The last two standing are the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Cardinals were one of those two last-day squeak-in wild card teams who made it into the postseason as much as a result of the Atlanta Braves’ collapse as their own mojo. The Rangers, of course, have a lot of prove after getting smothered by the Giants in the World Series last year.

I have no real rooting interest in this series; I mostly just wanted to see dramatic baseball. Thus far, this postseason has had plenty of that, but tonight’s performance was over the top.

I started my evening listening the the XM Sirius pregame show, which turned out to be quite good. They had Nolan Ryan on, as well as Rangers GM John Daniels, and even an interview with tonight’s pitcher, Colby Lewis, which had been taped during yesterday’s rain delay/cancellation.

That’s right, there was even an extra smidgen of anticipation in the air in St. Louis tonight because yesterday’s game had to be postponed due to weather. Lewis’s backstory was much talked about last year, as well–a guy who went to pitch in Japan when no more big league opportunities presented themselves, figuring that he had seen the last of MLB. And now he’s been in the World Series two years in a row.

The XM pregame was very Rangers’ heavy, actually, and several times interviewers or hosts made it sound like the Rangers’ winning was a forgone conclusion. Maybe it was just that at the point where I tuned it, it was all Rangers’ people they were talking to. Ryan was gracious and thanked the fans for their support this year (some kind of new attendance record in Arlington?) and for making the trek to St. Louis, too. Sounded like lots of Rangers fans made the trip and the XM hosts commented on it.

However, it was far too early to count St. Louis out… though it took eleven innings to prove that.

I’m trying to decide how to recap all the action in this game, which was a serious seesaw. In the words of Inigo Montoya, “There is too much. Let me sum up.” And since this is the Internet, that means MAKE A TOP TEN LIST.

Top Ten Things I Don’t Want to Forget About This Game:

1. Mike Shannon was on fire tonight on the KMOX broadcast. In the first inning, he repeated about a dozen times that Colby Lewis “has never given up a run in the first inning of a postseason game,” because “not that we want to jinx him or anything…” After the Berkman blast, he said, “we usually don’t like to jinx people like that up here, but what the heck.”

2. How it was “Albert Pujols’ last at-bat in a Cardinals uniform” at least three times. (And who know how many more tomorrow?)

3. My vote for NL comeback player of the year (if I had one), Lance Berkman. Two-run homer in the first inning to give the Cards a lead. Game-tying hit with the Cards down two runs in the bottom of the ninth and down to their last strike! All told: 3-for-5 with a walk, 4 runs scored, and 3 RBIs!

4. Texas scored in six of the 11 innings. St. Louis scored in seven.

INN   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10  11  R   H   E
TEX   1   1   0   1   1   0   3   0   0   2   0   9  15   2
STL   2   0   0   1   0   1   0   1   2   2   1  10  13   3

5. Texas’s homers kept looking like the death blow: Beltre and Cruz with back-to-back shots! And Josh Hamilton (who has a hernia and has been suffering this series) hit a Kirk-Gibsonesque two-run blow in the 10th inning! But somehow the Cardinals kept clawing their way back!

6. The wacky defense. (And wacky overall play…) Not only were there five errors in the game, there were some miscues that don’t show in the box score. None bigger than Nelson Cruz not getting to at least one, maybe two, balls that turned into game-tying hits. Oh, and Mike Napoli turning his ankle at second (shoe-in for MVP if the Rangers win), and Holliday’s “slide” out of the baseline… and later getting picked off third base by Napoli! Last time guy picked off third in a World Series was Gene Tenace in 1972, if the other writers I follow are to be believed. (Tenace was picked off in Game 5 of the ’72 series according to Retrosheet.org, but I can’t verify if anyone else was in the meantime…)

7. The Cards were down two runs and down to their final strike TWICE (in the 9th and the 10th) and came back to tie both times. Both times what I posted on Twitter just before the game-tying hit was “Please don’t let this be the last out of the baseball season!” And both times I got my wish. (Which I then also had to tweet.) This is the equivalent of a Hollywood movie having not one but THREE boss fights in the third act. And all of them being heart-pumping, suspenseful, and wonderful.

8. Pitcher Kyle Lohse had to pinch hit in the 10th inning. (Sac bunt.) Not as wacky as catcher Brent Mayne being the winner pitcher in an extra-innings game in Colorado, but worth a mention, especially since it did contribute to them tying the game.

9. Jake Westbrook, remember him? Winning pitcher. Whoever had him in their office pool must be cleaning up. Oh, and must mention Darren Oliver, who got a “hold” in the game, because in one-third of an inning he gave up two hits, and earned two runs, but… well, this is why the “hold” has never caught on as a stat. It’s like the “quality start” for relievers, a “consolation” stat. Anyway, Oliver is 41 years old. That means he (born October 1970) has been around longer than the Texas Rangers, who came into their current incarnation in 1971. (In 1961 they started as a version of the Washington Senators.) The Rangers are the oldest franchise not to have won a World Series, if the TV commentators are to be believed. Anyway, it’s totally full-circle time for Oliver, who was drafted by the Rangers originally, and in 1993 had his big league debut for Texas (appearing in 2 games). You know who else played on that 1993 Rangers team? 46-year-old Nolan Ryan, now owner of the team.

10. David Freese is a hometown St. Louis guy, and he had a clutch triple, and then the walk-off homer in the 11th. Storybook, can’t make this stuff up, my entire Twitter feed of MLB players, coaches, and media just blowing up with “love baseball” and “can’t believe it!” not once but three times in the game.

And I’m probably forgetting something. I imagine that the media corps probably had to delete a lot of ledes tonight. Most of what I want to remember about tonight, though is that a spine-tingling game of baseball was played, one that moved people to extremes of emotion, even those who didn’t have a rooting interest.

As with an extra-rare cultivated fruit or aged wine, it took all season and all postseason to get to this point, and what resulted was something to be savored.

I began watching the DVD collection from MLB, The Official World Series Film Collection, last night. My friends pooled their money together to purchase it for me as a Christmas gift and I’m finally getting the chance to watch it.

As determined by WILBB reader suggestions, I started at the beginning. The first film in the collection is the 1943 series, Cardinals versus Yankees.

Watching the film is truly like turning back time. Recall that the first major league game to be televised was just a few years earlier, in 1939, on an experimental station in New York City, W2XBS (what would become NBC). Only about 400 TV sets were owned in the metropolitan area at the time, but the World’s Fair was going on and new technology was a big to do. Regular programming on TV was still several years away, though (1946) and World War II brought most television production to a halt.

Movies, though, movies were a much more mature technology and the war only created even more desire for people, in both the US and UK, to want to go out to see films. After Al Jolson’s the Jazz Singer in 1927 created a sensation with its synchronized sound and picture, by 1929 nearly all Hollywood films were “talkies,” and the 1930s and 1940s are considered the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. Baseball was no stranger to the movies, and you had celebrity ballplayers like Joe E. Brown of the Cubs starring in “Alibi Ike” (1935), and movies like “It Happened in Flatbush” (1942) and the classic biopic about Lou Gehrig starring Gary Cooper, Pride of the Yankees (1942).

The first World Series film was made to be sent to the troops overseas as a patriotic lift, a reminder of home and all they were fighting for. As such, it is packed with a kind of stoic, rah-rah patriotism that we can rarely display these days without irony. It is easy to imagine, as you watch the film, being crammed into a make-shift movie house erected by the army with your squadron or battalion to see the reels played for the first time.

“The first four decades of World Series films were created as archival programs designed to capture the highlights for posterity,” writes MLB senior writer Jeff Scott about the collection. “The narration was staccato and to the point – much more play-by-play than storytelling.” The highlights of each game are run through chronologically, but there are other documentary moments, like establishing shots of the old, old Yankee Stadium, and the crowds making their way across the field to exit, that embellish the film. Also in the opening of the film is an acknowledgement of the MLB players currently serving (170 men) including a shot of Joe DiMaggio (as well as Ted Williams, Bob Feller, and others…)

One other thing I did not know, the film was written by Lew Fonseca–the same Lew Fonseca who had been an infielder for the Indians (and Reds, Phillies, and White Sox). As his Wikipedia page currently reads, ‘Fonseca is perhaps best known as one of the first men to use film in analyzing baseball games and finding flaws in players. It is said that his interest with cameras began while shooting Slide, Kelly, Slide in 1927. As manager of the Chicago White Sox, he used film extensively. After retiring from playing the game, he was director of promotions for both leagues. Fonseca worked on World Series highlight films for almost 25 years, as an editor and director, and occasionally narrated them as well.”

The narration is dry and yet peppered with normal, colorful baseball lingo like “Texas Leaguer.” The one thing that stands out immediately to me on watching the action highlights is that every ballplayer seems incredibly lanky. Perhaps some of that is the baggy, flannel uniforms, as well as the fact that players did not bulk up in those days, unless you count Babe Ruth overeating. They all seem to run like deer, on the balls of their feet.

The other thing you notice is all the errors and intentional walks. You can see in the footage how rough the infields are, and of course the gloves were smaller and not quite as sophisticated as the cowhide scoops we have today. (Check out this one of Bob Feller’s: http://www.sportsartifacts.com/gfeller.JPG)

And pitching duels. Lots of pitching duels.

The Yankees won the 1943 series, in five games, after having lost the previous year to these same Cardinals. Among the storylines that do emerge even in the dry play by play–the Cardinals were in every game. They scored first in the first three games, and would have probably taken a 2 games to 1 lead in the series in Game Three if their defense had not fallen apart in the bottom of the eighth, allowing for a five-run Yankee uprising.

One story not told in the film is that the one game the Cardinals did win (G2) was pitched and won by Mort Cooper, and caught by his brother Walker, on the same day that their father Robert died.

The duels continue in the 1944 series film, which I couldn’t help watching also, since after all, once we were sitting down in front of the TV, we might as well, no? And the older films are relatively short. 1944 was the All St. Louis series, with all six games played in Sportsman’s Park (presumably because it was the larger of the two home parks in town). It opens with a direct address from Connie Mack to the American soldiers, in which he touts America’s pastime of baseball as every bit as central to the American character then as it was when he first played ball in 1884. Wow.

Fonseca’s crew stretched themselves a little bit more in this one, using some techniques like slow motion and sound dubs of crowd noise. Of course, they only seem to have two little bits of crowd noise that they play over and over, but you can feel they’re trying to liven up the film. They also add the starting lineups to the beginning, showing a shot each player swinging his bat as the narrator gives his last name.

Again the Browns had chances to win that they missed, especially in game one, which went into extra innings and was lost in the bottom of the eleventh. Poor Ted Wilks, gets knocked around by the Browns in Game Three, and loses, but ends up earning the save in the clincher.

Pretty fascinating stuff if you are into baseball history–which I am. More reviews to come as I work my way through the collection!