Desert Classic

In the seventh inning of the seventh game of the 97th World Series a strange desert wind arose as gently as a whisper inside Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix and quickly grew in strength. It swirled in the hangarlike stadium, tossing to and fro flecks of umber dust and dirt, napkins, plastic bags and other orphaned trash, and fine droplets of rain that seemed too ethereal ever to reach the ground. The World Series had become a supersized, Southwestern-style snow globe, and it did so at the exact moment on Sunday night when you wished that you could preserve the essence of baseball like a souvenir on a shelf.

The final game of the longest season in history still remained in doubt and in the hands of two 20-game winners: Roger Clemens of the New York Yankees, at 39 the oldest Game 7 starter ever, and Curt Schilling of the Arizona Diamondbacks, pitching on three days' rest and into his 304th inning of the season—the stuff of long-gone eras. Each pitcher had allowed only one run. The resolution of an entire season was nigh. The fixed beauty of the snow-globe scene could not last.

When the dust cleared and the end did come, the game had passed from Clemens and Schilling to New York's Mariano Rivera, the best postseason reliever ever, and Arizona's Randy Johnson, yet another 20-game winner, who was working 24 hours after he had thrown 104 pitches. Narrowed to the last swing of the last possible game, the season ended with a shocker: The Diamondbacks beat Rivera.

This World Series reaffirmed the timelessness of baseball. It wasn't only that Schilling and Johnson pitched with old-fashioned heat and heart, logging dead ball era workloads and ERAs. The games were also reminders that the sport thrives without a clock. The life span of a game is measured not in seconds but in outs. Three of the final four games ended stunningly with a swing of a bat because the team with a ninth-inning lead could not get the 27th out. "Win or lose," Arizona first baseman Mark Grace said nearly an hour after the Diamondbacks' 3-2 Game 7 win, "I'm proud to have played in one of the greatest World Series in the history of this great game. Someone has to tell me we just beat the New York Yankees and Mariano Rivera, because I still don't believe it."

Down 2-1 to Rivera, Arizona began its winning rally at a local time of eerie numerical resonance, 9:11. The Diamondbacks scored twice against the man who had a 0.69 career postseason ERA and was the prime factor in the Yankees' 45-0 postseason record since 1996 in games they led after eight innings. The winning run scored on a bases-loaded, 140-foot, broken-bat, chili-dipped single by Luis Gonzalez. In its fourth season Arizona became only the sixth team to win a winner-take-all World Series game on the last swing, the first to knock out a defending champion that way. A dynasty is toppled. It was as if a house had fallen on the Wicked Witch of the East. "We saw the feet curl up and disappear," Gonzalez said.

"We realize," said New York manager Joe Torre, referring to the Yankees' run of four championships in five seasons, "how many times we snatched it from people when they were close, so you really have to take both sides."

Looming largest over the Series were righthander Schilling and lefthander Johnson, the co-Series MVPs who joined the company of Koufax and Drysdale, Spahn and Sain, and Mathewson and Marquard among the best pitching tandems in baseball history. Schilling and Johnson accounted for every Arizona win in the Series (4-0 with a combined 1.40 ERA) and got all but seven of the 54 Yankees outs in Games 6 and 7 after three harrowing defeats in New York.

The Diamondbacks lost each of those three games by one run, twice when they were one out from victory with a two-run lead. They should have known they were in for a rude go of it in the Bronx when, in the fourth inning of Game 3, a rat the size of a cat parked himself in their dugout near the bat rack. "A rat on steroids," Grace called it. A security guard removed the rodent in a box. The Yankees won by a whisker, 2-1, with a run in the sixth when Gonzalez let a two-out, softly sinking line drive by Scott Brosius land in front of him in leftfield. Rivera saved the win for Clemens with two innings of no-hit, four-strikeout relief. When a reporter mentioned to Grace that at least Arizona had made Rivera work hard—he threw 29 pitches—Grace cracked, "You mean we struck out on five or six pitches, not three?"

The Series turned positively spooky the next night, Halloween under a full moon. The Diamondbacks led Game 4 3-1 in the eighth inning when manager Bob Brenly pulled Schilling, who was working on three days' rest, after 88 pitches and asked his 22-year-old righthanded closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, to get the last six outs. Brenly, already concerned that Schilling had begun to leave his splitter higher in the zone, received mixed signals from his ace when he inquired about his energy level. After the game Schilling told reporters, "I was pretty gassed, [but] I told him I had another inning in me. He told me [I had had] enough."

The next day, though, Schilling went further when describing his deteriorating condition, saying, "I was running on fumes. I did think I had another inning, but I'm glad he had to make the decision and I didn't. In the sixth and seventh inning on every pitch—with the first hitter on base—I gave it everything I had."