Two Paths to Glory

The Dodger farm boys challenge those Yankee dandies

It was a duel that will be remembered in baseball lore. Two men, symbols of two very different baseball philosophies, fought a ninth-inning battle for the second game of the 1978 World Series. One was the best pressure hitter that money could buy, the New York Yankees' Mr. October, Reggie Jackson. The other was the finest young fastballer that the sport's best farm system could produce, the Los Angeles Dodgers' new Mr. Koufax, 21-year-old Rookie Bob Welch. For seven minutes of exquisite tension, nine sizzling pitches and six whooshing swings of the bat, the man who has known great autumns and the boy who will know rare summers struggled while the tying and go-ahead Yankee runs waited on base.

From his vantage point in center field, the Dodgers' Bill North gloried in the drama: "That was the best show I've ever seen. The game's best fastball hitter up against a kid who throws as hard as anybody in baseball. It was like the 15th round of a heavyweight championship fight and you knew both guys had won seven rounds. Bob just aired it out and said, 'Hey Reggie, here it comes. If you can handle it, you deserve it.' It had to end in a home run or a strikeout."

It ended in a strikeout, and suddenly the Dodgers led their rematch with the Yankees, two games to zip. Young Welch's achievement vindicated the old-fashioned Dodger way of baseball: scout the hinterlands for raw talent, groom it carefully down on the farm, then bring young players up to the parent club to fill the gaps that age and injury inevitably open during the long, hot summer. Of a 25-man roster, 13 are onetime Dodger farm boys. In contrast, the Yankees built their team by spending big bucks on the free-agent market and have only six home-grown players on their squad. The Yankees can field the most devastating starting nine in baseball but have few reserves to call upon when trouble strikes.

Both teams had their troubles over the course of the season, and their separate solutions to the problems of tenacious foes, injured heroes and warring locker-room egos outline equally separate paths to the World Series showdown. This year the one-big-happy-family of Dodger Manager Tommy Lasorda was not quite so happy. Unlike last season, Los Angeles struggled through the early months, swapping the lead with the Cincinnati Reds, then falling behind the San Francisco Giants. It wasn't until the last week of August that the Dodgers entered first place to stay, and that after an air-clearing fistfight in the clubhouse between Top Pitcher and Resident Flake Don Sutton and the Dodgers' Mr. Clean, First Baseman Steve Garvey.

As for the Yankees, who lack farmclub talent, the team would have been crippled by the early-season miseries of Pitchers Don Gullett and Catfish Hunter had not the remarkable left arm of Ron Guidry saved the day. Guidry finished with 25 wins and just three losses, one of the best records in modern baseball history. There were other problems--there always are with the Yankees--but the team created by Owner George Steinbrenner's money managed to make one of the most remarkable comebacks in baseball history. New York rallied from 14 games behind the Boston Red Sox to win a rousing pennant race and show the kind of poise and resiliency they would later need--and display--against the Dodgers.

Still, the long drive for the American League championship left the Yankees drained and hobbled. Three key regulars--Centerfielder Mickey Rivers, All-Star Second Baseman Willie Randolph and First Baseman Chris Chambliss --missed one or more of the early Series games. Other Yankees suffered nagging injuries that did not remove them from the lineup, but slowed them a step or took some snap from their bats.

The Dodgers entered the World Series bearing the emotional burden of a death in the family. First-Base Coach Jim Gilliam, a Dodger for 26 years, died after a cerebral hemorrhage, just two days before the World Series started. Each game at Chavez Ravine began with lowered flags and silence, and the Dodgers wore Gilliam's number 19 bordered in black on their uniform sleeves. On the morning before the second game, sitting together with some Yankees at the Trinity Baptist Church, the players said goodbye to the last of the boys of summer to wear a Dodger uniform.

The effect of Gilliam's death on the club varied with each player, but there was little doubt that the Dodgers' fierce concentration during the opening games was heightened by their determination to make Gilliam's last team a championship club. Captain Davey Lopes insisted the night before the funeral that the Yankees would have to beat 50 Dodgers, "all 25 men on the roster and then the part of Jim Gilliam that is in all of us."

Another home-grown Los Angeles star, Lopes was perhaps closest to Gilliam of all the Dodgers. In Game 1, he played with a vengeance. For all the intricate meshing of team play in baseball --the lightning ballet of the double play, the slick-quick coordination of a relay from the outfield--the sport remains a game of individual skills. Lopes produced the first of a string of great individual performances in this 75th World Series. He crashed two home runs into the bleachers in left center, the last a screamer that was still on the rise when it rifled into the stands ten rows behind the 385-ft. marker.

The Yankees, accustomed to pyrotechnics themselves, had to play pecking baseball, although Jackson stretched his World Series home-run string to four straight games. His towering blast cleared the left-field fence, the Yankee bullpen, and nearly carried over the wall to the parking lot beyond--460 ft. to the last line of defense in Chavez Ravine. It was not enough. With Lopes driving in five runs, the Dodgers took the opener, 11-5.

Jackson was the Yankee hitting hero of the second game as well, driving in all three Yankee runs. But Los Angeles Third Baseman Ron Cey, who came up to stay from Albuquerque in 1972, did him exactly one better. Cey is dubbed "the Penguin" by his teammates, and he runs as though he were wearing bedroom slippers. No matter; he could have walked the bases after crunching a Catfish Hunter pitch for a three-run homer. Counting an ear lier RBI, the final score was the Penguin 4, the Yankees 3.

Still, the game's best defensive play was a portent of heroics to come and a change in the fortunes of the Series. Yankee Third Baseman Graig Nettles, acquired in a trade with Cleveland before the 1973 season, made a spectacular diving catch of a line drive. In the next game, back in Yankee Stadium, Nettles showed he had the millisecond reflexes and cannon arm to be ranked with Brooks Robinson at third. When a weary-armed Ron Guidry turned shaky on the mound, Nettles stifled Dodger rally after rally. Any one of his four sprawling, crawling, flying, levitating plays would have made an ordinary third baseman's season, and together they unmade the Dodgers' hopes for the third game.

Robbed by Nettles on a bases-loaded play that would have swung the game, Lopes said with amazement and admiration: "It was the best exhibition of defense I've ever seen since I've been playing pro ball. He saved at least six runs." Enough said; the Yanks won, 5-1.

The fourth game was a searing drama of pitcher vs. hitter, mano a mano. Bob Welch came into a 3-3 game in the eighth inning and once again blew heat past the big Yankee bats. Six New Yorkers went down in order.

But the Yankees had bought some speed of their own during the winter: Reliever Rich Gossage, acquired as a free agent for a reported $2.75 million over 6 years. He finished his first season in pinstripes by saving 27 games and compiling an earned run average of 2.01, impressive figures attained by totally unsubtle yet highly effective means: throwing a baseball at better than 95 m.p.h. Facing the Dodgers, Gossage retired six hitters of his own. The Yankees finally got their bats around on Welch in the tenth inning, winning 4-3 on Lou Piniella's opposite-field single. With New York and Los Angeles tied at two games each, the 1978 World Series began all over again.

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