The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 24

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What was happening, I should say at long last, was that Doc was simply trying to become a better major-league pitcher. Outs, not strikeouts, are what count, and Gooden, who is intelligent, has clearly been persuaded that retiring the side on six or eight pitches, with no strikeouts, is easier on an arm and on a career than taking fifteen or sixteen pitches to fan the side. In spring training this year, I saw Gooden working a.s.siduously at a new pitch-an off-speed, high-to-low breaking ball-to add to his famous fastball and its lethal curveball counterpart. He fell in love with the new delivery, as young pitchers do when they find a beautiful toy, and for a time he had success with it in the regular season. The K"s went down, as we have seen, but his performance and his success ratio were just about as before. In midseason, though, he ran into unexpected difficulties, and there were several games in which I saw him begin to struggle as never before. He would miss-just miss-with a cut fastball or an off-speed breaking ball, and fall behind in the count, and when he then came back to the fastball and its companion he often couldn"t quite find the strike zone. The heater would be up a bit, or wouldn"t seem to have much movement on it even when it was in the black. He began walking batters, sometimes five, or even six, in a game (unheard of, for him), and after May 6th there were no more shutouts. He had some excellent games along the way (a four-hitter and a two-hitter in September), but he wasn"t the same: he was a little less.

In the postseason games (to look ahead a bit), Gooden pitched powerfully in his two starts in the playoffs, and his loss in his only decision was on an unearned run; in the Series, he gave up six runs in five innings in Game Two (he was the loser), and was taken out in the fifth inning of Game Five, by which time he had given up four runs and nine hits. He was deeply troubled by this last outing, and so were his teammates and his manager. But never mind the results for the moment. To me, Dwight Gooden in this game looked like a different pitcher altogether, just as he had in some stretches in midseason. The beautiful flow and freedom of his delivery weren"t there, even when he did throw the fastball for a strike. He didn"t seem to be finishing his motion in quite the same place as he did last year, with his body twisted over to the left and the fingers of his pitching hand almost down by his left shoe. He was straighter away on the mound, somehow.

My guess about Dwight is that he slightly altered his pitching motion (his mechanics, in the parlance) this summer in the course of mastering his new off-speed delivery, and then found he couldn"t always get back the stuff and the great control that were there, game after game after game, last year. He said he was squeezing the ball too hard at times, he said he had problems with his location. Whatever it was, he wasn"t all of a piece out there, which is what great pitchers look like and the way they feel themselves to be when things are going right for them. Bob Boone, the Angels catcher, told me that it had probably taken young Mike Witt an extra season or two to get his pitching act together, because Witt is so tall. (He is six-seven.) "His checkpoints are farther apart," Boone said, with a smile. Gooden"s checkpoints (this foot, that shoulder, the turn on the rubber, the microsecond when the arm starts forward, and so on) may have drifted apart by a fraction or two this summer, because of the very different motion and rhythm involved in throwing an off-speed delivery. Now he will have to get them together again.

After Gooden"s departure in Game Four, Marty Barrett, the Red Sox second baseman, said, "I feel Dwight"s mechanics are a little off. I went against him in spring training when he had that great year last year, and he was more straight up and over the top then. Now it"s almost like he"s throwing over and moving across his body." One of the Mets regulars said to me, "If Marty Barrett says anything like that, you can believe it. Anything from Barrett is like a message from Western Union. I think that"s what happened to Doc, and it made it a tough year for him. But we all have tough years. Now he"ll just have to go out there and get it back. Don"t bet against him."

*The news about Gooden"s difficulties with cocaine, which came to light in the early spring of 1987, damages this advice, of course, but it is still difficult to say whether Gooden"s addiction (he was a social or occasional user, according to his physicians) affected his work in 1986.

Game Three, National League Championship Series

IT CAME ON A chilly gray afternoon at Shea Stadium, and by the end of the second inning the Mets were in heavy weather of their own making, down by 40 to the Astro left-handed starter Bob Knepper. These N.L. playoffs, it will be recalled, had opened at the Astrodome with a dominant, almost suffocating 10 shutout performance by the Astros" big, sleepy-faced right-hander Mike Scott, who had struck out fourteen Mets batters with his darting split-fingered fastball and high heater, thus nullifying a strong effort by Dwight Gooden. The visitors had evened matters the next day, when the Mets, blown away by Nolan Ryan in his first trip down their batting order, jumped on him for five quick runs on their second look, to win 51, behind their left-handed off-speed precisionist Bob Ojeda. But here at Shea the sudden four-run Houston lead looked serious, for Knepper, a ten-year veteran with exquisite control, had defeated the Mets three times during the regular season, and we knew that Scott, the best pitcher in the National League this year, would be back for the Astros the very next day. Watching these glum proceedings from my press seat in deep left field (the foul pole actually blocked my view of the mound), I was afflicted by grumpiness and self-pity. The night before, at home by my television set, I had watched the Red Sox drop a 53 game to the Angels out in Anaheim, to slip behind in their playoffs by two games to one. My dream was already coming apart, and here at my sixth game in five days (two up at Fenway Park and three via television) I felt baseballed out. Ron Darling, the Mets" starter, had composed himself after two egregious innings (five hits, a base on b.a.l.l.s to the No. 8 batter, two stolen bases, a wild pitch, and a two-run homer by second baseman Bill Doran), but the Mets in their dugout-as viewed unsteadily through my binoculars-looked glum and wintry, with their arms crossed and their paws buried in the pockets or the armpits of their shiny blue warmup jackets. In among them I could pick out Wally Backman and Lenny Dykstra, the Mets" dandy two-cylinder self-starting machine that had figured in so many uprisings this summer, Dykstra bats from the left side and Backman is a switch hitter who does much better against right-handers, and so both were sitting out Knepper. ("I don"t care how fiery you are," Mets manager Davey Johnson said about Dykstra before the game. "It"s on-base average that counts.") The Shea mult.i.tudes made imploring noises from time to time, but they, too, looked m.u.f.fled and apprehensive. Nothing doing.

Kevin Mitch.e.l.l led off the Mets" sixth with a single over third, and Keith Hernandez followed with a modest fly ball that dropped into short center field for another hit-nothing much, except that Craig Reynolds, the Astro shortstop, now booted a grounder by Gary Carter (a double-play ball, in fact), sending Mitch.e.l.l home, and Darryl Strawberry lofted Knepper"s next pitch into the first deck in right field, to tie the game. I revived instantly, but also briefly, for the Mets now handed back the gift run-a walk (Rick Aguilera was pitching for the home side by now), a throwing error by Ray Knight, and an infield out-and very soon thereafter had to deal with Charlie Kerfeld, the Astros" lumpy, menacing right-handed rookie flamethrower, who blew out the candle in the eighth on a handful of pitches. Kerfeld is a hotdog-all shades, chaw, belly, and heat out there-and when he somehow reached behind his back to spear Carter"s hard one-hop grounder to the mound, he pointed at Gary as he ran up the line, relishing the moment before he threw him out.

I had improved my seat by a section or two during the afternoon, scrounging the places of no-show reporters closer to the action, but at the end of the eighth I decamped for the interview room, just beyond the Mets clubhouse in the nether corridors of the park-a way to beat the crowds, and a pretty good vantage point from which to watch the last few outs of a game, by means of a giant television monitor. Panting, but certain of my long wisdom in these matters, I attained my goal, to find the room virtually deserted: somebody had forgotten to set up the monitor. And so it happened that I got to see not the longest game-winning home run of my life but certainly the smallest-the sudden two-run, bottom-of-the-ninth smash to right by Lenny Dykstra that I watched, huddling with similarly misplaced media friends, via a palm-size Sony Watchman TV set that one foresighted reporter had brought along to the game. Peering like microbiologists, we watched the mini-replays and filled in the missing details. Backman, pinch-hitting, had dropped a leadoff bunt down the first-base line and made a skidding slide into the bag around an attempted tag by first baseman Glenn Davis; then he had motored along to second on a pa.s.sed ball. The Houston pitcher was the Astros" short-relief specialist Dave Smith, who had been wheeled in by manager Hal Lanier to wrap things up, thus expunging Kerfeld. Now a postage-stamp-size Backman, seen in black-and-white slow-motion replay, flung up his arms as he watched Dykstra"s homer sail into the Mets" bullpen and then began his jumping, backward-running dance toward third, while the rest of the Mets streamed onto the field to celebrate the 65 victory and their sudden lead in the playoffs. Dykstra, it should be explained, had come into the game in the seventh, when he fanned against Knepper. Davey Johnson was proud of this maneuver (he likes to have his pair of deuces in there late in a game), and explained that he had guessed-guessed right, it turned out-that Knepper would shortly be done for the day, leaving Dykstra still in there to swing against a right-hander his next licks.

Dykstra is a pistol. In this, his first full season, he not only had won the job in center field (moving Mookie Wilson to left, on most days, and permitting the club to drop the increasingly ineffective George Foster) but had quickly emplaced his engaging and brattish mannerisms in our ma.s.s Shea consciousness-his odd preliminary forward lean in the batter"s box, with bat held upright, as if to conk a burglar; the facial twitches, winces, and squinchings as he prepares for the pitch, and, before that, the peculiar, delicate twiddling of a gloved fingertip along his brow; the joyful little double jump and hand pop as he comes to a dusty stop beyond first with another base hit; and, contrariwise, his disbelieving, Rumpelstiltskin stamp of rage when a pitcher has caught a corner against him for strike three. Here in the interview room, Lenny was all cool and charisma-a guest on some late-night talk show. He said that the only other time he had hit a winning home run in the bottom of the ninth was in Strat-O-Matic (a board game), against his kid brother, Kevin.

In the clubhouses, I heard more talk about Strawberry"s home run than about Dykstra"s. Strawberry had suffered through a ghastly midsummer batting slump (he was booed horrendously by the upper-deck critics at Shea, where he went 0 for August), and had looked particularly helpless against left-handed pitching. The three-run homer struck off Knepper meant something, then-something beyond this game. Keith Hernandez said, "Baseball is a constant learning experience. Nothing happens very quickly for most hitters, and you have to remind yourself that Darryl is still only twenty-four years old. He"s played four years in the majors, but he"s still a baby. It isn"t often that a Gehrig or a Mattingly comes along, who can do it all at the plate right away. When I first came up, the Matlacks and Koosmans and Carltons of this league-all those left-handers-gave me fits. Jim Rooker just killed me at the plate. You have to be patient and try to learn to adjust, and Darryl is still learning."

What happened on this afternoon (and again in the fifth game of the playoff, when Straw whacked another telling homer against the Astros) did not quite turn Strawberry"s year around, for he batted only .208 in the World Series, with six strikeouts and a lone, superfluous home run and run batted in on his very last at-bat. He is an enigma and a challenge, perhaps to himself as much as to us and to his club, and his style (those thick, long young arms; the looping, easeful swing; the long-loping catch in right-center field that ends with a casual heavenward reach to suck in the ball, with the gesture of somebody taking down a hat from a top shelf) is always so effortless that it looks magical when it succeeds and indolent when it fails. Each year, we wait for the performance that will lift his numbers (.259 this year, with twenty-seven homers and ninety-three runs batted in) to the next level, which is superstardom; each year, that once-certain goal seems a little farmer away.

Here in the clubhouse, Strawberry said that Knepper had been throwing him breaking b.a.l.l.s all afternoon (he"d nubbed one down the third-base line in the fifth, for a thirty-foot single), and he had guessed fastball the next time up-guessed right, that is. The batting and first-base coach Bill Robinson said, "When Darryl got on base after that little hit, I said "That"s the way to beat on that ball!" and he told me maybe that at-bat would make him stay in the next time up. And that"s what he did do-he kept his right side in on that swing and didn"t pull off the ball. I tell them all, "Guess fastball." You can adjust to a curveball, a knuckleball, a slider, or a change off the fastball, but it"s tough to guess a curveball, a knuckleball, a slider, or a change and men hit the fastball. I believe most pitchers will throw the fastball six out of ten times. So six out of ten times I"m sitting on dead red and knowing I still have a chance on the others. If Knepper throws me a good slider or something outside that"s nasty, I"m not going to hit it anyway. You can count me good breaking-ball hitters in this league on the fingers of one hand-well, the fingers of two hands. We"re all fastball hitters in the end."

Game Five, American League Championship Series

Home in fine fettle after the Mets" sudden resurrection that Sat.u.r.day, I had a drink and some dinner, and took my ease in front of the set, where my Red Sox, out in the late sunshine at Anaheim Stadium, played resolute, patient ball in their almost boring Game Four, eventually dispatching the ancient and wily Don Sutton in the seventh inning. (I should explain that the two sets of playoffs never exactly overlapped in their progression, thanks to the vagaries of the network schedulers.) The Sox" 30 lead midway through the ninth looked safe as houses, for their pitcher was Roger Clemens, their soon-to-be winner of both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player awards in his league; he had gone 244 for the season, after winning his first fourteen decisions in a row, and had also established a new all-time record by striking out twenty batters in an April game against the Seattle Mariners. So far in this game, Clemens had simply brushed aside the Angels, allowing no one to reach third base; three more outs would bring the teams even in their playoff, at two games apiece. But in fact Clemens was running out of gas, and after a leadoff home run by Doug DeCinces in the ninth and one-out singles by d.i.c.k Schofield and Bob Boone he was abruptly gone. His successor, the young fastballer Calvin Schiraldi, suffered a nasty shock when a well-hit but catchable fly by Gary Pettis became a run-scoring double because Jim Rice lost the ball in the lights. With the score now 32, and with the bases loaded after an intentional pa.s.s, Schiraldi fanned Bobby Grich and went to two strikes and one ball on Brian Downing, but then hit him on the thigh with his overreaching next pitch ("Oh, no!" I cried, badly startling the snoozing terrier at my feet as I sailed up out of my chair, to the invisible balletic accompaniment of three or four million Sox fans to the north and east of me-along with their dogs, I suppose), to force in the tying run. The Angels won it in the eleventh (oh, yes), bringing exquisite joy to their rooters but ruin to my overcrowded baseball day.

Game Five, played out lengthily at Anaheim the next afternoon, has already taken its place on the little list of Absolute All-Timers, and I must a.s.sume that its immoderate events are known by heart by even the most casual followers of the pastime. The Angels pitched their main man, Mike Witt, a spidery righthander with an exceptional curveball, which he throws in two variant modes; he had eaten up the Red Sox batters in the playoff opener, retiring the first seventeen in a row. Now he survived a two-run homer by Rich Gedman in the early going and was still in command as the ninth began, with his club ahead by 52, three outs away from a pennant. The last two California runs had come in when Dave Henderson, the second Boston center fielder of the day (he had entered the game after Tony Armas twisted an ankle), made a fine running catch of Grich"s deep drive, only to have the momentum of his effort carry the ball up over the top of the center-field wall and, appallingly, out of his glove for a home run. In the ninth, Witt gave up a single to Bill Buckner, fanned Rice, and then threw a pretty good breaking ball, down and away, to Don Baylor, who reached out and drove it over the left-field fence: a sobering moment there in Southern California.* Dwight Evans popped up for the second out, though, and manager Gene Mauch called in a left-hander, Gary Lucas, to pitch to the left-side batter Gedman, in search of one more out and a championship. The tactic, arguably logical (and arguably the only appropriate occasion for "arguably" ever to see print), since Gedman had ripped Witt for a homer, a double, and a single for the day, didn"t work, because Lucas plunked Gedman on the hand with his first pitch, thereby setting up the next confrontation, between Dave Henderson and the Angels" less than imperious right-handed relief stopper Donnie Moore, who had thrown well in his most recent appearance. With the crowd putting up an insupportable din, with the ushers arrayed along the baselines and police stuffing the dugouts and bullpens, with the Angels up on their topmost dugout step for the pennant spring and the huggings and the champagne, Henderson worked the count to two and two, fouled off two fastb.a.l.l.s, and then hit the next delivery-a forkball, perhaps-into the left-field seats. Silence and disbelief out there. Exultation on the opposite coast. The Angels, it will be recalled, quickly made up the new one-run deficit in their half of the ninth, and even had the next winning run-the pennant-winner once again-poised at third base when DeCinces popped to short right field and Grich lined out softly to the pitcher. These extended melodramatics had settled nothing so far (Al Michaels, the exemplary ABC television play-by-play man, summed things up along about here by saying, "If you"re just tuning in, too bad"), but now it suddenly seemed clear that the Red Sox would win, although that took a couple of innings: a hit batsman (it was Baylor), a single, an unplayable bunt by Gedman, and the winning sacrifice fly to center-by Henderson, of course. Schiraldi came in at the end and got the save. The Angels repacked their gear and de-iced the champagne (I guess) and returned to Boston, where they lost their last two games of the year, 104 and 81. "I don"t think we ever should have had to come back here," Donnie Moore said when it was all over.

My eagle-eye view of Game Five was not nearly as clear as I have depicted it, since duty forced me to leave my TV set in the middle of the ninth that evening and head back to Shea for the fourth Mets-Astros affray, and I picked up most of the amazing and extended events in Anaheim over my car radio while tooling along op the Grand Central Parkway. Taking pity on his old man, my son taped the action on our VCR, and when I got home very late that night (the Mets had lost again to Mike Scott, just as I had feared) I played the last three innings over for myself, and, sure enough, the Red Sox won, 76, in eleven innings. It was the first time all month I didn"t have to keep score.

I thought back on this game many times after the Red Sox had won their championship and the Angels had packed up and gone home for the winter, but with a good deal less than pure pleasure. These last-moment reprieves and reversals are so anguishing for the losing players and coaches (and the fans, too, to be sure) that one"s thoughts return to them unbidden, long after the winners" celebrations have been forgotten. Players in the winning clubhouse always look like boys (and not just because they are behaving like infants), while the ones in the other clubhouse resemble veteran combat soldiers who have barely survived some dreadful firefight. They look worse after a playoff defeat than after the World Series, because the losing team in a championship elimination has won nothing at all; it has become a trivia question. Even the Red Sox players, I noticed later on, talked about their narrow escape in Game Five with dire, near-funereal images. "We were on our deathbed," Roger Clemens said. "The heartbeat meter was on a straight line." John McNamara, who has a whispery, monsignorlike habit of speech, said to me, "We were dead and buried. When Henderson went to two strikes and the police were all set to go, I looked over and saw Reggie taking off his gla.s.ses in their dugout, getting ready for the celebration. That"s how close we were."

I feel bad about the Angels, who were a team made up of some distinguished, or very well-known, older players-Don Sutton, Reggie Jackson, Doug DeCinces, Bob Boone, Brian Downing, George Hendrick, Rick Burleson, and Bobby Grich (Sutton and Jackson are in their forties, and the others in their upper thirties)-who fitted well with younger stars like d.i.c.k Schofield, Gary Pettis, Mike Witt, Kirk McCaskill, and the splendid rookie first baseman Wally Joyner. (He missed all but the first game of the playoffs with a leg infection.) I see that I have just referred to the Angels in the past tense, which is understandable, for this particular Angels team has ceased to exist. Grich has already retired, Jackson is a free agent-with no a.s.surance that anyone will pick him up for next season-and so are Downing, Boone, and DeCinces, and management has been extremely quiet about which of the other expensive old-timers we will see in Anaheim next summer. I feel sorry for Gene Autry, the seventy-nine-year-old president and chairman of the board, who is revered in the game (he is known as the Cowboy) and has owned the still pennantless team ever since its inception, as an expansion club, in 1961.

I even feel bad about the Angels fans. There is a popular dumb theory here in the East that there is no such thing as a California Angels fan, and that those two-and-a-half-million-attendance totals at Anaheim Stadium, year after year, are made up of moonlighting sunbathers and foot-weary families resting up from Disneyland. This is parochial nonsense, of course, and it"s about time we old-franchise inheritors admitted the Angelvolk to the ranks of the true sufferers-the flagellants, the hay-in-the-hair believers, the sungazers, the Indians-worshippers, the Cubs coo-coos, the Twins-keepers, the Red Sox Calvinists: the fans. I have heard from a few of them by mail. One pen pal, a professor of Byzantine history from Canoga Park, California, sent me a five-page single-s.p.a.ced typed letter delineating his pains and his heroes down the years, starting in 1961, when the Angels played at the Pacific Coast League Wrigley Field, in Los Angeles, and won seventy games in their very first season. "Now we know that rooting for the Angels is just like rooting for the Red Sox," he wrote. "One does it guardedly, always looking over one"s shoulder." Another Angels correspondent, a medical-journal editor who lives in San Francisco, sent along his scorecards for the A.L. playoff games this fall-beautifully detailed, meticulously executed, pitch-by-pitch delineations of the seven games, which concluded with a gigantic, smudgy execration of Gene Mauch scrawled across the bottom of the seventh-game score-card: the last Angels loss of the year. My correspondent apologized for this in a covering note: "I"m sorry-I was very upset. I still am."

I feel bad about Gene Mauch, too-everybody feels bad about Mauch by now-who has managed in the majors for twenty-five years without ever setting foot in the World Series, although he had come excruciatingly close before this. In 1964, his Phillies led the National League (this was before divisional play) by six and a half games with two weeks to go, and then lost ten of their last twelve games and, on the last day, the pennant. Four years ago, his Angels led the Milwaukee Brewers in the five-game American League playoffs by two games to one but lost-an outcome so painful that Mauch moved up to the front office for a couple of seasons, and took up the managerial burdens again only last year. He is a dour, unapologetic baseball chancellor (a former colleague of his told me that he"d never heard Mauch ask an opinion or invite a discussion about any move he had made, on or off the field), who has acquired a sharply divided body of pa.s.sionate loyalists and dedicated doubters in the press boxes and front offices of the game. He has also been second-guessed as much as anyone in his hard profession, but this, I have come to believe, is due not so much to his hard-sh.e.l.l exterior or to his reputation for over-managing as to a deep wish, however unconscious, among other managers and players and watchers of the game to prove that baseball really is more tractable, more manageable in its results, more amenable to tactics and patience and clear thinking, than it seems to have been for him. All of us-even us fans-want the game to be kinder to us than it has been to Gene Mauch, and we are terribly anxious to find how that could be made to happen. No group of games in recent memory had produced anything like the second-guessing of managers that one heard at these two championships, but this is explained, to my way of thinking, by the fact that five of the thirteen games were settled in the ninth inning or later-in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and sixteenth, to be precise-and that prolonging reties were also produced, twice in a ninth inning and once in a fourteenth.

Mauch"s moves during Boston"s ninth inning of that fifth game, when the three-run Angels lead was converted to a one-run deficit, will be a Gettysburg for tactical thinkers for years to come. An old friend of mine who has managed extensively in both leagues was in Anaheim that afternoon, and later on I asked him what it was like when it all began to come apart for the Angels out there, and what he would have done in the same circ.u.mstances.

"When Baylor hit his home run, the game still didn"t have that feeling of doom," he said. "You thought, All right, you don"t win 52, you win 54. There were so many different directions Gene could have gone-he just chose the one that didn"t work. Gedman looked like the problem, because he"d gone three for three against Witt. But for me, the one to worry about, the key batter, is the next guy, the right-handed hitter Henderson, and I"m not too worried about him, because my very best right-handed pitcher-my best pitcher of all-is still in the game. Mike Witt, I mean. He"s just struck out Rice and popped up Evans, so he can"t be all that tired. If he loses Gedman somehow, he just needs to get Henderson out, and if he can"t do that, then we don"t deserve the pennant. And Henderson would have a whole lot more trouble against him than against a Donnie Moore.

"We know that Gene went to Lucas, and Lucas came in and hit Gedman. Gene"s move could have worked, but I think the wrong man hit Gedman. If Witt hits him, it"s a very different story. With Witt on the mound and Gedman coming up to bat and all eager for that next rip at my pitcher, I would have walked out to Witt and said, "Look, the next batter is the one you want. Don"t worry about Mr. Gedman. Hit him on the hip with your first pitch, and if you miss go back and hit him with the next one. Then go after Henderson and we"re out of this and into the World Series."

"You know, when Donnie Moore came in after Lucas, I had the same little feeling I"d had back in Milwaukee when Gene"s Angels got so close in "82: Now, wait a minute: this is ours, but it isn"t quite ours yet-let"s not gather the bats. And then it all happened again. The fans took it hard, but I think they felt, Well, OK, we still just need one of the two games back in Boston. But you only had to look at the players" faces to know that it had gotten away from them and it might never come back. Once that phoenix gets out of the ashes, he wants to fly."

My friend the manager told me that he felt terrible about Gene Mauch. "He"s been in this place for so long, and he won"t give in to it and he won"t walk away from it. This one"s going to be very tough for him. He gets within one pitch and one run of the Series, but all those "one"s are still there for him. I know Gene, and I know all the cigarettes that have been smoked and the drinks that have been drunk and the miles that have been paced over this kind of thing, down the years. He"ll pay that price to get there, but now I don"t know if it will ever happen for him. How do you go on?"

*Baylor"s home ran, which I watched again and again in taped replay during the winter, ranks as Feat of the Month in this feat-filled October. Witt"s pitch broke sharply away over the farthermost part of the strike zone, and Baylor not only got his bat on it but somehow muscled the ball over the opposite-side fence.

Game Six, National League Championship Series

I wasn"t there, and had to pick up most of its extended, convoluted, and startling events in bits and pieces-by television and cab radio and word of mouth and television again-and then put them together in my head at last with the help of another tape made for me by the Mets screamers at my house. I was in Boston for the American League finale, and the Mets and Astros, as we know, had moved back to the Astrodome. The day before, I had seen the Mets go one up in their playoffs, in a makeup afternoon game at Shea (the thing had been rained out the night before), in which Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden pitched each other to a 11 standstill over the regulation distance. Ryan, who is thirty-nine years old, fanned twelve Mets and threw a two-hitter, but one of the two was a home run by Strawberry. Ryan left after nine innings and Gooden after ten, and the Mets won in the twelfth, when Gary Carter rapped a run-scoring single past Kerfeld"s rump, which Charlie this time did not grab behind his back, although he tried. The Astros were sore about an umpire"s out call at first base, which had cost them a run back in the second inning, but nothing could be done about it, of course.

I took in most of Game Six the next afternoon by television in my Boston hotel room-not much sport, to tell the truth, for the Mets instantly fell behind by three runs in the first inning, and could do nothing at all against Bob Knepper over their initial eight. It"s embarra.s.sing to curse and groan and shout "C"mon!" twenty or thirty times in an empty hotel room, but yelling and jumping up and down on the bed-which is what I did during Dykstra"s pinch-hit triple, Mookie"s single, Keith"s double, and Ray Knight"s game-tying sac, all in the Mets ninth-is perfectly all right, of course. And here, perhaps, we should pause for statistical confirmation of the kind of baseball week that it had turned out to be. Somebody along about here had noticed or discovered that in the six hundred and forty-two postseason games played prior to 1986 no team had ever made up a deficit of more than two runs in its final chance at bat. Now it had happened three times in five days.*

Darkness had fallen on the Public Garden by the time the Mets got all even, and I was overdue at Fenway Park. Four or five times, I turned off the set, grabbed my game gear, and headed for the door, only to come back and click on again for another out or two. (I didn"t know it at the time, but millions of Mets fans in New York were in the same pickle; baseball had burst its seams and was wild in the streets.) The Mets scratched out a run at last in the fourteenth, against Aurelio Lopez (possibly a leftover character actor from a Cisco Kid movie), and that was good enough for me: the Mets had it in hand for sure. I doused the game and headed out to keep my other date, and so missed Billy Hatcher"s gargantuan solo home run into the left-field foul-pole screen, which retied things in the bottom half. The sixteenth did wrap it up at very long last, but my patchwork impressions of its events (s.n.a.t.c.hes over somebody"s radio just ahead of me on the outside staircase at Fenway Park, and then glimpses on a TV monitor at the back of the overstuffed rooftop pressroom while several scribe friends tried to catch me up, viva voce, at the same time) have required subsequent firming up by tape. The Mets" three runs in the top half of the sixteenth and the Astros" gallant but insufficient answering pair in the bottom are still thrilling, of course, but the fatigue and bad nerves of the princ.i.p.als make you jittery, even in replay. Strawberry"s mighty-swing semi-bloop fly became a double when the Houston center fielder, Hatcher, got a very late start in for the ball, and a throwing error by right fielder Kevin Ba.s.s and two wild pitches helped the Mets almost as much as Knight"s single and then Dykstra"s. Jesse Orosco (who won three games in the playoffs) was so arm-weary by the uttermost end that fastb.a.l.l.s became an impossibility for him; one last, expiring sinker fanned Ba.s.s, with the tying run at second, and that was the pennant. A moment or two earlier, Davey Johnson (he told some of us about this back in New York), with the enormous, domed-in roarings of the Houston mult.i.tudes cascading and reverberating around him, noticed that his nearest companion in the Mets" dugout, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, looked a tad nervous. Davey leaned closer and said, "Come on, Mel, you knew this had to come down to one run in the end. It"s that kind of game."

What I missed by not being in Houston that day may have been less than what I missed by not being in New York. The pennant-clinching celebrations in Boston were happy indeed (about a four on the Roger Scale), but the excruciating prolongation and eventual exultation of the Mets" Game Six were something altogether different-a great public event, on the order of a blackout or an armistice. The game began at 3:06, New York time, and ended at 7:48, and in that stretch millions of Mets fans in and around New York, caught between their day-watch of the game and some other place they had to be, found themselves suspended in baseball"s clockless limbo, in a vast, mobile party of anxious watching and listening and sudden release. Sports can bring no greater reward than this, I think. In time, I-like many others, I imagine-began to collect Game Six stories: where folks had been that night, and what they had seen and heard and done during the long game"s journey into night. There was no rush hour in New York that evening, I kept hearing: so many office workers stayed in their offices to follow the game that the buses and avenues in midtown looked half empty. Subway riders on the IRT platform at Grand Central heard the score and the inning over the train announcer"s loudspeaker. A man I know who was in bed with the flu or something said that he rose to a sitting position during the Mets" rally in the ninth, and then left his bed and paced the floor; when it was all over, he got up and got dressed and was cured. Another man, a film editor-not at all a fan-was running around the Central Park Reservoir when a strange, all-surrounding noise stopped him in his tracks. It came from everywhere around the Park, he said, and it wasn"t a shout or a roar but something closer to a sudden great murmuring of the city: the Mets had won.

Men and women on commuter trains followed the news by Panasonic or Sony, cl.u.s.tering around each radio set for the count and the pitch, and calling the outs and the base runners to the others in their car. At the Hartsdale platform, in Westchester, a woman with a Walkman, having said goodbye to other alighting commuters as they hurried off to their car radios, started up a stairway and then stopped and cried "Oh!" Her companions from the train stared up at her, stricken, and she said, "Gary got thrown out, stealing." There were portables and radios at Lincoln Center, too, where the ticket holders at the Metropolitan Opera"s performance of "The Marriage of Figaro" reluctantly gave the game up at seven-thirty and went in and took their seats for the overture. After a moment or two, a man in the orchestra section sprang up and disappeared through a side exit; he slipped back in a few minutes later (he"d found someone in the cloakroom with a radio, he subsequently explained) and, resuming his seat at the beginning of Figaro and Susanna"s opening duet, turned and signalled, "Seven-four in the sixteenth!" on his fingers to the rows around him, and then did a thumbs-up to show he meant the Mets. A newspaperman heading back home to New York stopped off in an airport bar at Boston"s Logan Airport, where the game was on, and fell into Mets conversation there with a woman who turned out to be a Merrill Lynch investment broker; they missed the three-o"clock, the four-o"clock, and the five-o"clock Eastern shuttles, somehow tore themselves away for the six-o"clock-and discovered that the game was still on when they deplaned at La Guardia. A colleague of mine who lives in New Jersey said that while going home he"d followed the game by stages over a spontaneous electronic relay network that had sprung up along the way-a TV set in the fire station on Forty-third Street, a wino"s radio in Grace Plaza, a big TV in the window of a video store on Sixth Avenue, some kids with a boom box in the doorway of a Spanish deli, and then a crowd-encircled gray stretch limo parked in Herald Square, with its doors open and the windows rolled down and, within, a flickering tiny television set turned to the game. Radios on his PATH train went blank during the journey under the Hudson but they came back to life in the Hoboken station, where he changed to a New Jersey Transit train, and where the Astros retied the game in the fourteenth. A frightful communications disaster-the long tunnel just before the Meadowlands-was averted when his train, a rolling grandstand, unexpectedly ground to a halt ("Signal difficulties," a conductor announced), and stood right there through the top of the sixteenth, when the Mets scored three and service resumed.

Writer friends wrote me about the game, too. A woman"s letter began, "My friend Sandy came over to my place for the game with a quart of beer and some snacks-he doesn"t have a color TV set. Sandy and I had been to a couple of games at Shea together, and I a.s.sumed it would be just about the same, but this was more like the time we"d been to see the movie "Dawn of the Dead"-he kept turning his face away from the screen in dread. I kept up a casual, chatty, rea.s.suring act, saying comforting things like "It"s all right now. Ojeda is totally in command," but then there was this one terrifying closeup of Knepper out on the mound-eyes burning and steam coming out of his ears. A real image from a horror movie. As the game went on, I realized that I was living it through the Mets pitchers, maybe because the pitcher"s motions can give you that trancelike feeling of security. Just about all I was aware of late in the game was McDowell"s right leg coming down and that little bow-legged hop he takes after every pitch, over and over. As long as I kept seeing that, I knew we"d be all right."

An art critic who lives in the East Village wrote, "At our apartment during the late innings of Game Six were my wife Brooke, our daughter Ada, myself, two dinner guests, and two people who had dropped in on short notice and then stayed around. One of the guests was Nell, a film director we like a lot, even though she"s one of those people who can"t believe that anyone of your intelligence actually cares about baseball. One of the drop-ins, an Australian poet named John, knew nothing-nothing!-about baseball but took a benign att.i.tude, asking polite, wonderfully dumb questions about the game. The other drop-in was Aldo, our neighborhood cop on the beat, a Mets fan and a friend. Aldo was in full cop gear, and voices crackled from his walkie-talkie: cops out there talking about the game.

"Nell is one of those people who don"t know any policemen and who can"t believe that you do. She looked at Aldo for a while and then said, "Excuse me, but what are you doing here?" I had to explain that it was all right, he was here for the game.

"I don"t remember it all, but of course I do remember the growing delirium-like trying to explain to John what a foul ball was and how to throw a slider, and Nell becoming more and more agitated, and Brooke a.s.suming her old rally posture in a particular doorway we have, and then, at the very end, all the whooping and hollering and inaccurate high-fiving, and some wild hugging. Nell was leaning out the window shrieking with joy."

*Bobby Thomson"s miracle ninth-inning, three-run homer in 1951, which put down the Dodgers and won the pennant for the Giants, has not been overlooked here. The two clubs had finished their seasons in a tie, and the homer came in the final game of a two-out-of-three playoff. This was an extension of the season, in short, and batting and pitching records in the games were included in the 1951 league statistics.

Game Five, World Series

This was less than a cla.s.sic, perhaps, but there was spirit and pleasure in it. The home-team Red Sox ravished their Fenway supporters with a 42 win, behind their mettlesome left-hander Bruce Hurst, and defeated Dwight Gooden for the second time in the process. This was the Sox" high-water mark (it turned out later), putting them ahead by three games to two, but it also felt like the first game in which the Series compet.i.tion was fully joined. The Bostons, it will be recalled, had won the Series opener down at Shea, with a splendid 10 effort by Hurst against Ron Darling, in which the only run had come in on an error by Mets second baseman Tim Teufel. A promised Gooden-Clemens thriller the next day came to nothing when the Sox won by 93, doing away with Dwight almost without effort; Clemens, for his part, was wild, and was gone in the fifth inning. This was Dwight Evans" great game: a mighty two-run homer that caromed off a tent marquee out beyond left-center field, and then a lovely sliding, twisting catch against Dykstra in right. Up in Boston, the Mets, now in a jam, rebounded strongly, with four first-inning runs against Oil Can Boyd in Game Three; Dykstra"s leadoff home run set the tone, all right, but the central figure of the evening may have been the Mets" lithe left-hander Bobby Ojeda, a member of the Red Sox pitching corps last year, who nibbled the corners authoritatively ("You don"t live in one place in this ballpark," he said later) in the course of his 71 outing, and became the first left-hander to win a postseason game at Fenway Park since Hippo Vaughn turned the trick for the Cubs in 1918. Those two quick losses to the Red Sox in the early games meant that Davey Johnson would be overdrawn at the pitching bank in the ensuing games, but he got even at last in Game Four, when Ron Darling shut down the Sox for seven innings (he gave up no earned runs at all in his first two outings), and the Mets roughed up Al Nipper et al. with twelve hits, including two homers by Gary Carter. (A missing figure in the Red Sox pitching rotation was Tom Seaver, who suffered a knee-cartilage tear in September and was forced to sit out all the postseason games: hard news for Sox fans-and for Mets fans, too, I believe.) Hurst"s work here in Game Five was the kind of pitcher"s outing that I have most come to admire over the years-a masterful ten-hitter, if that is possible. This was his fourth start in postseason play, and although he was not nearly as strong as he had looked during his gemlike shutout at Shea, he used what he had and kept matters in check, scattering small hits through the innings and down the lineup, and racking up ground-ball outs in discouraging (to the Mets) cl.u.s.ters with his forkball. ("IT HURSTS SO GOOD," one Fenway fan banner said.) The pitch, which disconcertingly breaks down and away from right-handed batters, sets up the rest of his repertoire-a curve and a sneaky-quick fastball-and although Hurst resolutely refers to it as a forkball, it is in fact the ever-popular new split-fingered fastball (sort of a forkball), which Hurst learned in 1984. He didn"t actually have enough confidence to use the pitch in a game until late June last year, at a time when he had been exiled to the Red Sox bullpen, but it revived his career wonderfully, transforming him from a journeyman 3340 lifetime pitcher (in five and a half seasons) to a 2214 winner in the subsequent going. Hurst missed seven weeks this summer with a groin injury, but he de-convalesced rapidly, wrapping up his season"s work by going 50 and 1.07 in his last five starts, which won him a league accolade as Pitcher of the Month in September. Despite all this, I think we should be wary about making too much of one particular delivery, for pitching is harder than that. Hurst, it should be noticed, belongs to the exclusive Fenway Lefties Finishing School, which numbers two other polished and extremely successful southpaw pract.i.tioners among its graduates: Bob Ojeda and John Tudor, who pitched the Cardinals to a pennant last year with a tremendous 218, 1.93 summer and then won three games in postseason play. Ojeda, for his part, had an 185 record with the Mets this year, which was the best won-lost percentage compiled by any of the Mets" celebrated starters; it was the best in the league, in fact. Previously, Ojeda had toiled for six summers in Fenway Park, and Tudor for five. The uniting characteristics of the three Wallmasters are control, extreme confidence, and a willingness to come inside. At Fenway Park, the inside pitch to a right-handed hitter is what it"s all about, for it discourages him from leaning out over the plate in the hope of something he can rap onto or over the Green Monster, and requires him, in fact, to compete with the man on the mound for his-the pitcher"s-part of the plate and for his sector of the ballpark, which is to say outside, and to right or right-center: a mismatch. The inside pitch, it should be added, is mostly thrown in the early innings, to plant the idea of it in the batter"s head, but is then eschewed in the late going, when weariness is more likely to result in a tiny, fatal mistake. Actually, it doesn"t have to be thrown for a strike in order to have its effect, and unless you are a Clemens or someone of that order, it"s probably a much better pitch, all in all, if it"s a ball. "What Ojeda does, over and over, is one of the beauties of the game," Keith Hernandez said at one point in the Series. "When you miss, you"ve got to miss where it doesn"t hurt you. That"s what pitching is all about." For his part, Hurst, who throws over the top and finishes his delivery with a stylish little uptailed kick of his back leg, works with great cheerfulness and energy, and here in Game Five he finished his evening"s work with a flourish, fanning Dykstra for the last out of the game, with Mets runners on first and third. "BRUCE!" the fans yowled, "BRUUUUCE!"

It was a great night at the Fens. A gusty wind blew across the old premises (left to right, for the most part), and a couple of advertising balloons out beyond the wall bucked and dived in the breeze, tearing at their tethers. The long cries from the outermost fan sectors (the oddly slanting aisles out there looked like ski trails dividing the bleacher escarpments) came in windblown gusts, suddenly louder or fainter. The wind got into the game, too, knocking down one long drive by Henderson in the second (it was poorly played by Strawberry) and another by Jim Rice in the fifth, which sailed away from Dykstra and caromed off the top railing of the Sox" bullpen-triples, both of them, and runs thereafter. It was the kind of game in which each player on the home team (in that beautiful whiter-than-white home uniform, with navy sweatshirt sleeves, red stirrups, the curved, cla.s.sical block-letter "RED SOX" across the chest, and a narrow piping of red around the neck and down the shirtfront) seems to impress his own special mode or mannerism on your memory: Rich Gedman"s lariatlike swirl of the bat over his head as he swings through a pitch; Rice"s double cut with the bat when he misses-swish-swish-with the backward retrieving swing suggesting a man trying to kill a snake; Boggs" way of dropping his head almost onto the bat as he stays down in midswing; Buckner (with that faro-dealer"s mustache and piratical daubings of anti-glare black on his cheeks) holding the bat in his extended right hand and, it seems, aiming it at the pitcher"s eyes as he stands into the box for an at-bat. And so on. Almost everyone out there, it seemed-every one of the good guys, that is-had his moment in the game to celebrate and be put aside in recollection by the fans: Hendu"s triple and double, Marty Barrett"s walk and single and double (he batted .433 for the Series), a beautiful play by Boggs on Kevin Mitch.e.l.l"s tough grounder in the second, and, best of all, Billy Buck"s painful and comical hobbling gallop around third and in to the plate in the third inning to bring home the second run of the game on a single by Evans. Buckner can barely run (can barely play) at all, because of his sore back and his injury-raddled ankles; it takes him two hours to ice and wrap his legs before he can take the field. He had torn an Achilles tendon in the September 29th game and was playing in this one only on courage and painkillers and with the help of protective high-top boots. No one wanted to laugh at his journey home after Evans bounced the ball up the middle, but you couldn"t help yourself. He looked like Walter Brennan coming home-all elbows and splayed-out, achy feet, with his mouth gaping open with the effort, and his head thrown back in pain and hope and ridiculous deceleration. When he got there, beating the throw after all, he flumped belly-first onto the plate and lay there for a second, panting in triumph, and, piece by piece, got up a hero.

This was the last home game of the year for the Red Sox, and when it was over the fans stayed in the stands for a time (John Kiley gave them "McNamara"s Band" on the organ again and again), cl.u.s.tering thickly around the home dugout and calling out for Hurst and Billy Buckner and the others, and shouting "We"re Number One!" and waving their white Red Sox painters" caps in exuberance. There had been great anxiety about this game, because of the Mets" sudden revival in Games Three and Four, but now the Sox were moving down to New York for one more win, with a rested Clemens going on Sat.u.r.day and with Hurst ready again, if needed, on Sunday, and I don"t think anyone there at the end that night really thought it might not happen. There is great sadness in this, in retrospect, since the team"s eventual loss (and the horrendous way of it, on each of the last two days) has brought back the old miasmal Boston baseball doubt and despair-the Bermuda low that has hung over this park and this team perhaps since the day in 1920 when owner Harry Frazee sold a good young outfielder named Babe Ruth to the Yankees, two seasons after Ruth, then a pitcher, had helped bring the Sox their last (to this day) World Championship. Once again, New England"s fans have been sent into the winter with the dour nourishment of second-best to sustain them: Indian pudding. If they wish, they may once again ponder the wisdom of George Bernard Shaw"s opinion that there are two tragedies in this world: one is never getting what you want, and the other is getting it-a dictum they would love to put to the test someday. But enough of this. Glooming in print about the dire fate of the Sox and their oppressed devotees has become such a popular art form that it verges on a new h.e.l.lenistic age of mannered excess. Everyone east of the Hudson with a Selectric or a word processor has had his or her say, it seems (the Globe actually published a special twenty-four-page section ent.i.tled "Literati on the Red Sox" before the Series, with essays by George Will, John Updike, Bart Giamatti-the new National League president, but for all that a Boston fan through and through-Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other worthies), and one begins to see at last that the true function of the Red Sox may be not to win but to provide New England authors with a theme, now that guilt and whaling have gone out of style. I would put forward a different theory about this year"s loss and how it may be taken by the fans. As one may surmise from the Globe"s special section, the Red Sox have become chic: Pulitzer Prize winners and readers of the New York Review of Books hold season tickets behind first base, and the dropped "Geddy" and "Dewey" and "Roger" and "the Can" clang along with the sounds of cutlery and grants chat at the Harvard Faculty Club. The other, and perhaps older, fan const.i.tuency at Fenway Park has not always been as happy and philosophical about the Sox. The failures of the seventies and early eighties were taken hard by the Boston sports crowd (the men and women who care as much about the Celtics and the Patriots and the Bruins as they do about the Sox), and the departure of Carlton Fisk, Rick Burleson, Freddy Lynn, and Luis Tiant, and the retirement (at long last) of Yastrzemski, left a very bitter taste, and so did the team"s persistent, almost stubborn unsuccess in this decade. (It finished fifth, fourth, and sixth in the American League East in the three years before this one, an average nineteen games behind the leader.) The ugly "Choke Sox" label was much heard, and the team"s ancient, stubbornly held style of play, characterized by insufficient pitching, insufficient or nonexistent speed, a million ground-ball double plays (by the Sox, I mean), and an almost religious belief in the long ball, had become a byword in the game, a "pahk your cah" joke around the league. Nothing could change this, it seemed. But this year it changed: a baseball miracle. This year, the Red Sox not only won their division and the American League playoffs and, very nearly, the World Series, but became a different sort of team, to themselves above all. Nineteen-eighty-six turned around for the Red Sox because of Roger Clemens (and perhaps because of Schiraldi"s sudden mid-season arrival as a bullpen stopper), but a more significant alteration was one of att.i.tude-a turnabout that began when Don Baylor came over from the Yankees and almost immediately became the team leader, something the Sox had been lacking for as long as anyone could remember. He told the young pitchers that they had to pitch inside if the team was to win; he persuaded the batters to take the extra base, to look for ways to get on base in the late innings (like getting hit with pitches, for instance: a Baylor specialty), to find that little edge-the one play or moment or lucky hop-that turns games around. Tom Seaver came aboard in June, and deepened this same aura with his maturity, his ease, and his sense of humor and proportion. The Sox grew up this summer: you could see it on the field-in Jim Rice choking up on the bat by an inch or so when he got to two strikes (this for the first time ever) and stroking the ball to right-center now and then, so that though his homers went down by seven (to twenty), his batting average improved by thirty-three points and his. .h.i.ts by forty-one-and in the results. The players spoke of it themselves. "We have more character," they said, and "We"re going to win"-words unheard by this writer from any Boston club of the past.

What fans think about their team is subtle and hard to pin down, but I am convinced that everything was changed this year by one game-by that stubborn and lucky and altogether astounding Red Sox return from near-defeat in the fifth game out at Anaheim, when they came back from extinction and a three-run deficit in the ninth inning and won by 76. It almost carried the month, and it is startling to notice, in retrospect, that the Red Sox actually won five games in a row right in the middle of the postseason-the last three of their championship playoffs and the first two of the World Series. There is no prize for this, of course, but no other team in October played quite so well for quite so long. In its killing last-minute details, their loss to the Mets in Game Six (they fell after holding a two-run lead in the tenth inning, with no one on base for the Mets) was so close to what the Angels had experienced that their fans-even the most deep-dark and uncompromising among the bleacher-ites, I think-must have seen the connection, and at last sensed the difficulties of this game and how much luck and character and resolve it takes to be a winner in the end. History and the ghost of Sox teams past had nothing to do with it. The Choke Sox died in Anaheim, and this losing Red Sox team will be regarded in quite a different way in New England this winter. It will be loved.

Game Six, World Series

The Mets are not loved-not away from New York, that is. When the teams moved up to the Hub, with the Mets behind by two games to none, there was a happy little rush of historical revisionism as sportswriters and baseball thinkers hurried forward to kick the New York nine. Tim Horgan, a columnist with the Boston Herald, wrote, "Personally, I don"t think anything west of Dedham can be as marvelous as the Mets are supposed to be. I wouldn"t even be surprised if the Mets are what"s known as a media myth, if only because New York City is the world capital of media myths." Bryant Gumbel, on NBC"s "Today" show, called the Mets arrogant, and ran a tape of Keith Hernandez" bad throw on a bunt play in Game Two, calling it "a hotdog play." Sparky Anderson, the Tigers manager, declared over the radio that the Indians, the traditional doormats of his American League division, put a better nine on the field than the Mets, and a newspaper clip from the heartland (if San Diego is in the heart of America) that subsequently came my way contained references to "this swaggering band of mercenaries" and "a swaying forest of high fives and taunting braggadocio." Much of this subsided when the Mets quickly drew even in the games, and much of it has nothing to do with baseball, of course; what one tends to forget is that there is nothing that unites America more swiftly or happily than bad news in Gotham or a losing New York team. Some of these reflections warmed me, inwardly and arrogantly, as Game Six began, for I was perched in a splendid upper-deck-grandstand seat directly above home plate, where, in company with my small family and the Mets" mighty fan family, I gazed about at the dazzlement of the ballpark floodlights, the electric-green field below, and the encircling golden twinkle of beautiful (by night) Queens, and heard and felt, deep in my belly, the pistol-shot sounds of clapping, the cresting waves of "LETSGOMETS! LETSGOMETS! LETSGOMETS!," and long, taunting calls-"Dew-eee! dew-eeee!" and "Rog-errr! rog-errrr!"-directed at some of the Bosox below: payback for what the Fenway fans had given Darryl Strawberry in the last game in Boston. And then a parachutist came sailing down out of the outer darkness and into the bowl of light and noise-a descending roar, of all things-of Shea, "GO METS," his banner said as he lightly came to rest a few steps away from Bob Ojeda in mid-infield and, enc.u.mbered with minions, went cheerfully off to jail and notoriety. We laughed and forgot him. I was home.

Game Six must be given here in extreme precis-not a bad idea, since its non-stop events and reversals and mistakes and stunners blur into unlikelihood even when examined on a score-card. I sometimes make postgame additions to my own score-card in red ink, circling key plays and instants to refresh my recollection, and adding comments on matters I may have overlooked or misjudged at the time. My card of Game Six looks like a third grader"s valentine, with scarlet exclamation points, arrows, stars, question marks, and "Wow!"s scrawled thickly across the double page. A double arrow connects Boggs, up on top, to Spike Owen, down below, in the Boston second-a dazzling little hit (by Wade)-and-run (by Spike) that set up Boston"s second score of the game. Two red circles are squeezed into Jim Rice"s box in the Boston seventh-one around the "E5" denoting Ray Knight"s wild peg that put Rice on first and sent Marty Barrett around to third, and the other around the "72" that ended the inning, two outs and one run later, when Mookie Wilson threw out Jim at the plate. A descendant arrow and low-flying exclamation points mark Clemens" departure from the game after the seventh (the Red Sox were ahead ,by 32, but Roger, after a hundred and thirty-one pitches, had worked up a blister on his pitching hand), and an up-bound red dart and "MAZZ PH" pointing at the same part of the column denote Lee Mazzilli"s instant single against Schiraldi, while the black dot in the middle of the box is the Mazzilli run that tied the score. But nothing can make this sprawling, clamorous game become orderly, I see now, and, of course, no shorthand can convey the vast, encircling, supplicating sounds of that night, or the sense of encroaching danger on the field, or the anxiety that gnawed at the Mets hordes in the stands as their season ran down, it seemed certain, to the wrong ending.

The Red Sox scored twice in the top of the tenth inning, on a home run by Dave Henderson ("Hendu!" is my crimson comment) and a double and a single by the top of the order-Boggs and then Barrett-all struck against Rick Aguilera, the fourth Mets pitcher of the night. Call it the morning, for it was past midnight when the Sox took the field in the bottom half, leading by 53. Three outs were needed for Boston"s championship, and two of them were tucked away at once. Keith Hernandez, having flied out to center for the second out, left the dugout and walked into Davey Johnson"s office in the clubhouse to watch the end; he said later that this was the first instant when he felt that the Mets might not win. I had moved down to the main press box, ready for a dash to the clubhouses, and now I noticed that a few Mets fans had given up and were sadly coming along the main aisles down below me, headed for home. My companion just to my right in the press box, the News" Red Foley, is a man of few words, but now he removed his cigar from his mouth and pointed at the departing fans below. "O ye of little faith," he said.

It happened slowly but all at once, it seemed later. Gary Carter singled. Kevin Mitch.e.l.l, who was batting for Aguilera, singled to center. Ray Knight fouled off two sinkers, putting the Red Sox one strike away. (Much later, somebody counted up and discovered that there were thirteen pitches in this inning that could have been turned into the last Mets out of all.) "Ah, New England," I jotted in my notebook, just before Knight bopped a little single to right-center, scoring Carter and sending Mitch.e.l.l to third-and my notebook note suddenly took on quite a different meaning. It was along about here, I suspect, that my friend Allan, who is a genius palindromist, may have taken his eyes away from his set (he was watching at home) for an instant to write down a message that had been forming within him: "Not so, Boston"-the awful truth, no matter how you look at it.

Schiraldi departed, and Bob Stanley came on to pitch. (This was

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