WASHINGTON — Game 7 is inherently anti-baseball.
Baseball is a sport predicated upon playing the minute advantages in percentages, then watching those advantages play out slowly over six months, separating the good teams from bad ones. It is a slow grind, one that requires monk-like patience, and one that will come to a definitive conclusion in just nine innings (or possibly a couple more) on Wednesday night.
The regular season is built upon winning 55 to 60 percent of the time. The best hitting team in the American League (the Detroit Tigers) batted 35 thousandths of a point higher than the worst (the Houston Astros) over the course of 162 games. Even in playoff series, there is an art to setting up your rotation around the added off days, managing your bullpen usage, and setting your team up with the best chance to win both today and tomorrow.
But Game 7 can swing entirely on one inning, one poor managerial decision, one swing, one pitch, even one call from a fallible human umpire. For those of us who really care about baseball, Game 7 is the worst.
It’s also the best.
It’s the best, because years of planning and roster building come down to a pair of number three starters, both well on the wrong side of their prime. Tim Hudson, 39, and Jeremy Guthrie, 35, have made over 750 combined Major League starts, but each has made only one World Series start, five days ago, against one another, in San Francisco.
Guthrie and the Royals won that game, 3-2. Which gives us absolutely no substantive information about Game 7.
All across the internet today, you will see articles proclaiming the four factors that could determine Game 7, or the X-factors who will decide Game 7, or the history and stats to be aware of heading into Wednesday night.
And honestly, none of them are true. It’s not that these writers are liars, it’s just that every last thing matters because everyone is available for whatever duty they are called upon to fulfill. It is the only game of the baseball season in which there is truly no tomorrow for either club, no consideration further than ensuring that when the night is done, they have more runs on the scoreboard than their opponent.
This is just the second World Series Game 7 in the last 12 years of baseball. And while we didn’t get the matchup of the sport’s best records (Nationals vs. Angels), its most prolific offenses (Dodgers vs. Tigers, based on OPS+), or its best pitching staffs (Nationals vs. Athletics, based on ERA+), at least we got a Game 7. There’s nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy it.
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