In an inspired pairing, St. Louis assigned Stan Musial and Moe Drabowsky last week to throw out a first ball at the World Series, something to do with their being Polish. Musial was and is a natural. When Missouri first heard that a Polish Cardinal had been elected Pope, most folks presumed it was Stan. But the selection of Drabowsky showed an instinct befitting the best baseball town in America, an affection for October strangers.
With almost any team you can name, not just the Cardinals, Drabowsky was a relief pitcher in the '60s famous for his sense of humor and a proclivity for charging long-distance calls to the bullpen telephones. Retiring to a brokerage, he wrote a book titled Everything I Know About the Stock Market, filled with empty pages. Just last week he thought of adding a chapter. But on an unlikely afternoon in 1966, Drabowsky turned into the sort of World Series hero Dan Gladden and Tom Lawless have just become, not to mention Al Weis, Al Gionfriddo and a lot of ordinary Als from the past that Ring Lardner could not have invented.
Every year the World Series comes as a surprise. In Drabowsky's year the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers were supposed to sweep the Baltimore Orioles, but they got swept instead, with Moe striking out six in a row. This year first the Cardinals were expected to overwhelm the Twins, then the Twins were poised to obliterate the Cardinals. The reverse happened in turn. A grand-slam homer from a lead-off hitter like Minnesota's Gladden qualifies as a marvel, but the home run later hit by Lawless was a miracle.
A third-string catcher who sat around St. Louis all season without chipping ! in so much as one RBI, Lawless evened the series with his mighty blow in Game Four off the winner of the opener, Frank Viola. "You can see it in their eyes," Viola had said of his teammates, who twice chose the fourth inning on their way to a thumping 10-1 and 8-4 start at home. "The trouble is, I've seen it in other teams' eyes too." Of course it was the fourth inning when Lawless, the .080 hitter, stood at home plate with two on beholding the left- field fence like a man seeing Shangri-la before the recent riots. The ball barely skimmed over.
The first Cardinal out of the dugout to congratulate him was Pitcher Ken Dayley, a moment of pure poetry. The only other homer Lawless ever hit in the big leagues, some three years ago, was off Dayley. To press the point, with the bases loaded in the seventh inning, Dayley came in to save the game. This may be stretching poetry a bit far, but that is the World Series. For the way he marshals the forces of Vince Coleman, Ozzie Smith and Curt Ford, Manager Whitey Herzog is celebrated as a thinker. ("The game of baseball's been awful good to me ever since I stopped trying to play it.") But the older Cardinals manager, Coach Red Schoendienst, still likes to flutter his fingers at the opponents in a tried-and-true hex. Something was working. With bunts, balks and stolen bases, the Cardinals finished a three-game sweep on their own plastic turf (3-1, 7-2 and 4-2) to assume a one-game lead.