, too. He had a brilliant NLCS, whether it was double-switching three times while engineering the Game 4 win or aggressively taking out Jonathan Sanchez in the third inning of Game 6 or starting the Aaron Rowand/Edgar Renteria combo when it was obvious that Andres Torres and Pablo Sandoval needed to sit. Bochy might be frustrating at times during the regular season. But he had a chessboard full of knights, bishops and pawns against the Phillies' bigger pieces. And Bochy moved them all over the board to win. Maybe when I'm more coherent I'll be able to think of all the other examples. But for now, suffice it to say that Bochy has proven himself to be one heck of a playoff manager. He'll also get to pick the All-Star reserves next year. Sorry, Charlie. – And he didn't knock in a single run in the NLCS. Howard hit the ball hard at times, though. Like his double in the fifth off Madison Bumgarner. In the litany of Game 6 heroes for the Giants, don't forget center fielder Andres Torres, who made a perfect play on that ball to keep Jimmy Rollins from scoring. Howard's double won't be what anyone in Philly remembers from this series, though. It'll be the sight of the big slugger buckling on Brian Wilson's full-count slider to end the game. Wilson was asked several times what that little 90 mph pitch was. Sometimes he calls it a cutter. Sometimes he calls it a slider. Whatever. The guy won't admit he colors his beard, so believe whatever you want. Whatever it was, the pitch took stones to throw. "I don't want to leave anything middle, but then again I still have to challenge him," Wilson said. "Because worst-case scenario, we have a game tomorrow. The last thing I want is to tie it on a walk. I'd rather give it up, lose and we play again tomorrow. If the season's going to come down to it, it's going to come down to this. Let's go for it." Plate umpire Tom Hallion rang up Howard, and the celebration was on in front of a shocked crowd. "Everybody's screaming, I've got a catcher running at me with a fist, all angles," Wilson said. "I didn't even like champagne. I do now." As I watched the game play out, I thought it was fitting that the Giants used nearly their entire pitching staff to win. That's the reason they're here, right? "We talked about it when Sanchez was taken out," Wilson said. "I said, `Guys, this is fitting. We're going to have to nail it down. We'll get a late-inning run and it's going to take a combined effort and we'll celebrate afterwards.'" I asked Wilson: You've saved games for Timmy, for Bumgarner and for Sanchez. Did you ever think you'd save one for all three? "Yeah, I don't know who's game I was saving," he said. "I don't even know who got the win. (It was Javier Lopez.) I just know Uribe got a nice piece, put it over the fence and it was on from there. "You knew it wasn't going to come easy. You knew we're going to have to fly to Philly. It was going to come down to a late-inning run. But we knew when we finally did this, we'd look at each other and say, `This is well earned. It's exhausting and it feels good and it's going to be that much better of a celebration.'" All this time, Wilson was holding the NL trophy. It's a giant hunk of wood and brass. "This is getting kind of heavy," he said, almost tickled by the thought of what he just said. What does he imagine the World Series trophy is like to hold? "I hope it's a skyscraper," he said. – As for me, I changed my flight to the first thing hot tomorrow morning, which means I basically have time to shower, pack my bag, check out of my hotel and go straight to the airport. Much more tomorrow, and in the days to come. In the meantime, thanks for reading the game story, notebook and all our coverage. 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