Bart Giamatti, the late baseball commissioner who suspended Pete Rose and died a week later from a heart attack, said baseball is designed to break your heart. You wondered how true that is on a rainy night in the desert, where the mercenary veterans defeated the honorable dynasty in the best World Series of the last 25 years, just as baseball's club owners fired their first shot in an impending labor war precisely because of clubs like the new champions.
Maybe it was for the best that the Arizona Diamondbacks won this year's World Series, even though national sentiment backed the New York Yankees in the wake of a Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center that changed the feel of American life. In order to win the World Championship in four years of dwindling attendance without an established farm system, the Diamondbacks had to borrow $20 million from Major League Baseball and reportedly signed up for $200 million in deferred payments and guaranteed contracts through 2006.
Baseball probably needed this championship in Arizona, which will stimulate ticket sales and enable the franchise to crawl toward solvency.
As the Diamondbacks celebrated on their field after slugging outfielder Luis Gonzalez popped a single over a drawn-in infield, the clock struck midnight on baseball's labor agreement, the veteran core of great Yankee champions and perhaps the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos. Thus ended an extraordinary week of baseball, including two spine-tingling wins for the Yankees in their hearty town, which gave a touching sendoff to Paul O'Neill as he stood one more time in Babe Ruth's right field tracks at Yankee Stadium.
The better club won this World Series. The Diamondbacks were better by every measure -- at least enough times to matter. They outscored the Yankees 37-14, including wins of 15-2 and 9-1. For all that, they scored barely enough. Their closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, wasn't as good as the Yankees' closer, Mariano Rivera. But Kim blew leads only in Games Four and Five, while Rivera blew a lead in Game Seven. So Rivera was, just barely, not good enough.
The Arizona manager, Bob Brenly, put Kim in a position to fail Game Five by using him the night after he threw 62 pitches in Game Four. For that, and many other decisions, Brenly took more heat than probably any winning manager in World Series history. But, in retrospect, he made the decision that couldn't fail, putting this World Series as much as possible into the hands of Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson.
Many took issue with Brenly calling on Schilling to start Game Four with three days rest, considering that starters working so frequently had lost nine of their last 10 postseason decisions. Later, a lot of those pundits couldn't understand why Brenly removed Schilling after seven strong innings, setting the stage for the first Yankee comeback.
Probably because of that, though, Schilling had enough left another three days later to go six one-hit innings in Game Seven. And Johnson, who pitched the night before, finished up with two shutout innings for his third win of the series.
Dignity ruled this World Series, the kind of dignity that puts honor ahead of success. If Arizona hadn't rallied in the ninth inning of Game Seven, Brenly would have been mercilessly railed for allowing Schilling to bat for himself in the seventh and leaving him in to give up a tie-breaking homer to Alfonso Soriano in the eighth. But Brenly left the game with Schilling because Schilling is his horse and in the biggest game of the year you stay on your horse, just like New York manager Joe Torre stayed with Rivera all the way through the bitter end in the ninth.
If we learned one lesson from this World Series, it's the value of broadcasting experience for a Major League manager. Like Torre a former broadcaster, Brenly understands what the media is about, so he never broke his cool against the arrows sent his way. A lot of managers or coaches would be distracted by the criticism, but Brenly seldom expressed a second thought about it.
For those who aren't hung up on the money and who respect what ballplayers go through, it was beautiful to see so many older veterans win their first World Series, even if they had to do it as a checkbook All-Star team exemplifying many of the game's unsavory developments in recent years. Today, Johnson and Schilling have won a World Series, as have Mark Grace, Reggie Sanders, Greg Swindell, Mike Morgan, Steve Finley, Jay Bell, Matt Williams, Tony Womack and Bobby Witt -- guys who've all been banging around for a while, providing the opposition and fodder for other champions all these years.
As for the Yankees, the nation ought to not be broken-hearted, even if aging mainstays like O'Neill, Scott Brosius, Tino Martinez and Chuck Knoblauch are soon to depart. Many decades ago, "Break up the Yankees!" was the cry throughout the American League. But no one really wants to break up these Yankees, who have for the last couple years been sympathetic champions despite all their advantages.
Because of those advantages, the Yankees will be back soon, after they've brought up Nick Johnson to play first base and signed a couple big bats to play right field and third base, where Drew Henson will be ready within a few years. It appears Yankees owner George Steinbrenner is intent on quickly re-signing Torre and General Manager Brian Cashman, who will work harder than ever to replace the low-key personalities that have defined the latest dynasty.
Something about the Yankees winning this World Series would have been comforting to Americans because, among the elements of their mystique, the Yankees have long matched their times through victory. They won during 20 years of prosperity post-World War II, went away just as the Sixties went turbulent, refashioned themselves as egotistical champions in the mid-1970s, declined of their own avarice and vanity in the 1980s and returned to dominate the largest peacetime economic expansion in American history.
But it's no longer peacetime, the economy no longer is expanding and the Yankees have fallen, though just barely. As their very name originated as a slam against Americans, their championship might have harmonized with the country's present flag-waving defiance.
Instead, our new champions harmonize with a less traditional America of manufactured need and venture capital. While New York remains the capital of this global village America, its outposts are moving from the Midwest to the Sun Belt, newly legitimized with a World Series trophy.
Again, though, baseball faces possible crisis just as Americans returned to the Grand Old Game with respectable television ratings and vested its championship with importance. Like so many other corporations that over-extended themselves during economic expansion, baseball is prepared to downsize.
The difference is that the baseball players union, like no other, has succeeded at putting labor on equal footing with capital, being little concerned about the objections of ownership. Now faced with the possible loss of jobs, the players union is sure to fight as it always has.
Outside a core of about 7,000 committed baseball fans in each location, the clubs in Montreal and Minnesota wouldn't be missed if they were eliminated. Though both clubs have seen periods of high attendance, it's because the locals like winners a lot more than they like baseball.
Baseball has always fought an uphill battle to change habits in the French-Canadian reaches of Montreal, which turns a tin ear toward the old-time American religion. In essence, it's a European city with European tastes, where higher taxes and a weaker dollar stimulate more subdued notions of middle class luxury. The public dole is oriented to medicine rather than sports teams.
The Twin Cities version of Carl Lindner is Carl Pohlad, the mega-wealthy Twins owner who started his fortune by repossessing cars. Pohlad is viewed much differently in the Twin Cities than the way Cincinnatians view Lindner. Minnesota populism, though irritating in its hypersensitivity, is acute enough to know Pohlad couldn't have struck it rich without a vigorous middle class of workers and customers.
While Pohlad claims $150 million in losses on the Twins, Minnesotans are largely unwilling to spend any public funds on a new stadium, partly because they mistrust him after a few misfired deceptions to gain support for the venture. They also know that even if he's lost $150 million, he'll get over it. Pohlad paid a reported $38 million for 80 percent of the Twins in 1984 and stands to be paid a conjectured $150 million-$200 million by the other owners if he folds the club.
Meanwhile, the players union has withheld a position on contraction until the club owners inform it of their intention. It sounds ominously like calm before a storm. By accounts, the union and the owners have gotten along better recently, but contraction and job loss are certain to complicate negotiations on a new labor agreement, which have never been easy.
Those terrible words -- "strike" and "lockout" -- were seldom uttered during the final week of glorious baseball. And that's appropriate. But we can expect to hear plenty about those disenchanting words over the winter and perhaps into next spring, just when baseball regained much of its enchantment.
Giamatti had it right. Baseball is designed to break your heart.
