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ST. LOUIS — You want to tell me baseball isn’t football?
I’ll tell you this: Thank goodness. There is no clock. There is no victory formation. There is no situation that is too dire, too impossible, no comeback too ridiculous, too absurd.
I’ll tell you to sit where I have the great good fortune to be sitting at this moment, inside a baseball stadium that long ago lost its bearings and its voice, as midnight in Missouri approaches and passes. That’s 1 in the morning to you, and I know you probably are asleep as these words are typed.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope you saw it all. I hope you stayed up long past the point where your eyelids were willing and able, where the rational part of your brain kept chiding: Work in the morning. Alarm clock rings early. It’s only a game.
Only a game?
Tell that to the 47,325 people who just watched one of their own, a St. Louis kid from Lafayette High named David Freese, launch a game-winning home run over the center field wall, a 429-foot blast that landed in the grassy slope beyond the fence, gave the Cardinals an improbable, impossible 10-9 victory over the star-crossed Texas Rangers, and tied this 107th World Series at three games apiece.
Tell that to the fervent believers who stayed here throughout, who didn’t leave when the Rangers took a three-run lead in a seventh inning that included 829 feet of back-to-back home runs by Adrian Beltre and Nelson Cruz. Who didn’t leave when they were down two runs in the ninth, and two runs in the 10th, who stayed across every second of this 4-hour, 33-second masterpiece of a baseball game.
Don’t tell it to Tony La Russa, who 20 minutes after Freese’s ball landed in a happy pile of fans had a blue towel wrapped over his shoulders, looking like Ali after the Thrilla in Manila.
“Down two runs to their closer, and this guy’s a legit 1-2-3 guy,” La Russa said, wonder still in his eyes at what he had just seen — at what we’d all seen. “You’re just trying to get something started and once it gets started the other club worries. Once it gets started we start to think ‘We can do this’ rather than ‘Oh, bleep, this isn’t gonna work.’ “
It worked because Freese had one of the most remarkable, ridiculous games a player ever could have. In the top of the fifth, Freese felt an easy pop fly off the bat of Josh Hamilton land in his glove, then pop out, a Little League error that left everyone cowed. The Rangers scored not long after.
“Not my first error, won’t be my last,” Freese said later, “and that’s the only way you can look at it or you’ll drive yourself crazy.”
So of course it would be Freese up, two on and two out, a 1-and-2 count against him, bottom of the ninth against flame-throwing Netfali Feliz. Of course it would be Freese who would hit the ball just hard enough, just beyond the flailing reach of Nelson Cruz in right, two runners roaring around the basepaths, one stadium so delirious with joy you could almost see the foul poles shimmy and shake.
And of course it would be Freese, hometown boy, leading off the bottom of the 11th. Hamilton had a Roy Hobbs moment in the top of the 10th, giving the Rangers a 9-7 lead; the Cardinals, harder to bury than the cast of “The Walking Dead,” down to one strike again in the bottom, came back, Lance Berkman tying it this time.
Freese watched his blast and had one thought: Jim Edmonds, who in 2004 had won an epic Game 6 of the NLCS with a walk-off blast that Freese, then 21, a Cards fanatic and a student at South Alabama, had thrilled to.
“I remember it, too,” deadpanned Berkman, who as an Astro was one of the players forced to walk off. Freese knew what the people were feeling, all of them, knew that as they left Busch the voice of the great Jack Buck was no doubt ringing in their ears:
Go crazy folks! Go crazy!
I don’t believe . . . what I just saw!
And, best of all:
We’ll see you tomorrow night. . . !
Yes. Yes we will. See you here.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com