[Nick Soulis]

THE SPORTING SCENE
By Grantland Rice

PUCKETT AND THE GHOSTS OF GRIFFITH STADIUM
Special Correspondent to the Field of Dreams Tournament
Dateline: Minneapolis, Minnesota — October 1988

There is a young man from Florida who plays center field for the Minnesota Twins with a joy so unrestrained, so genuinely and completely felt, that to watch him take the field is to be reminded of why this game was invented in the first place. His name is Kirby Puckett. He is twenty-eight years old. He hit .356 this season and collected 234 base hits and drove in 121 runs and played his position with the grace of a man who cannot quite believe his good fortune at being paid to do this. He is, in the plainest terms available to this correspondent, a ballplayer.
He will need to be every inch of that against what is coming.
For the Washington Senators of 1951 are not the club their record suggests. The standings showed sixty-two victories and ninety-two defeats when the season drew to its close, and a man reading only those numbers might be forgiven for thinking Bucky Harris brought his club to Iowa to make up the numbers. He would be wrong to think it. The Senators scored 672 runs in a season when runs were not easily come by. They played, by the cold mathematics of the Pythagorean method, like a sixty-eight and eighty-six ball club — better than their record, better than their reputation, and better than at least several teams who have already been sent home from this tournament in considerably fewer games than their partisans expected.

Bucky Harris has managed a baseball game since 1924. He managed the old Senators to a World Series championship in his very first season as a skipper, a boy wonder of twenty-seven who somehow persuaded a collection of seasoned professionals to follow him into the fire. He has been managing ever since — through lean years and lean decades, through rosters built on hope and rosters built on stars, through every variation of circumstance a baseball life can produce. He is not a man who is impressed by the opposition's reputation. He has seen too much for that.
He will face Tom Kelly, who has managed in this tournament with a quiet authority that his record of four wins and one loss reflects precisely. Kelly is not a man who says much. He does not need to. He builds a lineup, sets a rotation, and trusts his players to execute. In Frank Viola he possesses the finest left-handed pitcher currently active in the American League — twenty-four victories, an earned run average of two and sixty-four hundredths, a Cy Young Award that no serious observer would dispute. In young Allan Anderson he has a second starter who led the American League in earned run average at two and forty-five. In Jeff Reardon he has a closer who converted forty-two saves and who does not, as a rule, surrender leads once he has been handed them.

And yet.

This correspondent has watched baseball long enough to know that the ledger of talent does not always balance the way arithmetic suggests it should. Eddie Yost drew one hundred and twenty-six bases on balls this season. One hundred and twenty-six. He crossed home plate one hundred and nine times. He is a third baseman who understands something about patience that most men never learn — that the purpose of a plate appearance is not always to swing the bat, that a walk is as good as a single in the right moment, that the pitcher who cannot find the strike zone with a man like Yost at the plate is already in trouble before the first runner reaches base.
Gil Coan hit .303 in center field. Mickey Vernon drove in eighty-seven runs from first base with the quiet efficiency of a professional who does not require praise to perform. Bob Porterfield went nine and eight with an earned run average of three and twenty-four — numbers that on a better club would have meant fifteen wins and a reputation considerably larger than the one he currently carries. These are ballplayers. They are not famous. They are not celebrated. They are present, and they are ready, and they have nothing whatever to lose.

The series opens at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, that great domed cathedral of Minneapolis where the crowd noise builds to something that has unnerved visiting clubs for years. The Senators will walk into that noise on the first pitch of the first game and discover very quickly what this tournament asks of the underdog. It asks everything. It always has.
This correspondent will be watching. He suspects the rest of the baseball world would do well to watch along.
The best teams in this tournament are the ones still playing. Washington is still playing.

— Grantland Rice, Field of Dreams Special Correspondent