THE BIG STARS WANT US TO REMEMBER THIS WORLD SERIES, LIKE IT OR NOT
Adolis Garcia and Corey Seager startle us with grand moments in a viewer-forgotten Fall Classic, meaning Arizona-Texas is providing scenes even if Fox ratings make us recall 40 million from the 1970s
They still call him savage, an untamed freak in baseball phraseology, while wondering how quickly his walk-off home run left the ballpark. Is Adolis Garcia a slugger primed for the anabolic steroid juicer or just the mistake of one lifetime? He was designated for assignment in 2019 by the St. Louis Cardinals, whose boss could have determined his head was shaped like a light bulb — una bombi — which led to his boyhood nickname of “El Bombi.”
It would have led to less shame than deciding Garcia was too old, then 26, a Cuban defector who’d played in Japan. His age also prevented other clubs from chasing him, with only the Texas Rangers rescuing his name from the unclaimed. But even they were more sold on a dusty pitcher, Mike Foltynewicz, and watched him go 2-12 with a 5.44 ERA that season while El Bombi was sent away.
Until someone finally using his eyes and brain, Rangers general manager Chris Young, brought up Garcia and helped bail the 2023 postseason with one of the sport’s stunningly belated stars. Ever see someone so maligned, all but told to leave our country’s pastime, resonate with astonishing might across October playpens? After hitting 97 homers and driving in 299 runs the last three regular seasons — ages 28, 29 and 30 — he has rocked October with eight homers, 22 RBIs, a .339 batting average and 1.153 OPS. No one since David Ortiz has blasted them with more clout.
He’ll be the man most remembered from this World Series — even though his head is screwed on straight — along with teammate Corey Seager, especially if the Rangers finish off a 2-1 lead and win their first championship ever. Anyone not watching Seager hit homers and save the hour in the eighth inning Monday night, when he dove and started an inning-killing double play with a sideways throw, doesn’t realize what he and Garcia have done to Arizona. Earlier, in the second inning of Game 3, Adolis wound up from right field and converted his 23rd assist this year, nailing Christian Walker at home after the baserunner blew off third-base coach Tony Perezchica’s late signal. He left the game in the eighth while tweaking his back during an at-bat, which happened after starting pitcher Max Scherzer left when smacked on the back with a batted ball and gave way to Jon Gray.
It’s surprising Garcia’s body didn’t collapse. His oblique will be watched a little more closely, before Game 4, than George W. Bush’s ceremonial first pitch.
“I don’t think I ever imagined that these things would be happening to me,” said Garcia, speaking in Spanish. “I think it's all been worth it. If I had to do it all over again, I would, because I feel so grateful for everything that has happened. I knew what I could do, what level of baseball I could play at.”
Does he comprehend what he’s accomplishing? “Personally, I know the struggle that I went through. The struggles that we go through when we’re trying to leave, play outside baseball,” he said. “And I know everything I had to go through and the struggle just to get where I am today.”
What we’ve learned from baseball is that solo beasts always carry the weight, even as viewer numbers decay from 40 million when I was a kid to 9.17 million for Game 1 this autumn. For the uninitiated, America has 335 million people, meaning hardly anyone is watching the lowest-rated and least-watched Series ever. It led commissioner Rob Manfred to sheepishly suggest he’ll discuss a better way of making sure 100-win teams, such as the Braves and Dodgers, are reaching the finale. Of course, unless major-league owners agree to shorten the regular season and extend the playoffs, that won’t happen.
“It will at least motivate a conversation about whether we have that right," Manfred said. “That conversation will take place post the season. Enough has been written and said that we have to think about it and talk about it, but my own view is the format served us pretty well. If the die was cast, meaning, ‘If I win 100 in the regular season I'm going to win the World Series,’ I don't think that's as interesting as what we've witnessed over the last month.
“One of the greatest things about the playoffs in baseball is anybody can win. It's about the competition that takes place in the postseason. I don't think what happened this year is all that out of line with history. Since 1980, only 11% of (100-win) teams have won the World Series. That's how baseball playoffs are, and frankly how I think they should be.”
Would I prefer to see Ronald Acuna Jr. and Mookie Betts — and for that matter, Shohei Ohtani — in the postseason? I speak for many more Americans in saying yes. Tony Clark agrees. “This went a little bit different than last year,” said the executive director of the MLB Players Association. “We'll see how things continue to manifest themselves moving forward. But I'll say this: At the outset, the interest by the league was a 14-team playoff. Our players were very cautious, both because there may be unintended consequences but, secondly, because they wanted to make sure that over the course of 162 [games], there was value still given to the division winners."
Yet an absence of consistency and vague results also have opened our eyes to Garcia. “He’s on another planet,” said his teammate, Josh Jung. “Every time he steps into the box it’s like, grab your popcorn. The chills are what was crazy. It was just blackout moments for everyone. I can only imagine what it was like for him, all the adrenaline rushing through his body.”
We also know Seager, whose game-tying homer in Game 1 pushed the Rangers to Garcia’s perfect ending. He completed the all-bases romp with a series of non-typical moments — a stare, a smile, a scream, a flip of the bat — for a generally unfazed dude. “They were all looking at me kind of sideways,” he said, surely knowing he could win a second Series after the Dodgers, where he won his first in 2020, have gone bad without him the last two years.
“That's as much emotion as (he has shown). He fired up the whole club,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said. “It's hard to hit a bigger home run than what he did there, down two in the ninth. He saved us there. You could see it in him.’’
Then he came back in the third inning of Game 3, crashing a two-run shot to right field. This time, Seager wasn’t nearly as emotional. “He came through in the biggest games of our lives,” Marcus Semien said.
We’ve also seem the assemblage of guile In Merrill Kelly, the right-hander who won Game 2 for the Diamondbacks by pitching three-hit ball over seven innings. He also was ruled as too old, once upon a time, forced to spend six seasons in the minors and three in South Korea. Now 35, Kelly has allowed three hits in each of his four postseason starts after going 12-8 with a 3.29 ERA this season. His days in the minors haven’t been forgotten.
“I definitely had visions and images about me sitting on this podium, for sure," Kelly said. “The big league games over there, for the time difference, are pretty much in the morning, pretty much right when I'm waking up. So that was kind of my routine. I'd wake up, make my coffee and check on big league baseball. I feel like just life gets in the way. This baseball thing takes up a lot of our time.”
So nothing shocks him. “At this point in my career, nothing is going to shock me,” he said. “I think going over to Korea as a 26-year-old is way scarier than pitching in the big leagues or even in the World Series, to be honest with you.”
Even Tommy Pham has created a fuss. He’s not doing it by slapping an enemy over a fantasy football fight — Joc Pederson, remember — but by giving an Arizona teammate his first career Series at-bat. After going 4 for 4 to start Game 2, the veteran approached Jace Peterson in the middle of the eighth inning and said he should grab a bat in a Diamondbacks blowout.
“Me and Jace are cool, man. I had to get my dog in,” said Pham, not concerned that only Paul Molitor and Albert Pujols ever have managed five-hit Series games. “I need my boy to get an at-bat in the World Series. He'll remember this for the rest of his life.”
The manager, Torey Lovullo, didn’t tell Pham to get lost. “Are you sure? One-hundred percent sure?” he said. “And I gave him some contingencies. I said, if it’s 7-1, that’s the only score I’ll allow it to happen. (If it’s) 7-2, lefty-righty, I’m going to reconsider it and I’ll circle back to you.”
Peterson, whose name is close to Joc Pederson, grounded out to second. “I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on social media. But my family will send me things. And I guess I was the idiot in the room that took Tommy Pham out of the game,” Lovullo said. “This was to me a true team moment. Tommy Pham knew — I’m sure he knew, because he’s extremely smart and pays attention to in some things that you wouldn’t expect a Major League Baseball player to pay attention to — I am guaranteeing you he was aware that he had a chance to get five hits. This was a moment where it was a teammate loving a teammate to give him an opportunity. He took what mattered most to him personally — No. 1 on the list — and said, it’s more about the team and my teammate at this moment.”
Will this magical interlude change his reputation? “I’m not really concerned about that,” Pham said. “My agency has been able to find me a job. I haven’t really felt like I lost the opportunity because, oh, you know, this guy has a bad reputation. Well, maybe it might be true. I read something in the middle of the trade deadline that the Giants said something about me.”
Yet there was Pham in the heat of the Texas dugout, stirring pitching coach Mike Maddux when picked off second base in Game 2. “Atta boy, you dumb f—k,” a Fox camera caught Maddux. Is this another Orlando Arcia deal from the Braves-Phillies series? Pham responded on X with a notebook emoji and a pencil, meaning he’s keeping notes.
We’ll take that tale home. But this is mostly about acknowledging Garcia and Seager, who aren’t even finished yet. You might not be watching the 119th World Series, but please reward those who are trying to make it memorable.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.