It began with a Michael Busch leadoff home run floating through the sky in Milwaukee at a little after 2 p.m. Weird and Wild Daylight Time. It ended with a Josh Naylor bouncer down the first-base line nearly 10 hours later, on the other side of midnight where I live.
So what were you doing while all that baseball was going on? Checking out the fall foliage? Hanging out at a college football game with 105,000 of your closest friends? Picking up that dry cleaning you forgot you dropped off three weeks ago?
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That, from what I hear, is the kind of stuff normal people do on October Saturdays. But it’s not what I did. Of course, it wasn’t. Instead, I was living the dream, watching 1,421 pitches go roaring toward home plate on one of the great baseball days of the year. Not that I was counting, except yes I was.
It was Day 1 of the Division Series. And it was something, all right. A guy who hit 55 homers this season got to pitch. The Brewers paraded 20 hitters to the plate before the entire Cubs lineup had gotten to bat once.
The Blue Jays did something they’d barely done since Joe Carter’s home run landed. (That was in 1993, by the way!) And the Tigers flew all the way across the country to fire up 11 innings of Pitching Chaos and ask: Collapse? What collapse?
Yes, I watched every darned minute of all of that while you were busy with your “normal” October stuff. But if you were curious about what you missed on the baseball fields of North America, you’ve come to the right place — where a Division Series edition of our October Weird and Wild column is coming right up in 3 … 2 … 1.
Take this Shoh to the Hill
On Saturday in South Philly, the amazing Ohtani was at it again. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
Suppose you’d somehow just slept through the last eight years of baseball. Suppose you had no idea that any such human as Shohei Ohtani existed. Then suppose I woke you up Saturday night and said:
Hey, guess what? The winning pitcher for the Dodgers, in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, was a guy who hit 55 home runs this year.
So what would you think, huh? Would you have asked: Is Babe Ruth still alive? Would you have asked: Were we mixing up real life with “MLB The Show”? Would you have asked: C’mon, who REALLY pitched for the Dodgers in that game?
You’d be in disbelief, right? So what does it tell us about the amazing Shoh Man that we just take this stuff he does for granted now?
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Every time he takes the field, he’s redefining the boundaries of what is possible. And we’re so used to it, we don’t even think stuff like this is a story at this point.
But let’s say this again: A man who hit 55 home runs was the winning pitcher in the Dodgers’ 5-3 Game 1 win over the Phillies. He spun off six typically dazzling innings, striking out nine, inducing 23 swings-and-misses, allowing a whopping three hits — just one of them to the last 17 hitters he faced.
And he’s a real person, right here on the planet we live on.
Well, maybe that isn’t a major news flash in your household. But it’s a big deal here at Weird and Wild Postseason HQ. So let’s suspend our disbelief and digest all this. What do you say?
55 home runs and he pitched? There’s no point in even asking how many other players have ever whomped that many home runs in a season a
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