Sport: A Not-So-Classic Fall Classic

However untidily, the Tigers chew on the Padres

After all the lovely and awful games of an occasionally tedious but ultimately fleeting baseball season, the desire to go out on a high moment is still strong. Even on the edge of a championship fully anticipated since April, the Detroit Tigers themselves seemed to be hoping for a better stage than a World Series only notable, and not remarkable, for scraps of drama—an exhilarating Chet Lemon catch or an excruciating Bobby Brown slump or two professional pitching performances by Jack Morris. When San Diego seemed all but finished, Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson said, "I wish before this is over that my team could have one day of playing the way it can play. No one's seen it."

In the fourth game many saw Tigers Shortstop Alan Trammell's consecutive home runs off right-winged Pitcher Eric Show, who absorbed seven of them in eight postseason innings, and some were impressed that the third time up, when circumstances called for him to try to move Lou Whitaker over, he finally did-with a single. Trammell provided all their runs in a 4-2 victory that left the Padres with no cheerful alternative to winning three games in a row, as they had done against the Chicago Cubs. "Maybe we should start our bullpen," said Manager Dick Williams, for the starting pitchers' earned run average over three losses and a victory was 11.70.

Before the 1984 Tigers, only the 1927 Yankees and 1923 Giants had led a pennant race from the first day to the last. Though Detroit's players expressed the usual respect for the opponent at hand, they seemed to imagine themselves in a deeper contest-playing for history. And not just engaged, enthralled. "Great teams are remembered fondly," Trammell sighed dreamily. Upon winning the first game 3-2, convoluted Conversationalist Anderson somehow concluded that a full seven-game Series was assured. "If it don't go seven," he worried, "people are going to miss some of my best stuff."

When San Diego took the second game 5-3, he turned around and declined to feign the customary contentment with a split of the opening two road games, preceding three at "home: "We feel like we can win every night." After Detroit won the next one 5-2, he reversed again: "Now we're sure we're going back to San Diego." Williams, the more stolid manager, said with less conviction, "I know we're going back, but I'd like for the Tigers to come with us." One of them had to become the first ever to manage a world champion in both the National and American Leagues. And now Williams had an idea who.