Any relationship between the World Series and the season that precedes it is often purely coincidental. A team that won a record 111 games during the regular season loses four straight to one that won 97. A pinchhitter comes off the bench to clout two pinchhit home runs. A substitute outfielder makes one fantastic catch, brushes briefly with immortality—and for years afterward, people ask: Whatever became of Sandy Amoros? But last week's Series stuck strictly to the script.
The Los Angeles Dodgers won it the same way they won the National League pennant—battling from behind scratching out hits, scrambling for runs' with the indifference of a team that had been through it all before. The Minnesota Twins lost it in the finest American League fashion—standing proudly at the plate, flexing their muscles, waiting for the big home run that never came.
Maury & Mudcat. There were no instant heroes. The Series belonged to the pros, the ballplayers who put their teams there in the first place—and they professed elaborate calm. "I just had an average day," shrugged Dodger Shortstop Maury Wills after the fifth game, in which he stole a base, scored two runs, and rapped out four hits to tie a Series record. "I'm still no Maury Wills " insisted Centerfielder Willie Davis, who stole three bases in one game. "I had a hell of a good time," said Rightfielder Ron Fairly, only 5 ft. 10 in. but the top slugger in the Series, with three doubles, two homers, a .379 batting average and six RBI's. Twins' Leftfielder Bob Allison saved one game with a diving catch, won another with a two-run homer—and still insisted, "I was a bust," because he struck out nine times.
All that modesty was too much for Jim ("Mudcat") Grant, the American League's No. 1 pitcher (season's record: 21-7). "I'm cool, sexy and suave," Grant announced, and he confided to newsmen that his broad shoulders were the result of eating possum as a kid. Star of the Twins' 8-2 first-game victory, Mudcat was knocked out of the box in the fourth game at Los Angeles. Two days later, with the Twins trailing 3-2 in the Series, he trudged to the mound again. Fortified by hot and cold showers ("to get the bad blood out"), he beat Los Angeles 5-1, supplying the clincher himself with a three-run, 395-ft. homer in the sixth inning.
"It's a homer! It's a homer!" Mudcat yelled, dancing gleefully around the bases and broad jumping the last 10 ft. to the plate. Newsmen wanted to know what kind of pitch he had hit. Grant grinned. "It was the best pitch I ever saw. A curve that dropped a foot. And I hit it into the teeth of a gale."