Heidi, are you grieving, over Comerica Park unleaving?:Game 20 of 22+

(Of the 23 games we had tickets for between August and October, I couldn’t go to 3. This ends my regular season baseball blog)
Summary:
Score: Kansas City 10 Detroit 8
Temperature: 65o
Attendance: 26,430
Winner of the Dunkin' Donuts Race: Again, no Donut Race! Ack!

Today was a beautiful and sunny day. It was also the final game of the season and I have to admit I was feeling pretty sad entering the park. At the beginning of August 22+ games seemed like infinity; it was a magical 2 months and I was feeling pretty sad to have it end. Every fall, I think about one of my favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, “Spring and Fall to a Young Child”* and I found myself nerdily rewriting it to suit today’s mood: “Heidi, are you grieving over Comerica Park unleaving?” The taste of last night’s loss was still in all our mouths today and again the possibility of taking the division championship was on everybody’s mind. When we paid the toll on the Windsor side of the tunnel, the agent said, “Kansas City’s going to sweep ‘em.” Dale and I rolled our eyes and thought, “as if!” Surely, after last night’s loss the Tigers would come out fighting and take it all. At the end of the third inning, a homerun from Inge made it 6-0 and I remember thinking, “winning today would be even sweeter than last night … it will prove that nothing in baseball is ever certain. They’ll win for sure today.” I spoke too early since in the 4th inning, Kansas City started acquiring their ten runs. As the game hobbled along, we watched the outfield scoreboard and watched Minnesota beat Chicago. Our loss coupled with their victory meant that Minnesota had won the division.
On Monday, people at work asked me about the game and “heartbreaking” was the only word that seemed to fit. It wasn’t so much that the Tigers had lost the game and the division, it was that the team looked awful and that they’d blown a 6-0 lead. The game went 12 innings. A woman behind us was yelling at players to step into the pitches: “Come on, let the ball hit you! If four of you get hit, you score a run, you win the game and I can go home and make dinner.” At one point, I whacked Dale with my ball cap and cursed him for getting me so attached to this team. It didn’t seem quite fair that a team that had done so much this season could end the season like this. I thought about Curtis’s struggles this season and was heartbroken for him; I wanted things to turn out better for him. And Craig. And Marcus. And Placido. And Magglio. No matter how many times I say “nothing is ever certain” in baseball or “nothing is ever easy,” it seems I’ve still got lessons to learn in that area.


*PS: on a Hopkins side note, here’s a lovely line from what my friend Alec calls “one of the best short stories ever written”: “If they also don’t react well when I tell them Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my favourite poets, I usually downgrade these friends to the rank of acquaintances. People who don’t share the same poetics can’t be real friends” (Yann Martel, “The Time I Heard The Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton,” 103).