A Line Drive, a Tipped Ball And the Beginning of the End?

Teammates love to tease Bird, who'd look like actor Jack Black if he gained 30 pounds, about his lack of a fastball. "Birdy is the unsung hero here," said Casey Blake, who had both a leadoff homer and an RBI single in the seven-run eruption.

"I hit 90 [mph] a few times a year. I did it once tonight," Bird chuckled. "I came back in the dugout and said, 'Hey guys, pick me up here. I just hit 90.' " The Indians responded by batting for 35 minutes and, perhaps, deciding this series.

The Indians now find themselves on the verge of a chance to win their first World Series since '48. And their aces -- Sabathia and Carmona -- are scheduled for the next two games. The sense already is in the crisp air here that two teams of destiny -- the long-frustrated Indians and the inconceivably hot Colorado Rockies -- soon will have a date with Series history. If the Red Sox ('04) and White Sox ('05) could end their enormous world championship droughts of 86 and 88 years, then isn't it obviously Cleveland's turn? On the other hand, who knows if the Rox, winners of 21 of their last 22, will ever lose?

For improbabilities that push hard against the boundaries of what seems possible, baseball in October seems to hold a unique place in sports. The game establishes parameters for our expectations over a six-month season; then, in a fraction of that time, it smashes our assumptions to pieces with glee. Even the players themselves are amazed at the sport's ability to dazzle them, with the Rockies as the current Exhibit A.

Indians Manager Eric Wedge, who may soon stand in the path of the Rox' karmic freight train, certainly grasps the magnitude of Colorado's current streak. For sheer mathematical improbability, it may already surpass any other late-season run by any team in any major sport.

"I can't understand it," Wedge said. "I don't think it's ever happened before, to have that type of streak late in the season and take it into the playoffs. It's almost freakish. But it's baseball. . . . The game continues to amaze people. You continue to see things on the field that you've never seen before. And that's why I think it's the greatest game in the world."

Leave aside the question of "best." This postseason already has given us documentation of why baseball is, incontestably, the most variegated and unpredictable of all our great games. The Rox, who were in fourth place in the National League West on Sept. 14 -- utterly off the radar and on the edge of mathematical elimination -- now are the hottest and most magically pixilated team ever to reach the World Series.

Whom might they meet there? Why, most likely the Indians -- a team with a third the payroll of the Yankees and less than half that of the Red Sox. On a roaring night at chanting, towel-waving Jacobs Field, we were given yet another example of how subtly, almost quixotically, postseason baseball chooses its champions. What was the turning point of this crucial game? A Boston pitcher forgot to do nothing.