A Sense of Doubt blog post #2081 - DODGERS WIN 2020 PANDEMIC WORLD SERIES
5 DAYS - daily election day countdown
Of course, I wanted either the Detroit Tigers or the Chicago Cubs (who had a better shot) to win the series this year, but it was not to be as they lost to the Miami Marlins in the new three-game opening round format.
Not that it was a bold prediction, but I had a feeling it was going to be the year for the Dodgers to win it all.
Also, I have a close friend who is a huge Dodgers fan, so I have been sharing news with her all season, but especially in the playoffs.
Also, don't get the wrong idea that I am putting an asterisk by this season. I think it's legitimate.
But I am disturbed by Jacob Turner testing positive for the novel coronavirus, pulled from the game in the eighth inning, and then returning to the field, masked, to celebrate but then removing his mask for photo ops.
CONGRATULATIONS LOS ANGELES!!
And the dual championships, pretty cool. Lakers-Dodgers.
Dodgers, Rays battle it out for 6 games in 2020 World Series | Full World Series Highlights + Recap
Full Final Inning of World Series Game 6 as Dodgers try to win 2020 World Series!
Social media reacts to the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the 2020 World Series
The 2020 World Series is in the books and the Los Angeles Dodgers are baseball's champions after defeating the Tampa Bay Rays 4-2 in the series.
After getting only two hits through the first five innings, the Dodgers' offense got going in the sixth inning when L.A. scored two runs.
That offense came after Rays manager Kevin Cash removed starter Blake Snell from the game. To that point, the top three hitters in the Dodgers' lineup had each struck out twice against Snell.
The decision to take out Snell after 5⅓ innings when he had given up only two hits and struck out nine will be highly scrutinized. Social media was quick to react.
After the first inning when Randy Arozarena homered for Tampa Bay's only run, the Dodgers' bullpen shut down the Rays, and Mookie Betts put the exclamation point on the win with an eighth-inning home run. Here's how social media reveled in the Dodgers' first World Series win since 1988.
L.A. teams
Celebrities
Fan scenes
Los Angeles Dodgers' Clayton Kershaw finally wins elusive World Series ring
ARLINGTON, Texas -- Clayton Kershaw stood in the Los Angeles bullpen in right-center field, watching Austin Barnes glove the final pitch, the one from Julio Urias that gave the Dodgers their first World Series title since 1988.
Kershaw had finally become a champion, just like Sandy Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela and Orel Hershiser before him. The mission took 13 years in the majors, 15 since the Dodgers made him the seventh pick in the 2006 amateur draft.
The left-hander raised both arms and pointed fingers toward the sky, a huge smile across his face. His blue Dodgers sweatshirt still on, the 32-year-old ace ran through the bullpen door and onto the infield to join his jumping teammates.
"I was trying to take it all in, as best I could," Kershaw said. "You never really script what you're going to do or how you're going to feel. It was just a content feeling -- just like, the job is done. We won. We did it. We won our race, and it's over. And we completed our mission. Just a feeling of contentment, joy. And then to get to see the guys and how happy everybody was."
Kershaw cut through the critics at last, just like one of his curveballs through the strike zone.
One of the most accomplished pitchers in baseball history attained the achievement he had sought most when the Dodgers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 3-1 in Game 6 on Tuesday night at Globe Life Field.
"When people talk about him, it's World Series champion first, then future Hall of Famer," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Speaking as graciously as he pitched elegantly, Kershaw spread thank yous as wide as his famous 12-to-6 curveball. After posing on the pitcher's mound with his family, he thanked "my wife, my kiddos, my family, my friends and all those people that have seen the discipline.''
"They wanted it just as bad as I did, and they wanted it for me. And that's such a selfless thing to feel," he said. "And so to get those text messages from former teammates or to get those text messages from friends or have friends at the game like I did tonight, just to see how happy they were for us, for me and for our family, it's overwhelming to think that people care that much about you and how they want you to have success and reach your dreams."
Kershaw went 2-0 with a 2.31 ERA over 11⅔ innings in two World Series starts this year, striking out 14 and walking three. He earned his title not far from his hometown of Dallas, with family and friends filling a ticket allotment supplemented with "nosebleed seats.''
His honors are too numerous to list on his likely Hall of Fame plaque: a five-time major league ERA champion, including four in a row from 2011 to 2014; a three-time strikeout champion; a two-time 20-game winner in an era when innings are diminished; a pitching triple crown in 2011.
He's also an eight-time All-Star; National League Cy Young Award winner in 2011, 2013 and 2014; the 2014 NL MVP; and winner of the 2012 Roberto Clemente and 2014 Marvin Miller awards for off-the-field achievements focusing on his community and charitable work.
But he entered this year just 9-11 in postseason play, with poor outings in a pair of World Series Game 5s that resulted in a 2017 no-decision and a 2018 defeat.
"I don't care about legacy. I don't care about what happened last year. I don't care about what people think. I don't care at all, man,'' Kershaw said. "We won the World Series. The 2020 Dodgers won the World Series. It's like, who cares about all that other stuff? To be a part of that team, all that other stuff is just pointless.''
He performed in the postseason like never before, going 4-1 with a 2.93 ERA and 37 strikeouts with five walks in 30⅔ innings. For the first time since 2015, he wasn't inserted into a bullpen role when he wasn't starting. That seemed to ease issues with back pain that has flared up repeatedly for five years.
Kershaw spoke passionately about Justin Turner, who was removed from the game after the seventh inning. Major League Baseball informed the Dodgers around the sixth inning that Turner's COVID-19 test earlier in the day had come back positive, depriving Kershaw of a teammate who had been alongside him since 2014.
"I'm sure it's really hard tonight and we all feel for him," Kershaw said. "But I hope that he can take solace in the fact that we're not here without him. He's been our guy for a long time. He's done so many incredible things for this organization. He's been the rock in the postseason for us every single year. And just like tonight might not be the night that we expected as a team or that he expected individually, they'll never be able to take away the World Series championship from any of us."
Kershaw thought ahead to the moment when the jubilation would be as fulfilling as the final out was, would be the way he envisioned it for so long.
"It might not be the same tonight as other teams get to celebrate," Kershaw said. "And that's not fair, obviously, to fans and us and everybody. But we're still the champs. And someday -- someday soon, I hope -- we are going to celebrate and we're going to be there and there is going to be a parade and there's going to be tens of thousands of Dodger fans. I don't know when. I don't know how soon. But whenever that day comes, I know JT is going to be there, and it's going to be a special thing."
World Series 2020: The oddest of World Series ends with the most 2020 moment of the season
ARLINGTON, Texas -- In this oddest of years, this most peculiar of baseball seasons, there was perhaps no more telling snapshot of the United States, circa 2020, than a COVID-19-positive man sitting on the ground, maskless, next to a cancer survivor, maskless as well, with indelible grins spread across their faces. Sports is and always will be a metaphor for society.
The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series on Tuesday night, and in the moments after, the world learned that Justin Turner, the team's third baseman and pulse of the clubhouse, had contracted the coronavirus. Turner was asked to isolate. He did not abide. He strode onto the field, where his teammates were celebrating their 3-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 6, and joined. He removed his mask to pose for pictures with his wife, whom he kissed. He planted himself on the ground as the team gathered for a photo to commemorate the Dodgers' first championship in 32 years. To his right sat Dave Roberts, the Dodgers' manager, who 10 years ago was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. To Turner's left, gleaming, sat the World Series trophy.
The bizarre aspect of the scene was undeniable. The Dodgers had spent the past three weeks at a resort in Irving, Texas, about 20 minutes from Globe Life Field, ostensibly bubbled from the world. They were supposed to go from the hotel to the stadium and back and nowhere else. Security personnel roamed the property to ensure nobody ran afoul of protocols, whether players, coaches, front-office staff or the family members who had joined them. Nearly two months had passed without a player testing positive. Baseball, the sport that nearly shut down early in its season due to outbreaks on two teams, was on the verge of crowning a champion with no complications.
Then came the eighth inning, when Roberts removed Turner. It was curious; only once had Turner left a game this postseason before its conclusion, and that was in a blowout. The revelation of why turned a moment that would've been so undeniably joyous into something more complicated -- a referendum on behaviors, choices, responsibility. On America and how its response to the pandemic, more than nine months after it landed on these shores, remains the most divisive question in the most divisive of times.
Justin Turner signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Feb. 6, 2014. For more than two months, he had sought a guaranteed deal after the New York Mets nontendered him -- told him, essentially, he was not worth the money he would make in arbitration. He wound up signing a minor league deal with the Dodgers, made the team out of spring training and batted .340. He won the third-base job outright the next season and has made more than $50 million and an All-Star team since.
In those years, Turner had evolved from castoff to the emotional fulcrum of the megateam the Dodgers had spent years building. When they went down three games to one in the National League Championship Series, Turner was the player who sent the text message to his 27 teammates telling them: "This is the chance to do something special." For all the brilliance of Clayton Kershaw, the future Hall of Fame starter whose playoff foibles long had vexed him, all the steadiness of Kenley Jansen, the closer whose regression had left the ninth inning no longer his, all the talent of World Series MVP Corey Seager and the indomitable Mookie Betts and ace Walker Buehler, Turner, his red beard a follicular metaphor for the fire with which he played, is the Dodgers' conscience. To the Dodgers -- to Los Angeles -- a championship without him would not feel like a championship at all.
"He's part of the team," Betts said. "We're not excluding him from anything."
So out Turner went, to revel in what he'd done, what they'd done -- how they'd avoided the embarrassment of the likely multiday postponement of Game 7 had they lost.
From the moment spring training started, the Dodgers were the favorites to win the World Series. On Feb. 11, two days before pitchers and catchers were due to report to spring training, they completed a trade for Betts, the star outfielder considered among baseball's best players. The Dodgers had won NL West division titles the previous seven years. They had lost two World Series -- the first, in 2017, in seven games to a Houston Astros team later sanctioned for a scheme in which they stole signs and relayed them in real time to batters, and the other, in 2018, to a Boston Red Sox team that Major League Baseball disciplined this year for its own illicit scheme the league deemed "far more limited in scope and impact" than the Astros'.
All of this gnawed at the Dodgers, Turner included. When commissioner Rob Manfred referred to the Commissioner's Trophy, given to the World Series winner, as "a piece of metal," Turner, already aggrieved that the league had given immunity to Astros players involved in the sign-stealing, hauled off.
"At this point, the only thing devaluing that trophy," Turner said, "is that it says 'Commissioner' on it."
All season long, in some circles of the game, there was a discomfort that baseball was even being played -- that as the death toll from the coronavirus in the United States exceeded 200,000, baseball was Marie-Antoinette, the season its let-them-eat-cake moment. Others applauded Manfred's damn-the-torpedoes approach, arguing that a year without baseball would be destructive to the sport, especially as the NBA and NHL finished their seasons in self-contained bubbles with nary a COVID-19 case.
Baseball, in many ways, was a microcosm of the country, of the balance that remains unstruck, of polarization. The league erred more on the side of those who see the pandemic as something scary. Masking was mandatory, socializing exceedingly discouraged. When two Cleveland Indians pitchers went out after a game in Chicago and were caught, they were demoted to the minor leagues. Even though the virus' effects on strong, healthy, 20- and 30-something men rarely leads to complications, the players weren't the only ones engaging in this real-time experiment. There were coaches, trainers, front-office staff -- people in their 50s and 60s and 70s, with preexisting conditions, far more susceptible.
Whether it was the fear of the endangered season, better adherence to protocols or some combination therein, COVID-19 cases more or less vanished as baseball approached its playoffs. And nobody had been better than the Dodgers. They went 43-17 -- a 116-win pace in a standard season. They outscored their opponents on average by more than two runs per game. Only four teams had ever done that, the last being the 1939 New York Yankees.
The Dodgers were a juggernaut. They had coalesced around Betts, who enjoyed being a Dodger so much he declined to test free agency this winter and signed a 12-year, $365 million contract extension on the eve of the season. They marveled at the resurgence of Seager, their beyond-talented 26-year-old shortstop who played in the field with a grace that belied his size and hunted bad pitches like a he'd summoned them with a duck call. Of the five pitchers in their starting rotation, the one with the lowest ERA was the most talented, Buehler, and stalking into a postseason with him and Kershaw and Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin and Julio Urias felt unfair.
Only the Dodgers for years had assembled this juggernaut -- with money, yes, a payroll funded by their outsize local-TV deal, the years of crowds packing Dodger Stadium, all the inherent advantages. But also with a process that worked. Friedman cut his teeth with the Rays, building them into a winner on a budget. His goal when he joined the Dodgers was far loftier. He wanted to build an unrelenting machine, one that embraced analytics and emphasized scouting, that drafted and developed better than anyone, that would not just open a window to win a championship but break the damn thing off its hinges.
For whatever weaknesses the Dodgers may have had -- their bullpen depth, sort of, or Roberts' decision-making, sometimes -- their talent always seemed to paper it over. Even at 35 years old, with his contract expiring at the end of the season, Turner managed to hit .307, to get on base 40% of the time. He hit a first-inning home run in Game 6 of the NLCS that proved the winning run of a must-win game. He homered in the first inning of Game 3 of the World Series and again in Game 4. Just like the team photo he'd eventually take, Turner was in the middle of everything.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2010.29 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1945 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment