A Not-So-Classic Fall Classic

By Tom Callahan

However untidily, the Tigers chew on the Padres

After all the lovely and awful games of an occasionally tedious but ultimately fleeting baseball season, the desire to go out on a high moment is still strong. Even on the edge of a championship fully anticipated since April, the Detroit Tigers themselves seemed to be hoping for a better stage than a World Series only notable, and not remarkable, for scraps of drama--an exhilarating Chet Lemon catch or an excruciating Bobby Brown slump or two professional pitching performances by Jack Morris. When San Diego seemed all but finished, Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson said, "I wish before this is over that my team could have one day of playing the way it can play. No one's seen it."

In the fourth game many saw Tigers Shortstop Alan Trammell's consecutive home runs off right-winged Pitcher Eric Show, who absorbed seven of them in eight postseason innings, and some were impressed that the third time up, when circumstances called for him to try to move Lou Whitaker over, he finally did-with a single. Trammell provided all their runs in a 4-2 victory that left the Padres with no cheerful alternative to winning three games in a row, as they had done against the Chicago Cubs. "Maybe we should start our bullpen," said Manager Dick Williams, for the starting pitchers' earned run average over three losses and a victory was 11.70.

Before the 1984 Tigers, only the 1927 Yankees and 1923 Giants had led a pennant race from the first day to the last. Though Detroit's players expressed the usual respect for the opponent at hand, they seemed to imagine themselves in a deeper contest-playing for history. And not just engaged, enthralled. "Great teams are remembered fondly," Trammell sighed dreamily. Upon winning the first game 3-2, convoluted Conversationalist Anderson somehow concluded that a full seven-game Series was assured. "If it don't go seven," he worried, "people are going to miss some of my best stuff."

When San Diego took the second game 5-3, he turned around and declined to feign the customary contentment with a split of the opening two road games, preceding three at "home: "We feel like we can win every night." After Detroit won the next one 5-2, he reversed again: "Now we're sure we're going back to San Diego." Williams, the more stolid manager, said with less conviction, "I know we're going back, but I'd like for the Tigers to come with us." One of them had to become the first ever to manage a world champion in both the National and American Leagues. And now Williams had an idea who.

A variety of untoward but entertaining situations conspired against the Tigers' hopes for a classic fall classic. Such as awkward outfielders barreling into bullpen pitchers, and butchered pitchouts burrowing into umpires' bellies. One starting pitcher for San Diego, Ed Whitson, surrendered three hits on his first three deliveries, then yielded before the inning was out to an uncommon young Texan ("The only timid Texan I ever met," Williams mused) named Andy Hawkins, 24, who pitched merely like Christy Mathewson for 5 1/3 innings on top of 2 1/3 the day before. He permitted one single every 24 hours, and the hit on that second day fell for no good reason in front of suffering Leftfielder Carmelo Martinez.

There were a few other embarrassments, such as the eleven walks and a hit batsman that the Padres pitchers pressed into just five innings of Game 3. The fourth game was dotted with errors and wild pitches. But the personification of everything unclassic about the Series was Kurt Bevacqua, 37, San Diego's designated hitter in the odd year, the pivotal character of the first two games after being the least active major leaguer for the past 13 seasons. A career pinch hitter with all the moves (Cleveland, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Kansas City again, Milwaukee, Texas, San Diego, Pittsburgh again, San Diego again), Bevacqua disavows the utilityman label, but only because it sounds to him like someone who should be working for the power company. He acknowledges that he has probably watched more baseball games from the bench than has any other player.

Of recent times, San Diego heroes have been in such small supply that the most celebrated personage in the entire city could well be a short man in a chicken suit. "Mr. San Diego," Financier C. Arnholt Smith, 85, the former leading citizen and founding owner of the Padres, was sentenced to county jail last week for mislaying a few million here and there. A move to canonize the late McDonald's millionaire and baseball savior Ray Kroc seems to be under way. Local papers keep referring to him in heaven. The New Yorker's Roger Angell, whose name is spelled with two l's, was taken somewhat aback when a San Diego radio interviewer asked, "Do you think Mr. Kroc is looking down on the team?" With careful kindness, Angell replied, "I know nothing to indicate that he isn't."

It is not too outlandish then that an eccentric man who catches baseballs spilled 390 ft. from the top of the downtown Imperial Bank Building (Bevacqua handled five out of six chances during the charity stunt, missing only the one he tried to glove behind his back) has been looked upon as a hero. Until last week, Bevacqua's other credit was a national bubble-gum-blowing championship. But then, leading off the seventh inning of Game 1, he doubled to rightfield, stumbled past second base and was thrown out at third. He ill-represented the tying run.

The spectacle of a designated hitter who bats ninth (.200) is at least as funny as a cleanup batter who hits .228 (Padres Third Baseman Graig Nettles). However, on an impulse, Williams decided to upgrade Bevacqua to the sixth slot for Game 2, and his three hits included a three-run homer, just his second of the year. "I'll do anything to get in the papers," he had proved before, but never so conventionally. (Larry Herndon, the silent Tiger who had an equally telling homer the day before, does anything to stay out of them.) After blowing kisses around the bases, Bevacqua reflected, "I've had a lot of valleys in my career; I've probably reached the top of the mountain tonight." Or at least somewhere between the roof of the Imperial Bank Building and heaven.

His counterpart, in a sense, was Kirk Gibson, the Detroit rightfielder who heaved the ball to Cutoff Man Lou Whitaker so precisely. "Last year," Gibson said, "I quite possibly could have thrown a 20-ft. slider. Al Kaline won't take any credit, but he taught me." The following day, fortunes reversed, and against Bevacqua's home run, Gibson made two errors. Dusty Rhodes, Al Gionfriddo, Gene Tenace and the usual list of fateful World Series names was redrawn and then increased. Marty Castillo, whom Anderson describes as "the fool-around, funny guy" of the Tigers, homered with a man on base in the third game, during which 24 other runners were left. Promptly his life story was requested, starting with when he was five and accidentally burned down the house. "I've been a big mouth all my life ..." he began.

A similar affliction, a less delightful strain of it, had plagued Morris. When he lost control of either himself or the ball, his habit had been to look around for an umpire or some other handy receptacle of blame. Early in the season, he was given to demonstrating on the mound against Tiger teammates who made errors, until Catcher Lance Parrish came up the hill to visit him once. "Nobody wants to play behind you when you're acting like this," Parrish told him, and Morris grew in grace from that moment on. They support each other now.

-By Tom Callahan