Somebody will write a book on baseball's greatest day ever

The headline is a sentence from Buster Olney, the former New York Times baseball writer who's now a go-to baseball guy at ESPN. He writes today on his Insider blog there, which requires a subscription:

The theater was unlike anything any baseball fans have seen in one day of a regular season, whether in 1908 or 1940 or 1949 or 1951 or 1967 or 1982, and for baseball fans...they saw events they will never want to forget.

The Yankees hadn't lost a 7-0 lead in the eighth inning or later since 1953, and that's what happened. The Red Sox were undefeated this year when holding leads after the eighth inning, yet they lost. There were four games involving the wild-card races Wednesday, and in three of those, a team came to within one out of victory, and lost. At 11:40 p.m., the Atlanta Braves matched the greatest September collapse in history, and 25 minutes later, the Red Sox set a new standard for September collapses. And Evan Longoria's game-winning homer was merely the second in history that propelled a team into the playoffs, on the last day of the season; the other belongs to Bobby Thomson.

To his credit, Olney set up last night's dramatic turns in a post yesterday morning: "Somebody will etch their name into history today...Some players will wake up this morning not knowing that the legacy of their lifetimes devoted to baseball will be shaped by midnight."