Tribal Warfare

Sibling Rivalries
Besides Roberto (far left) and Sandy (left) Alomar, who faced off in the American League Championship Series this year, four other sets of brothers have met in postseason play. Here is how they fared.
Year	Player, Team	G	AB	H	HR	RBI	Avg.
1920	Doc Johnston, Indians Jimmy Johnston, Brooklyn Robins	5 4	11 14	3 3	0 0	0 0	.273 .214
1921	Bob Meusel, Yankees Irish Meusel, N.Y. Giants	8 8	30 29	6 10	0 1	3 7	.200 .345
1922	Bob Meusel, Yankees Irish Meusel, N.Y. Giants	5 5	20 20	6 5	0 1	2 7	.300 .250
1923	Bob Meusel, Yankees Irish Meusel, N.Y. Giants	6 6	26 25	7 7	0 1	8 2	.269 .280
1964	Clete Boyer, Yankees Ken Boyer, Cardinals	7 7	24 27	5 6	1 2	3 6	.208 .222
1985*	Dane Iorg, Royals Garth Iorg, Blue Jays	4 7	2 15	1 2	0 0	0 0	.500 .133
*American League Championship Series; all other matchups occurred in World Series.

Driving West on Interstate 90 in the last dark hour of Saturday, having been on the losing side of the longest and possibly strangest postseason game in baseball history, Roberto Alomar is overcome by the possibility that this wretched day has time for one final insult. The silver Audi, the one his brother Sandy lent him to use while he was in Cleveland for the American League Championship Series, is running out of gas.

"Is there a gas station there?" Roberto asks while veering into an exit lane. Spotting no glowing beacon of petrol in the darkness, he quickly swerves left, back onto the highway, and presses on nervously. Relief is a mile or so away. Roberto exits the highway, rolls to a halt at a red light and then steers the Audi past the wrong side of a phalanx of orange-striped construction barrels, bounces it noisily over the pocked roadway, cuts across a side street and at last slides it to a stop next to a self-service pump.

He fills the car with $25 worth of gas and then signs an autograph on a blank charge slip for another patron who can't believe he has found the second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, an eight-time All-Star, pumping gas near midnight. The Audi sated, Roberto climbs back in and only now can laugh at one of the universal truths of brotherhood and birth order. Between them the Alomars will earn more than $8.8 million this year: $6.2 million for Roberto and $2.6 million for Sandy. But for the favor of lending his car, Sandy, the 31-year-old Cleveland Indians catcher, has exercised a timeless fraternal tradition: sticking the kid brother with an empty tank of gas. "Just like a big brother, huh?" says Roberto, 29. "He's always getting me like that. Whenever we talk on the phone, I'm the one who has to call, because, he says, I make more money than he does."

Welcome to the ALomar Championship Series, where the battle for the pennant has the look of a family picnic, particularly after Roberto drives to Sandy's Westlake, Ohio, house to chew on a bizarre Game 3 and some pizza with their mom, Maria, their dad, Sandy, a former 15-year big league infielder, as well as Sandy Jr.'s wife, Christie, and their two children. The sons and their father watch highlights of the game on a big-screen television, providing commentary in a loud mixture of Spanish and English. The room goes silent when Sandy raps a seventh-inning grounder that apparently will put his Indians ahead 2-0. But Roberto dives headlong at the ball to his left, gloves it and throws out his brother at first base. The Alomars never speak to each other during a game. Even here, in Sandy's family room, the sibling rivalry remains an unspoken one.

Conversation resumes with more highlights, especially the last one, in which Marquis Grissom steals home to score the winning run for Cleveland on a botched squeeze play four hours, 51 minutes after the epic began. In the history of the Cleveland franchise—exactly 15,000 games through Monday—no pitcher struck out more Indians in a game than the Orioles' Mike Mussina (15, all within the first 21 batters he faced) did last Saturday and no staff whiffed more hitters (21) than did Baltimore's. The Orioles had tied the game at 1-1 in the ninth when Brady Anderson lifted a fly to center and Grissom lost the ball in a dark-blue sky tinged with amber streaks, allowing Jeff Reboulet to score the tying run from second. So the ending in the 12th inning, which put the Indians ahead two games to one, was jarring, as if a felt-pen mustache had been scribbled upon this oil painting of a game. Cleveland's Omar Vizquel, the batter, missed a squeeze bunt, and Baltimore's Lenny Webster, the catcher, missed the pitch. John Hirschbeck, the umpire, the same one Roberto spat upon a year ago, ruled that Webster's mis-play hadn't been caused by a foul tip.

"I don't know," Roberto says after watching several replays, "but the other umpires should have stayed on the Held to help, just to make sure the call was right."

"He didn't tip it," Sandy says. "Watch Webster. He flinches when the ball conies. If a ball is barely tipped, it hardly changes direction. You catch it. He flinched."

"I think he tipped it," the father says. "Watch Webster. He doesn't go after the ball. He doesn't try to tag the runner. He must have known it was a foul ball."

Roberto begins to wrestle with his seven-year-old nephew, Marcus, and playfully nibbles on his ear. Sandy cuddles with his daughter, Marissa, who was born in 1992 on the day after Roberto's Toronto Blue Jays clinched the first of two world championships. Sandy the patriarch, who reached the 1976 World Series with the New York Yankees but didn't play in the sweep by the Cincinnati Reds, is quiet. It's left to Christie to needle Roberto with the words everyone must be thinking but dares not say lest he be accused of taking sides: "The Indians are going to win," she says. "You've had yours. Now it's Sandy's turn."

Three other sets of brothers have opposed one another in the World Series (box), but only once before, when Dane and Garth Iorg met in the 1985 American League Championship Series, had a sibling rivalry come to this cold postseason reality: One goes to the World Series, and one goes home. The Alomar brothers are to October what the Kennedys are to November. Not since 1990 has an American League Championship Series been played without one of them.