Sport: Sweet and Lingering Joy

A year is just an instant in baseball, but an inning is a long time ago, and before anyone could finish gulping or sighing, the World Series was on. If the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox take most of this week to realize where they are, it is because playoffs can hang in the air as improbably as homers off the bat of Lenny Dykstra or the glove of Dave Henderson, and neither the National nor American leagues had ever seen such playoffs.

Besides poetry, there was symmetry. Every dropped shoe seemed to have a mate. With the bases loaded in the ninth inning, Boston's irresistible young relief pitcher, Calvin Schiraldi, was one strike from holding off the California Angels, when he plunked their immovable old leftfielder, Brian Downing, on the hip. Two extra innings later, California took a 3-game-to-1 lead and Schiraldi a seat in the dugout with his face in a towel and his profile in a tableau. But the very next day he retired Downing for the final out of the most remarkable game almost anyone could remember.

In an eleventh-inning exchange that recalled Pete Rose, Carlton Fisk and the 1975 Cincinnati-Boston World Series, Angel Bobby Grich whispered to Old Teammate Don Baylor, "What do you think, Groove?"

"The best game I've ever been in," Baylor said softly.

"You and me both, pardner."

It whirled around Henderson, 28, a spare outfielder whom Boston rescued from Seattle last August after five uneventful seasons with the Mariners. He got into the game in the fifth inning only because regular Centerfielder Tony Armas went lame. Reaching for a Grich liner just below the top of the fence in the sixth, Henderson unwittingly boosted it over the wall to give California a one-run lead that became three by the ninth. Twenty-five-year Manager Gene Mauch, 60, the longest and saddest presider in the game, appeared to be on the brink of a smile. "My emotions have calluses on them," he said, "this big."

But Baylor homered with a man on to make it interesting, and Henderson did the same with two outs and two strikes to make it excruciating. "We're ballplayers," replied Henderson when asked how with one swing left in the season he managed to block out a mortal fear of failure. "We fail most of the time." Though the Angels tied the game in the bottom of the ninth and still had the bases loaded with only one out, Third Baseman Doug DeCinces and then Grich faltered in the clutch. After a couple of innings of outfielders' banging walls like cymbals clashing, Henderson's sacrifice fly finally and fittingly won. "I got no place to sleep tonight," Mauch said numbly. "I bet my house that DeCinces would get that run in from third."

Meanwhile New York had a game's lead over Houston after five, but the Mets were blessed to be alive. The best team in baseball, self-appointed, batted .189 and struck out 57 times. Split-Fingered Fast-Baller Mike Scott dismayed the Mets twice; all they could do with Scott was collect allegedly scuffed baseballs and cry to the press. Dykstra's ninth-inning homer saved a third loss, and Umpire Fred Brocklander's mistaken out call at first base forestalled a fourth. Houston's essential run was lost. Slumping Catcher Gary Carter eventually won that one in the twelfth inning with a flash single off flamboyant Reliever Charlie Kerfeld, who had given Carter the back of his glove and hand fielding an earlier zinger.