Part 22 (1/2)

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.