Delightful Imperfection Is Given Perfect Finish

Well! What movie was that from?

A home run in the bottom of the ninth with your team behind, a two-strike count?

Naw! Take that back for a rewrite. How about if the guy walks? How about if he strikes out? Pops up? That’s what you expect.

There has been only one other bottom-of-the-ninth homer to win a World Series. Who’s going to believe it? Let’s have a little credibility here.

It put a merciful end to a World Series here in baseball’s biosphere, SkyDome, the only hotel in the world with a baseball park for a lobby. Most hotels have restaurants, nightclubs, padded sofas or potted palms in theirs. This one has bases.

If any World Series had to end on a gopher ball, this was it. The pitching in this Series would have had to improve to be described as merely lousy.

It made for bad baseball, but great theater. This was not a race between two thoroughbreds. Two claimers. It was about as classy as a cockfight.

These teams messed each over so much that you look at the winner with a cut lip, a mouse over his eye, a torn ear and his knee scraped from getting up and he says “Yeah, but you should see the other guy!”

The Phillies were Bowery Boys to the end. Truculent, defiant, irreverent, they looked like every street gang you ever shuddered at. They don’t know when they are beat.

If anyone had to win it on a home run in the last inning, Joseph Chris Carter was probably that man. He has been his team’s long-ball hitter since he arrived there. Also their runs-batted-in man. He has driven in more than 100 runs in seven of his last eight seasons, but the three he drove in Saturday night were probably the most important of his life.

Carter is a rarity in that he was traded to Toronto in that kind of deal that is a baseball nirvana. You see, baseball men always like to describe a trade as “a deal that will help both clubs.” More likely, it is a deal in which general managers swap disappointments. But the Blue Jays got Carter (and Roberto Alomar) from San Diego for Fred McGriff (and Tony Fernandez). It is as balanced, as even a swap as you will ever see.

It paid off for Toronto on Saturday night. Carter is an old-school slugger. He smiles a lot, giggles a lot, is even-tempered and makes the Toronto clubhouse a happy, uncomplicated place. Like all sluggers, he strikes out a lot, but he is not a helmet-tosser. “He got me with a good pitch” is often his attitude.

Some managers do not cotton to a smiling loser, but Carter has hit more than 30 home runs three years in a row and five times in his major league career.

When he came up to bat in the ninth inning Saturday night, he was hitless but had batted in a run in the first inning with a sacrifice fly. He was batting .250. He had no grandiose ideas. There was one out and runners on first and second and his team was trailing, 6-5.

It was a matchup made in baseball heaven. Philadelphia had its certified Wild Thing, Mitch Williams, on the mound. He had walked the tying run on base, then given up a hit to Paul Molitor.

“I was thinking, ‘All I need is a base hit,’ ” Carter recalled. “I wasn’t thinking home run.”

The count was 2 and 2. Baseball players never think home run with two strikes. What ballplayers do with two strikes is shorten up on the bat, choke it down so they can protect the plate, not take their 360-degree home run swing, which is easy to miss altogether.

But Carter got his pitch. Williams had a demon of his own--wildness. He came with a low slider rather than the chancy high hard one. “I’m definitely a low-ball hitter,” Carter recalled later.

It was a classic home run, almost a batting-practice home run. “I lost it in the lights,” Carter said. It soared high and long into the left-field bullpen. It was the old ball game, the old world championship.

So, it was Joe Carter’s World Series. It gets remembered for him--as the 1960 Series gets remembered for Bill Mazeroski’s homer. Carter’s clout is a highlight film moment forever.

But it could have been Paul Molitor’s World Series. This man put on a hitting exhibition in these six games that put him in a class with the great batsmen of history--not excluding Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby. Mr. Molitor, whose name only a half-dozen sports fans could spell when the Series began, batted .500, hit two home runs, two triples, two doubles and 12 hits altogether. He batted in eight runs, scored nine and had an unbelievable 23 total bases.

Philadelphia’s Lenny Dykstra had four home runs, batted .347, scored nine runs and had seven walks. Even Carter in his postgame remarks paid tribute to Dykstra’s refusal to take defeat.

It was not a Series for the purists. It was a Series for the bleachers, those who go to the games with a glove on their hand, their hat on backward and a beer in the seat. It had the highest-scoring, most rollicking, embarrassing game in Series history, it was won by the fans’ favorite maneuver, the home run with men on, it snatched victory from defeat.

If you want skill, go to a chess match. If you want fun, hope they have a Series like this every year. It was noisy, turbulent, sloppy, up-and-down, groans, tears and wild ecstasy.

In other words, Baseball. Long may it wave its pennants. Sure, it was long, but, as the song says, “I don’t care if I never get back!”

Telling Blows

A look at World Series won in the last at-bat: Year: 1912 Result: Boston Red Sox d. New York Giants, 4-3. Trailing, 2-1, entering the bottom of the 10th, the Red Sox scored one run on Tris Speaker’s single and scored the winning run on Larry Gardner’s sacrifice fly off Christy Mathewson.

*Year: 1924 Result: Washington Senators d. New York Giants, 4-3. With the score tied, 3-3, in the bottom of the 12th, the Senators’ Earl MacNeely grounded a bad-hop single over third baseman Fred Lindstrom’s head to score Muddy Ruel.

*Year: 1927 Result: New York Yankees d. Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-0. With the score tied, 3-3, the Yankees loaded the bases with none out in the bottom of the ninth on a single and two walks. Pirate pitcher John Miljus then struck out Lou Gehrig and Bob Meusel before uncorking a wild pitch, losing the game and the series.

*Year: 1929 Result: Philadelphia A’s d. Chicago Cubs, 4-1. With one out and trailing, 2-0, in the bottom of the ninth, the A’s Mule Haas hit a two-run homer to tie it. Al Simmons followed with a double, Jimmie Foxx was walked intentionally, setting the scene for Bing Miller, who singled to left to win the Series.

*Year: 1935 Result: Detroit Tigers d. Chicago Cubs, 4-2. Goose Goslin singled home Mickey Cochrane in the bottom of the ninth to break a 3-3 tie.

*Year: 1953 Result: New York Yankees d. Brooklyn Dodgers, 4-2. The Dodgers scored two runs to tie the game, 3-3, in the top of the ninth, only to watch Billy Martin single home Hank Bauer with the winning run with one out.

*Year: 1960 Result: Pittsburgh Pirates d. New York Yankees, 4-3. Bill Mazeroski homered off Ralph Terry leading off the bottom of the ninth for a 10-9 victory.

*Year: 1991 Result: Minnesota Twins d. Atlanta Braves, 4-3. Gene Larkin singled off Alejandro Pena in the bottom of the 10th, scoring Dan Gladden to win the game, 1-0.

*Year: 1993 Result: Toronto Blue Jays d. Philadelphia Phillies, 4-2. Joe Carter’s three-run homer off Mitch Williams wins the game, 8-6, and the Series.