The Red Sox and Astros owe us some great baseball

In the wee hours of Game 1 of the 2018 American League Championship Series, a baseball hit Joe West right in the collarbone, and Baseball Twitter was alive, truly alive. Because West wasn’t actually hurt, there were approximately 74,398 simultaneous jokes about Christian Vazquez living out a shared fantasy of hitting him with a baseball. Current and former players shared in the revelry. You should have been there. Oh, we all had a good laugh, and so did Country Joe, to his credit.

It was the best part of the game.

That long, torpid, stupid game.

If the best part of a baseball game is something the umpire did, either it was a very bad baseball game, or the umpire went out to the field on the back of a capybara. In this case, it was a very bad baseball game. Let us count the ways.

First, some housekeeping: I’m usually here to celebrate baseball and all of its quirks. I’m all for a languid pace with my entertainment. Baseball is the Terrence Malick flick of sports, and it’s exactly what I need to get away from the constant buzzing and beeping of my everyday life. The methodical pace of baseball is a feature, not a bug.

But Game 1 of the ALCS was a game that featured nine runs and eight hits. It is nearly impossible to build an exciting baseball game out of nine runs and eight hits split across two different teams. There have to be walks for that kind of awful ratio to make sense. There have to be errors. There has to be at least one team screwing up horrifically. It has to be supremely ugly.

Game 1 of the ALCS was a game that featured nine runs and eight hits ... over four hours and three minutes.

Again, I’m not usually here to be a pace-of-game scold! While I’ve spent chunks of my life looking to see why modern baseball games are so long, that isn’t because it’s impossible to enjoy a three- or even four-hour game. Some of my best friends are four-hour games.

It’s just that this was an all-time dud specifically because of the expectations that were placed on it. This wasn’t just a game; this was a clash of the titans, a 211-win sandwich. This was the very best matchup in LCS history by regular-season wins alone, and not only that, it was a duel between Chris Sale and Justin Verlander. Just reading that makes me want to run through a sliding glass door like a less thoughtful Kool-Aid Man. What a matchup. What a freaking matchup.

JOE BUCK: Ball one, outside.

Okay. Let’s go. Heck yeah, Sale vs. Verlander, let’s GO.

BUCK: Ball two, outside.

BUCK: ...

JOHN SMOLTZ: Looks like they’re going to get a fresh ball in there. That one was scuffed.

SMOLTZ: ...

BUCK: Springer steps out.

BUCK: ...

Uh. Let’s maybe hit a dinger or something ...

BUCK: And now Pedro Baez is warming up. John, I’ll be honest, I thought he was on the Dodgers.

SMOLTZ: A hook is a ball that goes left. A slice goes right. But I haven’t had problems with either for years. Straight as an arrow. It’s the putting that’s killing me.

Let me reiterate the most important point here: This isn’t a problem with baseball. This can be a problem with specific games, though. Game 1 was one of those games, and I have two takeaways from it.

You’re never guaranteed great baseball just because both teams are great

It seems like a facile observation, but like a dummy, I went into this game like a kid with a bowl of Golden Grahams in front of Saturday morning cartoons. This is it, my existence, what I live for. Except nothing goes soggier faster than Golden Grahams, and sometimes the cartoons are Laverne & Shirley in the Army. It’s like what my old gym teacher used to say: “Nothing in this world is guaranteed except death, now get the hell out of my face.”

How will Verlander attack Mookie Betts? How should Sale attack Jose Altuve? Oh, man, the cat-and-mouse game of baseball is the absolute best. Fastballs in to set up breaking balls away, changing speeds. It’s all so beautiful, with strengths matched up against strengths and everyone determined to find each other’s weaknesses.

JOE BUCK: Ball one, outside.

It didn’t happen for the first game between the Red Sox and Astros. And, really, it’s a reminder that you’re never guaranteed a great game between great teams. Sometimes it’s soggy, muddy trench warfare. I get it.

But that brings us to the larger point.

The Red Sox and Astros need to pay this back with interest

I want great baseball. Not okay baseball. Not good baseball. Great baseball. These two teams should give us that.

In Game 1, Mookie Betts let a baseball clank off his mitt. It was an understandable play — he was worried about colliding with Brock Holt — but I can think of a million baseball things I want to watch Betts do, and none of them involve a clank.

Which is to say that Betts should hit an inside-the-park homer in the next couple games. Preferably in the ninth inning of a close game. That’s why I’m tuning in.

Keep going, down the line for both rosters. I want J.D. Martinez to hit a big ol’ dong. It can go over the Monster or hit the train in Houston, I don’t care. I want Jose Altuve to go 5-for-5 with five line drives up the middle. I want Andrew Benintendi to force a balk on a delayed steal, and I want Alex Bregman to do something that makes Red Sox fans hate him even more.

I want Chris Sale and Justin Verlander to have a classic pitcher’s duel.

All of this is still possible. I want only what is owed to us, and I’m thinking that we’ll get it. For one final time, this isn’t a referendum on baseball, the sport. It’s just an uncontroversial opinion that the four-plus hours of eight-hit baseball was boring as hell, and I’m absolutely going full Applecare meltdown on this one: Give me better baseball, Red Sox and Astros. I know you have it in you. I know it was cold. I know y’all were nervous.

Still, give us better baseball. We were promised the best baseball. Give us something ... close to that. The 2018 Astros and Red Sox are some of the best teams of their generation, and now they’re in a deathmatch to see who’s better.

Let’s have some fun, eh? Let’s make this fun, fellas. Don’t make us mention Joe West’s name again, and let’s have some fun.

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