The sun is shining through the window, and I don’t know why
Published 7:08 pm Friday, November 1, 2019
As I write, the sun is beaming through the window as if my favorite player just hit the game-winning home run, and the sun wants to celebrate with me. But we know that didn’t happen.
It has been cloudy and gloomy all week out here in Texas, until today — until the morning after my Astros lose in Game 7. Suddenly, the sun decides to show back up and shine its little heart out. Not that I don’t appreciate it. I know what’s he doing. He wants me to know that the sun will come out and shine today even if I didn’t think it would after last night’s bitter defeat.
But couldn’t it have shone a little love down on the orange and blue last night in Game 7 during the seventh inning when the season came unraveled like an old baseball? The ol’ sun had to know that the home team hasn’t been able to get a big hit or make the big pitch to send their fans home happy all series long — no, not for any of the first six games. How that can be?
Worse still — How can it be that it happened for the seventh time. The home team loses all seven games of the World Series — and, alas, all that after my Astros fought and scratched to win 107 regular season games and get the homefield advantage all the way through — only to find out the home team wasn’t going to win even one game in the World Series. Cruel irony, that is.
It wouldn’t have taken much for the ‘Stros to get that Game 7 victory, either. Don’t be fooled. If Juan Soto doesn’t make a diving, one-inch off the ground, two-out catch in right field early in the game — with Astros on second and third — then the Astros would have had two more runs and would’ve taken a 4-0 lead into that fateful seventh inning.
Or if Greinke — who had thrown a one-hitter going into the seventh — hadn’t made his first bad pitch of the night to the hottest hitter in the world, hanging that deadly slow curve right in the middle of the plate, then the Nationals might never have gotten out of the shoot. And Greinke might have pitched on through the night and been the hero himself.
But you know the story: Home run to Houston’s hometown boy, Rendon, then a walk to Soto, forcing A.J. Hinch to bring in Will Harris to pitch. What follows next is a dagger to the spirit: The next batter hits an unlikely home run to right field on a fading away outside pitch that you shouldn’t even swing at — and the home run hit about three inches inside the foul pole. It didn’t even look like a homerun. But, suddenly, it’s 3-2 Nationals, and then it was over.
Game 7 didn’t have to go to the visiting team this time. By the time that seventh inning rolled around, the Astros had left 10 men on base, the Nationals had left one. It could have easily been 4, 5, even 6 to 1 by the seventh inning. But that ol’ sun didn’t come out from behind those dark clouds, didn’t shine its happy beams down on the boys from home, didn’t give us our second championship in the last three years or my second since way back in 1975 when I started watching the ‘Stros.
No, instead, the sun shone down on Washington, D.C. For the first time in 95 years — since 1924 — the team from D.C. won the World Series.
And, maybe even more ironically, for the first time in at least 95 years everybody in Washington is happy. I guess they ought to call an emergency session of Congress and get everybody on the same page while the sun is shining down on them and everybody is chipper.
As for me, I’m not going to pout, at least not for long. I’m gonna put on my Astros shirt proudly, and the amazin’ blonde and I are flying out to Atlanta. We’ll be in LaGrange soon after that fickle sun comes up on Saturday morning. By Monday, we — along with Coca-Cola Mike and Glory — will be headed to Tennessee, to the Smokies.
So, don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay in a couple of days. I’m headed home where the sun is always shining.