Where Have You Gone, Joe Torr(agio)?
"The Red Sox and the Colorado Rockies wrap up their World Series this week, at last delivering a winner at the end of a season of spectacular losses in baseball. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, as Elizabeth Bishop told us, and for stretches in the late going this year it seemed as if the teams and the players were only out there to illuminate the maxim.
"In the divisional playoffs, the first round of the postseason, the Cubs, the Phillies, and the Angels all went down in the minimum three straight games, while the Yankees struggled to a lone win against the Cleveland Indians and then disappeared, losing their adulated long-term manager, Joe Torre, in consequence. The Mets, viewed for a time as the best team in either league, contrived to lose twelve out of their last seventeen games on the schedule—a feat unmatched and unimagined in the pastime—and lost first place in their division to the Phillies on the final day of the season and, with it, a place in the playoffs.
"Elsewhere, the San Diego Padres, one strike short of attaining their own post-season slot, instead surrendered a game-tying triple to Tony Gwynn, Jr., a Milwaukee Brewers rookie, and eventually saw the game and (after a one-game playoff) their hopes slip away. A week before, Padres manager Bud Black, while attempting to pull Milton Bradley (the outfielder, not the Parcheesi board) away from an argument with first-base umpire Mike Winters, inadvertently threw him to the ground and lost him for the rest of the year with a torn ACL.
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