The pitch came at him fast and furious, 99 miles an hour. You want to know how hard it is to hit a ball going 99 miles an hour? This is how Reggie Jackson described hitting a Nolan Ryan fastball in 1973: “You close your eyes, you swing, and if you get to open your eyes again you consider yourself mighty lucky.”
Jonathan Broxton could feel the end. So could the Dodgers. They’d been left for dead and they had come back, come all the way back to go up 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth at Citizens Bank Park, three outs away from tying the NLCS at two games each and guaranteeing a return trip to Los Angeles. Broxton got one out, walked Matt Stairs (awful mistake), hit Carlos Ruiz (unforgivable mistake), got a second out and now had but one out to go to get his job done for the night.
On the radio, driving through the Southern California night, the voice of the great Vin Scully summarized it for the folks back home: “Two outs, two on, and the last man Jonathan Broxton or any Dodger fan would ever want to see in this kind of a spot.”
That would be Jimmy Rollins. Scully has seen a few things in close to 60 years behind the Dodger mike. He saw Jackie Robinson in his prime. Saw Koufax and Drysdale. Did play-by-play on televeision for the Don Larsen perfect game, and then 30 autumns later he was the one who described a bouncing baseball thusly: “Behind the bag … it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight and the Mets win it …”
Scully knows a thing or two about heart. And about winners.
“If you get by Jimmy Rollins,” Vin Scully said, “you’ll know you earned this victory.”
And … well, we know what happened then. A strike. A ball. And then a 99-mile-per-hour pea, delivered from Broxton’s fingertips, piercing the night, connecting solidly with Jimmy Rollins’ bat, and by this point, if you were watching on TV, you knew where it was going: straight to the gap, dissecting center and right. Two runs scored. The Phillies won. And Rollins had done it again.
He is a flawed player, he goes through long stretches of the regular season playing with something akin to baseball ADD. But if you were to take a draft of the players still remaining in the baseball playoffs, you wonder how many would go ahead of him. You have to figure Mariano Rivera is the consensus No. 1, both becauseof his own continuing brilliance and by comparison watching the meltdowns of — no lie — every other closer in these playoffs: Joe Nathan and Huston Street and Jonathan Papelbon, Brian Fuentes and Ryan Franklin and Ryan Madson and now Broxton.
And maybe — for obvious reasons — Alex Rodriguez would be No. 2.
But then who? Would you take Derek Jeter over Rollins? Manny B. Manny? Even Ryan Howard or Chase Utley?
You could, if you like.
I’ll take Rollins.
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Someone Take a Pulse In Here Please: You know how you can tell you’re deep in the heart of SoCal? When the Dodgers lose a cataclysmic game as they did and the crowded bar area at a restaurant in Newport Beach barely reacts, barely responds, barely notices. Seriously, can you even imagine what Bobby Van’s or Spark’s would look and sound like if the Mets or Yankees were melting down in a playoff game?
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Buy This Book: No, not this one, although feel free if you’d like. I’m talking about “The Ultimate Book of Sports Movies,” by Ray Didinger and Glen Macnow, a couple of Philly guys who get just about all 100 right on.
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Monkey See, Monkey Do: Sorry. I have to come clean: I still get a kick out of the damned Rally Monkey.
