Being and Becoming: Houston, the World Series, and Game 7

Baseball is not obligated to resemble your imagination.

It’s a dreamer’s game, sure: Ahead of scoring the Stanley Cup-winning goal or Super Bowl-winning touchdown or NBA Finals-winning basket on the rungs of childhood fantasies is hitting the walk-off home run in game seven of the World Series.

It’s incredible to even come close.

Cleveland’s Rajai Davis came close against Chicago a year ago, tying the decisive contest late with a desperate laser whose chin barely cleared the bar in left. So did Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays won it all by touching ‘em all in ’93 with a ninth-inning blast off Philadelphia’s Mitch Williams—but that was in game six. Gene Larkin, Edgar Renteria, Luis Gonzalez: All brought home the Fall Classic’s winning run in game seven over the last 26 years, but all did so with singles.

Only Pittsburgh Pirate Bill Mazeroski, who played when there was no YouTube to immortalize his moment, has cracked a season-ending long ball in the year’s final possible game. Baseball is a sequence of improbabilities—over two decades, the odds were against even Ted Williams reaching base—and so most of its results come from a boring chaos.