Ted and Yaz and Rice and Yes, Dwight

He wasn’t Carl Yastrzemski. He wasn’t Ted Williams. He never won the triple crown. He never won the batting title. To tell the truth, he batted over .300 only once in his career. Last year.

But when it comes to contributing to the lore of the Boston Red Sox over the last decade and a half, you better put the name Dwight Evans up in lights a foot and a half tall.

He’s about a thousand hits behind Yaz, and he’ll never come close to hitting .400, like Williams, but when it comes to being in the lineup, being dangerous and putting in nine innings of impeccable fielding, night after night, Dwight (Dewey) Evans might be as valuable an asset as the Red Sox or any team in the league has or had.

He never played for anybody else. He’s 37 now and doesn’t look a day older than when he was a rookie. The belly is flat, the hips lean, the attitude hungry. No game is a bye to Dwight Evans.

The Boston Red Sox used to have the reputation as a clubhouse full of dilettante weekend players. The baseball equivalent of polo players. Country club was the term most frequently applied to the atmosphere.

They came into focus as a clique of soloists. The team was on its own. A pennant was for peasants. They played a game that could only be compared to Long Island polo. Victory was nice but not necessary. Playing well was more important.

The Red Sox had the record to back up their attitude. They almost appeared to resent the attitude of the community, which insisted on winning. The Red Sox left one n out of that word. And, sometimes, put an h in it.

Jacques Barzun said that whoever wanted to know the heart and soul of America had better learn baseball. Well, whoever wanted to know the heart and soul of New England had better study the Red Sox. They were New England’s problem children. Exasperating, frustrating, but you kept hoping they’d grow up.

Dwight Evans didn’t exactly change all that. Yastrzemski had started it before he got there. But he was a player of intensity and fierce pride right from the start. He couldn’t come to grips with losing. He never gave up on a fly ball--or a pennant--no matter how out of reach it looked.

Consider only the other night at Anaheim Stadium. It is the second inning. The Red Sox are already behind, 5-0. There are two outs, no one on. With the count two strikes, Evans starts to bite at a curve, low and away. He struggles to hold up his swing. The plate umpire rules in his favor. The first base umpire, 100 feet away, rules against, on appeal. Strike 3. He’s out.

It’s not like striking out with the bases loaded and the game on the line, it’s the third out in an inning already gone. One at-bat out of 500, one game out of 162. But Evans hurls his bat skyward in a rage. It is not a simple bat toss. It is a major league bat toss.

It recalls the time a grizzled old umpire watched another outraged batter flip his implement high in the air after a strikeout and noted wryly, “If that comes down, you’re outta here.”

Dwight’s finally came down and he was out of there and no doubt will be fined. But the statement was made: Evans does not suffer any defeat gladly. He does not treat a game, even an at-bat, with a shrug.

He will probably not be in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown but he easily makes the one at Fenway Park. The franchise fortunes picked up with Evans. This is a team that had been in only two World Series in 55 years when Evans joined them. In his 16-year tenure, they have been in two World Series and three league championship series.

In the 1975 World Series, popularly conceded to be one of history’s greatest, Dwight Evans got two home runs. One, he hit. The other, he caught.

It was in the sixth game at Boston and Cincinnati’s Joe Morgan hit what would have been the game-winning home run in the 11th inning. Evans caught it about four rows back in the stands.

It was one of the great catches in World Series history and it set up Carlton Fisk’s famous foul-line home run that won the game an inning later. Evans also had a triple, double and five runs batted in that Series.

In 1986, the Mets beat the Red Sox in the Series. It was no fault of Dwight Evans. As usual, with the Red Sox, it was a seven-game donnybrook and overlooked, because the Mets won, was Evans’ MVP performance. He hit two home runs, two doubles, batted .308 and drove in (count ‘em) nine runs.

Evans is on a ladder with every Red Sox star who ever lived. He has hit 350 home runs. Only Williams, Yastrzemski and Jim Rice have hit more. (Only 38 players in history have hit more.) He is third, behind Yaz and Ted, in doubles, extra-base hits, walks, games played.

He has as much right to be Mr. Red Sox as anyone who ever played in that funny little lopsided ball park in the fens of Boston.

You approach Dwight Evans on goals. Does he have priority goals?

“You bet!” Evans shoots back.

OK, what? 400 home runs? 2,500 hits? 500 doubles? 1,500 runs?

Evans shakes his head. “A world championship,” he says. “I want a world championship so bad. I can’t tell you.

“Do you realize in the last four World Series the Red Sox have played in, every one of them has gone seven games? Just a bounce here or there and it could be us, not them. Just once, I want it to be us. I want very badly to bring the world championship back to Boston.”

It’s an ambition that might bring a look of surprise from some celebrated Red Sox of the past. But it might explain why Dwight Evans’ bat has more hang time than a Ray Guy punt when he feels he gets only 2 1/2 strikes an at-bat. When you want to win it all, you put up with nothing.