The Living End

When it is played coolly and efficiently, baseball can sometimes be pretty dull. There is an insomniac in Manhattan who gave up Seconal for the Yankees. But sloppy baseball can be fun to watch--as it was last week, when the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers fumbled and bumbled their way through a wacky three-game playoff for the National League pennant. All it proved was that while the club owners could take the boys away from Coogan's Bluff and Flatbush, they could never take the old ways away from the boys. And while the transplanted Bums and Jints staged their comedy of errors. 20 million TV fans sat transfixed with horror and delight. Items:

Hardly an inning went by without infielders caroming off outfielders, pitchers falling on their faces chasing bunts, or wild throws zinging off in all directions. In the last game, the butterfingered Bums booted three in one inning: Pitcher Johnny Podres grabbed a bunt and heaved the ball into centerfield, Catcher Johnny Roseboro fired a pickoff throw into the tall grass, and Second Baseman Jim Gilliam uncorked a relay to first base that hit Giant Harvey Kuenn on the back of the noggin. The three-game tally by a genially myopic official scorer: seven errors for the Dodgers, four for the Giants.

The hitting was atrocious. The Giants left a total of 30 runners stranded high and dry on the bases. The Dodgers, shut out in their last two regular-season games, kept right on holding their breaths and bats for 14 agonizing playoff innings--and then, with a mighty sigh, blew across seven runs in a single frame.

The second game--won by the Dodgers 8-7--lasted a record 4 hr. 18 min., and the weary combatants used a record 42 players. Eleven runs scored in one inning, and there was a grand total of 20 hits, three errors and 20 men left on base. Then, in the ninth, the winning run dribbled across the plate, without benefit of a hit. On first with nobody out. Dodger Speedster Maury Wills upset a series of Giant pitchers to such an extent that they walked one batter, threw to the wrong base on another, and pushed Wills around to third, where he could skip home on a sacrifice fly.

Even the umpires caught stage fright. Jocko Conlan called the Giants' Willie Mays both "safe" and "out" on the same play (he meant "out"), later pleaded amnesia: "I don't remember doing any such thing." Shrugged Mays: "I guess I was out." One thing Conlan didn't forget: to face the TV cameras when he dusted off home plate--just in case his pants split.

To crown it all, the Dodgers went into the last inning of the last game leading the Giants 4-2--and then blew it, just as they had in 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit a three-run homer to give the Giants the pennant. Only this time, no crashing homer won the game. It came in with a bases-loaded walk.

In the gleeful Giant dressing room, First Baseman Orlando Cepeda wrapped Willie Mays in his massive arms, hoisted him on a table and poured champagne in his ear. Then the bone-weary Giants flew off to San Francisco to play the cool, efficient Yankees in the World Series--and baseball was back to Dullsville. Yankee Whitey Ford and Giant Jack Sanford turned in masterful pitching performances, and after 18 cool, efficient innings, the series was even at one game apiece.

No matter how the rest of the series went, one man who came out ahead was Giant Manager Alvin Dark. A teetotaling, tithing Louisianan who plays golf in the 70s, onetime Shortstop Dark, 39, sparked the Boston Braves to a pennant in 1948, did the same for the Giants in 1954, when he teamed with the mercurial Eddie Stanky to give Coogan's Bluff the best double-play combination in the National League. A pennant winner in his sophomore year as Giant manager, Dark runs the club with the solicitude of a tenderhearted drill sergeant. He never swears, but his temper is legendary: enraged by a 1-0 loss to the Phillies last year, he tore off the tip of one finger throwing a metal stool in the locker room. This year he intends to keep everything intact. "I knew we'd win the playoff," he said, confidently. "And we'll get the Yankees."

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