Eckersley Fields the Applause

It came down to Dennis Eckersley against Tony Gwynn. Game 1 of the division playoff between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Diego Padres was on the line Tuesday.

Baseball heaven, or as Cardinal Manager Tony La Russa called it, “a magical moment, as good as it gets, except I don’t want to try to get two more wins by getting Tony Gwynn with two on and two out in the ninth.”

Neither does Eckersley.

“If I had to do that for a living, I’d go broke,” he said.

This time, the dividend was a 3-1 victory for the Cardinals and the 12th postseason save for Eckersley, who shook his head and said, “How typical is that? Two out, nobody on, then, jeez!”

Chris Gwynn and Rickey Henderson kept the Padres alive with singles and suddenly Eckersley was facing the other Gwynn, the seven-time National League batting champion.

Perhaps the best hitter against the best relief pitcher of their time.

Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan went to the mound.

“Dunc says to me, ‘Well, this is what you wanted,’ ” Eckersley recalled. “ ‘All you have to do is get him out one time.’ I said, ‘Yeah, . . . that.’ I mean, I can laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing then.”

Six pitches. A 2-2 count. Gwynn hit it hard up the middle, but Eckersley made the play, characteristically pumping his arm after throwing to first.

“Tell you what,” Eckersley said. “I didn’t catch that ball as much as it caught me. I just put my glove down.”

Said La Russa, smiling, “Maybe he won’t complain so much now when we put him through those fielding drills in spring training.”

A Busch Stadium crowd of 51,328 wasn’t complaining.

A three-run homer by Gary Gaetti in the first inning, before the shadows turned hitting into a guessing game, provided enough support for Todd Stottlemyre, Rick Honeycutt and the indomitable Eckersley.

The Padres got eight hits, the Cardinals only six off Joey Hamilton and Willie Blair. In a game that started in mid-afternoon shadows, each team had nine strikeouts. Ken Caminiti, the San Diego third baseman and the National League’s probable MVP, struck out three times. The Padres stranded 10.

“This is probably the toughest time to play in this park,” Gaetti said. “I think it helped to score early.

“I’d much rather play a night game or an early afternoon game. It’s too bad. I think it takes away from the game.”

There were no excuses from Gwynn, who had doubled and singled in four at-bats before facing Eckersley.

“I saw the ball well all day and was pretty confident there [in the ninth],” Gwynn said. “He was nipping the outside and they were taking the hole [between short and third] away. I felt that if I could get my barrel out, I could take it up the middle. I did what I wanted to do, but he made the play. If it gets through, we have a run in and runners on first and third.”

It was a day of ifs for the Padres, coming off their sweep at Dodger Stadium.

They had two on and one out against Stottlemyre in the first, but he struck out Caminiti and got Wally Joyner on a ground out. Then Stottlemyre bade goodbye to the demons of previous playoffs and pitched 6 2/3 innings, striking out seven and giving up five hits, including a solo homer by Henderson in the sixth.

Honeycutt--”If there’s a Hall of Fame for set-up men, he should be in it,” La Russa said--came in and popped up Tony Gwynn with two out and two on in the seventh, then struck out Caminiti after a leadoff single by Steve Finley in the eighth. At that point, Eckersley arrived and retired four in a row before brewing up that magical moment.

The Cardinals got only three hits off Hamilton and Blair after Gaetti, who has produced everywhere except Anaheim, hammered Hamilton with two out in the first.

A fastball?

“I don’t know,” Gaetti said. “I do know it wasn’t his good gas.”

Gaetti was one of many building blocks on which the Cardinals climbed from the Central cellar to the penthouse.

At 37, he signed a two-year contract as a free agent and hit 23 homers with 80 runs batted in for the team that had been his boyhood favorite growing up in Illinois.

“I couldn’t have written a better script,” he said of his return to the playoffs for the first time since he was the Minnesota Twins’ third baseman and MVP of the American League’s 1987 championship series.

The loss interrupted San Diego’s special script, but Gwynn said, “We’re coming off a series in which we had to win three games and did. We’ve still got four left [in this series].

“Losing the first isn’t the end of the world.”