The Dream Game

Baseball is not what it used to be. While dive bars and stadium stands are still (mostly) full of fans, stalking their teams with the requisite fanaticism, there is a lump in the collective throat of the baseball electorate (America).

The doubts and shadows and skepticism; that baseball has regressed from sport to entertainment, the glory of its moments now served to its viewers by athletes with synthetically-enhanced physical clout (and avarice and hubris) is the dark thought that clouds (for many) each great outing, each home run, and each feat done.

But for one night last week, baseball became honest and unimpeachable again. In transient hours like last Thursday night, some of us skeptics were seduced by the winsome enchantment of our American pastime, its oldfangled and bygone innocence revived like arrogant fantasies we once held for ourselves.

Sactimonious as I sound, you don't have to ask me. Ask one of the 42,000 fans who crammed into a sold-out stadium on a Thursday night to watch a game featuring two losing teams in a filler match before the All-Star Break.

There was only one other draw, a washed-up 41-year-old baseball player, languishing in the twilight of his career. Craig Biggio, whose twenty years on the Houston Astros (and the Houston Astros only), embodies something of a different era.

And they crowded the stands to watch him pursue his 3,000th hit, a milestone mnemonic of more honorable times in the sport, baseball's moon-landing, something which fans once dwelled upon with admiration for not just the fait accompli, but the hopefulness of the era that encompassed it.

Biggio did not just manage the three hits he needed to reach the plateau that only 26 other players had reached in the history of the sport, he had five hits, more hits than any of those other 26 hit on the night they reached 3,000.

His 3,000th hit in the 7th inning tied a game the Astros were losing. Biggio tried to stretch the single into a double and was thrown out at second base. This out ended the inning and made possible, the five-minute standing ovation that followed. The Houston crowd, to whom baseball had only meant heartbreak for 45 years, erupted in celebration for their favorite son.

There were still two innings of baseball left in a tied game, but the game stopped. Biggio's crying family joined him on the field. He hugged and lifted his sons (both of them bat boys for the game) and kissed his wife, waving his cap to the fans in each area of the stadium, some of whom had watched Biggio collect his first hit in the old broken Astrodome, another glory of another era, exactly 18 years and 364 days before that night.

The seminal moment arrived as Biggio dragged a reluctant Jeff Bagwell out of the dugout. Bagwell was another baseball relic, Biggio's teammate for 15 years, a legend, an MVP, a home run minotaur, a rarity who also played his entire career with the Astros.

Bagwell should have been in uniform, but his career had been lost to injury (and likely steroids). In his last few years, Bagwell tried to play despite not being able to lift his shoulder or throw the ball more than 20 feet. He could still hit, and did so, in diminishing moments that brought fans back to seasons past, until one spring, he was forced to retire. Now during Biggio's swan song, Bagwell raised Biggio's arm and said his goodbye to the crowd and for thirty seconds, temporarily restored the excitement that had once been a Houston institution: The Killer B's with both its charter members on the field again.

To lose this game would be emblematic of the death of the game's magic, the pitless spiral of the home team's sustained decline. The game went into extra innings and the Astros gave up a home run in the 11th inning.

With the Astros poised to lose in the manner they had lost all season long, Biggio came up to bat with two outs in the bottom of the 11th. He collected his fifth hit, a short single, outrunning a throw that a number of players would not have beaten. Astros rookie wonder Hunter Pence then hit a double. One of the last Killer B's, Lance Berkman was hit in the ribs with a pitch to load the bases. Channeling Bagwell with one swing, Carlos Lee hit a walk-off grand slam to win the game for the home team. Teammates mobbed each other at the plate like they were little leaguers again.

The very next night, down one run in the bottom of the 9th inning, Mark Loretta hit a two-run walk-off home run to win the game. That the Astros were 12 games below .500 didn't matter. It was still possible for there to be magic.