Never has the idea of a national pastime been more clearly defined than in the past week, when a country that does everything by the clock watched baseball make time stand still.
And how sweet the irony that the only team sport that defies the clock could, while producing a game for all time, also defy the very master for which the game in question was created.
There was no sixth game in baseball`s playoffs until two years ago, when television decreed it would be so, extending the competition from best-of-5 to best-of-7. And not even the networks would dare order the leagues to play the games every other day so they could all be at night.
Five of the games had to be scheduled in the afternoon. The last of them, the sixth game of the National League playoffs between the New York Mets and the Houston Astros, made a shambles of the cherished TV notions of time slots and peak viewing periods.
Even more ironically, it was a trip back to the way we were before TV. In offices and rush-hour traffic, fans turned to the radio to follow the denouement of a story that had become a delightful succession of ad-libs.
Baseball, you see, may genuflect to The Tube, but it still believes in free will. So the Mets and the Astros played on and on Wednesday, 16 innings and 4 hours 22 minutes before New York won 7-6, through soaps time and drive time and into prime time, with no buzzers to stop them.
The press of international news can interrupt football games, as it did Sunday, but baseball kept ABC from airing a word of its sacrosanct national nightly news before it was air time for the seventh game of the American League series between the Boston Red Sox and California Angels. Instead, the country got eight straight hours of baseball as the champions of the American and National leagues–and thus the contestants in the upcoming World Series
–were determined.
ABC-TV commentator Tim McCarver, a whimsical voice of reason in the wonderland of sports hyperbole, decided after nine innings Wednesday that the game should be put into a time capsule so others would know what Americans cared about in the 1980s. Then, as the teams came face-to-face with infinity, McCarver wondered if we were already in the capsule, where time apparently had stopped. Certainly, baseball had entered a new zone by playing long beyond a twilight that passed unnoticed in the brave new world of the Houston Astrodome.
As distinctions blurred and the day game ran into the night game, one thing became clearer and clearer: Frenchman Jacques Barzun was right when he said whoever wants to understand the heart and mind of America had better learn about baseball. A foreigner would find the game is still our national passion play, staged for but not completely directed by TV.
Television need neither offer apologies nor accept them for its relation with such a capricious game. It winds up with a tasty slice of the American-as-apple-pie final act, getting one of those matchups Madison Avenue drools about when New York and Boston open the World Series Saturday night. In prime time, of course, like all the Series games.
Pity, instead, the poor World Series. It has been suckered into a game of Can You Top That.
Baseball, which for more than a century has been careful not to upset its apple cart, suddenly finds itself with that cart before the horse. The penultimate has become the ultimate. The playoffs are now the game`s showoffs, worthy of the grander title–League Championship Series–they have officially worn for their 18-season history.
As a five-game series, the playoffs were a form of Russian Roulette, often over before anyone started to pay attention. In the second year after being extended to seven games, they have turned into a variant of Chinese Water Torture, where the answer emerges under the greatest duress.
Truth be told, the World Series never had a chance after the American fall classic became plural. The playoffs match teams that usually had grown familiarly contemptuous of each other during a dozen regular-season meetings. So much more intense is the battle when the protagonists are also antagonists. The Series matches strangers in paradise. These are rivals so foreign to each other that their leagues don`t even play by the same rules.
Winning a division is nothing. Even the Cubs and Sox have done that. Making the Series is everything. No one knows that better than the Angels`
Gene Mauch, to whom hubris is not just Greek any more. Mauch is derided as the greatest manager never to win, even if two of his California teams have been in the playoffs.
But don`t playoff teams always say, ”We haven`t won anything yet?”
And don`t the survivors always say, ”I`m happy to be here?” once they make the Series. Getting there is more than half the fun. Winning is nice, if not mandatory.
It has all changed now that pennants are decided in the hell week that baseball`s fraternity uses as a rush to judgment. Unlike other sports, this is no bum`s rush, with teams that stumble toward mediocrity for six months allowed to join the postseason tournament. Only champs, not chumps, make the baseball playoffs.
But there hasn`t been a great pennant chase since 1967, when four American League teams went into the final week of the season within spitting distance of each other. It was like having a marathon decided unexpectedly by a sprint.
The person who wins the quarter-mile often looks as if the next step will be into the grave. The loser merely wishes for such a fate.
So it was, after the New York Mets had beaten the Houston Astros in 16 agonizing innings Wednesday, that Mets manager Dave Johnson complained of a headache even before swilling too much champagne. So it was that Astros starting pitcher Bob Knepper skipped the relief of a shower and clung to the dugout rail as if it were the hull of a sinking ship for the seven-plus innings after he was relieved.
So it was, after California had again been made fallen Angels, that Bobby Grich announced his retirement, a decision he said had been made in August. He had played 17 seasons at second base with a rare combination of elegance and grit. He had seen enough, most it in the last nine days.
The California-Boston playoff series had a game for the ages Saturday followed by another on Sunday. The New York-Houston playoff series had a game for the ages nearly every day. If the National Leaguers had played a seventh game, with Houston`s Mike Scott pitching again, a pastime that began in the industrial age might have been transported beyond the space age in barely a week. Beam me up, Scotty.
It was a week in which baseball replaced one of its touchstones, the Carlton Fisk home run in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, with a whole storehouse of new diamond gems.
The pictures of Fisk imploring the ball to stay fair had been a rock of ages, one of the first baseball memories made infinitely more magical by television`s wizardry. Willie Mays` over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 Series was well documented by cameras, but it was only an action shot. Fisk`s was . . . Close up! Wide angle! Rear shot! Front shot! Side shot! Pan the shot!
Shoot the moon!
Now there will be pictures of Houston pitcher Nolan Ryan`s mouth in a stoic wince as his elbow screamed in pain and his fastball made the Mets cry uncle; of Mets catcher Gary Carter clapping for joy over a mere single up the middle; of Boston reliever Calvin Schiraldi in agony and ecstasy; of Astros outfielder Billy Hatcher, a Fisk reincarnate, backpedalling toward first base as his 14th-inning home run collided with the foul pole and immortality.
