Favorite Playoff Hero? No Baloney, It’s Balboni

It’s probably not possible to really care who wins a Toronto-Kansas City series, but I don’t know when I’ve been so glad to see a pop fly fall in as the one that beat Toronto in Game 3 of the American League playoff matchup the other night.

It wasn’t the hit, it was the hitter.

The first time I saw Steve Balboni come to bat, I was sure it was Jackie Gleason playing a part. You know, The Poor Soul. The guy who keeps spilling things on himself. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Then, I figured it was a commercial. You know, the one where the guy is driving a car down the street and the transmission is falling out and the garage door comes down and hits him over the head.

Then, it dawned on me that this guy was one of the main characters. I mean, they were serious. This guy was actually the first baseman for the Kansas City Royals. He hadn’t come to deliver a refrigerator or star in an I-can’t-believe-I-ate-the-whole-thing ad.

Then, he took his hat off. I thought, “My God, this guy hasn’t got any hair!�

Right away, I knew I had a favorite player in this series. I mean, your heart has to go out to a guy who looks like your Uncle Louie out there and keeps messing up. I mean, you say to yourself, what truck did they get this guy off of? Or is he like that guy who accepted the Emmy award for that actress. Pretty soon, two cops will come out and take him away. You even think you recognize him. He’s either the guy who comes in and says, “OK, Ma’am, where do you want the piano?� or he’s a guy in the window flipping pizza dough and catching it on his fists.

No way he belongs in that lineup. I mean, just look at all those other guys out there. V-shaped, they got all their hair and they haven’t got any stomach, and they can button all their buttons. They all run down to first base in 3.5 or better. They’re all in their 20s. You figure Balboni is in his 40s. When you find out he’s only 28, you want to say, “28 what?!� If this guy’s 28, he’s had some hard life, right? He looks like George Brett’s father. Or, at least, godfather.

How can you not like him? Or not root for him? A guy who would boo Steve Balboni would stone Santa Claus.

You watch him play and your heart aches for him. I mean, Steve has been having a series that should happen to Arafat.

When he comes to bat, it’s gotten so you can’t look. You have to cover your eyes. I mean, Balboni doesn’t miss pitches. He ignores ‘em. You have to figure Steve is trying to hit something no one else can see. It’s for sure it isn’t the baseball.

In the field, it’s been pure Chaplin. Steve made a throw to third base the other night that may be one of the top 10 all-time worst. Like, it wasn’t even in the right zip code. It was so bad, the grounds-keeper almost picked it up because he thought it must have fallen out of a bag some place. Nobody with a glove on could have thrown it there.

In Game 2, he muffed a pickoff throw you could have caught with your teeth.

You had to be the kind of guy who enjoys pulling wings off butterflies to enjoy watching Steve Balboni’s series. It was like seeing Bambi caught in a net.

He’s my favorite player in the tournament. It’s not only that he’s got a silhouette most of us could identify with, or he has just as much trouble with the curveball as we would, it’s that these blue-ribbon events are not always champagne-squirting and “We’re No. 1!� orgies. For every guy that gets carried out on the shoulders of his teammates and takes top-step bows to the crowd, there’s always a guy sitting in the corner of the dugout staring at something no one else can see and looking as if he will never bring himself to smile again.

Who can forget Gil Hodges in 1953 going 0-for-the-World-Series, all seven games, so futile that priests in the pulpit led the congregations in saying Rosaries for him by the fourth game?

Did anyone ever let Mickey Owen forget he let a third strike and the final out of the game go through him in the ninth inning of a game the Dodgers had won and had tied up the Series, the most famous passed ball in history?

Can you imagine Ralph Branca standing in a crowd reminiscing happily about the 1951 playoff series and the home run Bobby Thomson hit for the Giants to win it and saying to that crowd, “I know, I’m the one who did it,� and they say, “You hit the home run?� and Branca says, “No, I threw it�?

I like to think Steve Balboni struck a blow for these and all the losers in postseason lore, including Casey at Mudville, the other night when he came up in the bottom of the eighth with two out and the score tied. Steve was 0 for 11 in the series at that time, and they had just walked the light-hitting Pat Sheridan to get at him.

It would be nice to say that Steve knocked the ball over into Kansas somewhere or up into an exploding light tower, but the truth of the matter is that Steve, as usual, took a bad swing at a worse pitch and popped it up. You can put away the Rosary beads. God likes Steve Balboni, too. He might be fed up with all those long-haired Adonises, too. That pop fly fell in the only place in the ball park where it could be sure to hit the ground. It fell right between three guys who can run faster in seconds than Balboni can in a minute. Any higher and one of them might have run under it. Any lower and Steve might not have beaten it out.

Steve Balboni is my idol. Any guy who looks like that and can deliver a clutch pop-up at the right time makes all those guys in Cooperstown pale by comparison.

George Brett is all right if you like .500 hitters. But give me a guy who can give you a key pop-up when you need it. Give me Old Bones.