Yankees 8, Dodgers 4

Oh, sorry, make that Yankees 5, Red Sox 3. I was simply riveted to that other game, the one where Reggie Jackson hit three home runs on three swings off three pitches to lead the Yankees to the 1977 World Series championship.

I saw it live in 1977 (color TV at a friend's, we still had a black-and-white RCA with the rotary dial at our house), and then I saw it again tonight, during the final episode of "The Bronx is Burning." And tomorrow night I'll watch it again, courtesy of a wedding present from my brother, all six games of the '77 Series captured on DVD. (The release of complete games and series on DVD has become one of the smartest marketing ideas in decades--what took them so long? I'm getting the '96 Series, and the Bucky Dent game, and Bird Stole the Ball, and Celtics-Suns Triple OT, and The Bush Push, and--should it become available--Arizona State 17, Nebraska 14 in the 1975 Fiesta Bowl, the game that pretty much introduced me to the possibilities of competitive sports, right along with the Carlton Fisk Game 6, a game I had watched two months earlier in my living room, as I had been allowed at the age of 10 to babysit my younger brothers when my parents went out for the evening. Different time.)

Anyway, as I headed out for my honeymoon a few weeks ago, Phil Rizzuto died. This intrigued me, because for a decade or so before his belated election to the Hall of Fame in the early 90's, the Yankee shortstop spanning the DiMaggio-Mantle dynasty (and it was a single dynasty, uninterrupted) had been in the enviable postion I think of as "Next in the Chute." Meaning, when people play the parlor game of Who's Out, and Should Be In the Hall of Fame, one name invariably is named before the others. When I was a teenager, the name was Hack Wilson. The Wilson got in, to be replaced in the chute by Joe Sewell . . . who was the elected in the eighties, and was replaced in the chute by the Scooter. Who stayed there for a good decade.

Two events pushed Rizzuto through the chute, and in. The first was the publication of David Halberstam's routinely brilliant book, The Summer of '49, a book, in the best baseball tradition, that was given to me by my father. This book was an account of the second-best pennant race in American League history (the summer of '78 will always reign preeminent), and a goodly portion of it was spent detailing Rizzuto's value to the team. This was a team of Joe D, Yogi, of Tommy Henrich and King Kong Keller. And if those names don't resonate as much as the Yankee names that came before before (Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, Crosetti, Combs, Hoyt, Pennock) or those who would come after after (Mantle, Maris, Bauer, Elston Howard, Whitey Ford, Kubek, Richardson, Skowron), keep in mind that these 1949 Yankees had three things going for them: Casey Stengel, the greatest manager of all time; a deep and talented starting rotation (Reynolds, Raschi, Lopat); and one of the great relievers ever, Joe Page (who would finish second in the MVP balloting to Ted Williams, then sadly blaze and fade).

And, oh, yes, they had the Scooter.

When I was a graduate student in upstate New York, I would venture down to New York City once a month to crash with a buddy from high school kind enough to put me up. (A good friend in NYC is worth several thousand dollars cash on hand.) And, in the broadcast booth, on TV for a thousand shills, there would be the Scooter: getting the names wrong, calling homers that weren't, then doing ads for The Money Store, a lending operation that dispensed money at just below what would put them away for violations of state usury regs. Oh, yes: there was always the end of the seventh, when the Scooter would announce to the TV audience, "I'm out of here, I'm on the bridge," that being the George Washington Bridge, his conduit to Jersey. His broadcast partners would finish the game.

This was not the Scooter I read about. Phil Rizzuto, to hear the Yankees talk, was simply their MVP, year after year, Joe D or no Joe D. His arm was positively weak for a shortstop, but his inhuman reflexes allowed him to play several steps closer than the average shortstop, and thus cut off balls up the middle. The Yankees understood his value and put the word out: no one was to spike Rizzuto, not ever. When it happened in one game, DiMaggio, who happened to get the next hit, a clean single, raced straight to second and spiked--brutally--the second baseman applying the tag.

Which brings me to the second reason Rizzuto got in.

The Scooter's value to the Yankees is something I read about. What I heard about later was Ted Williams's pleas to the Veteran's Committee to let Rizzuto in, something that morphed into the granting of a dying man's plea. I don't care. Rizzuto deserved in.

Which brings me to Graig Nettles. And tomorrow.