Sport: A Series of Ultimate Fantasies

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People, not numbers, play baseball, the Dodgers proved again. What folly to explain the game's latest outlandish finding in figures like the Oakland batting average and the Los Angeles ERA, when everyone who watched the World Series knows that Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser cannot be explained any more than Mickey Hatcher can be believed.

To start things off, on consecutive nights in Los Angeles, something close to the ultimate hitter's and pitcher's daydreams were played out in such implausible detail that it strained decency. The A's led in the ninth inning of the first game, 4-3. Had there been one out instead of two, two on instead of one, that would have been enough. But the win-or-lose situation was perfectly framed, as that stubbly spirit Gibson emerged from the infirmary to take his only hack on crippled legs that said home run or nothing. On a 3-and- 2 pitch, naturally, the Dodgers won, 5-4.

While less suspenseful, the next game was even harder to swallow. In itself, Hershiser's 6-0 shutout was unsurprising. After topping off his Cy Young season with 59 scoreless innings -- one more than Don Drysdale's eternal streak -- he had blanked the blankety-blank Mets in the playoffs. But against Oakland, the hits that Hershiser allowed weren't as astonishing as those he accumulated: three of them. No Series pitcher had given as good as he got since the Yankees' Don Larsen went 0-for-2 in 1956. Orel yielded three singles but took two doubles and a single back. Stretching the ridiculous was a pregame portrait of his Rockwellian mom and dad, the Little League Parents of the Year, tossing out first balls.

At home, Oakland won the third game, 2-1, on a ninth-inning homer by Mark McGwire off Jay Howell. But a day later, Howell coerced McGwire into popping up with the bases loaded to save a 4-3 victory. The A's started to get the picture. To assist in melodrama, a clutter of wounded Dodgers joined Gibson and Dr. Frank Jobe in the training room. The patients of Jobe included Mike Marshall, Mike Scioscia and starting pitcher John Tudor, whose elbow gave out, maybe forever, after only four batters.

Mickey Hatcher homers, as likely as Walt Weiss errors, multiplied. In fact, the Series images are largely of Hatcher doing everything, throwing his ample body on bases as though they were hand grenades. "You don't have to have all the talent in the world," he said, "if the team plays together."

Manager Tommy Lasorda's prescience began with his use of Hatcher. Besides making a concert of the hit and run, Lasorda also let the A's alumnus Mike Davis ("a buck-ninety hitter," as Dennis Eckersley moaned) swing away in the fifth game on a 3-and-0 count -- for a homer, of course. Wisest of all, he persisted with Hershiser in the treacherous moment of that last 5-2 victory, when the choirboy was so spooked he actually sang hymns. "Today I'm living out the dream," Hershiser had said, "of a kid who was funny looking, wore glasses, had arms down to his knees and ended up playing in the majors."