Chapter 22

The games winding down the season were tense and exciting. We were staying even with the Yankees and, since the Angels and Mariners in the AL West both had better records than either the Yankees or us, it looked like it was a matter of winning our Division outright, or playing golf in October.

For once in my life, I forgot about Joshua Brennan's batting average for a few minutes and concentrated on helping the Orioles win ball games.

I was hitting -- a little -- and knocking in a run here and there. The horrific slump seemed to have gone away. I was making a contribution.

But with three games left in the season, I looked back at the past week and realized that I wasn't going to make folks forget about Ted Williams.

I'd been hitting around .265 for the month of September, and of course my season average was creeping steadily downward. It would require a flurry of hits in the season-ending three-game series to creep back over the .400 mark.

Hitting .407 was already an impossible dream. Ted's mark was safe. I couldn't get it done.

As it turned out, I couldn't get a flat .400 done, either. Still, the batting average was only an afterthought when we won the Division and sent the Yankees home for the year without giving them so much as a smell in the playoffs.

Now, that was satisfying!

My final regular season average for my rookie year was .394.

I would be the American League batting champion. The nearest guy to me had hit .346. (I had to go and look at his whole line, of course. The bastard had hit 17 homers and knocked in 115 runs. Me, I had just 93 ribbies. --And guess how many homers?)

We met the Mariners, the AL Wild Card, in the first round of the playoffs, and we swept them.

But in the American League Championship Series, the Angels pretty much ate our lunch -- four games to one.

I hadn't distinguished myself in the post-season, and not making it to the World Series was disappointing. But how can you be too disappointed, after a season like that? The Orioles didn't go all the way, and neither did I, but, hey, "next year" was less than six months away, and I already knew, this time, where I'd be invited to show up for Spring Training.

Next year, by God, I was going to hit .407!

The day I was cleaning out my locker in the clubhouse, Paul Warren came by and shook my hand. "Helluva season, kid!" he said. "If you're not Rookie of the Year, I'm going to ask for a congressional investigation."

"I want to play in the Arizona Fall League," I told him. "I want to get my hitting eye back, right away, and I need to play some infield."