Angell, Gammons, and I now rode the elevator. In the Boston clubhouse, a crowd of reporters surrounded Buckner’s locker, waiting. Cruel jokes were already being worked up. (Question: What do Bill Buckner and Michael Jackson have in common? Answer: They both wear a glove for no apparent reason.) And then there came Buckner, limping from the shower, clad only in a towel at the waist. The reporters surged forward, surrounding him at the center of the clubhouse, pelting him with questions. Nobody from the Sox suggested that perhaps the pitchers should also be held to account. Buckner was left there, all but naked, to explain the errant seconds that would define his long and otherwise distinguished career.
It was an astonishing thing to see. Buckner stood, stoic and patient, answering for his mistake until every inquisitor was satisfied. He then returned to his hotel room, took a consoling call from Reggie Jackson, returned two days later to the ballpark, and singled in his first at-bat in Game Seven. Which the Mets won, with Hernandez sparking a sixth-inning comeback: “I got a hit. Drove in two runs. That was pressure. Not enjoyable.” Frank Viola, a Minnesota Twins pitcher who grew up twenty miles from Shea Stadium, was in touch with Buckner in the years before his death, in 2019. “He took a lot of crap,” Viola told me. “He lived with it. Such a proud guy, too. Everybody was watching. Devastating.”
The Hall of Fame pitcher Stanley Coveleski, who won three games for Cleveland during the 1920 World Series, once said of his career: “You worry all the time. It never ends. Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.” Living with such daily disquiet is still at the center of the game, but, among current players, Juan Soto’s candor and brio are refreshing because they’re so rare. The typical modern player is a lone, distant figure, emerging to issue platitudes about remaining in the moment, taking it one game at a time, the language itself sanded down to an anodyne pallor. To suppress the dread that the next player to be humiliated might be him, he specializes in routinized ways of calming himself.
Consider the Dodgers’ lithe, versatile slugger Mookie Betts, who repairs to quiet inner-stadium rooms to focus. (This will be especially called for in Yankee Stadium, a pot built of metal, concrete, and plastic, in which the roar of the crowd, combined with a stridently electronic din and constantly flashing lights, makes a visiting player feel like he’s attempting to hit splitters in Times Square.) Betts embodies the Zen approach. After amassing four hits and four R.B.I.s in a Game Four win against the Mets, he shrugged and said, “Today worked, but tomorrow’s a new day.” Baseball—“it’s just a lot of work,” he added. Gerrit Cole, the Yankees’ ace, is admired by peers such as Carlos Rodón for comporting himself “like a robot.” On even the coldest late afternoons, the Dodgers’ pitcher Michael Kopech walks the outfield perimeter in shorts and bare feet, a “grounding” exercise otherwise known as “earthing.” “I’m very strict with myself, how I go about the day,” Kopech told me. “We all find our peace out here.”
Baseball is endlessly scrutinized by team analytics departments, and no organization is more assiduous than the Dodgers in imaginatively mining the inner game. The club’s personnel includes directors of baseball strategy, performance science, systems applications, cultural development, quantitative analysis, and integrative baseball performance. “It’s a massive operation,” Andrew Friedman, the team’s president of baseball operations, told the Los Angeles Times. The ability to choose effective players and get the most from them explains how a team riven with injuries has still reached the World Series. The Dodgers are said to lead the league in meetings; analytics advisers are in close dialogue with scouting, and players like Betts talk of fulfilling a daily plan.
Such preparation is one of many ways players seek control over baseball’s defining anxieties. In contrast, the Guardians, the youngest of the four teams, were notably shadowed by doubt. The twenty-four-year-old reliever Joey Cantillo threw a record four wild pitches in a single inning, and the twenty-three-year-old shortstop Brayan Rocchio made three crucial errors in five games, including something seldom glimpsed on a major-league diamond: a dropped pop-up. In the aftermath of these travails, I heard no revelations, and it was the same with Gaddis post-Soto. I thought back to Game One of the 1988 World Series, when the Oakland Athletics’ Hall of Fame reliever Dennis Eckersley permitted a walk-off home run on an off-speed pitch to Kirk Gibson, of the Dodgers. There again, I watched in the clubhouse as someone who’d just been scalded in public responded with extraordinary self-possession.
The scene was “wild,” Eckersley told me. “All these guys around my locker. Insanity. I was in such a funk. I just took it on. What are you gonna say? ‘I’m not talking’? No! I just gave up one of the biggest homers in the history of the World Series. I was there forever, the last guy to leave that locker room.” Facing his mortification, Eckersley said, is “one of my proudest moments.” Even now, he will still volunteer, “Should have thrown Gibby a fastball!”
The Mets, it must be said, were the only team of this year’s four finalists that seemed to be taking conspicuous pleasure in what is, after all, a game. They may have baseball’s largest payroll, but they still seem like an underdog. The first baseman Pete Alonso travelled with a lucky “playoff pumpkin,” purchased from a Wisconsin patch during the team’s first-round victory over the Milwaukee Brewers. There was abundant talk of their good vibes, a buena onda that included the second baseman Jose Iglesias’s hit single “OMG.” (Many Mets wore “OMG” ski hats.) The team’s stellar shortstop Francisco Lindor—signed away from Cleveland for three hundred and forty-one million dollars—is also valued for his sunny, encouraging personality. His nickname is Mr. Smile; had he not been a ballplayer, he says, his chosen profession would have been dentist.
The Mets were endearing, but the Dodgers turned them into a pumpkin because they maintained more composure afield, working counts, taking walks, Ohtani and Betts relentless atop the order, everybody else following the plan. In today’s World Series quest, nothing’s more salient than superstars, and the Yankees and Dodgers simply pay more for them than other teams. The bigger the talent, it seems, the more imperative the need for remove. As a Yankee rookie in 2017, Judge lived in Times Square, until he was rescued by his teammate Brett Gardner, who gave him pastoral shelter in the Westchester County hamlet of Armonk. When the softspoken Judge talks about his approach to baseball, he expresses a complete commitment to professional inner peace. Since “everything’s important” in this “humbling game” of “ups and downs,” a player must keep light of heart, maintain a “short memory,” and not “make any moment too big.” Everything else, he concluded, “you just kind of ignore.”
The ballplayer of the day, of course, is the Dodgers’ six-feet-four, Japanese-born Ohtani, whose nonpareil strength and fluid techniques make him superior as both a home-run hitter and a strikeout pitcher. The last player to do both at such a rarefied level was Babe Ruth. Ohtani, who is recovering from arm surgery, didn’t pitch this year, but he compensated by becoming the first player ever to hit fifty home runs and steal fifty bases. Because the press knew Ruth so well, the public did, too—and beyond his superlative play, the Sultan of Swat became beloved for his enormous charisma and appetites. Perhaps ballplayers then were more accessible because the times were less intrusive. Today, Ohtani isn’t available for daily spontaneous baseball conversation. When he does meet with assembled journalists, he arrives accompanied by a translator. His previous interpreter entangled Ohtani in scandal, having pleaded guilty to stealing nearly seventeen million dollars from Ohtani’s bank accounts to pay off gambling debts. That Ohtani was not implicated has stopped exactly nobody from speculating about how such a large withdrawal could go unnoticed by him.
One explanation is that Ohtani stays sealed in the airtight confines of baseball. During a brief public interview, after the N.L.C.S. Game Four, he wore a lush bronze Boss sweatshirt made of enough cloth to serve as a topsail, and was studiously succinct about his ongoing experience. “I’m grateful to be able to play in this playoff environment,” he said. His approach, he explained, never changes: “I’m really just focussed on playing a good game tomorrow.” As he listened to English-speaking questioners, Ohtani often nodded in a way that implied he understood them. In an earlier session, when asked whether he was nervous about his first postseason, Ohtani immediately replied in English—“Nope!” There is doubtless a complexity to him we may never know.
Even with its changes—the cryptic players, the pitching and batting clocks designed to shorten games—there remains something timeless about baseball. “I always looked at baseball as the game of life,” Joe Torre, who won four World Series as the Yankees’ manager, told me. “People can relate more to us than other sports. It’s not the excitement of the Super Bowl, where every yard’s a big deal, but it has a certain riveting charm.” I was reminded of this anew before A.L.C.S. Game Two when, beside the Guardians dugout, I fell into conversation with Steven Kwan, Cleveland’s magnificent young left fielder. It was a cold, windy evening, and Kwan began to describe the seasonal adjustments that were now necessary for him to play this summer game. “The breeze is unexpected, and on Judge and Stanton fly balls I have to be under them,” he said. “I can’t drift. It’s my first year wearing contacts, and in this weather I blink a lot.” As he spoke, I felt the little thrill that comes when someone deepens your experience of something to which you’ve happily given attention all your life. But Kwan was still talking. There was also an advantage to the conditions. “With the wind slashing through my ears,” he said, “the jabs and jeers get lost.” ♦
