A’s announcer Korach: tough loss, classic game

Every time I drive to or through Flagstaff, Ariz., I am reminded of my favorite long and memorable baseball playoff game.

Before one gets to Flagstaff and those cool pines, there is a little railroad town just off old Route 66 called Williams. This is where Billy Hatcher grew up.

Who knew such a small town could produce such a good ballplayer? Who knew Hatcher would hit a ball off the left-field foul pole in the bottom of the 14th inning off Jesse Orosco on Oct. 15, 1986, tying once again a great ballgame the Mets had untied in the top of the 14th?

The Mets finally won it by scoring three runs in the top of the 16th. The Astros could manage only two in the bottom of the 16th.

Four hours, 42 minutes of daytime drama that extended into early evening. A couple of years ago, the MLB Network said it was the fifth-greatest game played over the past 50 years, and that includes nine-inning games.

Expansion has created lots of room on rosters for light-hitting middle infielders and guys who can’t throw strikes if their lives (and a three-team parlay) depended on it. It also has produced cumbersome tiers of playoff games, and thus many more opportunities for long and memorable playoff games to emerge from these cumbersome tiers.

Mets-Astros, Braves-Astros, White Sox-Astros. The Astros, for whatever reason, have been involved in a lot of long and memorable playoff games. Maybe it was the funky uniforms.

Yankees-Red Sox in 2004; 12 innings one night, 14 the next. Who can forget those games? Who can forget Mariano Rivera blowing saves on consecutive nights?

And now you can add Royals-A’s, 2014 American League wild-card game, to the list.

It was 12 innings and 4 hours, 45 minutes of prime-time drama in the Heartland. Three minutes more than Mets-Astros in ’86. This ballgame went on for damn near five hours. It didn’t seem like it. It was like watching “Gone With the Wind.”

Let those waters at Kauffman Stadium dance.

“We’ve all watched those long Yankees-Red Sox games and then you go ‘God, it’s 4 hours, 45 minutes.’ We didn’t sign off on the postgame show until after 12:30 in the morning,” said longtime Las Vegan Ken Korach, who called the instant classic as lead announcer for the A’s radio network. “The team bus left the stadium at 1 a.m. I always thought it would be hard to do one of those games. And then (Tuesday) night, there you are, it’s a 4-hour, 45-minute game and it was so intense that we never lost our energy on the air.

“It was just one of those games that took you with it, that took you for a ride.”

It was like riding Space Mountain, if the guy working the control lever walked away so he could steal bases.

The Royals swiped seven bases, which is only six fewer than the Washington Senators swiped during the entire 1957 season. This is what A’s catcher Geovany Soto gets for jamming his thumb in the third inning.

Kansas City was the first team in baseball history to come back from a four-run deficit in the eighth inning of a win-or-go-home game.

Like many classic games, this one ebbed and flowed but mostly flowed during the late and extra innings when the Royals were running relay races between first base and third. It was almost like having an entire 162-game season wrapped up and put into one box, which is what A’s relief pitcher Sean Doolittle said afterward.

Neither team erred, and there weren’t many walks, either. Other than the Royals stealing bases as if Engelberg of the “Bad News Bears” were catching, this was a well-played game.

The A’s sometimes are thought of as one of baseball’s Johnny-come-latelies, but Korach said this was the eighth time during his 15 years in the booth that Oakland has made the playoffs. That’s sort of Yankee-like, or at least sort of St. Louis Cardinals-like. So Korach has witnessed a lot of playoff games.

Some were pretty memorable. None was as memorable as the one in Kansas City on Tuesday night, even if the A’s lost.

“It might be at the top of the list,” Korach said of where Royals-A’s ranks in his batting order of Oakland classics, a list that includes Dallas Braden’s perfect game and the A’s going on that crazy winning streak a few years back that landed Korach an audio cameo in the movie “Moneyball.”

“Obviously, it was extremely disappointing for the fans and for the team. It was a tough loss, but a classic game. I’ve heard from people who say it was the best postseason game they’ve ever seen.”

The Cubs had this announcer named Jack Brickhouse who would say during taut games “you could cut the tension with a knife.” With Royals-A’s, you needed a machete, one of those Crocodile Dundee models.

“It was everything you could have wanted in a postseason game,” Ken Korach said after the A’s had pushed across a run in the top of the 12th, only to watch KC push across two in the bottom half of the inning.

“Braden’s perfect game, that was the most incredible (regular-season game) I’ve had, calling the last out, maybe the best story … but the postseason is different, because of the intensity on every pitch.”

It’s the intensity you remember long after the last out is made. It’s the intensity you remember when the sign on the road coming out of Williams, Ariz., pop. 3,023 and the hometown of Billy Hatcher, says it’s 34 miles to Flagstaff.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.