Series Heroes Require Introductions

By Tom Callahan

In an inspired pairing, St. Louis assigned Stan Musial and Moe Drabowsky last week to throw out a first ball at the World Series, something to do with their being Polish. Musial was and is a natural. When Missouri first heard that a Polish Cardinal had been elected Pope, most folks presumed it was Stan. But the selection of Drabowsky showed an instinct befitting the best baseball town in America, an affection for October strangers.

With almost any team you can name, not just the Cardinals, Drabowsky was a relief pitcher in the '60s famous for his sense of humor and a proclivity for charging long-distance calls to the bullpen telephones. Retiring to a brokerage, he wrote a book titled Everything I Know About the Stock Market, filled with empty pages. Just last week he thought of adding a chapter. But on an unlikely afternoon in 1966, Drabowsky turned into the sort of World Series hero Dan Gladden and Tom Lawless have just become, not to mention Al Weis, Al Gionfriddo and a lot of ordinary Als from the past that Ring Lardner could not have invented.

Every year the World Series comes as a surprise. In Drabowsky's year the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers were supposed to sweep the Baltimore Orioles, but they got swept instead, with Moe striking out six in a row. This year first the Cardinals were expected to overwhelm the Twins, then the Twins were poised to obliterate the Cardinals. The reverse happened in turn. A grand-slam homer from a lead-off hitter like Minnesota's Gladden qualifies as a marvel, but the home run later hit by Lawless was a miracle.

A third-string catcher who sat around St. Louis all season without chipping ! in so much as one RBI, Lawless evened the series with his mighty blow in Game Four off the winner of the opener, Frank Viola. "You can see it in their eyes," Viola had said of his teammates, who twice chose the fourth inning on their way to a thumping 10-1 and 8-4 start at home. "The trouble is, I've seen it in other teams' eyes too." Of course it was the fourth inning when Lawless, the .080 hitter, stood at home plate with two on beholding the left- field fence like a man seeing Shangri-la before the recent riots. The ball barely skimmed over.

The first Cardinal out of the dugout to congratulate him was Pitcher Ken Dayley, a moment of pure poetry. The only other homer Lawless ever hit in the big leagues, some three years ago, was off Dayley. To press the point, with the bases loaded in the seventh inning, Dayley came in to save the game. This may be stretching poetry a bit far, but that is the World Series. For the way he marshals the forces of Vince Coleman, Ozzie Smith and Curt Ford, Manager Whitey Herzog is celebrated as a thinker. ("The game of baseball's been awful good to me ever since I stopped trying to play it.") But the older Cardinals manager, Coach Red Schoendienst, still likes to flutter his fingers at the opponents in a tried-and-true hex. Something was working. With bunts, balks and stolen bases, the Cardinals finished a three-game sweep on their own plastic turf (3-1, 7-2 and 4-2) to assume a one-game lead.

Taking lessons in stoicism from Rookie Manager Tom Kelly, Minnesota was inclined to regard it not as a crash but as a correction. From the July All- Star Game to the October playoffs, Gary Gaetti, Kent Hrbek and Kirby Puckett brought all their muscle to bear, and still the Twins won just nine away games. For that matter, the last time the franchise managed a World Series victory on the road, the Washington Senators won it and Walter Johnson pitched it. Naturally, the people of St. Louis cannot imagine a more genial place than Busch Stadium, though their perspective may have become a little bleary over the years. Ford Frick was the commissioner in 1953, when Gussie Busch bought the team and wanted to rename old Sportsman's Park Budweiser Stadium. Frick ruled out such crass huckstering, but at 88 Busch has got the last laugh aboard a beer wagon that fetches him to his box before the home games.

Like sedated Clydesdales, the fans of St. Louis have been trained to clomp along to the Bud theme played incessantly as a rallying call. Advertisers might term this subconscious motivation, but it is conscious aggravation to everyone else. And someone seems to open the hatch to the broadcast booth whenever the organist strikes up again. After three days of shouting over an uninterrupted commercial, ABC's Al Michaels, Tim McCarver and Jim Palmer must have been glad to get back to the relative quiet of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.

Humphrey's presidential campaign song in 1968 was a regrettable selection that went, "Will everyone here kindly step to the rear and let a winner lead the way." From before Humphrey to after Walter Mondale, with a lot of Harold Stassen and Viking Super Bowls in between, the hanky-waving citizenry has been desperate to be known as a winner and to lead the way. Behind 5-2 in the sixth game, they thought about despairing again, until old Don Baylor hit a two-run homer, and Hrbek a grand slam. No team had ever won all four home games in a World Series, but by a score of 11-5 and a grace as big as all indoors, the Twins won the right to try. Meanwhile, back in St. Louis, the headline writers stood by wondering which it would be -- THIS BUD'S FOR YOU! or NO JOY IN BUDVILLE.