$10 says they broke the bed.

My buddy texted me this morning to ask what Game 6 looked like through the eyes of a St. Louis Cardinals fan last night, and it took me about 3 hours to respond. I’ve never seen anything so remarkable, so bipolar, so… baseball, in all my life. One second I’m on a stool, rope wrapped tightly around my neck, just waiting for Matt Holliday to kick the legs out. The next I’m screaming for Jon Jay to haul his unkempt afro to home plate. It was way too stressful for a guy with a long family history of high blood pressure, but it was amazing nonetheless.

There are three types of sports fans – the kind that love baseball (like Brandon and I do), the kind that don’t have a problem with baseball but don’t love it enough to watch a game that they don’t have a horse in, and the kind that think baseball sucks. That third kind usually still owns a New York Yankees hat. I don’t think there’s a way in this world that anyone didn’t think last night’s Game 6 between the Cardinals and the Texas Rangers wasn’t the most incredible game they’ve ever witnessed. And we thought it couldn’t get better than the last game of the regular season.

The Cardinals won 10-9 in the bottom of the 11th on a walk-off blast by David Freese to dead center. This game featured boneheaded errors, 28 hits in total, and more World Series firsts than I can even list right now. So let’s recap the game in pictures, or at least the parts I can remember.

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Wir mussen die Nation ausrotten!

Baseball has been a bit undersold at With Leather, so I’ve decided to take a break from nonstop webcomics and professional wrestling to remedy the problem. Unfortunately nobody likes to read about baseball, because it is boring and not football, so you kinda have to coax people into clicking the link and consolidate everything into concise blurbs, preferably featuring a 65 x 90 picture of Buster Olney. That guy really knows his stuff. Did you realize how important On Base Percentage is?

Anyway, Baseball is Boring is the column to read if you want to kinow what happened this weekend, but you don’t want to know badly enough to find out at a reputable news source. Also, you don’t want to Google “Barry Bonds steroids” in quotes.

Kinsler and Cruz break every record, all at once.

The Texas Rangers’ Ian Kinsler and Nelson Cruz made history by becoming the first set of teammates to homer in each of the first three games of a season on Sunday, closing out a sweep of the Red Sox. The duo set a number of records, because we live in a society that puts things like “most copies sold on Game Boy” in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Here’s the queick list: Kinsler and Cruz came into the game as one of only six teammates to homer in each of the first two games of the season, and Kinsler became the first player to hit a lead-off homer in the first two. Cruz’s homer was the second by a right-handed batter to reach the upper deck in right field at Rangers Ballpark. ESPN set a record by mentioning Cliff Lee for no reason in 100 of their first 100 stories about the Texas Rangers, and the Red Sox became the first team to make me laugh out loud in real life in 2011.

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