I’ve been going to the Miami Open since it was the Lipton – held in the balmy confines of Key Biscayne – and yesterday I saw something I’d never seen at the tournament: a player smashing his racket during a practice session. It was Alexander Bublik, at the end of his hit with Gaël Monfils, and, heading to his chair, he tossed the mangled racket to fans in the stands.
Every team I rooted for in the NFL playoffs lost, a perfect record explained only in part by my lifelong love of the underdog.
But in tennis, the man I was pulling for to win the Australian Open, the red-headed, mild-mannered, soft-spoken Italian with the unlikely name of Jannik Sinner, lifted the championship trophy, two days after defeating the hot-headed, racket-smashing defending champion Novak Djokovic.
So, sportswise, a not entirely lost weekend.
The Phillies in the playoffs resembled the month of March: They came in like lions and went out like lambs. Students of the game, which include undoubtedly some of Philadelphia’s most faithful fans, know that power hitters get hot – and then they cool off. In the case of the Phils, who boast a lineup rife with power, they got hot in unison and then chilled together – regrettably, uncharacteristically, but in a way predictably, in their home ballpark. Fifty thousand screaming fans cannot force a bat to make contact with a slider. Last night in the first inning Bryce Harper, the multi-million-dollar first baseman who was supposedly going to carry his team to a world championship, struck out swinging at two unhittable pitches. Previously in the first inning, on the first pitch, he had hit a towering home run, and trotted around the bases like a pinstriped superhero, a man in total control of his destiny. Last night he looked like a flailing mortal. In the city of Rocky, he became Casey.
My mother died in 2018 and I still get the urge to call her - never more so than in October when the Phils take out the Braves.
It was a sad end to the baseball season for Florida’s teams. On the bright side, the Marlins and the Rays both made the playoffs, but they were both swept in games that had almost identical scores: 4-1 and 4-0 for Tuesday’s contests, and 7-1 in yesterday’s. By scoring that one run yesterday, the Rays were saved from the ignominy of breaking the Los Angeles Dodgers’ record of 34 straight scoreless innings in playoff games. This from a team that this season won its first 13 games. Their record gave them home field advantage, such as it was, as only 19,704 people showed up for the first game, the lowest attendance at an MLB playoff game in 104 years. Granted, it was an afternoon game, during the week, in perhaps the unloveliest stadium in the majors. The Marlins, on the other hand, played at night before a crowd of raucous Philly fans (is there any other kind?). Perhaps the sight of a packed stadium awash in red and deafening with decibels was so alien to them that it affected their play.