Sport: Sweet and Lingering Joy

A year is just an instant in baseball, but an inning is a long time ago, and before anyone could finish gulping or sighing, the World Series was on. If the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox take most of this week to realize where they are, it is because playoffs can hang in the air as improbably as homers off the bat of Lenny Dykstra or the glove of Dave Henderson, and neither the National nor American leagues had ever seen such playoffs.

Besides poetry, there was symmetry. Every dropped shoe seemed to have a mate. With the bases loaded in the ninth inning, Boston’s irresistible young relief pitcher, Calvin Schiraldi, was one strike from holding off the California Angels, when he plunked their immovable old leftfielder, Brian Downing, on the hip. Two extra innings later, California took a 3-game-to-1 lead and Schiraldi a seat in the dugout with his face in a towel and his profile in a tableau. But the very next day he retired Downing for the final out of the most remarkable game almost anyone could remember.

In an eleventh-inning exchange that recalled Pete Rose, Carlton Fisk and the 1975 Cincinnati-Boston World Series, Angel Bobby Grich whispered to Old Teammate Don Baylor, “What do you think, Groove?”

“The best game I’ve ever been in,” Baylor said softly.

“You and me both, pardner.”

It whirled around Henderson, 28, a spare outfielder whom Boston rescued from Seattle last August after five uneventful seasons with the Mariners. He got into the game in the fifth inning only because regular Centerfielder Tony Armas went lame. Reaching for a Grich liner just below the top of the fence in the sixth, Henderson unwittingly boosted it over the wall to give California a one-run lead that became three by the ninth. Twenty-five-year Manager Gene Mauch, 60, the longest and saddest presider in the game, appeared to be on the brink of a smile. “My emotions have calluses on them,” he said, “this big.”

But Baylor homered with a man on to make it interesting, and Henderson did the same with two outs and two strikes to make it excruciating. “We’re ballplayers,” replied Henderson when asked how with one swing left in the season he managed to block out a mortal fear of failure. “We fail most of the time.” Though the Angels tied the game in the bottom of the ninth and still had the bases loaded with only one out, Third Baseman Doug DeCinces and then Grich faltered in the clutch. After a couple of innings of outfielders’ banging walls like cymbals clashing, Henderson’s sacrifice fly finally and fittingly won. “I got no place to sleep tonight,” Mauch said numbly. “I bet my house that DeCinces would get that run in from third.”

Meanwhile New York had a game’s lead over Houston after five, but the Mets were blessed to be alive. The best team in baseball, self-appointed, batted .189 and struck out 57 times. Split-Fingered Fast-Baller Mike Scott dismayed the Mets twice; all they could do with Scott was collect allegedly scuffed baseballs and cry to the press. Dykstra’s ninth-inning homer saved a third loss, and Umpire Fred Brocklander’s mistaken out call at first base forestalled a fourth. Houston’s essential run was lost. Slumping Catcher Gary Carter eventually won that one in the twelfth inning with a flash single off flamboyant Reliever Charlie Kerfeld, who had given Carter the back of his glove and hand fielding an earlier zinger.

The eye of most storms, though, was Dykstra, 23, a 5-ft. 8-in., 160-lb. outfielder, whom the Mets cannot keep from trying to hit home runs. In his first full season in the big leagues, Dykstra has lived up to his nickname both in bearing and at bat: “Nails.” Buzzed by Nolan Ryan in the second game, he jumped up and whacked a base hit. “That kind of triggered some emotion,” mused Manager Davey Johnson. The two-run homer that won the third game moved Third Baseman Ray Knight to emote, “It was like having your lost child found.” Then Dykstra’s triple to open the ninth inning of game six effectively started a whole new ball game, one that went on tautly for 16 innings, the National League’s version of the most stirring in memory.

In a way, once the Mets made up a three-run deficit in the ninth, the seventh game was grafted onto the sixth. Their dread of Scott-in-waiting was so huge that Johnson burned his entire relief corps and most of his bridges in one all-out stand. The new short-order king of the bullpen, Roger McDowell, went longer than ever (five scoreless innings) before giving way to the deposed and somewhat forgotten Jesse Orosco. By the 14th inning, the Astros were down to Aurelio Lopez, a preposterous-looking screwball pitcher as wide and homely as a handball court. Promptly nicked for a run, Lopez watched from the dugout in sloe-eyed wonder as Houston Second Baseman Bill Doran struck out to open the home half, and Billy Hatcher, popping his bubble gum, strolled languorously to the plate.

Not since Fisk eleven years ago has anyone backpedaled up the first-base line as dramatically as the Astros’ centerfielder beseeching his narrow home run to catch in the netting that defines the leftfield foul pole of the Astrodome. But Hatcher became his own flip side in the 16th, misplaying a Darryl Strawberry fly ball into a double. Wild pitches, among other calamities, left the Astros three runs to make up in the fifth hour of their final game. With a brace of singles off fast balls, they got two of the runs scored and the tying one to second base with an out left and Leading Hitter Kevin Bass up.

Ordinarily, Mets First Baseman Keith Hernandez drops by the mound to counsel the pitcher, but this time he addressed Carter. “Kid,” he said, a perfectly natural nickname for a 32-year-old catcher, “if you call another fast ball, I’m coming to home plate, and we’re going to fight.” Seven sliders later, none of them especially close to the strike zone, Bass struck out fishing. Revalued Orosco recorded his third victory of baseball’s most intense week, and the game dissolved to the mere spectacle of a World Series.

Kid. Nails. Groove. Mex. Doc. Momentarily they will be turned into Agamemnon to serve the purposes of literature. But whoever first observed that baseball is a game small boys try to play like grown men and grown men try to play like small boys was probably profound enough. Dykstra’s cataclysmic homer put him in mind of a Strat-O-Matic dice-and-board game that he once waged against his brother. “I was Rod Carew, and I beat him.” Second Baseman Wally Backman, who spent most of the playoff series blazing new base paths to first, talked of “thinking back on all the games I ever saw as a kid. I just don’t remember seeing any as good as these.”

Or as bad. The first awful display that the Angels put on in Fenway Park, foreshadowing their final two staggers in Boston, took California Pitcher Don Sutton, 41, back to his root-beer days. “The last time I saw a game like this,” he said wistfully, “the coach wouldn’t take us to the Tastee-Freez.” Ground balls were lost in the sun, popups in the shadows, but Grich looked the most misplaced of all, blaming Third Base Coach Moose Stubing too savagely for botching a signal. Grich remains spry enough at 37 to lash game-winning hits, but he had grown too old for baseball and after the last out retired.

Most seasons, there is little enough nobility left for the loser of the World Series, but this may be the oddest year, where the playoff victims are actually mourned and remembered. Because of a mysterious leg infection, possibly from a spider bite, the Angels were deprived of their best player, Rookie First Baseman Wally Joyner, for the three straight losses. Confounded only by the ump in a nine-inning two-hitter, Nolan Ryan struck out twelve Mets not just with an aching elbow but for four innings on a sprained ankle. “A lot goes into getting you this far,” Ryan said, “and so little keeps you from going farther.”

The beleaguered city of Houston, jinxed in oil and space and now ninthinning rallies, showed particular grace and unusual humor in defeat. A courageous child “soloist” in a pinafore came out on the infield and sang the national anthem before the last game, and the morning after the Chronicle reported, “Around 2 p.m., little Amber Pennington, seven years old, fought her way through The Star-Spangled Banner before the start of the sixth game of the National League Championship Series. Before the game was over, Amber joined the Brownies, the Girl Scouts and went to her senior prom. She was married, had two children and took up aerobics.”

By the end of the World Series, she may be too old to care.