SPORT: A BRAVURA SEASON

BASEBALL GOT WHAT IT DIDN’T DEserve. Namely, baseball. A season that began with 48-year-old Pedro Borbon Sr. wheezing and falling off the mound as a replacement pitcher ended with a glorious World Series in which 27-year-old Pedro Borbon Jr. was warming up in the ninth inning for the world champion Atlanta Braves. A season that at first seemed too short because of its 144-game schedule provided fans with too many memories. Forget the owners, forget the union activists, forget the Baseball Network, whatever that was. Remember that the game, if left alone long enough, can restore itself.

As the Braves cavorted amid the fireworks at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium Saturday night after their 1-0 victory over the Cleveland Indians, they seemed to be shaking off the monkeys of their two recent Series failures. There was David Justice, who hit a solo homer in the sixth off Jim Poole; Tom Glavine, whose one-hit pitching over eight innings, coupled with his win in Game Two, earned him the Series MVP award; and Mark Wohlers, who dispatched the top of the vaunted Cleveland order in the ninth to give the Braves their first World Championship in 38 years.

They should have been joined by the entire cast from 1995: Cal Ripken, Hideo Nomo, Mo Vaughn, Randy Johnson, Trammell and Whitaker–even Mickey Mantle. The season just past is as worthy of celebration as the Braves are.

First and foremost, there was Ripken. It’s hard to say which number was more noteworthy, the 2,153rd consecutive games the Orioles shortstop has played in, or the 200 million autographs he signed in an effort to reunite the game with the people. The 46,000 fans who were at Camden Yards on Sept. 6 aren’t about to forget the fifth inning, when his 2,131st straight game became official and they made him jog around the park–an odd way to show their appreciation for someone’s work ethic.

There were other nice stories in baseball this year: the arrival from Japan of Nomo, the revival of the franchise in Seattle, the retiring of the Detroit Tigers’ longtime double-play combination of Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell. The Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, who between them have 164 years without a world championship, teased their fans for a while. Even the death of Mantle in August had a sweetness to it, as people called him up to mind the way the Yankees called him up in 1951.

Then there were the savagely named Braves and Indians. Cleveland won 100 games, which is astonishing in a season with only 144. What made their record even more remarkable is that during spring training in 1993, the team had to regroup after the tragic deaths of two of their pitchers, Tim Crews and Steve Olin, in a boating accident. So when the Indians raised the division championship flag after clinching the American League Central on Sept. 8, manager Mike Hargrove made sure they played the Garth Brooks song The Dance–the same song played at the memorial service for the pitchers.

Man for man, the Braves had neither the talents nor the physiques of the Indians. In fact, you might see better builds in the local country-club locker room than in the Atlanta clubhouse, which actually does have a miniature golf course. But as manager Bobby Cox says, “They may not look like much, but Greg Maddux, Mark Lemke, Tom Glavine, Rafael Belliard–those little guys can play for me any day of the week. We don’t have a lot of superstars. But we do have a team.”

The two sides of baseball were readily apparent in the World Series. On the one hand, you had Cleveland pitcher Orel Hershiser, who was so nice that he stopped his press conference after winning Game Five because he heard someone’s tape recorder click off on the table in front of him. (He found the recorder, flipped over the cassette and resumed talking.) On the other hand, Hershiser’s teammate, Albert Belle, verbally assaulted nbc reporter Hannah Storm as she waited in the Indians’ dugout before Game Three. (Shouldn’t Albert and Hannah swap names?)

Then there was the brief, out-of-character confrontation between Hershiser and Greg Maddux in the first inning of Game Five, after Maddux brushed back Eddie Murray. “I told him, ‘You can do better than that,’ says Hershiser. “He just looked at me, and we shared respectful glances.”

If one image stands for ’95, it might be from the late innings of Game One of the American League Championship Series between the Mariners and the Indians. Seattle manager Lou Piniella had taken a gamble on an unproven 22-year-old rookie, Bob Wolcott, and Wolcott came through with a surprising and winning performance, even though he had walked the bases full with nobody out in the first inning. There was Wolcott sitting with the 6-ft. 10-in. ace of the staff, Randy Johnson. The veteran patted Wolcott on the leg as if to say, “Nice going, kid,” and Wolcott grinned from ear to ear.

Nice going, baseball.