Slam-bang Series

A boy thinks of the backyard and his brothers at the World Series. Eisenreich's other brothers, Bill and Tom, drove to Toronto from St. Cloud last weekend. They were driving the 1,000 miles home after Sunday night's game, rocket-fueled by pride in their younger brother Jim. "It'll probably only take them two hours to get back," said Eisenreich.

That's because, behind 0-2 in the count to Stew, Eisenreich turned on a high inside fastball and drove it 391 feet over the right-centerfield fence at the Sky-Dome, giving the Phillies a very necessary 5-0 lead. Necessary, because Toronto's offense, a relentlessly dripping faucet, would reduce the Phils' lead to 5-3 (ping!) before Phillie centerfielder Lenny Dykstra hit his seventh career postseason home run (pong!) in the seventh. It was still 6-3 by the time Phillie closer Mitch Williams made his usual excruciating appearance near game's end. Unusually, Wild Thing entered in the eighth inning. (No David West on this night.)

Thing, as Williams is known, allowed a run on Olerud's sacrifice fly and then walked Roberto Alomar on four pitches. But after Alomar stole second, Williams wheeled and threw him out to end the eighth as Alomar foolishly tried to steal third. All of which is to say that Thing was his usual, unwatchable, diabolical self.

In the Phillie dugout Schilling draped a towel over his own head for Thing's performance in the ninth. "I do it for two reasons," Schilling explains. "To keep my sanity, and so I don't throw up on the bench. But he's comfortable out there. He goes 3 and 0, and it doesn't bother him. Then he paints three in a row. It's like, 'What the hell are you doing?' " What Williams was doing, in his own inimitable way, was procuring a 6-4 Phillie win.

But afterward, the phalanx of cameras and klieg lights and the journalists from 43 countries were embanked around Eisenreich, the man whose neurological disorder was once thought to be mere nerves, an inability to perform in the white-hot light of the big leagues. "I was playing third base in Milwaukee the day he tripled and had to leave the game because he was hyperventilating," Molitor remembers. "I felt bad for him then. I'm happy that everything's turning out great for him now."

Well after midnight on Monday morning, Eisenreich stood erect at his locker and addressed the mob. Not because he enjoys doing so, he said, but because he may be able to reassure others with Tourette's. Children: They are not oddballs, they are not outcasts.

"It's part of the journey of life," is how Eisenreich described his ordeal. "You have ups and downs. Hopefully, I've had my downs. I'm going to enjoy the ups. I'm going to cherish this as long as I live."

Cherish the moment. Seize the day. For life is short, and time pauses only during the World Series, where last call is always another hour away.