To the Blue Jays, Game 7 Might as Well Be Tonight : Game 6: Some Toronto players say that they want to avoid a one-game series in Atlanta. The must-win Braves will send Avery against Cone.

The player in the blue uniform stood behind the batting cage at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium Friday afternoon and spoke of final breaths.

“Everybody is going to be greasing up their guns and loading them up for Saturday’s game, because there is no tomorrow,” the player said.

Then Dave Winfield of the Toronto Blue Jays paused, as if suddenly realizing that his team still leads this World Series, three games to two.

“I mean, there is no Monday,” Winfield said.

It was too late. The truth had leaked.

After losing to the Atlanta Braves, 7-2, in Game 5 Thursday, the Blue Jays are feeling like that back against the wall belongs to them.

The scorecard shows that this weekend they will have two chances to win their first world championship. But the Blue Jays’ hearts are telling them they have only one chance.

It will come tonight in Game 6 against the Braves at 5:41 p.m. PDT.

David Cone of the Blue Jays will face the Braves’ Steve Avery in what the Blue Jays hope will be the final pitching matchup of the season.

“We’re don’t want it to come down to a Game 7 . . . anything can happen in a one-game series,” Joe Carter said. “This first game is the one we have to win.”

The Blue Jays are so concerned, they took batting practice Friday during the day off while the Braves stayed home.

When Winfield, with no extra base hits and one run batted in, was asked about his team’s lack of hitting, he shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Not that the Blue Jays are worried without reason. The last five times that a team trailing by 3-2 has won the sixth game of a World Series, that team has also won the seventh game.

All five times, those final two games were played on the home field of the team that was trailing when the final two games began.

“We feel better coming home trailing 3-2 then we felt going up to Minnesota with a 3-2 lead last year,” Brave pitcher John Smoltz said, referring to his team’s loss in last year’s World Series.

Also, the Blue Jays probably sense that when a World Series goes this far, it usually goes the distance.

Only 17 of 88 previous World Series have ended in six games. Nearly twice as many, 32, have ended with a seventh game.

“We aren’t looking at this like we have to win one of two,” Kelly Gruber said. “We’re trying to win (today).”

John Schuerholz, the Braves’ general manager, held the same position with the Kansas City Royals when they came back from a 3-1 deficit to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1985 World Series.

He already has a name for what could happen this year.

“The Great Escape, Part 2,” Schuerholz said. “I don’t know what it is--maybe a resiliency, maybe a toughness--but these guys do seem to respond to adverse conditions.”

Schuerholz could have been talking not only about the Braves’ original three-games-to-one deficit--only six teams have overcome that margin to win a World Series--but also about their clubhouse trouble.

The Braves’ feuding that was reported after Game 5 was silenced Friday, perhaps because only Schuerholz made himself available to all the media.

“I don’t think you can play a game as well as we played (Thursday) if there is this great discord among the team members,” Schuerholz said.

Since the Braves’ feuding seemed to work, the Blue Jays tried a bit of it Friday.

Carter, whose only two runs batted in have occurred on homers, challenged Devon White and Roberto Alomar to discover first base.

The first two hitters in the Blue Jays lineup are batting a combined .154.

“You’d like to have more RBI opportunities, but they just haven’t been there--they’ve been able to keep Alomar and Devon White off the bases,” Carter said.

Said Alomar, who has a sore left elbow: “You can’t make a living just off the top of the order.”

Alomar then questioned the effectiveness of catcher Pat Borders while the Braves have stolen 13 bases, the most in a World Series since 1909.

The Braves will shift to overdrive today against Cone, considered baseball’s worst pitcher at holding runners. Deion Sanders has seven stolen bases against him in 12 career at-bats.

No wonder Cone seemed unnerved in his first start in Game 2, walking five in 4 1/3 innings while getting no decision.

“We have to stop their running game,” Alomar said. “The pitchers have been doing a good job, but Borders has to start throwing the ball a little lower. He does a great job, but even he said his throwing hasn’t been as good as it could be.”

Manager Cito Gaston questioned the Blue Jays’ ineffectiveness against Brave left-handers, who include Avery and Game 7 starter Tom Glavine.

Avery, Glavine and reliever Mike Stanton have a combined 1.91 earned-run average against the Blue Jays, who batted nine points higher against left-handers (.270) than right-handers during the regular season.

“We’ve always had trouble against left-handed pitchers, I don’t know how to explain it,” Gaston said. “Even back when we had (Jesse) Barfield and (George) Bell, about the only guy who was decent against left-handers was Cliff Johnson.”

At least the Blue Jays will not have to face the Braves’ Lonnie Smith. The grand-slam hero of Game 5 will return to the bench for these final two games because there will be no designated hitter.

However, this also means Winfield must return to right field, where he started only 26 games during the season.

“All I know is, you should get in front of your television sets tonight, because it’s going to be a good one,” Winfield said.

He didn’t say a thing about Sunday.