Baseball: One Ran Away

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It was the biggest rumble out of Yankee Stadium in months, and the wonder was that there was anyone there to see it. It came on one of those hot, muggy nights when players as well as fans were languoring in the yawning gulf of ten games separating the Yankees from the rest of the American League. The yawn grew wider as the Yankees carried a 3-1 lead into the eighth inning; even the natives were getting restless.

Then Cleveland Indian Pitcher Gary Bell grazed the middle of Yankee Joe Pepitone. Pepitone trotted down to first base, but a hot verbal exchange with Bell sent him running out to the mound, and the dugouts boiled over. The field jammed spectacularly, but like the American League race, it was all show and not much action. Push a bit, swing a bit, yell a bit and it was over: Bell was fined $50 for deliberately throwing at the batter, Pepitone was accused of incitement to riot and later fined $50, but the Yankees won as usual, and the runaway ran on.

The gulf between the National League-leading Los Angeles Dodgers and the bunched-up teams below, from St. Louis to Philadelphia, was not so wide or so yawny. And, bless Doubleday, the National's season is traditionally more prone to surprises. The San Francisco Giants showed hopeful early-season strength, and it was not so far back that St. Louis was half a game ahead and the next four teams were no more than 2½ games out of first place. But in July the Cardinals were walloped out of the lead in a fateful three-game series with the Dodgers. Los Angeles has never since lost the lead, and last week opened it up to 6½ games with another two-out-of-three series over St. Louis.

So it looks like a Dodger year. But fans have a recurrent nightmare of the old New York Giants' Bobby Thomson homering away Brooklyn's hopes in the 1951 playoff, and the memory of last year's pitching collapse and the Dodgers' virtual abdication of the crown to the Giants is still fresh.