The Year Everyone Won

By Tom Callahan

A happy feeling makes it to the World Series

Some time in the 1960s--tough to pinpoint, but the impression is of the Green Bay Packers sweeping an end--it was said that pro football had replaced baseball as the national pastime, that baseball was yesterday, the radio era, and football was today, the television age. This shows how confused people were in the '60s.

The World Series is here, the National Football League is not, and people could hardly be enjoying baseball more, or missing the striking football players less. One year after its own walkout, which somehow struck deeper at the heart of games, baseball drew 44,587,873 customers this season, a record by a million. In past years the World Series had to hustle to keep from being upstaged by the league playoffs. But this season the play-offs just hoped to live up to the division races. The unspeakable "split season" of 1981 was put behind for good on one final pretty day of regular play.

Maybe the Los Angeles Dodgers disagree, but there barely even seemed to be any losers. In the National League West, it was nice and democratic the way the San Diego Padres beat the Atlanta Braves for the Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants beat the Dodgers for the Braves. In the dugout getting ready to hit in the seventh inning, 39 and not so sure that this would not be his last at-bat ever, Giant Second Baseman Joe Morgan said he got to thinking of Ted Williams. (Do running backs ever break from the huddle thinking of Jim Brown?) In his final at-bat in 1960, Williams homered at Fenway Park. The Boston fans clamored for Williams to come back out of the dugout and take a final bow. He never did. After Morgan's homer that resolved everything so neatly, Little Joe took his curtain call and waved his cap to Candlestick Park.

At Baltimore, where the Orioles were able to win three straight games but not four from the Milwaukee Brewers, retiring Manager Earl Weaver did more than just pop back out of the dugout afterward; he led Memorial Stadium in cheers. Curiously, Baltimore has adopted for a municipal symbol and mascot a cab-driving, beer-belching mountain man who can roughly spell out the letters O-r-i-o-l-e-s by flailing his limbs. When the score is forgotten, the memory will be of Weaver taking over for Wild Bill Hagy and acting out how everyone felt. As he closed his last press conference, Weaver commended the umpires.

The loveliest expression of the season was Don Sutton's line in the Milwaukee clubhouse when the winning pitcher went looking for Shortstop Robin Yount and someone wanted to know how Sutton expected to locate a pip-squeak like Yount in the crush of these burly Brewers. "That's easy," said Sutton. "Robin Yount stands taller than anybody I've ever played with."

As mean-looking as the Hell's Angels but not as well groomed, the Brewers are a happy gang. "Have some fun," Harvey Kuenn told them in June when he moved his stuff from a coach's stall to the manager's office. They did. Kuenn has a wooden leg and a bad heart, and he squints a bit from the time he tried to catch a home run and his eye got hooked up on a centerfield fence. The fences never were able to contain his effort, or his team's.

While a New York Mets fan might be understandably peeved to see Manager Joe Torre, fired only last year, thriving with the Braves, and General Manager Joe McDonald, forced out the year before, frolicking with the St. Louis Cardinals, there seems to be little animosity now even for winners. Gene Autry bought the Angels' way into clover this year as surely as any owner ever did. But the cowboy has shown a grace by comparison that makes even wealth forgivable. "Oh, well," Autry comforted Reggie Jackson when Reggie slumped in September. "I made some pretty bad westerns too." Now that's the way to take it.

Even people who cannot stand the sight of Reggie Jackson knew that this was October and no time to look away. In October he might take three swings at three first pitches off three different pitchers and hit three home runs, as he did against the Dodgers in the final game of the 1977 World Series.

"When he hit the third one, and I was sure nobody was looking," Dodger First Baseman Steve Garvey said, "I applauded into my glove."

Not just a season, autumn is a time of life for a 43-year-old pitcher, and each National League division winner had one.

The Cardinals' Jim Kaat made it 24 campaigns this year, the only major league pitcher ever to make it that far. Atlanta's gray knuckleballer, Phil Niekro, was gypped out of 4 1/3 shutout innings last Wednesday night when the National League playoffs were stalled by the first of two rain-outs in St. Louis. With no Pete Rose or Carl Yastrzemski left around, and Pittsburgh's Willie Stargell gone forever, Niekro is the survivor of the year. Undaunted by the rain, he tried to talk Manager Torre into restarting him without rest Thursday night, and renewed and nearly won the argument Friday night before it stormed again.

Who can resist a 43-year-old pitcher who wants to pitch every day? "I don't want rest," said Niekro. "I want the baseball." Niekro goes back to the Milwaukee Braves (1965) and had hoped to go back to Milwaukee. "Lots of Polacks, lots of bars," he said. "My kind of town."

Whatever happens, wherever it happens, something will occur worth toasting. Those back-and-forth games, hockey and basketball, are cranking up again, and there are few bleaker measures of how long the winter can be. These last days of baseball will go fast. --By Tom Callahan

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