BLEACHER CREATURES.(Mike Gimbel on baseball and exotic animals)(Interview)(The Talk of the Town)

In Boston last week, after the Red Sox knocked off the A's, chaos reigned briefly outside Fenway Park. The home team was away, in Oakland, but on Ipswich and Lansdowne and Boylston Streets beer bottles flew, cars were overturned, and breasts were bared. Several long-deprived Soxfans--"knuckleheads," according to Boston's mayor, Thomas Menino--broke into the empty park for a victory lap around the bases.

Not long before, another repressed knucklehead (or knuckle-dragger, at least) had broken out of his park, the Franklin Park Zoo, in nearby Dorchester. Eleven-year-old Little Joe, a three-hundred-pound gorilla, set off on a city stroll--his second in as many months--spiking a two-year-old girl along the way. His jaunt, in the spirit of the hopefulness that very occasionally comes over the cynical citizens of Red Sox Nation, ended after two hours, when he was finally subdued, near a ballfield, by half a dozen tranquillizer darts.

Here in New York, the Yankees' defeat of the Twins passed more or less without fanfare; expectation begets entitlement. The animal news, though, was big stuff. A man named Antoine Yates was attacked by Ming, a Bengal tiger that had been living in his apartment, across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium. Yates, who usually fed Ming raw chickens, had tried to prevent the tiger from dining on Shadow, his house cat; Ming's apparent conviction that everything in the apartment was his to eat seemed, on the eve of the big Yanks-Sox showdown, to reflect Yankee fans' boundless presumptions. Ming required just two tranquillizer darts, and police, once inside the apartment, also discovered Al, a five-foot alligator (some papers called him a caiman). Shadow was nowhere to be found. By the series opener, on Wednesday, it was not clear whether the gator or the tiger was to blame.

Amid such circumstances, the man to consult was clearly Mike Gimbel, of the city's Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations. Gimbel happens to be one of those rare experts in both baseball and exotic-urban-pet keeping. In the late nineties, he served as the Red Sox' "statistical consultant"; he was a predecessor of the team's current adviser, Bill James. Gimbel liked to refer to himself as the club's "secret weapon," and was, in a sense, one of the architects of Boston's most recent playoff team, which lost to the Yankees, in five games, in 1999. Gimbel, like Yates (but not like James), kept an apartment full of wild beasts. Some years ...