WORLD SERIES / ATLANTA BRAVES vs. MINNESOTA TWINS : In Minnesota, the House Rules

Stop me if you’ve heard this--I think we’ve seen this film before--but the Minnesota Twins, who have never lost one here, won their seventh World Series game in a row at the Metrodome Saturday night.

And a pie is round and fudge is fattening and the Pope is Polish and there are bear tracks in the woods.

The Twins are as big a cinch in this arena as the iceberg against the Titanic.

This is not a ballpark, it’s a hoodoo. A haunted house. Dracula’s castle. If you look closely at the portraits on the wall, the eyes move. You keep waiting for wolves to howl. They should have a guy in a cape with pointed teeth at the door smiling bloodily and saying, “Show the lovely people in, Igor. My, you have a lovely neck, my sweet.”

Any lawyer would have gotten the Braves a change of venue.

The story of the game will say that Kirby Puckett won it for Minnesota. He got the home run in the 11th inning that decided it. He also got a triple that scored the first run, and he scored the second run--and his homer was the Twins’ fourth and deciding run.

But somewhere up above the baggy folds of the dome of this improbable ballpark, you can probably hear the ghostly laughter of the perverse gods of this place. They won the game. They always do. Bring a crucifix and a mirror if you enter after dark. The National League is like Little Red Riding Hood noticing what big teeth it has.

The World Series of 1991 had turned into an agony fight Saturday night--two palookas on rubber legs clinching and mauling, unable to land a telling punch.

You can understand batters not hitting 20-game winners or 95-m.p.h. fastballers, but these guys were waving at bouncing curves, high-and-outside changeups and hanging sliders from tired-armed relievers.

If it wasn’t the World Series you would have switched over to Saturday Night Live. Test patterns.

If you ever find yourself on a sinking ship, don’t get into a lifeboat with the Atlanta Braves. It’ll have a hole in it. These guys’ luck would have to improve to be classified as bad.

Guys going to the electric chair have a better chance. The only way their trip in here could have been more scary is if they found their host slept in a coffin.

In the first inning, Atlanta led off with probably the best 21-year-old pitcher on the planet. Steve Avery throws the ball 96 m.p.h. He won 18 regular-season games and two postseason games. He was up against Scott Erickson, a pitcher who got chased in his first World Series start, had a so-so second half of the season and whose manager and pitching coach both question his ability to stay calm enough for the pressure.

I want to tell you something: Scott Erickson should go directly to Vegas after this game. If he gets in a poker game, he should draw four cards and bump the pot.

Erickson never fooled Atlanta’s hitters much. Every hit off their bats was what the ballplayers call a “frozen rope.” The Minnesota third baseman broke the listed standing high-jump record to take one key hit away. Kirby Puckett then broke that record taking a ball off the plexiglass that barely missed being a home run. David Justice hit a towering smash that would have been an upper-deck home run, except it curved foul by inches. And Terry Pendleton, who hit a home run lter, barely missed a triple on a ball that all but kicked up dust on the left-field foul line.

Meanwhile, handle hits were falling in for Minnesota. A handle hit is a swing at the ball on which you are so badly fooled, you hit it off the narrow neck of the handle. It is baseball’s answer to the shank.

Once, an Atlanta left fielder, frantically trying to call off another interfering fielder, dropped a routine fly ball. Minnesota kept getting key hits with bats that were sawed in half.

This ballpark is so diabolically crafted, it has these little holes in the plastic, airship-like ceiling that can resemble baseballs. Sometimes, you have to decide which of the three round white objects in your line of vision is really the baseball.

Atlanta should have been leading this game by about 7-2 when Pendleton hit a home run in the fifth inning. But all it did was tie the score.

At the same time, Atlanta’s answer to Christy Mathewson opened the game by issuing a triple, two singles and two runs in the first inning.

Minnesota got a run on no hits in the fifth inning. A walk, a stolen base, a move to third on a fly ball and a sacrifice fly by (who else?) Puckett scored a go-ahead run.

This meant that Puckett drove in or scored every run his team got. The little round man had quite a night.

But it wouldn’t have been enough if the house wasn’t winning as usual in this crapshoot. The score is Metrodome 7, National League 0. And it may--probably will--go to 8-0 tonight.

Not that it didn’t get an assist. In the 11th inning, with Puckett coming to bat and the score tied, the Atlanta manager got a great idea.

You remember Charlie Leibrandt from Game 1 of the Series? A left-hander with an assortment of pitches that are soap bubbles in size and velocity. He gave up a home run, two doubles, three singles and four runs in that first game.

The Metrodome couldn’t believe its good luck. Manager Bobby Cox was not only agreeing to spend the night in their Hall of Horrors, he wasn’t even about to lock his door.

Putting Leibrandt in this fright hall is like putting a hen in a fox coop.

The thing about this malevolent place is, it teases you. It let the Braves go 11 innings. It dangled victory before them time and again--then, laughing uproariously, took it away.

Charlie Leibrandt against Kirby Puckett--and the Metrodome demons--was a terrible mismatch.

Puckett only thinks he hit the home run that won the game. We all know who did it. The phantom of this opera is this hokey, haunted castle the public thinks is merely a ballpark. It’s really Frankenstein.