League Championship Series

ST. LOUIS -- Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox might have tipped off the emotions his slumbering team took into Game 5 of the National League Championship Series last night at Busch Stadium. It came Sunday night, when the Braves teetered on the brink of elimination after losing to the St. Louis Cardinals to fall behind, three games to one."It's not deflating," Cox said after the defending World Series champions blew a three-run lead with two out in the seventh inning and lost on a home run by Brian Jordan in the eighth.

ATLANTA -- Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox and his counterpart, the New York Yankees' Joe Torre, are taking different approaches to setting up their rosters for the World Series.Cox apparently will stand pat, though he has until noon today to change his mind. He'll most likely stay with nine pitchers and keep Jorge Fabregas as a third catcher because of continued concerns over the knee of Eddie Perez, the Most Valuable Player of the National League Championship Series."We're still worried about Eddie's knee blowing out," Cox said.

ATLANTA -- If it's the World Series, Scott Brosius must be in a groove.Sure beats the rut he was in during the season.The New York Yankees' third baseman was named Most Valuable Player of last year's Fall Classic after batting .471 with two homers and six RBIs. The image of Brosius, shouting with his fist raised as he rounded first base, is one of the clearest of the '98 Series.He held the broom that swept the San Diego Padres, and he reached for it again on Saturday. Brosius collected three hits in Game 1, poking singles to left, center and right in New York's 4-1 win over the Atlanta Braves.

The World Series has been over for a week, but baseball still is hogging the headlines.Maybe today's should be: "Have MVP trophy, will travel."The Texas Rangers pulled off a blockbuster deal last night, trading two-time American League Most Valuable Player Juan Gonzalez to the Detroit Tigers in a nine-player deal that brought pitcher Justin Thompson, top outfield prospect Gabe Kapler and four other players to the defending American League West champions.If...

Just because their last assignment was one of the most dramatic postseason series in baseball history, NBC's Bob Costas and Joe Morgan know that it doesn't necessarily follow that this year's World Series will be more of the same.The widely celebrated pair were behind the mikes for the National League Championship Series between the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets, which had as many dramatic turns as a Robert B. Parker mystery.Though Sunday's 15-inning marathon, won by the Mets 4-3, has become etched in the public's consciousness, Morgan is partial to Tuesday's Game 6, captured by Atlanta in the 11th on a bases-loaded walk after blowing a 5-0 lead, as the true classic.

The New York Yankees get all the ink, but let's be honest. The true dynasty of the 1990s is -- and always has been -- in Atlanta, where the Braves have won their division so routinely over the past decade that baseball fans have started to take them for granted.Take this year, for instance. The early loss of first baseman Andres Galarraga and the occasional struggles of some of the elite members of the starting rotation created the notion that the Braves are in decline.You might want to ask the New York Mets about that.

NEW YORK -- A Subway World Series? If it's going to happen this year, the New York Transit Authority had better start digging a new line to Atlanta.The Yankees are on their way to holding up their end of the deal after coming from behind to beat the Red Sox in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series last night, but the Mets are in big trouble after losing the first two games of the National League Championship Series to the Braves.Things can change in a hurry, of course, as the Red Sox proved with their remarkable Division Series comeback against the Indians.

Ah, the World Series. The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the endless commercials, the nonstop promos for one dopey sitcom after another, the four-hour games how can you not love it?Some observations from a lifelong baseball fan as the Fall Classic -- or is it the Taco Bell Fall Classic now? -- between the Yankees and Braves gets under way:It's a tad brisk to be playing "the Summer Game" now, isn't it?Baseball sold its soul to the devil Television a long time ago. But apparently no one told the network executives that when they schedule night games, in northern climes, in late October, it can often get, oh, what's the word we're looking for here?

NEW YORK -- The San Diego Padres have heard it all before. They were supposed to be outflanked by Randy Johnson and the Houston Astros in the Division Series. They were supposed to be overmatched by the vaunted Atlanta Braves' starting rotation in the National League Championship Series. Now this.The New York Yankees, the team with so much destiny that it's almost disgusting, have won 121 games -- including the postseason -- and are a heavy favorite to win four more in the 94th World Series that opens tonight at Yankee Stadium.

NEW YORK -- Cuban sensation Orlando Hernandez, the 29-year-old rookie whose arrival in the United States and impact on the New York Yankees already has become the stuff of Bronx legend, yesterday went from starting Game 4 in the American League Championship Series to being handed the ball for Game 2 of the World Series.Hernandez, 12-4 with a 3.13 ERA in 21 starts during the regular season, evened the ALCS at 2-2 by shutting out Cleveland on three hits through seven innings.That performance, coupled with the struggles of left-hander Andy Pettitte and manager Joe Torre's desire to pitch David Cone in the warmth of San Diego, elevated Hernandez in the rotation.

CHICAGO - -Hall of Famers don't ride buses. They don't carry their own bags and they don't look forward to post-game meals from restaurants like Shoney's and Arby's. They don't do those things often, anyway. But Ryne Sandberg has. He has managed in the Cubs' farm system for three years, including a trip to the championship series of the Double-A Southern League this season, and has positioned himself to become the first Hall of Fame player in more than 30 years to get a chance to manage in the major leagues.

Manny Ramirez has been nearly unstoppable since joining the Los Angeles Dodgers on Aug. 1. Tim McCarver, who will call the National League Championship Series on Fox television, is among those who have noticed. "It's extraordinary - the dichotomy between what he was in Boston and what he is in Los Angeles," McCarver said, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I mean, talk about wearing out your welcome in a town, and it was a long welcome with the Red Sox. But some of the things he did were simply despicable, despicable - like not playing, refusing to play.

As we learned in the first round, the Los Angeles Dodgers are no longer the team that appeared destined to miss the playoffs in August and scraped in with an 84-78 record. They're a versatile outfit with dangerous bats up and down the lineup and a stingy starter in every rotation slot. Their matchup with the Philadelphia Phillies is no easy call, but I'll take the team that's hitting and pitching better than at any point this season. Not only do the Dodgers boast a nuclear-hot Manny Ramirez in the three hole, they have their chief table-setter, Rafael Furcal, back at the top of the lineup.

You'll probably hear some derivative of the word at least 50 times during the 2008 National League Championship Series: contrast. It's Philadelphia and its blue-collar fatalism pitted against Los Angeles and its impassioned and impersonal glitz. It's baseball's most revered manager, Joe Torre, against its most maligned, Charlie Manuel. It's a bunch of big-name bombers versus a lineup with less power than the Federal Reserve Board. It's a team no one expected versus one always expected to choke.

The one-line bio on Wikipedia reads as such: "Terry Lee Landrum is a former professional baseball player who played in the major leagues primarily as an outfielder from 1980-1988." Another line should be added: He never had to buy a drink or dinner in Baltimore after Oct. 8, 1983. Or maybe this: No Baltimore sports fan over the age of 30 can hear the name "Tito Landrum" without smiling. Tonight the Orioles are celebrating the 25th anniversary of their 1983 world championship team - their last drink of title-sweet champagne.

DENVER-- --This should come as great news to everyone who has bristled at the way the Boston Red Sox and their fans seem to take over Camden Yards whenever they come to town. It isn't just us. The Red Sox were their normal overbearing postseason selves last night, and it took only three innings for the road warriors of Red Sox Nation to break into a very audible "Let's go Red Sox" chant during the first-ever World Series game at Coors Field. No, they didn't out-shout the towel-waving home crowd, but they were able to make themselves heard over the stunned silence when the Red Sox jumped all over Rockies starter Josh Fogg for six runs in the third inning.

Boston -- Having the World Series in Boston has allowed Major League Baseball to put its interview on hold with the most recent player accused of using human growth hormone. Bob DuPuy, MLB's chief operating officer, said last night that because the Indians didn't win the American League Championship Series, Cleveland pitcher Paul Byrd doesn't need to be interviewed until after the World Series. Byrd said last week that he took hGH via prescription for a pituitary gland problem and was supposed to meet with MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred to tell his side of the story before the World Series.

News item: Enigmatic Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez made headlines recently when he said that if Boston failed to come back and defeat the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series, "It's not the end of the world." My take: That was just flat-out wrong. Everybody knows that after the Red Sox lose a postseason series, there is always a remote mathematical possibility that the sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the solar system. Manny obviously wasn't paying attention during astronomy class.

If you've been paying attention for the past 10 years or so, you've probably noticed that Baltimore is no longer the center of the baseball universe. Maybe it never was, but there was a time when the Orioles were one of the sport's cornerstone franchises, and during a big chunk of that heady period the general manager of the team was a nice man named Hank Peters. Peters, in fact, was the GM for the final 10 of the Orioles' amazing string of 18 straight winning seasons (1968-1985), somehow keeping the player development component of Oriole Way alive nearly a decade into the free-agent era. This little testimonial is not intended to strike some contrast between the good old days and the frustrating new ones, but to serve as pretext to an uplifting little story about the way a good organizational philosophy is handed down from generation to generation, though not necessarily in the same organization.

The Boston Red Sox are supposed to be playing in October, and no one should be surprised that the Cleveland Indians also made it to the American League Championship Series. Both are 96-game winners. Both looked impressive in the postseason's first round. Both aren't just happy to be there. Then there's the National League Championship Series, which begins tonight and pits two of the league's most recent expansion teams, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies. Sports fans nationwide aren't exactly frothing over that one. It's not getting a lot of attention in Arizona, either - the first two games in Phoenix weren't sold out as of yesterday afternoon.