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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1963, Roger Angell on that year's World Series, between the Yankees and the Dodgers
Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, in a surprise news conference two days after the conclusion of the recent World Series, announced that Major League Baseball will undertake a radical change in scheduling next fall, when the Divisional and League Championship eliminations will come after the World Series, not before. "Tradition matters," Selig said, "but the fans have made it clear that they much prefer the interest and drama of the earlier rounds of post-season play, and we're going to oblige them. From now on, it's the Fall Classic first and then heartbreak." The commissioner confirmed reports that he had called in some top metaphysicians to tackle the contradictions implicit in such a plan. "They're gung-ho for the plan, conceptwise," Mr. Selig said. "Once we have this in hand, we're looking to clear up the designated-hitter dilemma, as well. Ambiguity is tough, but so is Roger Clemens."
Well, maybe not, but after the vibrant and confounding baseball scenes in the weeks just past, no possibility can be wholly excluded. Look what did happen:
* In the ceremonials before the third game of the American League Divisional playoffs between the Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics, a Red Sox relief pitcher named Byung-Hyun Kim heard prolonged boos from his home-team Fenway Park fans when his name was announced, and responded digitally.
* Another bird, the Yankee Stadium celebrity eagle Challenger, lost his way while performing his ceremonial flight from the center-field bleachers to a handler on the pitcher's mound before the first game of the Red Sox-Yankees American League Championship Series, wobbled past Derek Jeter (who flinched away, snatching off his cap), and flumped to the ground near home plate. Fired on the spot, the famous fowl unexpectedly emerged from retirement prior to the third game of the World Series, but now with a Sun Belt employer, and made a safe journey home for the Florida Marlins during the anthem at Pro Player Stadium, in Miami. Redemption.
* At Wrigley Field, in Chicago, Cubs left fielder Moises Alou leaped and stretched for a fly ball descending in foul ground beside a steep bank of seats, and had the ball deflected from his glove by a lifelong Cubs fan, Steve Bartman, whose name, on the instant, became inextricably woven into the hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old history of the franchise. (As is perhaps not known to schoolchildren in Mukden or Petrozavodsk, the Cubs have not won a World Championship since 1908 and the Boston Red Sox since 1918.) The incident still left the good guys three runs ahead in the game and an easy inning and two-thirds away from a victory over the Florida Marlins in the National League Championship Series and their first trip to the World Series in fifty-eight years, but the Cubs now swiftly yielded a base on balls, a single, a clanking error by their shortstop, and an eventual eight-run rally. They lost, lost again the next night, and were eliminated. The sight of Bartman being pelted with insults and threats and cups of beer, and taken away, hiding his face, by the cops for his own safety, has stuck in mind, however. Cubs players and coaches quickly came forward to say that his instinctive grab had nothing to do with the outcome, but Bartman was subjected to later vilifications on the Internet and in the papers, and felt forced to issue a lengthy apology. Baseball is the only sport that fingers individual spectators this way and remembers their names: Sal Durante, who caught Maris's Ruth-breaking sixty-first home run in 1961; Jeffrey Maier, who reached for that short home run to right field in Yankee Stadium in a 1996 playoff against the Orioles; and Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi, the bleacher fans at Pac Bell Stadium who ended up in a scuffle for the ball and the court costs, after Barry Bonds's seventy-third. Ask not for whom that ball falls.
* At the Boston games, fans saw separate interference plays by Red Sox infielders in the same inning nullified when two different Oakland Athletics base runners forgot to touch home plate; witnessed the seventy-two-year-old Yankee bench Kewpie Don Zimmer throw a punch at Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez (who deflected the attack in the manner of Belmonte dealing with a heifer) during a team brawl; and (by television from the Bronx) watched Sox manager Grady Little perform a gruesome public seppuku by failing to remove the selfsame Pedro from action in the eighth inning of the A.L.C.S. seventh-game finale, after successive hits by the Yankees. The Yanks tied the game on a bloop double by Jorge Posada, and won it--against a different pitcher--in the eleventh, on a lead-off, walk-off home run by Aaron Boone. Getting either or both of the Cubs and Red Sox into the World Series on their hallowed home fields had been a happy possibility nationally discussed and op-edded since July, and when the two teams were again dispatched winless into winter their fans were left with a last gnawing weirdness: both clubs had led by an identical three-run margin at a moment when they stood the same bare five outs away from a pennant, and both blew the chance.
Even as the World Series began, friends of mine were saying how much they mourned the absence of these famous losers in the finale. They'd yearned to see the sweet and accursed old teams have at each other in their grand old parks--a lore-off, so to speak. Part of me felt the same way, but when Juan Pierre,...
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