The Yankee beaters

23-year-old Texan, finishing only his third Major League season, said the young, inexperienced Florida Marlins might just be stupid enough to win it all, even against the dynastic Yankees in their own stadium. He didn't mean stupid as in lacking in intelligence, just stupid as in lacking an abiding awareness of the odds facing the team and of the Yankees' intimidating history of dominance in more than a quarter of all the World Series played.

Beckett's brash wit was reminiscent of another kid who was only 23 when he shut out the Yankees to clinch a World Series. In 1955, and ever since, Johnny Podres has said that he was simply too young and inexperienced to understand or be affected by the history of failure that so burdened the Brooklyn Dodgers when he took the mound for the seventh game of the only World Series the team ever won in Brooklyn.

Under the wise control of a premier catcher, the late Roy Campanella, Podres mixed in just enough off-speed pitches complementing his young arm's fastball to keep the Yankees off balance and shut them out, 2-0, finishing only his fifth professional season with a historic flourish. Only one of the runs he had to work with was earned; the other grew out of an infielder's error. He battled against one of the other team's most experienced lefthanders (Tommy Byrne). Under the wise control of a premier catcher, Ivan Rodriguez, Beckett mixed in just enough off-speed pitches complementing his young arm's fastball to keep the Yankees off balance and shut them out, 2-0, finishing only his fifth professional season with a historic flourish. Only one of the runs he had to work with was earned; the other grew out of an infielder's error. He battled against one of the other team's most experienced lefthanders (Andy Pettite).

Podres accomplished his feat in what is baseball's ultimate climactic moment when everything is on the line. Beckett accomplished his with the stakes only slightly lower -- a sixth game, when defeat would mean the crap shoot of a seventh game. In 1955, Podres was only the third pitcher to hurl a shutout in Game 7; six more pitchers have done it since. Perhaps ironically, Beckett is only the fourth pitcher to win the World Series' penultimate game by shutout, the second to do so under modern rules, and the first to do it under modern rules while pitching a complete game.

Podres was signed by the Dodgers in 1950 out of high school in the iron-mining town of Witherbee, N.Y., north of Albany. He made the majors in his third pro season and had a record of 29-20 going into the '55 Series, having been injured much of that famous season.

Beckett was also signed out of high school, making the majors in just his second season, but having only a 17-17 record before this month. Both these kids wanted the ball for the big game and showed that something beyond experience can matter more.

They are not unique. Of the nine pitchers to throw shutouts in seventh games, three were established stars in their prime: Lew Burdette of the Milwaukee Braves in 1957, Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965, and Jack Morris of the Minnesota Twins in 1991, who went 10 innings to beat Atlanta, 1-0.

But three others were virtual babies finishing stellar seasons: Dizzy Dean was just 24 in 1934 when the St. Louis Cardinal legend won 30 games and two in the Series; Ralph Terry was 26 in 1962, when he won 23 games for the Yankees; and Bret Saberhagen 21 when he won 20 in the regular season.

Three more were pure, untested kids: Podres in 1955; Johnny Kucks, at 23, the following year for the Yankees; and 25-year-old Babe Adams, who in his third major league season led Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates over Ty Cobb's Detroit Tigers in 1909.

Beckett now joins the second tier in the annals of clutch pitching. In the old days of best-of-nine series, Billy Dineen of the Boston Red Sox in Year One, 1903, and Art Nehf of the New York Giants in 1921 pitched clinching shutouts. But in 1995, Tom Glavine of Atlanta accepted relief help from Mark Wohlers in the ninth inning to save the shutout in the only other Game Six masterpiece.

Baseball offers take-it-or-leave-it lessons. The record with everything on the line is that experience can matter but that it often doesn't.

Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.