So they’ve made it to the World Series again. I high-fived a bunch of dudes last night at the bar and walking down Green after Kershaw got that last out, and watched the team celebrate with champagne and beer… I wonder if I’m the only person who got the feeling that their hearts weren’t completely in the celebration last night. I’m not too sure about us fans, either.
This is where we expected them to get. This is where they expected to get from the beginning of the season, even with all the ups and downs. We’ve done all this before – last year. Maybe winning the Pennant is more exciting when you haven’t done it in a while. I know I was more excited last year than I am this year. Not that I’m taking the Pennant for granted or anything – anyone who’s been reading my blog knows that I had my share of doubts about the team. But this whole season has been happening with one goal in mind:
Winning the World Series.
So that makes all that’s happened this far seem like preamble. Yeah, yeah, we know…division title, winning the NLDS, Pennant… Been there, done that.
Maybe I am taking the Pennant for granted after all. But so is everybody else. I reckon that may include the guys on the team. Winning the Pennant is something pretty amazing… If I were on a team that won the Pennant I’d be jumping up and down and shooting champagne down my teammates’ backs, and really mean it. It never happened to me, but I reckon that, if I were pouring ice cold champagne down Slater’s back, it wouldn’t look like last night’s celebration. We’d have been so excited y’all would have been jumping up and down watching us.
They looked like they were having fun last night, but they weren’t getting me to jump up and down. Nobody in the bar was jumping up and down either. As for the guys in the clubhouse, did you notice how most of them didn’t even bother with goggles this time?
None of this is bad, don’t get me wrong…but, since they said this was what they were going to do, it’s not as exciting as it might be. It was a frustrating season to be a Dodgers fan, but they did make good on their promise to make it back to the World Series.
Thing is – and they’re totally aware of this – now they gotta win it. And I will be jumping up and down when it happens. It’ll make up for those two years the Smokies lost in the last round of the playoffs.
It’ll make up for it big time.
Keaton read my last post and said that the team had proved me wrong about manufacturing runs because all their scoring in Saturday’s game came through long balls. I wasn’t wrong: Bellinger’s and Puig’s homers came with men on base. There was a 2-shot and a 3-shot. So 3 of the Dodgers’ 5 runs were manufactured. When I was criticizing that the team was depending too much on hitting home runs, I mostly meant solo homers. When you hit a ball out of the park and there are guys on base, you’re not having a problem with runners in scoring position.
And you need to hit less home runs to get a big number on the scoreboard.
Y’all know that I like players who’ll stand on their heads to make a catch. That’s almost literally what Chris Taylor did in Saturday’s game. That Cody Bellinger called it the “catch of the year” should give you an idea of how amazing a catch it was. Until then, the catch of the year was probably his airplane flop a few days earlier. (I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but Bellinger deserves credit for the leap he took over Taylor after CT3 made the catch. That could have been one ugly collision.)
That’s one of the reasons why CT3 could be my favorite Dodger. And don’t forget he can play shortstop too.
Thinking back to that catch in Game 5 and a couple super important hits, I reckon that Bellinger did deserve to be series MVP. He was having one heck of a sophomore slump this season…but he’s made up for it big time.
(I hope it doesn’t sound too gay, but I’m really liking his necklace, whatever it’s made of:
But someone should explain to him that he needs to make sure it’s always inside his jersey…like Meemaw explained to me about the cross necklace she gave me for my 16th birthday. It looks cooler when you only see some of it. Ok, maybe that does sound gay. Never mind lol.)
However good Bellinger was in the NLCS, the bullpen as a whole probably deserved the MVP award more than him. But they probably can’t give the MVP to a whole bunch of guys (although they did give it to two last year.) I reckon enough people have said that the pen was our MVP enough times to make them feel as though they won it. And they certainly should feel good knowing that they were way better than that Brewers bullpen everyone kept saying was so great.
4 wins to go.
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