As a matter of fact, there wasn’t much of anything wild in sight to open the American League Championship Series Friday night, if you didn’t count the frequency with which Daisuke Matsuzaka got himself into and out of more traffic jams than a Las Vegas taxi driver and the Tampa Bay Rays got themselves into and out of a couple of rally-ready innings with nothing to show but castaways on the bases.

“That’s a good team. You’ve got to make sure that you capitalize when you have chances,” said becalmed Cliff Floyd, imported to the Rays to bring a little veteran stability to the flock of youngbloods. “When you don’t, you’re going to settle into an unfortunate situation like this.”

The unfortunate situation to which he referred was Dice-K taking a no-hitter into the seventh inning and the Boston Red Sox opening the ALCS with a 2-0 triumph that may yet prove to have been the night of the wasted chances from which the passionate bright young Rays may have to learn some lessons harsh enough.

This is not to say Matsuzaka made life simple for his mates, either. “We always joke how he gets out of these innings,” said Kevin Youkilis when it was over. “He’ll have bases-loaded, nobody out; or first and third, nobody out, and he gets out of jams. We wish he wouldn’t put himself in those jams, but it’s amazing how he does it and shows how great of a pitcher he is.”

It isn’t illegitimate to ponder whether genuinely great pitchers prove their greatness by walking the ducks onto the pond in the bottom of the first, as Matsuzaka did with Akinori Iwamura, Carlos Pena (with one out), and Carl Crawford (with two out, after a magnificent punchout of Evan Longoria frozen rather plainly), before he lured Floyd into sending one right toward Dustin Pedroia for the escape.

But they might do it by keeping the Rays at bay over the following five innings, the only blemish against Dice-K through the span a second walk to Pena, this time with two out in the third. Tampa Bay starter James Shields must have wondered throughout his own credible evening’s work whether he’d have to try for a perfect game in order to keep up with the Red Sox righthander with the hesitation windup and the no-hesitation corner-working repertoire.

Shields had his own assignment-opening problem in the top of the first, walking Pedroia after starting with a swishout of Jacoby Ellsbury, then holding his breath just a moment when Youkilis sent one down the right field line that might have pushed Pedroia home had it not bounced over the fence for the ground ruler.

Granted such a reprieve, Shields pounded the swishout onto Drew for his escape, then nearly matched Matsuzaka for cold efficiency until the Red Sox fifth. This time, his early-inning walk (to Jason Bay) cost him when Mark Kotsay, the erstwhile Oakland Athletic, shot a clean double toward the left field gap to set up second and third for Jed Lowrie. Lowrie lined one to the rear end of right field, allowing Bay’s rear end to cross the plate unmolested.

Shields otherwise kept the Red Sox almost as docile as Matsuzaka was keeping the Rays, until Pedroia swatted a one-out single in the seventh to end his evening’s work. Pedroia stole second so promptly after J.P. Howell came in from the bullpen that Howell could have been forgiven a lapse of plan when he walked David Ortiz and Youkilis drilled a clean double to left to send home Pedroia.

That’s when Balfour was brought in, and that’s when Drew took one on the shoulder, prompting a little hollering from the Red Sox—who haven’t exactly forgotten the rough stuff the upstart Rays started earlier in the season—but nothing much more than that.

The Rays can’t afford to renew it. Not when they’ve opened their first League Championship Series stranding the bases loaded, stranding all five men they managed to push into scoring position, and killing an eighth-inning rally (base hit, second on a wild pitch, infield single) when Justin Masterson, in relief of Hideki Okajima (one hitter, one fly out), worked Longoria into dialing an inning-ending Area Code 6-4-3.

“You have to tip your cap to Dice-K and the way he got out of jams,” Shields said graciously when it was done. “He was the better man tonight.”

Already the Rays are growing up. And just in time, if they’d like to prevail against Josh Beckett Saturday. Or, if not prevail, at least not go down without the right kind of fight.

Perhaps that’s what winning two World Series in four years, and two more than your archest of rivals in the new century to date, does for you. Because once upon a time you would have predicted it to be the Red Sox, and only the Red Sox, to stand on the threshold of the next plateau, if not the Promised Land itself, and find themselves shoved off the edge for keeps on the push of a busted ninth-inning suicide squeeze.

Only?

Well, it’s understandable why you might think so, but it’s also simple enough to forget the Los Angeles Angels have had a few crossed stars, curses actual or reputed, and calamities of their own to bear. And along came Erick Aybar, whose seasonlong performance as one of the American League’s more underrated middle infielders and plate pests was poisoned in one moment grisly enough to make even today’s customarily accommodating Angel fans lose their decorum, if not their dinners.

Oh, sure, the Angels rather stupefied one and all with that rapacious plunge through the 2002 postseason, but they had a few ghosts of their own to vapourise to get there. And some of those ghosts were hovering since the first time the Angels and the Red Sox met for a ticket to the next stop en route the Promised Land. Some of them trace back to the franchise’s very birth.

None of them is as troublesome even now as the sad ghost of Donnie Moore, but perhaps Moore’s tortured soul can rest a little further in peace now. Wherever he reposes, he has to know by now that he’s no longer the most inconceivable of Angel goats, the taut reliever who threw an unhittable forkball that a modest enough hitter sent over the left field fence with the Angels a strike away from their first World Series.

No one, over the coming seasons of merciless and sometimes obscene booing and catcalls any time he poked his nose out of the Angel bullpen, could convince Moore other than that it was nothing more than one man catching lightning at the expense of another doing his absolute best. But someone’s going to have to get busy convincing Erick Aybar that accidents will happen, even at the worst of possible times, even when they block the Angels from pushing a lead run across the plate in the top of the ninth Monday night in the all-time home of the great perverse ghosts.

Even when they come one night after Aybar was the man of the hour, the hero who’d kept the Red Sox from shoving the Angels aside in three straight for a third straight American League Division Series meeting, the infield gazelle whose bat had turned to beef jerky for thirteen previous ALDS at-bats until the bottom of the twelfth Sunday night, when he launched a shuttlecock up the pipe that had just enough elusiveness to invite Mike Napoli to cross the plate all the way from second.

On a night the Angels left sixteen men on, including eight in the first three innings, Aybar had gone from absentee ninth man up to drawing up the Angels’ possible survival papers.

Here, now, come Monday night, was a move Aybar had executed often enough during the season that he could have done it under heavy sedation strapped to a guerney. Turn an oncoming baseball into a dead fish, pushed just far enough up the forward infield to keep a lumbering catcher from grabbing it in time to thwart the plan.

This time the plan was to get Reggie Willits across the plate by any means necessary short of shooting him out of a cannon down the third base line. This isn’t exactly a plan alien to Angels manager Mike Scioscia, a man who learnt his baseball at the feet of, and behind the plate for, Tommy Lasorda, a man to whom the squeeze was something close enough to orgasmic.

When you’re only too well aware that your usually well-synchronised lineup of hitters has been turning baserunners into castaways at an alarming enough level throughout the regular season and throughout the first postseason round (how does hitting 8-for-40 with men in scoring position strike you?), you’re going to want to break that ninth-inning tie in any way, shape, or form that presents itself to you.

When your biggest woodsmen—Vladimir Guerrero and Mark Teixiera—are hitting .467 each for the series but getting little or nothing to work with when they’re swinging, you’re going to want to break that ninth-inning tie in every way, shape, or form that presents itself to you.

So Scioscia had Willits on third, a young man who runs the bases with his brains as much as with his bones, and Aybar, his leading bunter on the season (nine sacrifice bunts), coming up. And Willits was on third in the first place thanks to a bunt.

You could just about pick the Red Sox’s brains and see where they were already making their plans to play come-from-behind ball in the bottom of the ninth. Even if they knew the Angels had the squeeze on—and they expected it any any given time if and when the Angels had the chance—this was the Angels’ kind of game.

And it became advantage, Angels, when Boston reliever Manny Delcarmen went up and in twice to Aybar, leaving him little enough choice but to throw a strike rather than risk a free pass to the ninth hitter in the lineup. Sure enough, Delcarmen threw Aybar a thigh-high fastball angling just enough toward the inside that you could have bunted it with a feather.

Aybar pushed his bat to the ball as Willits pushed his way off third and down the line at power full enough. The only place the ball went was smack into Jason Varitek’s mitt. And the only place for Willits to go from there was surrender. He was dead on arrival. Except that who bargained for Varitek trying to chase Willits back up the line, rather than start the traditional rundown?

For one moment it looked as though the Angels would catch an extraterrestrial break in spite of themselves, as Willits scampered back up to third and Varitek, who’d picked up the missed ball barehanded, moved the ball to his mitt and lunged for a tag.

Don’t even think about it, Angel fans. Varitek had the ball secured in his mitt as he swiped Willits’s leg en route hitting the baseline diving, the ball within his control for a couple more than the required seconds to count before it popped from the mitt as the husky catcher hit the dirt.

It remained only for the Red Sox to do to the Angels what was once upon a time done to them with transdimensional impunity, Jason Bay diving home on Jed Lowrie’s two-out single for game, set, and date with the Rays with the American League pennant on the line.

It remains only for the Angels to figure out how John Lackey could have been outpitched by Jon Lester in both his ALDS starts; how Francisco Rodriguez could have picked the wrong time to serve gimpy J.D. Drew a two-run ninth-inning bomb; how a team whose reputation on the bases is among the game’s best could have worked the bases as though there were burning coals at or around each of them; or, how second baseman Howie Kendrick could have tried for Jacoby Ellsbury’s second-inning Game Three bloop when it should have been Torii Hunter’s play and call-off instead of a three-run single.

Those should be simpler to figure out than trying to figure out how their best bunter missed his chance to squeeze the Red Sox into a win-or-go-home fifth game.

Or, how the Angels as a whole squeezed themselves right into a round of unflattering comparisons to another team who spent year after year as division owners, came up with only one World Series win to show for it, and ended up boring everyone including a lot of their own fans to death.

The Angels are still many things among which boring is not to be found. Though Lackey is probably pushing his luck there by trying to wave off the Red Sox as a lesser team who finds ways to win on nothing hits. Makes you afraid to ask what he’d think if Aybar had dropped the bunt, Willits crossed the plate, and K-Rod had managed to hold the Red Sox off.

Last we looked, squeeze bunts weren’t as bone-rattling as rifle-shot doubles off the Monster, of the kind that provoked Lackey’s unwarranted observation in the first place.

The Angels’ lone Series triumph, not that long ago, turns out not to have exorcised a few of their own transdimensional ghosts. Those ghosts squeeze a little harder than the one Erick Aybar couldn’t drop and won’t forget.

This time, they got option b). Even if they needed twelve innings to secure what they started, 5-4, and avoid a third consecutive round one sweep whenever they’ve faced the Red Sox in a postseason dance.

Until Chone Figgins pounced on pitch one in Fenway Park and sent it down the right field line, the Angels and their devotees had every reason on earth to fear that even a less-than-fully-healthy Beckett might do a reasonable facsimile upon them Sunday what he’d done to launch the 2007 division series sweep.

You couldn’t blame those devotees, however, if they weren’t about to heave relief and think that this night might be different, until Figgins strolled home on a bases-loaded walk not too long afterward, with Beckett needing to lure Mike Napoli into an inning-ending forceout to keep the damage to a measly run.

Unfortunately, Beckett paid for that inning ender two innings later, with the Red Sox up by two  (Jacoby Ellsbury unloaded a bases-clearing single in the bottom of the second) and the Angels starting to feel their customarily ornery selves. Again Beckett surrendered an inning-opening double, this time to Vladimir Guerrero, who got frisky enough even on his well-compromised legs to steal third with two out. Up stepped Napoli, and over the Monster went a Beckett curve that had more hang time than a weather balloon.

These were not the Angels who barely brought themselves into calibration while Jason Bay—you remember him, the one whom nobody figured could replace Manny Ramirez when Manny Being Manny meant finally exasperating the Olde Towne Team into swapping him out of town for whatever reasonable facsimile they could get—put on whatever Manny costume he’s been carrying since becoming a Red Sox and yanked a two-out, two-run bomb off a theretofore-cruising (1-0 lead) John Lackey in Game One last Wednesday night.

These were not the Angels who couldn’t quite crawl back against Daisuke Matsuzaka and company in dropping Game Two, 7-5, thanks to J.D. Drew, another member of the Red Sox’ emergency room corps, who’d shown up in all of two games among the Red Sox’s final 38 down the stretch, unloading on Francisco Rodriguez, of all people, in the top of the ninth, giving Jonathan Papelbon all the room he’d need to send the Angels to the threshold of a nightmare.

These Angels kept pushing and shoving against Beckett and his mates. Even in innings when they couldn’t push a soul across the plate they pressurised Beckett and forced him to pitch and pitch again. On the other hand, you could have forgiven the Red Sox if they thought they might have mojo enough to get past the sudden Angel peskiness, especially when Torii Hunter stranded the ducks on the pond in the top of fourth.

But you could have forgiven the Red Sox if they’d begun to feel forebodings of their own an inning later, when Napoli launched a second bomb off Beckett, this one a solo performance with one out. That one compelled the Red Sox to play tie it up, which Kevin Youkilis did with a drive to the back of center field, a double that was deep enough to let Ellsbury wait for a cab to take him home.

That was enough to send Angels starter Joe Saunders, like Ervin Santana one of the club’s huge pitching surprises on the season (Saunders and Santana picked up the proverbial slack well enough over their own heads while the club awaited Lackey’s recovery from an elbow injury), out of the game. From that point forward, it was bullpen matcing bullpen for shutout baseball, Manny Delcarmen, Hideki Okajima, Jon Masterson, and Riverdance Papelbon for the Red Sox and Jose Arredondo, Darren Oliver, Scot Shields, K-Rod, and Jered Weaver (normally a starter, moved to the pen for postseason round one) for the Angels, and except for a few dicey bumps and grinds along the way (a Red Sox threat in the seventh that was crippled when Ellsbury was caught stealing and Shields came in to swish Youkilis for the side; K-Rod pitching out of a bases-loaded jam half his own making in the tenth; the Angels pushing first and second and one out against Papelbon before he got a fly and a swish to quell it), there it stood until the twelfth.

Javier Lopez hit the mound for the Red Sox and Napoli hit him for a leadoff single, with Howie Kendrick pushing Napoli to second on a by-the-blueprints bunt, before Erick Aybar, who may yet earn a little prop as the sleeper of the league at his position, singled up the pipe to send home Napoli.

And all Weaver had to do in the Red Sox twelfth was shake off a jolting drive to the back of the park by Youkilis that Hunter ran down like a cop running down a burglar, drop strike three in on Bay, and convince Alex Cora his destiny on the night was to ground out to Figgins at third nice and quiet like.

All they have to do now is convince Lackey to remember how he looked in the first five innings to open the set, before Bay splashed him in the sixth, when he goes against Jon Lester for a rematch in Game Four. It sounds simple. It’s anything but. With these two teams especially.

This time, there was no Jolly Cholly electing to send Hank Borowy on the mound with one day’s rest to try to nail a World Series, rather than open his doghouse just once to spring an extremely well-rested Hy Vandenburg for a fresh arm to feed the Detroit Tigers.

There was no Leo Durocher electing to spend more time baiting and alienating umpires into possibly allowing nearly every last close play in which they’d be involved go against the Cubs.

There were, to the best of our knowledge, no such vile venom soupmakers among the Bleacher Bums as to provoke enemy pitchers to beg for rotation switches just to get a crack at jamming one down the Cubs’ throats, as Bob Gibson did down the 1969 stretch.

There was no ground ball to figure out a way to turn a first baseman’s legs into a croquet wicket through which to sneak, as turned those of Leon Durham in the 1984 National League Championship Series.

There wasn’t even a Steve Bartman in the stands down the left field line, upon whom angry fans could fix the blame they couldn’t bear to impose upon Alex Gonzalez, whose glove disappeared in the same moment he elected to turn his chest into a trampoline for oncoming should-be double play balls.

And, they didn’t even have to sit in the Confines to watch these Cubs collapse in what might be, for them, the new old-fashioned way. This time, the Cubs earned it.

They earned it from the moment Joe Torre began to out-think and out-manage Lou Piniella. They earned it with their bats turning to noodles when they needed to harden into missile launchers and high-powered shotguns.

They earned it from the moment they stranded their first runner in scoring position, finishing their National League Division Series hitting .208 (5-for-24) with men in scoring position after leading the National league in scoring. (855 runs.)

They earned it from the moment Joe Torre out-thought Lou Piniella, hitting-and-running when he if nobody else knew the Cubs’ pitching and defence were particularly vulnerable, and they earned it from the moment Ryan Dempster, the Cubs’ resident crystal ball gazer, lost his control well enough to set up the ducks on the pond all by himself in the firs game, before serving James Loney a ball so luminous that Loney could have picked out the words “grand slam” outlined on the meat before sending it over the center field wall.

They earned it from the moment their defence proved they could siphon Carlos Zambrano’s combustibility and do around the horn what Zambrano still does once in awhile on the mound—implode and explode in perhaps the same motion, providing the Dodgers with a five-run second in the second game.

They earned it from the moment Manny Ramirez, from whom jaw-dropping bombs are as predictable as jaw-dropping attitudes in dire need of adjustment, committed a jaw-dropping act in Wrigley’s left field, in which there is no known men’s room for spontaneous repose, when he leaned into the fabled foliage to catch a Jim Edmonds fly as though he’d been playing the Monster in Fenway in abject preparation for just such a leaning.

They earned it from the moment Hiroki Kuroda showed them that he could tie them up like burglary victims even with something far less than his customary repertoire, that he didn’t need to strike out eleven as he’d done in June to provide six innings worth of Cub futility.

They earned it from the moment they first hit the field against the Dodgers to the moment they left the field for the final time this year, with nary a billy goat, or a live baseball bat, in the immediate vicinity.

They earned it perhaps from the moment Piniella decided a little public humiliation was just what struggling Kosuke Fukodome needed to catch himself back on track. Playing yourself out of the starting lineup is one thing, but when Fukudome needed a bracer from his own people while Cub Country was beginning to come down on him with both feet, what he got from his manager was a shovel and a tombstone.

As if he was the only one whose bat turned into a slat.

“Let me tell you this,” said Piniella when it was all over, resisting with remarkable aplomb the temptation that was surely there to run back onto the field, in the middle of a din of Dodger delerium, and rip out the Dodger Stadium bases for a few well-aimed throws. “You can play postseason baseball for now to another one hundred years, but if you score six runs in a three game series it’s going to be another hundred years before we win.

“We just didn’t hit, you have to score runs. We had opportunities and you have to take advantage of them. This is six games I managed now in the postseason and we have scored just twelve runs. That doesn’t get it done.”

What it got was the Cubs done for the season. It also completed Joe Torre’s resurrection. Let’s have no more talk about the weakness of the National League West or the manner(s) in which his Yankee teams might have been able to outplay his wounding flaws. And let’s have no more talk, especially, from the Yankee encampment or elsewhere, about how any given Lou Piniella team would never have gone as deathlike as Torre was going come postseason time.

These Dodgers looked as though they were at the front of the line when God was loading up the adrenaline and the spirits. These Dodgers looked as though they couldn’t wait to hit the field or the batter’s box, and the only thing for which they seemed to have the patience to wait was whatever Cub pitcher’s service had the look and the trajectory for a meeting with the head of a Dodger bat.

These Dodgers had something about them that could turn idiosyncratic Manny Ramirez into so relaxed and contented a character that he could (and probably did) carry them the second half of the season, down the stretch, and into round one merely by snapping a dreadlock and laughing it off when he couldn’t find the men’s room in any other left field fence.

He even found himself relaxed enough to lead or be among the first waves to celebrate when any of his Dodger mates delivered a big payload in their own right. For the first time in a very long time, Manny Being Manny included drawing a little inspiration from those surrounding him as much as he might let them draw from that well.

That’s a better recommendation for the younger Dodgers—Loney, Matt Kemp, Jonathan Broxton, Chad Billingsley, Russell Martin, and company—than the reputation they forged in their 2007 falterings for having been full-of-themselves underachievers.

And it isn’t unrealistic to suggest that one major reason for all the above is the man who is now Ramirez’s field boss. The man against whom Ramirez shone often enough in Red Sox silks. Ramirez has looked at the man from both sides now and not even his staunchest allies or most stubborn critics could tell you the last time Ramirez has looked this much at peace playing pressure baseball.

The Dodgers have a date with the Philadelphia Phillies. The Cubs have a date with winter vacation. The second century of the Cubs’ rebuilding effort has begun. And there isn’t an external or extraterrestrial scapegoat—billy or otherwise—in sight.

Only those wearing Los Angeles Dodgers silks will be laughing when they hark back to the top of the second. Anyone in Cubs silks who permits anything beyond a funereal smile is liable to risk Carlos Zambrano leading him to the slaughterhouse.

Zambrano could probably learn to live with Russell Martin launching a bases-clearing double to the back of left center field. It’s how the bases got loaded in the first place that might provoke a nightmare or three jolting him awake into a state in which murder might not be an unviable option.

Begin with one out (Matt Kemp, looking at strike three) and first and second when Cubs second baseman Mark DeRosa handled Blake DeWitt’s likely double play grounder as though the seams had been waxed with a particularly potent poison, allowing Andre Ethier (leadoff single) and James Loney (followup single) to second.

Continue with Derrek Lee, customarily a reliable pair of three-time Gold Glove first base hands, handling Casey Blake’s grounder as though the poisons were still finding the ball’s seams. Proceed to Zambrano swishing his Dodger opposite, Chad Billingsley, before Rafael Furcal—who seemed to have spent over half the season requiring medical attention otherwise—made Zambrano want an appointment with his doctor by beating out a bunt to push home Loney and keep the ducks on the pond for Martin.

And, now, watch as Martin’s tracer sails to the back of Wrigley Field and DeWitt, Blake, and Furcal come scampering home. Zambrano—who actually pitched well enough otherwise on the evening—almost didn’t dare watch. If he did, he’d have been the next man arrested as a Chicago serial killer.

With Billingsley pitching as stingily as you could ask when gifted a lead so fat, the Cubs seemed destined for little more beyond stranding what few baserunners they could muster, while the Dodgers added bits here (Manny Ramirez, with a hefty belt onto the batter’s eye club past center field to launch the Los Angeles sixth), pieces there (Kemp doubling Ramirez home with two out and Neal Cotts in relief of Zambrano in the top of the seventh), and fragments yonder (Furcal and Ramirez singling home a run apiece in the top of the eighth), right up to the moment Blake singled home pinch-hitter Juan Pierre (safe on another Cub error, Ryan Theriot throwing his grounder wild enough past first) in the top of the ninth.

All the Cubs could calibrate in response was Jim Edmonds doubling DeRosa home with two out in the seventh and DeRosa, who owes a little bit more in the realm of repayment, doubling home Lee and Aramis Ramirez off a slightly spent Takashi Saito, before Jonathan Broxton came in, shook off a walk to pinch-hitter Felix Pie, and lured Geovanny Soto into lining out to late substitute Angel Berroa at second, before dropping strike three right in on Kosuke Fukudome and Daryle Ward to end it.

All you had to see to punctuate the Cubs’ calamity was Manny Being Something Other Than Manny in the bottom of the fifth. He went to the ivy for Edmonds’ drive, leaned into it to spear the drive, and flipped the ball to center fielder Kemp like they were a pair of kids going for a cheap chuckle at summer camp, Kemp replying with a joyous slap on Ramirez’s shoulder.

That’s how things go for the Cubs in this division series thus far. They’re inspiring a fellow not usually known for being one of nature’s great defenders to hunt it, peck it, flip it, and laugh it. They’re also inspiring these Dodgers to play above and beyond the Dodgers who got waxed right out of the 2006 postseason (by the Mets) before they had time to grease their guns.

Any further such inspiration and the Cubs will go where not even the Boston Red Sox have gone before. Nor even the Philadelphia Phillies, who stand themselves on the threshold of shoving the Milwaukee Brewers toward winter vacation. I could spell it out for you, but as a latent sympathiser to Cub Country I’d like to see them go into the next game with something else to hold onto.

Hope would be a rather nice something else. That, and a one-game bypass of the second inning.

And that would be Ryan Dempster learning the hard way that you never throw a 1-2 bases-loaded meatball to James Loney, when the Chicago Cubs have a 2-0 lead, certainly not in Wrigley Field. It seems to mean mostly that Loney and the Dodgers are going to dine in style, after the ball lands beyond the center field wall.

While the actual Yankees continue their offseason pondering of what needs to be to bring them back to the postseason their fans think is theirs by birthright, their former manager banked it and two of their former Red Sox nemeses insured it, a 7-2 thump off perhaps the best Cubs team since . . . no, we’re not going to invoke the ghosts of 1969 or 1984 now.

Derek Lowe, arguably the best pitcher in baseball over its final fortnight (6-1 from 11 August to the final day, and a 1.27 ERA over that span), didn’t let Mark DeRosa’s one-out two-run bomb rattle him out of keeping the Cubs otherwise impotent, seven hits on the day amounting to nothing much beyond either stranded baserunners or two inning-ending double plays.

Manny Ramirez, say what you will of him otherwise, should think about formalising his credentials as an insurance agent. He started the Dodgers’ insurance by opening the top of the seventh with a lesson for Chicago reliever Sean Marshall: Don’t throw the all-time postseason bomb leader anything that even imitates something to hit. It’ll do a pretty fair imitation of a ballistic missile on its way into the left center field bleachers.

Not that the rest of the Dodgers planned on letting the ex-Red Sox have all the fun or Loney take too much of the glory. That was Martin Being Manny to open the top of the ninth, Russell Martin greeting Jason Marquis in from the pen with a rude bomb to the approximate real estate Ramirez had visited two innings earlier.

And that was Blake DeWitt taking advantage of Jim Edmonds’s rare miscue running down his eighth-inning double, taking third in time for Casey Blake, like Ramirez an erstwhile Cleveland Indian, to send him home with a single up the pipe.

This wasn’t exactly the manner in which Dempster nor Wrigley expected things to go. Not with a fellow who went 14-3 in the Confines on the regular season and had predicted rather boldly before the season that these Cubs would win the World Series. This year. Not next year. Not next century.

“Let’s put this one behind us,” said Cubs manager Lou Piniella, like Torre an erstwhile Yankee manager, “and go get them tomorrow.” And he didn’t so much as reach for his cap, never mind to throw it, while he said it.

Loney, who isn’t a former Red Sox, could only admire the lineup mate who was. “We get a sense of what he’s been doing all these years,” he said. Manny Ramirez has invited many reactions over his years, but understatement usually isn’t one of them.

The Red Sox have been resilient enough through their injuries to make them seem a slightly better survival bet against the Angels than the Angels turned out to be against them last season. The Red Sox survived the loss of their biggest bat (and biggest pain in the ass) at the trade deadline, but the Angels added a big bat (Mark Teixiera) and never really did have to worry about going too much extra for run creation, anyway.

Still, you have to worry whether the Olde Towne Team’s dings will be just enough to keep them short when going up against the Angels’ remarkable pitching, while you have to worry whether the Angels winning the American League West before anyone else settled anything else around the Show didn’t put a slight amount of rust into their joints: they lost two of three to Texas, including a series-opening 12-1 blowout, on the final regular weekend.

Sabathia himself is as resilient as they come but the Brewers needed and got him to all but carry them over the second half and down the stretch. Hard enough: Sabathia on the season pitched 253 innings, counting his time in Cleveland and Milwaukee. Harder: He pitched slightly more than half those innings (about 131) as a Brewer, launching with that tenure-opening four-game winning streak the final three of which were complete games.

And, after finishing the season with a complete-game shutout of the NL Central champion Chicago Cubs, Sabathia’s going up on three days’ rest against Brett Myers in Game Two of the division series against the Philadelphia Phillies, while penciled in to go against Myers on three days’ rest in a fifth game if needed.

Sabathia down the stretch was Johan Santana with better support. He had only four no-decisions; the Brewers won two of the four; and, he pitched well enough (three earned or less) to win all four games. He lost the lead before coming out of the first (28 July, against the Cubs); the Brewers tied it up in the bottom of the inning. He came out with a lead in the second (against the Pittsburgh Pirates); the Brewers surrendered the lead and had to come back to win it. He came out with a lead against San Diego 5 September; again, the Brewers lost the lead (Brian Giles going long in the eighth) before winning late (J.J. Hardy’s walkoff RBI single). But he came out in the hole against Cincinnati 10 September, a game the Brewers came back to win.

If the Brewers hadn’t burped up two leads and could have taken the lead in the half-inning they tied one up following his departure, Sabathia might have finished with a 14-2 record as a Brewer and a 20-game winner on the season as a whole.

Would you like to know how he looks down the stretch, really? Defining the stretch as 23 July until whenever the division title or the wild card winner is determined, Sabathia faced four contenders (they were still in contention at the time he faced them) six times, including the team his team most needed to beat to keep a claim on the division title twice.

23 July—Sabathia went up against Braden Looper and the St. Louis Cardinals, who were trying somehow to stay in the race in spite of their own multiples of miseries and doing enough of a job of it that enough people thought they had an outside chance toward the wild card at minimum.

This was the third of those four straight tenure-opening complete games; he shut the Cardinals out, 3-0, kept Albert Pujols hitless including forcing the Cardinals’ big man to strand a couple of baserunners, and walked only two while striking out seven.

28 July—Sabathia’s next start was against the Central-leading Cubs. This was the game in which the Cubs took a 4-3 lead that included the go-ahead run coming in when Rickie Weeks threw a little wild past second, allowing Fukodome to score behind Ronny Cedeno (who was scoring when Derrek Lee hit into what should have been the double play start).

2 August—He beat the Atlanta Braves, still lingering in the NL East, rather handily, 4-2, the runs coming on a pair of RBI singles in the first and the ninth, the second compelling manager Ned Yost to bring in Salomon Torres to finish up.

18 August—He beat the Houston Astros, who were launching their magnificent revival bid toward the card at least, and did himself a huge favour with a two-run, bases-loaded single that launched a five-run Milwaukee fourth. (For the record, Sabathia at the plate went 2-for-3 on the day and scored himself in that fourth, the second of two driven in on Hardy’s RBI single.)

16 September—This was the one not-so-great outing on the log, a 5-4 loss to the Cubs in which he was done in by a first-inning RBI double (Lee), a two-run, third-inning double (Alfonso Soriano), and an RBI single (Henry Blanco) in the eighth.

28 September—By now the Cubs have clinched and Sabathia’s trying to get the Brewers the wild card. When he finishes, he’ll have another complete game and a clinch with the bullpen-battered Mets falling to Florida. You could also call it a potential League Championship Series warmup, assuming all the work hasn’t drained Sabathia—the lone blemish on his afternoon, Aramis Ramirez coming in on Cedeno’s ground out in the top of the second.

Sabathia’s stretch record against the contenders: 4-1, one no-decision, a 2.70 ERA, and a 1.25 WHIP in forty innings’ work.

Just how much he left on the field before he hits the mound Thursday against the Phillies remains to be seen. The Brewers’ immediate future depends upon just how much he has left in the tank.

This time, they didn’t blow a seven-game divisional lead by going 5-12 in their final seventeen, with the Florida Marlins hammering the last nails into the casket on the final day. This time, they blew a mere three-and-a-half game divisional leadand went 7-10 in the final seventeen, with the Marlins again hammering in the last nails—crafted and gifted them by a member in good standing of the Mets bullpen, what a surprise.

Let’s have no more talk, anywhere, ever, as was heard astonishingly enough earlier in the final month, about whether Johan Santana, really and truly, didn’t have the warrior’s real makeup. Fellow goes out, does his job, keeps himself evenly strained, and there are those who think he’s no legitimate ace. Doesn’t have The Right Stuff. Came without the Ace’s Face.Those who suggested those things can plant those suggestions where the sun has only a slightly better prayer of reaching than these Mets prove to have had in reaching to slip into a postseason enough ranks among their squadron were hell bent on avoiding as they couldn’t avoid incinerating games.

Santana merely went out Saturday afternoon and put the truth to the supposition that the only way to keep the Mets’ bullpen from turning baseball games into torch songs was for the starting pitchers to throw complete games. Throwing eight fewer pitches than his previous outing (eight innings, two earned runs, beating the Chicago Cubs 23 September), Santana shut out the Marlins on three hits. On three days’ rest. An assignment he asked to work.

You tell me he doesn’t have a case for dragging his team into court for nonsupport.

A shame the Good Oliver—the Oliver Perez who either keeps his club in a game or lances the enemy early and often while his mates somehow manage to provide him a run or three to work with—showed up to throw five shutout innings and surrender a measly pair of runs in the sixth Sunday.

Actually, Perez had one of the Mets’ bulls to thank for the second run, when Joe Smith—who’d actually been defying the Met pen modes by pitching well enough to make you think the club might have found their closer-in-waiting—handed Josh Willingham, to whom he’d been brought in specifically to pitch, a walk with the ducks on the pond.

A shame, too, Carlos Beltran tying it up right away in the bottom of the sixth with a hefty two-run belt off Scott Olsen turned out to have swung for nothing. And, after Brian Stokes held the Marlins off in their half of the seventh (with a little help from Endy Chavez, who hit the gas and ran down Jorge Cantu’s high liner in front of the fence, keeping Cameron Maybin on second), Beltran and the Mets he had Scott Schoeneweis and Luis Ayala to thank for the net result, with that pair of bulls serving up back-to-back bombs in the eighth.

Whether or not the bullpen arson took a toll on many if not most Met hitters is difficult if not impossible to isolate, but the Mets’ bats spent most of the weekend against the Marlins swinging as though you could throw them watermelons and they couldn’t connect. They produced only five runs all weekend long and, come Sunday, when they entered in a wild-card tie with the Milwaukee Brewers, they stranded baserunners in every other inning in which they had any, beyond the Beltran bomb.

These Mets were the sort-of surprise winners in last winter’s Santana lottery, and they spent the season proving how little they deserved the work he gave them nearly all the time. What they did deserve was the Philadelphia Phillies winning the National League East, anyway, when Jimmy Rollins took a dive Saturday and turned a bullet up the pipe into a game-ending double play, a bailout of Brad Lidge that won’t cost the Phillies half of what the Wall Street bailout might cost American taxpayers if it comes to pass, and a win for Jamie Moyer that tied him with Phil Niekro for the most wins in a season by a middle-aged pitcher.

These Mets deserved what they ended up receiving when their season shook to its close Sunday. And they weren’t going to get any help from the Brewers, either—the Brewers had only one break to give, and they gave it, when the Cubs thumped injury-addled Ben Sheets Saturday. The Brewers come Sunday were too busy dispatching the NL Central-champ Cubs, 3-1, in a nice postseason tuneup.

And if they’ve probably torched Santana out of a Cy Young Award he might have won in a blink, these Mets deserve to genuflect before their mild-mannered ace and offer anything short of a human sacrifice for his forgiveness. No, better amend that. These Mets have already offered enough human sacrifices this season. Santana was the big offering, after all.Santana now has eleven no-decision games this season with a 16-7 won-lost record to show for it. Defining pitching well enough to win as surrendering three earned runs or fewer, in only one of those games (a 17 July loss to the Cincinnati Reds) did Santana not pitch well enough to win.

The Mets’ record in his no-decisions finishes at 6-5. If they’d won only the ones in which he came out of a game with the lead, he’d have finished his season at 23-11; if they’d won all his no-decisions, he’d have finished at or close enough to 27-7. That’s Koufax territory, ladies and gentlemen.

You can phrase it this way, then. With these Mets, you give them something resembling Sandy Koufax and they’ll treat him like he’s something resembling Anthony Young.

They were also given something resembling Casey Stengel—the Stengel who once managed the Yankees to ten pennants in twelve seasons—as a manager, and they ended up treating him like he was something resembling Joe Schultz.

But unlike the manner in which the Mets finished Shea Stadium’s major league life, let’s not finish on notes that sour. Let’s return to the good news: The Mets managed somehow to show a remarkable two-game improvement from last season to this. They might even have the chance to go 8-9, or dare we hope 9-8, down the final seventeen next season.

They need only eat right, exercise, grease their bulbs properly, and find relief pitchers who can leave the blow torches, flame throwers, box matches, and lighter fluid behind when they’re asked to do their part in getting a game to the back end.

Because if they don’t, these Mets have done quite enough damage without concurrently inspiring the bad punmakers to turn their brand-new, rather beautiful Citi Field into Piti Field.

And when he isn’t planning to abscond with one of the bullpen pitching rubbers and a little patch of the bullpen grass, The Mariano is finding more than a little perspective on where his real importance might be.

I see people that come to this stadium and they grind it out in their daily lives, pay their money and watch us play. It really hit home with me one day when we were playing a game and I wasn’t able to do my job. I lost the game and let so many people down, and I was very upset.

As I started to walk off the field, I noticed people gathering around a particular fan. I remember how hot it was, because this was after a mid-summer day game. This fan had suffered an apparent heart attack – the next day someone told me the person had died – and here I am so upset about a loss, still fuming, and this Yankees fan comes to the ballpark to enjoy the game and is fighting for his life in the stands. That moment still impacts me today. God showed during that time the importance of having a realistic perspective on things, especially losses. I was so miserable thinking, ‘Here I am, ticked off about a game, and yes, it is my job, but I saw this person fighting for his life, man. A life!’

He isn’t exactly the second coming of Montaigne, but there above is one reason why those who know consider The Mariano the class of the Yankees’ class.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE JUNGLE . . .

ANOTHER DAY AT THE RACES—With Roy Halladay beating the Olde Towne Team 6-3, Saturday afternoon, it kept the Toronto Blue Jays’ “faint” postseason hopes alive while keeping the Red Sox a game and a half behind the Rays in the AL East . . .  Stop the presses: that was the Mets’ bullpen surrendering one mere run (unearned) Friday night, Oliver Perez keeping the Braves to four runs (three earned), David Wright going 2-for-5 with two ribs, and the Mets shaking off early defencive shakes to beat the Braves, 9-5, and retake the NL East lead with a little help from the Marlins, who waxed the Phillies 14-8 . . .The Cubs lead the Cardinals 5-0 in the fifth Saturday afternoon, a day after the Cardinals delayed their clinching party with a 12-6 Friday night flogging.

The fort’s commanding officer (no, silly, not the manager) was not amused. Of course, in that time and place he was not very much amusing. Even the gags about his throwing out the first manager of the season had worn out their welcome already, a point said commanding officer ignored for, oh, about most of the next decade.

All this season’s eulogising the big ball orchard in the Bronx has been gushy, mushy, sentimental, and mostly on the mark. Never mind that, technically speaking, the House That Ruth Built (actually, it was built for him, opening in 1923, with particular attention paid to making life simple enough for his lefthanded power stroke) became the House That Ruthless Rebuilt (with a lot of help from New York City’s strapped taxpayers) in 1975-76.

The Yankees would have loved nothing better than to close their longtime mansion with a trip to the postseason. You can thank injuries and ill-timed slumps, perhaps an ill-timed benching or two, for that. (They’re already debating whether manager Joe Girardi waited too long to send indifferent Robinson Cano to the pine.)

But it isn’t as though Yankee Stadium is necessarily lacking in championship seasons. Or other kinds of seasons. There certainly have been enough of a boatload of Yankee Stadium doings and undoings, in or around the place, to cover half the width of the Harlem River. We’ll bet you didn’t hear about half of them in the course of the season-long hosannas.

“Mr. Gehrig is Badly Underpaid”—That was Joe DiMaggio’s quiet reply, before the 1938 season, when owner Jacob Ruppert, trying to quell DiMaggio’s salary holdout—the Clipper was looking for $40,000 for the season; Gehrig’s contract would pay him $39,000—sought to force DiMaggio to accept $25,000 and not a penny more by quoting him Gehrig’s salary.

DiMaggio eventually signed after Ruppert threatened to suspend him, but the holdout actually turned DiMaggio into something of a hate object, with no little help from manager Joe McCarthy, who was fool enough to say, “The Yankees can get along without DiMaggio.”

(For equals in the annals of foolish commentary you’d have to fast forward to M. Donald Grant, the unlamented Mets general manager, saying during Tom Seaver’s contract contretemps, when Seaver pressed the Mets concurrently to dip a little into the rising free agency market, at a time the farm system was parched and the trade market low, “We won a World Series without superstars and we’ll do it again.”)

Scoot!—Maybe Phil Rizzuto was over the hill as a player by 1956-57. But general manager George Weiss and manager Casey Stengel calling him in to ask him to suggest a roster cut to make room for Enos Slaughter—while rejecting his suggestions, one and all, until the Scooter was left to get the distinct impression that he was the cut they had in mind—was something even George Steinbrenner at his worst might not have thought to pull.

To his credit, however, Rizzuto refused to divorce himself from the Yankee organisation . . . and signed on as a broadcaster, impressing Red Barber (who’d joined the Yankees after the 1953 World Series) when he approached Barber at once and asked him to teach him all he could, all he knew.

Hats Off—Weiss was so insensitive to the thought that maybe the Yankee image might need a little humanising that, for years, he refused to sanction the sale of replica Yankee caps for kids. That kind of thinking goes a long way toward explaining why the Yankees of the era might have been mighty and unavoidable but weren’t necessarily anywhere near loveable.

A Night at the Copa—Celebrating Billy Martin’s birthday, a group of Yankees and their wives took in Sammy Davis, Jr. at the Copacabana after earlier stops for dinner at Danny’s Hideaway and to catch Johnnie Ray at the Waldorf. It should have been a pleasant evening all around but for someone apparently hurling racial epithets at Davis, offending the Yankee party in general and outfielder Hank Bauer in particular.

The short take: Bauer barked at the drunk to shut up, after one of the drunk’s racial barbs actually prompted a comeback from Davis. (”I want to thank you very much for that remark. I’ll remember it.”) The drunk barked back an order that Bauer make him shut up. Others in the drunk’s party suggested Bauer not test his luck that night. Martin suggested both parties take it away from the tables, and he was accompanied by Mantle. Bauer’s wife suggested he stay out of it. Martin and the drunk’s brother agreed to keep the drunk away from the Yankee party. Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford were found in the men’s room restraining Bauer, who was standing over the drunk stone cold on the floor with a broken nose.

The problem was that Bauer swore it was Copacabana bouncers who’d decked the drunk and not himself, which didn’t stop the drunk from wanting to swear out an arrest warrant for Bauer. The further problem was that Weiss assumed Martin was the instigator, not to mention speculation all over that the Yankees were trying to cover it up—even as they fined Martin, Mantle, Ford, Berra, and Bauer $1,000 apiece and young pitcher Johnny Kucks $500 . . . before a grand jury hearing that ended with the case thrown out.

The Copa incident plus a subsequent on-field brawl with Larry Doby of the Indians—after a knockdown pitch to Doby provoked him to threaten Yankee pitcher Art Ditmar—finally drove Weiss to trade Martin, on whom the general manager blamed the Copa incident, at the non-waiver deadline.

The Milkshake Muckup—Weiss got his, though, at least once, when he hired a firm of detectives to tail some Yankees he thought were enjoying a little too much nightlife during the 1958 season, when the team was slumping somewhat. (Weiss has long been believed to have beaten Mickey Mantle out of a pay raise one winter, after getting some damning reports about Mantle’s extracurricular activities from other private detectives he’d hired, and then all but threatening Mantle with their public release unless he came to terms on Weiss’s terms.)

Whom did Weiss hire—the Keystone Kops? Mantle and Ford, of course, didn’t have carrot juice for brains; they spotted the dicks and shook them almost at once, hiring a cab to lead them on a merry high speed chase around Detroit.

But the dicks’ most embarrassing report involved players with a very different idea of nightlife than the roisterous Mantle and Ford. It turned out that this group of dicks spent most of their time tailing infielders Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek, and pitcher Bobby Shantz—a trio of straight-arrow teetotalers with a particular passion for milkshakes, whose idea of a night on the town was hitting the YMCA and similar establishments, where the only skirts they were caught chasing were any that might have been draped around the edges of ping-pong tables.

Richardson, Kubek, and Shantz needed all of about five minutes to figuring out they were being tailed and adopted a few evasive maneuvers of their own to shake the gumshoes. They ducked into a movie theater, prompting the dicks to buy tickets for the evening show themselves, unaware the three players had ducked out a side door with, perhaps, a little help from a knowing usher.

The papers got wind of the Yankees’ spy operation and Kubek threatened a holdout for the following season. “I’m going to ask for a raise for next year,” he said, “and tell them to pay me what they paid the cops to follow us.”

Shake It Up—Dan Topping’s apparent attempt to force manager Ralph Houk to jiggle his lineup and let Mantle have a better crack at ruthsrecord than Roger Maris in 1961 should have shamed any and everyone who ever associated with the Yankees. To his credit, Houk didn’t budge. And, as it turned out, he got a little help from Mantle’s health: a hip abscess thanks to a bad vitamin shot took Mantle out of the running and, as it turned out, out of the 1961 World Series altogether.

Tell Me Why?—Not even the Voice of the Yankees himself was immune to Yankee panky. After suffering a vocal ailment during the 1963 World Series that at least one columnist suggested was psychosomatic (as in, he couldn’t bear to watch Sandy Koufax and company sweep the Yankees for the first time in their storied postseason history), Allen ended up dumped in favour of Rizzuto as the Yankee broadcast representative for the 1964 World Series.

To the day he died, Allen was never offered a thorough explanation as to why, beyond an almost rote reply from Yankee television sponsor Ballantine Beer that the brewery was trying to plug up the leaks in the bottom line.

The Swap Heard ‘Round the World—In the same summer, as CBS was buying the Yankees from Dan Topping and Del Webb, and with Houk now their general manager, the Yankees were looking for any reason to dump first-year manager Yogi Berra when the team struggled and Berra’s inability to play tough sergeant was cited as a key reason. What they found was Berra’s eventual successor—in St. Louis.

And here’s where it gets interesting. Johnny Keane was himself the subject of a little backroom backstabbing, with some Cardinals front office men—and, it was alleged, broadcaster Harry Caray—angling to move then-Dodger coach Leo Durocher into Keane’s job while the Cardinals experienced a few struggles of their own approaching the stretch drive.

What they and nobody expected: Both the Yankees and the Cardinals ended up winning the pennants.

The Yankees put on a phenomenal stretch surge; rookie righthander Mel Stottlemyre’s nine wins down the stretch, and late-season relief acquisition Pedro Ramos were two of the keys.

The Redbirds needed a lot of help from the infamous Philadelphia collapse, in addition to a lot of big work from Bob Gibson, Dick Groat, Bill White, Ken Boyer, and company. And even then, on the final weekend, the hapless Mets, of all people, almost beat them out of the race by winning the first two of a season-ending three-set, including Al Jackson beating Gibson stylishly enough, threatening an unprecedented three-way tie for first.

Finally, on the final day, the Redbirds outlasted the Mets while the Cincinnati Reds (with incentive of their own: manager Fred Hutchinson’s cancer had finally forced him to retire, and they were trying to win one more for the dying man who’d managed them to the 1961 pennant) took care of the desperate Phillies.

Then, the Cardinals won a thriller of a seven-game World Series. The following day, both managers were out.

Keane upstaged Cardinal owner Gussie Busch, who called a press conference to announce Keane’s rehiring, by handing Busch his resignation: he’d already agreed to take the Yankee job, possibly well before the World Series. That job became vacant officially when Berra went to the Yankee offices the day after the Series and came out with his head on a plate.

The deal didn’t do anybody any good in the long run. With the Yankee farm system still parched, Keane suffered enormous pressure while trying to compel the Yankees to adapt to a National League style of play for which they weren’t exactly built. The Yankees fell all the way to the basement by the end of 1966.

So far as arm-troubled pitcher Jim Bouton was concerned, that pressure (including Houk and CBS pushing him to rush players back onto the field before injuries healed fully) was the likely cause of Keane’s fatal January 1967 heart attack, after he’d left the Yankees to sign on as a California Angels scout. He was 55.

Eddie, Are You Kidding?—Just prior to that strange 1964 season, an ex-Yankee pitching bellwether proved himself a scouting blind man. Eddie Lopat, scouting for the Kansas City Athletics, dismissed Tony Oliva as a prospect: “This kid will never hit in the big leagues.” The Minnesota Twins thanked Lopat profusely for that one.

Ball Foul—Don’t go getting any ideas that Houk was a saint. In fact, he was only too willing to skirt the rules, as the Yankees’ general manager, and was in a holdout tussle with locquacious pitcher Bouton. Houk attempted to fine Bouton $100 for every day the righthander continued his holdout.

Ssssssh!—The Yankees, like many teams, were often loath to disclose just how seriously a particular player might have been injured. In one case, they may have been loath to tell the player. It took long enough for Yankee fans who couldn’t figure out the causes to discover that Roger Maris’s wrist injuries—which robbed him of his once-prodigious power—were far more serious than first revealed. It took just as long for the Yankees to tell Maris himself how serious they really were.

Better Dead Than Red—Unless there’s been such a canning elsewhere that I’ve yet to discover, the dumping of Barber from the Yankee team after the 1966 season—and the reason that probably triggered it—was at least as big a disgrace as the swap dump that made an ill-fated Yankee manager out of Johnny Keane.

Barber’s crime: He ordered his television camera crews to pan a near-empty Yankee Stadium, during a September 1966 game, toward the end of a season in which the Yankees fell to a level they hadn’t seen since the Wilson Administration—dead last. That non-crowd, Barber realised, was the real story of that game, if not the state of the Yankees themselves.

Barber’s superiors nullified the order, and Barber was handed his unemployment at season’s end.

Let’s Make a Deal—Marilyn Peterson (wife of pitcher Fritz Peterson) and children, traded to pitcher Mike Kekich for Susanne Kekich (wife) and children. Thank God there were no players to be named later. Unless you want to count that the former Mrs. Peterson ended up moving further on, happily marrying a New Jersey physician.

That’s Politics—George Steinbrenner had barely taken control of the Yankees—after buying the team almost under the radar, when a group led by Joe DiMaggio himself thought they might have the best shot at buying them (DiMaggio later swore he knew nothing of the Steinbrenner group until he read of the deal in the newspapers)—when he got suspended for a year over a contribution to Richard Nixon’s 1972 election campaign.

Bronx Cheer—In a postgame, televised press conference, after the Big Red Machine steamrolled the Yankees in four straight in the 1976 World Series, Pete Rose plopped a Yankee cap on his head, turned his thumbs down, and loosed a raspberry. Not even Yankee fans deserved a display like that.

Duck! Duck! Goose!—Designated hitter/periodic catcher Cliff Johnson and future Hall of Fame relief ace Goose Gossage scuffle in the shower, leaving Gossage with a broken thumb and Johnson with a one-way ticket out of The ‘Stripes.

Riding the Pine Tar—George Brett. The nullified three-run homer. The pine tar bat. The attempted multiple amputation by Brett upon the umpires. The makeup inning.

The Firing Line—Seventeen managers in seventeen years. Sixteen if you count Billy Martin’s tenures; fifteen if you count Lou Piniella’s; fourteen if you count Bob Lemon’s.

Shirley, You Jest—Flaky pitcher Bob Shirley, getting a ninth-inning assignment in a blowout, retired the side to secure the Yankee win. He was there in the first place because Rich Bordi, the reliever Billy Martin really wanted, was away from the Stadium as his wife gave birth. “It was nothing,” Shirley said when reporters flocked to praise his performance. “The only reason I got in there was because of something that happened in the Bordi bedroom nine months ago.”

Stool Pigeon—Steinbrenner had taken to ripping Graig Nettles’ alleged falling out of shape when Nettles came into the clubhouse to find Steinbrenner sitting on his locker stool. “George is right,” Nettles said, pointing at Steinbrenner. “Nettles is getting fat!”

Steinbrenner also rewarded Nettles at last with a longterm contract for big money . . . only to trade him to San Diego when Nettles’ tell-all book, Balls, was published at about the same time.

And even when he mellowed over it, Steinbrenner couldn’t resist bad timing. During one of his bids to discredit Dave Winfield, he suddenly waxed about Nettles—who was just about finished as a player: “[Winfield]’s nothing like Reggie, or even Graig Nettles. Nettles may have said a lot of nasty things about me but he played hard, gave me his all, and was all for the team. I’d take him back anytime.”

Ding! Dong! The Boss is Dead!—No moment in Yankee Stadium history was more surreal than the night Steinbrenner got a standing ovation that swelled slowly around the park . . . when he wasn’t even allowed to be there: he was suspended for a second time, this time by Commissioner Fay Vincent, over using gambler Howard Spira to help discredit Winfield.

The Yankees were hosting the Detroit Tigers. Yankee fans clung to portable radios awaiting the news, which was believed to be coming that very evening. When the news broke, a slow surge of applause started down the right field stands. Within moments, it swelled to consume the entire park.

The timing was even more surreal: the news broke and ovation began as the Tigers were coming up to hit. The Tigers had no idea what was happening, and indeed many of the Yankees may not have known what was really going on, either. It may have been the first time in baseball history that fans gave the owner a standing ovation for getting put on ice for three years.

By the way, the Yankees beat the Tigers that night, 6-2, with Jesse Barfield and Oscar Azocar going long against Steve Searcy and Dave LaPoint pitching a complete game for the win.

Hizzoner the Maier—Game One, the 1996 American League Championship Series. Talk about a helping hand. (And, if the Baltimore Orioles continue their none-too-winning ways over another decade or three, a Curse of the Maier.)

Scoot! Part Two—Rizzuto all but ended his broadcasting career thanks to The Boss, when Steinbrenner or his minions refused to allow him time off to attend Mickey Mantle’s funeral.

“You Lost! Go Home!”—Triumphant Florida Marlins pitcher Josh Beckett hollered that at lingering, commiserating Yankee fans after the Florida Marlins dispatched them in the 2003 World Series. Not even Yankee fans deserved that, either.

And yet . . . and yet . . . even a no-questions-asked Yankee hater could only sit in awe, after the Boston Red Sox finished what they started so improbably, those four straight wins off a down-to-the-last-strike crunch in the 2004 American League Championship Series. George Steinbrenner, of all people, dismissed calls to send the rollicking Red Sox fans home and close the Stadium for the winter once and for all.

“No,” Steinbrenner insisted. “They earned it. Let them enjoy it.”

Let’s be fair and remember that there were more classy than crassy moments in the Big Ball Orchard in the Bronx, the House That Ruth Built, the House That Ruthless Rebuilt, Fort Apache Yankee Stadium.

There was Lou Gehrig’s spontaneous eloquence in the face of certain death on the day in his honour in 1939.

There was Babe Ruth’s humility, likewise in the face of certain death, on a similar day in his honour in 1948.

There was Mickey Mantle’s physical courage.

There was Roger Maris getting in-your-face to every last one of his critics on the final day of 1961.

There was the genuine awe in the immediate aftermath (”I can understand how he won 25, what I can’t understand is how he lost five”—Yogi Berra), when Sandy Koufax whiplashed them in Game One, 1963.

There was Reggie Jackson and the three pitches, three swings, and three majestic bombs in Game Six, 1977.

There were the Yankees up and down the roster and organisation behaving with class throughout when, for once, the world seemed to be a Yankee fan in the World Series wake of 9/11.

And, there was Bobby Murcer’s cheerful courage in what proved a losing battle against brain cancer.

But when Steinbrenner ordered one and all to leave the partying Red Sox fans alone, that they might celebrate their greatest triumph in the home park of their longest-standing enemy, that may have been the classiest Yankee Stadium moment of them all.