The most thrilling game I’ve seen in a long time

Wow. What an amazing 13 innings of baseball.

It’s rare in baseball that you get a clear cut, do-or-die game for both teams, especially a matchup between a perceived underdog at home who has been on fire over the last two weeks and a team starting a Cy Young winner on the mound.

But we got so much more than that.

We had the perceived underdogs take an early lead, only to have the momentum shift the other way after Adrian Gonzalez’s grand slam. We had the unknowns take a lead late, only to give it up in the eighth. We had the Padres threaten in extra innings, only to be denied. And we had the Padres take the lead in the 13th, saving one of the best closers of all time for a save situation, only to see the Rockies score three runs to win the game.

We saw great plays and we saw errors. We saw players we’ve heard of do well and do badly. We saw players we’ve never heard of contribute in big ways (like Seth Smith).

We saw managers make many decisions that could be second-guessed, some working, some not. The Rockies used 23 players and the Padres used 21 — both managers managed like it was a do-or-die game with no tomorrow guaranteed.

We even had a decent broadcast, as TBS didn’t seem to shove their personalities or other shows into our faces, or invent other ways to annoy us with Scooter-like elements. They let the game sell itself.

Some fans will spend way too much time today focusing on the bad call at the end of the game, where it looked like Matt Holliday never touched home. But the bad calls went both ways — you can’t mention the play at home without mentioning Troy Tulowitzki’s home run in the seventh inning was ruled not a home run. (EDIT — it was Garrett Atkins, not Tulowtizki. Oops.) Had Atkins been given the homer, and everything else stayed the same, you could argue the Rockies would’ve won in nine innings.

Rockies fans, celebrate long and hard today. Wins like this don’t happen often.