A series surprise

Last year’s worst achieve a baseball first

SPORTS

At its best, the World Series is among the most gripping of sporting spectacles. In the best-of-seven battle between American and National League champions, there is drama in each confrontation between pitcher and batter, and risk in every managerial decision. This year, the Fall Classic seemed especially compelling because of the astonishing performances by the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins. Both teams finished last in their respective divisions in 1990, and no team in major-league history had rebounded from last place to finish first the following season. That statistic alone testifies to the character of the teams, and helps explain why, while the pre-season favorites are already on vacation, the underachievers of 1990 have become the darlings of the World Series.

This is the series of the underdog, a conundrum for fans whose sporting loyalties follow their hearts. Atlanta’s baseball woes are almost legendary: the team finished last in the NL West division four times in the previous five years. Minnesota won the World Series in 1987, but the team subsequently crumbled following a series of free-agent departures, trades and retirements that left the Twins in the AL West division basement a year ago. Now, the Twins and the Braves are teams of destiny and oddsmakers’ nightmares, led by stars who include Kirby Puckett, the Twins’ brilliant outfielder, and Terry Pendleton, the Atlanta third baseman who won the NL batting title this year.

Players and team officials in both clubs predicted that pitching would be the key to the World Series, just as it was in their playoff triumphs. Minnesota manager Tom Kelly said that the team’s acquisition of free agent Jack Morris last winter gave the Twins an experienced winner to complement the emerging talent of their other two starters, Kevin Tapani and Scott Erickson. “Pitching’s the name of the game, and we’ve pitched well,” Kelly said after the Twins defeated the Toronto Blue Jays for the AL pennant. In the NL championship series, the Braves stymied the Pittsburgh Pirates’ vaunted offence with brilliant pitching performances by right-hander John Smoltz and lefthander Steve Avery, a hard-throwing 21-yearold. As well, the Braves will start Tom Glavine, a 20-game winner this season. “I’m sure the Twins have a great staff,” said Avery, “but I don’t think that any team in the league can match our staff now.”

For fans of the other 24 major-league teams, the World Series is a nagging reminder that their teams failed to reach their ultimate goal. But the weight of lost opportunity rested most heavily on the Blue Jays and the Pirates.

Pittsburgh, considered by many baseball experts to have the strongest roster among the four playoff teams, was unable to score a single run against Atlanta in the final two games of the championship series, and lost four games to three. Toronto, meanwhile, lost three consecutive games at home to fall four games to one to the Twins.

The Jays’ loss precipitated a week of secondguessing and speculation, not only among mournful fans, but also in the team’s Sky Dome headquarters. Open-line radio shows in Toronto were jammed with callers questioning the tactics employed during the playoffs by Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston. Jays president Paul Beeston told Maclean ’s that no decisions about personnel would be made until he met this week with general manager Pat Gillick and other senior team officials to assess the Jays’ 1991 performance and to evaluate their needs. He said that last winter’s trades for infielder

Roberto Alomar and outfielders Joe Carter and Devon White were intended to improve the team so that it could win its division and advance to the World Series. “I thought we had done that,” he said. “We all did.” As for 1992, Beeston said that the top priority would be the acquisition of a full-time designated hitter.

Perhaps the Blue Jays’ biggest off-season job will be to maintain the faith among the club’s fans. The team has lost in all three of its playoff appearances—1985 and 1989 were the other division-winning years—and some observers have suggested that the unfulfilled expectations for the team might leave fans disillusioned. Analysts point to the experience of the Montreal Expos: in 1981, Sports Illustrated magazine rated them baseball's best team. But on a chilly October afternoon that year, the Expos lost the fifth game of the best-offive NL Championship Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Rick Monday’s ninth-inning home run. The Expos have not reached the playoffs since, and attendance at Olympic Stadium declined to 978,045 last season, down from 2.32 million in 1983. Beeston said that the Jays could not rest on their laurels. “We have achieved some degree of success,” he said. “But we haven’t won the World Series, which is what it is all about. That’s the disappointing part that eats at your stomach.”

For the World Series combatants, the challenge was to achieve one more improbable series victory. “We had unheard-of odds against us all year,” said Smoltz, who added: “We prefer it that way.” There is pressure, too, on the Blue Jays, who are aware that they still have much to win—and much to lose if

they don’t,

JAMES DEACON