WORLD SERIES : ATLANTA BRAVES vs. CLEVELAND INDIANS : Indians Are Part Bulldog

OK, hold the flowers. Never mind the Mass cards. Take off the black armbands. The wake has been called off. Cancel the casket. Put the lilies on ice. You don’t need ‘em yet. Tell the pallbearers you’ll call them if you need them.

The Cleveland Indians aren’t dead. They’re able to sit up and take nourishment.

They had hardly any pulse when they took the field in this town where rivers catch fire and summer is a weekend in July on Thursday night. The townspeople spoke of them in hushed tones, of the dear departed, the undertaker was on call, the wreath was ready for the front door when their eyelids suddenly fluttered and they woke up and asked what everyone was crying about.

They’re not only alive, they now might win this World Series. I don’t make them a longshot by any means.

They were as long a shot as a mule in a Kentucky Derby when the fifth game started Thursday. Down 3-1 in games, they were facing a guy everyone says is not only the greatest pitcher on the scene today but maybe in the history of the game, an equal of Lefty Grove, Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax. Hell, of Cy Young.

He wasn’t even the best pitcher in Cleveland by the time the night’s game was over.

You know, when Albert Einstein first propounded his theory of relativity, it was widely believed there were only three people in the country who knew what he was talking about.

And when Orel Hershiser talks about pitching, there are even fewer who have a clue what he’s trying to tell them.

Orel Hershiser makes pitching sound like quantum physics. You figure Sir Isaac Newton should cover it.

But you heard me, Orel Hershiser. That’s Orel Leonard Hershiser the Fourth. Talk about getting up out of your deathbed!

You all remember Orel. The guy who came wandering off the cover of a Saturday Evening Post to stand the National League on its ear in 1988. The guy who suddenly couldn’t raise his arm to comb his hair after rotator cuff surgery in the years immediately following.

Even in his salad years, getting beat by Hershiser was a little like being robbed by a nun, bitten by a Chihuahua or run over by a baby carriage.

You know how tough most big league pitchers look. Beard like barbed wire, chaw of tobacco leaking onto the chin, fire in the eye and murder in the heart. Orel looks more like a guy studying for the priesthood. He doesn’t look mean enough to stand on a mound and sneer at big league hitters.

First of all, Orel is so pale and skinny that, if he had a dry martini for lunch (he wouldn’t) and you held him up to the light, you’d be able to see the olive. You could read a book through him. He could haunt a house, play Casper the Ghost without makeup. His chest was so concave he looked like a question mark from the side view. The guys in the locker room tease him by calling him “Muscles.” Orel doesn’t care.

He’s as religious as a cathedral. He never jumps in the air to celebrate a win, he goes to his knees to thank God for it. You’d never expect to see him in a baseball uniform with a two-seam fastball but in a cassock with a Bible.

He put the Cleveland Indians back in the World Series on Thursday by outpitching the guy who is supposed to be the whole book on pitching, Greg Maddux.

No one who was around Dodger Stadium in 1988 should be surprised. That year, it was Hershiser who was the equal of anybody who ever took a mound in the grand old game. He won 23 games, the Cy Young Award, the pennant and, with a little help from a Kirk Gibson home run, the World Series. He was as unhittable as a lottery.

He did it without a four-letter word, a snarl for the press or even an unkind word about ax murderers. He blew hitters away almost apologetically. But he went a record 59 consecutive innings without giving up a run.

He tried to pitch a year later with an arm so sore it was hard to lift a coffee cup, never mind throw a 90-m.p.h. fastball. He was such a ferocious competitor that his manager, Tom Lasorda, coined the nickname “Bulldog” for him. That surprised a lot of people who were fooled by his choirboy looks, but the hitters knew where it came from.

The Dodgers let him go, sore arm and all, and the baseball world thought maybe Orel should get a job on Wall Street or preaching on television.

Hershiser still thought that a guy who knew as much about pitching as he did should be in a rotation someplace.

Cleveland was dubious, but the Indians gave him the ball and said “Show us.”

Are they glad they did! Cleveland had enough home run hitters. What they didn’t have was enough pitchers to make the home runs not be irrelevant.

Albert Belle hit his 50 home runs, but it may have been the pale, polite, devout bulldog who put the pennant over Jacobs Field.

He drew the starting assignment in Atlanta last Saturday night. Suddenly, in the seventh inning of a tie game, Orel seemed to strike his colors, walk off the field. It seemed, at first, like a fighter quitting in his corner. “Bulldog?!” sneered the press. “Lap dog!”

“I over-managed myself,” Orel laughed about the incident Thursday night. “It became a bigger incident than it deserved. A veteran player knows when he can no longer be of use to the ballclub, and you don’t let your ego get in the way of winning.”

The press misunderstood, Orel feels, but it made his second Series start a matter of redemption calling for a demonstration of character for him. “I retired myself from managing. And it became important for me to go back out and show the leadership and intensity I was suppose to bring with me. “

He did. He threw a typically impeccable Hershiser performance, put a clamp on the Atlanta lineup and put the Braves’ victory celebration on hold.

He raised the dead. Then he put on his granny glasses and went home to read the Good Book. When other pitchers talk of going to “the book” on hitters, they mean the scouting report. Orel means Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Atlanta better hope they don’t have to face this prophet in a Game 7.

When he stands sideways you wouldn’t be able to see Orel at all if he didn’t have an Adam’s apple. But when he has a baseball in his hand, he looks like King Kong to a hitter. In a British schoolboy’s disguise.