In Today’s World, Small Stars Are Shining Brightest

Now that the Dodgers, of all people, have won the World Series, it’s official: The star system is dead.

It all began in Hollywood years ago, when leading men stopped being big good-looking guys with wavy hair and rippling muscles and began to be guys who looked like bellhops.

I don’t know what happened, unless it was that screenwriters were guys who couldn’t get a dance at the prom in high school and decided to get even and began to write scenarios for the wimps to get the girls. Anyway, Robert Taylor and Clark Gable were out and Dustin Hoffman was in.

It carried over into sports. Whoever wrote that this was the Century of the Common Man knew what he was talking about.

You may remember, years ago, in a movie in which she played an old-time film star, Gloria Swanson looking up into the screen of today and, her face distorted with disgust, shrieking, “We had faces in my day!”

Remember when we had Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, the great Connie Mack teams? They took charge of World Series. They used to blow everybody out just taking batting practice.

It didn’t work for the Oakland Athletics. They just stood up there belting these incredible batting practice shots up into the far reaches of Dodger Stadium, but if the Dodgers even noticed, they didn’t let on. Jose Canseco hit one clear over the palm trees in the Dodger bullpen, and the Dodgers yawned.

The clubhouse man, Nobe Kawano, put the right light on it. “Hell!” said Nobe, “them balls ain’t curvin’!”

Reputations don’t mean a thing anymore.

It happened in golf. The great nobodies of the game began to win.

First, it was just any tournament and then, pretty soon, the majors. Leader boards began to look like motel registers. It was mob rule. It went from a monarchy to an anarchy, from Who’s Who to Who’s That? From Ben Hogan to who-did-you-say-again? Guys starred on the tour one week and couldn’t make the cut the next.

Tennis held the line for a while. It was the more formful of the major sports. Not anymore.

Big Bill Tilden used to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, annually.

Then, Donald Budge. Jack Kramer.

You know who won at Wimbledon this year? How about Stefan Edberg? Know who won it last year? Try Pat Cash. Know who won the U.S. Open? Would you believe Mats Wilander?

Parity is built into pro football. They leave nothing to chance. They start cutting you down to size the minute you show signs of rising above the crowd. They punish you. Win, and you draft last. You settle for the dregs. A few years ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Miami Dolphins were two of the finest football aggregations in the history of the game. Now look at them.

The modern athlete doesn’t scare. Not so long ago, the wife of a well-known golfer came up to me at the start of a tournament. She was a wreck. And so was he.

“My God! He’s paired with Hogan!” she despaired. “He’ll never be able to draw the club back! He’s in awe of Hogan!”

No one’s in awe of anyone in this era. In the just-completed World Series, the Oakland A’s were supposed to be the nearest thing to the Ruth Yankees the game has seen since, well, since the Ruth Yankees. The Dodgers were just a bunch of scale-wage mechanics.

But look who’s been winning the World Series in the last few seasons. The Kansas City Royals? The Minnesota Twins? Ruth would laugh.

Look who’s been winning the Masters. Britishers.

Elitism is out. People make movies with hand-held cameras and unglamorous leading ladies such as Glenn Close and Meryl Streep. It’s a sign of the times.

Of course, Orel Hershiser IV won the world championship for the Dodgers in 1988. And he’s no face in the crowd. Any more than Grover Cleveland Alexander was.

But it was the lunch-pail guys who made the difference in the last analysis. You have to look down the lineup to two guys on the assembly line who typified the winning spirit. Wednesday’s pivotal game, as near to a team effort as you will find in a game as relentlessly individualistic as baseball, was a triumph of a lot of little men, the infantry in the game.

One of these is Franklin Stubbs. Stubbs is no bubble-gum card heirloom. But he was as steady a player as appeared in the tournament. And he might not even have gotten to play had Kirk Gibson not come up hurt. Stubbs’ key hits and runs in Games 4 and 5, his 2 booming doubles and his .294 Series average pounded a lot of respect for him into Oakland pitchers.

And do you let a .196 hitter swing on a 3-and-0 count? Of course not. A .196 hitter gets the take sign in those situations.

Unless the hitter is Mike Davis. You know Mike Davis is no .196 hitter. You know he’s going to get a batting-practice pitch in that situation. Now, a true .196 hitter might pop up a batting-practice pitch. But Mike Davis is a guy who hit 65 homers in his last 3 seasons, when he was with Oakland. He hits one into the right-field seats. A 3-and-0 pitch has no pedigree.

We don’t have royalty in this country. We don’t have Sultans of Swat in sport anymore, or King Carl. Even the commissioner isn’t the Czar anymore. Democracy has come to the playing fields, too. The peasants have taken over the palace. It’s probably what the founding fathers had in mind.

But the Oakland A’s must feel like George III--or Louis XIV. You don’t rule by divine right any more. If you want to run the game, you better have real muscle. You can’t get 3-and-0 counts past today’s ballplayer on reputation or by showing them your clips. The ball better sink. Or you will. It’s the People’s Republic of Baseball.