WOW. I am very nearly speechless, and I’d already written a very different EBS that I now have to edit. And it’s very hard, because I’m left without words, and shaking a little bit. Baseball is awesome, eh?
Down two in the bottom of the 9th, and without a walk-off this year, Jason Heyward stepped to the plate with two outs and the bases loaded. He worked a long at bat. The tension built. There were timeouts. Mound visits. The tension built more. And with two strikes, Heyward freaking unloaded on a no-doubt grand slam to walk it off.
My lord.
It was almost a much, much different game.
The pull. I know that a lot of folks will be grumbling about the decision to pull Jose Quintana in the 6th inning with two runners on and two outs, which was followed by Steve Cishek giving up the game-tying homer into the basket on his first pitch to Aaron Altherr. At the time, I liked the pull – Quintana had been fantastic, but his fastball velocity was dipping multiple MPH, and he was going to be approaching 100 pitches. Two guys on, dangerous righty up, and you have Cishek specifically for those kinds of moments, and he never gives up homers. It didn’t work out, and that sucked.
Then you throw in the 9th inning two-run homer Brandon Morrow gave up to Dylan Cozens, the first of his career – on a good low fastball, opposite field into the basket again – and that sucked awfully hard.
And THEN you throw in the fact that Morrow and Cishek had the 1st and 3rd longest homerless streaks in all of baseball … and the suck, man. It wouldn’t end.
Except then it did end.