Ever since Willie Mays hauled down that drive off the bat of Vic Wertz in the ’54 World Series, running full-tilt with his back to the plate, I’ve had queasy feelings about the San Francisco Giants. It doesn’t matter that I was eight months old at the time. The team with the best record in baseball (111–43), the Cleveland Indians, ended up being swept—how could I not have noticed?
And it doesn’t matter that the Giants were actually the New York Giants at the time.
But this year I’ll be checking their box scores every night, right after I find out how the Tribe fared, just to see how their rookie shortstop Emmanuel Burriss is doing. Burriss was a classmate of my kid’s at Wilson High in the District, and he had Major League written all over him at the time. He went on to play ball at Kent State, where he was Player of the Year in the Mid-American Conference. As fate would have it, he’s a switch-hitter, just like his teammate Omar Vizquel, who made the nineties so enjoyable and memorable for us in Cleveland (in the extended sense of “Cleveland”), and who’s currently on the disabled list and isn’t even first string anymore (I don’t think).
Burriss stroked a double leading off the 13th inning on Wednesday, stole second, and scored the go-ahead run on a single in a game where Greg Maddox was denied his 350th win. Remembering how Maddox and the rest of the Atlanta pitching staff made monkeys of the Cleveland hitters in the ’95 World Series, I wasn’t particularly sad. (According to Wikipedia, “In 1995, the Cleveland Indians batted .291 as a team, led the league in runs scored, hits, and stolen bases, and had eight .300 hitters in their starting lineup. However, the Tribe was held to a .179 batting average in the World Series.”)
The Giants are in DC the first week in June. That will be additional incentive to get me down to the new ballpark.
Addendum 2008.05.04: There’s a nice profile of Emmanuel Burriss in today’s Washington Post.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who gets spasms whenever I see a baseball player who previously killed my team in the postseason. Kirby Puckett and Jim Leyritz are my two. The unfortunate demise of both of them should be proof that my voodoo is strong and should not be messed with…
So … by the processes of elimination and induction … your team is the Braves? Holy cow! That’s okay—I certainly don’t blame the Braves for beating the Indians (in the match-up known to some as the Politically Incorrect Series). And I apologize that, due to ’95, I was probably cheering for the Yanks in ’96. The Yankees! Hey, unlike most of my family, I don’t hate them, I just like beating them. (Like Cleveland’s Kobayashi—the relief pitcher, not the hot-dog-eating machine. He got his first Major League win on Saturday, and the fact that it was the Yankees made it extra special.)