Don’t Bet (Gas) House on Phillies

OK, world, the bad boys didn’t win it.

It’s safe to come out. Unbolt the door. Put away the beads. Unlight the candles.

The barbarians were stopped at the gates. The posse caught the outlaws. The streets are safe. Paris won’t fall. The republic is spared. The Mounties got their man.

You could have let the kids stay up to watch it. The Frank Merriwells beat the bullies. The old homestead has been saved. The villains got hissed. The sheriffs shot the guys in the black hats. Justice prevailed. Somebody ran over Hell’s Angels cycles.

The Phillies phailed. Phlopped. Phizzled. All that hair and dirt and crud underneath the fingernails didn’t help a bit. The guys in the clean uniforms and white hats gave them a good spanking. Told them to go home and change their trousers, this is a respectable neighborhood.

It was a Canadian caper.

It was a great game if you’re crazy about foul tips and 3-and-2 counts. It was longer than the War of 1812. The Blue Jays got the worms.

A World Series is not supposed to be a morality play. Neither side can ideally expect to be on the side of the angels, God’s team, while the other is an emissary from Hell.

The grand old game has had its contrasts. In 1934, the St. Louis Cardinals were a collection of rascals, roustabouts and reprobates. The press dubbed them “the Gas House Gang.” They were gifted, garrulous, truculent, arrogant. They’d steal your watch or your base with equal amounts of skill and enthusiasm. They had the Dean brothers, Dizzy and Daffy, Leo Durocher, Frankie Frisch and Ducky Medwick and they were harder to beat than dandruff. They stopped grounders with their chests and stole bases with their spikes.

They were a great baseball team, but they wouldn’t be much fun on a picnic. They were a tobacco-spitting, crotch-scratching, beer-swilling collection of thugs you wouldn’t want your sister to marry. They were underpaid, underfed, but never overmatched. Their uniforms were always dirty and so were they, because, in that Depression year, there was no money for soap and the Cardinals spent most of the game in the grime, diving for balls, sliding headfirst, rolling around in fistfights.

We never thought we would see their like again. When they got in a World Series with the lordly Detroit Tigers, the American League was rather like a pillar of the community, dour, correct, necktie-and-three-piece-suit types who went to church and felt degraded to have to play (and lose to) these ruffians, clownish types who made a mockery of the grand old game and its Victorian values. When the great Dizzy Dean, against his manager’s orders, unleashed a high fastball to the great Hank Greenberg, who promptly lashed it off the scoreboard in left, Manager Frisch screamed, “What’d you do that for? I told you he killed fastballs!” Dean replied, “I was beginning to think he couldn’t hit nuthin’!”

Well, now, it’s 1993 and out on the field in front of us is the replay of that long-ago World Series.

We have a new Gashouse Gang, the ’93 Philadelphia Phillies, wall-to-wall scruff, the Bowery Boys, the dirty two-dozen, the boys from the back of the truck. If you saw them coming on a dark street, you’d hide the Rolex and dial 911. The baseball version of the James Gang. Quantrill’s Raiders. Tobacco Roaders.

The National League has always been the “other” league, the one that played host to this kind of squad. Even though it’s older, it has been the black sheep of the family. The brash characters always seem to come from the National League. The American runs more to the Establishment. Haughty, disdainful. The bankers’ league. The landlords’ league. It is the league of the home run, the big inning. It doesn’t get its uniform dirty. It trots haughtily around the bases. It doesn’t scuffle for its runs, it gets them three at a time. It wins World Series games 18-4, 16-0, 13-5. Let the National League bunt, roll around in the dirt, dive for balls. The American League just hits them in the seats. It is no accident the New York Yankees were in the American League. For years, they were the American League.

So, what we’re seeing here in this 1993 revival of an old play is the same old plot. The National League wins like a dirty-faced kid with his hat on backward stealing a loaf of bread and running as fast as his legs will carry him. The American League wins like a bank foreclosing. With the kind of bored deliberateness of a judge issuing a writ.

Even the manager fits the mold. National League managers run to the mold of John McGraw, who answered to the nickname of “Muggsy” and all but invented the bunt, steal, slide and pray-for-rain style of play. The American League’s Joe McCarthy was the prototype of the wooden-Indian style of managing. He just got comfortable in a corner of the dugout and waited for the three-run home runs. You don’t need steal signs, sacrifice signs, hit-and-runs. You could bring a book when the 1932 Yankees played.

Clarence Edwin Gaston was as perfect for the American League as Joe McCarthy--or Babe Ruth, for that matter. He runs the game with the kind of bored elegance of a five-star general with crack troops.

You can never tell by looking at Cito Gaston whether he’s leading or trailing by five runs. The expression never changes. The smiles come infrequently, but the eyes miss nothing. He has never been known to panic. He makes moves like a chess player, not a fireman. “The calmest teams win these things,” he tells his team.

An American League manager, he has put together an American League team. The familiar AL weapon, the home run, undid Philadelphia Saturday night.

He is not particularly interested in the fact that he is the greatest and most successful black manager in the history of the game. Gaston gives no more thought to his color than Joe McCarthy did to his religion.

Managing the 1993 Toronto Blue Jays is not as simple as managing the 1927--or 1932--Yankees. You can’t just hand the bat to someone and say, “Why don’t you just go up there and hit a three-run homer so we can go home?”

The Toronto lineup is, like its manager, Amercan League to the core. The Blue Jays hit two big home runs in Game 1 Saturday, one from John Olerud, the league’s leading hitter, and the other from Devon White, the player who is supposed to beat you with the leather, not the wood.

But Cito’s team is not one that relies on the leg or the glove. It belted out 159 home runs during the season and had four guys with more than 20 and one with 33.

It is not a team that would fear a bunch of guys who need a shave and a haircut and a bath. It is a team that lost the two pitchers who led it to the World Series championship last year--Jimmy Key and Jack Morris--but Gaston was no more concerned than if he lost the key to his locker.

He doesn’t play a rah-rah game. He’s not Rockne. He runs the Blue Jays more like a tenured professor or a C.E.O.

It is a team that expects to win. Because its manager expects to win. Gaston is about as excitable as a tax collector.

They seemed to regard the Phaltering Phils with their lineup of motley cutups with bemused detachment as if to say, “Very cute. Good copy. Now can we just play baseball?”

When they did, it was the guys with the buttoned-down shirts and the un-torn pants 8--and the motley crew 5. Cito didn’t look surprised.