Drink it up: Why Game 7 of the World Series is the greatest thing in sports
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – In the middle of the Kansas City Royals' clubhouse, on a table surrounded by eight desk chairs, sits a 2-foot-tall gold magnum of Armand di Brignac Brut Gold. On its shiny exterior, surrounding the ace of spades logo, gleams the signature of every Royals player. The bottle is their amulet, their beacon, their goal. They bought it at the beginning of October for what Wednesday will bring.
Smaller bottles rest in black boxes hard by the lockers of James Shields, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer. Stamped onto the top of the boxes: FRAGILE. It speaks not to the contents of the drink so much as that of the Royals' season as Game 7 of the World Series beckons. The first pitch of the 2014 season's final contest will arrive Wednesday at 8:07 p.m. ET, the last however many hours later their struggle with the San Francisco Giants takes to complete, and only then will the fate of the bottles be determined.
They exist for this moment and this moment only, these self-assured Royals the only ones who didn't think buying thousands of dollars worth of Champagne was in any way presumptive. This conviction, and a deluge of runs backed by a brilliant Yordano Ventura pitching performance that led to a 10-0 Game 6 victory at a Kauffman Stadium that reached Richteriffic levels Tuesday night, shows such faith well-placed.
"Ever since the postseason started, the bottles have been there," Hosmer said. "And we'll bust 'em out if we win for sure."
And if they don't, Hosmer said, they'll play an alternative role: "We'll drink away our sorrows."
Game 7 of the World Series constitutes sports' greatest six-word phrase for that very reason, for the finality of it, the fact that in a season spanning nearly 2,500 games, only one can end the season for one team and gild it for the other. In the NBA Finals teams don't change strategy, and in the Super Bowl teams stick to what has worked the previous 18 game days, and in the Stanley Cup Finals teams grind to punctuate two months of attrition. Baseball turns into a fundamentally different game, one of feints and dekes, of strategy and tactics, of immediacy that ensures the slightest crack gets a managerial mudjacking.
It is not just Jeremy Guthrie vs. Tim Hudson, because the Royals' and Giants' starters will operate with the sorts of hooks needed to catch a minnow. Madison Bumgarner lies in wait for the Giants, one of the best postseason pitchers ever primed to throw as much as his arm will allow on two days' rest. And James Shields, his lesser counterpart in Games 1 and 5, will do the same, his coming free agency be damned, because he'd rather a ring than a contract with an infinite number of zeroes adorning it.
Ned Yost and Bruce Bochy, the so-called managerial dunce and the one who wears two World Series rings, will engage in a game of speed chess, their on-the-fly scheming perhaps the difference between a winter spent reliving chances missed and another kissing babies and being selfie-bombed and forever knowing how the apex of the sport truly feels.
"It means everything," Royals outfielder Jarrod Dyson said. "We can make history right now."
History for the Royals is littered with 29 years of awful baseball, with bad decisions compounded by bad ownership. It is the sort exorcised in one incredible wild card game, furthered by sweeps in the division series and ALCS, extended to this seventh game. It is the Royals' constant companion and their eternal pain.
History for the Giants is far kinder, or at least recently so, with championships in 2010 and 2012 and another even-year shocker at the ready. They're the been-here, done-that crew, full of those who aren't sweating Game 6 because it's one game, and one game did not deter the last championship club that stared down six win-or-go-home affairs and landed on the winning side all six times. Cockroaches, zombies, vampires – whatever. To kill the Giants takes an armada of weaponry, not just some Raid or a blow to the head or a silver bullet.
Kansas City unleashed its full assault Tuesday night over a 33-minute second inning that featured five singles, three doubles, seven runs and 40,372 people who will show up to work Wednesday morning utterly useless from the constant screaming the torrent prompted. Ventura becoming just the 12th pitcher ever to spin seven shutout innings at 23 or younger was the hot fudge on a sundae that needed no further fattening.
"This means nothing until [Wednesday]," Hosmer said, "until we win."
He wasn't pulling a Joe Namath. Hosmer simply reflects the attitude in the Royals clubhouse that has pervaded this postseason and turned Kansas City into an enjoyable-to-watch team. They have characters like Dyson, breakout stars like Lorenzo Cain and a manager in Yost who's so off-the-wall wacky – he said when the series was tied at two games that he'd like to see it go three more, just so he could manage a Game 7 – that this October would've been far less without his presence.
How he fares against Bochy provides one of the countless storylines going into Game 7, which almost always creates World Series heroes. Even in 1985, the last Royals postseason, an 11-0 blowout of the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 7 cemented the legacy of Bret Saberhagen, the baby-faced pitcher with the awful mustache who at 21 years old threw a five-hit shutout.
The last nine Game 7s have been won by the home teams, a number there simply to gawk at rather than to use as any harbinger for this Game 7. Because they're all unique, all set to their own whims, all special for offering a canvas every player can coat with his story. All of the questions – how long Bumgarner can pitch, how early Yost will call upon his relief-pitching Cerebrus, how the Giants will recover after following 18 runs in Games 4 and 5 with none in Game 6, how the Royals for a second consecutive day rekindle their biggest offensive output of the postseason – will get an answer, and the ones of which we can't conceive will be solved, too.
Small things will change, the sorts of things that probably don't matter in the least. It's unlikely the Giants will delight in another pregame treat of Z-Man sandwiches from the unparalleled Oklahoma Joe's barbecue joint, as they did Tuesday afternoon. Fifty of the sandwiches – beef brisket, smoked provolone, two onion rings and pickles with a touch of sauce – found their way into San Francisco's clubhouse, and whether it was Kansas City's smoked-meat kings sending some good vibes the hometown team's way or simply a coincidence that Z-Man consumption coincided with pure lethargy, their presence is no longer welcome.
"They better do it again," Cain said. "Z-Man. Do it again. Same thing."
He laughed because it's easy to laugh when you're the team that takes a 10-0 victory into Game 7. Of course, it's pretty easy to smile at the knowledge of Game 7 alone, at what it portends: Baseball poetry, a game in which every nook and cranny is spelunked to find shiny objects. There are historical moments to be made, heroes to be crowned, rings to be won. It's all there for the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants, for everyone to drink, one side sour, the other unfathomably sweet.
