Lots of chatter last night about those dreaded bad beats. I get kind of amused by this talk, as anytime there’s a close loss, so many of the bettors on the losing side immediately knee jerk to the bad beat reaction.
Personally, I’m more inclined to try and find out why a close game lost and whether or not I had what might have been the right side and got burned. Crying “bad beat” is easy and nothing positive gets derived in the process. It’s often a case of being on the wrong side and simply getting lucky to even be in the hunt for the win.
Here’s a good example, and I was on the losing side of this one. The Giants lost a tough one to the Cardinals in Game Two of the NLCS last night. It’s easy to call this a bad beat. The Giants led 3-2 pretty late, and that’s normally going to mean a victory. In this instance, they lost the lead, fell behind, caught up in the the top of the ninth and then lost on the Kolten Wong bomb off Sergio Romo. Tough loss? Definitely. Bad Beat? Absolutely not!
The truth is, the Giants caught some crazy good breaks in this game and still managed to lose it. They got a hit when the ground knocked the ball out of Jon Jay’s glove. They got a bloop double on a ball just out of the reach of Matt Holiday that was also just barely a fair ball. The Giants were beneficiaries of an injury to superstar catcher Yadier Molina that ended up having a major impact on the game. They scored the tying run on a wild pitch where Matt Duffy scored all the way from second base. Those were all good fortune occurrences with the run scored by Duffy something that almost never happens.
The Cardinals, on the other hand, hit four home runs in the game and somehow nearly lost. Teams that hit four dingers in one game don’t lose very often.
The plain truth is anyone who bet the Giants, myself included, was remarkably fortunate to have a chance to win this game. And this was certainly not anything resembling a bad beat.
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