Of course it was Edgar Renteria

Sometimes, being a Pirate fan makes me forget how much I love baseball. Months and months of missed cutoff men, historically bad pitching performances, and terrible baserunning sometimes make baseball-watching a chore, even for a guy like me. Some years, the playoffs even make things worse. Watching the Phillies and Yankees win pennants and World Series makes it seem like a team like the Pirates will never, ever have a chance to make it back to the top. Thank goodness for 2010.

Thirteen years ago, I was 12 years old and holed up in my parents bedroom late into the night, watching the Cleveland Indians’ dynasty fail to materialize. It was hard to not like the Indians growing up where I grew up; I live just as close to Jacobs Field as I did to Three Rivers and the Indians were good. They were what I hoped the Freak Show Pirates of 1997 would turn into and were proof that if the Bucs played their cards right, maybe they would. The Marlins, on the other hand, had jumped in line. They bought a contender to lay down on top of their expansion franchise with the expressed intent of winning a World Series in 1997. It worked and I realized for the first time that maybe baseball wasn’t fair or even close to it. But the winning hit in that World Series didn’t come from Sheffield or Alou or Bonilla, it came from 20-year old Edgar Renteria and since that World Series has ended, history now mostly associates it with Renteria’s hit and not much else.

Today, pretty much everything in my life is different than it was 13 years ago. I watched the game in a bar in North Carolina with several friends who are, like me, grad students. Like everyone else that grows up, I’ve got things to think and worry about today that I could’ve never imagined when I was 12. For some reason, though, Edgar Renteria is the same. When he hit Cliff Lee’s hanging cutter just over the left-center field wall in Arlington, I caught my breath and got the same rush that I got in 1997: “That hit just won the World Series!”

I don’t know why it’s Renteria who gets his name mentioned with Gehrig and DiMaggio and Berra as the only players with two World Series-clinching hits. Maybe there’s something undefinable about him that let him get those hits. More likely, he’s just lucky. He wasn’t even in the Giants’ starting lineup when the playoffs started, and two weeks later he’s crushing the only real mistake made by a guy who some consider this generation’s best playoff pitcher into the stands to lead Giants to one of the more improbable World Series titles in the last decade. The World Series ending with Edgar Renteria hitting a three-run homer off of Cliff Lee while the Rangers score just one run over the final 18 innings of the series is something so ludicrous that it’s only retroactively believable, an even now just barely. Maybe the World Series only went five games, but it was still great. Game 1 was an unexpected shootout with two of the best pitchers in baseball on the mound. Game 5 was the pitcher’s duel we expected in Game 1 and Lee cracked in an unexpected place.

Now the Giants, a weird and extremely likable mashup of great young pitching, journeyman position players, and a catcher that looks like he’s 12, are the World Series Champions. I didn’t see it coming even a week ago, but they just kept getting better with every round and they deserve everything they’ve earned (Sidenote/Pontification: This is what’s great about baseball only letting eight teams into the playoffs: everyone earns their spot and when someone unexpected wins like the Giants do, it’s almost impossible argue that they didn’t “deserve” it because someone got upset by a crappy team in the first round or because they snuck into the playoffs at ten games under .500. You have to earn your spot, and then you have to beat the other teams that earned their own spots. Of course, this is probably the last year that only eight teams make it, because Bud Selig doesn’t know how to leave things alone). The truth in baseball is that even though the playing field is tipped severely, every once in a while something really improbable happens. And that’s good enough for me.