Baseball: Heroic Tale

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There are those who hold that the World Series is one of the most exquisite tortures devised by man. Take two baseball teams, put them through a grueling, 162-game pennant race, then pit them against one another in a short, four-out-of-seven series with the world championship riding on the outcome. No wonder the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers committed six errors in one game last year, three of them by Outfielder Willie Davis. And yet more often than not, all the fierce pressure produces some of the year's best baseball and brightest heroes—as it did last week at the start of the 1967 Series be tween the National League's St. Louis Cardinals and the American League's Boston Red Sox.

Not that anyone expected less. Though few experts picked St. Louis for the pennant at season's start, Manager Red Schoendienst's Cardinals were clearly the class of the league, soaring home with a huge 1(H game lead and the kind of statistics fans like to brag about—a .263 team batting average and five pitchers with wins in double figures. So it was hardly surprising that they went into the series as 3 to 2 series favorites, while Boston was still reeling from one of the most frantic four-team pennant scrambles in American League history. That the Red Sox made it at all was due largely to the heroics of their two stars: Leftfielder Carl Yastrzemski, 28, winner of batting's triple crown (.326 average, 44 home runs, 121 RBIs), who got seven hits in his final eight times at bat, and Fireballing Righthander Jim Lonborg, 25, who locked up the pennant and his 22nd victory (v. nine losses) by cutting down the Minnesota Twins in the very last game of the season.

Back to the Burglar. In the first game of the Series last week, all the heroes belonged to St. Louis. On to pitch came Veteran Righthander Bob Gibson, 31, twice victor over the New York Yan kees in the 1964 World Series, twice a 20-game winner, and well on his way to another big season before a line drive broke his left leg last July. If there were any lingering effects, they certainly did not show. Boston's one real hit was a fluke homer by Pitcher Jose Santiago; only six other Red Sox batters even got to first, and in the strikeout column stood ten big Ks. With that kind of pitching, all it took to wrap up the game was a pair of runs, both of them supplied courtesy of Leftfielder Lou Brock, 28, the Cards' hardhitting (at .299) lead-off man and baseball's most artful burglar since Maury Wills decided to go straight. Lean, whippet-fast, a master of getting the jump on a pitcher, Brock has stolen no fewer than 189 bases in the last three years, and reform never entered his head last week. Four times he came to bat, four times he singled; twice he stole second, and once he went all the way from first to third on a hit to leftfield. All that scampering around produced two runs, and the ball game 2-1.