| | | This was a World Series for the ages. It would be hard to imagine a better one. Seven games, five great ones, and three with the home team either coming from behind and at least tying it in the bottom of the ninth or, as in Game 7, winning it. At times during the three games in the Stadium, it seemed that they were following the dictates of the great St. Louis philosopher L.P. Berra: There was the Tino Martinez home run in Game 4 ("it ain't over 'til it's over"). And then, when that bit of philosophy was used up, there was in Game 5 the Scott Brosius home run ("déjà vu all over again").
For anyone who loves the game it was marvelous baseball because it followed the book and deviated from the book -- a team with certain limitations but with two overpowering pitchers playing against a team with good but not great pitching, a brilliant bulllpen, and a more experienced, seemingly better everyday lineup. The games themselves remind us that nothing in baseball is ever quite as predicted.
Thus, with Curt Schilling on the mound in the seventh inning of Game 7 with a 1-0 lead, the Arizona fans had a right to think they had a wrap; while shortly after, with the Alfonso Soriano home run and with Mariano Rivera on the mound, the Yankees fans had a right to think they
had a wrap. So the book seemed to dictate, but the book was wrong.
Through that last inning of the last game, the Yankees had barely led in any of the games (a total of seven-and-a-half innings out of 67); they were, as a team, batting only .183. And yet they seemed to be on the way to one more championship. That was how exciting it all was.
In the beginning, looking at the book for this series, it was obvious that if the tandem of Schilling and Randy Johnson pitched four times, the Yankees had to win at least one of them; if they pitched five times, then the Yankees had to win two. In that sense, at least, the book held.
What was surprising was how well the Arizona pitchers -- Brian Anderson and Miguel Batista -- fared in the other two games. I thought Batista's performance was especially admirable, the way he moved the ball around to both sides of the plate. If anything, pitching like that turned out to be typical of the Diamondbacks throughout the series. They were a lot better than most people thought; among other things, they had scouted the Yankees as well as the Yankees usually scout other teams in the postseason, and their pitchers brilliantly executed what was in those scouting reports.
It was a series that mocked (well, actually humiliated) Tom Hicks, the Texas owner who had given Alex Rodriguez the huge Pentagon-budget-like contract, the biggest in the history of baseball, most of it, one assumes, at the expense of the the rest of his team, most
notably the pitching staff. If anything, this underscored the inflated quality of some of today's power statistics; few of the owners of the big home run and RBI totals made it deep into the postseason, and the only player who did, Luis Gonzalez, was hardly a major factor in the Series, at least not as a power hitter. Clearly, the old rule that has always governed baseball at this time of year, that good pitching dominates good hitting, seemed to be more true than ever.
Going in, of the two teams, Arizona had the better pitching. Schilling and Johnson were at the top of their games and in exceptional form at the end of the season, something quite unusual for any team with superstar pitchers.
Watching this, and the way they seemed to play off each other, I had a sense of the synergy of their interaction, that each gave the other something extra, pushed the other to be a bit more complete, and that each gained in confidence from the other -- since neither had to carry alone the entire burden of the team, as often happens with superstar pitchers, especially in a short series. I suspect there is an indefinable quality to that synergy for each of them -- someone else who understands the rare quality of the pressure of being so important a player on a team which, without you, immediately falls to the middle of the pack. Pitchers, after all, tend to be apart from most of their teammates, including their managers. It is as if they speak their own language to each other -- with Schilling and Johnson, I suspect it was the language of twins.
The Yankees, going into the series, had very good but not great pitching. They might have matched up well against the Braves, but not against Arizona. In truth, they were lucky to get past Oakland which, because of its three young pitchers, was to me the most intimidating of the American League teams.
Nor were the Yankee pitchers on any kind of a roll. Mike Mussina had been pitching very well; his late season nearly perfect game against Boston was a gem. I love watching him pitch -- he's so smart and talented -- but you are also aware of days when he cannot put the ball exactly where he wants, and he thus becomes immediately vulnerable. Roger Clemens, in the last few starts, was not really as good as his record suggests, and it was obvious that he was hurting somewhat; Andy Pettitte had pitched well for the Yankees in big games, but he is not in the Schilling-Johnson class; and Orlando Hernandez, always a bit enigmatic, was more enigmatic than usual this season. The Yankees got a marvelous performance from him in Game 4, when enough of his remaining skills blended with all of his guile. Yankees pitching did not lose this series -- Arizona pitching won it.
And then, of course, there was the Yankees bullpen. If they could stay close through the first five or six innings, all Yankees fans believed, they would somehow win in the late ones.
That had been the Yankee style in the past. But this was a Yankees team that had seemed to age this year -- Hernandez was injured part of it, and Clemens was not 100 percent at the end, and Paul O'Neill and David Justice seemed older. Even so, even if it was the last gasp of a great core team, soon to be broken up, it played well when it mattered; this is a veteran team that always plays better in the postseason, especially in the big moments in big games, than it does in the regular season.
Starting with that first Series win against Atlanta in 1996, it was a team with the ability to make seemingly more talented teams play the full nine innings, and made opposing pitchers pitch to all the players in its regular lineup. It was never carried by the core of its batting order, and it was not surprising that over the years the team MVP varied so much. With the Yankees, if you pitched around someone to get to the next hitter, the next hitter tended to be as good as the person you had just pitched around.
But it was a team that had become vulnerable to left-handers, and it was in the World Series more vulnerable on the road than at home because it lost the use of the designated hitter, which with so balanced a batting order was a major subtraction. But it was a smart team and nominally it played well and intelligently in big games.
In the end, it was a wonderful run for the Yankees, and they were beaten by a better team, which did to them what they have done to others for so long. So let me add what should be a new Yogiism of my own to all the old Yogiisms, on the theory that if some smart sportswriter had been sitting next to the Yogi, then Mr. Berra himself would surely have said it: Live by the ninth inning rally, die by the ninth inning rally.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, who has written 12 bestsellers, including "Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made," "The Best and the Brightest," "The Powers That Be," "The Reckoning" and "Summer of '49," writes a bi-weekly column for Page 2.
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