BASEBALL PLAYOFFS : The South Has Risen to the Top

Frankly, Atlanta, you gave a damn.

You never abandoned your baseball team, as thousands of Pittsburghers did. You never stopped beating the drum for your baseball team, even when your players were too far away to hear it. And you never missed a beat when anyone (sorry) had the colossal nerve to suggest that your show was over. Like your baseball team, you just kept playing.

America’s team?

Hey, maybe it is.

Life is good today in the land of the free and the home of the Braves.

When you play host to an Olympic Games--as Atlanta will--the competing teams are everybody’s. When you play host to a Super Bowl--as Atlanta will--the competing teams could be anybody’s. But when you play host to a World Series--as Atlanta will--one of those teams out there is yours.

And that’s what the 1990s are becoming, Atlanta.

Yours.

Somebody must have put something in the water down there. Georgia Tech won a chunk of a national championship. The Falcons even beat the 49ers. So, go ahead, y’all. It’s your decade and you can cry if you want to. Your time has come, Atlanta. Time for a little Southern exposure.

In Game 7 of the National League playoffs Thursday night, the Atlanta Braves buried the hatchet in the Pittsburgh Pirates. They overcame the team with the best record in baseball--a team that embarrassed itself by not scoring one run in Three Rivers Stadium after the eighth inning of Game 1; a team doubly embarrassed by the indifference of fans who sold the Pirates down all three rivers, leaving empty more than 10,000 seats.

Zero was the score for Pittsburgh three times in its own park, and nothing was what Andy Van Slyke, Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds did when the Pirates desperately needed them to do something. All the zeroes on the paychecks of these heroes meant precious little in the long run, and Bonilla might never accept a penny from the Pirates again, possibly defecting to the Yankees, Mets or Angels.

Times are hard here in the coal-and-steel belt, where the final home playoff game of last season also had thousands of no-shows. The exasperated manager of the Pirates, Jim Leyland, keeps telling himself to count his blessings, being father to a new baby boy, but the older boys who play for him are sorely testing Leyland’s patience.

They were beaten by a team that went 26 innings without a run. They were beaten by a team that had to do without its leadoff man and leading base stealer, outfielder Otis Nixon, who had a drug problem; without its leader in games saved, relief pitcher Juan Berenguer, who had an arm problem; and without its slugging first baseman, Nick Esasky, who had a fear of heights. Too bad, too, because a World Series--well, a baseball player can’t get any higher than this.

The Braves had reinforcements. They had a pitcher with a surname out of a Dr. Seuss story, John Smoltz, who wrote the ending to their storybook season. They had another pitcher with a baby face and a funny haircut, Steve Avery, who didn’t telegraph his pitches; he Koufaxed them.

They had a lifer minor leaguer, Greg Olson, who caught so many shutouts and so little shut-eye that Atlanta traded for another catcher eight days from season’s end, one not even eligible for the playoffs. They had a downwardly mobile major leaguer, Alejandro Pena, who didn’t arrive until the end of August and didn’t do one thing wrong thereafter.

They also had the pride and joy of Paramount High and Cerritos College, the long belter from Long Beach, rookie Brian Hunter, who broke into baseball as an outfielder, who didn’t mind playing first base as long as he was playing and who stepped up to the plate in the first inning and Reggie’d one so far over the fence that he stood there, Jackson fashion, admiring it.

You couldn’t blame him. It was a beauty.

“I never wanted to hit a baseball so hard in my life,” Hunter said, “and I never have.”

So, improbably, the World Series of tomorrow will be played between the Washington Senators and the Boston-Milwaukee Braves of yesterday, except it will be played in Minneapolis and Atlanta. The first time the Braves won the Series was in 1914, when they were in last place in July and then caught fire. The next time they won it was in 1957, when Lew Burdette filled in for a flu-ridden Warren Spahn and won the seventh game on two days’ rest.

That was also the last time the Braves won it.

Thirty-four years later, Tom Glavine will be the pitcher for the Series opener, and Atlanta has a built-in rallying cry if it needs one: Glavine, Smoltz and Avery and Pray For Bravery. Recent years may have been lean ones, but even “Gone With the Wind” eventually produced a sequel, and tomorrow is, as it turns out for Atlanta, another day.