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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Before the Anaheim Angels ran onto the field for home ballgames this fall, you heard the loudspeakers at Edison Field putting out "Back in the Saddle Again," but the hokey touch may not fit them much longer. The Angels, who went forty-one years without qualifying for a single inning of World Series play, unexpectedly stand as World Champions, and the shade of Gene Autry should be allowed to dismount at last. The founding owner of the 1961 expansion club became known throughout the sport as "the Cowboy," and the brave smile he sustained through the endless back trails of baseball fatuity (he died in 1998, at ninety-one) made everyone hope for a pennant for him someday. Now it's happened. Jackie Autry, his widow, produced his white cowboy hat at the on-field award ceremonials after the team put down the San Francisco Giants, 4-1, in the seventh and deciding World Series game, and waved it for the exulting scarlet-clad home crowd. It was like George Steinbrenner brandishing Babe Ruth's bow tie, only sweeter. The team has belonged to Disney since 1996, but it's up for sale, at a suddenly improved price. Michael Eisner, there on the same stand with the commissioner and the rest of the brass, wore an Angels cap, but appeared stunned under its curved brim; a year ago, the Angels finished forty-one games back in their division.
This was the noisiest World Series to date, with the California fans endlessly whacking those scarlet or black-and-orange plastic ThunderStix together (the sound is like a shipment of tin pails falling downstairs), and the teams knocking out a hundred and forty-two hits and a record twenty-one homers and eighty-five runs. Although the rivals tied or reversed the lead six times during the Series, and four of the games were settled by one run-- the Angels took the last two, at home, to grab the title--the humiliation of both sets of starting pitchers (their combined 7.82 earned-run average set another Series record) deprived the games of the anxious silences and sense of foreboding that accompany a classic. This was another action movie, all bangs and blasts, with the Angels' affinity for the retributive big inning providing one main plotline, and Barry Bonds, a monstrous Vaderish force looming up again and again in the middle of the Giants' batting order, the other. Terrific entertainment, and undemanding.
This was not much like last year's Series, one of the best of all, in which the Yankees produced those two last-gasp home runs at the Stadium, and led the Arizona Diamondbacks in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game, out in Phoenix--of course, America was thinking--before the defense and Mariano Rivera came unglued and cost the Yanks a fourth straight championship. This year's Yankees, again easy winners in the American League East, disappeared quickly, going down to the wild-card Angels in the divisional playoffs, in four games. Back-to-back eighth-inning home runs by Garret Anderson and Troy Glaus took away a game in the Bronx that El Duque had seemed to have safely in hand; out West, where the even-up elimination was resumed, a 6-1 Yankee lead dissolved while the batters were swinging feebly at the fiery sliders of a twenty-year-old rookie reliever named Francisco Rodriguez. The next day, Doomsday, the Angels ran off ten hits and eight runs in the fifth: the biggest one-inning October outburst in seventy-three years. Adios, empire.
When the debacle was picked over, much blame fell upon the losing Yankee starters--Andy Pettitte had lasted three innings, Mike Mussina four, and David Wells departed after a seven-hit barrage in the fifth--but the Angels batters did similar heavy damage to the Twins' pitchers in the next post-season stage, and to the Giants after that. All three celebrity pitchers are in their thirties, while Roger Clemens, who started the first game and departed in the sixth, long before the Yankees' winning rally, is forty. Age may not have been the only problem, though. Patience, stout pitching, and a strong defense have been the cinder blocks of the splendid Yankee edifice, but they were rarely in evidence this time around. The 2002 Yankees hit a lot of home runs--more than any other team in the American League except the Texas Rangers--but also struck out the most. It was the Angels, you began to see, who kept showing a useful aversion to the K.
As the Yankees began to slip behind in the games out West, it seemed to me that they had taken on a weird resemblance to their remarkable second baseman, Alfonso Soriano, who set all sorts of franchise records this year as a lead-off man but lost his stroke in the late-September going while he lunged and flailed after a fortieth home run, to go with his forty-one stolen bases. Soriano is stubbornly impulsive--he managed only twenty-three bases on balls in seven hundred and forty-one plate appearances--and it's time someone convinced him that the home run...
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