Who's Best? Play Ball

By Daniel Okrent

No one likes the baseball play-offs. Purists yearn for the days when just two teams would emerge from the grueling, 162-game slog of the regular season to battle one-on-one on crisp October afternoons. Modern fans too often watch their deserving hometown favorites stumble to an early-round upset. And nonfans run the risk of missing three weeks of Just Shoot Me.

Even the baseball officials who decreed this clumsy, attenuated and sometimes--as this year--thrilling system don't like the play-offs, although in their case it's the word itself that bothers them. It makes them gag--"play-offs" sounds so much like, oh, hockey, where everyone gets in.

But the play-offs--sorry, Bud--do enable the Lords of Baseball to count the additional money that jingles in their pockets and, in vintage years like this one, allow the rest of us to be reminded how thrilling the old game can be. This year's were as good as it gets, and the World Series that started Saturday may be just as memorable.

The exhausting, rain-sodden rumble the Atlanta Braves survived against the New York Mets for the National League championship last week consisted of six games decided by a total of seven runs, the last two games comprising 26 innings of struggle more nearly reminiscent of rugby union than of sunlit summer afternoons at the ball park. In the American League, the Boston Red Sox's lightning comeback against the Cleveland Indians in the first round was more histrionic than their testy five-game loss to the hated Yankees, but not remotely as dramatic. No script in baseball comes close to the 80 years of back story that informs all Yankee-Red Sox encounters.

Of course, the Red Sox lost. But not because of the Curse of the Bambino--the infamous mojo said to hover over Fenway Park ever since Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees in 1919--or because of a pall of New England Puritan guilt, or decades of nerves frayed into vermicelli by the exploits of Bucky Dent or Bill Buckner. The Sox lost because two mighty players--Pedro Martinez, the best pitcher in baseball, and Nomar Garciaparra, the finest shortstop whose first name happens to be his father's name spelled backward, at least until there's a better shortstop named Bob--could not carry 23 relative mediocrities on their backs.

So the matchups that would have made the best stories didn't eventuate. Mets-Red Sox would have been a replay of the Buckner series of '86; and Yankees-Mets, presumably, the mythic second coming of the famed Subway Series that marked the 1950s--mythic because, these days, people who ride subways don't often get tickets to Series games in New York City. After the corporate box-seat ticket holders and other big shooters are taken care of, it would only be accurate to call a Yankees-Mets engagement a Lincoln Town Car Series.

Instead of an epic encounter between fabled foes, we have a contest between the two best teams in baseball. And not merely the two best teams but two paradigms of the modern baseball-world order. The Yankees, with the game's highest payroll, are rich because they're in New York. The Braves, fifth highest, are rich because they're owned by a giant, jillion-dollar media company (the same one, Time Warner Inc., that owns this magazine).

There are some who say that Atlanta cannot be considered a great team, or the Braves' Bobby Cox a great manager, if they can squeeze only one world championship out of eight consecutive first-place finishes. They forget that the Orioles' Earl Weaver, generally acknowledged to be the best manager of the post-expansion era, pulled only one championship out of six firsts, and he never had to chain-smoke his way through three rounds of play-offs. Cox could have retired last Friday and history would recognize him as the outstanding manager that he is.

Like Weaver's, Cox's success--Atlanta's success--has been built on three foundations: starting pitching, starting pitching and starting pitching. Like Weaver, Cox has excelled at identifying four strong arms and keeping all of them healthy. Pitching coach Leo Mazzone, who has been at Cox's side for the entire decade, says, "Pitchers are cared for here." Other teams, he says, "blame their pitchers--'Oh, we lost it on our pitching.' Those are the teams that won't be in a World Series anytime soon." Seven of the past eight National League Cy Young Awards sit on Atlanta mantelpieces, which is not only unprecedented but nearly unfair.

Pitching is what brought the Yankees to their showdown with the Braves. At their best, the Yankees' somewhat aged starters--the thirtysomethings David Cone and Roger Clemens, the 27-year-old Andy Pettitte and the your-guess-is-as-good-as-his Orlando ("El Duque") Hernandez--almost match up with Atlanta's foursome of Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Kevin Millwood and Tom Glavine. The rest of the Yankee team is more balanced and more powerful than the Braves. And while Atlanta does have a snorting, 225-lb. alpha male lefthander, John Rocker, in the bullpen, the Yankees can turn to the impeccable Mariano Rivera, whose career post-season record--28 games, two runs allowed--enables New York manager Joe Torre to maintain his equanimity. And it's Torre's almost preternatural calm that keeps the players happy, which keeps the Yankees winning, which keeps George Steinbrenner out of the picture, which keeps Torre in his job.

A tough job it is too, as is Cox's. If the Series that concludes this epic play-off season goes the full seven games through Sunday, one of the managers is going to wake up the next morning and have to face two ugly realities: losing and November.

--With reporting by Greg Fulton/Atlanta

With reporting by Greg Fulton/Atlanta