186. Baseball Pain (7) Philadelphia continues to lead the league in anguish.

Whatever their own pain Cincinnati fans have to admit that for repeated anguish in the closing weeks of the 1964 season the Philadelphia fans are hard to beat.  Even if the anguish had stopped after those two games reviewed here, the 1-0 Chico Ruiz loss and the twelve-inning double-comeback loss, even if the rest of the games in their ten-game disaster had been blowouts (dull pain, not anguish), they would have been setting pain records.

But no, the very next day: anguish.  And not just ordinary anguish, not the anguish of a game tipped away from you by some little bounce or mistake.  No, this was a game ripped from you, after it was yours, with a pain the gods set you up for, and make more exquisite.

Those gods gave Philadelphia a 4-0 lead in the fifth inning, with Win Expectancy 92%.  They let Art Mahaffey, suffering a worrisome end-of-season slump, pull out of it with four strong innings.  Then after letting him frighten the fans with a weak fifth inning (two runs scored) they had him show his toughness in the sixth, when with two men on and nobody out he got Dennis Menke (who had earlier hit a home run) on a pop fly and with one out and the bases loaded got a strikeout and a bouncer back to the mound.  If you don't believe that that was pressure pitching take a look at the Leverage Index on the last two batters: 4.26 and 4.29.  (LI shows the damage a batter can do to you.)

OK, Mahaffey has shown that he wasn't unmanned by that wild pitch he made while Ruiz was going for home (remember?), and when in the next inning he puts down Lee Maye, Hank Aaron, and Eddie Mathews in order the Philly fans can sit back.  They'll read next day that their slumping pitcher has "regained his mastery."

But then in the next inning, after he has put two men on base, the gods (through Gene Mauch) take Mahaffey out.  So that Bobby Schantz can show his mastery.  Which he does, getting out of a bases-loaded jam with a strikeout and a popup — but only after a passed ball has let in a run, the run that makes it a one-run game and ups the heat on the ninth by about 20 degrees.

The gods need that increase because, painful as the anxiety is, it raises the prospect for pleasure.  Pulling out a close one is always more satisfying than winning an ordinary one.  And doing it when your fears are high, when you're doubting your toughness, that's really satisfying.  "Yeah, ole Bobby showed 'em what we're made of."  So Philly fans, in addition to the pain of loss, get the pain of lost pleasure, envisioned pleasure.  And it isn't such a distant vision.  All ole Bobby has to do is continue his mastery for three more outs. 

Nothing doing.  Not with Hank Aaron leading off.  It's a single.  It's not a home run, thank God, but it's not the strikeout you can often get when a hero opportunity brings big swings out of a slugger.  Then another slugger, Eddie Mathews, under the greatest pressure so far (LI 4.65), follows with a single.  "Oh God, we're in the cooker now.  C'mon, Bobby, we know what you're made of."  (Philly fans had seen the 39-year-old Schantz on the mound eight times in September and only once had he let in as much as one run, and that was in a game where he went seven innings. Now he's making his fourth appearance in four days.) 

“The one thing we never got in ’64,” Jim Bunning said, years later, “was the one performance, the one big hit, the one huge pitching performance that could have stopped the bleeding.”  This could have been the one huge pitching performance he was hoping for.  Schantz was already huge.  Now all he had to do was wiggle out of this jam.  A popup here, a ground ball there, especially a ground ball, that would do it.

And he gets the ground ball, to the shortstop!  Could be a double play!  But oh no.  Tony Taylor muffs the throw to second.  Bags loaded.  And sure enough the next batter, Rico Carty, hits a triple and clears the bases.  There's the ole ballgame.

Tony Taylor, good guy, reliable fielder, Tony, the player whose dive had saved Jim Bunning's perfect game back in June, Tony makes the crushing error, the one that comes at just the time that will kill your soul.  Just as Scott Rolen made the error that lost the Reds the game that lost the 2012 series (remember, Blog Post #173?).  Why does it happen so often to losing teams?  Why does it come when you have your one big chance?  Why does it never happen to the Yankees?