Word: eckersley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dennis Eckersley, the greatest reliever of all time, came in to pitch the ninth inning, his team up 4-3. He retired the first two batters, and got to a count of one ball and two strikes on Mike Davis, who hadn't hit well all season. From our seats in Dodger Stadium's upper deck, we could see the entire stadium parking lot. It was already emptying out fast as fans tried to beat traffic and make it home. This game was over...
...Shlain interviewed dozens of players, managers, umpires, reporters and general managers for his book, which is at its best when the author simply lets them speak. Shlain's range is impressive: he talked with ballplayers from Ted Williams and Al Kaline (his boyhood hero) to Willie Randolph and Dennis Eckersley. Nothing in Homer (except his name) matches tales told by baseball players, and Baseball Inside Out is chock-full of such gems...
...feral competitor, whose "death stare" would spook Cyclops. Or face Bob Welch, the first American League pitcher since 1968 to win 26 games in a season. Try hitting a grounder through the A's stingy infield. And if you hope to rally, ponder the presence of ace reliever Dennis Eckersley, who has issued only seven bases on balls in two years. You can run but you can't walk...
...rock 'n' roller when Elvis died, every A's fan remembers where he was at that fateful moment in Game 1 -- bottom of the ninth, Oakland leading 4-3 on a Canseco grand slam -- when Kirk Gibson hobbled . to the plate and gritted a game-winning home run off Eckersley. Sobbing was heard among the faithful; choking was displayed by the players. It was Gibson's only appearance of the pageant, but the A's never shook off his back- from-the-dead blow. They faded in five games...
...Louis Cardinals in 1928. In both epochs the winning team hit five home runs in one game; in both, no contest was decided by fewer than three runs. Canseco twitched off the Dodgers jinx and launched one of his ho-hum homers into the 900 area code. Eckersley, accused during the Toronto play-offs of doctoring the ball, hardly needed to suit up, let alone sand up, as the A's performed what amounted to surgery without anesthesia. At the end, in the champagneless locker room, the satisfied heart of A's manager Tony La Russa could be seen beating...