Word: playoff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Seamy as it sounds, my purposes in the Naked City were legitimate. I was making a pilgrimage to the baseball shrine at 161st street and River Avenue, to catch my first Yankee playoff game since the 1996 World Series...
...caveat before I proceed: this being October, I'm going to admit to the malaise that curiously befalls most Americans around this time of year, the playoff fever that makes us abdicate good judgment and sound priorities when baseball is t stake...
...leave the post-game analysis to my colleagues on the sports page, but suffice it to say that playoff baseball--and the death-grip it holds on the imagination of otherwise reasonable people--is a topic of concern even outside the sports community...
Presumably, the Red Sox will fall short of the World Series as they have seemingly done for millennia. Will service be speedy enough when a vintage edition of Home Run Derby (e.g., Harmon Killebrew vs. Frank Robinson) is on ESPN instead of playoff baseball? Will Home Run Derby devotees (my roommate among them) be able to cope, knowing that Fly-By will not be fast enough for them to hear the habitual recounting of the rules at the very start of the broadcast. All we can do is hope that the Red Sox go all the way and delay consideration...
...LOUIS: Once again, history got itself a nice round number -- courtesy of Mark McGwire. With all due respect to the wild-card playoff game that Sammy Sosa and the Cubs will play against the San Francisco Giants on Monday, the 162-game regular season is over, and so is the historic 1998 home run race. Mark McGwire did that with four staggering blasts in two days, leaving his comrade-in-forearms Sammy blinking in the dust and trying to help his Cubs find their way into the playoffs. Any Sosa comeback now in his extra nine innings is practically...