It was the end of the World Series as we know it. It ended with the first pitch of the first game last Saturday night, and not because it prompted an unprecedented Fall Classic announcement of game-time humidity (82%, for those of you scoring at home). The Series, which began with a moon over Miami, had never before been this far south or this far afield from its roots. Hosted by a second-place team in its fifth year of existence—a club of transplants playing in a region of transplants—this Series was different from the previous 92. This is baseball at the turn of this century.

With all due respect to the Atlanta Braves and their 716 wins this decade, the Florida Marlins are the Team of the '90s. They reached the World Series by playing checkbook baseball and capitalizing on the three gizmos produced by major league owners this decade: expansion, the wild card and interleague play. Florida, established in 1993, reached the Series faster than any other expansion team, despite having only the third-best record in its own division against National League teams. The Marlins, who finished nine games behind the Atlanta Braves in the National League East, also lost more games within their league than the New York Mets. Florida's 12-3 record against American League opponents in the first year of interleague play essentially qualified it for the postseason and the eventual showdown with the Cleveland Indians, another Rotisserie-like team heavy on turnover and payroll.

The Faux Classic began, appropriately enough, not in a pitchers' park or in a hitters' park, but in a quarterbacks' park, Pro Player Stadium. Last year the Series was played in The House That Ruth Built; this year it was held in The House That Marino Built, where Marlins fans trekked to a place only Dolphins fans have typically ventured: the upper deck.

"Can I bring my glove?" 10-year-old Frankie Rodriguez asked his father, Leo, before Game 1. Leo, 43, checked the tickets—ninth row of section 411—approximated the mileage and said, "Forget it. No way a ball will ever come up here."

How appropriate, too, that the first pitch of this new era was hurled by someone to whom the great mythology of the World Series meant nothing. "When I was a child, I didn't even think of this, because it wasn't something that passed through my mind," said the Marlins' Game 1 starter, righthander Livan Hernandez, who defected from Cuba two years ago. Until he watched the Game 6 telecast last year, he never had seen a World Series game.

ALSO

High Standards World Series Coverage

SEARCH CNN/SI

Hernandez was not even aware that his veteran counterpart, 39-year-old righthander Orel Hershiser, had won a Cy Young Award (in 1988, when Hernandez was 13). No matter. From the moment the pubescent group Hanson sang the national anthem before Game 1, this World Series had a fresh look. In the allegorical pitching matchup, Tradition took a beating.

Hershiser spent the days leading up to the opener defending himself against accusations that he throws a spitter. Once the game began he established beyond a reasonable doubt that he had absolutely nothing on the ball. The Marlins blasted the man who had lost only one of 16 career postseason starts for seven earned runs; no pitcher had allowed more in the previous 545 World Series games. Hernandez, who turned 22 in February, pitched serviceably into the sixth inning to become the youngest pitcher to win a Game 1, as Florida prevailed 7-4.

"This isn't the kind of Series I'm used to," Hershiser said before the thrashing. "It's a Series where we're writing history instead of reliving it."

The only thing harder than packing for this World Series (snow flurries were forecast for games in Cleveland this week) was predicting it. In Game 2 on Sunday night Indians righthander Chad Ogea, who had a losing record (8-9) in the 1997 regular season, thoroughly outpitched Marlins ace righty Kevin Brown, who had not lost in 14 starts since July 27. Brown allowed 10 hits in Cleveland's 6-1 win, including two to shortstop Omar Vizquel, who had struggled so badly in his previous 29 postseason at bats that he had had as many hits as Hanson—one.

The Series, to the apparent delight of both teams, lacked a clear favorite. As Indians DH-outfielder David Justice, a former Brave said, "I think everybody is tired of seeing the Braves in the World Series." The Marlins and the Indians each peddled the no-one-expected-us-to-be-here position. That was as difficult to buy as an undeveloped corner between Miami and Palm Beach. In truth the Indians, with a $60 million payroll, outspent every team in baseball except the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles, and the Marlins finished fourth in that department ($53.7 million).

Last winter Florida reaffirmed the importance of spending when it veered from its player-development strategy and dropped $89 million on free agents. That's why the Marlins look a lot like their fans: Everybody seems to be from someplace else. While the three-county South Florida region includes more people born in New York than in Florida, the Marlins' roster includes only one player not imported from another team or another country: catcher Charles Johnson. Even the security guards at Pro Player Stadium have trouble keeping up with this team. During the National League Championship Series one of them collared Craig Counsell, who was acquired in a July trade with the Colorado Rockies, as the second baseman tried to enter the clubhouse. "Uh, where do you think you're going?" the guard asked.

"I'm a player, Craig Counsell," he replied.

"Let's see some I.D.," the guard said.

Counsell produced his driver's license.

The most important newcomer to the club, outfielder Moises Alou, a $25 million free-agent pickup and the Marlins' regular-season RBI leader, provided the biggest hit of Game 1. In the fourth inning he drilled a three-run home run off the leftfield foul pole, which is actually an advertisement painted to resemble a giant yellow pencil. Talk about erasing a deficit. Having been down 1-0, Florida took a 3-1 lead with that hit. Something about clunking one off an oversized writing implement, though: It hardly seemed as classic as Carlton Fisk's 1975 Series homer off the unadorned pole at Fenway Park.

Johnson then became the 10th batter in Series history to follow one home run with another, but the first to do so over a football ring of honor covered with sheeting. He hit the ball so far that it cleared the hidden Bob Kuechenberg nameplate—not exactly the same as reaching the Lou Gehrig monument. Johnson hit it so far that Hershiser had to squint to follow it. He hit it so far that the elder Rodriguez caught the darn thing (barehanded, naturally) way up in section 411. Of course, Rodriguez isn't a native Floridian, either. Like Hernandez, he emigrated from Cuba, arriving in 1970 and becoming a fan of the Cincinnati Reds and fellow countryman Tony Perez. Now he roots for the Marlins and Hernandez. Amid more Cuban, Colombian and Puerto Rican flags than Stars and Stripes, this postmodern Series has such an international flavor, mirroring baseball's diversity in the '90s, that by the ninth inning of Game 2, eight of the 18 players in the game had been born outside the U.S.

The Marlins, who like to call themselves the Team of the Americas, have come so far so fast that none of their fans can claim what is a birthright in Cleveland: the classification of long-suffering. The Indians have not won a world championship since 1948, the year their general manager, John Hart, was born. Cleveland won a pennant in '54 and then not again until '95, by which point Hart had built what looked to be a foundation for long-term success with young players signed to multiyear contracts. But Hart so disliked the undisciplined personality of his team that he broke it apart and remade it. Two years later only 10 players remain from the club that lost the World Series to Atlanta.

If the frosty Albert Belle best personified that '95 team, centerfielder Marquis Grissom is the ambassador for this one. Hart telephoned Grissom last March to tell him that the Indians had acquired him and Justice in a trade that sent centerfielder Kenny Lofton and lefthander Alan Embree to the Braves. A year earlier Grissom had happily signed a contract extension to play in Atlanta, near his home in Fairburn, Ga., through at least 1999. "I'll never forget his reaction," Hart says. "He gets a phone call out of the blue telling him to go to Cleveland, and he says, 'I'm a baseball player. I'll be there tomorrow.'"

What Grissom brought with him was one of the most potent bats in World Series history. He broke a 1-1 tie in the fifth inning of Game 2 with an RBI single, one of the three hits on Sunday that raised his career World Series average to .441 (26 for 59 in three Series), better than anyone else who has batted at least 50 times in Series play. "I didn't come here to set records," Grissom says. "I came here to win."

That's the one aspect of this Series that makes it like the 92 others. It's not the humidity, it's the heat—the competition with a world championship on the line, wild cards, payrolls and ridiculous pencils be damned. Something happened on that first pitch in Game 1. Leadoff hitter Bip Roberts, who was obtained in a trade only hours before the Sept. 1 deadline for postseason eligibility, stood in the batter's box for the first World Series of his life. He had played 1,204 regular-season games and would turn 34 in nine days. The moment made his knees tremble so much that he prayed right there between the freshly laid chalk lines. "Good Lord, help me," he said to himself. "Give me strength."

Hernandez, with all of 18 regular-season games behind him, let fly with the pitch. Suddenly hundreds of cameras flashed, burning bright in the moist night, triggered so closely together in capturing this new kind of history that they seemed to create a single explosion of light. Roberts was blinded. He never saw the pitch. He only heard home plate umpire Ed Montague shout, "Strike!"

"I've always watched the World Series and seen how players get so excited," Roberts said later. "I just had to experience it. I'd sit there and think, It can't be that exciting. You know what? It is, man. It's all of that. And then some."

Issue date: October 27, 1997