Unlikely heroes take it one step further
NEW YORK -- What do you say when a season comes down to this, except maybe thanking the Big Guy for making you a sports fan in the first place?
Start with this: Never before in baseball history has a pennant been decided by anyone named Yadier.
It is a story in the finest baseball postseason tradition of improbable heroes. A guy who hits .216 and slugs .321 during the regular season, a catcher who has more regular-season pickoff throws (7) than home runs (6) sends his team into the World Series with a ninth-inning two-run homer that gives the St. Louis Cardinals a 3-1 victory over the New York Mets in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series last night.
And then finish with this: A rookie pitcher who enters the postseason with three career saves gets out of a bases-loaded, ninth-inning jam with a three-pitch dispatch of MVP candidate Carlos Beltran, the final strike being an outrageous breaking ball that floats in right on the outside corner.
In between, the crowd of 56,357 saw a baseball game that had enough drama for a month and included one of the great catches in postseason history, a leaping bring-'em-back-alive grab of a sure Scott Rolen home run by the Mets' Endy Chavez, who turned an apparent two-run, go-ahead homer in the sixth into an inning-ending 7-6-3 double play. The shame of it now, of course, is that it will be a mere footnote in Mets history. It could have been, and should always be, compared to the famed Sandy Amoros catch off Yogi Berra in Game 7 of the 1955 Series. But for that to have happened, the Mets needed to win this game, and they did not.
The primary reason the Cardinals will be meeting the Detroit Tigers tomorrow night in Game 1 of the 2006 World Series is the primary reason the Tigers will be there waiting for them. The Cardinals had enough pitching to get the job done.
You need look no further than the two brilliant pitching jobs turned in by Series MVP Jeff Suppan. The 31-year-old righthander, weaned in the Red Sox farm system, gave the Cardinals seven innings-plus of two-hit, one-run baseball last night, keeping the Mets off the scoreboard for the final six innings after giving up a double to Beltran and a two-out bloop single to David Wright. This followed a brilliant performance in Game 3, when he blanked the Mets on three hits in eight innings of work. Fifteen innings, five hits, one (barely) earned run. Tony La Russa couldn't ask for any more than this.
``I never thought I'd be in a situation like this," said Suppan, who has won two Game 7s in the past three years. ``But this is a tremendous organization. Basically, all you can do in a situation like this is the best you can do. You really go pitch by pitch, which is what I did. Yaddy [Molina] did a tremendous job of keeping me in check."
La Russa replaced Suppan after he walked leadoff man Beltran in the eighth. Had Beltran come around to score what would have been the go-ahead run, the skipper might have been roasted for sending Suppan out there after he had thrown 99 pitches through seven. But the decision turned out to be amazingly prescient when lefty Randy Flores dazzled the Mets, striking out the menacing Carlos Delgado and Wright, and retiring Shawn Green on a meek grounder to first.
The Mets were so completely befuddled by the Cardinals' pitching that they went 28 batters in between base hits before Jose Valentin led off the ninth with a single to center that fell a foot or 2 beyond the glove of second baseman Ronnie Belliard. A single by Chavez and a two-out walk drawn by Paul Lo Duca loaded them up with two outs, but the 6-foot-7-inch Adam Wainwright, who combines a 94-mile-per-hour heater with a superb breaking ball, made extremely short work of Beltran.
The Cardinals came very close to missing the playoffs entirely, losing eight in a row and nine of 10 in one late stretch before pulling themselves together. They wound up with a very unimpressive total of 83 wins, and were clear underdogs in this series, even though the Mets had sustained well-publicized pitching losses.
``We just kept telling ourselves that if we get to October, we're going to be a dangerous club to play," said La Russa, who will be taking his fifth team into the World Series. ``It was a best-of-seven. A club with 83 wins beat a team with 97. That's a tough way to compete, but it was very exciting."
All pregame Mets discussions centered on the identity of the starting pitcher. Oliver Perez was put down by one and all as being either the worst, or, should we say, least worthy, man to start a Game 7 anything in baseball history. But he vindicated Willie Randolph's judgment in him with six strong innings of four-hit ball, the only St. Louis run off him being produced by a Belliard safety squeeze that brought home Jim Edmonds in the second inning. ``I'm real proud of him," Randolph declared. ``He stepped up and just gave us more than we expected, really, more than a quality start."
The game changed almost without warning in the ninth. Aaron Heilman had worked a strong eighth for the Mets, and he started the ninth by striking out Edmonds. But Rolen singled and Molina, who has been swinging a potent postseason bat, lofted a fly ball to left that just kept on going and going and going until it drifted over the fence. It was as if it were taunting Chavez by saying, ``Catch that one, Endy!"
And so the good people of St. Louis will see a World Series for the 16th time since their first one 80 years ago. That's one every five years, which is pretty good. But none of the 15 Cardinals representatives overcame more to get there, and none of the others featured any ``Yadiers."
And none got there by playing in such a dramatic game. La Russa said all day long he was up for a classic Game 7. He got one.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com. 
