MLB Rankings: The greatest hits of the season’s final week
By Bill Felber
MLB Rankings: Greatest Hits of the Final Week
10. Ildemaro Vargas, Arizona Diamondbacks, 46 percent
Arizona’s marathon 19-inning, 6-hour, 53-minute victory Tuesday will go down as the game that almost scuttled St. Louis’s chances of winning the NL Central. It sent the Cardinals into a four-game losing skid, and only Milwaukee’s failure to win its season-closing series in Colorado preserved the Cards’ hold on the division title.
But for Vargas, the two teams might still be playing. Of course, if it weren’t for Vargas, they would have long since been tucked in bed by nearly 2 a.m. Arizona time, when the contest finally concluded.
Vargas entered the game as a pinch hitter in the bottom of the ninth and still managed to get four hits. The first of them, a one-out home run, was statistically the biggest. It swung the Arizona odds from just 12 percent to 59 percent.
He singled again with two out in the 11th only to retired due to what turned out to be overly aggressive base-running.
In the 13th, after Paul Goldschmidt’s home run gave St. Louis a 2-1 lead, Arizona re-tied the game on Caleb Joseph’s base hit.
Vargas opened the bottom of the 16th with a double, but his teammates failed to move him around.
His 19th inning walk-off single came with two out and the bases loaded thanks to a pair of singles and an intentional walk. By that time, the actuaries had already conceded Arizona a 66 percent chance of winning, so his walk-off wasn’t quite as dramatic as his game-tying shot so many hours earlier.