Error on First-Base Line Pales Compared to Error on Deadline

When I was a little kid and my grandmother told me that one day I would have to pay for my sins, I pictured myself in some future time up to my neck in ice-cold water, or locked in a cellar with eight rabid rats, or with the soles of my feet held against the coals of hell’s hottest coke heap. I thought I might be sentenced to a lifetime of eating turnips or listening to rock records in a room from which I could not escape.

I never dreamed my punishment would be sitting in a cold press box out between third base and the left-field foul line in Shea Stadium, praying for somebody to get a hit--anybody!--in time to end a game for my deadline. That all I would want in this world was a half-hour of lead time between the final out of a ball game and the time I had to start writing something that had the veneer of perspective on it.

I know the public is not supposed to care about your travails in this business of bringing journalistic truth to the masses, but there I was Saturday night, reviewing my whole life flashing before my eyes and making all kinds of extravagant promises.

If someone would please just get a hit and end this thing, I vowed silently, I would never tell another lie. I was sorry for every candy bar I ever stole. I’d never cheat on my income tax as long as I lived if this game would just end. I’d never put down a “5” again on a hole where I really made an “8,” and I’d never see an X-rated movie again as long as I live, and I would give till it hurts to the United Way, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, and I would never put down on my expense account again a cab I didn’t take or a meal I didn’t eat.

Nothing worked. The game went on and on, through time zones, through deadlines. Worse yet, it never seemed to want to come to any definite conclusion.

It was Torquemada, himself--and he should know--who once said that the ultimate torture was uncertainty.

Torquemada would have loved sixth games of World Series. In his book, they would rank right along with fingernail pliers, the rack, Chinese water torture and being pulled apart by teams of wild horses.

The satanic beauty of a sixth game is that it might be the last game. Journalistically, this means you must concentrate your interest in the team leading, 3 games to 2. It’s the way to bet. It’s the way to write.

Accordingly, the flower of American journalism, the poets of the press box, Saturday night in New York had exhausted their best adjectives extolling the artistry and talent of a Red Sox pitcher, Roger Clemens, who had not only gotten a lock on the 1986 Cy Young Award but had won 24 games in his league, struck out 238 batters, including a major league record of 20 in one game during the season.

Roger was sailing along through the Mets’ lineup so effortlessly that the press box boys had begun to circulate a no-hit pool. This is the ultimate accolade to a pitcher, a baseball tradition, an in-house lottery gotten up whenever the pitcher displays sufficient mastery over the opposition as to presuppose he might throw a no-hitter against them.

That’s how overpowering Roger Clemens was in the early innings Saturday night.

A few innings later--alas!--his manager removed him from the ball game and grown men were observed sobbing in the press box.

It has long been considered axiomatic that the way to beat the Red Sox in this Series was to get into their bullpen and go to work on their so-so relief staff.

When Clemens was gone and the game was in the hands of these plumbers, you knew Boston’s lead--and your deadline--was no longer in safe hands. And it wasn’t. The game resorted to the galling inconclusivity as the second hand and the minute hand swept around the clock towards--and past--the witching hour.

Stories waffled. Curses rent the gelid air.

Then came the top of the 10th, and Cinderella burst into the scene. Dave Henderson, who was a scullery maid of the game in Seattle, put on the glass slipper with a home run into the left-field scoreboard.

The knights of the keyboard fell to with a will. Here was sure-fire fairy tale stuff, the reject from last place, the hero of the ball. Stop the presses!

Stop the story. Kill the angle. In the bottom of the 10th, the New York Mets unfolded one of the classic stories of American sport. The World Series had finally gotten good. America’s attention had finally been riveted to the grand old game’s fall classic, which had been playing second fiddle to its playoffs up until then.

The only trouble with the story was that press row had run out of editions to tell it. How can you glow about a great game if the trucks have rolled with the last of the Sunday papers?

Night World Series games, which are played in and for the great god Television, had finally laid an egg. It’s the old story: does a tree fall in the forest if there’s nobody there to report it? Who would have heard of the fall of Troy if Homer weren’t there?

The venerable journalist, Leonard Koppett, who covered many a World Series, once propounded the law--what will happen in a World Series is whatever will inconvenience the greatest number of people.

Saturday’s Mets-Red Sox game may have been a historic one. If the Mets win the World Series, generations from now will come to believe that the things that befell the Boston Red Sox in the sixth game--Bill Buckner’s error, Bob Stanley’s wild pitch--really happened in the seventh game.

The seventh game, tonight, will begin 15 minutes earlier. That’s a step in the right direction. Those who know baseball don’t expect it to be enough. They expect a 16-inning finale. And a denouement two hours after deadline.

I once knew an editor who used to grumble, “I want news, not history.” As long as World Series are going to be played at night, he had very little chance of getting the former and not too much more of getting either.