posted 10-29-2003 07:33 PM                       

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Cam Cole

National Post

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

The spotlight is a heartless front-runner, and makes no apologies for it.

When you win, the spotlight can't get enough of you, bathing you in its artificial warmth, lighting up your smile, telling the world how wonderful you are.

But when you lose, and especially when you lose the big one, you don't want to be anywhere near the spotlight, for that's when its glare is cold and harsh and irritating, baring your every blemish, illuminating your every bad guess, searching until it finds you and then refusing to leave. It stays, like an unblinking eye, daring you to react, knowing that you must.

The spotlight works well with the television camera. Some think they are one and the same, but the spotlight is broader than that, more powerful: It uses TV to zoom in on a loser's face until you can count his pores, in the same way it uses talk radio to excoriate and newspapers to ridicule and public opinion to single out and venerate, or to isolate and destroy.

It doesn't care, either way.

This may have been the greatest October baseball fans can ever remember -- night after thrilling night delivering games dripping drama and riveting story lines -- but it was also the most intrusive, the most over-the-top, the least forgiving.

Saturday night, the spotlight embraced the Florida Marlins' old man, 72-year-old manager Jack McKeon, and the kid, World Series MVP pitcher Josh Beckett, and warmed a franchise that has done little to deserve two championships in an 11-year existence, but which proved -- as the Arizona Diamondbacks proved two years ago -- that the era of death, taxes and the Joe Torre Yankees is over, and that any team with a couple of stud pitchers can be dangerous if it can produce a few hits in the clutch. Which it is far more likely to do, when nothing is expected of it.

But for some reason, this fall, the spotlight has lingered more intensely on the casualties.

Yesterday, it burned a hole right through Boston Red Sox manager Grady Little, as it was bound to, from the moment he walked to the mound to take the ball from Pedro Martinez in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, and went back to the dugout empty-handed. Pedro lost the game, the Red Sox lost the series, and yesterday, Little lost his job.

The day before, the spotlight ushered out New York Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, whose career probably ended -- symbolically, at least -- the moment the emotional old fart charged the mound in the ALCS Game 3 and was thrown onto his bald head by Martinez.

Two weeks ago, it exposed an unlucky Chicago Cubs fan named Steve Bartman, whose life may forever be altered by the simple act of reaching up to grab a souvenir foul ball in the third-base bleachers at Wrigley Field, leading to a series-changing Cubs collapse against Florida in Game 6 of the NLCS.

Tomorrow? Perhaps it will seek out Yankees hitting coach Rick Down, who couldn't find the magic words to stop the priciest lineup in baseball from gagging with runners in scoring position, and couldn't tell Alfonso Soriano why he had gone so rapidly from superstar to strikeout artist -- a slave to the low, outside slider -- and couldn't reverse the everyday hopelessness of Aaron Boone.

Or maybe, unsatisfied with such a small name as Down's, it will go for bigger prey and find manager Joe Torre, who dared to lose to the Florida Marlins with US$160-million worth of ballplayers at his disposal -- and who might, if he weren't under contract, think twice about coming back to a team whose best players' best days are behind them.

Torre has already lost his friend and confidante, Zimmer, who has vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium as long as George Steinbrenner owns the team. He will almost certainly lose Down. First base coach Lee Mazzilli has been given permission to talk to the Baltimore Orioles about the managing job, and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre also admits to feeling "abused" by Steinbrenner, whose jabs at the coaching staff this year were widely viewed as his cowardly way of trying to sting Torre.

"This kind of pressure [to win] is good, even though it's a lot to ask," Torre said, when the Yankees cleaned out their lockers. "The rewards are so great that you never question that or feel sorry for yourself."

But the Marlins, like the Angels of last year, the Diamondbacks of the year before, and the Florida team of 1997, are very likely blips on baseball's radar screen, of no lasting importance. They've won the lottery; they can go back to obscurity now.

The Yankees never can. Even in defeat, they are centre stage. The spotlight cannot leave them alone. It wants to know what they will do about a pitching rotation that must deal with Roger Clemens retiring and Andy Pettitte a free agent and David Wells a gifted but unreliable fruitcake.

Most of all, the spotlight stays trained on the player that matters more than any other in the Yankees' annual quest to be back in the same place, same time, next year: George Steinbrenner's wallet.

"Of course I was disappointed," Steinbrenner said, in a statement. "But we will be meeting soon to make whatever changes are needed to bring back a stronger, better team for New York and our fans. You can count on it."

Oh, yes, you can count on it. He will buy a couple of relief pitchers, set-up men for closer Mariano Rivera.

He will buy himself a big-name outfielder. The Expos' Vladimir Guerrero would be a good bet. He will probably buy a third baseman.

And he will do it because, for all the wrinkles and rot the spotlight exposes in defeat, for all the lives it ruins, no one loves it and needs it quite as much as the owner. And he will do anything, spend any amount, to get in its way and cast his broad, dark shadow.

For most people, the spotlight is not where you want to be when things go wrong. For George Steinbrenner, there is nowhere else.

Heartless. Unapologetic. Front-runner.

No wonder he loves it so much.

ccole@nationalpost.com

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