The Roger Angell Baseball Collection Part 22

He sounded deeply puzzled-more troubled man I'd ever heard him.

"Do you remember that Olympics cross-country skier named Koch-Bill Koch, I think it is?" he went on. I said I did, and Quis said, "Well, in the 1984 Winter Olympics he was one of the big favorites-he'd won a medal eight years before, I think-but when his race came he didn't do well. He finished eighteenth, or something like that, but when he got interviewed afterward he didn't seem upset at all. He looked sort of calm and happy, and he said-I don't remember the words exactly-he said he felt good, because he'd been at his best level in that race. He couldn't have done better, he said, and he didn't need a medal, because he was satisfied with his effort on that day. I've heard the pitcher Ray Burns say the same kind of thing, and Phil Niekro, too. Live with what you've got that day, they're saying. Well, that's the kind of athlete I hope to be. I don't believe in fate. I'm not an advocate of good luck. I know that players get hot, just like teams get hot, and then there are times when they can't do better than what you're seeing. They can't. All this year means is that I've got to go out and do a job when baseball life is tougher. I don't think I should complain, because that's what most major-league players go through every season, year in and year out. I don't know what's going to happen. Who's to say what the kids of the future will say about me-will I be Mr. Normal and experience a lot of hard days from now on, or will I be a hero again? Janie said the other day that if it turns out that I'm pitching in the top third of major-league pitchers now instead of the top fifth, the way it's been, those numbers would still be considered a good career by most people. And I know that-I know she's right."

He paused and then gave a little shrug.

"This summer-we'll find out about this summer. It would be very weak of me if I couldn't accept a whole year like this. I'm really stuck, though. I'm between a rock and a hard place. I want to have balance-I want to accept failure and accept success, and be human. But at the same time I have these unrealistic goals and ideas on the mound. So part of my fight for balance will never be answered, because I'm expecting perfection."

Afterword: The two seasons since this account was written have been the most difficult in Dan Quisenberry's baseball career. Almost nothing went right for him in 1986, when he finished with a 37 won-lost record and an earned-run average of 2.77-his highest since his first full season in the majors. He had finished up with thirty-seven saves in 1985, to lead the league in that department for the fourth consecutive year, but in 1986 he accounted for only twelve. His game appearances and innings-pitched were drastically reduced. He pitched well in patches, but the rocky stretches were longer and more noticeable: no saves in the months of May, eleven outings in July that produced no wins and three losses, and a 5.27 earned-run average. Left-handed batters rocked him with a c.u.mulative .310 for the season. Manager d.i.c.k Howser (who left the team in July, when it was discovered that he was suffering from a malignant brain tumor) and his replacement at the helm, Mike Ferraro, stopped wheeling in Quisenberry in his accustomed closing role, and Quis, who knows that his peculiar, fine-tuned stuff cannot be counted upon unless he works regularly, felt ill-used as well as ineffectual. The world had turned upside down for him. He tried to accept this without complaint, as one would expect, but Jack Etkin, of the Kansas City Star, told me that the summer had been a "typhoon of emotions" for Quisenberry. His difficulties, in any case, were only one part of a horrendous season for the defending World Champion Royals, who fell into a tie for third place in their division, sixteen games behind the pennant-winning Angels; nothing, of course, affected the team as much as the loss of Howser, who died the following July.

Quis pitched a little better in 1987, but neither of the new Royals managers, Billy Gardner and then John Wathan, used him much in his accustomed role; he pitched only fifteen innings after the All-Star Game break in July. Early in the year, a rookie right-hander, John Davis, was tried in Quis' old spot, and early in September, when the club was caught up in a four-team pennant scramble in the A.L. West (the Royals finished second in the A.L. West, two games behind the Minnesota Twins), the Royals purchased Gene Garber, an accomplished seventeen-year veteran short reliever, from the Braves-a final signal, if one was needed, that they had given up on their old submariner. Quisenberry's final figures for 1987 were a mixed bag. He finished up 41, with an earned-run average of 2.76 and eight saves, but twenty-eight of the forty-seven baserunners he inherited in game situations came around to score. When the season ended, Quisenberry asked the Royals to trade him to another team. "I don't really want to do this," he said. "This is the only uniform I know. This is the only locker room that I know. These are the only stadium and front office that I know. These are the only fans that I know. I'm comfortable with everything here, except not being a partic.i.p.ant."

Finding a new team for Quis will present difficulties, starting with his $1.1 million guaranteed annual salary; the Royals must also contrive to separate his baseball pay from his lifetime partners.h.i.+p with Avron Fogelman-the multi-million-dollar real estate contract mentioned above. The Royals' affection for Quisenberry is undiminished and they will try to honor his wish to be traded, but his future in the game looks uncertain at best.

The puzzle of Quisenberry's sudden loss of mastery will probably never be answered, but he himself looks on these mysterious reversals with composure now. "I still miss not being the guy-being out there every day," he said to me at lunch one day in midseason, "but I'm not miserable all day, the way I was, thinking how I can get the ball again. I've got peace of mind. Maybe I'm not the same pitcher that I was. I never got my ERA under two last year, and my hits-per-inning were over one. They're a little over one right now. Maybe that's because I'm not working so much, or maybe it's because my sinker isn't as good. Maybe my sinker is sunk. Left-handed batters have always. .h.i.t me pretty hard, on and off, even in my best years, but now I've lost the luxury of weathering the storm. I still covet that, but I may never be in that spot again in my career. I think there's always been some skepticism about me, because I look funny out there, but it's plain enough that people on the club think I don't have what I had. I don't get into conversations about it. I still want to pitch a lot, but I have no trouble sleeping at night."

Knowing what I did about Quis, I probably shouldn't have worried about his courage and demeanor under these unhappy circ.u.mstances, but reactions elsewhere have been less admirable. Often last summer or this summer, I noticed that when his name came up some baseball people-writers or front-office men: never players-would smile knowingly and say something like, "Well, yeah, but he was always-you know, just trickin' them." And the speaker would waggle his arm and wrist side-arm in a comical, disparaging way. I didn't like this, but then I realized that I had begun to disparage Quis a little, too, in my mind. I would find his pitching line at the bottom of another box score and see that he hadn't done very well, hadn't quite closed down the other team, and part of me would think, Maybe he isn't so good, after all. Maybe he's just a nice guy who did pretty well, considering. Not quite a great pitcher, maybe not exactly a big-leaguer...This is bitterly unfair, but what are we to do about it? We want our favorites to be great out there, and when that stops we feel betrayed a little. They have not only failed but failed us. Maybe this is the real dividing line between pros and bystanders, between the players and the fans. All the players know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong for them in their line of work-they'll stop hitting, or, if they're pitchers, suddenly find that for some reason they can no longer fling the ball through that invisible sliver of air where it will do its best work for them-and they will have to live with that diminishment, that failure, for a time or even for good. It's part of the game. They are prepared to lose out there in plain sight, while the rest of us do it in private and then pretend it hasn't happened.

*Quisenberry's subsequent work in the 1985 season and his adventures in the champions.h.i.+p playoffs and the World Series are described in the next chapter.

To Missouri

- Fall 1985 BASEBALL HAS HAD THE shutters up for more than a month now, but its devotees still hang around outside the old saloon in the evenings, out of habit, recalling the lights and the talk and the smoky laughter, and hoping to hold in memory the way so many of us-old regulars and excited newcomers, families and friends and kids-were swept up in what came to feel like a summer-long party. It went on too long, of course, and some parts of it weren't much fun at all, come to think of it, but never mind-it was a fine baseball summer, and I miss it. Good parties come back to us in a blur of names and shouts and too close faces and overlapped talk, and it would be wrong somehow to try to get every part of that in order later on, even if it could be done. This was the summer when Pedro Guerrero hit all those homers (fifteen of them) in the month of June, and Gary Carter hit all those homers (five in two days and eight in a week) in September; it was the summer when n.o.body caught up with the Blue Jays, and the autumn when the Royals caught up with everybody; it was the beginning of Vince Coleman and Bret Saberhagen, but also the time of Ron Guidry and Dave Parker, once again, and of Wade Boggs and George Brett and Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly and Willie McGee some more. It was the time of John Tudor vs. Dwight Gooden-two rows of zeros up in lights. It was the year of Tom Herr yet again coming up to bat with Coleman or McGee already on base, and the pitcher out there running the count to 31 and then going to the rosin bag....Nineteen eighty-five was when three of the four pennant races were settled on the final Sat.u.r.day of the season, and when the Giants lost one hundred games, for the first time ever-the last of the proud old flags.h.i.+ps to suffer that indignity. It was the summer in which catchers Carlton Fisk and Buck Martinez each separately accounted for two outs on one play at the plate, and in which Tom Seaver, Rod Carew, Nolan Ryan, and Pete Rose made us aware of some larger numbers. It was the year of another players' strike, which came on miserably and unstoppably, continued for two days, and then was settled and instantly forgotten. It was the year when the Cubs lost all their starting pitchers to injury, and when a creeping mechanical tarpaulin caught the fastest man in the National League and probably cost the Cardinals a World Champions.h.i.+p. Baseball was in court in Pittsburgh, where cocaine was the topic, and in Chicago, where state and city edicts banning night baseball at Wrigley Field were at issue and were upheld, thereby almost a.s.suring the eventual abandonment of that grand old garden by the restless, neo-Yuppie Cubs. There was no Subway Series in 1985, it turned out; instead, the year wound down to the enthralling, suddenly turned-about sixth game of an all-Missouri World Series, followed by a horrific 110 laughter the next day, which simultaneously enthroned the Kansas City Royals as World Champions and the St. Louis Cardinals as world-cla.s.s soreheads. There was more, to be sure, but this is enough, unless anyone cares to remember that this was also the year when a singer named Mary O'Dowd stood up to deliver the Canadian and American national anthems before a sellout Yankees-Blue Jays game at Yankee Stadium and then utterly forgot both the words and the tune of "O Canada." I'll never get over that.

Toward the end, this baseball summer took on a special savor, a tang of particularity, that brought it to the attention of even the most casual fans. "Quite a season, isn't it?" friends of mine kept saying in August and September, and since most of them weren't folks who had demonstrated any prior fealty to the pastime, it usually took me a minute or two to realize that they weren't talking about the weather. I live in New York, where it suddenly was quite a baseball season along about back-to-school time, but I can't a.s.sume that my own symptoms of attachment-clicking on the bedside radio in the dark at one in the morning to hunt out a late score from the Coast; lifting my gaze from a book or a magazine to see again in my mind Keith Hernandez sprinting in across the infield to short-hop a bunt (my G.o.d, on the third-base side of the pitcher!) and then firing to third for the force; opening the newspaper before breakfast to the critical "GB" column in the standings (and knowing beforehand what it would show)-also afflicted families in Winnetka and Del Mar, say, where Cubs fans and Padres fans of necessity went to sleep and woke up thinking about last year's baseball. For all that, the game did seem to matter more this summer, perhaps because of Pete Rose, perhaps because of the strike that struck out, perhaps even because of the bad news: the drug trials in Pittsburgh, with their celebrity witnesses, pale-faced and in coats and ties for the day, telling us what we wished not to hear about some of their friends and teammates. Baseball had a record year at the gate in 1985, and the over-all attendance of 46,838,819 included best-ever seasons for both leagues and for the Orioles, the Cubs, the Twins, the Cardinals, the Padres, the Blue Jays, and the Mets, whose 2,751,437 was the highest attendance mark in New York baseball history.

The Mets and the Yankees didn't get to the World Series after all, and neither did the Dodgers (in the end) or the Phillies or the defending-champion Tigers or any of the other grand predictables-not even the vivid and appealing Blue Jays, whose demise in the seven-game American League playoffs was almost insupportably painful to their wildly hoping, secretly doubting supporters. After the playoffs, some friends of mine-and some baseball colleagues, too-confessed that they were finding it hard to summon up much enthusiasm for this year's heartland finalists, yet I have the conviction that the Royals-Cardinals World Series excited and warmed great sectors of the game's fan family by the time it was done. It wasn't an epochal Series-the pitchers were too good (four hundred and fifty-two official at-bats produced four home runs), and the last game should have been called after the fifth inning-but the games were somehow life-sized and pleasing, which is a rare result in this era of ceaseless gargantuan spectacle, which we watch, for the most part, with a deepening inner silence.

At 8:01 p.m. E.D.T. on Wednesday, September 11, in the first inning of a game with the San Diego Padres in Riverfront Stadium, Pete Rose stroked a soft single off the Padres' righthander Eric Show. It was. .h.i.t No. 4,192 for Rose, at last putting him one ahead of Ty Cobb's life total on the all-time hit parade, and by the time it struck the ground in short left-center field there were some of us in the land who had the impression that we had already witnessed and counted each of Pete's 3,161 other singles, and even his 13,767 previous at-bats in the majors. I was delighted for many reasons, most of all for Rose himself, whose stroke and style and fervor and ebullient good cheer I have written about for more than two decades now, but I think I was almost more pleased by Pete's next hit-a triple to left, in the seventh-which broke the new record (as will every hit of his from now on) and suggested that baseball as we know it would now be permitted to resume, and that games, not monuments, are its purpose and reward. The "Cobb Countdown" had been a daily feature of the sport pages for better than two years, appearing even on the many mornings when it was dutifully noted that Pete hadn't played the previous evening, or that he'd gone oh-for-three in the game. The slowly oncoming Blessed Bingle had given rise to a whole cottage industry of Rosean artifacts, including 4,192 autographed Pete Rose ceramic plates ($25 to $125 apiece), 4,192 numbered Pete Rose color prints ($175 apiece), fifty silk-screened Pete Rose prints by Andy Warhol ($3,000 apiece), and much more, of course-possibly including a four-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety-two-percent rise in the national riboflavin intake, thanks to those Pete Rose Wheaties commercials. I did not attend the game, however, being of the impression that I would probably not spot anything there that was invisible to the three hundred and seventy-five reporters and cameramen who were on hand that evening. I'm sorry I missed Pete's company and his jokes and one-liners (there were fifteen ma.s.s press conferences in the ten days prior to and including Der Tag), and even his tears when he broke the record. I also treasure some of the footnotes and substats that were turned up by the press moles digging back through Rose's 3,475 prior box-scoring appearances-for instance, his twenty-nine hits against future dentists (Jim Lonborg is one of them); his hundred and thirty-one hits against Hall of Famers (Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Robin Roberts, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Don Drysdale, and Hoyt Wilhelm); his hundred and three hits against the Niekro brothers ("I wish they'd been triplets," Pete said); and his six hits to date against Dwight Gooden, who wasn't born until after Rose had already rapped out three hundred and nine major-league blows.

Pete is great, but Cobb was better, having achieved his famous total (in 1928, when he retired) in four hundred and forty-two fewer games and in 2,339 fewer at-bats; Pete is a lifetime .305 batter, but Cobb, at .367, was the best hitter the game has ever seen. I feel like an old crab in pointing out these obvious discrepancies, but they exist, and the obdurate fact of them makes you wonder about our apparent wish for guaranteed present greatness or historic certification, or whatever it is that has driven us to make so much of this particular milestone. Late in the summer, I began to wonder who it was Cobb had supplanted in the lifetime lists, and after spending a happy half hour with my nose in the Baseball Encyclopedia I decided that it must have been Honus Wagner (3,430), whom Cobb motored past in 1923, six years after the Dutchman's retirement. But what happened on that September day in 1923? How had the local scribes and fans and historians celebrated the end of the "Wagner Watch," I wondered.* Finding no mention of the moment in several histories of the pastime, I called up Seymour Siwoff, the grand sachem of the Elias Sports Bureau, a Fort Knox of stats, which keeps track of every jot and t.i.ttle in the books, not quite including Sunday foul tips in the Federal League.

"Nothing happened!" Siwoff said instantly when I put the question to him. "Just the other day, we tried to come up with some mention of the event. We looked and looked, but there was nothing there. The hype wasn't in. This Rose thing was a sitting target all the way. There was much more of a challenge for Pete in 1978, when he was going after Joe DiMaggio's consecutive-game hitting streak, winding up in a tie with Willie Keeler at forty-four, which is still the best in the National League. Any single-season record has a finite ending, so it means something."

Four other life landmarks were celebrated this summer: Nolan Ryan's four-thousandth strikeout (he is alone at this level); Tom Seaver's three hundredth winning game and Rod Carew's three-thousandth hit (these two fell on the same afternoon, August 4th, a great day for newspaper layout men across the land); and then Phil Niekro's three-hundredth win, on the very last day of the regular season. I was tickled about Seaver's arrival in the Old Moundsmen's Sodality (he had an excellent, 1611 year with the White Sox), and when Niekro made the club, too (they were the seventeenth and eighteenth admittees), I suddenly remembered that he and Seaver had pitched against each other in the very first National League Champions.h.i.+p game, way back on October 4, 1969-a terrible game, as I recall-when Tom and the Mets beat Phil and the Braves, 95. Nierkro's No. 300 was a party, for it came in a game at Toronto that meant absolutely nothing (the Blue Jays had eliminated the Yanks the previous afternoon), so everyone there and everyone at home by his set could pull for Phil, who had come up short in four previous attempts. He is forty-six, and although he will enter the free-agent market this winter he must be very near the end of the line. Watching him out on the mound these past few summers, with his preoccupied air and his white locks, bent shoulders, protruding elbows, and oddly rumpless pants, I was sometimes weirdly put in mind of a colonial-planter hurler puttering about in his garden, his brain alight with Rousseau and Locke and the knuckler. In the Blue Jays game, Niekro eschewed his specialty pitch until there were two out in the ninth and his team was leading by 80; then, smiling at last, he fanned Jeff Burroughs, an old Braves teammate of his, with a sailing beauty.

What is certain about these plateau observances is that there will be fewer of them in the seasons just ahead. Don Sutton's fifth victory next year will admit him to the three-hundred-wins circle, but then, since there are no other viable contenders in these categories at present, we can put away the speeches and the cornerstone trowels for a half decade or more, which is OK with me. After Pete Rose's single bounced in short left field at Riverfront Stadium that day, a Redsperson painted a white circle on the field at the point where it struck, so that it might be AstroMarked for the ages. However, some lunkish football players scrubbed out the spot a day or two later, during a Cincinnati Bengals workout on the field, which means that the place-of-the-hit may be forever lost to the ages. Like the site of Custer's Last Stand, it will have to live on only in our imagination, which was probably the best place for it all along.

I may be overlooking Prenshrinement-a phenomenon I first encountered in October, when a veteran baseball-writer friend announced to me that Dwight Gooden is the greatest pitcher who ever lived. The Doctor, who turned twenty-one just three weeks ago, had a great year-there is no argument about that. His twenty-four wins (he was 244 in all) led both leagues, and so did his two hundred and sixty-eight strikeouts and his earned-run average of 1.53. He pitched sixteen complete games, including eight shutouts, and ran off a stretch of forty-nine consecutive innings-from August 31st to October 2nd, when it mattered most to his team-in which he did not allow an earned run. He was the youngest pitcher ever to win twenty games in the majors, and the youngest to win the Cy Young Award, which he can put up on his mantel next to last year's Rookie of the Year plaque. Gooden at work is pleasing as well as thrilling. I have come to expect that midgame inning or two when he turns up the meters and becomes even more dominating out there, closing down the other side at the moment when lesser pitchers, even the best of them, so often look vulnerable and anxious. Like other fans, I'm sure, I also appreciate the inner calm and the businesslike unmannered mien with which he gets his work done, game after game-an austerity of style that is so prettily replicated by the clean, ledgerlike columns of one's scoreboard at the end of one of his outings. I look forward to these and further wonders from Dwight next summer and, barring injury or some unforeseen decline in his fortunes, for many summers to come, and the only way to diminish such a prospect, I believe, would be to turn him into a statue, as my friend has proposed. To watch him that way-to enter a mental checkmark beside each strikeout or shutout from now on, simply to confirm our grandiose evaluation of his ultimate place in the history of the sport-is to lose the pleasure and dangers of the day and our joy in his youth: exactly what we came to the game for in the first place.

It is tempting for us fans to a.s.sume that baseball is falling to pieces, like so many other parts of our lives, and that therefore we must prop it up with honorifics and superlatives. Perhaps we should just try to keep our eyes open. What is more pleasurable in the game, I wonder, than to watch Willie McGee, whose .353 batting average, quickness on the bases-he had eighteen triples and fifty-six stolen bases-and scintillating work in center field brought him the Most Valuable Player award in his league? I felt the same sort of satisfaction this summer in watching Don Mattingly up at bat and reflecting on what he has done in his own behalf in his first two full seasons in the majors. Once known as a good wrong-field hitter, with no power and no position (he was shuttled back and forth between the outfield and first base throughout his minor-league career), he settled into place last year as the day-to-day Yankee first baseman, and led his league in hits, doubles, and batting average (.343). This year, he batted .324, with thirty-five homers (fourth best in the league), and led all comers in doubles, extra-base hits, total bases, and runs batted in. He was recently voted the American League's Most Valuable Player-an easy choice, to my way of thinking. His total of a hundred and forty-five runs batted in, by the way, has not been topped in the A.L. since 1949. Mattingly is not notably burly or overmuscled (he is five-eleven and weighs a hundred and eighty-five), but, watching him at the plate, you notice that he is a package of triangles-neck, arms, torso, thighs-that together mesh and turn on a pitch like a drill press; his upper body has the thick, down-slanting droop that we once saw in the hockey immortal Gordie Howe-what Howe's teammates called "goat shoulders." Up at bat (he is a lefty swinger), Mattingly positions his front foot with balletlike delicacy, its in-turned toe just touching the dirt, and then tilts his upper body back, with his full weight on the back leg and his hands and bat held close to his body. He hits left-handers exceptionally well, often going with the away pitch and cuing the ball off to left, but he also has enough confidence and power to pull the outside fastball to right field on occasion, to the consternation of the man on the mound. He simply kills anything inside, turning beautifully on the pitch and releasing the bat in an upturned, circular arc-the Stadium Swing, which he has retinkered and polished ceaselessly these past two seasons or more, and which so often cracks or bonks or wafts the ball into the middle-upper deck. In the meaningless last Yankee game of the year-Phil Niekro's outing against the Blue Jays-Mattingly rapped a homer and three singles in five at-bats, but when he also grounded out he flung down his bat, shaking his head at such inept.i.tude.

Mattingly would be an easy pick as the man most likely to win the next triple crown of batting (highest batting average, most home runs, and most runs batted in, all in a single season-a trick last turned by Carl Yastrzemski, of the 1967 Red Sox), except that he would somehow have to garner more hits than Wade Boggs in the process. Boggs, the Red Sox third baseman, this season won his second batting t.i.tle in the past three years, finis.h.i.+ng at .368, with two hundred and forty hits-a total not exceeded in his circuit since Heinie Ma.n.u.sh whacked two hundred and forty-one for the 1928 Browns, in an era when the ball was made of rabbit toes and bathtub gin. Only Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Ted Williams ever racked up single-season on-base totals (hits plus walks plus. .h.i.t-by-pitcher) higher than Boggs' three hundred and forty this year. It might demean Boggs to call him an automaton of hitting, except that he tries to be an automaton. He eats chicken for lunch every day-not always the same chicken dish but the one that comes around on his precise fourteen-day, thirteen-recipe rotation. Before night games, he arrives at Fenway Park at exactly three o'clock; and he runs his wind sprints-the same number of them, and for exactly the same distance-starting at exactly 7:17 P.M. He stands up at the plate always in the same way-his feet comfortably apart, his bat well back (he, too, bats from the left side)-and cuts smoothly at the ball, with his head tucked in and his long arms extended, and raps it on a low, straight line to all fields, but most often to left or left-center. He does this all the time: in six hundred and fifty-three at-bats, he popped out to the infield twice this year. Tik-Tok of Fenway plays similarly afield: whenever he happens to make the last out of an inning by catching a foul fly in front of the visiting-team dugout (on the third-base side, in Boston), he will still turn and circle back clockwise, outside the bases, so that he can return to his dugout by his own special route; if you study the gra.s.s between the foul line just beyond first base and the home dugout at Fenway Park, you will see four worn places on the turf-the four steps that Wade Boggs takes on his way back to where he can get ready to start hitting again.

Late in the summer, a coincidence of scheduling offered the riveting possibility that the Mets and the Yankees could both move into first place in their divisions by whomping their main rivals-the Cardinals and the Blue Jays, respectively-in adjacent home-stand series in the second week in September; the engagements even overlapped, with the third and last game of the three-game Cardinals-Mets set at Shea Stadium falling on Thursday afternoon, just before the opener of the four Toronto-Yankee games that night. Entranced by sudden visions of an epochal collision between the two New York clubs in the World Series this year, the Gotham media performed a dogged mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of the moldering Subway Series feature, with many a backward look, via TV or tabloid, at fans in fedoras cheering on Dem b.u.ms or the Jints against Whitey and the Mick, et al. (I enjoyed a Sports Ill.u.s.trated photograph of the magazine's intrepid correspondent George Plimpton in the act of descending into the IRT, apparently for the first time in his life.) None of this quite came to pa.s.s, of course, but the two teams certainly did their part in preparing us for the festival-the Yankees by mounting an eleven-game winning streak (their best surge in twenty-one years) that brought them to within two and a half games of the Jays on the eve of their meeting (they had trailed Toronto by nine and a half in early August), and the Mets with a succession of improbable melodramas on a West Coast trip (a ninth-inning game-winning pinch-hit homer by Keith Hernandez against the Giants; a five-for-five game for Keith against the Padres the next evening; Gary Carter's five homers in two days in San Diego; Darryl Strawberry's thirteenth-inning double against the Dodgers, to settle what had begun as a double-shutdown duel between Gooden and Fernando Valenzuela), which brought them even with the first-place Cardinals as the momentous week began. The ensuing games and discoveries-the best fun of my baseball summer, it turned out-can only be suggested here, perhaps in shorthand: Tues., Sept. 10: Yucko Shea weather (drizz., tarps, planes roaring, etc.) for Grand Opening, but Metsie fans stay high in fog. Herr homers vs. Ronnie Darling in 1st, but irrit. St. L. twirler Danny c.o.x loses temper w. dawdling Foster in bottom of stave & plunks Geo., loading ha.s.socks. Mistake? Yep: H. Johnson rockets 21 pitch over R-CF fence, for slam. Fans: "HOJO! HOJO!" Whatta team, whatta guy, etc. Metsies lead 51, but pesky Redbirds peck at Ronnie, close to 54 by 7th. Bad nerves in stands ("C'mon, you guys!"), but kid reliever R. McDowell slams door w. sinker. Mets up by one in NL East. Hard work, whew, etc. F'tnotes: R. Darling 1st NY pitcher to hurl key game on same day his Op-Ed piece (bettering our burg, etc.) runs in Times...Keith, back home from bad-boy drug testimony in Pitts., gets standing O. in 1st frame. Message of some kind: prob. love. Keith wipes tear, bops single.

Wed., Sept. 11: Dwight vs. John Tudor: 9-inn. double-zip standoff before 52,616. Terrif. strain. Doc great, but pickle-puss Tudor no slouch: slider, change, sneaky FB, in-out, up-down. 3-hitter. Best LH in NL. (Typical ex-Red Sock: so-so at Fens, Superman now. Go figure.) Mgr. Davey J. yanks Doc after 9 (young arm, long career ahead, etc.), & Card slugger Cedeno takes Orosco deep in 10th. Winning blow. Cards-Mets tied for No. 1. (Davey after n.o.bel Peace Prize or whart) Thurs., Sept. 12, aft.: Visiting scribes scan road maps, subway maps, for unus. postgame exped. to Yankee Stadium, in Bronxian wilds. Game here at Shea starts with Metsies ripping St. L. hotdog starter Andujar. Back-to-back-to-back doubles for Straw., Heep, HoJo. We lead 60 after 2. Beaut, afternoon. Pesky Cards batt. back (see lues, script), close to 65 after four. ("C'mon, you guys!") In 9th, McOee (skinny neck, mighty stroke) ties it w. 396-ft. blast to left CF, vs. Jesse again. Silencio. No hope. Home of 9th, Mookie hoofs out hopper to SS, beats peg. Hope. Sac. to 2B by good-old Wally B. Keith up ("keith! keith!"), strokes daisy-cutter thru 3B-SS hole & Mookie hotfoots home. Yay, yippie, etc. Mets No. 1. Nothing to it. Knew it all along.

The visiting writers found their way from Queens to the Bronx through the rush hour that evening ("It was b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper in that subway tunnel under Grand Central," one of them reported), but the visiting Blue Jays fared less well in the game. Steaming along behind a two-hitter by their ace right-hander, Dave Stieb, they suffered an uncharacteristic spell of nerves in the seventh, when second baseman Damaso Garcia and shortstop Tony Fernandez utterly missed connections on a double play, and Stieb lost his connection with the strike zone; thus encouraged, the Yankees scored six unearned runs-the last three of which came around on an enormous home run into the top deck by catcher Ron Ha.s.sey-and went on to win by 75. The crowd, which had begun the evening by booing the Canadian national anthem, concluded it by chanting obscenities about the Blue Jays, but I forbore from any easy sociological comparisons between the two leagues and the two audiences, since it seemed certain that great segments of the crowd had attended both games, contributing to both ends of the 98,436 total for the odd doubleheader.

I stayed home the next night, enjoying the quieter vistas of Sony Stadium, and watched the Jays put away Phil Niekro by 32 and resume their two-and-a-half-game margin. The score suggests a brisk, well-kempt pitchers' duel, but my scorecard, which notes a bare two errors for the evening, is in fact a picture of Dorian Gray, repulsive to behold or think about. Early on, after I had observed the Toronto left fielder, George Bell, mis-play a drive by Bobby Meacham, on which the Yankee shortstop impulsively scurried over to third base, only to find it occupied-oops!-by a teammate, Willie Randolph, and then returned without hindrance to second base, since no Blue Jay had bethought himself to cover the bag, I realized that some new form of game notation might be needed to capture the special flavor of this one, and so sketched two inky Maltese crosses in the margin of my notebook. Another cross was quickly needed when Ken Griffey, in left for the Yanks, played Al Oliver's single into a two-run triple; and two more crosses appeared in no time when the Blue Jay middle infielders messed up two successive clear chances at a double play. And so it went-two crosses for Tony Fernandez when he twice failed to make contact on a sacrifice-bunt attempt, a fat one for Rickey Henderson when he allowed himself to be picked off first base in the seventh, a two-cross effort by Henderson and Griffey on a looped, catchable fly that bounced between them for a double, a black mark for second-base ump Mark Johnson, who blew the call on Barfield's plainly safe steal of second, etc., etc. When the long night was done, I counted fifteen black marks in my notebook, which had taken on the appearance of a First World War aerodrome under attack by Fokkers.

The Blue Jays beat the Yankees the next day, Sat.u.r.day, and again on Sunday-winning, without strain or undue effort, by 74 and 85-and left town with their first-place cus.h.i.+on up to four and a half. Although the Yankees did not fall apart on the field, they certainly did in other quarters. During the Sat.u.r.day game, George Steinbrenner visited the press rows and there delivered himself of critical comments about the abilities of some of his well-paid stars-predictable deportment for him, with predictable results. "The guys are going to get upset," Dave Winfield said when the owner's remarks reached him. "It's like rattling a stick across the bars of a cage with some animals in it." The Yankees left town in disrepair, and the three Toronto losses became part of an eventual eight-game losing streak. Manager Billy Martin seemed to take sulky pleasure in punis.h.i.+ng his players in his own ways: permitting his ace pitcher, Ron Guidry, to stay in a game in which he was pummelled for five home runs; allowing the fine young reliever Brian Fisher to absorb a six-run pounding by the Indians; and even ordering one of his players, Mike Pagliarulo, to turn around and bat right-handed, for the first time in his professional career. (He struck out.) The trip ended with Martin's bar fight in Baltimore-and eventually, one may conclude, with his postseason firing, his fourth and possibly last fall from the post. None of this requires comment here, since it speaks for itself and is part of a long and miserable pattern of events for the once-proud Yankees.

If there is an impatient or aggrieved sound to these remarks, it is not directed at the Yankee players, whom I mostly admire and wish well. I would like to root wholeheartedly for the Yankees one of these days, but somebody is always jumping up and spoiling the view-the owner, the manager, some of the fans. The resonance of the game up at the Stadium has gone sour, and often comes across as being ill-tempered, distracted, patronizing, and frantically concerned with winning. That tone is perfectly represented by the Stadium organ music-if that is the right word for the puerile and infuriating a.s.sault of noises, nudges, and schlocky musical references with which the management (it must be a management decision, after all) attempts to cajole the players, bait the visitors, and whip up the helpless captive ma.s.ses in the stands. The mighty electronic wurstmaker is scarcely silent for the duration of a foul tip, it seems, and its mindless and almost ceaseless commentary abrades the fabric of the game and the soul of the watching fan. This year, forcing myself actually to listen to the thing for once, I tried to pick out the main phrasings and modulations of a mid-inning concerto jurioso: Organ: "Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da! Buh da-da! BUH da-da-da-da-da-da!" (theme from "Gaite Parisienne," here repeated in mad up-tempo.) Pause. "Tah-tah-tah TAHHH!" (Beethoven's Fifth, opening theme.) Pause. "Beedle-di-deet, dah-dah-dah-deet! Beedle-di-tweet, dah-dah-dah-tweet!" (Theme from "Dardanella," for seven seconds.) Pause. "Tah-tah-tah-tah-ta-TAHHHHHH!" (The "Charge!" bugle call, accompanied by a gigantic illuminated "CHARGE!" command out on the scoreboard.) Then, ominously, as Rickey Henderson comes up to bat: "Buh-buh b.u.m-b.u.m, buh-buh b.u.m-b.u.m, BUH-BUH b.u.m-b.u.m, BUH-BUH b.u.m-b.u.m!" (Shark music from "Jaws.") Pause for the pitch. Single to center field. Organ, joyfully: "Tee-tah tattle-tah tattle-TAH!" ("Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue," quickly segueing into the "Colonel Bogey March.") Pause. David Winfield steps in, to a low-register "Grrummmm buddledy-dummmml" (Crypt theme: Bach? Mussorgsky?) There is a base hit, sending Rickey to third base and bringing us the theme from "Over There" ("The Yanks are coming." Get it?) fortissimo, and then, very quickly, an irritating repeated upbeat "Blim-blim blah! Blim-blim blah! Teedle-weedle-dee dah-blim-blim-blah!" which drives me bananas for the minute or two before I can recall it as an asinine and once nearly inescapable commercial jingle for Campbell's soup: "Mhmm-hmm good! Mhmm-hmm good! That's what Campbell's soup is-mhmm-hmm good!" Well, enough of this, I think, except that it should perhaps be added that whenever Mike Pagliarulo came up to bat at the Stadium he was greeted with "Funiculi-Funicula"-except for the times when he heard "Oh! Ma-Ma" ("It's the butcher boy for me," etc.). He batted .239 for the year.

The Mets relinquished their mini-lead in the National League East when they lost two weekend games in Montreal immediately after the great baseball party at Shea, and they never got back to first place. But let's say this the other way around: The Cardinals nailed down their half-pennant this year with two seven-game winning streaks in mid-September. At home in Busch Stadium one night, they beat the Expos, 53, after being behind by 32 in the seventh; successive triples by Cesar Cedeno and Terry Pendleton produced the go-ahead run. The next day, they trailed the Expos by 61 but won the game by 76, with a two-run homer by Jack Clark. The next afternoon, they were losing to the Expos by 54, with two out in the ninth, when Tom Herr hit a two-run homer. It was Pendleton's turn again in the next game-a two-run triple in the eighth pulled out a 54 win over the Pirates. This is top-grade champions.h.i.+p stuff, of course, and reminds us that the Cards were not just the little speed-and-pitching windup toy that we had somehow come to believe. The Mets, for their part, could not seem to put together more than two winning efforts in a row, and lost on three occasions to the abysmal, gallant Pirates. Mildly afflicted, I fell into pathetic fan postures: finding an office radio on which to follow a Mets-Cubs game out at Wrigley Field, and sending couriers down the halls with inning-by-inning bulletins ("Gary just hit a grand slam!"..."There's trouble in the seventh"..."I think we blew it"); overvaluing good news (Sid Fernandez' two-hit, 71 win over the Phillies); betraying my own "Bench Strawberry! The man may not hit again in our lifetime!"); secretly relis.h.i.+ng hard luck in the enemy camp (Jack Clark was out of the Cardinal lineup with a pulled muscle). On the last weekend of the month, I pa.s.sed two afternoons on a splintery lakeside dock, upcountry from Manhattan, where I simultaneously took in the lovely slanting suns.h.i.+ne, an occasional beer, and the news, via WHN, from Three Rivers Stadium. There the Mets, closing ground at last, were achieving some heroics of their own: on Sat.u.r.day, Jesse Orosco came in with the bases loaded and fanned the last two Pirates of the day; on Sunday, Howard Johnson delivered the tying homer in the ninth, and Carter won it with a two-run homer in the tenth. We hugged and danced and did high-fives on our dock, startling the swans.

Down by a bare three, the Mets moved along to St. Louis for their last, crucial series-the games we had been thinking about all summer. Misfortune kept me at home at the last moment, and I had to make do with televised glimpses of the Tuesday cla.s.sic: Tudor once again, Tudor prim-faced and imperturbable, Tudor the perfectionist, but this time opposed by Ron Darling, who pitched the game of his professional life. They were both gone after ten scoreless frames, and then Strawberry won the thing with one stroke-a humongous, crowd-stilling bases-empty home run in the eleventh that bounced off the digital clock at the top of the right-center-field scoreboard. Da-wight (as Ralph Kiner p.r.o.nounces his name on television) pitched the next game and won on an off day-it was his last effort of the year-in which he permitted Cardinal batters to reach base in every inning and tinkered like a Mercedes mechanic with his suddenly recalcitrant breaking ball. The Cards scored a run in the ninth, to close to within 52, and the last out of the game was a bases-loaded screamer by Tom Herr-bang into the glove of Wally Backman. I think we all knew that this was the Mets' high-water mark. They had closed to within a game of the leaders, with four to play, and it was not a shock or really much of a surprise when they lost to the Cards the next night, 43, in spite of Hernandez' five-hit outburst at the plate. The Mets had required a sweep of the series-a fantasy, a child's dream-and there was even a dour satisfaction when that did not come to pa.s.s. It is the difficulty of sustained winning baseball, the rarity of sweeps and miracles, that keeps us interested, even when we lose. I did feel bad about missing the Tudor-Darling encounter. Friends back from St. Louis told me that it had been the kind of silent, seizing ballgame that is remembered for a lifetime, and now I have begun to hold on to it in invisibility, like that one boulder in a j.a.panese rock garden that one cannot see from any vantage point, even though one knows it is there.

I had comfort in the knowledge that other fans were suffering, in other places. The Dodgers kept a cushy lead in their unferocious half of the National League and won without effort, so I exempt their fans (if that's what they are) in this a.s.sessment, but rooters for the Kansas City Royals and the California Angels and the Toronto Blue Jays never drew an easy breath after midsummer. Through the late weeks, I kept receiving baseball letters and telephone calls from Alison Gordon, a friend of mine in Toronto, who used to cover the Blue Jays as a beat writer for the Toronto Star but now does features. Suddenly this summer, she became, for the first time, an absolute fan; it was like a marriage counsellor falling in love. She and her barrister husband had season tickets behind first at Exhibition Stadium this year, and from time to time she would send me news about the games and the players-Dave Stieb's near no-hitter against the White Sox, George Bell's beginning to look like the team leader and then not looking that way-and then, as the Jays hung on and October drew near, about the excesses of the local press (a quarter page per day in the Star given to poems and prayers by reader fans; a statement in Maclean's by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood that the Blue Jays' challenge to American baseball supremacy was "like Richard the Lion-Heart going out to war," etc.), but mostly, I think, she wanted to lean on me a little because she knew that I was a long-term Red Sox and Mets rooter, which meant that I had been here before. "I can't stand it anymore," she said on the phone one morning. (It was October, and the Yankees had unexpectedly risen once again, while the Jays had just dropped three in a row to the Tigers.) "We're going to blow this thing, I know it. I was sitting at breakfast this morning and all of a sudden I burst into tears-I couldn't believe it."

I was wise and gentle and insufferable in response. Pain and trouble, I told her, were what it was all about. She was a true fan now-she belonged. The Jays would pull it out-and if they didn't she would survive. At most, she would feel heartbroken if they lost-not angry and vengeful, like Yankee fans. (That helped: she despises the Yankees.) I pointed out that some true rooters-Cubs fans, Indians people, and the like-never get to pull for a winner in their lifetimes. And so forth. Alison recovered, along with her Jays, at least until they lost the seventh game of their league playoff to the Royals, but in retrospect I think I wasn't being quite fair with her. For one thing, she was fresh to the strains of winning; the daily stabs and downers and sudden zinging highs of it all were nearly new to her, while I, an old addict, could barely recall how I had really felt back in 1967, say, when Yaz was marching the Red Sox to the finish line, or in '69, when Tom Seaver and the Mets made all New York feel young again. What I also failed to tell her was something that I fully understood only at the very end of the season, after the Mets didn't catch the Cardinals, and the Kansas City Royals did catch, in turn, the Angels, the Blue Jays, and, at the very end, the Cardinals themselves. Most of the time, I see now, the place to be is a close second. That way-for a challenging team, for its players and manager, for its fans-there is always the taut, delicious possibility that you will nail the other guys at the very end. If you don't-well, it's too bad, we weren't quite the best after all, d.a.m.n it, and if only, etc., etc. Long-term leaders like the Blue Jays (who stayed in first place from May 20th until the last hours of the A.L. playoffs) have no such release, and neither do their fans. If your team picks up a game on its pursuers, to go ahead by two, your response is: Great! Now we got 'em!...Only, I wish it were three. Why can't it be three? Lose a game, and it's: Here we go! I knew it all the time. I can't stand it anymore. Your summer is like walking down a long, dark alley with the conviction that a jaguar is about to bite you in the seat of the pants.

We Metsvolk regathered at Shea on the last Sat.u.r.day of the season for a farewell afternoon of scoreboard-watching. The magic number was down to one, and there was a small yell when the Cubs, who were playing the Cardinals out in St. Louis, put a "1" on the board in the fourth, to tie up that game for the moment, but the news before us on the field was all too clear from the beginning. The visiting Expos were cuffing Ron Darling-a homer by Dawson, a homer by Hubie Brooks in the early going-and it was plain that there would be nothing much to shout about today. (I was wrong about that, it turned out.) On the board, there were other pennant-settling engagements to think about-the Yankees losing at Toronto (beaten there by Doyle Alexander, a Yankee castoff), the Angels beating Texas (but the Royals, who would play that night, won their game, it turned out, and got to open the champagne). Hopes leaked slowly away at Shea, but no one around us in the mezzanine looked desolate or upset. It was a blowy afternoon, and dozens, then hundreds of paper airplanes took to the air, to the accompaniment of cheers. The Mets had handed out orange-and-blue scarves to the ticket holders (it was Fan Appreciation Day), and suddenly-I don't know what set it off-all forty or fifty thousand of us there began waving our scarves in the air, a festival of b.u.t.terflies, and then we laughed and applauded and cheered for that. Through most of this, two women seated just behind me kept up a sociable running commentary about the day and the team and the season. They were side by side: comfortable-looking, Mets-blazoned ladies in their upper thirties-old friends, by the sound of them. Their husbands were over in the adjoining seats.

"They tried, you know," said one of the women, sounding not unlike a Little League mom. "They didn't have it easy, with all those guys out."

"Yes, what was it with Strawberry-seven weeks, with the thumb?"

"Yeah, and Gary's knees, and then Mookie, you know. Imagine if we'd've had Strawberry all the time, it might be different. But that's the way baseball is."

The Mets had been giving away prizes and promotional gifts through the afternoon, and when the loudspeaker now announced a trip to St. Pete for two and listed the seat numbers of the winners, one of my Euripidean chorus girls said, "Why don't they give like a trip to the dugout?," and they giggled together.

On the board, the Cards went ahead by 51, and then 71, and somebody near me said, "Good. I hope they win by five hundred to one." A few folks began to head home. One man looked back up the aisle just as he turned into the exit tunnel and spotted a friend up behind me somewhere, and he tipped his head back and made a little throat-cutting gesture. He was smiling.

At last, the red light went out next to the Cubs-Cards game on the scoreboard-the Cardinals had won their pennant-and then everyone in the ballpark came to his feet to applaud the Mets. Gary Carter was up at bat just them, and when he grounded out, we called him back-"GAR-EE!" "GAR-EE!" "GAR-EE!"-and he came out and waved his helmet and gave us his engaging grin. Strawberry stepped in, to more yells and cheers, and hit a homer over the right-center-field fence-the first home run of next year, so to speak-and then he got more yells and came out again and waved his hat. It went on a longish while-the Expos batted around in the ninth, and won the game by 83, it turned out-but we stayed to the end, almost all of us, and cheered some more for our team, and for ourselves. The lights on the scoreboard gleamed in the late-afternoon shadow, and the clock there said "4:52" at the end. I went down to the clubhouse to shake hands with a few friends and wish them a good winter. The Mets looked tired and almost relieved. There was a joke floating around (n.o.body could remember who in the clubhouse said it first): "If only Doc hadn't lost those four games, we'd have had 'em then!"-but the players kept coming back to the cheers and the ovations on the field at the end there. They couldn't get over the fans.

Back in June, I received a stimulating letter from a ninety-two-year-old baseball tan named Joe Ryan, of Yountville, California, who wrote to tell me about a trip he made to New York in October 1913, to take in the opening game of the World Series between the Giants and the Philadelphia Athletics. He was twenty years old that fall and was working for an insurance company in Hartford, at a salary of fifteen dollars per week, but he and a colleague named Dave were Giants fanatics and impulsively determined to attend the cla.s.sic. Mr. Ryan's letter is wonderfully precise, conveying not only news of the sport ("It was a good game, but apprehension turned to despair when Home Run Baker put one of Marquard's best into the right-field stands...") but a careful accounting of every penny disbursed during the long-ago two-day outing. Viz: Railroad fares for two, round trip: $4.40. Room at Mills Hotel: 800 (two nights at 400 per night). Restaurants: $2.50 (Childs Restaurant breakfast, 250 per person; Childs Restaurant fried-oyster dinner, $1 per person). Hotdog lunches: 400. Transportation: 200 (nickel rides uptown and back via Ninth Ave. elevated). Tickets: $2. Lagniappe: 500 (tip to a wino who directed the out-of-towners to a gate at the park where same-day tickets were still available). Theatre tickets: $2 (balcony seats, at $1 each, to see Jane Cowl in "Within the Law"). This last was consolation for the Giants' 64 loss to the A's in the opener. "Just to look at Jane helped a lot," Mr. Ryan wrote. "We thought she was the most beautiful creature who had been allowed to live." The total budget came to $12.80, plus a possible 250 (Mr. Ryan isn't sure about this) for three Blackstone cigars.

I cite this vivid communication to make a point not about inflationary economics but about inflationary baseball. This year, the league champions.h.i.+p series were expanded to a best-of-seven-games format (they had been operating on a best-of-five system since their inception, in 1969), in the interests of augmented television revenues. The Cardinals, as we know, eliminated the Dodgers in the National League playoffs in six games, while the Royals went the full seven in knocking off the Blue Jays. Seven World Series games were then required to establish the Royals as champions: in sum, twenty postseason games. More people watched more October baseball than ever before, which may or may not be a good thing, but I think we can take it as a certainty that in the year 2057 there will not be a single surviving fan who remembers even one of these games with anything like the clarity and pleasure that Mr. Ryan so well conveys. Already, mere weeks after the games, I sense an inner blur and an accompanying incapacity to bring back more than a handful of postseason plays and innings.

Each of the playoffs opened in perfect misdirection, with the eventual losers winning the first and second games. The Dodgers, starting at home, put down Tudor at last, with the help of some slovenly Cardinal work afield, and then administered a gruesome 82 whacking to Joaquin Andujar, the combustible Dominican right-hander, who, when in difficulties, persistently damaged himself with angry down-the-middle fastb.a.l.l.s; he also bunted into a double play which he proudly did not deign to run out. I joined the action at Busch Stadium, where the Redbirds, playing before the home folks (53,708 loyalists, in 53,708 Cardinal-red ensembles), gave a marvellously quick and instructive lesson in their special style of speedball. The front three Cardinal batters-Coleman, McGee, and Herr-got to bat against Dodger starter Bob Welch in both the first and the second inning and reached base all six times, fas.h.i.+oning four runs out of four hits (one of them a homer), two walks, two stolen bases, and two jittery pickoff-play throwing errors. The Cards won by 42, and drew even in the series the following night, when they sent fourteen batters to the plate in the second inning, in a 122 walkover-"one of those games," in b.a.l.l.speak. The more significant news of the day was the grotesque workplace accident suffered before the game by young Vince Coleman, the Cardinal baserunning flash, who was knocked down and nearly devoured by an oncreeping automatic infield tarpaulin; he suffered a chipped bone in his left leg and did not reappear in further postseason action-a most damaging turn of events for the Cardinals, it turned out.

Game Five was the one that mattered: a fairish pitching duel between Fernando Valenzuela (who somehow gave up eight bases on b.a.l.l.s) and the St. Louis bullpen committee (Dayley, Worrell, Lahti), which took over in the fourth and shut down the visitors until Ozzie Smith delivered a sudden little ninth-inning homer, for a 32 victory-an amazement, inasmuch as it was his first left-handed home run (he switch-hits and had turned around to face the right-handed Dodger reliever, Tom Niedenfuer) in 4,277 professional at-bats. Dodger manager Tom Lasorda was understandably testy in the postgame interview ("What do I think about what?" he barked at a reporter. "I'm not too happy-all right!"), but this Q. and A. was a mere plate-warming compared to the rotisserie broiling that Lasorda endured immediately after Game Six, in Los Angeles. The matter at issue here may be remembered for a while, at least around the Casa Lasorda: the decision of the ever-popular Dodger manager-ahead by 54 in the ninth inning-to allow his hurler (the selfsame Niedenfuer) to pitch to Jack Clark, the muscular Cardinal cleanup batter, with first base open and Cardinal base runners at second and third, instead of giving him a prudent base on b.a.l.l.s. Clark hit the first pitch four hundred and fifty feet in to the bleachers, for the pennant. Manager Tom, in his defense, had several left-hand-vs.-right-hand, pinch-hitter-vs.-new-pitcher scripts in mind before he made his difficult decision, but I think he must be viewed as a victim of overthink. Back in St. Louis, talking to some reporters in the home clubhouse after the third game, Jack Clark had said, "Both of these teams have decided that there are certain guys they're not going to let beat them, which is why batting in that fourth spot is so hard." Lasorda forgot.

I had lunch with Alison Gordon in Toronto before the first American League playoff game. "I'm feeling better," she told me. "I'm all right, for now." I didn't see her after that, and I was secretly relieved, for her Blue Jays won the first two playoff games there-a fine 61 outing by Dave Stieb and then a surprise tenth-inning comeback victory over the Royals' stellar submariner, Dan Quisenberry-and I was certain that she had begun to think, Well, maybe!...Out at Kansas City, the Jays put together an early five-run inning, but Doyle Alexander couldn't hold it-George Brett went four-for-four (single, double, two home runs) on the day-and the Royals prevailed. Toronto next pulled out an unexpected 31 win with a startling three-run rally against Charlie Leibrandt in the ninth inning of Game Four, topped off by Al Oliver's pinch-hit double against Quisenberry, but signs of fatal turnaround were becoming evident, for the Jays had stopped hitting. They were shut out the next day by the young K.C. left-hander Danny Jackson, and then Mark Gubicza, Bud Black, and the Quis together worked out a 53 Kansas City win that brought the teams even at last. Bret Saberhagen had to leave the deciding game (we were back in Toronto by now) when he took a sharp bouncer on the palm of his pitching hand, but Leibrandt (and Quisenberry again, at the end) held off the Blue Jays without difficulty, and took the gonfalon with a 62 victory. The Royals' pitching was both wide and deep, it turned out, and the resultant strain on the other side brought out some weaknesses-a cla.s.sic turn of events. The mid-game Kansas City left-handers in the last two games (Black and Leibrandt) forced the Toronto skipper, Bobby c.o.x, to wheel in his right-handed platoons, who men proved helpless against Quisenberry. The Jays had far less pitching, especially out of their bullpen, and as the vise tightened, the lightly experienced Blue Jay lineup became cautious on the bases and began to overswing fiercely when up at bat; twenty-six Toronto batters were stranded in the last three games. In the end, everything seemed to turn against the Blue Jays-some terrible umpiring (it was just as bad for the other side, but the Toronto players brooded about it), the luck of the games, the weather, and even the dimensions of their park. Doyle Alexander, furious over a ball-four call, gave up a game-clinching double to the next and bottommost Royals. .h.i.tter, Buddy Biancalana, in Game Six. Dave Stieb, left out there far too long in Game Seven, watched a windblown pop fly by Jim Sundberg barely reach the top of the fence out in the too-short right-field corner of Exhibition Stadium, where it caromed away for a three-run triple, putting Toronto behind for the winter. I had pulled for both of these teams throughout the season, so I felt mixed emotions at the end. I should have looked up Alison Gordon, but I didn't, and after a couple of days she called me in New York. "I'm all right, but let's not talk about it," she said. "I just thought I'd tell you a subhead in the Globe & Mail here on the day after the Cardinals and Royals won, d.a.m.n it. It says, 'Missouri loves company.'"

The Missouri ballparks, east and west, presented the usual festival buntings, identical gra.s.sless lawns, and some slummocky game accompaniments by the organists. The musical commentary at Royals Stadium, though less oppressive than the Yankee Stadium stuff, is of a repellent cuteness, while the resident Schweitzer at Busch Stadium spurs on the crowds with little more than ceaseless repet.i.tions of a Budweiser jingle. The Cardinals fans appear to enjoy this custom, I must admit, happily patting their paws together in time to the commercial Braulied, but this response is as nothing compared with their enravishments during the pre-game show at Busch, when a gate in the outfield swings open to admit the famous Clydesdales, who perform several galumphing circuits of the field, pulling behind them an ancient, s.h.i.+ning beer wagon stacked high with cartons of Bud, with a waggy Dalmation perched on top. The swaying wagon seat, aloft and forward, is occupied by a busy teamster, his fists full of reins, and by August A. Busch, Jr., the diminutive eighty-six-year-old millionaire owner-brewer, bravely waving his plumed, Cardinal-red chapeau as he hangs on for dear life. I had some initial critical doubts about this spectacle, wondering whether the precedent might not encourage Mr. Steinbrenner to cruise the Yankee Stadium outfield in a replica tanker some day, but in time I began to look on the ceremonial more tolerantly, comparing it, rather, to a colorful but puzzling indigenous religious rite, like fire-walking or rajah-weighing or a blockful of beefy, sweating Sicilians groaning under their tottering ninety-foot saint's tower on some downtown feast day-a spectacle, that is, better entrusted to a National Geographic photo crew than to an out-of-town baseball writer.

The Series games, seen in brief retrospect, invite further attention to the commanding nature of stout pi