Four hours before the start of this year’s World Series, a bus rolled to a halt in front of Yankee Stadium. The assembled fans, usually held back behind metal barriers, swarmed free on the picture-perfect October Saturday except in a narrow corridor from the Padres’ team bus to the stadium. A few players appeared, each walking quickly and with his head down. Catcalls rained down like hail.
Then Kevin Brown, the Padres’ Game 1 starter, showed his face. Brown did not hurry and he did not bow his head. He walked proudly and with a playful little smirk, the look of a man who believes he knows things others don’t, the look Mickey Rourke built into entire film roles before he lapsed into scuzzball self-parody. Brown was laughing at all that New York bluster, just waiting to make his statement a few hours later.
“You gonna get shelled!” a moon-faced fan with a voice like a fire alarm screamed.
As it turned out, the jeering fans knew something Brown didn’t. They understood that sometimes when New York demands something as insistently as it demands a World Series victory this year, events will find a way to fall into place. That might mean a key home run from an unlikely source (diminutive second baseman Chuck Knoblauch) or it might mean an umpire (Richie Garcia) blowing an important call, but one way or another the Yankees were going to get all that talent untracked in Game 1 and in the Series, helped along by the manic energy of a manic city, funneled down into frenzied sellout crowds at the Stadium.
“I’ll be pretty vocal on the plane to loosen everyone up,” Padres slugger Ken Caminiti said late Sunday night in the quiet of the visitor’s clubhouse after his team’s second loss to the Yankees. “I sensed a little pressing this weekend. It’s hard not to press in the Stadium. The crowd’s on you all the time, telling you, ‘You suck!’ They work with the team. It’s impressive. The whole Stadium is built right on top of you, so you can hear ‘Ken you suck!’ Today I did.”
The Padres had that monster crowd silenced during Game 1 until the blown call in the seventh inning. San Diego left-hander Mark Langston made a 2-2 pitch to Tino Martinez that was at the knees. It was an obvious strike, as obvious as Jay Leno’s jokes, and yet Garcia called it a ball. Somehow. And Langston, understandably agitated, left his next pitch up where Martinez could jack it to right for a grand slam that turned that game, and probably the Series.
Padre pitching coach Dave Stewart wasn’t about to question the bogus call in his postgame comments to reporters Saturday night, saying again and again it could have gone either way, and doing so with a poker face, not a wink. But Stewart did add: “You just hope the guy calling the balls and strikes is as deep in concentration as you are.” Garcia wasn’t, lending an air of prescience to the screaming Sports Illustrated cover already on news racks: “Kill the Umps!”
So instead of having a chance to take the game into the late innings, all tied up, the Padres had to watch as a crowd of 56,712 erupted in rapture. The Padres had to face down the fact that despite getting two homers from Greg Vaughn and one from Tony Gwynn, they were going down in Game 1 and letting the Yankees set a tone that had most people expecting the Series to go five games at most. The only question was how strong a claim this year’s Yankees would stake on being the greatest team ever. If they sweep the Padres, the way the ’27 Yankees did the Pirates, that could be quite a claim.
During the second inning of Sunday night’s 9-3 Yankee demolition job, the Fox camera zoomed in tight on Stewart, slumped over in agony, and it was almost shocking to see: the indomitable Stewart looking like a man wishing he could find an exit door. An hour earlier, Stewart had escorted starter Andy Ashby all the way in from the bullpen in left field, talking to him the whole way, trying desperately to pass on some crucial spark, some trace of that iron will that made Stewart 10-2 as a postseason starter. But the Yankees jumped on Ashby for three runs in the first and had him reeling again in the second. Stewart, holding his hand to his head like a man fighting a New Year’s Day headache, sensed Ashby didn’t have much of a chance.
And sure enough, just after the extended shot of Stewart, Bernie Williams nailed a low Ashby fastball to center for a two-run homer to make it a 6-0 rout. “I can’t go by what I did as a pitcher,” Stewart said after the game. “The toughest part is as a coach, and a teacher, you worry that you left something out. I thought I had prepared my staff better than this. I have to keep searching until I find the right answer. Hopefully I’ll find it before we play Game 3.”
Fairly or not, Game 2 had the feel of being over before it started. Orlando Hernandez was going for the Yanks, and this is a man whose air of destiny is as impossible to miss as his high leg kick, probably the most distinctive since Juan Marichal’s heyday with the Giants in the ’60s and ’70s. Hernandez has the look of an old-time ballplayer, and his great pull-the-cap-down-on-the-head motion is as classic as his nasty, hard-dropping curve. Hernandez was a hero back in Havana, where the papers dubbed him “El Duque,” and now he’s the Duke in New York, too, a nickname for the ages that Hernandez looks ready to live up to and more.
He was in Havana a year ago, dropping in on the CNN bureau to watch his younger brother Livan pitch the Florida Marlins to a World Series victory. He didn’t survive a weeklong raft exodus from Cuba just to show up at Yankee Stadium for his own World Series start and fail to live up to the moment. Once Paul O’Neill made a beautiful leaping catch in the first, slamming into “The Wiz” sign in right to rob Wally Joyner of extra bases with two runners on base, Hernandez was in command. So were the Yankees, giving an entire city a chance to revel in feeling on top of the world, a feeling New Yorkers claim as a sovereign right.
New York-style brashness has become so famous in sports, it’s often rendered in broad-stroke caricature. Yes, New Yorkers are more demanding of their athletes and their teams than anyone this side of English soccer hooligans. Yes, the New York media has a way of boiling things down to a testy, insistent shout, as in New York Post headlines like “SLAM DIEGO!”
But a lot of that New York swagger is pure pose. Scratch beneath the surface of a New York sports fan, and more often than not you find a big softy who just wants to feel like a kid looking up to sports heroes again. The archetypal Yankees fan could be 9-year-old Edward, a gray-eyed, rail-thin youngster from the Dominican Republic who rode the No. 4 subway home to the South Bronx on Friday, clutching a baseball bat in his hands like a totem, shyly predicting (in Spanish) that the Yankees would win in seven, then prancing off the train and taking a few cuts, no doubt imagining himself hitting a big homer. New Yorkers remember.
Even if the sun-baked lightweights out in California may have forgotten from what far-off quarter they imported their two most-storied baseball teams 40 years ago, the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers still registers here as a psychic wound almost beyond comprehension. Riding the subway, you are liable to spot a big photo of four smiling Dodgers huddled together. Jackie Robinson and the others are boyishly happy, exemplars of joy and light. Then you read: “In Brooklyn, we know a thing or two about healing broken hearts … The Brooklyn Hospital Center.”
Still mourning that loss, New York demands satisfaction on the playing field time and time again, as the Padres learned this weekend. Anything else seems like a slap in the face. That’s why the Padres couldn’t wait to board the team’s charter to San Diego Sunday night. Caminiti spoke for his teammates as he got ready to leave the visitor’s clubhouse. “It’ll be a big relief to get out of here.”
The San Diego Padres have one hell of a ride waiting for them in New York.
That goes for the electric opening games of their World Series with the New York Yankees, the team that won 114 games this year with all the fuss and bother of a talk-show host silencing a crackpot caller with one push of a button. But it also goes for the 100 or so city blocks the Padres must travel just to get to the House That Ruth Built in the South Bronx — a trip that starts at their hotel near Grand Central Station, wends its way through the nervy bustle of midtown, the swank haughtiness of the Upper East Side and the burned-out brick boxes of Harlem — before the Padres can even think of hustling into the dank confines of the Yankee Stadium visitors’ clubhouse. This is the best pregame ride in all of sports, and it starts off with an explosion of weirdness so New York, so out there and in your face, it has a way of getting to visiting teams.
Joel Oks, a fellow who would have to be played by Dennis Franz in the made-for-TV movie, has it down to a science. He saunters out of his men’s clothing store on 42nd Street, Porta Bella, just before the visiting team bus rolls by amid the honking of cabs and the stench of exhaust fumes. Oks unbuckles his belt with the practiced efficiency of a blue-movie extra, flashes his translucent-white behind at the bus and its passengers, and then gives it a quick, curt slap for emphasis. “People walking by don’t even blink,” Cleveland Indians vice president Bob DiBiasio commented this week after one of Oks’ displays. “It’s become such a tradition, we get worried when he doesn’t do it.”
Sooner or later, the people at Adidas are going to line up Franz to run through the whole bit on TV for another of those shake-your-head-great “Only in New York” Yankee ads, the ones starring the fat-guy fans with Magic Marker letters on their guts spelling out Y-A-N-K-S (except in the one where the cab driver turns and asks, “What’s ‘ANSKY?’” setting off more squirming and Jell-O-vibration than in all of “Animal House”). Oks enjoys his small bit of infamy, but he insists he has a point to make, too. “I do it just to show them New York is messed up in the head,” he explained a few years back. “They go to so many cities. This way, they always know you.”
Oh, they always know New Yorkers, all right. That goes for the battery-throwing fans in right field up at the Stadium, the PA announcer with a voice like a pre-Revolution Cohiba and the official scorer with mutton chops, a pursed mouth like an exit wound and a ringing voice just made to scream, “Get me rewrite!” No world city demands to be taken on its own terms more than New York, and visiting teams either accept that or end up shuffle-stepping out of town mumbling to themselves and looking forward to a visit to Blockbuster so they can shut themselves up somewhere in the suburbs for the winter and try to forget.
That’s what is so intriguing about the Yankees’ matchup with the Padres, a team whose guiding philosophy is a kind of “Yeah? So?” defiance that has been personified during the playoffs by the photogenic face of pitching coach Dave Stewart. There’s no question that one of general manager Kevin Towers’ best moves last offseason was getting Stewart to take a job Stewart knew would not help him toward his goal of being a general manager. It also helped to add virtuoso psychopath Kevin Brown to give them a true staff ace; and to stick with Greg Vaughn and give him a chance to forget his forgettable 1997 season in a platoon situation with Rickey Henderson. Vaughn’s 52 homers were a lot of offense to add to a lineup that already featured the pure hitting brilliance of Tony Gwynn and the blunt power of Ken Caminiti. Stewart, looking right where he belongs back in uniform, has come to be the symbol for this team. Back in spring training, he got everyone’s attention on the first day when he put three thick rings down on a tabletop. There were no position players in town yet. This was a meeting of pitchers and catchers. Stewart put down his three World Series rings and got his point across: Pay attention.
That was his message then, and it’s his lesson all the time: Pay attention. A lot of people comment on what great mound presence Stewart had, especially during his incredible run of four straight 20-win seasons for the Oakland A’s (1987-90), and there’s no question the man has a look that’s both confident and intimidating. But people need to look a little closer. If you really watch Stewart giving one of his Stew looks, what you notice is his unblinking patience. The people who read hostility in there are coming up with that on their own. Look into those eyes and you see a certain blankness, a certain calm. Stewart is watching and waiting. He’s alert and he’s ready to pounce, but mostly the look is of a man waiting for the other man to blink first. A lot of times, he will.
That, in the end, was what the Braves did in the National League Championship Series. They had their freak-show rotation of pitchers with more control than Harvey Keitel in one of his “cleaner” roles, but it wasn’t enough. Just as the Cubs would have been doomed to a winter of seeing their kid left fielder drop that ball, late in the regular season, if they had not come back to squeak into the playoffs, the Braves can pass the offseason with bolt-upright-in-bed flashes of Danny Bautista rabbit-punching a sinking liner out in left field to turn Game 6 into a Padres rout. Now the slate is blank and all that’s certain is that the Yankee Stadium backdrop for this weekend’s first two games will be so thunderous, so delirious, so magical, the talk of this as the Summer Game’s dream year will keep up its rat-a-tat beat.
If it’s all about the Yankees at first, so be it. Even with all the power of their reputation, and their season, this year’s Yankees are not a cocky bunch. Someone with as much strut as Rickey Henderson back in his glory years with the Yanks would not fit in now. There’s flashy shortstop Derek Jeter, GQ cover boy and sometime companion to Mariah Carey, to represent Manhattan-style mega-glamour, but Jeter’s signature look is a heavy-lidded stare toward the horizon, one clouded with a sense of all it will take for the team to get where it’s going. Then there’s sure-handed manager Joe Torre, the man with a voice so suggestive of a ’40s radio announcer, and a gaze so direct and kind, you forget what decade he inhabits; and left-hander David Wells, the big doughboy who would be a punk if he were not a ballplayer, but instead is just a character, turning mellowed tyrant George Steinbrenner on to Metallica, lounging in the clubhouse before games with a kind of stately patience, and most of all taking to big-game pressure like a Harley nut to his first Hog.
But these are also the Yankees of right fielder Paul O’Neill, and that’s what makes them so dangerous in the World Series, even more than their great team speed and defense (with only second baseman Chuck Knoblauch’s throwing troubles to worry about). O’Neill, brother of New York Times food writer Molly O’Neill, has a certain kind of fussy intellectual’s approach to the game: That is, he’s easily disappointed. Specifically, he’s easily disappointed in himself. In fact, he might already have homered in a game, and his team might be up by four runs, and if he has a weak at-bat, you can count on watching the batboys run for cover when he comes back to the dugout. He’ll hiss imprecations at himself; he’ll throw his batting helmet and anything else he finds; and most of all, he’ll seethe. That seething dissatisfaction with anything short of triumph is the element, often invisible to outsiders, that takes all that talent and experience at the Yankees’ disposal and turns it into something special. This year’s Yankees are elegant, an architectural wonder, really, but they also spring from the streets that made attitude attitude, the same streets in which the crazed Porta Bella man flashes his get-used-to-it-or-fuggedaboutit message whenever he can.
The real magnitude of what Mark McGwire has accomplished this memorable year won’t become clear for another month or so. McGwire has given us all a whole passel of delicious images to replay this offseason and beyond: the pumping of the fist and the raised-arm gestures of exhilaration this last week that showed the world what some of us had already known about McGwire, that deep down he played the game with passion, even if he was awkward about expressing it; the dazed, drunken stumble down the first-base line, still in shock that No. 62 had been a buzz-bomb liner just over the left-field fence, not a prodigious, Ruthian clout of the variety that had helped get America excited about the long ball again; that grinning, embarrassed hop back toward first base after he had missed it the first time, like a Little Leaguer still not sure how the drill goes; and then, of course, cable-armed hugs, not just for son Matthew, not just for fellow slugger Sammy Sosa, whom he lifted at one point with one arm as if he were holding a bag of groceries, not just for teammates and coaches and everyone else who crossed his path that magical night, but for all of us.
The thrill the record-setting homer unleashed was universal, starting at the Busch Stadium epicenter and rolling in every direction like some California-into-the-Pacific monster quake. The party was for everyone. But the accomplishment had a more pointed purpose: It was for baseball.
McGwire hung in there over the difficult years of his career not because of raw ambition, or greed, but because he wanted to be a part of the game he loved. Well, he’s a part of it now, all right, his face etched into the Mount Rushmore skyline of baseball giants. McGwire has earned this status as a baseball great, worked harder than any outsider would believe. But the true meaning of his achievement won’t become evident until a month from now. That’s when the surge of interest he has unleashed this summer rolls over into the fall and breathes new life into baseball’s sacred yearly rite, the World Series. McGwire’s heroics have set the stage for a rebirth of baseball not just as pleasant use of a vacant lot, a bat and a ball, but as something more — a national religion of sorts, a national pastime that can unite eggheads and sloe-eyed teens and great-grandmothers and yes, even the besieged inhabitants of the White House.
“People say it’s bringing the country together,” McGwire said this week. “So be it.”
The idea of penance has been kicking around a lot lately, as the self-appointed moral guardians of the nation fill the airwaves and news columns with endless fatuous indignation over the petty acts of a sometimes-squirrelly president. Well, baseball had to do some penance, too. It had to suffer a little, get off its high horse, to convince fans that it deserved to be taken back into their hearts after the nauseating betrayal, the unforgivable profanity of a canceled World Series. Baseball has served that penance, it has come roaring back, and McGwire serves as the perfect symbol of all that.
The best thing about McGwire is that he is what he is. He lifted his son Matthew high in the air at home plate just after he tied Roger Maris’ record, and he lifted him even higher in the air the next night, just after he surpassed Maris. It was the greatest, the most unforgettable consecration of the parent-child bond baseball ever produced, and it had not a sliver of phoniness to it, unlike so much of the media-devoured gestures of other star athletes. McGwire up until this week was never considered a charmer, but he has been a loving father. Dedicated, even. And yes, a role model to other men trying to be good fathers even after a divorce.
PHOTO: AP/WIDE WORLD
Top: St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire lifts his son Matthew at home
plate after hitting his 62nd home run of the season, breaking Roger Maris’
37-year-old single-season record.
- – - – - – - – - -
It sounds too cheeseball even to mention, now that McGwire’s crinkly eyed smile has been branded onto the public consciousness, but the man has had shots at home-run history before, and turned them down. He had hit 49 homers going into the last game of his rookie year, and pulled out of that game so he could fly back to California to be there when Matthew was born.
“I’ll never forget his first year when we were in Chicago,” longtime A’s traveling secretary Mickey Morabito, a former Billy Martin sidekick, recalled this week. “He called me in the middle of the night because Matthew was being born and he wanted to fly back. I had to tell Tony (La Russa, then the A’s manager) the next morning. He was going for 50, one of those nice round numbers you want to get. It just shows what a great guy he is, what a great father he is, that he wanted to do that.”
There’s more. Covering McGwire over his last four years with the Oakland A’s, I can attest that Matthew was always his favorite subject for clubhouse conversation, and this was true even though McGwire and Matthew’s mother had divorced years earlier. McGwire loved to talk about Matthew’s prowess with a golf club. He loved to talk about his time with him. And when the A’s traded McGwire to St. Louis last July, he did not even consider signing a long-term deal with the Cardinals until Matthew and one of his buddies (a Cardinals fan, as it happened) had flown from Southern California to Missouri to check the place out. Matthew pronounced St. Louis “cool,” and soon McGwire was breaking down at the press conference announcing his new contract, just after he announced he was setting aside a million a year for a foundation to help children who are victims of abuse.
But these being the ’90s, people ask for personality, preferably personality that can be packaged in nice sound bites, and this demand comes through just as belligerently from the people smart enough to lament the “Geraldo”-ization of our culture. McGwire has never been good at this sort of thing, a fact that has opened him up to all sort of inane caricature. One shrill-voiced media critic recently dismissed McGwire as “a colorless technician with the flair of a 1972 East German weight lifter,” an assertion that looked about as bright this week as the assertions of those who once heralded Bret Easton Ellis as the savior of American fiction. One Bay Area writer too lazy to come to terms with McGwire when he was in Oakland disparaged him this week for “normally” displaying the emotional range of Stonehenge, a perfectly fair charge if you’ve confined your observations of McGwire to “SportsCenter” highlights and those postgame media gang bangs.
One time at Tiger Stadium, McGwire hit a ball out of the park. That’s right, it bounced once on the little ledge of roof in left field, then it was gone. McGwire made a ball disappear. He stood ready for reporters’ questions after the game that day two years ago and the first one came from a radio type, who jammed his microphone forward and posed the following question: “Mark, you’ve hit (X) homers here at Tiger Stadium, and that was (X-plus-1)!” McGwire looked over at me, rolled his eyes and grinned, showing a lot more emotional range than Stonehenge. But he was gracious to the radio type and talked for him about seeing the ball and staying within himself.
McGwire is moody, no question, and he has at times seemed personally affronted by media attention. “We always called him ‘Baby Huey’ in the late ’80s,” former teammate Rickey Henderson says. “Mark never wanted the pub. He never wanted the media. He never wanted the attention. I think he probably was afraid of the attention and he didn’t want to be bothered by it.”
But the people who complained about McGwire being surly were always on suspect ground, and I should know, since I was at the wrong end of his most famous media snit. This was back in 1995 when McGwire was playing his way back into shape after one of his injuries. I asked him after one of these games if he was fine, and that made him mad, since he was on a program of coming out of games early. What really enraged him was the pack of radio and TV types who descended on him after that. McGwire boycotted all media for close to a month after that, and I had to face down those green dinosaur eyes glaring at me with undisguised rage to try to make amends, but McGwire put that behind him and was almost always helpful to me when I needed to talk to him.
Now that he’s hit the big time, and everyone is celebrating his accomplishments, it’s almost hard to believe how many injuries he had to fight through, how much unkind commentary he had to slough off. He had to take a back seat to Jose Canseco, the guy who could tell stories about the trapeze in Madonna’s bedroom. He had to endure losing one season to a hellish relationship, a couple of years after his divorce, and several others to injuries. He had to fend off sniping about his work with weights, which many believed led to injuries. But all the waiting, and all the falling short, ended up helping McGwire. The game showed him things. By the time he hit 58 homers in 1997, he was a different hitter and a different man than he had been a decade earlier. His power swing was shorter than ever and more powerful. Years of talking to a therapist gave him a confidence and sense of himself he had at times lacked in his early days in the big leagues. “You have to feel good inside and then everything else falls into place,” he says. McGwire tolerated living every day of his life as if he were only part of a man, squatting, crouching, constantly contorting a back that would betray him in a second if he stopped catering to its whims. A single bulging disc means pain will never be a stranger to McGwire. Spasms can never be avoided, only held off for a few more weeks. McGwire was hurt by the talk, during the years lost to injury, that he was not tough enough. That he might be soft. He knew what he was and what he was not, and a part of him knew there was a cruel, superficial ring of truth to some of the talk.
He comes across as almost the stereotype of the grinning, good-natured Southern California boy. He has never charged the mound after being hit by a pitch. He likes to joke around and kid his teammates, and any portrait of him that tried to capture the man, the real person, would paint him with his head tucked downward, face crinkled in laughter. He’s intense, but it’s his own kind of intensity. It leads him to work out hard and rehab hard and do everything he can to keep his body toned and supple; it does not include talking about being tough, or talking about how hard it is to sit and watch your baseball life seem to pass you by for what feels like forever. His kind of intensity required that he wait until he could do his talking with his bat. Now he’s done that.
“I think modern-day fans seem to care more about these records because
it tells you that what’s going on now matters,” writer Roger Angell said
earlier this season. “It says that we matter. I don’t think there was a
huge fuss made when Babe Ruth hit 60 because he’d already hit 59. We
want these records to say to us that these times are as good as the
past, or that these athletes are better.” The athletes are better, there’s no question about that. And the
convulsion of national interest over McGwire’s September to remember
helps remind people of that, not just ardent baseball fans but equivocal
followers of the game too. None of that guarantees the swirl of
excitement will last, especially since McGwire and the Cardinals are
already out of playoff contention. But baseball caught fire once already
this year, and it will be tantalizing to see if it can do it again for
the Fall Classic.
