For This Season, Wild Card Race Has This Fan’s Vote

This is back to the past. This is what it used to be. I mean, what’s the score of the Cubs’ game?

And wherever it is you’re sitting, don’t dare change your seat because it might change your luck. This is not what passes for a pennant race, it is a pennant race. It may be an ersatz race because it’s called “wild card,” but the tension is real. Hold your breath.

Four games like that in Houston with the Mets hitting a home run in the eighth or ninth inning to change the lead in every game. Mike Piazza and Todd Hundley doing real drama with what serves for fiction. Al Leiter providing gallantry by slogging late into a game when the relief pitchers desperately needed relief of their own.

Maybe there never were four games like that. It really doesn’t matter if there were. And, as preamble, the last out of last Sunday’s 1-0 win at Montreal came on an outfield throw to the plate. These are the Amazin’ Mets.

I’m one of the world’s foremost opponents of the concept of the wild card, and this doesn’t exactly change my mind about some consolation prize at the end of the season, but what the Mets are doing, oh boy! The division winners essentially have been a foregone conclusion for some time--like the Yankees were assured of a place in the playoffs before the lifeguards stopped work on the beach.

But the Mets and the Cubs are playing for life or baseball death. Gotta win. One of them has to finish first in their race. They’re creating memories right now that will last a lifetime. Are the Jets in crisis? Who has room to think of football?

I’m sitting in my room after school in 1946 and the Dodgers and Cardinals are going game-for-game through September. I’m listening to Red Barber and Connie Desmond tell me about the Dodgers on the radio and one ear is on the St. Louis score. I’m not about to change my seat or start my homework. And, wouldn’t you believe, the Cardinals had to beat the Dodgers in a three-game playoff, the first time there ever was one in baseball.

In 1947 there was something called television, but who had a television set? Well, some people did, but none of my guys did. So we stood on Park Street on the sidewalk in front of Nassau Home Appliance and watched on the set Mr. Yurman set up in the window when he closed. It just happens that at this time I don’t have cable, which is the newfangled way to watch baseball. We couldn’t miss those Houston games. So Anita, my wife who appreciates having grown up between third and home at Ebbets Field, watched in a crowded bar. People shout encouragement at the TV as if it were carrying their voices back to the ballpark. When Piazza hit the three-run home run when the Mets were down to the last strike of the last out, the emotion wasn’t the whiskey talking. And what’s the Cubs’ score?

A race like this is an everyday part of life that only baseball can provide. It eases the pain of going back to school. One landmark now plays against another landmark in time. I listened with Steve Lekowski, a Yankee fan, when Jerry Coleman blooped a single with the bases loaded against the Red Sox as the Yankees swept a two-game series to win in 1949.

Remember the Giants overtaking the Dodgers in 1951 and Jackie Robinson lying prostrate after his desperate diving catch against the Phillies on the last Saturday when it was the Dodgers trying to stay alive. Or did Robinson really trap the ball beneath his body? Robinson is gone, and he never told.

I know I was a freshman at Indiana University, learning to do my own laundry, listening on a radio in the laundry room with some freshman football players. One of them put in too much soap, flooded the room and was thereafter known as Bubbles Hargrave.

This is Destiny. Or not. Remember the Mets of ’73 being last at the end of August and coming on. Remember Dave Augustine of the Pirates hitting a ball off the very top of the left field fence at Shea and instead of bouncing over, it came back to Cleon Jones like a pointer in stoopball, and he threw out Richie Zisk at the plate. How could that happen? God, it was explained, had sublet a condo in Forest Hills.

Then the Mets, who won only 82 games--fewest by a team that ever won anything--miraculously beat the marvelous Big Red Machine in the league championship series.

Maury Wills, the Dodgers’ shortstop of the ‘60s, before wild card or even divisional play--when a team really had to finish first--told me that from Labor Day on he could hardly eat a meal. He’d sit down and know he should eat a steak to keep up his weight, compromise with his tension by ordering a sandwich and manage only a few bites.

A player who can do in the tension what he usually does is a clutch player. Piazza has been hitting as if he had Roy Hobbs’ bat, the one that was created from a bolt of lightning. The word is avatar--the descent of god to earth in human form. Maybe Piazza is so caught by the emotion that the Mets can hold him here. And what about Hundley: He blocked the plate for the last out against Montreal, he won the game in Houston with the pinch home run. Isn’t there some way New York can have both of them? It makes a fan wistful to think he knows he has to go.

If only the Mets and Cubs were playing head to head for this. If only we could see Turk Wendell’s explosion after getting out Sammy Sosa in the ninth inning. Boy, did Turk pitch his heart out in Houston.

That is the way it used to be. As it is, the last time the Mets played the Cubs was in July. When the Yankees caught the Red Sox in the Saga of ‘78, they played seven times in September. Remember the Massacre in Boston when the Yankees swept four games, outscoring the Red Sox, 42-9, despite hitting only two home runs.

There were two divisions then and teams finished up playing in their own divisions. There are too many teams now. Or I’m an antique who should really be thinking that there aren’t enough teams. Maybe there should be 32 big-league teams, 16 in each league and four divisions of four teams and only the team that won a division got to play in October. Then they could play head-to-head in September.

The wild-card race isn’t going to be like this every year. Too often it’s going to be some kind of consolation prize like the Islanders in one round of the playoffs.

This is a delight. Where are we watching tomorrow night? McGwire’s and Sosa’s race against Ruth and Maris got our attention, and maybe that’s the topic of interest in Denver or Tampa, but the pennant race leaves that far behind. And what’s the Cubs’ score?

This could make a person a baseball fan.