The Days Dwindle Down

By WALTER SHAPIRO

The natural superiority of baseball can be expressed in two electric words: pennant races. The daily games through September and the all-or-nothing arithmetic of a sport still unsullied by complex playoff pairings give baseball a dramatic structure without parallel. Last week, as the California Angels gamely struggled to overtake the Oakland A's, Bert Blyleven, the bearded 38-year-old ace of the pitching staff, said, "This is what everybody plays for, to go into the last week of the season and have the games make a difference."

Rarely have so many late-September games held the potential to make such an epic difference for so many teams. In all of baseball's four divisions, the pennant races will not be officially decided until this week, the final seven days of the season. Only the San Francisco Giants, astride the National League West, possess breathing room ahead of the late-charging San Diego Padres. Powered by outfielder Kevin Mitchell (46 homers) and first baseman Will Clark (109 RBIs), the Giants may boast the game's most titanic twosome since the Yankee era of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Small wonder that manager Roger Craig is chortling, "It's going to be hard for anyone to catch us now."

What lifts the September showdowns in the other three divisions onto an almost magical plane is the identities of the contending teams themselves. No celluloid Field of Dreams can compete with the real-life resurrections that are a recurrent theme of this year's pennant sagas. In particular, four teams vying for the playoffs boast a distinct personality. Whoever prevails can be said to vindicate not only a theory of how the game should be played but, perhaps, for those who hail baseball as a religion, a philosophy of life as well.

The power of team chemistry. When the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East dropped 24 of their first 36 games this spring, it seemed the epitaph for a talented but erratic team. Renewal began with a new manager (soft-spoken Cito Gaston) whose unflappable style helped inspire the midseason revival of brooding power hitter George Bell. The August acquisition of spark-plug centerfielder Mookie Wilson added on-the-field leadership. As Gaston, one of the two black managers in baseball, puts it, "If I wasn't sitting in the dugout, I'd buy a ticket to see Mookie play."

The meek shall inherit the earth. In a rational universe, the Orioles (losers of 107 games last year) have no business nipping at the Blue Jays' heels. Aside from their lone star, indestructible shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., the O's represent an amalgam of rookies and major-league rejects. A typical lineup includes six players who have been released or traded cheaply by other teams. | Jeff Ballard, their junk-balling star pitcher, had a career record of 10-20 before this season. Cleanup hitter Mickey Tettleton never clubbed more than eleven homers in a year; in '89 he already has 25. As the O's clubhouse T shirts ask, WHY NOT?

Talent will triumph over adversity. The Oakland A's were the preseason favorites in the American League West. Even after moody slugger Jose Canseco missed the first half of the season and superstar stopper Dennis Eckersley soon joined him on the disabled list, manager Tony La Russa kept the Bay Area Bombers at the head of the pack. Now Eckersley and Canseco (who just unveiled a 900 number for fan calls) are back, joined by the sultan of swipe, base stealer Rickey Henderson, rescued from the clutches of the New York Yankees. Still, the A's must shake off the Angels if they hope to become the first team to capture successive flags since 1978. Says pitcher Dave Stewart, who just put together his third-straight 20-game season: "We didn't expect it to be this tough."

The joy of redemption. The Chicago Cubs are blessed with a beautiful ball park (Wrigley Field) and saddled with a tragic curse: no pennant since 1945. Their old-school manager Don Zimmer carries his own albatross: the memory of squandering an 11 1/2-game lead as skipper of the Boston Red Sox in 1978. But with the Cubs in the lead in the National League East, Zimmer can relax enough to tell his ball club, "If you're not enjoying this, you should get a real job." The mood is infectious, whether it is .300-hitting first baseman Mark Grace describing the pennant race as "really neat" or rookie phenom Dwight Smith likening the season to a "dream." Only one thing stands between the Cubs and ecstasy: the ragtag St. Louis Cardinals, managed by Whitey Herzog, the game's resident genius.

Perhaps these feverish pennant races are baseball's way of recompensing its loyal fans for the disgrace of Pete Rose and the specter of a strike next spring. But for the moment, the game is glittering like the Wrigley Field diamond in sunlight, as the schedule decrees that the season ends with the Cubs playing the Cardinals, the Giants taking on the Padres and the Orioles trying to knock the Blue Jays off their perch. It is enough to make even skeptics worship at the Church of Baseball.