ARLINGTON, Texas — So this is the way a World Series finds its tipping point:
One manager, who thinks of baseball as the kind of wall-sized mathematical problem that only Will Hunting would understand, felled by the most simple act possible: the voice on one end of a telephone call misunderstanding the message delivered by the other end.
“Loud ballpark,” Cardinals manager Tony La Russa would say. “Sometimes those things happen.”
And the other manager, who insists that you keep all your genius sobriquets and hand them out elsewhere, who believes in simple baseball postulates — like excellent communication with his players, the kind you don’t need a telephone for — drawing an inside straight for the second straight night, a quirk in his batting order turning into a brilliant, happy accident. Again.
“I can’t match wits with Tony, and I don’t try. I haven’t been in the game that long,” Rangers manager Ron Washington said. “And I think my players understand that we’re all in it together. I trust my players and try to get them in position to be successful. And they haven’t let me down yet.”
More to the point, he hasn’t let them down yet. And because of that mutual respect, because Washington’s gut moves have been gut shots for the Cardinals three of the last four games, the Rangers beat the Cardinals 4-2 last night, crawled out to a 3-2 lead in this 107th World Series, and tomorrow will be 27 outs away from winning the first world championship for a franchise whose mostly star-crossed history extends to Washington, D.C., and dates to 1961.
For two straight Octobers, the television cameras have fallen in love with Washington, capturing him constantly in the Rangers’ dugout. For two years, we have seen him clap his hands and slap his players’ backs; Sunday night, we saw him jump up and down and giggle like a schoolkid when his boss, Nolan Ryan, let the ceremonial first pitch from George W. Bush bounce off his glove.
Washington comes off as a cross between someone’s crazy uncle and a guy who went looking for his box seats and somehow ended up in the dugout, and it’s a perception he embraces eagerly. Only a funny thing has happened these past two autumns. Twice his team has beaten the Tampa Bay Rays of Joe Maddon, he of the impeccable managerial cred. He beat Joe Girardi and his binder. He beat Jim Leyland. And now he seems to have gotten in La Russa’s head, too.
You don’t win these matchups by accident.
“Everything he does,” Texas catcher Mike Napoli said, “is designed to give us the best possibility to win. When you realize that, you can’t have a problem because he has the best interests of the club at heart.”
Napoli knows. Two nights running, Washington has penciled his name eighth in the Texas batting order, despite the fact Napoli has hit damn near .400 since the Fourth of July. It gave the sport’s cognoscenti the bends. Seemed a little nuts.
And now it seems to have nudged the Rangers to the brink of Valhalla.
Napoli’s three-run homer broke open Game 4. And last night the game’s defining moment found him again, even all the way down in the eight-hole, Napoli finding the right-centerfield gap, plating two runs, pushing the Rangers to the precipice and himself into the position as leader in the clubhouse for Series MVP.
This was all helped along by a complete communications breakdown by the Cardinals. La Russa blamed the loud crowd and the lousy phone line. Bullpen coach Derek Lilliquist indicated he only heard the phone ring once, a story that seemed to change depending on whom you asked.
La Russa wanted Jason Motte to face Napoli, but Motte wasn’t warm. Lefty Marc Rzepczynski stayed in the game, served up the game-winner, and because Motte still hadn’t gotten up, La Russa was forced to humiliate himself and bring in Lance Lynn to face one batter — Ian Kinsler — whom he intentionally walked.
It was a fiasco and it was wonderful to see, the Cardinals’ savant fouled up by the simple act of communication, the Rangers’ Great Communicator looking smarter than an iPhone, again. Colliding at the tipping point.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com