Why Our Need For Narratives Made the Cardinals' World Series Win Inevitable

We love sports because they are narrative.  We organize everything into narratives:  our jobs, relationships, and lives.  Sports can be morality plays of good guys against bad guys, nationalistic narratives of the USA against the Russians, redemptive narratives of comebacks, little guy narratives of the-underdog-become-the-champion.  But they are always narratives.  The 2011 World Series illustrated an immutable law of sports, that is at once a narrative principle and yet entirely true in reality -- that catastrophic, emotional collapses in championship baseball make a series loss inevitable.   

Put more directly, once the Texas Rangers lost two championship points in Game Six (within a strike of victory in the ninth and tenth innings consecutively) en route to an eleventh inning loss by walk-off home run, there was no point in playing Game Seven.  The outcome of the narrative was compelled.  The players were just enacting it, like characters trapped in The Sims.

Many examples from recent baseball history make this clear.  Most of us will think back to Bill Buckner, and the groundball that trickled past his aging knees, allowing the Mets to complete a comeback in Game Six of the 1986 World Series.  The Red Sox, like the Rangers, had gone two runs up in the tenth.  It was 5-4 with two outs in the tenth when Mookie Wilson hit a slow, playable roller to Buckner, who was unable to field it for the third and final out, and what would have been the first Red Sox championship since 1918.  There was no need to play Game Seven.  The Red Sox stormed out to a 3-0 lead in it before coming from ahead to lose.  Mets 8, Red Sox 5.  Your 1986 World Champion Mets.

Among inevitable Game Seven losses, though, an even better example than The Buckner (and one well-known to Cardinal fans everywhere) is The Denkinger.  The Cardinals of Ozzie Smith and Whitey Herzog entered the 1985 World Series as prohibitive favorites, with a 101-61 record, playing the less-heralded 91-71 Kansas City Royals of George Brett and Brett Saberhagen.  The Cards even led this series three games to one at one point (as did the next two teams I use as examples after them in this piece of inevitably lost Games Seven).  After the Cards dropped Game Five, the series moved to Kansas City for its conclusion.  With the Cardinals leading 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth of Game Six, Jack Clark tossed a grounder to pitcher Todd Worrell for the first out in the final inning.  Except first base umpire Don Denkinger called Jorge Orta safe when he was out. 

After the Royals took advantage of Denkinger's horrible call and rallied for two runs and evened the series, the emotions took hold and made the narrative, and there was really no point in playing Game Seven.  Manager Whitey Herzog berated Denkinger throughout Game Seven as he worked home plate.  The Royals got out to an early lead on the Cards' suddenly flummoxed and unsteady ace John Tudor, before he left, and punched an electric fan, cutting his finger.  Joaquin Andujar in relief charged Denkinger and had to be restrained before leaving the game and destroying a clubhouse toilet with a bat.  Final score:  Royals 11, Cardinals 0.  The Denkinger is the best example of how sports are emotion, and the experience of collapse leads to emotions that fuel more collapse.

But there's no need to stop with long-ago history.  In 2003 and 2004, we had The Bartman and The Four Game Collapse of the Yankees, which make these points very well.  As I recently recounted in a blog gloating about the Cubs' 103rd consecutive failure to win a World Series, the 2003 Cubs were set in Game Six of the National League Championship Series.  They had Mark Prior (18-6 that year) on the hill in the eighth, staked to a 3-0 lead and five outs from the World Series, when fan Steve Bartman interfered with a pop foul.  Moises Alou cursed about the play when it happened.  The Marlins put up eight runs in that inning.  The emotions of the collapse made Game Seven, again, a formality.  The Cubs led 5-3 early on, but the Marlins took command in the fifth and never looked back, winning 9-6 and moving on to play (and beat) the Yankees in the '03 Fall Classic.

The 2004 ALCS was a great example of emotion and collapse.  The first time in either basketball or baseball that a team down 3-0 came back to win a series, it saw the wild card Red Sox defeat their archrivals from New York with four consecutive wins following three consecutive losses.  The closeness of victory and its seeming inevitability of the championship for the '85 Cards, the '86 Red Sox, and the '03 Cubs was a force multiplier for failure when the inevitable did not come to pass.  The '04 ALCS took this math to a higher level.  No one had ever gone from 3-0 up to losing a seven game series in the sport.  The Red Sox had to cobble together a game-tying run in the ninth inning of Game Four by stealing a base while the game's greatest closer, Mariano Rivera, was on to nail down the American League championship.  David Ortiz's walk-off homer in the 12th gave the Red Sox life.  The next night, in Game Five, the Red Sox tied the game off of Rivera in the eighth, and took six more innings before Ortiz blooped home the winning run in the fourteenth.  Game Six showed the emotion building to a crescendo.  Curt Schilling pitched in the infamous bloody sock game, but a better illustration of the emotional dynamic was A-Rod slapping lamely and illegally at Bronson Arroyo on a first-base line tag play, costing the Yankees a run though his ineffable (and here, unmistakably uptight) A-Rod anti-clutchness.  Game Seven?  The Yankees still haven't come out of the clubhouse to play it.  The Red Sox were up 6-0 after 2, and won 10-3, as the Yankees looked like listless zombies, with a sense of inevitability settling like a pall over The House That Ruth Built.  The end.

And then came the Rangers, who executed the heretofore unknown Double Buckner.  Like the quadruple toe-loop, a Double Buckner was thought to be impossible to execute in reality.  Little did students of baseball failure know what lay in wait in St. Louis in Game Six.  Up 7-5 in the ninth, one strike from their first championship, the Rangers yielded a tying triple.  But like Buckner's misplay, it was a gettable out:  usually stalwart right fielder Nelson Cruz simply didn't catch up to a long fly ball.  Had he caught it, the game ends 7-5.  He did not.  The very next inning, the Rangers wasted a two-run home run by Josh Hamilton that staked them to their second consecutive two-run lead, again coming within a single strike of the championship.  When the Cards cobbled together two more runs, and an eleventh-inning walkoff homer, the series was history.  I thought it would be 8-3 Cards in Game Seven, but it was 6-2.  Whatever.  Game Six was the game with meaning, when the teams picked the moods they would feel and the roles they would play the next day.  Game Seven was denouement, and inevitable.

So why is this?  Why are the collapses inevitable?  Because the narrative is the truth in sports.  Right now, I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.  It's a collection of essays about the increasingly blurry border between art and reality.  He writes about how in the videogame The Sims, participants live a reality in a box.  About a Guns n' Roses tribute band that lives the GNR lifestyle in shows.  About MTV's The Real World and how it ratified cultural caricatures and drove them back out into culture in a seamless cycle.  I think he's right.  Narratives can inflect reality, and back again.  We love sports because we need stories, like I said up top -- stories of underdogs, local boys or girls made good, redemptions, nationalist stuff, whatever your story is.  And when the collapses happen, the emotion of the experience becomes the reality for the players and for us.  It doesn't matter if the collapsing team is on the road (the '85 Cards and the '86 Red Sox), or at home (the '03 Cubs and '04 Yankees).  The teams collapsing play to ratify the emotional dynamic of the series.  We expect it of them.  They expect it of themselves.  And the other team expects to win.  It's the same reason the Bulls won the 1993 and 1998 NBA Finals.  The Suns should have won Game Six at home, and led late.  The 1998 Jazz, likewise.  In both cases, it was a psych.  The narrative there of Michael Jordan's greatness made him know he could and would execute down the stretch, and made his foils, who knew they were supposed to lose like so many Washington Generals, oblige.  KJ and Stockton had threes at the buzzer.  They may as well have had to shoot medicine balls the length of the court in those moments.

The Rangers were no more going to win Game Seven than Gary Oldman's Count Dracula was going to live forever with Winona Ryder as his vampire countess in Coppola's 1992 Dracula, or any more than Star Wars would end after two movies because Luke joined Dad in the family business.  We love movies for their narrative arcs, their charming, predictable finitude.  They start, and they end.  We love sports because they bring into a space that is almost reality (baseball diamonds and basketball courts we can see!  they must be real!) narratives that are more inevitable than the morality plays in life, where the good guys often lose their jobs, where relationships aren't all Meg Ryan falling into Tom Hanks' arms. 

Along these lines, the commercials for cross-marketed World Series swag ask fans to "become part of" the championship by buying a hat or shirt.  To join the story.  As Klosterman's book of essays implies, to merge their real reality into the entertainment reality.  It is thus funny that one knows the outcome of a game played by actual humans in advance, as I knew (and anyone who knows baseball history literally knew) the outcome of 2011's Game Seven.  And I did.  8-3, 6-2.  Whatever.  Dracula is dead again.  Jordan didn't really push off on Bryan Russell.  Luke connected with Dad, who died, and the Ewoks danced a little jig around a fire.  And the Rangers joined the '85 Cards, the '86 Red Sox, the '03 Cubs, and '04 Yankees in our tidy book of failure stories.  Because we needed them to, and they knew they had to.

But for the sake of all the little kids in Texas who had their hearts broken by baseball this year, I hope Nolan Ryan signs this Roy Hobbs guy for next year.  I hear he can tear the cover off the ball, and could carry any team to a championship.  There's always another story to be told.  Just wait 'til next year.  Or so we tell ourselves, to make our narrative arcs work for us...