Indians come good to make World Series

For decades they have been the emblem of bad baseball, on the cinema screen and in real life. But finally the Cleveland Indians have put their woebegone past behind them, crushing the Seattle Mariners to win the American League pennant and return to the World Series for the first time since 1954.

Their fourth and clinching win in the best of seven championship series could not have been more emphatic, a 4-0 shut out before 59,000 silenced fans in the Mariners' own Kingdome on Tuesday night, at the expense of Randy Johnson, Seattle's previously invincible pitching ace.

Three times in the play-offs, Johnson's murderous fast-balls and wicked sliders had saved the Mariners in crucial games. But this time the 6ft 10in lefthander ran out of miracles. When he stalked disconsolately off the mound after giving up three runs at the bottom of the eighth innings, the last of them a rocketing home run to straightaway centre by Carlos Baerga, Seattle's dream was done.

"The people of Cleveland have suffered long," the Indians manager, Mike Hargrove, said, waxing headily poetic in a champagne-drenched Cleveland dressing room. "I wondered if this was really happening, to me Mike Hargrove and to the Cleveland Indians. But then I looked over at Dennis and knew it was so."

That "Dennis" was Dennis Martinez, the evening's greatest hero. In the end, Cleveland prevailed not thanks to their redoubtable hitters - comparatively subdued throughout the AL championship series - but to the steady and relentless pitching of two of the craftiest veterans around: the 37-year- old Orel Hershiser, who won games two and five with performances as peerless as when he led the Los Angeles Dodgers to World Series victory in 1988, and Martinez, at 40 one of his sport's truly ancient monuments.

In his native Nicaragua, which follows his fortunes avidly, they call him "El Presidente", despite a chequered career which included a long bout with alcoholism. Now, after an immaculate seven innings in which he bested none other than Johnson, Martinez is the uncrowned king of Cleveland. Placing his pitches to perfection, he tied the Mariner's normally potent hitters in knots. "This one was for old guys all over the world," Martinez said. "After all I've been through in my career, finally I did something we can all remember."

Thus the Indians go on to a World Series against the Atlanta Braves that neutrals have been hoping for all season. It will be a feast of political incorrectness, pitting Cleveland's "Tribe" and its tom-tom pounding fans and their mascot Chief Wahoo, against the Braves, propelled to the baseball's grand finale by an army of war-whooping supporters whose trademark is the tomahawk chant. Far more important, it pits the two best teams in baseball.

In the National League series the Braves simply shut down the fancied Cincinnati Reds, limiting them to just five runs in four games. The World Series, which starts on Saturday in Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium, will be a competition between two crushing weights of expectation.

Series runners-up to Minnesota in 1991 and Toronto in 1992, and NL division winners in 1993, the Braves justifiably consider themselves the best club of the 1990s never to have won the world championship. But after more than 40 years in the wilderness, the Indians reckon that history owes them - and the resurgent rust-belt city they come from - even more.

That is what Bob Feller believes: "We've got great pitching, terrific hitting and good management, just watch and we'll wind up world champions." And Feller, whose statue is outside the brand new ballpark in Cleveland, should know. He was the Indians' pitching ace back in 1948, the last time Cleveland won the World Series. Their victims then? The then Boston, now Atlanta, Braves.