Stoudemire to Miss Six to Eight Weeks

GREENBURGH, N.Y. — Amar'e Stoudemire's troublesome knee is causing increasing headaches for the Knicks,

What was originally described as a sore left knee and then later called a ruptured cyst has turned out to be more complicated. Stoudemire will need surgery, the team announced Tuesday, and will be out six to eight weeks.

The Knicks had said last week that Stoudemire would miss only two to three weeks. He is expected to have the surgery within the next week.

The surgery will be the third on his knee in his career. Dr. James Gladstone, a knee specialist and orthopedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who is not involved in Stoudemire's diagnosis or treatment, said such a procedure, known as debridement surgery, would both clean the knee and look for any other major damage.

"If you clean up the stuff that's dangling or floating in his knee, the damage in the cartilage is still there," Gladstone said. "If hard cartilage is the problem, more might have to be done."

Even though Stoudemire is just 29, considered the prime of an N.B.A. player's career, his knees and his coming to the pros straight from high school has made his body older than that.

In 2005, Stoudemire had microfracture surgery in his left knee. He also had arthroscopic surgery on his right knee in 2006.

Entering his 11th season, Stoudemire has appeared in every game in a season just three times in his career, all with the Phoenix Suns. The last time he played a full N.B.A. season was in 2009-10.

Stoudemire went to great lengths to not only get healthy for the season, but to also become a better player. During the summer, he went to Texas to work the Hall of Fame center Hakeem Olajuwon on low-post moves. Stoudemire's improved post play was on display in a preseason game Oct. 19, against the Toronto Raptors. Two days later, the Knicks announced he had the ruptured cyst.

"That's disappointing because I know how hard Amar'e has worked this summer, so I feel for him," Tyson Chandler said. "He's been one of the hardest workers."

If Stoudemire is to be out for next two months, he will miss the first 30 games of the season.

"You can't fully know when he will return until after two to three weeks after he begins his rehab," Gladstone said. He said the Knicks, Stoudemire and the doctors involved would "have to see how the strengthening in the muscle is working."

Both Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony have both expressed their optimism that they might finally find a way to play in sync after not being able to for the past season and half.

"I definitely thought that we had a chance to go out there and play together in a full season," Anthony said. "This knee thing came out of nowhere. He's kind of been catching a bad break when it comes down to injuries."

Now, Anthony will play a mix of small forward and power forward. Coach Mike Woodson said he would most likely make his decision on who he will start at the power forward based on the Knicks' opponent.

Woodson said he would turn to Rasheed Wallace, who is attempting a comeback after a two-year retirement and did not play in the Knicks' six preseason games, to help fill the void. The Knicks could particularly use Wallace's presence on defense and his ability to stretch the floor with his long-range shooting.

"How many minutes, I don't know that," Woodson said of Wallace. "I have to see what kind of flow we have in the game and who is doing what. But he will play some. No doubt about that."

Chandler, who sustained a bruised left knee, also appears to be ready for the season opener Thursday against the Brooklyn Nets. He participated in practice, but sat out of contact drills. Chandler said he did not experience pain in the knee when he was running up and down the floor, but he did wear a brace on the knee.

"Tyson looked good," Woodson said. "He went through all the skill sessions and then we ran him some on his own. I think he's going to be fine."

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Dave May Dies at 68; Player in Hank Aaron Trade

Dave May, a onetime All-Star for the Milwaukee Brewers who was traded to Atlanta in order to bring back the local hero Hank Aaron, died on Oct. 20 in Bear, Del. He was 68.

The cause was cancer, his son Derrick said.

May played the outfield for five big league teams over 12 seasons, beginning in 1967 with the Orioles, who were emerging as a powerhouse. He was a reserve on the Oriole team that won the 1969 American League pennant and appeared in two games of the World Series, in which the heavily favored Orioles were upset by the Mets.

The next season he was traded to the Brewers, an American League expansion team playing its first year in Milwaukee after a debut season as the Seattle Pilots.

May had his best years in Milwaukee. In 1973 he batted .303, hit 25 home runs, had 93 runs batted in and was named to the All-Star team. In November 1974 he and a minor league pitcher were traded to the Braves for Aaron, then the career major league home run champion, who had left Milwaukee when the Braves decamped for Atlanta after the 1965 season. May played two years for the Braves and one for the Texas Rangers before splitting his final season, 1978, between the Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

David LaFrance May was born on Dec. 23, 1943, in New Castle, Del. He was signed after high school by the San Francisco Giants and played for their Salem, Va., farm team in 1962 before moving to the Orioles organization.

May's marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son Derrick, who played 10 major league seasons for six teams and is now the minor league hitting coordinator for the St. Louis Cardinals, he is survived by another son, Dave Jr., a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays; a daughter, Denae May; five sisters; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

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New York City Marathon Officials Determining Storm’s Effect on Race

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

The marathon's course does not pass through Lower Manhattan, which lost power Monday night and experienced significant flooding.

As officials evaluated widespread storm damage, organizers for the New York City Marathon began work Tuesday to determine how Sunday's race might be affected by flooding and power outages.

Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Central Park, the home for the finish of the New York City Marathon, will remain closed until debris and fallen trees have been cleared.

"N.Y.R.R. continues to move ahead with its planning and preparation," Mary Wittenberg, the chief executive of New York Road Runners, the group that organizes the marathon, said in a statement. "We will keep all options open with regard to making any accommodations and adjustments necessary to race day and race weekend events."

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — a marathon booster because it generates hundreds of millions dollars in economic activity — said Tuesday night that the race would go on as scheduled, but that additional details would be provided Wednesday.

Putting on a five-borough race with 47,000 runners, 8,000 volunteers, 1,000 staff and 2 million spectators just days after a devastating storm will be challenging as the police and fire departments, electric utilities and transportation agencies attempt to get the city back on its feet.

Race officials were weighing which race-related events to reschedule or eliminate, and waiting to see how many runners would seek to defer their entries.

"There will be a marathon," said Norman Goluskin, a board member at New York Road Runners. "I don't know how many thousands of people will run it, but I will say with confidence that 47,000 people will not be the number."

Runners and fans, though, have been arguing whether holding the marathon is an act of triumph or tastelessness in light of the storm, a debate that evokes the days after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when Major League Baseball considered when to restart the season.

"They need to cancel and focus on getting their city back together," Crystal Sara Martin wrote on the New York City Marathon's event page. "It doesn't seem right to continue to have this marathon when their city and their own people are affected."

Some runners questioned whether the food used for the race should be diverted to the hundreds of thousands of people who lost power. Others, including a few who would have come from overseas, said they had already deferred their spot in this year's race and were hoping to recoup the cost of their plane tickets and hotel rooms.

For now, the course remains a question mark. Many of the city's bridges and tunnels only reopened Tuesday afternoon and some roads are still impassable, so race officials had not determined whether any part of the 26.2-mile course was flooded. Typically, race officials drive the course several times in the days before the race to ensure that nothing is blocking the roadways and their equipment is in place.

The marathon's course does not pass through Lower Manhattan, which lost power Monday night and had significant flooding. But about half of the nearly 50,000 runners take the Staten Island Ferry, which leaves from the Battery, to get to the starting line early Sunday morning. The ferry may resume service, but subways leading to the Battery may not be operating.

And although the starting line is high up on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the first leg of the course in Brooklyn curls up Fourth Avenue, not far from areas that were flooded Monday night. From there, runners head north through Queens, hugging the East River and crossing over the Queensboro 59th Street Bridge.

The course winds up Manhattan's Upper East Side, through the Bronx and down into Central Park, which will remain closed until debris and fallen trees are cleared. Critically, many fans, runners and volunteers rely on New York City subways to get to the race. Limited bus service was expected to return Tuesday night, but there is no timetable for the resumption of subway and railroad service.

Race officials said they were in contact with city agencies. At least for Road Runners, electricity is less an issue because it uses its own generators to power equipment at the start and finish lines.

Juliet Macur contributed reporting.

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Global Soccer: Media Make a Meal of Accusations Against English Referee

LONDON — The English Premier League is such a hot commodity right now that just about every country wants a piece of it.

There are billionaires from Russia to the Gulf to the United States in the boardrooms. There are new television and marketing deals opening by the year. And just this weekend, NBC Sports outbid Fox to bring the games into double the number of U.S. homes beginning in 2013.

It is big, sometimes ruthless business. Chelsea, the current European champion, has opened a commercial office in Singapore and is as eager as Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal are in doing business in the growing American popularization of soccer.

So when the magnificent Chelsea versus United match Sunday in London spilled over into controversy, the 24/7 news machinery across the world became instant box office. Rumor and truth became entangled in the rush to publish and broadcast.

The score was 3-2, United's first league victory on Chelsea's territory in the decade since the Russian Roman Abramovic bought Chelsea and the American Malcolm Glazer purchased the Manchester team.

As night followed day, the fieriness of the contest centered on the controversies surrounding the referee. Mark Clattenburg — who refereed the Olympic Games final between Brazil and Mexico, and was expected to be among the 2014 World Cup match officials — made plenty of brave calls at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea's home stadium.

He sent off two home team players, and he allowed Manchester United's winning goal — which, the television cameras proved, should have been ruled offside.

But the storm brewing around the official was nothing compared to what he now stands accused of.

Chelsea took its arguments to the referee's room after the game. The soccer authorities, the London Metropolitan Police and a human-rights lawyer are all looking into allegations that Clattenburg used "inappropriate language" toward two Chelsea players during the arguments on the field.

Those words are carefully weighed.

Chelsea's chairman, Bruce Buck, is an esteemed American lawyer. Where his club speaks of inappropriate language, the media wade in with the claim, the assumption, that the words used were racist.

The players involved, though not officially named by the club, are John Obi Mikel, a Nigerian, and Juan Mata, a Spaniard.

By leak or by deduction, the media ran with all sorts of damning interpretations. One tabloid, The Daily Mirror, reported that there had been a barroom style bust-up around the referee's room in which the words, "I'm gonna [expletive] break your legs" were heard.

In the same newspaper, a columnist pointed out that while Clattenburg had made generous decisions in Manchester United's favor in the past, his full record of games involving the Reds amounts to 11 victories for United, four ties and five defeats.

"But don't," wrote the columnist Mike Walters, "let the facts spoil a good lynching."

Too late for that kind of evenhandedness. This is Chelsea, whose captain, John Terry, is sitting out a four-game league ban after using racist language toward a black opponent a year ago.

In addition, the police are investigating how a match steward came to be hospitalized after Chelsea fans threw coins and other objects, including a torn plastic seat, toward the players after United's final goal Sunday.

The London club, and English soccer in general, is a tinderbox after the Terry case, and amid other tensions that almost weekly imply racial content between players in a league whose money entices players from every conceivable country on earth.

Money is not the source of the outbursts, but it exacerbates it.

Clattenburg gets a retainer and £1,000, or about $1,600, for each game that he referees. That, at best, affords the former electrician, who is now 37, about £70,000 a year.

The players get that, and more, by the week.

Yet the ref is supposed to control the players, to rise above the foul-mouthed abuse that the Terry case so wretchedly confirmed players direct not only at one another, but often toward the officials.

That tawdry image is anathema to decent folks, to parents, ultimately to sponsors who pay to be associated with soccer.

We are not yet in a position to judge what Clattenburg said in the heat of confrontation with players. We did not hear, as his match assistants heard through their microphones to the man in the middle, exactly what was said.

It could easily come down to one man's word against the others', and to a question of interpretation.

Mikel's English and Clattenburg's might differ. The player comes from Nigeria, and ironically, his interpretation was the subject of an unholy row between Manchester United and Chelsea when he was a teenager.

Both claimed to have signed him in 2005 from the Norwegian club Lyn Oslo. FIFA ultimately ruled in Chelsea's favor.

Clattenburg comes from northeastern England, where the local accent is sometimes difficult for Englishmen, let alone foreigners, to understand. Remember how Cheryl Cole, the singer (and former wife of Chelsea full back Ashley Cole), was said to have baffled American audiences, whom she had hoped to entertain as a celebrity television panelist?

For now, Clattenburg is removed from the list of Premier League referees while he fights his case. But there is nothing unusual in that: An assistant referee who erroneously flagged offside a perfectly timed goal for Liverpool on Sunday has also been kept on the sidelines.

It is normal to remove the match officials from the heat when accusations are hot and flying. And it is normal for the media to make a meal of the controversy.

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Ban on Lasix at Breeders’ Cup Keeps Some Horsemen Away

ARCADIA, Calif. — Call it uncharted territory, as some horse trainers here have, or the new facts of life, as many breeders and drug reformers prefer, but for the first time in the history of the event, 2-year-old horses at this weekend's Breeders' Cup world championships will not be allowed to be injected with a drug that is intended to restrict pulmonary bleeding.

The ban on the race-day drug will be imposed on horses in all 15 of the Cup races next year to get American racing in step with the rest of the world.

About 95 percent of American thoroughbreds race on furosemide, a drug first approved for race-day use in the mid-1970s. Furosemide helps to prevent exercise-induced pulmonary bleeding, which can occur in horses and impair their breathing and performance.

Even though Breeders' Cup officials announced the ban in July 2011, it has been met with resistance and criticism by prominent American horsemen. The ban will continue to be debated until Friday, when the first of the series of races worth more than $25 million in purses are run. Leading trainers like Todd Pletcher, Dale Romans and Bob Baffert disagree with the ban on furosemide, an anti-bleeding diuretic sold under the name Lasix or Salix.

Mike Repole, a horse owner based in New York, cited the new rule as the reason he was not sending four of his promising 2-year-olds to the Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita Park. Other owners might have filed their protest at the entry box, as the two most prominent races for 2-year-olds have fewer entries than normal: only nine colts are expected to run in the $2 million Juvenile, and only eight were entered in the $2 million Juvenile Fillies race.

Most regulators say furosemide enhances performance by flushing 20 to 30 pounds of water out of a horse. It is prohibited in Europe, Hong Kong and the rest of the world's major racing circuits. In the United States, however, almost all horses, whether they need it or not, have a needle filled with furosemide plunged into their neck several hours before racing.

"We call ourselves a world championship, and we attract some of the best horses in the world each year," said Craig Fravel, the chief executive of the Breeders' Cup. "It is time to start moving to the same rules and same formats as the rest of the world."

Even if the furosemide ban is not the cause of the smaller field sizes, Fravel said that he and the Breeders' Cup board would remain undeterred.

"We'd like them bigger, but we're not going to cry in our beer about it," he said.

The New York State Racing and Wagering Board enacted a series of new rules recently that significantly restrict the use of legal drugs on horses and require trainers to disclose what treatments their horses receive. They are among the most aggressive rules in the nation and were recommended by a task force appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who concluded more than half of the 21 horse fatalities that occurred at Aqueduct last winter could have been prevented.

Still, Repole said Breeders' Cup officials decided to ban furosemide with little research and less concern for the betting public.

"If you want to experiment with racing 2-year-olds without Lasix, let's do it on the second race at Belmont on a Wednesday afternoon," said Repole, whose colt Uncle Mo won the 2010 Juvenile and was named the 2-year-old champion. "Let's not do it on one of the biggest days when people are actually paying attention. Why would you want to experiment with top 2-year-olds? I wouldn't want it to be my horse who bleeds or gets injured."

Repole's boycott of the Breeders' Cup, however, will not keep his trainer, Pletcher, out of the world championship races. Among the contingent he took here was Shanghai Bobby, the 2-1 morning line favorite in the Juvenile, and Dreaming of Julia, which is 5-2 in the Juvenile Fillies. Each will be racing without furosemide for the first time.

"It is uncharted territory for me as a trainer," Pletcher said. "I'm pro-Lasix. We work horses on Lasix to prevent them from bleeding. Dirt racing is more demanding than grass racing, and we see more bleeders over here than in Europe. I don't anticipate any problem, but the only way to know is to run, see how they perform and scope them afterward."

The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission narrowly approved a limited ban on Lasix in June after months of acrimonious debate among owners, breeders and trainers.

In July, more than 40 owners and breeders pledged to stop giving the drug to their 2-year-olds on race day, and among them was the Darley operation, owned by Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. His trainer, Kiaran McLaughlin, has a colt named Fortify in the Juvenile, and he prepped him without Lasix. He watched him win his debut by five lengths. Fortify finished second in the Grade 2 Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga and third in the Grade 1 Champagne Stakes; those races were won by Shanghai Bobby.

McLaughlin said Fortify (9-2) did not bleed in those races, but knows that fact will not quiet critics on the ban.

"It's a big, hot debate," he said. "The Maktoum family are supporters of no Lasix, and therefore, I'm supportive of no Lasix."

Graham Motion, a trainer with an owner who pledged to quit using race-day medication, said that a majority of his horses do bleed after heavy exercise, but "whether they need to receive Lasix or not to run is a different story."

He made it clear, however, that a ban on furosemide should not keep horses at home.

"I'm a little disappointed in some respects that the Juvenile Fillies might be a small field," he said. "I think that's pretty shortsighted. I don't think it's that big a hurdle to overcome."

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The Giants Plan to Pay Homage to Their New York Roots

DETROIT — It has become Mike Murphy's new biennial tradition. When the Giants win the World Series, he immediately calls Willie Mays. And then he calls his wife.

It's understandable. Murphy, the Giants' avuncular equipment manager, and Mays share a deep friendship. It goes all the way back to Murphy's first day with the team as the Giants' bat boy in 1958, the year the club moved to San Francisco from New York.

In 2010, when the Giants won their first World Series as a Bay Area team, Murphy did the same thing as he did Sunday night. And the Giants as a team are basically sticking to their script, too. After they won in 2010, they paid homage to their New York roots by sending Mays, the star catcher Buster Posey and the championship trophy to Manhattan for what amounted to a sentimental victory tour of the city.

And now they're going to do it again. "We're bringing it back," exclaimed Giants General Manager Brian Sabean amid the euphoric celebration here Sunday night after his team won Game 4 to sweep the Tigers. "Tell everyone in New York to get ready, because we're coming with it."

That may not be such heartening news to the Mets and the Yankees, the two local teams who would prefer to be parading the trophy around the city themselves. But instead it will the Giants, who played in New York for more than 70 years. It was in January 2011 that the Giants contingent carried out its initial championship visit. Sabean was part of the group, as was the team president, Larry Baer, now the team's chief executive. They met with two groups of old-time New York Giants fans, all of whom faithfully attended games at the old Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan and never lost their love for the team, despite being abandoned by it. The fans regaled Mays with their recollections of his majesty at the Polo Grounds, and happily listened to his stories.

In addition, Mays and the rest of the Giants contingent visited a public school in Harlem, where Mays told students about living in their community as a young player on the Giants. And the Giants also took the trophy down to Finnerty's, a Second Avenue pub that has become a New York hub for transplanted Giants supporters from the Bay Area.

"It was a really cool trip," Posey said Sunday, not long after his two-run homer helped the Giants win the title.

Although there was real heartache when the Giants, who were founded in 1883, left New York, their departure did not engender the same animosity that the Dodgers encountered in deserting Brooklyn for Los Angeles. For one thing, it was the Dodgers' owner, Walter O'Malley, who was seen as the catalyst — or culprit — in the decision of both teams to move to the West Coast; for another, the Giants, despite their distinguished history in New York, did not have the romance attached to them that the Dodgers did in Brooklyn.

The bitterness was simply more profound among Dodgers fans and, as such, it might be harder for the Los Angeles Dodgers to ever attempt a victory tour of Brooklyn similar to what the Giants are now doing in Manhattan for the second time.

"The whole thing with New York is that we see ourselves as a 130-year-old franchise," Baer said. "It's not just the 55 years in San Francisco. The New York roots are important to us and we don't forget them, so yeah, I'd like to bring the trophy back. I think we should do it every time we win."

Shawon Dunston, a spring training instructor and part-time coach for the Giants, grew up in Brooklyn, where he was a high school baseball star. His parents still make the borough their home. Dunston said that when the Giants take the trophy back to New York this time, he wants to be a part of the celebration. He also noted that the current Giants had a strong connection to another New York team — the Yankees.

After all, Sabean worked in the Yankees' front office, and Dick Tidrow, the Giants' scouting director, was a pitcher on the Yankees' championship teams in 1977 and 1978. The Giants coaching staff also includes several other former Yankees, most notably Dave Righetti, the pitching coach.

"We learned from the Yankees," Dunston said. As for the Giants becoming a West Coast dynasty that would mimic the Yankees' overall success, Dunston said, "We're not there yet, but we're getting close, yes we are."

In fact, the Giants, who now have seven championships, are still 20 shy of the Yankees. Their first title came in 1905, and all six before now were celebrated in New York at some point. And now the seventh will be, too. Perhaps with Mays again joining in the celebration.

"He was all excited and said, 'Murph, we won it again,' " Mike Murphy said Sunday night in the champagne-drenched Giants clubhouse as he recounted his phone call with Mays. "He said he was on pins and needles the whole game. We waited a long time for the first one. Now it seems like every other year, we win one."

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A Fan’s Notes: No Poetic Words Can Lift Spirits After Tigers’ Loss

Jim Young/Reuters

The romantic side of losing? Tell that to the Tigers' Quintin Berry.

They say there's romance to losing. They're wrong. After watching my beloved Detroit Tigers be swept out of the World Series, I can fairly report that losing stinks. And of all the purple prose that has been written about the glory of losing at baseball, here's some of the purplest:

"You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it."

That nonsense was written by the revered Roger Kahn in the 1972 book "The Boys of Summer," a recounting of his time spent covering the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1952 and 1953 seasons, when they lost a pair of World Series to the reviled Yankees. As a lifelong Tigers fan who just watched my team rudely dispatched from the World Series by the sharper and more deserving San Francisco Giants, I can safely report that Kahn's romance about falling in love with a team in defeat is a wagonload of horse meat.

But Kahn wasn't finished waxing rhapsodic about those doomed Dodgers of the early 1950s. "The team was awesomely good and yet defeated," he went on. "Their skills lifted everyman's spirit and their defeat joined them with everyman's existence, a national team, with a country in thrall, irresistible and unable to beat the Yankees."

Well, we're 60 years past all those soap suds. This year's Tigers didn't have Duke Snider or Jackie Robinson and his race-barrier-busting story in their narrative. But they were pretty good and they did have a Hispanic player named Miguel Cabrera who won the first triple crown of batting supremacy in almost half a century. And they did play in a city that has been brutalized in ways Brooklyn will never imagine. And they did beat the Yankees to make it to the World Series.

Yet, the Tigers' defeat in the Series didn't join them with everyman's existence, or make them the national team of a country in thrall. The television ratings for this year's World Series were among the lowest ever, which leads me to conclude that outside Michigan and Northern California, I'm one of few people who cared about the lopsided Series. This doesn't mean that Kahn was wrong about the magical Dodgers of the '50s. It means that today, it's almost impossible for sports teams to capture the imagination of an atomized, media-blitzed, scatterbrained populace. It has become impossible to hold this country in thrall.

Joe Queenan, a long-suffering Philadelphia Phillies fan, came much closer to the truth than Kahn. In his book "True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans," Queenan wrote, "There can be no denying that the desire to win is the single most important component of the spectatorial experience."

And while we're getting literary here in the afterglow of defeat, let's end with a line from "The Great American Novel" by Philip Roth that reads, "The sooner we get rid of losing, the happier everyone will be."

Exactly right. So does that mean I'm giving up on my cruelly vanquished Tigers? Of course not. I grew up worshiping the team. They swept the Yankees to win this year's American League pennant. They had a fine season and they're loaded for bear. And opening day is just five short months away.

Bill Morris grew up in Detroit in the 1950s and '60s. He is the author of the novels "Motor City" and "All Souls' Day," and has finished another, "Vic #43," set during the 1967 Detroit riot and the Tigers' 1968 championship season.

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Keeping Score: Called Third Strike Is Rare Way to End World Series

Jim Young/Reuters

Sergio Romo got the Tigers' Miguel Cabrera on a called third strike to end Game 4 as the Giants won the World Series.

When Miguel Cabrera stared at strike three from Sergio Romo in the bottom of the 10th inning of Game 4 of the World Series, ending the Detroit Tigers' season, Twitter exploded with hundreds, possibly thousands, of people saying the same thing: "Beltran'd." With a better knowledge of history, they would have been saying: "Goslin'd."

Striking out looking to end a postseason series has become synonymous with Carlos Beltran, whose knees buckled at a nasty bases-loaded curveball from St. Louis Cardinals reliever Adam Wainwright in Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series. The pitch ended the game, and the series. The play was so devastating that the Mets, at that point the class of the National League, began to crumble, and Beltran, who had come to the team after a dominant postseason performance for the Houston Astros in 2004, became a punch line.

Others have joined him since, with both the American League and the National League Championship Series in 2010 ending on called third strikes, to Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees and Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies. But to compare ending a league championship series to ending a World Series is a stretch, as the stage is so much greater when a ring is on the line.

Faced with being the final out of a decisive World Series game, 18 batters have struck out, including Cabrera, perhaps the game's best active hitter.

Fifteen of the 18 swung at the final pitch and one possibly did, leaving just two batters to end a Series without protecting the plate, a fundamental strategy drilled into players from the time they are children.

The first strikeout to end a World Series came right away. In the inaugural World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Americans in 1903, it came down to Pittsburgh's best player, Honus Wagner, at the end of Game 8, but he came up short.

With game records at that point not recording whether a player swung or not, it is unclear if Wagner took a cut, but his performance in the series was bad enough that he refused to send a portrait of himself to a hall of fame that had been created for batting champions and wanted to honor his 1903 title.

"I was a joke in that Boston-Pittsburgh Series," Wagner said in a letter to the hall. "What does it profit a man to hammer along and make a few hits when they are not needed only to fall down when it comes to a pinch? I would be ashamed to have my picture up now."

(Cabrera will almost certainly not follow Wagner's lead when it comes to sending memorabilia to Cooperstown to commemorate his 2012 triple crown, the first in baseball in 45 years.)

After Wagner's Series-ending strikeout, no batter would do it again until 1925, when Goose Goslin, the Hall of Fame left fielder of the Washington Senators, failed to take his bat off his shoulder against the Pittsburgh Pirates, becoming the last player to end a World Series that way until Cabrera on Sunday night.

In between those two, 15 batters went down swinging to end a World Series, a group that includes greats like Brooklyn's Gil Hodges (1949) and Jackie Robinson (1956) as well as lesser-known players like Colorado's Seth Smith (2007) and Tampa Bay's Eric Hinske (2008).

The pitchers to nab that final strikeout have, in recent years, tended to be a team's star reliever. But the group includes great starting pitchers like Sandy Koufax (1965, against Minnesota) and Bob Gibson (1967, against Boston). The last starting pitcher to do so was the Los Angeles Dodgers' Orel Hershiser, who ended the 1988 World Series by striking out Tony Phillips of the Oakland Athletics to close out Game 5.

In any case, Cabrera's status as one of the game's greatest hitters is not in danger. But given the long gap that followed Goslin's called third strike in 1925, it may be quite a few decades before another batter chooses to wait for a better pitch with his team one strike from elimination.

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Back Home in Brooklyn, Marv Albert Welcomes a New Resident

Courtesy of Marv Albert .

Marv Albert, right, was a one time Knicks ball boy.

The Nets have come to Brooklyn, where I grew up. And even after nearly 50 years of calling basketball games, I can't wait.

But when I call their first regular-season game at Barclays Center, on Thursday night against the Knicks, I will not be curious about whether the move from New Jersey will go well. It will. I will want to know if a hard-core Nets crowd will be at the arena. One of my measuring sticks for the success of the Brooklyn Nets will be their ability to overwhelm the sound and presence of Knicks fans.

Around the city, people keep asking me about the Nets — at a rate that I never thought possible. Fanatics from New Jersey used to be the only people who wanted to chat me up about the Nets. Sometimes, you hardly knew they had taken the court at Izod Center. Far more often, people wanted to talk to me about the Knicks — and kept asking after I left the Knicks' TV booth to call Nets games.

The Nets are a likable group, and even without playing a game they've become popular. I think they'll win over kids who haven't developed loyalties yet. They will certainly lure basketball fans drawn to the new arena by games against the Lakers, the Celtics, the Thunder and the Heat. And if the Knicks stumble and don't make the playoffs, some Knicks fans might defect to watch Deron Williams and Joe Johnson.

The Nets are finally being embraced, perhaps for the first time since Julius Erving's heyday.

We all know that the Nets are the first professional team to play in Brooklyn since the Dodgers went west after the 1957 season.

My onetime boss Walter O'Malley made that move. And he wanted me (and some others) to follow him to Los Angeles.

Yes, in 1957, I was a 16-year-old office boy for the Dodgers. O'Malley signed my checks. He didn't pay me much, but he didn't pay his players much, either. Part of my job was to fetch coffee at the Chock Full o'Nuts around the corner from the team's offices. I was also entrusted with bringing tickets to sell at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, where the Dodgers played a few games that season.

I used my exalted position as an O'Malley gofer to prepare for a future in sportscasting that I aspired to as early as the third grade.

I hauled my huge Wollensak tape recorder to the employee side of the press box at Ebbets Field and called the games for my own amusement. But my announcing was apparently not as mellifluous — or welcome — as Vin Scully's. I was, it seems, too loud and enthusiastic for O'Malley's pals, who were sitting on the other side of a partition from me. I was informed that I was annoying them, much as the Czar, Mike Fratello, would disturb all those in his presence. So they strongly suggested that if I had to continue my fantasy broadcasts, I had to go to an overhang located down the right-field line. Not what I had in mind.

One day before the end of the season, I got a letter from O'Malley asking if I'd like to move to Los Angeles. I tried to convince my mother that it would be a good move for the Alberts if I became an office boy for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not what she had in mind.

At around this time, I was also a weekly guest panelist on "All-League Clubhouse," an ABC radio show hosted by Howard Cosell where teenagers interviewed sports celebrities. Cosell was always nervous that we kids wouldn't show up on time. So he called my house in Manhattan Beach. Dad was at our grocery store, so my mother answered. "Is Marv on his way?" he asked. Somehow I doubt that he called Muhammad Ali's mother to inquire about his whereabouts if he was late for a prefight interview.

Growing up in Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach, I was as passionate about basketball as baseball. I played three-on-three in the P.S. 195 schoolyard, where a friend, while playing, called our games and imitated the N.B.A. referee Sid Borgia, whose expression "Yes, and it counts!" became part of my repertory. My friend, the play-by-play announcer, later became an accountant. It's a shame. He was pretty good.

My on-the-court game was ordinary. I had a jumper but needed screens. I could go right but not left. So I was not invited to join the weekend games at the fabled court in Manhattan Beach where Connie Hawkins, Roger Brown, Alan Seiden, Barry Kramer and Artie Heyman played. So did Jack Molinas, the central figure in a point-shaving scandal that got Hawkins and Brown barred from the N.B.A. It was hard to relate to these astonishing players. Nobody had ever seen anyone like Hawkins, the way he held the ball over his head and soared to the hoop — Dr. J before Dr. J. Connie is a kind guy with a great smile. It's too bad N.B.A. fans never saw the Hawkins I saw.

I was a Knicks fan of the Kenny Sears-Carl Braun-Jim Baechtold vintage. I was even their ball boy when I was a teenager. But my feeling was that they played the season for the sole purpose of being eliminated from playoffs, which seemed to be ordained by the N.B.A. president, Maurice Podoloff. While Red Auerbach was making the Celtics a dynasty, the Knicks often selected their draft choices out of Street & Smith's annual preseason magazine.

Back then, of course, there was no pro alternative in New York to rooting for the Knicks. Now, the Nets can challenge them as they never did from Long Island, Piscataway, the swamps of New Jersey or Newark. They are finally relevant, and it should be fun to watch.

Marv Albert, the lead N.B.A. announcer for TNT, will call the Knicks-Nets game with Steve Kerr on Thursday at 7 p.m.

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If Canceled, Winter Classic Will Not Be Played

If the N.H.L. cancels the Winter Classic, it has no plans to reschedule the event for this season, even if there is a prompt settlement to the lockout, said Bill Daly, the deputy commissioner.

Responding to reports that the league will cancel the Jan. 1 game later this week, Daly wrote in a e-mail: "We aren't commenting on the timing of the Winter Classic announcement. It will (or won't) be made if and when necessary."

But he added, "I can certainly confirm that if the game is canceled, there is no 'resurrection' scenario for this year."

The Winter Classic, a regular-season showcase for the N.H.L., is scheduled to pit the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs, the first Canadian team in the Classic, at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. About 115,000 fans are expected, a world record for hockey attendance.

A spokesman for the Michigan athletic department said Monday that the university had heard nothing from the league about canceling the game.

"We haven't heard anything from the N.H.L., so as far as we're concerned, there is no change in the current status," said David Ablauf, the associate athletic director for media and public relations at Michigan.

According to the N.H.L.'s contract with the university, the league can cancel as late as the day of the game and pay only a minimal penalty. The contract does not grant the league access to the stadium for rink-building purposes until Dec. 1.

But Brian Cooper, the president of the Toronto sports management company S&E Sponsorship Group, said there were many reasons the league would need to cancel the Winter Classic as much as two months in advance.

"There are so many arrangements associated with an event of this magnitude — about 109,000 tickets have already been sold," he said. "For companies attending the game or doing business there, you've got to book hotels, transportation. There are bands playing that have to book dates. All that has to be in place six to eight weeks in advance at the latest."

Union officials have said privately that they expected the league to cancel the Winter Classic early as a pressure tactic. Last week, the league canceled games from Nov. 2 through Nov. 30, but some of those games could be restored if the lockout ends in the next couple of weeks. No negotiations are scheduled.

While the sponsorship arrangements surrounding the Winter Classic may require an early decision on cancellation, the physical setup of the rink could be done relatively late.

Rink-building preparations for last year's game at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia began Nov. 21, when workers started laying down armor decking to protect the grass field. But the year before, crews did not start building the rink at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh until after the Steelers' last home game on Dec. 23, just nine days before the Winter Classic. In 2009 at Fenway Park, rink construction began on Dec. 10.

If the league cancels the Classic before Saturday, it will forfeit $100,000 of its $3 million rental fee. If the league cancels at any point from Saturday until Jan. 1, it will forfeit the same $100,000 and whatever expenses the university incurs up to the time of cancellation.

In both cases, the university would refund the remainder of the N.H.L.'s $3 million rental fee to the league.

But while the logistics of setting up Michigan Stadium for the Winter Classic could be relatively easy, the same may not be true for as associated slate of outdoor events at Detroit's Comerica Park.

Those events include games between Red Wings and Maple Leafs alumni, as well as A.H.L., N.C.A.A. and junior games. The first of those games at the Detroit baseball stadium is scheduled for Dec. 27, with a doubleheader involving Michigan, Michigan State, Western Michigan and Michigan Tech.

The Red Wings announced Friday that the outdoor games at Comerica Park would take place only if the Winter Classic game is played.

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N.F.L. Roundup: Bills’ Mario Williams Is Optimistic on Wrist

The surgery to mend the sprained left wrist of Mario Williams, the Buffalo Bills' high-priced defensive end, appears to have also done plenty in repairing his self-confidence.

Williams was upbeat Monday in discussing how much better he felt physically and mentally after rejoining the Bills following the team's bye week, and six days after having arthroscopic surgery in Alabama.

"With this procedure, it's definitely given me a lot of hope and a different mind-set," he said. "I feel like I was stagnant. That's why I'm very excited to have been able to go clean it out and being optimistic about things."

And that includes Williams, the N.F.L.'s highest-paid defensive player, declaring himself ready to play Sunday, when the Bills travel to play the Houston Texans, Williams's former team.

Williams returned to Buffalo on Sunday, when he visited the team's facility for treatment. He was held out of practice Monday, with Coach Chan Gailey saying the plan was for Williams to be back on the field Wednesday.

"I talked to him, and he sounded very encouraged," Gailey said. "Hopefully, he doesn't miss a beat."

49ERS UPEND CARDINALS San Francisco 49ers flexed its N.F.C. West dominance with a 24-3 flattening of Arizona in Glendale.

Alex Smith completed 18 of 19 passes for 232 yards and 3 touchdowns — two to Michael Crabtree and one to Randy Moss — to help San Francisco (6-2) open a two-game lead in the division and send Arizona (4-4) to its fourth straight lost.

Smith's only incompletion was dropped by a wide-open receiver. Smith was 14 of 15 for 146 yards and two touchdowns, both to Crabtree, as the 49ers built a 17-0 halftime lead.

Moss caught a 47-yard touchdown pass, dodging tacklers down the sideline on a play that seemed to turn back the clock to the receiver's prime. With the catch, he tied Terrell Owens for fourth on the N.F.L. career touchdown list with 156.

Smith, who tied a career high with the three touchdown passes, spread out his completions to 10 receivers. Crabtree led the way with five catches for 72 yards.

Arizona's defense, supposed to be the team's strength, missed tackle after tackle in an embarrassing nationally televised performance at home. The 24 points were the most allowed by the Cardinals this season.

STORM DELAYS TRADE DEADLINE The N.F.L. moved its trade deadline back two days to Thursday because of potential complications from Hurricane Sandy.

The deadline now is 4 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, when waivers for vested veterans also begin. It is the second time the trade deadline was moved this year. After negotiations with the players union, the deadline was switched from after games of Week 6 to Oct. 30, after games of Week 8.

Traditionally, there are few trades by the teams at the deadline. The N.F.L. hoped the two-week change might result in more deals.

PAGANO ATTENDS MEETING Colts Coach Chuck Pagano made it back to the team complex for a short staff meeting Monday.

It was the first time Pagano had been back since he was found to have a form of leukemia Sept. 26. Bruce Arians, the interim coach and offensive coordinator, told reporters last week he did not expect Pagano back at the team facility for a while because doctors wanted to keep him in a sterile environment where he would not risk infection.

QUINN MAY HAVE CONCUSSION Chiefs Coach Romeo Crennel said Brady Quinn, who is being evaluated for a possible concussion, would start Thursday against the Chargers if he was cleared to play. Otherwise, Matt Cassel will be back under center.

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Jets to Use Bye Week to Hit Reset

In the ever-changing world of the N.F.L., no team is static. From week to week, it improves or regresses, nothing else. The verdict on these Jets was delivered twice, in different fashions, in the last two days.

First, in the form of a 30-9 pummeling Sunday by the Miami Dolphins, a loss that left some players humiliated, others dumbfounded but all grasping for answers. Then, in the words of their coach, Rex Ryan, who on a conference call Monday morning tacitly acknowledged that claims made a week ago after an overtime loss in New England — when he vowed that the Jets were playing much better than in their 2-2 September — were erroneous.

"We thought we're getting closer and closer," Ryan said. "We thought we were getting better as a football team. And then we had a big step back yesterday."

It is the soundtrack to the Jets' year, not just 2012 but 2011. The Jets are 11-13 since the beginning of last season and have lost 8 of their last 11 games, with several of those defeats contending for the most deflating of the Ryan era (Sunday's was the latest submission). Five have come since Sept. 16, which is why midway through this desultory season, the Jets are 3-5, in last place in the A.F.C. East and 12th in the 16-team conference, stumbling around as if blindfolded on an obstacle course.

Their offensive line is inconsistent. As is their running game. As is their quarterback, and it is all connected. The Jets' pass protection failed several times Sunday. On consecutive first-quarter plays, a punishing hit by Tony McDaniel and a sack by safety Jimmy Wilson, the Dolphins reached Mark Sanchez untouched. And even when Sanchez had time to throw, he often misfired or endured a drop: the rookie Stephen Hill muffed his second touchdown in two games against Miami.

"I think it's kind of difficult especially when you're dealing with an offense that hasn't been doing much at any position — offensive line, running back, wide receiver, tight end," Jets center Nick Mangold said when asked about the crowd's chanting Sunday for Tim Tebow. "You can't just plug somebody in and all the sudden it's going to be a magic formula and everything is going to be right. We have to correct all the issues that we have throughout the whole offense."

The bye week is upon the Jets. It is a welcome respite, a chance to recharge and repent, to study film and self-scout. Defensive tackle Sione Po'uha described the break as "a long reset," and as much as Ryan said he wanted to meet with his players this week, Hurricane Sandy will not let him. So he will trust that they use this time to their advantage, just as he said he intended to.

This week, Ryan said he would solicit opinions from his entire coaching staff. Not just small, cosmetic changes, but "radical" changes. Lineup changes, perhaps.

"I'm up for every suggestion," Ryan said.

Every suggestion? Ryan has held firm that Sanchez will remain the starting quarterback because the Jets' problems extend far beyond Sanchez's realm. "If it was one man, that's easy to do, O.K.?" Ryan said. "It's not on one person."

But imagine if, during this evaluation process, several of the Jets' coaches recommend that Ryan start Tebow instead. It is a fascinating hypothetical, but only that. Ryan is fond of saying that he will always do what is in the best interest of the team.

Extending that logic, Ryan would switch quarterbacks if he thought the move would benefit the Jets. He was asked whether the gap between Sanchez and Tebow, who has been entrusted to throw only two passes this season, is too vast to make a change. Ryan did not directly answer the question.

"Like I said, if it was one guy, I think it's easy to say we'd make that change," Ryan said. "I think Mark gives us the best chance to win. That's how I feel. Can Tim be successful? Absolutely. And we need to look at that as well."

Ryan hinted that the Jets would look to expand Tebow's role. In all fairness, it could not be much smaller. Tebow played on 5 of the Jets' 82 offensive snaps Sunday — touching the ball but once, on a 2-yard rush in the second quarter — to run his season total to 55 of 553 (10.1 percent), according to charting by the analytical Web site ProFootballFocus.

The Jets' chemistry will be tested in the coming weeks, especially if their offensive struggles put pressure on the defense. After Sunday's game, Antonio Cromartie mentioned how the Dolphins' defense dominated.

"I think that we learned last year that pointing fingers and being disgruntled doesn't help anybody, it's not going to help anybody," Mangold said. "I think we have a pretty good locker room, where we all understand that it comes down to execution. When we don't execute, we don't do good things."

As was the case Sunday. And four other times over the past six weeks.

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A Fan’s Notes: Beyond Detroit’s Economic Woes and World Series Deficits

Paul Sancya /Associated Press

While the word from Comerica Park was again bad for Tigers fans, beyond the stadium's fences there were still things to feel good about.

This is more like it. This is the kind of place that can turn a disastrous World Series around for a Detroit Tigers fan. It's called the Motor City Bar, tucked into a vale of saloons on Manhattan's Lower East Side, its walls covered with stuff guaranteed to thrum a native Detroiter's heart strings — signs for Vernor's ginger ale, the Bob-Lo Boat, the Bridge to Canada. Bolted into the bar are the chrome nameplates of Detroit cars that are music to any gearhead's ears: Torino, Galaxie and Eldorado, Skylark and Valiant. The handles to the restroom doors are steering wheels from muscle cars. The only TV in the place is a battered little box perched on the bar. Enough said.

Meeting me here for Game 3 — a must win for the Tigers — is fellow Detroiter Mark Binelli, who is about to publish a magnificent book called "Detroit City Is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis." It's a crackling rebuttal to ruin porn, those glossy coffee table books that fetishize Detroit's decay, bursting with pictures of the gutted Packard plant and Michigan Central Station and maybe, by way of piling on, a once-bustling thoroughfare like Gratiot Avenue, shot at midday, with not a car or a soul in sight, just the echoes of ghosts.

Such pictures don't lie — Detroit is bristling with photogenic ruins and empty spaces — but they tell only a fraction of the truth about the city where I grew up during its last hurrah and where Mark Binelli grew up during the first laps of its long decline. To his credit, Binelli looks beneath the clichés and writes about urban farmers, vigilantes, artists, entrepreneurs, autoworkers, activists, and a successful magnet school for pregnant teenagers and mothers. These are stories about the unquenchable energy that has convinced Binelli and me that something special is happening in our hometown, something way bigger than this so-far disappointing World Series.

In fact, as soon as the game begins and I buy a round of beers, I'm astonished to learn that Binelli, 42, has little appetite for the two staples of nearly every Detroiter's daily diet: cars and sports.

"There were a few perfunctory trips to Tiger Stadium when I was a kid because that's what Americans are supposed to do," says Binelli, the son of Italian immigrants. "I tried to make the effort to follow sports, but I was always faking it. I was never an obsessive car guy, either." He pauses as a dark thought clouds his face. "People from Detroit are going to turn against me when they find out I don't care about sports or cars."

Not likely. His book is the medicine our hometown needs right now. It's a clear-eyed look at promising recent developments, without any saccharine optimism. Amazing positive things are happening in Detroit these days. Unfortunately, they're not happening inside Comerica Park tonight. The Giants score two runs in the second inning and the Tiger bats remain as meek as the Yankee bats were a week ago during the American League Championship Series.

But I remind myself that this is, after all, just a baseball game. In his book Binelli dismisses claims that the fate of a sports team says something meaningful about a city, including this breathless slice of baloney from a CNN columnist: "History has shown that when the city's sports teams start doing well, it's a sign of healing in Detroit."

The Detroit Tigers are not doing well. As the game moves to the bottom of the ninth inning with the Giants still leading, 2-0, Binelli, a hard-wired optimist, says, "I think we're going to turn it around."

After the first two Detroit batters fly out, I say, "This was not meant to be." The final batter of the night proves me right by striking out.

Mark Binelli heads for the door with a shrug. "Sometimes," he says, "you get the feeling the fates are not aligned for these Tigers."

True words, spoken by a teller of important truths.

Bill Morris grew up in Detroit in the 1950s and '60s. He is the author of the novels "Motor City" and "All Souls' Day," and has finished another, "Vic #43," set during the 1967 Detroit riot and the Tigers' 1968 championship season.

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Premier League Deal Gives NBC 380 Soccer Games

NBC Universal's three-year deal with England's Premier League, which starts in 2013, will let the company televise up to 380 games a season on the NBC broadcast network, the NBC Sports Network and at least two other cable networks.

The Times's soccer blog has the world's game covered from all angles.

NBC Universal, which was to announce the agreement Sunday night, will pay the league $80 million to $85 million annually.

About 200 games will be available on the NBC networks in six time periods on Saturday, Sunday and Monday during the league's 10-month season. The rest will be available online or in some other packages, one of them probably pay-per-view.

"There will be live, exclusive games, and we're not going to tape delay any of them," said Mark Lazarus, the chairman of the NBC Sports Group. "Multiple games go on at once, and we can't carry every one on our networks. But we won't regionalize games."

Despite inquiries, NBC has no plans to resell any of the games to another network, as Fox Soccer now does, sublicensing about a fifth of its games to ESPN.

NBC Universal defeated a joint bid from Fox Soccer and ESPN, and another from beIN, an aggressive new network started by Al Jazeera that recently won the United States rights to carry the top leagues from Spain, Italy and France, and the American national team's World Cup qualifying road games.

"We think this is a terrific property that we can do a lot with," Lazarus said, "and the leadership of the Premier League is interested in doing new things in the United States."

NBC recently dropped out of the bidding for the rights to carry Major League Baseball when, it said, the price that was being asked would have guaranteed substantial losses.

"Baseball is a good product, and we had an appetite for it at a certain level, but the price we're paying for the Premier League is a terrific value for us," Lazarus said.

The deal gives NBC all the United States television and digital rights. Lazarus said NBC changed its offer in the second round of the two-stage bidding process, in which the league sent out a tender soliciting a plan and a bid.

"This is a product we believe in," Lazarus said. "The Premier League has struck a chord in the States. We're already involved with Major League Soccer, we found great success with soccer at the Olympics, and our company made a large investment in the FIFA World Cup for Telemundo." Telemundo and mun2 — also NBC Universal networks — will carry Premier League games.

NBCSN will be the hub of the media giant's coverage of the league, and Lazarus says he expects that its viewership will exceed that of Fox Soccer, which peaked in 2009-10 at 149,000. This season, the average is 136,000.

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Giants 4, Tigers 3, 10 Innings: Giants Sweep Tigers to Win Second World Series Title in Three Years

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Sergio Romo after striking out Miguel Cabrera to win the World Series.

DETROIT — Rain and bristly winds swirled. A hostile crowd grew feisty as the home team stirred to life. And still the San Francisco Giants remained calm. For all they had gone through in these last weeks, this was nothing.

The Giants defeated the Detroit Tigers, 4-3, over 10 tense and taut innings Sunday night to claim their second World Series title in three years. The game, played before an announced crowd of 42,152 at Comerica Park, provided a short dose of intensity to a series that felt like an anticlimax to the team's otherwise stunning postseason run. After flirting dangerously close to elimination in their two previous series, the Giants were cutthroat and businesslike against the Tigers, finishing them off in the minimum four games.

And now, this storied franchise, born in New York, packed and moved to California in 1958, has its seventh World Series title, its second since upending the Texas Rangers in five games in 2010.

"To be world champions in two out the last three years, it's amazing," Giants Manager Bruce Bochy said. "Believe me, I know how hard it is to get here, and I couldn't be prouder of a group of guys that were not going to be denied."

Bochy, 57, a former catcher with a languid mien, will be further acknowledged as one of baseball's elite tacticians. He pulled all of the necessary strings, mixing his players, keeping them afloat as they faced a two-games-to-none deficit in the Giants' National League division series and a three-games-to-one disadvantage in the league championship series. The Giants won their last seven games of the year, a feat they never accomplished during the regular season.

After the game, Jim Leyland, the manager of the Tigers, was emphatic that the trophy was in the right hands.

"Obviously there was no doubt about it, they swept us," Leyland said. "So there was certainly no bad breaks, no fluke. I tip my hat to them. Simple, they did better than we did."

Leyland and his team were left without answers after falling flat when it counted most. Their performance will produce discordant echoes of their trip to the World Series in 2006, when they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in five games. After beating the Yankees in four games the previous round, the Tigers became the third team to sweep the championship series before being swept in the World Series.

"There were a lot of beautiful things that happened this season," said Prince Fielder, who went 1 for 14 during the sweep, "and unfortunately we have to end it with a loss in the World Series."

It was a cagey confrontation, the final game, with runs appearing in sporadic bursts, all momentum undercut with swift counterpunching. The Giants jumped ahead in the second inning, but were leapfrogged by the Tigers in the third. The Giants barreled in front again during the sixth, but the Tigers tied them up in the bottom of the frame.

The starting pitchers, the Giants' Matt Cain and the Tigers' Max Scherzer, battled a chilly, windy night and stood their ground. They left the game at an impasse, but after the mound was bequeathed to the bullpens, the relief pitchers refused to bend either, sending the game into extra innings.

The game turned, finally, in the 10th. Ryan Theriot led off with a single off Phil Coke and moved to second on a sacrifice bunt. One out later, Marco Scutaro, who finished the postseason with 21 hits, looped a ball into center field. The crowd gasped as it fell for a single.

"When I saw it, I said: 'Please, get down. Don't stay up,' " Scutaro said of his hit. "When I saw it drop, it was, 'Oh my God.' What a feeling."

As the ball plopped into the outfield, Theriot raced around third and then raised his arm in triumph as he slid across home plate. In the dugout, his teammates pummeled his helmet with their fists. The title felt in their grasp.

Then one final image of the powerful Tigers' sudden futility at the plate was sealed in the bottom of the inning, when Sergio Romo, the Giants' bearded closer, struck out the side. For the last out, he set down Miguel Cabrera, winner of the league triple crown, catching him looking at an 89-mile-per-hour fastball, right down the middle of the plate.

Romo clenched his fists and pumped them in front of his chest. Seconds later, his teammates engulfed him.

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Sergio Romo Turns Up Heat on Miguel Cabrera to Seal World Series Title

DETROIT — With baseball's most dangerous hitter, the Tigers' Miguel Cabrera, at the plate, capable of tying the game with one swing, Giants reliever Sergio Romo shook his head. He was not going to go with his best pitch.

The San Francisco Giants led the Detroit Tigers by a run in the 10th inning of Game 4 of the World Series on Sunday night, and with one more strike, the Giants would win their second championship in three years. But Cabrera, the triple crown winner who had already hit a home run in the game, stood as an imposing obstacle.

With two strikes and two outs, and the Tigers fans in Comerica Park hoping Cabrera could extend the season one more inning, and perhaps one more day, Buster Posey called for what he almost always calls for from Romo: a slider.

Why not? It is Romo's best pitch, and because it is so good, he is not afraid to throw it over and over again. Posey had already called for five straight sliders to Cabrera, but Romo had other ideas. He believed that he might be able to catch the slugger by surprise on a 2-2 count.

So he shook his head.

"That guy," Posey said an hour later, shaking his own head in amazement. "He shook to a fastball there. That shows the type of guts he has and faith in what he's got. It's just a great job by him. This is not a knock, but he throws 88 or 89, but he's got a plus, plus slider."

From the bench, pitching coach Dave Righetti was intrigued, if not a bit surprised.

"I knew it wasn't a fake shake," Righetti said. "He was going to go with it."

Romo unleashed a fastball inside on Cabrera at 89 miles per hour, freezing him for strike three — the final pitch of the season. As soon as home plate umpire Brian O'Nora made the call, signaling the Tigers were 4-3 winners, Romo went into his crazy dance to celebrate his third save of the Series as Posey and the Giants ran to the mound to celebrate.

Romo inherited the closer's role late in the season as the Giants made do after the injury to their regular closer, Brian Wilson. Romo had only 14 saves this season, six of those in September. But he saved four games in the Giants' postseason run.

"He's a little man who pitches like a big man," fellow relief pitcher Javier Lopez said. "He's a small dude, but he pitches like he's 6-6, 250 pounds. And he's just got an unhittable slider."

But as Cabrera seemed to forget, Romo also has a fastball he believes in, and on this night, an unhittable one.

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Russian Auditors Scrutinize Costly Soccer Stadium

Anatoly Maltsev/European Pressphoto Agency

When Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev visited the site of a new soccer stadium in St. Petersburg, Russia, last month, he complained of a "disgraceful" lack of progress. Work began in 2007.

MOSCOW — A project to build a state-of-the-art soccer arena on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, envisioned as the jewel of Russia's stadiums when the nation holds the World Cup in 2018, now stands to be scrutinized by auditors as part of a high-level inquiry into why it has repeatedly and drastically exceeded its budget.

The government ordered the audit after soccer fans displayed their frustration by heckling St. Petersburg's governor, Georgy S. Poltavchenko, before a soccer match played by the local team, Zenit, nine days ago.

"The governor's a lout," hundreds of fans chanted repeatedly, their arms punching the air, as security guards looked on. The fans then switched to another slogan.

"Finish the stadium," fans on one end of the arena roared.

"Sell your dacha," replied the crowd from the other end, using the common word for vacation home.

The public anger is a danger signal for Russia's government, which has earmarked billions of dollars for construction ahead of the World Cup and the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. The unfinished concrete carcass in St. Petersburg has become a symbol of government mismanagement, fueling frustration with officials and threatening to grow into a political liability.

Sergei V. Stepashin, the chairman of the federal accounts chamber, announced on Friday that auditors would analyze construction expenses and any new budget increases, according to Interfax, a Russian news agency. The audit chambers of Moscow and St. Petersburg will cooperate in the investigation, he said.

In an interview with Sovetsky Sport, a Russian sports newspaper, Mr. Stepashin added that Moscow intended to pay closer attention to the project from now on. "We will not leave until the stadium is completed," he said.

The outburst against Mr. Poltavchenko was triggered by a local television interview in which he said soccer fans were welcome to offer their help in completing construction.

The comment touched a nerve with many residents, who have complained that the arena is sucking up all the government's time and resources, drawing attention from everyday services like snow removal and building renovation.

The costs of the tax-financed project have soared since it started in 2007. The St. Petersburg authorities recently asked for a further budget increase, pushing the cost to an estimated $1.4 billion, up from the initial estimate of $210 million, officials have said.

Construction began as a financial collaboration between the St. Petersburg government and Gazprom, the state natural gas company. After Gazprom pulled out of the project in 2009, the city has been responsible for the budget.

During a September visit to the site, Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev berated Mr. Poltavchenko for a "disgraceful" lack of progress. "I was here two years ago, and everything was the same," he said.

Mr. Poltavchenko has denied speculation that corruption or embezzlement may have contributed to the costs. "I have no reasons to suspect that anything was stolen," he told BaltInfo, a local news agency. Costs rose when FIFA, the international body that oversees the World Cup, asked to expand the stadium's seating areas, Mr. Poltavchenko said, and when plans were adjusted after the death of the stadium's original architect, Kisho Kurokawa, in 2007.

Still, his suggestion that St. Petersburg residents help with construction was regarded as an insult, according to a statement on the Web site of Zenit fans, Landscrona.ru. "We view these words as a striking act of impudence on behalf of individuals whose professional duties make them accountable for this city, its projects and their implementation," the statement read.

Although officials have not drawn a connection between the maneuver by St. Petersburg soccer fans and the start of the official audit of the construction project, the timing suggests the government hopes to prevent the anger from escalating any further.

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John Terry: Chelsea’s Dark Knight

David Ramos/Getty Images

Terry was ejected during last season's Champions League semifinal between Chelsea and Barcelona for kneeing a player in the back.

LONDON — John Terry has played soccer for Chelsea for 14 years, eight of them as captain, at a time when the team has never been more successful. He hates to miss a match. He plays injured. He plays hard. He plays as if every moment mattered more than every other moment. He plays with a fierceness and a focus that do not waver even when he is being baited and taunted by opposing fans, which is often the case. When he plays, even in away matches, Chelsea fans proudly unfurl a banner: "JT: Captain, Leader, Legend."

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Nick Potts/Press Association, via Associated Press

Queens Park Rangers' Anton Ferdinand, left, was racially abused by John Terry in a Premier League match in October 2011. Terry was fined and banned four matches.

One of the canniest, toughest and best defenders in English soccer, Terry is also perhaps the country's most reviled player. Even in the combustible, fiercely tribal Premier League, where the fans' unconditional love of their teams is matched only by their implacable hatred of everyone else, Terry inspires a special degree of loathing. He is the only player in the history of England's national team to be removed as captain twice. (He retired from that team, under a cloud, last month.) Even many Chelsea fans are finding it harder and harder to reconcile John Terry, the fantastic soccer player, with John Terry, seemingly major league brat.

"J. T. is an amazing leader on the football pitch," said Neil Harvey, 51, a lighting consultant who has a £900-a-year season ticket (about $1,450) to Chelsea. "But, like most people — would you want him to be your friend? No. But he's not there to be my friend."

Nothing in his roller coaster of a career has matched what happened a year ago, when, in an on-field confrontation with a black player, Terry used a racial slur during an exchange of ugly insults. The scandal ended up engulfing all of English soccer, dividing players, exposing unsavory truths about on-field behavior and disgracing Terry, his team and the Premier League. Terry was acquitted in a criminal trial, but in a scathing judgment last month, an independent tribunal called his defense "improbable, implausible and contrived," fined him £220,000 (about $354,000) and handed him a four-match ban.

The incident was merely the latest in a wearying series of unfortunate episodes.

There was the time Terry and some teammates went on a drunken binge in an airport hotel bar while passengers stranded by the 9/11 attacks watched the Twin Towers burn on television. There was the time he was charged with assault after a melee in a nightclub in which a bouncer was slashed with a broken bottle. (He was acquitted.)

There was the time he was fined £60 (about $97) after leaving his Bentley in a parking spot for the disabled while he went to a pizza restaurant; the time he was thrown out of a bar in Essex after urinating in a beer glass and dropping it on the floor; the time he was investigated, and cleared, by Chelsea after he was accused of charging an undercover reporter money to show him around Stamford Bridge, Chelsea's stadium; the time he brutally kneed a Barcelona player in the back in the Champions League semifinal last April and denied it until confronted with a videotape that proved he was lying; and the time when he violated the players' unwritten code of loyalty by, it seemed, cheating on his wife not with a groupie in a bar, but with the estranged girlfriend of one of his teammates.

"He's a walking disaster," said Mark Perryman, a research fellow in sport and leisure culture at the University of Brighton and the author of "Ingerland: Travels With a Football Nation." Using English slang for hooligan, he said: "He's been caught out serially, and that makes him a yob — but that doesn't make him a bad footballer. It makes him a bad role model."

The Chelsea club did not make Terry available for an interview for this article.

Britain's newspapers mostly fell out of love with Terry a long time ago (in headlines, The Daily Mail flatly calls him things like "the serial brawler, drinker and womanizer John Terry"), and the Football Association ruling was seen as a disgrace too far. "John Terry and Ashley Cole have shamed Chelsea and embarrassed English football," The Observer of London said in an editorial, referring to a Chelsea teammate whose defense of Terry, the tribunal said, was a lie.

'A One-Club Man'

He had promise from the beginning. Anyone who knows Terry says that he lives and breathes soccer and that it has always been that way, since he was a boy kicking a ball around the rough streets of Barking in East London. His father was a forklift operator in a wood yard who was never good enough to play soccer professionally, but played for a local amateur team and encouraged John and his older brother, Paul, to aim higher (Paul Terry now plays for Thurrock, a lower-division team). Money was tight. Terry's father started work at 6 a.m., got home at 6 p.m., drove the boys to soccer and got home to dinner at 10. Soccer was a lifeline and a ticket out for an aggressively unacademic child like Terry.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 27, 2012

An earlier version of this article mistakenly identified Vanessa Perroncel as Veranika Perroncel.

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N.F.L. Teams Are Beating Odds This Season in Mounting Improbable Comebacks

Brian Billick once received as a gift a book by Knute Rockne. Rockne, who developed a passing offense that helped ignite football's early appeal, wrote that if coaches had to choose between a good offense and a good defense, they should always choose offense, said Billick, a former Baltimore Ravens coach and current NFL Network and Fox analyst. Rockne's reasoning resonates even 80 years after his death: with a good offense, a team is never out of a game.

He might be shocked at the drastic changes on offense — and the relatively recent rules to enhance it — since he revolutionized the shift. But it seems Rockne forecast the heart-pounding results it has wrought this season.

Big, unlikely comebacks, in which teams overcame chances of winning of no better than 1 in 10, have occurred about twice as often so far this season as they did in the previous dozen seasons, according to statistics compiled by Brian Burke of AdvancedNFLstats.com. Twenty percent of the games in the first seven weeks of the 2012 season had a comeback factor of 10 or more, meaning a team overcame at least a 1-in-10 chance of winning at some point in the game; only 11 percent of the games from 2000 to 2011 featured such turnarounds. Ten percent of the games this season had a comeback factor of 20 or more, meaning a team overcame at least a 1-in-20 chance of winning, but only 5 percent did so from 2000 to 2011.

"There's no being safe anymore," said Herman Edwards, who as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles was part of a most improbable comeback in 1978, when he returned a fumble against the Giants for a victory that became known as the Miracle in the Meadowlands.

"All it takes is a couple throws now. If you don't have guys in the back end of the defense that can play the ball down the field, you've got problems. It's either a 50-yard pass interference, or the ball is going to be caught. Then they've got you."

Burke created the comeback factor statistic based on the victorious team's lowest point in its probability of winning the game. The win probability of a game in progress considers the score, time remaining, field position, down and distance, based on a mathematical model built on outcomes of N.F.L. games from recent seasons. The higher the comeback factor, the bigger the comeback.

Indianapolis's comeback from an 18-point halftime deficit against Green Bay had a comeback factor of 20. Detroit's victory after trailing the Eagles by 10 points with five minutes remaining in regulation earned a comeback factor of 16.67. Denver's victory over San Diego after trailing by 24-0 at halftime gave the Broncos a comeback factor of 33, the highest so far this season. The Giants' comeback victory over Washington with a 77-yard touchdown pass to Victor Cruz with 1 minute 13 seconds to play had a comeback factor of only 11, but that factor was 20 for their victory over Tampa Bay in September, when the Giants trailed by 14 early in the third quarter.

The Jets' epic overtime win over the Miami Dolphins in 2000 after trailing, 30-7, at the start of the fourth quarter earned a comeback factor of 100. That game was an outlier, though, for its absurdity — Jets offensive lineman Jumbo Elliott caught a touchdown pass — and especially for its era. According to Burke's figures, in the entire 2000 season, including playoff games, only 10 games had a comeback factor of at least 20. Through seven weeks this season, there have been nine.

The sudden surge in the most improbable outcomes, coaches, players and analysts said, can be explained by an amalgam of factors, many of which stem from the migration of the no-huddle and spread offenses from college football to the N.F.L., and the years quarterbacks have trained in that style before they turn professional.

The Broncos' recent comeback was constructed the old-fashioned way, on the back of five second-half turnovers, including three interceptions and two fumbles on sacks of Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers. The Colts' comeback began with an interception of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Turnovers are undoubtedly more plentiful as offenses — even those with healthy leads — continue to throw the ball throughout games. But the required explosions for big comebacks are also enhanced because teams pass more often between the numbers, forcing linebackers and safeties, who get little practice tackling during the week, to tackle receivers in open space. One missed tackle in such a situation, and a 10-yard gain could turn into 20 yards or, in the case of Cruz, who ran untouched between the Redskins' bracket coverage, a 77-yard touchdown.

Greg Cosell, who analyzes game video as a senior producer at NFL Films, said huge comebacks were more possible now because offenses had regained control after several years of having defenses nudge ahead by using unusual pressure concepts and substitution packages. The widespread use of the no-huddle offense this season dictates what defenses can do — they substitute less often and wear down — and essentially turns the entire game into a two-minute drill.

"You have so many young quarterbacks who are used to scoring enormous amounts of points in college," said Clyde Christensen, the Colts' quarterbacks coach. "For kids in a spread offense, a 21-point deficit doesn't intimidate them anymore. So many more teams are more up-tempo now. It's hard to get fresh pass rushers on the field. By the fourth quarter, the pass rush has slowed down considerably. It's hard to hold off a fourth-quarter charge. And the more no-huddle you've been in, it makes you a good two-minute team."

The two-minute drill, Burke said, is nearly a thing of the past. Teams can, and do, score much faster than that, in part because clock management has become more efficient. When the New England Patriots, who run the fastest no-huddle in the league, needed a drive to tie the score at the end of regulation against the Jets last Sunday, it took them three plays after the kickoff to move inside the Jets' 35.

But even teams that do not run a no-huddle practice a hurry-up offense regularly. The Giants are one of them, and it is no surprise that Eli Manning has 23 fourth-quarter comebacks in his career.

"We're not a team that gets nervous or we're going to get scared to be in that moment," Manning said last week. "It feels like when we are behind or we are down, we seem to excel, which is a great quality, and I think we've got to take that same quality when we're ahead. You have a lead, you've got to protect it, and we've got to keep that same mentality that 'Let's attack, let's go, let's win the game right here.' "

Christensen felt the momentum swing against Green Bay from the Colts' sideline, even though they came back methodically. Watching on television as Peyton Manning led a Denver touchdown drive to open the second half against the Chargers, followed quickly by a fumble return for a touchdown, Christensen said, "I thought: 'Oh boy, here it comes. They're going to have trouble stopping this thing.' "

"I think the hardest thing to do in sports is to preserve a lead," Christensen said. "Defenses get more conservative. How many times do you say, 'They've been blitzing,' then here comes soft coverage, and short completions, and you start moving it down the field."

More and more this season than ever before.

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