Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (15 page)

The wives of the three friends apparently accept their husbands’ zealotry and their arcane closed company; indeed, they have no choice, since they cannot enter it on anything like even terms, and none of them, in truth, is much of a fan. Max and Sissi Lapides used to go to several games together each year, but then during one Yankee game, with the score tied at 6–6 in the eighth inning, Max noticed that his wife was quietly reading a book under her program, and it was thenceforth agreed that their interests in the pastime were not really comparable. Sue Shapiro is an admitted front-runner, who gets excited about the Tigers only when they are doing well. “Don is a fan,” she said recently. “It’s a fact of his life, so I have no trouble with it at all.”

The game at Bert’s house glides along, with the Tigers leading the Orioles by 4–1 after the fifth, and everything apparently in hand; the lighted figures move distantly on the screen, the room deepens in shadow, and the men lean back in their big chairs and let the baseball lull them. There is nothing to be concerned about except Kaline’s average (computed today by Bert on a pocket calculator), and now, after his second unsuccessful trip to the plate, the figures slip at last to .2994788, and Al Kaline is no longer a lifetime .300 man. It is sad; this may be Kaline’s last year. Then, a bit later, Eddie Brinkman singles, and Tiger first-base coach Dick Tracewski slaps him on the rump as he stands on the bag. Max Lapides says, “I wonder who holds the lifetime record for handing out most pats on the ass.”

“It has to be Crosetti,” Bert says instantly. “All those years he stood there in the third-base box for the Yankees and slapped all those big guys as they came around. He must be ahead by thousands.”

“A true piece of baseball trivia!” Max shouts.

“You can’t
say
‘baseball trivia,’” Don says. “It’s a contradiction in terms. It’s antithetical. We don’t use the word ‘trivia.’”

“OK, then,” Max says. “OK—how about ‘A Compendium of Little-Known Facts’?”

We cannot quite leave these friends here—three aging men, laughing together still, but too comfortable with their indoor, secondhand sport, and too much like the rest of us. Perhaps this sort of unremarkable fandom is what is ahead for them now; perhaps not. Bert Gordon, who worries about his health, goes to fewer and fewer night games. “You get older,” he says. “It gets colder.” Max Lapides, much happier in his Chicago job than he was in the old one in Detroit, has less time to call Bert with a baseball stumper in the middle of the morning. “I’m beginning to change a little,” he confessed recently. “Sometimes I even put an old player on the wrong team by a year or two. I sometimes think that after the big years of ’67 and ’68 I couldn’t really stay intense
all
summer about the Tigers if they were playing under-.500 ball again. I’m looking at it all from farther off, I guess.” The Lapides family now lives in Highland Park, Illinois, where the new school year is just beginning; by next April the late Tiger scores will bother Max a little less. The Tigers, in any case, have just about slipped from contention for this year; now in third place, behind Baltimore and Boston, they trail the division-leading Orioles by seven games—a margin that, according to Bert’s calculator, will require them to play at an .864 clip throughout September (plus a helpful Baltimore slump to a .500 level) in order to bring about another miracle. The friends have also lost Billy Martin, who, despite their stamp of approval, was recently fired as the manager of the Tigers. It’s been a hard season. No matter; these three men should be remembered in full summer, and at their home ball park, for it is there that they, like a few other great fans in other cities, made their game into something resembling a private work of art. It is a modest genre, to be sure, and terribly dated now, but still perhaps not one to be put aside too quickly. At the very least, these gentle prodigals have used their sport to connect themselves to their fathers and to their boyhood and to their city—the inner city that they long since lost and left—and also to connect themselves to friends with whom they could share a passion, a special language, and an immense private history. Baseball has been a family to them.

Don Shapiro, perhaps the most intricate of the three, may be the only one who will not change—the last to give up that mad, splendid hope of one absolutely perfect season: one hundred and sixty-two straight wins for his Tigers. Late last May, Don went to a night game against the Oakland A’s, and after eight and a half innings the score still stood at 0–0. Mickey Stanley led off the ninth for the Tigers with a single, and Gates Brown came up to bat. “He’s got to bunt. He’s
got
to!” Don said, watching the field intently. “He’s got to bunt, but he can’t. Just wait and see.” He was right; Brown swung away and singled to right, sending Stanley to third, as vast sounds of joy rose in the night. Oakland changed pitchers, and Duke Sims struck out. Tony Taylor batted for Cash, and on the one-and-two count Stanley set sail for the plate at full career, and Taylor, bunting on the suicide squeeze, fouled the ball off and was out.

“I don’t
believe
it!” Don cried hoarsely. “They’ve lost their minds down there! They’re trying to kill me. They’re doing it on purpose. If they don’t do it, I’ll have to kill myself.”

Dick McAuliffe then struck out, taking the called third strike without moving his bat from his shoulder, and the rally and the inning ended. Don, who had been standing and clutching his temples, now sat down and buried his head in his arms. He shuddered, and at last forced himself to look out at the emerald field. “If we lose, this is the worst game I ever saw,” he announced.

Following the Tigers has not become any easier since this report was written. Kaline and Cash and Northrup and McAuliffe and other stalwarts have departed; the team finished third in its division in 1973, and dead last in 1974 and 1975. Thanks to some new stars like Ron LeFlore and Mark Fidrych, they moved up to fifth place in 1976 but finished twenty-four games behind the division-winning Yankees. The three great fans, it is comforting to report, have changed much less than their team. Max Lapides, now entirely at home in Chicago, has not turned to the White Sox or the Cubs for solace. He follows the Tigers as best he can, sometimes calling Bert for a good long catch-up on the team, and he goes to every Tiger game within reach. Two years ago, in June, he arranged things so that he was able to drive to Milwaukee and back on three successive days—a total of more than five hundred miles—to watch a Tigers-Brewers series. The Tigers lost the first game, 8–4; on the second day, they dropped a doubleheader, 5–0 and 4–2; they also lost the last game, 5–4. President Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, thus relieving Bert Gordon of one of his self-imposed morning tasks; the last reading on Bert’s calculator showed that Mr. Nixon had surrendered 30.62970 percent of his White House tenancy. Bert’s other vigil ended in October 1974, when Al Kaline retired. Shortly before game-time on the afternoon of the Tigers’ final home game that year, Bert suddenly realized that he was missing his last chance to see Kaline in action. He jumped in his car and raced for Tiger Stadium. He turned on the car radio and heard Ernie Harwell describe Kaline’s first turn at bat in the game; he parked in his regular lot and was hurrying across Michigan Avenue to the ball park when he heard the crowd roar that greeted Kaline’s second appearance. Bert went in and happily took his seat, and for an inning or two he did not notice that Kaline had left the lineup after that second time up—left it for good. “I got up and went home,” Bert said later. “There wasn’t even anybody there I could
tell
about it. It was the story of my life.” The next morning, in his office, he punched out the final Kaline numbers: 10,116 at-bats, 3007 hits, for a lifetime batting average of .2972518.

Since then, Bert has suffered the diminution of Cesar Gutierrez at the hands of Rennie Stennett, and one day last summer, when he was idly skimming the box scores, it suddenly came to him that Ed Figueroa, the Yankee pitcher, has all five vowels in his
last
name. “Goodbye, Aurelio,” Bert wrote in a letter to Max. “I still can’t believe the whole thing.”

Don Shapiro gave up on the Tigers in the terrible season of 1975, when they lost 102 games and finished 37
½
games behind the division-leading Red Sox. “I hated myself,” he says, “but I couldn’t help it. They were literally killing me.” Last year, when the young Tigers suddenly began knocking off the Yankees and the champion Red Sox in surprising fashion, Don allowed himself to be won back. He called me late in the summer and told me that he and Bert were going to Tiger Stadium that night. “This Mark Fidrych is pitching,” he said, “and he’s got a little color, you know. At least, I think he does—we’re not used to that sort of thing here in Detroit, so it’s hard to tell. And Ralph Houk [the incumbent Detroit manager] is so lackluster that it has this deadening effect on everybody, especially me. But I’m getting optimistic again, I think. I really am. The fires are being stoked.”

*
Bert Gordon’s pleasure in the Gutierrez miracle was expunged on September 16, 1975, when Rennie Stennett, second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, went seven for seven against the Chicago Cubs, in a game at Wrigley Field that the Pirates won by the score of 22–0. Gutierrez had set his mark in a twelve-inning game, but Stennett’s seven straight hits—four singles, two doubles, and a triple—came in the regulation distance; actually, Stennett wrapped up his day’s work in
eight
innings, and then was allowed to sit out the ninth. The next day, Stennett singled on his first two trips to the plate and then at last popped out, after nine straight safeties. The first (and only other) seven-for-seven performance was achieved in 1892 by Wilbert Robinson, of the Baltimore Orioles, which was at that time a National League club. Gutierrez—as Bert now sometimes murmurs to himself—still holds the American League consecutive-hit record for one game.

October 1973

A
LL SPORTING MEMORIES ARE
suspect—the colors too bright, the players and their feats magnified in our wishful recapturing. The surprising rally or splendid catch becomes incomparable by the time we fight free of the parking lot, epochal before bedtime, transcendental by breakfast. Quickly, then, before we do damage to the crowded and happy events of the late summer and early autumn, it should be agreed that this was not absolutely the best of all baseball years. The absorbing, disheveled seven-game World Series that was won by the defending Oakland A’s, who had to come from behind to put down the tatterdemalion Mets, was probably not up to the quality of the seven low-scoring games contested by the A’s and the Cincinnati Reds last year, or even comparable to three or four other classics we have been given in the past dozen Octobers. As for the Mets, the general rejoicing over their deserved victory in their league did not match the passions or disbelief of 1969, when the Amazin’s did it all first and better; these 1973 Mets finished their season with a won-lost percentage of .509, the lowest ever recorded by a winner or demiwinner in either league. Not a vintage year, then, but not a vapid one by any means. Both the league playoffs went to the full five games, as they did last year, with the Orioles and the Reds going down bitterly at the very end. The unforgiving brevity of these Championship Series, which can sink a proud summer flagship in the space of three unlucky afternoons, is just beginning to be understood by the players, who now look on them with far more concern and apprehension than they do the World Series. It was during the playoffs, it will be remembered, when the Mets’ and Reds’ squads threw themselves to scuffling and punching in the infield dirt, when showers of trash came out of the left-field stands of Shea Stadium, and when the Met fans, at the very pinnacle of their joy, fell into hysteria and violence. All of this, to be sure, made for some wonderfully eventful and discussable days and weeks—a time in which baseball almost seemed to return to its central place in our autumn attention.

There were many fresh discoveries and speculations to be found in the season’s statistics. Nolan Ryan, the California Angels’ fireballing right-hander, and an ex-Met (
there’s
a speculation!), struck out 383 batters, to erase (by one whiff) Sandy Koufax’s old one-season record. The White Sox, early leaders in the American League West, collapsed after an injury to their star slugger, Dick Allen, and attained a startling low when two of their pitchers, Wilbur Wood and Stan Bahnsen, became twenty-game losers in the same season. The Yankees, leading their division at the All-Star Game break, lost drearily and implacably through August and September, and finished seventeen games off the pace; in the end, they also lost not only their manager, Ralph Houk, who resigned and moved along, probably to pilot the Tigers next season, but their ball park, which will be closed for alterations for the next two years. Suddenly the poorest of poor cousins, the Yankees will now have to share Shea Stadium with the National League Champion Mets—their first clear shot at likableness in forty years.

The season-long assault mounted by Hank Aaron against Babe Ruth’s lifetime total of 714 home runs—perhaps the most widely memorized figure in baseball—utterly captivated the sporting press. Aaron’s progress was so numbingly over-reported that the real news was not his season-ending total of 713, one shy of the Babe, but the fact that he was able to function at all on the field in the presence of a hovering daily horde of newsmen, network camera crews, photographers, publicity flacks, souvenir hunters, advertising moguls, league officials, and other assorted All-American irritants and distracters. All those magazine cover stories, wire-service bulletins, and breathlessly updated daily figures were curious indeed, because Aaron’s splendid consistency at the plate and his remarkable athletic longevity have made his arrival at the sacred plateau very nearly inevitable for the past two or three years. Since there was no immediate time element in this particular achievement, the story had none of the tension and excitement of, say, Roger Maris’s attack on Ruth’s one-season mark of sixty homers. The next couple of clicks on the Aaron meter will come in April or May, then, and the only cause for concern will be whether the new numbers and the old hoopla will not somehow again obscure the kind of man and the kind of ballplayer Hank Aaron is. Observers back from the Atlanta tent show have told me that Aaron sustained a three-month-long attack on his privacy and concentration with absolute patience and good humor. Playing under these conditions, at the age of thirty-nine, he enjoyed an exceptional season at the plate—40 home runs and a batting average of .301. Skipping the second games of doubleheaders and afternoon games played after night games, he struck his 40 round-trippers in only 392 official at-bats—a rate of production exceeded only six times in baseball history. Let it be noted, too, that Aaron and Ruth and Willie Mays, who retired last month with 660 homers to his credit, are the only three ballplayers to attain even 600 lifetime home runs; the next nearest, Harmon Killebrew, is more than a hundred back of Mays, with 546. Aaron’s over-.300 season—his fourteenth in twenty years in the majors—was achieved despite a miserable start; from June 15 on, he batted .354. A wonderful year, then, but very nearly an ordinary one for Hank Aaron. His cumulative home-run totals have been ticked off, year after year, with almost machinelike regularity. Never hitting as many as 50 in a single season, he has averaged (since his first three warm-up seasons) very close to 36 or 37 per year for every three-year span over the past seventeen seasons; that level is actually up a bit in the past five years, when he has averaged 40 per year. To look at this another way, he notched his 100-homer marks in his fourth, seventh, tenth, thirteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth summers. Next summer, his twenty-first (showing us, as always, the perfect daily temperament for this most daily of all sports, and that familiar grooved, elegant, iron-wristed, late,
late
swing), he not only will pass the Babe in homers but will probably also move up to first place in times at bat and runs batted in, adding these to his present records of most extra-base hits and most total bases. What else? Well, one more statistic: Hank Aaron, soon to possess the No. 1 record attainable in his sport, also ranks No. 1 alphabetically; his is the very first name on the all-time roster of the thousands and thousands of players recorded in big-league box scores. Figuring the odds against
that
meaningless wonder should take us all a good way along toward spring training.