All Aces

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.