Bring back the pain of a pennant race

I miss pennant races that hurt.

Not 3-game “showdowns” between the Mets and the Braves for the right to dodge the Dodgers in the Division Series, as strategic as that might be.

Not the Phillies and the Brewers mud-wrestling for the right to call themselves the No. 6 team in the National League.

I’m talking about pennant races where the losing clubhouse is as silent as nuclear winter, and you’re playing the game in front of you while you worry about two others going on elsewhere.

Commissioner Rob Manfred doesn’t feel that way, of course, but neither did predecessor Bud Selig. They diluted the post-season the same way water dilutes bourbon, and now you have 12 playoff teams out of 30, with four of them getting a first-round bye. That is why the Mets and Atlanta are playing for, this weekend. The runnerup in the East will be the No. 1 wild-card team and the fourth seed, and if it wins a best-of-3 series with the No. 5 seed, it will confront the Dodgers. That’s not the easiest post-season path. But in a true pennant race, the loser of that series tips the clubhouse attendant, signs a couple of autographs and goes home for the long, long winter.

That’s what 1987 was like, in Tiger Stadium. Toronto led Detroit by one game with three head-to-head games left. The seats were full, including those in the pressbox, filled by writers from two nations. Detroit won on Friday, and on Saturday, 36-year-old Mike Flanagan of the Jays took on 32-year-old Jack Morris of the Tigers. Morris threw 150 pitches and Flanagan 147, over 11 innings. It was one of the great baseball games ever played in this country, and Alan Trammell won it with a single in the 12th that drove in Jim Walewander. Then, on Sunday, Frank Tanana finished off the Jays, 1-0.

“The only bad thing,” Morris said after the Saturday game, “is that one team is going to have to go home after 65 losses and wonder which loss was the one that really did it. But that also makes it great.”

Maybe the Blue Jays knew they were doomed when a large octopus was launched from the stands and near the on-deck circle, a refugee from a Red Wings game. Or maybe it happened when Manny Lee missed a hit-and-run sign on Sunday and watched Cecil Fielder get thrown out at second like a beached orca. Then Lee tripled, and was stranded.

And the Friday game was notable because Doyle Alexander raised his record with Detroit to 9-0. The Tigers got him from Atlanta at mid-season and probably wouldn’t have hauled down Toronto without him. At the moment they neither realized nor cared that John Smoltz, the 20-year-old they gave up for Alexander, would have 213 wins and 154 saves in the next 22 years and would get into the Hall of Fame. There was a race to run.

Strange people show up in pennant races. Sometimes they take them over. Brian Johnson was a former Stanford quarterback who played for six MLB teams in eight years, In 1997 he crashed a 12th-inning home run for the Giants that wiped out the Dodgers’ division lead, and the Giants went on to win the N.L. West.

Bucky Dent was known as a solid spear-carrier among all the Yankees stars in 1978 when his homer off Mike Torrez won the 163th game in Fenway Park. Dent hit 40 home runs in 1,392 big league games. That one was the fifth of his season. But that was only the coda to a daily stress test that lasted a month and a half.

On Aug. 20 the Yankees were eight-and-a-half games behind Boston. On Sept. 16 they led the Sox by three-and-a-half. They went 9-6 thereafter and the Red Sox still caught him, thanks to Rick Waits’ 9-2 win over the Yankees for Cleveland on the final Sunday. Waits’ lifetime record is 79-92.

But nothing was as harrowing and nightmarish as the misadventure of the 1964 Phillies, a team managed by the inimitable Gene Mauch (pictured), a team that had never won a World Series before. Most Philadelphians who were cogent at that time can recite the details. They led by six-and-a-half with 12 to play and then lost 10 consecutive, reviving themselves in time to beat Cincinnati twice at the end and give the pennant to St. Louis, which was 11 back on Aug. 23.

The city watched all this in slow motion. It was more of a body-snatching than a collapse. The Phillies lost two games when the Dodgers’ Willie Davis and the Reds’ Chico Ruiz stole home, the latter with Frank Robinson hitting in a scoreless game. Mauch played rookies Alex Johnson and Adolfo Phillips against Milwaukee’s Wade Blasingame because he was informed the rookies hit Blasingame well in the Pacific Coast League. They didn’t hit him in this loss, but the truth was they’d never hit him at all, despite what Mauch had heard.

Three times in mid to late September, Mauch asked Jim Bunning to pitch on two days’ rest, and the result was 0-3 with a 15.18 ERA. Three times, Mauch also asked Chris Short to pitch on a third day and the result was 0-3, 4.50.

Frank Thomas, brought over to hit lefthand pitching and doing a credible job of it, hurt his ankle. Vic Power, brought over to replace Thomas, tore off a fingernail. Asked many years if he remembered much about those hellish weeks, Mauch puffed a cigarette slowly and finally answered: “Not much. Just every (bleeping) pitch.”

The 2022 Phillies can’t be compared to the ‘64 Phillies, not on proficiency, not on public magnetism, certainly not on drama. Yet they’re sinking in the same footsteps. Bailey Falter, a 6-foot-4 lefty, got them straightened out Friday with a win over Washington, but the Brewers also beat Miami, 1-0, behind Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes. The two are tied.

Jean Segura, a veteran infielder, wandered off the base in Chicago because the scoreboard said there were four balls. There were not, and he was tagged out.

Kyle Schwarber went nine games with only two homers, in the same game. J.T. Realmuto had two RBI in an eight-game span. Bryce Harper lost 15 points on his batting average in 16 days. Until Friday, the Phils had lost 10 of 14 games.

They have six games left, three at Washington, three at Houston. It’s compelling, and it fits a Philly fan base that never has seen a sky that couldn’t fall. But it sure as heck isn’t a pennant race, mainly because of two elements it lacks. There’s no pennant at hand, and nobody’s racing.