On the brink

The hero of Game 3 should have been Glavine, the only pitcher ever scratched from a Game 1 World Series start for being sick as a dog. Glavine had it bad, there was no doubt, and he was eating nothing but soup and saltines as recently as Monday.

He might have been weakened, but he didn't show it Tuesday night. He was sharp from the beginning, and with Glavine in control, the Braves knocked Yankees starter Andy Pettitte out of the game early with their first offensive outpouring of the series and cruised ahead to a 5-1 lead. Glavine had it working so well, at one point he retired Paul O'Neill on a ball that traveled about one ball length from the plate and at another he had Chilli Davis fooled enough to lose his bat on a strikeout and send it flying into the stands.

"I was surprised," Glavine said. "I felt better than I thought I would. I was throwing better and felt sharper than I expected."

The key to the game was the eighth. NBC's cameras showed Cox conferring with Glavine after the seventh, with the Braves up 5-3, obviously asking how the pitcher felt. Glavine leaned back with a stony expression on his face that made it clear he wasn't about to come out of the game. He had only thrown 72 pitches at that point.

"He's their No. 1 pitcher," Curtis said. "You don't pull your No. 1 pitcher when it's 5-3."

Good point. Even so, it had a bad feel to it. Then Yankees catcher Joe Girardi led off the bottom of the eighth with a crisp single and it really started to look like Glavine was in trouble. But Cox hung with his ace, and the next batter, Chuck Knoblauch, homered to right to tie the game, 5-5. Right fielder Brian Jordan drifted back and leaped, and the ball hit his glove and bounced away. "It was like, 'Oh man, another inch and I would have had it,'" Jordan said.

"It would be easier if I could sit here and say I was tired or if I could sit here and say I made a bad pitch," Glavine said. "When it left the bat, I thought it was a routine fly ball to right. If we were in Atlanta, that's not a home run. But we're not in Atlanta."

Added Cox: "We got beat by a popup to right field. It was a Yankee home run. The ball went 315 feet and it was a home run."

Complaining about the contours of another team's ballpark, to put it politely, is what losers do. As good as the Braves have been this decade, as impressive as their starting rotation and regular-season numbers have been, they are now staring in the face of a likely 1-4 World Series record in the '90s. Their slow expiration in this Series has an end-of-an era feel to it, and as much honor as there may be in being displaced by a great Yankees club, it would have been much better for the game if the Braves had not let this one slip away. That total silence that filled Yankee Stadium as the Braves jumped out to an early lead was beautiful, too beautiful to last.

Much has been made of the lack of animosity between these two teams, and that's a fair point, but it's time to take the idea one step further. Really, the Yankees club that looks ready to establish itself as a dynasty here at the end of the century has a lot in common with the methodical Braves teams of the recent past. Dynastic teams usually have more than just confidence. Baseball people like to comment that the Oakland A's teams of a decade ago would swagger into your ballpark with a cocky strut like they were not just going to embarrass you on the field but have their way with your womenfolk while they were at it.

Compared to that sort of image, this year's Yankees are more like that really good periodontist who gets helicoptered in from Connecticut. They are confident, oh yeah, and Jeter at times has trouble disguising his oh-so-cool awareness of just how much better he is than everyone else. But it's a confidence that you put on and off like an overcoat getting checked at the opera.

Mostly, these Yankees are low-key and professional and, as a result, they risk becoming boring. Tuesday night's come-from-behind win was anything but that, and it pushed the Yankees' World Series winning streak to 11 games. It's already time to shift to the question of how many seasons the Yankees can keep this going. Judging from the way things went at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night, it may be a long, long time.

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