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All Aces In a World Series stacked with top-drawer starters, Orlando Hernandez and the Yankees got a leg up on the BravesBy Tom Verducci
No one spoke of a juiced baseball. The height of the mound wasn't discussed. The dimensions of the ballpark seemed absolutely fair to everyone. A sense of equilibrium returned to baseball in the game's last days of the 20th century. What was true in the first World Series would be just as true in the century's last. Pitching is the brick and mortar of championships. The greatest assemblage of starting pitchers in a World Series in this generation would see to that. The Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees lined up eight starting pitchers with the richest portfolio this side of Warren Buffett's: 1,142 combined wins, 31 All-Star selections, 13 Cy Young Awards (including 11 of the past 16 Cys), nine world championship rings and three postseason MVP awards. The group included four of the top six active pitchers in career wins and five of the top 10 active pitchers in winning percentage (minimum: 50 decisions). So decorated was this octet that at least one Cy Young winner was scheduled to start every game. Just check the blackboard for the Cy du jour. The rotations were so stacked that only the fifth Cy versus Cy matchup in Series history -- Yankees righthander Roger Clemens versus Braves righthander John Smoltz -- was relegated to Game 4. "The two best pitchers of my generation are here in this Series, Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens," fellow Cy guy David Cone of New York said on the eve of the World Series last Friday. "I'd like to think another three or four of us here are right behind them. It makes for a great matchup. I look at the rotations as a wash." A wash? Heretofore in this decade no team could dare say with such conviction that it was the pitching equal of the Braves. Atlanta, after all, has fielded what its pitching coach, Leo Mazzone, has said "may go down as the best rotation of all time given the amount of offense in the game today." It was obvious after two games that Cone was wrong. This was no wash. The Yankees held the clear edge in starting pitching. Righthanded slingers Cone and Orlando Hernandez had outpitched Braves righties Maddux and Kevin Millwood at Turner Field with Dead Ball era dominance. They could have pitched against Atlanta at Turner Studios without damage to the set. Only nine of the 49 batters to face Hernandez and Cone hit the ball beyond the arc of the infield. Incredibly, Atlanta got all of one hit in 21 at bats on each night against the New York starters while scoring a total of one run against the two of them. After losing 4-1 and 7-2, the Braves had to admit that they'd met their match. Maddux, when asked following Game 2 if the Yankees' rotation was as good as Atlanta's, responded without hesitation, "Oh, yes. Absolutely. Their starting pitching gets overlooked. And they've got a bullpen that can match up with anyone's. I saw on TV where they're 33-10 under [manager] Joe Torre [during four years] in the postseason. Thirty-three and 10! That's impressive, man. That's pitching." New York was riding one of the greatest postseason rolls ever. Only Babe Ruth's Yankees of 1927, '28 and '32, who won 12 consecutive World Series games, rang up a longer winning streak in the Fall Classic than the 10 straight these Yankees had through Game 2. Unlike their Murderers' Row forefathers, however, this New York team had wiped out the best available competition more by arm than by bat. The Yankees' rotation is too good to overlook anymore. Through Sunday, in 23 postseason games over the past two years, Cone (six starts), Hernandez (six), lefthander Andy Pettitte (five), Clemens (two) and the departed (to the Toronto Blue Jays) lefty David Wells (four) were a combined 18-2 with a 2.31 ERA. They'd pitched at least seven innings in 18 of those 23 games and allowed two or fewer earned runs in 18 as well. Much of baseball is unrecognizable from its early-20th-century roots. In 1912 people gaped upon the newly built 25-foot-high leftfield wall of Fenway Park as if it were the moon, wondering if man could ever clear it. Now home run balls routinely smash against dome catwalks, splash into swimming pools, shatter scoreboards and practically orbit around a Fenway made smaller and smaller. This World Series is a sepia-toned reminder of what hasn't changed. Ninety-six years after the Boston Pilgrims and the Pittsburgh Pirates combined for a mere 13 runs on 30 hits in the opening two games of the first World Series, the Yankees and the Braves scored 14 runs on 27 hits in the first two games of the century's last. The dead-ball guys hit three home runs, the rabbit-ball guys one, by Atlanta's Chipper Jones off Hernandez. The first Series began with Cy Young himself throwing the first pitch. The century's last began with four-time Cy Young winner Maddux doing the chucking -- not including that done by the Braves' would-be Game 1 starter, lefty Tom Glavine, who did his hurling at home because of a stomach flu. Glavine was rescheduled to pitch against Pettitte on Tuesday, when the Series moved to Yankee Stadium for Games 3, 4 and, if necessary, 5. Maddux's start was like so many by Atlanta's illustrious starters in this decade's postseasons: He pitched well, but not better than his opponent and not well enough to overcome meager run support. (Through Sunday, Braves starters were 7-6 over the last two postseasons.) Maddux took a 1-0 lead into the eighth inning but failed to get another out. He gave up a first-pitch single to Scott Brosius. Torre, electing not to bunt, lifted Hernandez for pinch hitter Darryl Strawberry. With three lefthanders in the Atlanta bullpen, Torre knew this was his only chance to get the lefthanded-hitting Strawberry an at bat against a righthander. "Brilliant," Cone called the move. Maddux, respectful of Strawberry's power with a 15-mph wind blowing to rightfield, issued a five-pitch walk. "We still felt it was a 1-0 game we could win," Mazzone said afterward. "They bunt, we walk [Derek] Jeter, and then we have [lefty reliever John] Rocker to face [lefthanded hitter Paul] O'Neill. We can play the infield back for a double play." Chuck Knoblauch fouled off the next pitch on a bunt attempt. "When I fouled it off, I saw Maddux jump really quickly off the mound toward third base," Knoblauch said afterward. "I couldn't believe it. He was really aggressive, breaking toward third like that. So on the next pitch I actually was trying to bunt the ball straight back through the mound." Knoblauch bunted hard just to the right of the mound, far from Maddux and nearly past charging first baseman Brian Hunter. Hunter fielded the ball but then dropped it for an error as he tried to throw to first. "Bases loaded and no outs is a lot worse than bases loaded and one out," Mazzone said. Maddux worked Jeter to 0 and 2 but could not put him away. He missed away with one pitch and left the next one up and over the center of the plate. Jeter smashed it into leftfield for a game-tying single. Then O'Neill, batting against Rocker, rapped a 97-mph high-and-tight fastball through a drawn-in infield for a two-run single. That hit made a winner out of Hernandez. Nothing new there. El Duque is 34-13, including 5-0 with a 1.02 ERA in the postseason, since leaving Cuba and getting a four-year, $6.6 million deal from the Yankees in 1998. The Braves were one of many clubs that decided Hernandez wasn't worth that kind of money, not when they couldn't verify his age (he claims 30 but might be as old as 34) or the pop on his fastball. All the while they should have been measuring his ticker. "In his mind he's the equal to Maddux or anybody," Cone says. "This is his chance to prove it. You can tell this is his time right now, and he wants to take advantage of it." On July 16, in a 10-7 Atlanta win, the Braves had plastered Hernandez for six runs in 4 2/3 innings. At the time he was having undisclosed personal problems. "He wasn't focused," New York pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre says. "I think they lulled themselves into thinking they were going to see the same El Duque they saw then. I think they were surprised by what they got." In Game 1, Atlanta manager Bobby Cox started six righthanded hitters (including Maddux) against Hernandez, who held righties to a .187 average this year. El Duque dominated the Braves with his sampler box of breaking balls, a variety pack of surprises. Atlanta looked at breaking balls that looped into the strike zone and swung at others that slid sharply out if it. Righthanded batters swung 35 times at the assortment of pitches, missing 13, fouling off 16 and putting only six into play, all for outs (two on the ground, four in the air). "I noticed, and I'll do the same tomorrow," Cone said after Game 1. "They seem to be vulnerable to breaking balls, and you can get them to chase out of the zone." Against Cone's similar sidewinding style, however, Cox inserted into the Atlanta lineup three experienced, if lesser used, lefthanded hitters who had combined for seven home runs all season: Ozzie Guillen, Keith Lockhart and Greg Myers. "He caught me off guard a little bit with the lefthanders," said Cone afterward. His Cy Young Award is the only one of the 13 in this Series not hanging in its owner's residence; Cone gave his to his father, who displays it in his Kansas City house. "Then I considered all the lefties to be better fastball hitters, anyway, so I stayed with the breaking stuff. It didn't change my approach much. I didn't give in at all. I sensed that in the middle innings they began to get frustrated and were swinging at pitches out of the zone." Myers did contribute the only hit off Cone, a fifth-inning single after which he was immediately eradicated by a double play. By then, the Braves trailed 7-0 and their starter, Millwood, who has the best winning percentage (.690) among active pitchers with at least 50 decisions, had long been driven from the game. Ten of the 15 batters he faced reached base, and five of them scored. The Yankees, contrarians to the slugfest mentality of these times, hadn't bothered to hit a home run in half the games of their 10-game World Series winning streak. They preferred to use singles, bunts and walks like arsenic. They were on the doorstep of having their third world championship team in four years without a 30-home-run hitter. "My pitches were either right down the middle or way out of the zone," Millwood said afterward. "You can't do that against these guys." It wasn't the sort of flameout you expected from any of the Big Eight starters in this Series. Through Game 2 (chart, page 43) they had started more than half of all the postseason games since 1991 (113 of 212) and earned one quarter of all the victories in that time (53). Such superb starting pitching gave the century-closing Series a fittingly retro look, recalling the 1963 Fall Classic, when future Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale (for the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Whitey Ford (Yankees) converged, or the five-game '05 Series, when the Cooperstown-bound Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity (New York Giants) and Chief Bender and Eddie Plank (Philadelphia Athletics) accounted for nine of the 10 starting assignments and every game ended in a shutout. This Series did more than wink and nod at the past. It fairly welled up with tears, especially during one particularly touching moment when the 18 living members of the All-Century team were introduced before Game 2. Hank Aaron, Ken Griffey Jr. and Willie Mays delicately assisted 81-year-old Ted Williams into a chair upon a stage erected at second base. Williams in his winter has acquired an endearing patina, the fierce Teddy Ballgame having become a sweet Grandfather Baseball. The entwinement of three generations and 2,334 home runs captured in wordless eloquence the greater part of a century of baseball. There was, too, a less poignant moment that better caught the spirit of this World Series. The first set of All-Century players to be introduced were starting pitchers Clemens, Koufax, Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan and Warren Spahn, a five-man rotation spanning every baseball season since 1946. They stood there erect and silent in coats and ties, like a tribunal of elders satisfied by how the century was closing. Cone and Millwood were throwing in the bullpens. Baseball never seemed more timeless. Issue date: November 1, 1999
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