Art of baseball: The chase for the pennant

Mariners players would come to the ballpark at noon and reluctantly leave past midnight. The previously morguelike Kingdome was rocking like it never had before, the never-used Mariners bandwagon suddenly overflowing with delirious new converts.

Maybe it started with Ken Griffey Jr.'s game-winning home run off the Yankees' John Wetteland, eight years ago today. Maybe it was Tino Martinez's two-run walkoff blast off Oakland's Dennis Eckersley, or Doug Strange's ninth-inning shocker off Texas' Jeff Russell.

Who knows? It crept up on everyone, fans as well as players. All the Mariners knew is that eventually they felt they couldn't lose, and that when they did, the town grieved and grumped and moped as if a part of its very soul had died.

It was a town falling in love with its baseball team, and the baseball team falling in love with the notion that it was finally relevant.

Major-league baseball came to Seattle in 1969, then returned in 1977. Pennant-race baseball arrived, unexpectedly, in the fall of 1995, and fans here found out just how tense and exciting and wonderful life is in the maelstrom of a stretch drive that means something.

Pennant races are the essence of baseball, the bridge between the monotony of the dog days and the capriciousness of the postseason.

"You play the whole four, four-and-a-half months to get to that point," said Seattle manager Bob Melvin, who is guiding the Mariners through another stretch drive. "You don't have to work to get up for games. There's nothing more exciting than a pennant race."

The very best ones — in 1908 and '20 and '38 and '49 and '51 and '64 and '67 and '69 and '78 and '93 and '95 — became ingrained in the sport's lore.

Pennant races energize a community and give purpose and focus to a ballclub. Rather than clinging to the artificial motivation of stat-padding and spoiling the race for other teams — the empty September script for noncontending teams — players in the race eagerly eschew selfishness for sacrifice, stats for victories.

"This is a game where if everyone does individual things well, then you win games," Red Sox veteran John Burkett said. "But you can win more games if you give yourself up and are unselfish. If you're out of it, I think it's just human nature — guys aren't going to move a runner over, man on second, nobody out, when you're 20 games out."

Playing in a pennant race can deliver almost unbearable pressure. Wins cause 24-hour giddiness, losses hit like a punch in the gut. Participants become obsessed not just with their own team's performance, but suddenly immerse themselves, as well, in the parallel worlds of each contender.

"It's pressure, it's scoreboard-watching, all that," former Mariner Jay Buhner said. "There's less room for error; everything is more magnified. But it's a great feeling. It's what you play for. It becomes addictive, and it becomes contagious."

With the drama of '95 playing out against the backdrop of a stadium push that would determine the future of baseball in Seattle, the Mariners had given the California Angels a 13-game head start before they began refusing to lose.

And just as suddenly, the Angels were inventing new and horrifying ways to go down. Buhner says it bluntly, as he talked about the Mariners' positive attitude going into the one-game playoff at the Kingdome that would decide the American League West title:

"It was going to go into the record book, regardless, as the biggest comeback ever, and the biggest choke ever. Man, they spit the hook."

It got positively comical for the Mariners to watch from afar as the Angels' once-hefty lead frittered away with each successive defeat.

"That was almost as much fun as us winning," third baseman Mike Blowers said. "We'd flip on the TV or ask one of the writers what the Angel score was. 'What, they lose again?' We're all cracking up, asking, 'Can you believe it?' We were holding up our end, and we can't believe they're not winning."

Added Buhner: "There was a total dichotomy between the two teams. We were finding every way in the world to win, and they were finding every way in the world to lose. We were winning in the most ridiculous ways, against the best closers and starters. They were booting the ball, throwing wild pitches. We were scratching our heads and laughing."

Then, when the thought began to take hold that the charging Mariners had a shot at a wild-card berth, Buhner said to heck with that; they were going for the division title.

"They had this stupid 'wild-card countdown' deal (at the Kingdome)," Buhner said. "I told them to rip the damn thing down, and if anyone had a problem with that, they could come talk to me."

Heroes are born in pennant races — Doug Strange's legacy lives on long beyond the rightful statute of limitations his modest career would otherwise warrant — and so are goats.

Entire regions are transformed into teeming masses of obsession. Memories are singed into the brain so enduringly that 73-year-old Roland Hemond can lapse, rhapsodically, into an account of Hank Aaron's pennant-winning home run in 1957 as if it were yesterday.

"That moment is indelible in my mind," said Hemond, then a young executive with the Milwaukee Braves, now a senior adviser to Kenny Williams, Chicago White Sox general manager. "I get the same chill and excitement telling the story again. I get a smile on my face ear to ear. Pennant races are what you remember more vividly than anything else in the game."

If you doubt the veracity of that statement, or just how powerful and eternal are the emotions of a pennant race, consider Ted Williams' recollection of Jerry Coleman's bloop three-run double in a key game of the Boston Red Sox's doomed 1949 race with the Yankees.

"Oh, God, that cheap hit. That cheap, stinking hit," Williams muttered 40 years later in David Halberstam's book, "Summer of '49."

Consider the anguish that permanently attached itself to manager Gene Mauch and the rest of the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, the epitome of stretch-drive chokers after blowing a 6-1/2-game lead with 12 to play. Or the eternal glory that resides with Bobby Thomson and Bucky Dent, to name just two pennant-race demigods.

Consider Chicago Cubs manager Don Zimmer, tears streaming down his face as he kissed his players, one by one, after the Cubs won the '89 division title, at least partially vindicating him for his role in the Red Sox collapse of '78.

"OK, maybe the pennant race isn't open-heart surgery or even World War II," Tim McCarver wrote in his book, "Oh, Baby, I Love It." "But it's a time when there are deep circles under your eyes and a big lump in your throat as you walk out on the field. It's a time when even water goes down in lumps.

"What's not to love about a pennant race? It's the essence of the game. But, man, what it can do to you."

If you're the Red Sox's Carl Yastrzemski in '67, it can elevate you to heroic stature. Yaz set the standard for rising to the moment, hitting .448 with 19 runs batted in over the final 19 games, including a 7-for-8 performance in the final two games to lead the Red Sox to the AL title in a classic four-team race.

Other pennant-race titans: Mike Schmidt, who hit four home runs in four regular-season games in October to clinch the 1980 division title for the Phillies; Stan Musial, who hit .426 with seven RBI in 12 games after being called up late in 1941, and had a .344 average in September in his career; Doyle Alexander, 9-0 with a 1.53 earned-run average down the stretch for the '87 Tigers, nearly obscuring the fact that Detroit traded John Smoltz to get him; and Tom Seaver, winning his final 10 starts of 1969 to lead the Miracle Mets, who won 38 of their last 49 games to overtake the Cubs.

If you're Bob "Hurricane" Hazle in 1957, a pennant race can provide the stage for brief but undying fame. Hazle was called up July 28, 1957, hit .403 the remainder of the season to help the Milwaukee Braves win the pennant, then was sold to the Tigers the next season, never to be heard from again. Except when the subject is pennant-race phenoms.

Other ephemeral stars: the Los Angeles Dodgers' Dick Nen, just called up from the minor leagues in September 1963, hit a pinch-hit home run in the ninth inning to tie a key game against the St. Louis Cardinals that the Dodgers went on to win; it was the only hit Nen ever got for the Dodgers; and Floyd Giebell, a Detroit rookie who beat Bob Feller 2-0 in the pennant-clinching game of 1940, eliminating Feller's Cleveland Indians; Giebell never won another game in the majors.

And if you're the New York Giants' Fred Merkle, or the Brooklyn Dodgers' Ralph Branca, or the Red Sox's Mike Torrez, or the San Francisco Giants' Salomon Torres, the pennant race can outfit you with goat horns forever.

Merkle's failure to touch second base as the winning run scored in a key game with the Cubs in 1908 — nullifying the run and forcing a makeup game for the pennant that his Giants lost — left him branded for perpetuity as "Bonehead Merkle." Branca gave up the homer to Thomson, Torrez to Dent, and they still haven't lived it down.

Torres was a 21-year-old Giants rookie when Dusty Baker tabbed him to pitch the final game of the 1993 season at Dodger Stadium, with the Giants and Braves tied at 103 victories.

Torres, hyped as the next Juan Marichal, got battered by the Dodgers, his fifth loss in six starts down the stretch. It took years to repair his psyche from the damage.

"If I would have done the job, I would have been top man, really famous," Torres told The Seattle Times in 1997, shortly before he was released by the Mariners. "But that was too much pressure to put on me. It was a very frustrating and complicated time. They wanted me to do so much, and I wasn't capable."

That '93 season has been called the last great pennant race, because the advent of the wild card the next season gave teams like the Giants a back-door entry into the playoffs.

The very term, in fact, has been an anachronistic misnomer since 1969, when multidivision play began and teams no longer battled down the stretch for a pennant.

But the concept remains embedded in the American consciousness, in the same way that singers still vie for the "Album of the Year" Grammy long after CDs made wax obsolete. When teams are vying for a playoff spot in September, it's a pennant race, end of story.

Members of an aspiring punk-rock band in New Jersey that named itself The Pennant Race reflected the resonance of the term in response to an e-mail inquiring about the source of their name.

"We are all pretty much at the end of our childhood, and everyone knows that the greatest thing when you are growing up is baseball. Well, now that we are all getting older, music has filled that spot.

"Nobody wants to let go of the good times that you have when you are young, so we figured, let's not. An easy way to do it is to name the band after something in baseball. The only thing that would be fitting is The Pennant Race."

Forget about the wise words of Annie Savoy in "Bull Durham" — "It's a long season; you've got to trust it."

When the season gets short, down to the waning days, nothing can be trusted, or left to chance. Days off become unthinkable.

"If you're in a pennant race, the only way you don't pitch is if your arm's hanging off," Cincinnati's Danny Graves said in 1999.

Dave Parker called it "panty-hose time" — no nonsense. Players will tell you that a game in April is the same as a game in September. Don't believe it.

"Anyone who's playing in September with a chance for the playoffs and says there's no pressure is either lying or dead," pitcher Kevin Brown once said.

Don't think everyone stands up to the pressure, either. Thomson delivered perhaps the most celebrated and most clutch hit in American sports history in '51, but a few years later, with the Braves, he failed with a runner in scoring position in the final weekend of the season, and the Braves lost the title.

Toronto's George Bell had two hits in his final 26 at-bats as the Blue Jays lost the final seven games in 1987 (but still was named league MVP). For years, Barry Bonds had to live with the rap that he choked in the clutch, even though he almost single-handedly led the Pirates to the 1992 division title by hitting .392 with 11 homers and 27 RBI in September and October.

"You actually see the best and worst in some guys," Boston's Johnny Damon said. "Some guys press a lot and just get nothing done at all. But that's also where silent heroes are made, guys that are not expected to do much. But in crunch time they stick with their game, and they're able to go out and perform higher than anyone's expectations."

Manager Tony La Russa believes the game actually becomes easier in the pennant stretch, because the finish line is in sight to provide a tangible goal. And yet La Russa once marvelously captured the swirling blend of exhilaration and dread that can consume you in a pennant race.

"I am as nauseous as I've ever been," he told Newsday in September 1996. "I have a terrible headache. My head is pounding. I feel like throwing up and I'm having trouble swallowing. And the beauty of it is, you want to feel like this every day."

Noted sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman confirmed the obvious — that players react to pennant-race pressure differently.

"To some guys, the pennant race is enchanting," he said. "They say, 'Thank God I'm not with a loser again. Thank God September means something.' Then other guys say, 'Oh, my God, I hope I don't mess this up.'

"A pennant race should be a joy, a challenge, not a threat. If as soon as you say 'pennant race,' your rear end slams shut, you're in trouble."

To combat such an attitude, Dorfman reminds players that it's not life or death (it's bigger than that, a Red Sox or Cubs fan might counter), and that "Even if they didn't handle it well previously, they're still alive, still breathing, people still love them."

He emphasizes that the key is to take care of the task at hand and minimize the distractions.

"All you do when you start thinking of consequences is inhibit your muscles," Dorfman said. "You'll be slow with the bat through the zone, your arm is going to be tight. All those physical manifestations are from trying to do more than just trust your ability."

Conquer a pennant race, and it can transform a career.

"Look at Jason Schmidt," said ESPN commentator Jeff Brantley, referring to the Giants' ace who blossomed last fall and now is one of the most dominating pitchers in baseball.

"There were a couple of teams, in the Braves and Pirates, who didn't ever think he was going to do what he's doing now. A lot of it is the realization you can do those things. Once you do well in the pennant drive and the postseason, it allows you to get that big confidence you need when things aren't going that great. That's what really makes the difference for a lot of guys."

In the old days of baseball, fans would gather in town squares to watch as accounts of key games in other cities were relayed on "game boards" via Western Union dispatches. That evolved into the quaint art of "scoreboard watching," which can be as maddening and tantalizing as the game itself.

Baker, now manager of the Cubs, likes to think that when his team has already posted a win before their rival plays, that his team's spirit is somehow hovering over the other team's stadium, watching over the proceedings.

In the wired modern world, players can monitor key games in the clubhouse via satellite television, eliminating the relatively common old-time scenario of gathering around a telephone as a team official talks to someone listening to a radio broadcast in another city.

They can even log on to the Internet to follow a game, or carry a handheld sports ticker. Those technologies were in their infancy back in '95, when the Mariners lost their final two scheduled games against Texas, then sat in the visiting clubhouse and watched on television as the Angels beat Oakland to force a playoff game at the Kingdome.

Flying back to Seattle from Dallas, Blowers for the first time felt the pressure of their raucous pennant chase enveloping him. What if they came back so far, only to have it all slip away?

"We felt we had nothing to lose, all the way to the last week," he said. "Then it was right there in front of us. The rest of the time was a heck of a lot of fun for us. But then, for the first time, I got jitters and nervousness going into this one game. We had come this far, and now it was down to this."

Still, he added, "I guarantee you the Angels didn't want any part of Randy (Johnson). Flying back, we felt we were going to win that game."

They did, 9-1 behind Johnson and Luis Sojo ("Everybody scores!"), to end the first pennant race in Seattle's major-league history.

Two weeks later, having beaten the Yankees in an uproarious division series, they lost the American League Championship Series in six games to Cleveland, and the Mariners went home.

"Players were emotionally spent," Blowers said. "When the last out was made and done, we were sitting in the clubhouse, looking at each other, like, 'Can you believe what we went through, and what a blast it was?' I remember going home thinking, 'I haven't been so tired in all my life.' "

A pennant race can do that to a person, player and fan alike. That's why we love 'em.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com