Better to spare yourself riches for the moment you will need them most.

Maddon meditates, laughs at himself, digs beatnik jive and many days offers a reasonable and entertaining facsimile of Jack Kerouac in cleats. He has no less of an ego, however, than the next homo sapiens. After Game 6, he stoutly defended using Chapman and said he expected “more of the same” from the fastballer in Game 7. So when Chapman loped in from the bullpen in the eighth inning on Wednesday night, the Indians could be forgiven for fearing that they had been tied to the tracks as the Erie Lackawanna freight train rumbled through.

Except they flipped the train over. Chapman gave up a run-scoring double. Then up came the 36-year-old outfielder Rajai Davis, who chokes up on his bat and battles. Chapman kept tossing and Davis kept hacking, like a man chopping with a machete at a dense thicket of underbrush.

Finally, Davis uncoiled and whacked a home run into the left-field stands. Just like that, a World Series that had seemed Chicago’s for the taking was tied at 6-6.

Afterward, I asked Maddon: Would you rethink your use of Chapman? He shrugged: Not really. “Listen, I think barroom conversations are great,” he said. “I used to hang out at Bellhops back in Hazleton, and we used to talk about stuff all night long.”

He looked at me. “But sometimes people forget both sides are good.”

Maddon’s best moves this night were born of desperation. After Davis’s homer, his batters fought back and scored still more runs, taking the lead in the 10th inning. Shorn of relievers, Maddon called in Carl Edwards Jr., a 6-foot-3, 170-pound rookie who was picked in the 48th round of the 2011 draft and was known as the String Bean Slinger in the minor leagues. Edwards is from Prosperity, S.C., and his parents, fiancée and baby daughter were in the crowd in Cleveland.