Indians May Be The Best, But Stars Point Toward M’S

Be afraid, Cleveland. Be very afraid.

You cannot begin to fathom what it is you’ve gotten yourself into.

None of us can.

It seems to have very little to do with baseball, of which you’re probably the best practitioners currently, uh, practitioning. We will grant you that, Cleveland. Stitch it on a pennant.

Best in baseball. That’s you.

But the Seattle Mariners can play a little, too, and what’s more they’ve managed to bore into some vein of voodoo, some heretofore untapped potion that’s equal parts karma, mob euphoria and Edgar Martinez.

And you will not get out of this city without getting some on you.

That’s right, this city. Believe it, baseball.

Amazingly, wondrously, the American League Championship Series has to come through Seattle - just as the New York Yankees had to. They didn’t get out alive, finally submitting to civic will and the Mariners 6-5 in 11 innings on Sunday night - just about the time rational beings and George Steinbrenner must have figured the magic show was over.

Since we’re struggling to find the stuff to describe it, let’s turn it over to Norm Charlton out of the bullpen.

“This,” Charlton insisted, “isn’t unbelievable anymore.”

No, indeed.

So accustomed have the Mariners become to winning the hard way that it seems inappropriate for them to make it easy on themselves - to do the job with but a single comeback.

No, for the most momentous game in the franchise’s 19-year history, the Mariners had to do it twice.

This, then, must be why they left the bases loaded with the score tied in the eighth inning, why two died on base in the ninth and why two more were stranded in the 10th.

See, they couldn’t make a move until New York took the lead again.

And the way the Yankees did it - so humdrum. Walk, sacrifice, single through the infield. Station-to-station baseball. You wouldn’t figure a team from Broadway - well, OK, off-Broadway - to have no sense of theatre. Although, hey, they did do it against Randy Johnson, the pitching savior who was asked by manager Lou Piniella to suck it up for a batter or two - he pitched on Friday, remember? - and wound up throwing three innings.

But check out Seattle’s script:

- Bunt single by Joey Cora when the Yankees and 57,411 roaring fans least expected it, with a twist out of the basepath to elude Don Mattingly’s tag and bring Yankee manager Buck Showalter out of the dugout to put forth the same argument he did the night before.

- Single up the middle by Ken Griffey Jr., who had homered earlier to launch Seattle’s first comeback - and then was intentionally walked in the ninth so he couldn’t be a hero then.

- Double to left-field by Edgar Martinez, who had struck out against Jack McDowell - doing a little relief duty a la Big Unit - in the ninth. Martinez’ rope on an 0-1 pitch bit in the corner long enough to allow Junior to fly home with the winning run.

“Saint Edgar,” read the banner draped from the dome’s upper deck.

Forget it. He just got promoted to God.

“The guy is amazing,” said M’s third baseman Mike Blowers. “Time after time he gets up there and delivers. After McDowell struck him out (in the ninth), you just knew he wasn’t going to make an out this time.”

For Showalter, then, it was a matter of choosing which sword he wanted to fall on.

“The chances of getting them both out is basically what it came down to,” he said. “You are dealing with two of the best hitters in baseball and simple mathematics says you have a lot better chance to get one of them out than both of them.”

All we will remember from this game is the 11th inning, but getting there took an incredible journey.

Start with 18 years of mediocrity and a desperate search for an ownership group that would agree to lose millions of dollars in search of a winner. Throw in just the right parts, have them all put together career seasons - and then live through a September wringer that ranks with the game’s greatest pennant drives.

Oh, yeah. Then put the club through four elimination games in seven days.

“Just watching things as they happened in this game, I had a thought,” said Yankee first baseman Don Mattingly. “Why not us? Somebody was going to have to win this game and I knew that 57,000 people thought it would be Seattle. But to me, there was no reason we couldn’t win it, that we couldn’t be the team.”

No reason, except where and who the Yankees were playing.

Of course, there’s no reason for Cleveland to accept this nonsense. The Indians will arrive for Game 1 on Tuesday rested, confident and favored by four or five touchdowns.

“I remember a young Cincinnati club in 1990 that played against Oakland in the World Series,” said Piniella, who just happened to be the manager of that team. “Not too many people gave them a chance, either.

“They did all right.”

Be afraid, Cleveland.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review