I’ve decided to live in the alternate reality where Aubrey Huff’s eighth-inning fly ball went out of the ballpark.
Oh, it’s a great day here. For a second, I thought the game was going to be decided on an RBI groundout. See, that was the second RBI groundout of the game, which is a supremely ridiculous way to build an insurmountable lead. Yet the Padres always do that. And I thought, oh, here we go again. But that wasn’t the case, as the fly ball that Aubrey Huff absolutely crushed was a two-run home run. So the Giants won. It was really, really, really fun to watch. You should have been there.
And I thought the yammer-mouth starting pitcher -- who yammered his mouth about a sweep when he can’t even throw strikes like a normal major leaguer -- was going to take another loss against the Padres despite his ERA being -0.32 against them this season.
Nope. Silly me. I was the idiot for being so negative.
As someone who would have been thrilled with an outcome of a series win before the series started, I guess that outcome would have still been possible if the Giants had lost. That doesn’t mean that this wouldn’t have been a junk-in-the-pencil-sharpener kind of game if Huff’s ball didn’t go out. But it did. It sailed into the dark green abyss, bouncing twice before leaving our sight, the crowd pulsing with absolute elation as fireworks shot off, illuminating the round peg in the round hole in our soul that was carved out by the Padres earlier in the year. The ball went out. Then Wilson saved it. It was awesome.
I like living in this world. Because living in a world in which the fucking Padres won another fucking one-run game against the Giants would be a horrific nightmare. It would be like watching someone hit on 17 every chance they got in blackjack, coming up with threes and fours every time. Wait, no. It would be like watching that same card player, except if the player were Clayton Richard, grinning arrogantly every time he walks to the dugout, or maybe it could have been Yorvit Torrealba twitching like a methed-out finch after every single event on the field.
I don’t believe in "this team has the other team’s number." I believe that baseball is a game of skill and luck, and that for one team to win that many close games against the other is an imbalance between skill and luck. I think Madison Bumgarner is going to come out tomorrow and FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF his way into our hearts. I also think that I need to stop writing before I punch a plate-glass window.
Man, I’m sure glad Huff’s ball went out.