Only So Much Excitement

By Tom Callahan cr; KEN REGAN CAMERA 5

Whether the New York Mets won or the Boston Red Sox lost, the World Series left enough hands and heads wringing and ringing to get all sides through the winter. The MVP was benched in the second game and threw a ball over the first baseman's head in the sixth. Ray Knight also singled to prolong the sixth game and homered to win the seventh. "You only can get so excited," reasoned the Mets' third baseman, "but it seemed, every game, I got more and more excited." October was unreasonable this year.

Baseballs routinely bounced out of gloves and over walls, including the well-oiled one of Boston Rightfielder Dwight Evans. Of 20 World Series veterans involved in the postseason, only Evans was found at his old stand, a commentary on the baseball business that even the Mets players might contemplate. Before the series, when casually asked about the Game 3 home run he hit eleven years ago off Cincinnati, Evans looked up in astonishment. "Nobody remembers that," he insisted. "That was the greatest thrill of my career. I'm the only one who remembers that." Now he has hit two more that will scarcely be recalled.

It is pleasing to think that the Mets never quit, even in the sixth game, when, like the Red Sox in the play-offs, they were down to a last strike. But the accompanying image is of Team Leader Keith Hernandez making the second out in that 5-3 tenth inning and going directly to the clubhouse for a resigned beer. Manager Davey Johnson was left in the dugout banging out a cold requiem with the back of his head against the stone wall.

"I'm really a nostalgic person at heart," Johnson said two days later, after Lee Mazzilli's pinch hit for Pitcher Sid Fernandez started to restore the manager's public brilliance. "Mazzilli was a hero here in New York before he was shipped to no-man's-land -- Pittsburgh and Texas. I like to see guys come back and be stars again." Tom Seaver, the ultimate Mets' star, sat out the series in the Boston clubhouse. Now and then, in the quiet time after games, Seaver leaned back on a locker and raised a sheet of X rays to the light. At 41, he underwent arthroscopic surgery on his right knee late last week, and the great pitcher's career may have ended in New York after all.

In Dennis ("Oil Can") Boyd's locker was a portrait of Satchel Paige wearing his Negro Leagues Kansas City Monarchs uniform. Over the 39 years they have been allowed to win World Series' games, six black pitchers have done it: Joe Black of Brooklyn, Bob Gibson of St. Louis, Jim ("Mudcat") Grant of Minnesota, John Wyatt of Boston, John ("Blue Moon") Odom of Oakland and Grant Jackson of Pittsburgh. Before the third game, when the Mets appeared ready to be vanquished if not swept in Boston, Boyd began to imagine himself in the baggy flannels of another day. By the time he came to in the first inning, Game 3 was decided, and when another start in the seventh game seemed to be rolling his way like a grounder to Bill Buckner, rain washed it past.

Blighted Red Sox fans are not yet ready to hear that the longing may be better than the winning; the shiny faces of Jesse Orosco, Gary Carter and Knight are too vivid. But losing can be compelling too, when Boston is in form. Late after the final game, a bottle flew out of the night. Players being expendable by then, it naturally caught Traveling Secretary Jack Rogers on the bean. He led them home in an ambulance.