Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Baseball culminates every year in the sinking light of autumn evenings, crisp weather that excites the heart and offers clarity on the latest long season. This has been a signal year not so much because of the superiority of any one team but because of the individual feats of Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, as well as of Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts, surpassing players deployed in potent pairs at the tops of the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers lineups.
Yes, them again. The Yankees and the Dodgers are baseball’s Big Oil franchises, the prosperous winners of now forty-one and twenty-two pennants, respectively, since the World Series began. This year’s Series, which began on Friday, is the twelfth instance in which the teams have met in these Punic confrontations, with the Yankees prevailing eight times. The Dodgers have been to four of the last eight Series. In a thirty-team league, the two teams together employ eight of the twenty-six highest-paid players.
Forsaken again in the League Championship Series were those wildcat baseball drillers, the Cleveland Guardians and the New York Mets, teams whose followers are prone to proclaiming that the season’s over when the season begins. The Mets haven’t won the Fall Classic since 1986; Cleveland last triumphed in 1948. But following any club yields the rewards of this beautiful, eccentric game—and, inevitably, even perpetual losers are susceptible to pangs of optimism.
Such was the mood on Ontario Street, in downtown Cleveland, as Game Three of the L.C.S. unfolded. The Yankees had won the first two games in New York, but now Cleveland led 3–1, with two outs in the eighth inning and a runner on first. The Guardians are exponents of Guards Ball. This is not a Jane Austen-era officers’ formal but a spunky method of play, familiar to olden baseball observers, in which the object of the game is to make contact and hit ’em where they ain’t. By contrast, the modern style is about home runs, strikeouts, and walks. “It’s a big power game now,” Ozzie Smith, the Hall of Fame shortstop known for his speed and artistic fielding, told me. “I’m not sure if guys like myself would even get drafted today.” The Guardians surely would have taken him. They compensate for having far less money than the Yankees or the Dodgers by relying on relatively unknown players notable for place-hitting, foot speed, and superior defense—as well as suffocating relief pitching.
So it was that the Guardians’ formidable closer, Emmanuel Clase, emerged from the bullpen to oppose the Yankees’ center fielder, Judge. “You hand him the ball, and we don’t even watch the game,” David Fry, Cleveland’s designated hitter, said of Clase. “We’re chatting it up because we know the game’s over.” Clase permitted an almost unimaginably stringent five earned runs all season. But Judge is an imposing man: he stands six feet seven, wears a size-seventeen shoe, and was his league’s best hitter this year. Clase threw his hundred-mile-an-hour cut fastball, and Judge lined it over the right-field wall. Next up was Giancarlo Stanton, the exemplar of our hit-or-miss moment: he’s amassed more home runs and strikeouts than any active player. At six feet six, with woodcutter’s biceps, Stanton can chop baseballs with such force that the sound resonates like an axe to a melon. This is what happened when he reversed Clase’s cutter toward the downtown skyline beyond center field. “We were, like, obviously shook,” Fry said. But it was “our time to pick him up.”
The Yankees scored another run in the ninth, and in the Cleveland stands sorrow seemed imminent. Then Jhonkensy (Big Christmas) Noel, perhaps the most anonymous of Cleveland’s unsung personnel, stepped up to pinch-hit. With a runner on second and two outs, Noel tied the score with a homer launched in the general direction of the North Pole. “Feliz Navidad! Feliz Navidad!” Rafa Hernández-Brito, the Guardians’ Spanish-language broadcaster, exulted. In the tenth, the score now 5–5, Fry came up with a runner on third and two outs. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single would have won the game. To everyone’s disbelief, Fry instead rapped yet another homer. “I blacked out,” he said.
This was among the most dramatic baseball games of importance ever played. Even Aaron Boone, the Yankees’ manager, called it “kind of a classic game.” But apparently not so for Noel. Afterward, he insisted, unsmiling, that it all had been “nothing special.” There was “one game today. Tomorrow we have another one.” Which the Yankees won, with Clase again failing to hold a late lead. And then New York ended the series an evening later, on a tenth-inning homer by Soto, whose numerous baseball talents include a prizefighter’s swaggering eagerness to shuffle and then pounce. He fouled off a succession of off-speed pitches, licking his lips and nodding out at the pitcher, Hunter Gaddis, until finally a fastball came. “I was waiting, waiting for the mistake. . . . I’m all over it,” Soto said. For Cleveland, it was another year knocked cold.
That’s baseball: elusive, uneasy, and mortal. Part of what brought many of us to the sport was the sense of intimacy we felt with players who came in all sizes, from almost every kind of community. We saw and heard from ballplayers every day, on the radio or in the news, and we grasped that foundational to this challenging sport was how they metabolized the possibility of failure—a seminal feature not just of their lives but of ours.
On October 25, 1986, I saw up close the way a public game could distill the deeper meaning in disappointment. It was Game Six of the World Series, and the Mets were at home against the Boston Red Sox. I was sitting in the Shea Stadium press box between Peter Gammons, my then colleague at Sports Illustrated, and Roger Angell, of this magazine. Gammons had spent most of his career with the Boston Globe, and Angell credited him with exploring the attachment that mill towns, fishing harbors, and villages across New England felt for a supposedly doomed team. But now the Red Sox had gone ahead 5–3 in the tenth inning, and were three outs from winning their first championship since 1918. The Shea press-box elevator was a creaky vessel, and, as far as I could tell, all the press-box occupants, save the official scorer, Red Foley, had departed for the slow descent to the clubhouse level, eager to watch the Boston players’ reaction to the long-awaited victory. But Angell and Gammons insisted on staying. It was important to see things through, they said. And so there we were, in an empty room.
Shuffling out to first base for Boston was Bill Buckner. For years, he’d been the picture of what baseball people called “a professional hitter.” Ron Darling, one of the Mets’ pitchers, said that Buckner was “a hitting machine. There was a toughness about him most of us didn’t have.” At nearly thirty-seven, Buckner had torn off a seventeen-game hitting streak in September—and this on such wounded legs and feet that locomotion depended on a buffet of ice, strong medication, and custom-made high-top cleats. His Fenway Park locker was stuffed with healing potions sent to him by fans; one came from a Salem witch. Usually, in the last inning, he would be replaced afield by the youthful, sure-handed Dave Stapleton, but not today. It seemed that John McNamara, Boston’s manager, was overlooking Buckner’s hobbled tendons out of a commitment to his character.
Quickly, two were out. One was was Keith Hernandez, the first baseman and team captain who typified New York’s approach. Hernandez played with swashbuckling aggression, ranging far from his positional crouch, expanding the realm. Before games, you could see him sitting at his locker, smoking Winston Lights and competing with teammates to finish the New York Times crossword; after games, he’d return to the same spot, sipping beer while offering a thoughtful exegesis of the just-completed events. “You’re playing a team you’re unfamiliar with,” Hernandez told me of the stress of a World Series. “I always felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know the pitchers. Discombobulating. Had to revert to my primordial instincts.”
But now it was Boston’s relievers who unravelled, yielding a succession of singles. A game-tying run was scored on a wild pitch. And then the Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson nudged a bouncer toward Buckner, whose glove closed too soon, as the ball—and the game—skidded just past it. Hernandez considers this the “greatest comeback in World Series history.” But what people would remember, far more than the Mets’ achievement, was Buckner’s botch.
Angell, Gammons, and I now rode the elevator. In the Boston clubhouse, a crowd of reporters surrounded Buckner’s locker, waiting. Cruel jokes were already being worked up. (Question: What do Bill Buckner and Michael Jackson have in common? Answer: They both wear a glove for no apparent reason.) And then there came Buckner, limping from the shower, clad only in a towel at the waist. The reporters surged forward, surrounding him at the center of the clubhouse, pelting him with questions. Nobody from the Sox suggested that perhaps the pitchers should also be held to account. Buckner was left there, all but naked, to explain the errant seconds that would define his long and otherwise distinguished career.
It was an astonishing thing to see. Buckner stood, stoic and patient, answering for his mistake until every inquisitor was satisfied. He then returned to his hotel room, took a consoling call from Reggie Jackson, returned two days later to the ballpark, and singled in his first at-bat in Game Seven. Which the Mets won, with Hernandez sparking a sixth-inning comeback: “I got a hit. Drove in two runs. That was pressure. Not enjoyable.” Frank Viola, a Minnesota Twins pitcher who grew up twenty miles from Shea Stadium, was in touch with Buckner in the years before his death, in 2019. “He took a lot of crap,” Viola told me. “He lived with it. Such a proud guy, too. Everybody was watching. Devastating.”
The Hall of Fame pitcher Stanley Coveleski, who won three games for Cleveland during the 1920 World Series, once said of his career: “You worry all the time. It never ends. Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.” Living with such daily disquiet is still at the center of the game, but, among current players, Juan Soto’s candor and brio are refreshing because they’re so rare. The typical modern player is a lone, distant figure, emerging to issue platitudes about remaining in the moment, taking it one game at a time, the language itself sanded down to an anodyne pallor. To suppress the dread that the next player to be humiliated might be him, he specializes in routinized ways of calming himself.
Consider the Dodgers’ lithe, versatile slugger Mookie Betts, who repairs to quiet inner-stadium rooms to focus. (This will be especially called for in Yankee Stadium, a pot built of metal, concrete, and plastic, in which the roar of the crowd, combined with a stridently electronic din and constantly flashing lights, makes a visiting player feel like he’s attempting to hit splitters in Times Square.) Betts embodies the Zen approach. After amassing four hits and four R.B.I.s in a Game Four win against the Mets, he shrugged and said, “Today worked, but tomorrow’s a new day.” Baseball—“it’s just a lot of work,” he added. Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ ace, is admired by peers such as Carlos Rodón for comporting himself “like a robot.” On even the coldest late afternoons, the Dodgers’ pitcher Michael Kopech walks the outfield perimeter in shorts and bare feet, a “grounding” exercise otherwise known as “earthing.” “I’m very strict with myself, how I go about the day,” Kopech told me. “We all find our peace out here.”
Baseball is endlessly scrutinized by team analytics departments, and no organization is more assiduous than the Dodgers in imaginatively mining the inner game. The club’s personnel includes directors of baseball strategy, performance science, systems applications, cultural development, quantitative analysis, and integrative baseball performance. “It’s a massive operation,” Andrew Friedman, the team’s president of baseball operations, told the Los Angeles Times. The ability to choose effective players and get the most from them explains how a team riven with injuries has still reached the World Series. The Dodgers are said to lead the league in meetings; analytics advisers are in close dialogue with scouting, and players like Betts talk of fulfilling a daily plan.
Such preparation is one of many ways players seek control over baseball’s defining anxieties. In contrast, the Guardians, the youngest of the four teams, were notably shadowed by doubt. The twenty-four-year-old reliever Joey Cantillo threw a record four wild pitches in a single inning, and the twenty-three-year-old shortstop Brayan Rocchio made three crucial errors in five games, including something seldom glimpsed on a major-league diamond: a dropped pop-up. In the aftermath of these travails, I heard no revelations, and it was the same with Gaddis post-Soto. I thought back to Game One of the 1988 World Series, when the Oakland Athletics’ Hall of Fame reliever Dennis Eckersley permitted a walk-off home run on an off-speed pitch to Kirk Gibson, of the Dodgers. There again, I watched in the clubhouse as someone who’d just been scalded in public responded with extraordinary self-possession.
The scene was “wild,” Eckersley told me. “All these guys around my locker. Insanity. I was in such a funk. I just took it on. What are you gonna say? ‘I’m not talking’? No! I just gave up one of the biggest homers in the history of the World Series. I was there forever, the last guy to leave that locker room.” Facing his mortification, Eckersley said, is “one of my proudest moments.” Even now, he will still volunteer, “Should have thrown Gibby a fastball!”
The Mets, it must be said, were the only team of this year’s four finalists that seemed to be taking conspicuous pleasure in what is, after all, a game. They may have baseball’s largest payroll, but they still seem like an underdog. The first baseman Pete Alonso travelled with a lucky “playoff pumpkin,” purchased from a Wisconsin patch during the team’s first-round victory over the Milwaukee Brewers. There was abundant talk of their good vibes, a buena onda that included the second baseman Jose Iglesias’s hit single “OMG.” (Many Mets wore “OMG” ski hats.) The team’s stellar shortstop Francisco Lindor—signed away from Cleveland for three hundred and forty-one million dollars—is also valued for his sunny, encouraging personality. His nickname is Mr. Smile; had he not been a ballplayer, he says, his chosen profession would have been dentist.
The Mets were endearing, but the Dodgers turned them into a pumpkin because they maintained more composure afield, working counts, taking walks, Ohtani and Betts relentless atop the order, everybody else following the plan. In today’s World Series quest, nothing’s more salient than superstars, and the Yankees and Dodgers simply pay more for them than other teams. The bigger the talent, it seems, the more imperative the need for remove. As a Yankee rookie in 2017, Judge lived in Times Square, until he was rescued by his teammate Brett Gardner, who gave him pastoral shelter in the Westchester County hamlet of Armonk. When the softspoken Judge talks about his approach to baseball, he expresses a complete commitment to professional inner peace. Since “everything’s important” in this “humbling game” of “ups and downs,” a player must keep light of heart, maintain a “short memory,” and not “make any moment too big.” Everything else, he concluded, “you just kind of ignore.”
The ballplayer of the day, of course, is the Dodgers’ six-feet-four, Japanese-born Ohtani, whose nonpareil strength and fluid techniques make him superior as both a home-run hitter and a strikeout pitcher. The last player to do both at such a rarefied level was Babe Ruth. Ohtani, who is recovering from arm surgery, didn’t pitch this year, but he compensated by becoming the first player ever to hit fifty home runs and steal fifty bases. Because the press knew Ruth so well, the public did, too—and beyond his superlative play, the Sultan of Swat became beloved for his enormous charisma and appetites. Perhaps ballplayers then were more accessible because the times were less intrusive. Today, Ohtani isn’t available for daily spontaneous baseball conversation. When he does meet with assembled journalists, he arrives accompanied by a translator. His previous interpreter entangled Ohtani in scandal, having pleaded guilty to stealing nearly seventeen million dollars from Ohtani’s bank accounts to pay off gambling debts. That Ohtani was not implicated has stopped exactly nobody from speculating about how such a large withdrawal could go unnoticed by him.
One explanation is that Ohtani stays sealed in the airtight confines of baseball. During a brief public interview, after the N.L.C.S. Game Four, he wore a lush bronze Boss sweatshirt made of enough cloth to serve as a topsail, and was studiously succinct about his ongoing experience. “I’m grateful to be able to play in this playoff environment,” he said. His approach, he explained, never changes: “I’m really just focussed on playing a good game tomorrow.” As he listened to English-speaking questioners, Ohtani often nodded in a way that implied he understood them. In an earlier session, when asked whether he was nervous about his first postseason, Ohtani immediately replied in English—“Nope!” There is doubtless a complexity to him we may never know.
Even with its changes—the cryptic players, the pitching and batting clocks designed to shorten games—there remains something timeless about baseball. “I always looked at baseball as the game of life,” Joe Torre, who won four World Series as the Yankees’ manager, told me. “People can relate more to us than other sports. It’s not the excitement of the Super Bowl, where every yard’s a big deal, but it has a certain riveting charm.” I was reminded of this anew before A.L.C.S. Game Two when, beside the Guardians dugout, I fell into conversation with Steven Kwan, Cleveland’s magnificent young left fielder. It was a cold, windy evening, and Kwan began to describe the seasonal adjustments that were now necessary for him to play this summer game. “The breeze is unexpected, and on Judge and Stanton fly balls I have to be under them,” he said. “I can’t drift. It’s my first year wearing contacts, and in this weather I blink a lot.” As he spoke, I felt the little thrill that comes when someone deepens your experience of something to which you’ve happily given attention all your life. But Kwan was still talking. There was also an advantage to the conditions. “With the wind slashing through my ears,” he said, “the jabs and jeers get lost.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
