Word: pennants
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gods of baseball work in mysterious?and intercontinental?ways. In Japan, where baseball is considered only slightly less important than breathing, Osaka's famously hapless Hanshin Tigers (one Series title in 68 years) cruised to a pennant this year and will face the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in the Japan Series this week. Across the pond, the Boston Red Sox, who haven't won a title since the end of World War I, are alive in the post-season, just one step away from the World Series. There are other similarities: each team plays second fiddle to an imperial rival...
...outfielders start dropping flies, their infielders fling routine ground balls in the general direction of Mount Fuji and three Tigers runners simultaneously arrive, bewildered, at the same base. Their home-run hitter goes off to join the Detroit Tigers. Their arch-rivals, the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, claim the pennant. And the Tigers fans, like Japan's perennially beleaguered politicians and CEOs, promise domination next year...
...their road trip--that other great American pastime--with an account of their bittersweet seasons as Red Sox. Though they played as a foursome from 1942 to 1951, minus a few years for World War II, they never won a World Series, and in 1949 they lost the pennant to the New York Yankees on the last day of the regular season on a dying-quail blooper. ("I can still see it with my eyes closed," Williams would remember, five decades later. "It's funny how you can remember something so painful so clearly.") Halberstam captures the full Housmanian drama...
...been averaging 44 a year--54 in that first year alone. In the process he changed baseball. His upward swing and the short right-field fence in Yankee Stadium--the House That Ruth Built, which opened in 1923--would lead the 1927 Yanks to the pennant. At the end of the season, on a 1-1 pitch against Washington's Tom Zachary, he set a home-run record that would stand for 34 years. BABE SMACKS SIXTIETH CIRCUIT SWAT, read one headline. The World Series against Pittsburgh would be a mere formality. Babe 4, Bucs...
...last rites, and played on). Or Pete Gray, who lost an arm in childhood yet still played a year in the majors. Or some schmo with average skills (like Bobby Thompson in 1951) who achieved an incandescent moment that brought his team to greatness ("The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant...