The Korean youngster had surely suffered enough, after giving up the tying two-run homer with two out in the ninth inning (and, of course, the winning home run an inning later.) There can be no explanation for Brenly’s decision to call on an overtired and overwrought Kim again except mindless, managerial macho. Especially in the stadium where Yankee great Yogi Berra coined that immortal phrase deja vu all over again. And, of course, it was exactly that–another tying, two-run homer off Kim with two out in the ninth. Poor Kim had looked nervous in his first go-around. Last night he simply looked terrified. I recognized the look from when I walked into the room for my college physics final exam–and I scored a 38. Kim, sadly, didn’t fare as well. Now Arizona is down to its last three hopes: Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling and the possibility that Brenly might find an acorn. Don’t count on any of them.
Nov. 1 – I don’t think I need a translator to say this to Byung-Hyun Kim, that fine, young Arizona Diamondback hurler who apparently doesn’t speak much English. After all, hasn’t “OK” become part of the universal language?
If not, it certainly must be understood in Korea, where our GIs have been leaving their lofty cultural imprint–from Juicy Fruit to Puff Daddy–for a half century now. Because I desperately want to get this message across to Kim: Kid, believe me, all evidence to the contrary, it really is OK!
And just as desperately, I want to believe what I’m saying. I know there must be pitchers past who have shrugged off such catastrophic baseball moments and gone on to have stellar careers and normal lives. Like Ralph Branca, who gave up the most famous home run in baseball history–“the shot heard round the world,” Bobby Thomsen’s ninth-inning, pennant-winner back in 1951. Branca dined out on the story for years, even pairing up with Thomsen for some jovial anniversary exercises in baseball nostalgia. So he must have been OK with it, right. Of course, you just have to ignore that fact that Branca, who, at age 25 had won 13 games for Brooklyn that cataclysmic season, never won 13 games the rest of his life and was out of baseball by age 30.
Baseball, more than any other sport, is a game of failure, a truly punitive pursuit. Get a hit one out of every three times up and you can call yourself a batting champion. One out of four and you can settle for being a 10-year journeyman raking in more than $2 million a season. A pitcher who wins anything approaching half his starts gets a bust in Cooperstown. Tom Seaver won only 47 percent of his starts, Sandy Koufax 42 percent and Nolan Ryan just 40 percent. But when it comes to failure, no position appears to be more psychologically treacherous, more fraught with peril, than that of the ace reliever. Their singular task assures that their labors always come with the game on the line. Theirs is the ultimate hero-to-bum position.
But when the failure occurs on baseball’s biggest stage in the glare of the postseason’s bright lights, the effect can prove shattering. Mitch Williams might not have been the most stable reliever in history, as his “Wild Thing” personal style might suggest. But in three stellar seasons with the Phillies in the early ’90s, he had stabilized Philadelphia’s bullpen by saving 102 games. Then came the 1993 World Series against Toronto. Williams blew a five-run lead in game 4, then gave up a ninth-inning, Series-winning home run to Joe Carter in game 6. His career was essentially over. He would play for three more teams over three more seasons; his ERA in those final seasons was a mind-boggling 8.43, compared to a career mark of 3.52 before the Series debacle.
If there was ever a postseason that spelled out the horrors, big and small, that can accompany failure by a team’s relief ace, it was 1986. Calvin Schiraldi was the Boston Red Sox’s promising young closer, a fireballer with an extraordinary 1.41 ERA who had been almost unhittable down the stretch. Though Bill Buckner always took the rap for the error against the Mets that sealed the Red Sox fate in game 6 of the World Series, it was Schiraldi’s ragged relief that blew the game. And given a chance to redeem himself a night later, he lost game 7, too. Over the next five years, he drifted through four different teams and was out of baseball by age 30.
But that’s just meager punishment compared to the tragedy that befell Donnie Moore after that same season. Moore was the California Angels’ ace reliever, having saved 52 games in two seasons with the club. He was called upon to save one more game, against the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. Moore was a single out, indeed a single strike, away from putting the Angels into their first-ever World Series. Instead, he surrendered a home run to Boston outfielder Dave Henderson, and the Angels folded, losing two more games and sending the Red Sox on to their own Waterloo against the Mets. Moore’s life spiraled out of control. He played only two more seasons. After the last, in which he saved just four games and gave up 48 hits in 33 innings, the 35-year-old Moore tried to kill his wife, then fatally shot himself.
I am not for a moment trying to suggest that Kim is in any serious peril. But the 22-year-old from Kwangju will need the remarkable resilience of youth, or less likely now, that of the Arizona team, to keep those two historic Halloween home runs from haunting his entire career. I for one think he deserves only a small share of the blame. Sure he made a couple bad pitches: a low fastball to Tino Martinez, a notorious lowball hitter; and, after pitching Jeter tight, a pitch on the outside part of the plate that the shortstop–MR. NOVEMBER read one clever sign–could poke over the stadium’s short right-field porch.
But my goat of the game is Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly, who took a gutsy gamble and then didn’t demonstrate the courage of his convictions.
Letting Curt Schilling pitch on three days was a brash “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” move. It was the perfect call for Schilling, a hurly-burly throwback to another baseball era who has stymied everyone this postseason by throwing heat and then more heat. Brenly’s gamble appeared to be sheer genius when the Dimondbacks took a 3-1 lead in the eighth inning. But then the manager did what so many gamblers do when they don’t trust their good fortune. Instead of riding his stud horse, he tried to hedge his bet, taking Schilling out before he’d thrown 90 pitches and, thus, preserving him for a possible game 7 showdown.
Then he threw a 22-year-old kid into the lion’s den. No one escapes that lion’s den unscathed (except maybe Joseph). It is hard enough at such a tender age to compete in a World Series let alone in the baseball shrine that is Yankee Stadium and at this particularly emotion-charged time in history. I can’t prove that the ghosts of the Babe, the Mick and Joltin’ Joe are hovering over the Bronx. But how else to explain why Arizona stalwarts drop popups, collide in the field, fall down on ground balls and, of course, serve up gopher balls just one out away from glory?
Now the Diamondbacks will have their ace ready and raring to go in game 7. But don’t bet on Arizona getting that far. All the karma seems to be on the side of a team that, like none I can ever recall, plucks victory out of certain defeat. Arizona, like so many other teams to which I’ve given my allegiance in the hopes that they’d do to the Yankees what my Red Sox never could, appears doomed to come up short. I’ll just have to settle for looking smart–Yankees in six was my pre-Series prediction–rather than happy. In truth, I don’t even have the stomach to watch the sorry end. But I will. And for one reason only. I’m sticking around to pull for Byung-Hyun Kim. And to keep flashing him the OK sign.
