[BluesDuke]

How would you like to try being a Mets and a Red Sox fan? I could therefore present myself as living proof that schizophrenia and dual natures can be overcome - even in the 1986 World Series!

To be honest, I don't dislike the Braves. I also happen to think that just maybe Tom Glavine, and not Greg Maddux, will prove in the final wash cycle to have been the greatest pitcher in the franchise's history who isn't named Warren Spahn. (For that matter, I think one of the candidates for the most memorable moments should have been that fine day in 1963 that Spahn nailed his 20th win of the season - becoming, then and still, the oldest man in baseball history to win 20 games and the only one to win 20 or more thirteen times.) But I will always wonder why after all these years the Braves still don't get it about handling their pitching and end up, almost perenially, with a blown-out staff by the time the postseason comes. Those pitchers have deserved better than what their postseason performance papers show.

[Dales]

Yeah, but I think the pitchers' lack of success in the playoffs has more to do with a reliance on the bats of Mark Lemke or Keith Lockhart and so forth and a perpetually weak hitting bench than being overworked. I haven't looked it up, but going off of memory I believe their pitching numbers outside of W-L have been pretty solid.

That 86 series was something else. I had yet to move to Georgia. I was in college, in a fraternity which seemed to be overrun with people from Mass who were diehard Red Sox fans. As a matter of fact, I was a mere pledge at the time.

I remember being hazed BADLY by them, them drunk off their asses and simultaneously getting me hammered as I catered to them (all in good fun).

Then single. Single. Single. Wild pitch. And a slow roller.

That playoff year was the best I can remember. I remember Mike Scott being unhittable. I remember Nolan Ryan pitching a one-hitter (and finding out afterwards it was on a broken ankle) but Gooden holding him off and the Mets winning in 10. I remember a comeback just as wild as game 6 sparked by my favorite player at the time, Len Dykstra.

And the AL wasn't any worse, with Dave Henderson trying to singlehandedly win it.

What a year that was. It was a prime example of why that game sucks me in. When it is right, there is nothing better.