Now His Banjo Is Playing the Hits

You want a profile of a World Series hero?

OK, forget the 6-foot-4, 250-pounders with the big, booming swing and the gaudy slugging averages. Don’t even bother with the 20-game winners. Skip the guys with the lifetime batting marks in the high .300s.

Pick the guy who’s just hanging onto the job; who’s, likely as not, platooned; who’s not on any bubble-gum cards, never makes the cover of The Sporting News.

It’s usually a script right out of Rocky. Bet the underdog.

You take Game 4 of the 1991 World Series. If you were in the Atlanta dugout before the game, you would have seen this little guy running around looking for a bat, and you might have had to look down your program to see who No. 20 was. If he didn’t have a number, you might have figured him for the bat boy. He was wearing these horned-rimmed glasses and a harassed look. You were surprised somebody wasn’t yelling at him to pick up the towels or go get them a Coke.

Mark Lemke is not on his way to Cooperstown. He’s not going to renegotiate a multimillion-dollar contract. He’s a .225 lifetime hitter. That puts him 142 points behind Ty Cobb. He has exactly 63 lifetime hits. That puts him only 4,193 behind Pete Rose.

But, he has now driven in the winning run in one World Series game and scored the winning run in the other. He is batting .417, he is slugging .667. That’s Babe Ruth territory.

Go figure.

It should come as no surprise to the scholars of the game. The gods of baseball are very capricious fellows. You have the unlikeliest characters taking over the year’s biggest spotlight. It’s like the old Broadway cliche. The leading lady gets temperamental, and the nice little kid from Sunday-school America gets pushed on stage by the director as he shouts in her ear: “You’re going out there a nobody and you’re coming back a star!”

That’s what’s happening to Mark Lemke, a marginal player, a banjo hitter who toiled through eight minor league seasons with six minor league teams before he came upon his field of dreams. He now goes to join the likes of Al Weis, a .215 hitter who began clubbing game-tying home runs for the New York Mets in 1969 and batting .455 or .240 over his lifetime marks. Or maybe he rings up alongside Brian Doyle, a guy who batted .192 in 1978 until he got to the World Series, where he hit .438.

But, while I wouldn’t begrudge Mark Lemke his hour in the stage lights, the ballplayer on Atlanta who is bursting on his first national stage but not his last is the one wearing not Lemke’s 20 but 23.

Every time I look at the Atlanta right fielder, I see Roy Hobbs. The movie slugger. The Natural. The kid-with-all-the-tools. The light-breaker. Born to be a star. A great part for Redford.

Even the name fits. Justice. Perfect. Right out of a dime novel. Ranks right along with Frank Merriwell, Dick Daring. Ronald Goodheart. A name made for a headline. Justice is righteous and will prevail. Thrice is he armed that hath Justice on his side. When a Justice makes an early inning error and makes up for it later with a home run, you say it’s only poetic Justice. When he misses a strike three curveball, you shrug--after all, it’s well known Justice is blind.

He’s not exactly The Franchise. He shares the billing with Ron Gant and a battery of the best young left-handed pitchers in the league. But, David Justice has what Hollywood would call star-quality. He lights up the screen.

He’s the perfect size--6 feet 3, 200. No fat. His belly is flatter than Texas. He has the most perfect swing this side of Ted Williams. He’s a born hitter. Lots of rookies come up with the knack for getting the bat on the ball. Usually, that’s all they do. Get their 200 hits, find the chinks in the outfield, hit .330, mostly singles. Justice can do that. But, he prefers to hit for power, too. Not since the young Mayses and Musials has anyone done both any better than David Justice can.

So, it makes you shudder this brilliant young athlete almost went down in baseball history not as a super player but as a new synonym for a goof-up, a modern-day Fred Merkle, Roy Riegels, the guys who ran the wrong way into the history books.

Atlanta got in this World Series because of David Justice. But it also got in in spite of David Justice.

It was in Game 5 of the NL championship series against Pittsburgh, fourth inning. The score was 0-0, the series was tied, 2-2, in games. David Justice, who reached base on an error, was on second base with none out when--guess who?--Mark Lemke singled to left. David Justice scored easily. But, he forgot to touch third base on his way round it. Pittsburgh went on to win the game, 1-0, and was going home with a 3-2 lead in games.

It was a gaffe that might have haunted David Justice all his career--just another indication that the Justice system doesn’t work. But Atlanta rallied to win the last two games and the pennant.

Like all the greats, he’s lucky, too.

There’s another allure of this civil Justice. He comes in duplicate. There is the superb young hitter who can become Mr. Hyde when he drops the bat; who is capable of suddenly taking it upon himself to dart in front of a teammate making a catch and foul up the play and turn a routine out into an extra-base hit. He has done that twice in this World Series. But he has also hit a home run, scored a winning run and, in the ninth inning Wednesday night, came up with a crucial sliding catch of a line drive in the corner that had triple written all over it, and which would have ignited a Minnesota attack.

He’s never boring. His career is like a Saturday afternoon serial. He hangs cliffs. But Justice always triumphs in the end. As, I would guess, the Minnesota Twins are beginning to suspect.