Sultan Of Swat

"If she gets a cold, it's like being deathly ill," says Ryan. "Sometimes I call her up, and she can barely talk."

Still, Lorene made it to Cleveland to see Ryan crank one into the right-center-field seats in Game 4. The ball landed a few rows in front of her, and she introduced herself to the man who caught it. In a sign of these memorabilia-crazed times, the man asked Lorene for a photo ID, and then he offered her a deal: She could have the ball in exchange for two balls autographed by the entire Braves team, a few pictures and a bat. Lorene considered it a bargain. "I can't even explain the feeling," she says. "I was sitting there with Michelle, and I said, 'Come on, Ryan, hit one to Mom.' Next thing I know, the ball is landing 10 feet in front of me. It was just incredible."

For Ryan it was the highlight of his career. His mother, he says, is the reason he made it to the big leagues. His father, Howard, and Lorene were divorced when Ryan was in high school, and before that, Howard was frequently away at work in the oil fields off Long Beach, Calif. It was Lorene who caught for Ryan in the backyard, sitting on a flipped-over water bucket to give him a good target.

"I did the same thing for his two sisters, who were pretty good softball players," says Lorene. "It was no big deal." At least not until young Ryan learned the deuce. Lorene had no trouble with his fastball, but one day she took a nasty curve-ball in the leg and returned from her doctor on crutches. "Ryan's dream was to play in the big leagues," Lorene says, "and I just did what every mother would do: I helped him follow his dream."

Ryan says he tried for years to pay his mother back with a new car, but she resisted. Finally he just walked into her house and put the keys to a Ford Thunderbird on the kitchen table.

"When I was a kid, my mom would watch baseball on TV and say to me, 'See those guys? You're going to be one of them someday,' " Ryan says. "I never thought it was possible, but she always believed in me."

Lorene was in Atlanta in October to share her son's World Series triumph. "The morning after the last game, we were sitting around just enjoying the whole thing," says Lorene, "and Ryan said to me, 'Well, Mom, we won the World Series. What next? I've got a World Series ring. I've done just about everything I wanted to do in life. What am I going to do now?' "

He'll think of something.