A Goat’s Tale

Baseball is, as has often been said, a game of failures. There are, of course, miscues in basketball and football—bricked free throws, dropped passes and shanked field goals—but mostly it is the glory that is transcendent. We remember "The Catch," Montana to Clark to win the 1982 NFC championship game against the Cowboys, but not the name of the defensive back Dwight Clark leaped over in the end zone (Everson Walls). Michael Jordan's steal and buzzer-beater to win the 1998 NBA title was against the Jazz, but I have only the vaguest recollection of whom he victimized (Utah guard Byron Russell).

In baseball we always know the names of the victims. Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard Round the World", the ninth-inning homer that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants against the cross-town rival Brooklyn Dodgers, has long been regarded as baseball's greatest moment. And as long as we recall Thomson's name, it will be paired with Dodgers hurler Ralph Branca, the man who gave up the immortal blast. So many heroes of bygone seasons are forgotten, but fans of baseball lore know of "Bonehead" Fred Merkle, whose baserunning gaffe may have cost the Giants the 1908 pennant; Mickey Owens, whose ninth-inning passed ball cost the Dodgers their shot at the 1941 World Series; and, of course, Bill Buckner, whose impersonation of a wicket back in 1986 set back the dreams of Red Sox fans for another 18 years.

And in the final days of this baseball season—a season with so many dramatics that you wonder if October can live up to the prelude—two of the game's greatest pitchers, future Hall-of-Famers and class acts both, were given a shot at glory and wound up wearing the goat's horns. As a result, fans witnessed two of the great come-from-behind playoff runs in baseball history, the first by the Philadelphia Phillies and the second, in the witching hours one day later, by the Colorado Rockies.

The first to stumble was the New York Mets' Tom Glavine, who could be, if Randy Johnson can't mount a comeback from injury, the last pitcher ever to top 300 wins. Given the chance to rescue a team in freefall and keep the Mets tied for first place, Glavine turned in the kind of performance that pretty much any random fan out of the stands could have delivered. In the top of the first inning, he surrendered seven runs while getting just one out.

Sure, the Mets' flop was a genuine team effort, with the biggest culprits down the stretch being New York's bullpen and its 24-year-old shortstop, Jose Reyes, who somehow in the course of a month stopped hitting and running and went from being baseball's most ballyhooed young game-breaker to a potentially worrisome problem for next year. But it is Glavine—delivering what, given the stakes, was certainly the worst performance of the 669 regular-season and 35 postseason starts he has made over 21 seasons—whose ghastly finale will endure as the face of the Mets' failure. And if it is, in fact, Glavine's last start ever, it may wind up overshadowing a glorious career. Not fair, of course. But then how many folks remember that Bill Buckner won a batting crown, hit over .300 seven times and banged out more than 2,700 hits during his standout career? If baseball were truly fair it wouldn't be half as interesting.

The very next day, the role of Glavine was reprised by San Diego Padres reliever Trevor Hoffman. Hoffman, despite being baseball's all-time saves leader, has pitched 15 seasons in relative anonymity (that's essentially a baseball synonym for San Diego). Over the weekend he had already blown a game that would have sent the Padres to the playoffs, giving up, in a classic baseball irony, a two-out hit in the bottom of the ninth to Tony Gwynn Jr., son of the man who will be always be the greatest Padre ever.