For a brief commercial break during Monday night’s White Sox-Tigers game, I believe I stumbled upon my own personal holy grill of sporting highlights. It came after the Tigers catcher Tucker Barnhart played a fine subtle rush that helped stop a potential inning-ending double play (and finally let the Tigers score two runs) off the line to throw a hesitant Danny Mendic. As much as possible before going down to make a hard slide. In an age without old-school takeout slides, it’s really best to intervene with people trying to throw at first.
Tiger analyst Kirk Gibson Loved it This effort, and play-by-play man Matt Shepard when Tony La Rusa throws a commercial change while changing a pitching, he teased, “You see Tucker Barnhart went second. It’s paleer than last year. We’re back. Then we will show what we want to say. ”
It turned out that Shepard was referring to a reel by Gibson as a lunatic on the sidewalks, but I think another Michigan Sports Seiko had their minds set on July 20, 2006, when Marcus Thames fired Tadahito Iguchi, the second baseman of the White Sox. Closing a double play in one of the Tigers’ most important wins in a generation.
When it came back to my mind last night, I was almost terrified of how quickly I could get rid of the memories from this game – some of which I could verify and some I couldn’t. I remember seeing my aunt and uncle in the living room, after swimming in their pool that day. I remember, although it is not seen in any account, that the start of the game was delayed for some reason. I think – this one Is Verifiable — Chris Shelton পর who started the season ridiculously after the Thames breakup slide, was surprisingly hot but so cold that he went down to the minors ড্রাই drove the game-winning RBI. And I remember this sweet picture of the slide on the first page of the next day Free press Department of Sports. (I did something No. Learn: Tom Hanks and Ron Howard were part of the sellout crowd!)
I’ll admit that it’s a bit strange how clear it is still, but I’m not exaggerating the importance of this win. Although the twins took the AL Central crown and forced Detroit on a wild card later this season, the White Sox felt like the main rival of this upstart team for most of the year. It’s hard to believe, but they were fresh from a World Series win, a formidable roster consisting of Jermaine Dye, Jim Thom, Paul Conerco and the early pitcher of that day Jose Conteras, who had already beaten Detroit twice. Meanwhile, the Tigers have not played a play-off since 1987 and have not even posted a winning record since 1993, but with a combination of splash free agent signing and strong drafting, the team has revived the city, introducing me to the idea of a baseball season where you Follow your team day in and day out and really care about whether they’ve got a place in the standings or lost.
When the White Sox and Tigers met for the series in July, it was a clash between the top two records in baseball, but the Chicago Tigers have beaten the Tigers six times in eight seasons so far. They did, however, split the first two games of this meet-up in Detroit, and so presented this final as an opportunity for the Tigers to hang out with the defending champions.
It was as exciting as hell, and Kenny Rogers deserves a lot of credit for escaping from a base-loaded, one-out situation, where just one run comes. But the defining figure of the day, and in the end the entire Tigers-White Sox struggle, has fallen on top of Thames Iguchi, whose score is tied at one in the seventh. I think every sports city probably likes to believe that they appreciate the hard-nosed, scrappy, blue-collar, neglected effort compared to others, but bad violence and respectable perseverance is still a unique aspect of motor city sports. The city’s three NBA titles come first through the most infamous offensive team in league history and then behind one of the lowest scoring superstars of all time. Its NHL dynasty, still relatively fresh in 2006, was more memorable for the fight than for its goals, especially when a vindictive Darren McCarthy surrendered to a cowardly Claude Lemieux. And in a rare instance of baseball where physical contact between opponents is possible, Marcus Thames was not afraid to carry that legacy.
“You always want to break a double game – I learned it in the Little League,” Thames said later. “It’s just a dirty game if you can’t touch the bag, or you try to get the guy with your spike.”
Although Tigers manager Jim Leyland was characteristically upset about the huge win (“We won a game, and it’s July 20. That’s what it means.”), He and opposing White Sox manager Ozzy Guillen both prompted the Thames in the postgame.
“I want my players to do the same,” Guillen said. “I do not want anyone to be hurt, but I applaud him. That’s the decent thing to do, and it should end there. “
Of course, this is no longer the way to play games. Like the 2014 Catcher Clash, most versions of Takeout Slide were outlawed by the MLB before the 2016 season, after the previous play-off chase, Ottley Ruben Tejada, broke his leg. Now, runners can’t change their path to start communicating, and they can’t create anything other than a basic, basic slide in the bag. Basically, if you’re going to bring out an infielder as a private today, you have to make it look like an accident, meaning there’s no room for that kind of hard-but-legal game to win the Thames game 16 many years ago.
But for other reasons it is a lost drama. You may have already noticed, as I described the verb, I don’t actually have a video to show you. That’s because I couldn’t find it. Images of my mind, fortunately, exist in the real world, but since this game happened just before YouTube and long before Twitter became ubiquitous, there doesn’t seem to be any video evidence left. I’ve searched for it in the past and in vain, and no one seems to have filled the void between that last attempt and today. I trolled through the YouTube compilation of Takeout Slides, the full retro game, MLB’s movie room, the Twitter account that posted the old baseball highlights, and the search engine results pages and I couldn’t find anything more provocative than a normal newspaper for gamers to watch that slide again. There is no apparent way for me. There is no way I can share this with you in a way that captures the effect of seeing it happen for the first time. But I guess it survives the same way.