Baseball (2 page)

I
n 1958, the St. Louis Cardinals made a barnstorming trip to Japan on the golden anniversary of the first visit by two major league squads. Among the Cardinals' entourage was Stan Musial, about to turn thirty-eight, old by baseball standards, but still exhibiting his characteristic smile and convoluted batting stance.

In the city of Tokyo was a seventeen-year-old prospect named Sadaharu Oh, the son of a Chinese noodle shop operator and a Japanese mother. Oh was already Japan's best-known high school player. His batting coach, Tetsuharu Kawakami, strongly suggested that Oh adapt Musial's coiled stance. “Hitting is with your hip, not with your hand,” said Kawakami, who had won five batting titles in Japan.

With the obstinacy of a seventeen-year-old, Oh declined. Several years later, on the brink of failure that was partially self-induced through his excesses and hardheadedness, Oh would submit to his guru. With the hope of salvaging his career, Oh would accept an even more idiosyncratic posture—“the flamingo stance,” the Japanese would call it. He would raise his front leg, the right one, forcing his weight and power to his back foot. The new stance had its roots in the twisted Musial position.

That earnest trip in 1958 was regarded as something of a failure by Musial, who hit only two home runs for the adoring Japanese fans. “I was tired, worn out after the regular season,” Musial would recall thirty years later. “I'm sorry they couldn't have seen me earlier.” Yet the trip by the Cardinals would help produce the greatest home run hitter in the history of baseball, as Sadaharu Oh would eventually hit 868 home runs.

Years later, Musial and Oh would meet, shake hands, and bow to each other, left-handed sluggers from opposite shores, comrades in unorthodoxy.

This is the beauty of baseball. Everything is connected, either by statistic or anecdote or theory or history or the infallible memory
of a fan who was there, who saw it, who can look it up. It is possible to sit in the ballpark (not the stadium, not the arena, but the ballpark, a homey title claimed only by baseball) and, during the process of one game, watch several overlapping games, overlapping generations and histories, all at once. The grandson, if he is not looking around for the hot dog vendor, may see Ichiro Suzuki slap a double into the corner. The grandfather may be thinking of how Stan Musial used to smack doubles just like that.

—

The American playwright John Guare is known for his enduring play
Six Degrees of Separation
, based on a theory that there are no more than six layers between any two people on the planet. Guare was not talking about baseball, but he could have been. The so-called American game has existed in a straight and highly detectable line since the 1840s—and backward into earlier times on other continents.

The game is perpetuated in raucous living museums, many of them in the center of cities, on a continent just beginning to have some history to it. Some cities have been playing other cities for a long time now, by American standards. These old places contain triumphs and resentments, nowhere near the rivalries of the old city-states of Europe, but the beginning of history, at the very least.

The hearts of the fans contain memories of something horrible that happened in 1908, or 1940, or maybe even last week. No other American sport has so many ancient joys and sorrows. It sounds overbearingly cutesy when sportswriters in Boston refer to the Red Sox as Ye Olde Towne Team, yet in that marvelous October of 2004 the Sox labored under a cloud of communal frustration dating back to 1918 when Babe Ruth pitched the Sox to a championship, and was soon sold to the New York Yankees. When the Sox went on their memorable eight-game romp in 2004, you could hear the brass band of a century earlier: a local rock group had resurrected “Tessie,” the anthem of the very first World Series of 1903. Base-ball's history echoed in vibrant Fenway Park as well as the crooked streets and anarchic traffic of Boston.

Baseball fans know these links, discuss them in dens and bars and
playgrounds and even at contemporary ballparks—that is, when they can be heard above the god-awful din of the modern sound system. These memories are much more than trivia or statistics; they are a way of keeping history alive.

The sport has a timeless feel to it, as if it has always been here. That is because each game is unfettered by the tyranny of a stopwatch, as anybody will attest who has ever held car keys in hand, poised in an exit portal, only to witness a nine-inning game suddenly lurch into extra innings. I am thinking here of a marathon I once covered as a young reporter in 1962, the first year of Casey Stengel's Amazing Mets, who very quickly established themselves as the Worst Team in the History of Baseball, capital letters and all. On a chilly spring night, the Mets played the equally wretched Chicago Cubs in extra innings. The game seemed interminable— refreshment stands were closed down, children were fast asleep on their parents' laps, and fans were beginning to dread getting up for work in the morning. As I sat in the stands to savor the mood of this horrendous new team so gloriously born in New York, I heard one fan say to another, “I hate to go—but I hate to stay.” Those words seemed to sum up the morbid compulsion that keeps fans in their seats, quite unable to leave this silly game.

The absence of a clock is matched by the perfection of the calendar. The season begins in the hopefulness of early spring and it flourishes in the heat of the summer and then it breaks hearts in the nippy evenings of late October.

Plus, they play it every day. No other sport in the world can match baseball for constant adventures, new results. All around the world, at every moment, there are compelling sports events, many of them presented on multiple television channels—soccer goals rocketing into the net in Rio, basketballs dunked in Shanghai, nifty putts in Madrid, dazzling backhands in Melbourne, gaudy touchdowns in Dallas, vehicles whizzing across finish lines in Monte Carlo or Daytona. But only baseball summons the same cast of characters to return, a few hours after the end of the previous game.

“Let's play two,” chirped Ernie Banks of the Cubs, who had often played two or even three games a day in the Negro Leagues and
became an icon in the major leagues for his celebration of the daily ritual.

No other sport has this endurance. American football players must go back into their bunkers to receive six days of drills before their bodies heal enough to play again. Likewise, basketball, soccer, and hockey players cannot play every day. Yet barring injuries, baseball regulars are expected to start in 140 or 150 games out of a total of 162, with starting pitchers expected to throw once every five days.

The result of this regularity is a delightful soap opera that airs virtually seven days a week. The player who muffed a fly ball last night or stole a base or made an incredible catch must go back out there today, in front of fans who reward him or revile him for events only a few hours old.

These daily games seep into the consciousness of citizens who insist they have stopped paying attention to baseball. People say they became disillusioned at their favorite team's defection to another town or the serial labor shutdowns of the past generation, and they claim they would rather watch pro football or stock cars going around in circles, or whatever. They declare they are turned off by high salaries as well as the steroid generation that saw bulked-up sluggers whacking home runs at an unprecedented rate, but the reality is that baseball has survived gambling plots, outlaw leagues, racial segregation, depressions, world wars, the early death of a stunning number of its heroes, financial failures of teams, inept ownerships, the bad taste of its sponsors and networks, blundering commissioners, inroads by other sports. It endures.

—

Stan Musial is a perfect example of baseball's great depth of living genealogy. In recent years, Musial's radiant excellence has been squeezed by the reverence for Babe Ruth as well as Musial's two more mystical contemporaries, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, and Musial has also been somewhat obscured by the great outfielders who came along in his wake—Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente.

Yet for fans of the 1940s and 1950s, Stan Musial was a beloved figure who played 22 seasons and batted .331, a high success ratio in a sport that acknowledges daily failure. He was of average size for his generation—six feet tall, a supple 175 pounds, and more inclined to grin than to glower. Stanley Frank Musial was a child of his times, straight out of the great American Depression. His father, Lukasz, a Polish immigrant, had worked in the zinc mines in Donora, Pennsylvania, in the worst days of the murderous smog of the Ohio River valley, grateful to be working in the aftermath of the great stock market collapse of 1929. Lukasz wanted his son to attend college but the boy insisted on signing with the massive minor league system of the St. Louis Cardinals. His career, his life, would touch a century of American history.

• Baseball was never more the national game than when these desperate young men, bound to the Cardinals by a Supreme Court–endorsed reserve clause contract, played survival-of-the-fittest games. Branch Rickey, perhaps baseball's most creative executive, had salted away hundreds of Depression-era youths in tiny rural towns, in his so-called farm system. These migrant workers in frayed hand-me-down flannel uniforms were the equivalent of the Joads in Steinbeck's
  The Grapes of Wrath
  , although a few actually made it to the majors. The upward mobility of American youth—an athlete in the purest, most unthreatening form—has always been part of American mythology. Even in the worst moments of the Depression, people sought cheap entertainment at the movies, or the local ballpark. Family farms were failing but Branch Rickey's farms were thriving.
  

• Young Musial became just another body, a sore-armed pitcher due to be replaced by some other eager recruit. But his minor league manager, Dickie Kerr, had seen him swing a bat. Kerr knew a thing or two about this game. In the 1919 World Series, Kerr had won two games while some of his fabled Chicago
  White Sox teammates had mysteriously under-performed as part of an odious gambling scandal. Revered as a symbol of honesty, yet working in the low minor leagues, Kerr converted Musial from a failing pitcher to a promising slugger. In Kerr's later years, Musial would buy him a house, to repay him for his encouragement.
  

• Joining the Cardinals' major league team late in 1941, Musial would eventually match a retired gent named George Sisler as the greatest left-handed hitter ever to represent St. Louis. Sisler, who had been discovered by Branch Rickey at the University of Michigan, had played for the other team in St. Louis, the Browns, who would ultimately be run out of town by Mu-sial's Cardinals.
  

• Musial was on the winning side against Ted Williams's Red Sox, in the 1946 World Series, when all the men, at least the lucky ones, were back from World War Two. In 1947, Rickey, by then running the Brooklyn Dodgers, would bring up Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player of the century, and the balance of power would immediately change. Because of the skill of their black players, the Dodgers would supplant the Cardinals as the premier team of the National League, and Musial would never play in another World Series.
  

• Musial kept slashing hits right through the 1963 season, when he retired at the age of forty-two, replaced during the next season by Louis Clark Brock, who personified the alertness and speed that had characterized the Negro Leagues. Brock would break records for stolen bases, helping the Cardinals win three pennants in the next five years. Musial, a civic treasure in gracious retirement, would giggle and say the Cardinals were winning because they finally got themselves a good left fielder.
  

• The first great hitter of St. Louis, George Sisler, modest and sedate, had been eclipsed by Musial and other hitters until 2004,
  when his record for hits in a major league season was threatened by another left-handed hitter: Ichiro Suzuki, formerly with the Orix Blue Wave of Japan. Playing for the Seattle Mariners, a team that had not existed in the time of Sisler or the time of Musial, a team owned by Japanese merchants of the electronic game Nintendo, Ichiro was the perfect ballplayer for the new age of the Pacific Rim. In that worldly city where people shop for fish and rice in Asian supermarkets, Ichiro's aura was of a master craftsman who was respected by the hometown fans, as Sisler had been in one generation, and Musial had been in another. The great players have a way of being unique, yet after fifteen decades of baseball they also have a way of fitting a pattern.
  

The spectacle of baseball is ancient. When settlers in America's Northeast romped through a game of town ball, an early version of baseball, they did it in close proximity to walls and windows, roofs and chimneys, flowers and gardens.

Baseball is as urban as sparring gladiators in the Colosseum, fighting each other, fighting lions, the scent of terror and failure and blood sickly-sweet in the air. Baseball is as urban as bearbaiting on the south bank of the Thames, a spectacle that competed for shillings with the words of Shakespeare and Jonson.

Nowadays in glittering and brutally noisy ballparks in the center of cities, fans scream as if life were at stake, urging pitchers to throw blazing fastballs within inches of the batters' chins. This is not some bucolic pastime, even when Willie Mays or Ken Griffey, Jr., is chasing a line drive in some downtown meadow.

In North America, baseball lives in the framework of a century of performance and legend, duly recorded. Whenever a player makes a mental mistake in a vital game, fans and broadcasters and writers (although not the players, who are rarely students of the game) still bring up the memory of poor Fred Merkle, a nineteen-year-old rookie who got a rare chance to play and helped cost the New York Giants a pennant because he neglected to step on second base. This was in 1908, mind you. Merkle's name still comes up today.

—

The game survives on its oral tradition. What else do you do at the ballpark but chatter for two or three or four hours? In rural America, people sat on their front porches and whittled with their knives and talked to each other. In ballparks, fans and players and commentators still have time to play with words and ideas and memories. Some fans debate the fine points of strategy, while others compare Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds, Ty Cobb and Pete Rose, Sadaharu Oh and Henry Aaron, Wee Willie Keeler and Ichiro Suzuki, as if they had seen them all play. Stumpy ornery Earl Weaver in Baltimore in the 1970s reminded people of nobody more than stumpy ornery John J. McGraw in Baltimore in the 1890s.