I can't say I'd be unhappy about this World Series matchup, which is one Cleveland win away from becoming reality after last night's 7-3 win over Boston. There's something to be said for the scrappy little teams ("little" being a relative term in baseball these days) beating out the Big Contract Juggernauts. Imagine a World Series without Alex Rodriguez, whose Big Brass Agent Scott Boras has the nerve to be demanding a 12-year, $400 million contract for a 32-year-old infielder. A World Series in which Lefty McDreamy's $126 million deal didn't even figure. A World Series in which Daisuke Matsuzaka isn't the pitching staff savior that the Red Sox thought they were getting when they paid $52 million for him.
As if this most magical postseason for the Colorado Rockies, golden-hued as it is with the "Win one for the Gipper" factor of potential World Series cash going to the pregnant widow of one of their minor league coaches who was killed by a line drive this season, didn't have enough movie-ready poignancy, there's also this:
At the top of the Rockies' lineup card, manager Clint Hurdle discreetly scrawls a tiny "64," circles the magic number and carries it near his heart night after miraculous night, as his team plays winning baseball that defies history and logic.
How to explain why the mysterious 64 means everything to a team doing what Babe Ruth or Sandy Koufax never dreamed?
It's a tale of wonder that must begin with a brave, dead boy.
"His name is Kyle," said Hurdle, elbows propped on the dugout railing, his face so heavy with emotion it pushes the manager's stare to the floor. "He's a hero to me."
Kyle Blakeman was a 15-year-old sophomore from ThunderRidge High School, a suburban kid who loved baseball and mac 'n' cheese. Late in summer, when the Rockies had swung big yet appeared on the verge of missing the playoffs for a 12th straight season, Blakeman died from a puzzling, rare cancer at 7:45 on the final Tuesday evening of August.
[snip]
"This is a story of a kid you want the world to hear," said Joanna Blakeman, whose late son proves it's possible to find a hero on any street in America.
[snip]
Faith can touch you anywhere, even the grocery store, where a tap on the shoulder by a stranger introduced Hurdle to a sick teenager two years ago. Genuine friendship blossomed.
Which is why Hurdle and Blakeman found themselves staring at each other across a hospital
bed on Aug. 24, knowing it could be the last of at least 20 conversations between two baseball lovers. "Give me something here to take the team some luck. You got a little?" Hurdle recalled asking Blakeman, after a loss to Pittsburgh had incited an ugly press conference with badgering questions about the debilitating loss.
"Luck? Oh, yeah," Blakeman told the manager. The kid possessed quiet courage and unbreakable toughness to the nth degree. A hospice bed, however, seemed a weird place for a slumping 66-64 ballclub with fading postseason dreams to search for good fortune.
"He looked at me like I was full of it," Hurdle recalled.
Blakeman, ever game, played along when the manager asked: "Got a favorite number?"
The kid said he had always worn No. 64 on the football field.
Perfect.
So Hurdle scribbled "64" on the top of the lineup card he filled out for the very next game at Coors Field, against Washington.
And no Hollywood screenwriter could dream what happened. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with the Rockies trailing by four runs, slugger Matt Holliday smacked a home run to spark a rally. Colorado won 6-5.
"I walked back in the hospital that night with this look on my face, and the nurses and family members are laughing at me, saying: 'What? You didn't think it would work?"' said Hurdle, who arrived past 11 p.m. to deliver the lineup card to his young buddy.
Within five days, the boy succumbed to renal medullary carcinoma, which attacks the kidneys first. Never heard of the disease? Only 100 cases have been confirmed worldwide. Doctors don't understand much about this cancer, except it strikes victims born with the sickle cell trait and usually kills within weeks.
And that is why baseball is more than a sport....it's a kind of bucolic magic in an urbanized world.
Of course there's still another game for Cleveland to win, but the Rockies have eight days till they have to play again. Of course a hot team can cool off a lot in eight days, but the way the Rockies have been going, you could probably ask them what our way out of Iraq is and they'd come up with the answer.
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