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BOB COSTAS — GAME 7 WORLD SERIES PREVIEW (1935)
Tomorrow night at Jacobs Field, baseball will stage one of its oldest and most unforgiving rituals: a Game Seven.
Six games have been played in this World Series, and all six have been won by the home team. That pattern, tidy and compelling, suggests order. But Game Sevens exist precisely to defy patterns. They are the sport’s reminder that precedent is not prophecy.
For Cleveland, this moment arrives weighted with legacy. The Indians stand on the brink of a fourth World Series championship, a distinction that would place this club among the enduring pillars of the American League. Yet history also lingers uneasily here. Cleveland has been close before, and not all of those memories are comforting. Triumph would affirm continuity. Defeat would reopen old scars.
For San Francisco, the stakes are different, but no less profound. The Giants seek only their second World Series title, but what they are really chasing is permanence — the kind of win that alters how a franchise is spoken about, how it is remembered. A victory on the road, in a hostile park, in a Game Seven, would not merely earn a championship. It would define an era.
The series itself has unfolded as controlled chaos. Offense has surged. Pitching has bent, but rarely held. Heroes have emerged nightly — Mendez, Barrios, Walters, Valenzuela — only to be replaced the next evening by someone else. It has been a World Series less about dominance than about survival.
And now, everything compresses.
Tomorrow, there will be no margins. No tomorrow to plan for. Every managerial decision will feel heavier. Every baserunner will feel larger. Every out will sound louder.
The crowd at Jacobs Field will arrive believing history is on its side. The Giants will arrive knowing history does not care.
That is the quiet, brutal elegance of a Game Seven.
Two teams.
One night.
And when it ends, one story will be told forever — while the other will always be told beginning with the words, “What if?”
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