Baseball naysayers tend to revert back to certain stock criticisms of our beloved game...
"It's boring!!!!" they say, often right before they tell you how big a fan of Manchester United they are.
"The games take too long.." they say from behind their Dallas Cowboys hat, presumably unaware of the irony that after accounting for beer commercials, halftime shows, and injury stoppages, that football games can take just as long.
"The season's just too long...." they say, unaware that they're really only letting the rest of us know that they believe that catching that rerun of Flip or Flop for the 18th time is a better summer pastime.
Sure, we know their arguments are weak sauce. Yes, baseball requires an attention span greater than an over-caffeinated ferret to fully appreciate. But the knowledgable fan knows that hidden amongst the supposedly mundane minutiae of a 162-game marathon lie the overlooked important individual moments that truly determine which teams will still be playing in October when Mr. Casual Fan finally decides to show up.
These are what we can call "Threshold Moments." The moments, for good or ill, that define a season and act as major turning points. The games where everything after is viewed in a different light.
Over the course of a 162-game season you never know when one of these thresholds will pop up. When it does, sometimes you know right away that what you're watching will define the rest of the season. Think of Matt Shoemaker in 2014 and his one-hit shutout of Boston the night after the gruesome Garrett Richards knee injury at Fenway. While journeyman third baseman and noted butthole Will Middlebrooks broke up Ol' Shoey's no-hit bid, that gutsy performance set the tone for the rest of that season. It sent a message to the baseball world, that while the Angels had lost their ace, they still had plenty of fight in them. Even though they ran out of gas when they ran into the Kansas City buzzsaw in the Division Series, I look at that Shoemaker game as the defining moment of the 2014 season; the moment when Angels kicked it up into a higher gear, picked up their fallen teammate, and raced off to win the division by 10 games.
Alternatively, there was 8/1/12, AKA The Day That Never Happened. I won't dwell on the specifics, but the epic buttercupping we've tried to not remember turned out to be somewhat of a defining moment for that season. It was a perfect metaphor for all that went wrong that year; for coming up just short despite massive expectations. Let's forget I brought it up, okay?
Sometimes it's only in retrospect that the threshold moment becomes clear. For example, in 2002, the gold standard of Angels seasons, I believe that the turning point happened on April 28th. The Angels infamously had gotten out to a 6-14 start to the year. At the time this was the kind of Angels performance that we had become pretty well accustomed to. But then something amazing happened...
The Angels and Blue Jays had locked up for 14 innings of back and forth baseball when David Eckstein, the plucky little underdog that came to represent his entire team's persona, came up and knocked a walk-off Grand Slam. I still remember pumping my fists and honking my horn as I listened the end of that game on the radio while driving down Anaheim Street in Long Beach. The rest, of course, is history. The Angels began an amazing May surge, dominated the rest of that season, and then went on to win their lone World Series title in thrilling fashion. If you ask me, that '02 title may have been won in October, but it started with Eckstein's slam in April.
Which brings us to yesterday. It's too early to determine if that 7-run comeback against the Mariners is a true threshold moment for this season. There's a lot more baseball to be played yet. Perhaps yesterday's epic comeback will prove to be a fleeting happy memory in an otherwise unremarkable season. But dammit, it just feels different. The realist in me says that it's still early. That we've beaten teams that may not exactly be the class of the American League. That we should expect a buttercupping until proven otherwise. The dreamer in me wants to believe that these things don't just happen. That this victory was indicative of a new "never say die" ethos. That come October we're going to look at this moment and say that this was moment a contender was born.
I think there's something special brewing in Anaheim right now. Where the wave will crest is anyone's guess, but for today I'm going to believe that we're standing at the threshold of greatness again. It's good to be back.
