King Kaufman's Sports Daily
It ain't luck if you do it 20 times: Rockies take 3-0 lead over D-Backs. If we're lucky, the Indians and Red Sox will save us from a postseason of routs.
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Oct. 15, 2007 | Thank goodness for the Cleveland Indians and their seven-run 11th inning Saturday night, or Sunday morning, or Tuesday afternoon is what it felt like by the time that glacier of a game ended. In six series this postseason, the Indians in the A.L. Championship Series are the only Game 1 loser to win a Game 2 and make a contest of the thing.
In every other matchup, including the NLCS, which is now 3-0 Colorado after the Rockies beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 4-1 in the Denver rain Sunday night, one team has won its way to within a game of clinching while their opponents are still on the schneid.
Three of the four first-round series were sweeps, which is the first time that's ever happened, and all the Diamondbacks have to do to avoid becoming the fourth team this October to feel the broom is beat a team that's won 20 of its last 21 games.
And do it on the road.
Something strange is happening when the baseball playoffs aren't as competitive as the upper echelons of college football.
But that's how it's going. One top-ranked college team after another has been falling -- just to make me look bad after I wrote last month that college grid is a beat-down festival. Also to make me feel bad in the case of my then-second-ranked alma mater losing on a bonehead play Saturday mere minutes after No. 1 LSU had gone down, clearing the path to the top spot.
But we were talking about baseball, and here was Eric Byrnes of the Diamondbacks Sunday night, stepping to the plate in Denver, the crowd raining boos on him and the sky raining rain on him, though almost certainly without the same malice.
The Rockies faithful were mad at Byrnes, who actually played for the Rox for two uneventful weeks in 2005, for saying in an interview that the Rockies hadn't so much outplayed the Diamondbacks as benefited from some lucky breaks.
"Definitely, the ball has bounced in their direction," he'd said. "They've been the beneficiary of some calls."
This is one of those things that you look bad talking about if you're down 2-0 instead of up 2-0, even if you're just trying to buck up your teammates, as Byrnes later said he'd been doing, because you look like a sore loser who's dissing the team that just beat you. Which is true, and you are.