Another Masked Man Is Turned Into a Hero

ATLANTA —  I don’t see how either one of them can win it. It’s like a fight between two palookas. “He’s up!” “He’s down!” “Looka that eye!”

First one guy’s on the ropes, then the other. It’s a Rocky fight.

Honk if you’ve ever heard of Ed Sprague.

This is the year of the backup catcher. This is the third consecutive game in this ballpark in the postseason decided by a, presumably, banjo-hitting reserve catcher. It was the second night in a row a home run from one of them decided the game.

Even so, Ed Sprague is ridiculous. That home run he hit to win a World Series game Sunday night was his second of the season. That was only the sixth of his lifetime in the major leagues. They put him in the game just to see if he could move the runner along and keep the rally going.

He moved the runner along, all right. All the way to the plate. And himself right behind.

Don’t look for Ed Sprague on any bubble-gum cards. He’s still about 750 home runs behind Henry Aaron. But he tied up the World Series Sunday night.

Any night now, you expect the trainer to come up and hit one out.

Before the game, major league baseball apologized to Canada for flying its flag upside-down.

But, this was nothing to the indignity the team was visiting on the home front in the early innings. You felt it was the Toronto Blue Jays who should have done the apologizing to the dominion. They did everything they could to hand this game over to the Braves. For instance:

--They allowed the Atlantans a run before they got a hit in the second inning when a walk, a stolen base, an error and a wild pitch allowed Atlanta’s Dave Justice to score the game’s first run.

--They allowed five stolen bases.

--They struck out nine times.

--They walked seven batters and hit one.

Of course, as Earl Weaver used to preach, the homer covers a multitude of sins.

But, how do you pitch to Ed Sprague? The Atlanta brain trust had pretty much figured out what to do with a Dave Winfield (“Don’t give him anything inside to pull”) or a Joe Carter (“Throw the hook and pray”) or even a Robbie Alomar or Kelly Gruber.

For an Ed Sprague, you’d have to go to Stanford University or Syracuse and the minor leagues to find out what he couldn’t hit.

The Blue Jays drafted him off the Olympic gold medal baseball team in Seoul and made him a backup catcher because they didn’t know what else to do with him. He considered himself a third baseman.

When he came to bat Sunday night, the Blue Jays and the Braves had been rassling around in the mud indecisively for eight innings, and Atlanta looked like the survivor in this unflattering contest (the Braves threw in two wild pitches and an error of their own). The bottom of the order was coming up for Toronto in the last inning and they trailed, 4-3.

Atlanta had Jeff Reardon, a crafty relief pitcher who had been through more towns than the Mississippi river at flood, and when the desperate Blue Jays began to replace .240 hitters with other .240 hitters, there was no cause for panic. Reardon had been in more than 815 major league games--some of them World Series--in his peripatetic career, and he knew how to handle .230 hitters--certainly an Ed Sprague, with a .234 average, one home run and seven runs batted in over the season. Sprague was an unfamiliar face, but he didn’t look like Stan Musial or any World Series hero to Reardon. He looked like a sucker for a low fastball to Reardon.

The next thing Reardon knew, the ball was rattling around behind the fence, where they have put up a plaque commemorating Henry Aaron’s historic 715th home run.

It was as close as he’ll ever come to Henry Aaron, but it tied the World Series.

We might be interviewing the wrong people. The pitchers may be challenging the wrong hitters. Maybe they should just serve it up to the Dave Winfields and Dave Justices and Joe Carters and Ron Gants and say “Here, hit this!” while pitching around the dangerous batters--the lifetime .234 hitters who get in the lineup only when there’s no one else in the dugout or when a regular breaks an ankle.

The butlers are taking over the castle. The sidekicks are saving the forts and getting the girl. They could almost play in masks. Pitchers will start to quake now when a guy with a bat walks up there and they don’t even know his first name.

In the case of Sprague, Mr. Reardon, it’s Ed. Mister Ed to you.