There's no crying in baseball

Sporting News, The, Nov 6, 2000 by Dave Kindred

Al Leiter fell. The Mets' pitcher fell reaching for the silly little ground ball. He fell on his hind end, as if in a hurry to sit down only to miss the chair. Another foot this way, the ball so close, he'd have grabbed it, and everything would have been all right.

But now he could only hope someone else could field the silly squib. And surely they would, a ground ball rolling slowly a foot from the pitcher's reach.

Leiter had made a good pitch, a change-up so good that the Yankees hitter, the journeyman Luis Sojo, scraped the top of the ball and created a silly, bouncing, rolling, hopping squib that maybe once in 10,000 times amounts to anything.

Such a long, hard night. Midnight now, Leiter's face drawn tight at the lips and eyes. The pitch to Sojo was his 142nd. He'd quit on hard stuff and gone to changing speeds and locations. He'd given up only five hits to a Yankees team eager for the one more victory that would give it a third straight world championship.

"Anxious, gut-wrenching games," the Yankees' Paul O'Neill called this subway drama in five acts, and Leiter says of the Yankees, "Every pitch against that lineup, you're grinding."

Leiter's good pitch to Sojo, a master's pitch, produced a little ground ball that this time, this once in 10,000 times, eluded Leiter and passed a foot left of second base headed into a no-man's land beyond two diving infielders.

Anywhere else, me squib was harmless, me inning over, the runner at second left there, a 2-2 tie going into the last of the ninth inning. But Sojo's silly ground ball rolled under all the gloves and into the outfield grass. And Leiter, in the dirt, propped up on his hands, his eyes fixed on the ball rolling away from all the grasping hands, was helpless after doing so much all night.

The day before, Leiter spoke to Bobby Valentine. The last three years, the 35-year-old lefthander built a 46-26 record for the Mets. But 10 times in his career he had started postseason games, somehow winning none. Now the Mets needed a victory to move this World Series to a sixth game.

"You can leave me in for 150 pitches," Leiter told Valentine, maybe 40 over the usual limit.

For another manager in another place, Leiter once threw 166 pitches in midseason. For three weeks after, he brushed his teeth righthanded. "Who knows what that guy was thinking?" Leiter says. "But with Bobby, I told him, `I've got four or five months to rest.'"

He would leave only when carried off on his shield. Even with two Yankees on in the ninth, Valentine let Leiter face Sojo. "He'd earned the right to win or lose it himself," the manager says.

Only after Sojo's squib caused two runs to score did Valentine replace Leiter. He left to a standing ovation and sat in the dugout head down, face in his hands, spent, weeping. His friend and teammate, John Franco, says, "Al gave us his heart and soul."

These are disintegrating Yankees, eroding before our eyes. Yet now they have won a third straight world championship, four of the last five. And they have reason to call themselves the best team of all time.

They just might be, if we add up the five years and let this one count for only a little. But this .540 season, the ninth-best finish in Major League Baseball this year, is cause to argue that the 2000 Yankees are the worst team ever to win a World Series, though the .525 Twins of 1987 were ninth-best in the standings as well.

It also can be argued that the fifth-best team in the A.L. standings beating the fourth-best N.L. team would be seen as nothing special had it not involved both New York teams in a reprise of those glorious Yankees-Dodgers days when the world was young.

So argue it.

Here the preference is to remember Al Leiter in defeat, a man larger than Roger Clemens in victory. "Pitching for the team I grew up watching, it can't get much better than this," says Leiter, a Jersey boy.

Three nights earlier in Shea Stadium, Franco stood with Leiter and stared up at two big stars in the sky and decided, in Leiter's words, the stars were their fathers "having a beer, watching us have fun."

An hour after the Game 5 defeat, Leiter hung at his locker answering reporters' questions. Not easy, no fun. New reporters showed up every few minutes, asking questions asked by earlier reporters. Leiter answered them all, some with a smile, making eye contact, standing tall.

He said the Yankees were better. "Not much better than us, but enough," he says. Wasn't Luis Sojo's hit just lucky, a 15-hopper up the middle that gets two runs? "I'm convinced that with good teams and good players, lucky stuff happens," he says.

One pitch from ending the ninth, a 2-2 slider called a ball, Leiter then walked Jorge Posada and gave up a single before Sojo came to bat. "I'm upset about what went on in the ninth. I wanted to be able to finish it."

How upset? "It was the most emotional time I've had as a pro. Maybe in Little League, I got more emotional, I don't know. I was a kid then," he says.

He laughed with us at that, and someone asked if he had cried on the bench.