Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (17 page)

When I caught up with the Mets again the next afternoon (this time via a tiny TV set perched in a corner of a Union News Company stand in Baltimore’s dusty, ancient Pennsylvania Station), they were engaged in another character-builder, once again leading by a bare 1–0 in the seventh. The pitcher was Matlack, who looked even more commanding than Seaver had the day before; his fastball was riding in on the fists of the right-handed Cincinnati batters, and he was pouring over some scimitarlike curves as well. Between innings, I exchanged glances with some fellow Met freaks in the little crowd of standees, and we shook our heads wordlessly: not enough runs. Wrong again. In the top of the ninth, the Mets put together two walks and a tiny fusillade of singles, most of them just over second base, for four more runs and the game and the tie—and, now, some solid hope.

Another squeaker seemed insupportable, and Rusty Staub took care of
that
quickly the next afternoon, at Shea, with a first-inning home run over the Manufacturers Hanover sign in center, and a second-inning home run above the right-field auxiliary scoreboard. The latter poke came while the Mets were happily batting around, and a little later Jerry Koosman drove in a run with his second hit of the afternoon, and the Reds began throwing the ball away in rather discouraged fashion, and the score went to 9–2, and the Gotham hordes were laughing at the Cincinnati pitchers. This kind of breaking apart is perfectly commonplace, of course, though not perfectly or equally acceptable to all participants. And so in the top of the fifth, Bud Harrelson, airborne in the middle part of a lovely 3-6-3 double play, came down a bit heavily on the sliding Pete Rose, and Pete Rose came up a trifle irritably with an elbow, and then Bud and Pete were rolling and punching in the dirt, and all 53,967 of us came to our feet shouting. First the benches emptied and then the bullpens, with the galloping Met battalion being led—
ta-ra!
—by Teddy R. McGraw. As ancient custom dictates in these matters, there was a great deal of milling and shouldering but really not much doing—until Cincinnati relief man Pedro Borbon fetched New York relief man Buzz Capra an unexpected clout on the right temple, to which Capra (who had not worked since mid-September) responded vigorously but with understandably poor control. In time, they all streamed slowly off the field, and Borbon, discovering a Met cap on his head (it was Capra’s), furiously snatched it off, bit it, tore it in half, and flung it away. Eventually, Pete Rose resumed his post in left field, to an accolade of garbage and abuse (he outweighs Harrelson by forty or fifty pounds, and Bud is … well,
ours
), but when a whiskey bottle plumped to the ground near him, he sensibly withdrew, and Manager Sparky Anderson waved his troops from the untidy field. Shouting and chaos, but no baseball. Then spake the president of the tribe of the Nationals, the goodly Chub Feeney, and so it came to pass that forth from the home dugout emerged a holy company—Yogi, Cleon, Rusty, Tom, and, yea, Willie himself—and right swiftly did they hie themselves toward the troubled multitudes, and sweetly did they remind them, with upraised arms and pleading visages, of the hospitality and courtly good will owed the visiting gentle knights, and also of the score, which stood so fairly for the forces of right and good, and of the power of dark-garbed arbiters to erase and reverse such a score in the face of undue hubbub. And lo! the multitudes were hushed and the play resumed and the memorable foolishness at last concluded.

In the batting cage the next afternoon, the trailing Reds seemed loose and cheerful, while the Mets, now only a game away from the pennant, looked pale and grim. Some of the Reds stared up at the new banners unfurling in the upper deck—
“ROSE IS A WEED,” “THIS ROSE SMELLS,”
and others less elegant—and Johnny Bench murmured, “The best thing you can do is get Pete Rose mad.” This Rose had led his league (for the third time) with a batting average of .338, rapping out 230 hits (his sixth 200-hit season); by instructive contrast, Felix Millan established a new club record for the Mets this year with 185 hits. When play began, the left-field pack again bayed vociferously at Rose, but then the tension of the game caught everyone up, and a remarkable quiet descended. It was 1–0, Mets, but then 1–1 after Tony Perez’ homer in the seventh—a waiting, silent sort of game, too close for pleasure. Tug McGraw came on in relief of George Stone and repeatedly pitched himself into terrible difficulties, loading the bases in the ninth and again in the tenth—and somehow wriggled free, helped in no small part by the Reds’ inordinate difficulties when bunting. Twice, Tug tiptoed past the wolves’ lair at the top of the Cincinnati batting order, releasing screeching cries of hope from the upper decks, but the Met hitters were being utterly smothered by the Cincinnati relief men. In the eleventh, with two out and two on, the visitors’ Dan Driessen poled a line drive deep to right; Rusty Staub, running hard, hard, pulled the ball in over his left shoulder and collided heavily with the wall, falling onto his back with the ball still clutched in his glove. Enough Tug for this day, clearly, and when Pete Rose came up in the twelfth, the new pitcher was young Harry Parker. Rose had been on base three times without result, but this time he made sure, whacking a high fastball out over the right-field fence and under the scoreboard. He circled the bases with his right fist held high.

The finale, the tie breaker, was less good as a game, better as a pageant. Rusty Staub, his right shoulder damaged by his smash into the wall, was replaced by Eddie Kranepool, the only surviving Met from the original 1962 light-opera company, and nobody present could have been entirely surprised to see the bases loaded when Eddie stepped up in the first inning, or absolutely astounded when he rapped the first pitch to him on a line into left field for two runs. It was going to be that kind of an afternoon. Tom Seaver, without his fastball this time, pitched with restraint and intelligence—curves, sliders, hard work. The Reds labored, too, and Pete Rose doubled and then came around to tie the score in the fifth. Minutes later, Garrett doubled and then Jones doubled and Milner walked, and the bases were loaded, and Willie Mays—yes, of course,
that
kind of day—batted for Kranepool. Over-swinging, fooled by the pitch, Willie hammered the ball straight into the dirt (or perhaps off the plate itself), so that it bounded high up in the air and came down, thirty feet up the third-base line, far too late for Clay Carroll, the unhappy pitcher, to make a play anywhere, and another run was in. It was the shortest heroic blow in memory, but, as Mays suggested after the game, box scores and record books do not show the distance of hits, or their luck. Two more runs ensued, and in the sixth Tom Seaver hit a double that Pete Rose ran and dived in the dirt for, all in vain, and then Tom came around and scored, of course—7–2 now—and grins and cheers and smiles and hugs and handshakes broke out everywhere, and all of us believed.

Somehow it should have ended there, when the scoring stopped, but there were three more innings to be played, which is a long time to put off a party. The cries of joy became chants, the shadows deepened, and there were clouds of paper on the grass, and sudden ripping sounds in the stands as strings of firecrackers went off. The ninth began, and the waves of waiting celebrants pushed forward in the lower stands, filling up the lower aisles and crowding the railings. There was some enormous urgency visible here—a yearning for the field itself, a need to belong to this event in a deeper way. A temporary fence out beyond the home dugout collapsed with a tearing noise, and then there was a long, tension-filled wait as some frightened wives in the official Cincinnati party were led from their overrun box seats and out through the visitors’ dugout. It
was
frightening, in a way, and so was the enormous horde let loose by the final out, and the sight of Reds and Mets alike (Tug McGraw from the mound, Pete Rose from the base path) running and dodging, as if for their lives, through hundreds upon hundreds of grasping hands, past hundreds of passionate, shouting faces. Streamers and papers (and one sudden red flare) and other things came down from the upper deck, and then a great cloud of dust rose and hung over the entire field as chunks of turf began to be torn up and taken away. This sort of riotous unleashing has almost grown into an institution in our sports in recent years, and what one makes of it all probably depends on what each of us thinks about a great many complex matters, the very least of which is baseball. Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson, for instance, was disappointed that the police did not take matters in hand, and he said, “Can you imagine this happening in America?” The answer to
that,
at least, seems easy.

The convention opened gently in Oakland. Both clubs, recovering from playoffs of bruising intensity, were plainly glad to be in the World Series at all, and they regarded each other with congratulatory speculation. (The A’s had won an eleven-inning squeaker over the Orioles’ Mike Cuellar; had lost 5–4, going down before a shocking five-run Baltimore rally; and then had taken their flag on a 3–0 shutout by Catfish Hunter.) Any other outcome of the playoffs would have produced teams that had already faced each other in a recent World Series, but A’s vs. Mets was new and promising. I was grateful, too, to have the defending champs back—the grand White Shoes, with their cheerful dash, their proud quarrelsomeness, and the vivid quality of their play. The A’s were probably an even better club than they had been the previous October, with deeper pitching, more speed, and some useful new second-line players purchased with the customary sudden midseason disbursement of cash by owner Charles O. Finley. Their fine young center fielder, Bill North, who had stolen fifty-three bases, was out with a sprained ankle, but this was less of a handicap than the sidelining of Reggie Jackson in last year’s Series. This year, Reggie had just concluded a brilliant season—32 homers, 117 RBIs and a certain coming award as the Most Valuable Player in his league. The Mets, we could all see, were outmanned again.

In the opener, the Oakland left-hander Ken Holtzman pitched extremely well and won, while Jon Matlack pitched even better and lost. The day contained a bare few minutes of news. Matlack, falling to a 3–2 count on Holtzman in the third, came in with a fastball that Holtzman rapped into left field for two bases—and a vivid concurrent editorial on the designated-hitter artifice. Bert Campaneris now hit an easy roller to second, which the almost infallible Felix Millan missed cleanly, for an error and a run; it seemed to me that Campaneris’s burning speed up the line distracted Millan. That same threat now distracted Matlack, who caught Campy leaning the wrong way at first but flung his pick-off throw high, allowing Campaneris to motor safely along to second, from where he scored Oakland’s second and final run, on a single by Joe Rudi. The Mets responded in the next half—a double by Cleon Jones, a run-scoring single by John Milner—but then Reggie Jackson, playing center field for the first time this year, got a splendid jump on Jerry Grote’s line drive and made a dazzling, going-away catch, to amputate the only Met hopes of the day.

Having been given a canapé for the opener, we came back the next day for a gigantic goulash of mistakes and wonders that the Mets finally won, 10–7, in twelve innings. It was the longest World Series game in captivity, and one that absolutely defies elucidation. (A friend of mine, driving his wife and children from New Hampshire to New York City that afternoon, tuned in to the game on the car radio, grateful that it would help pass the early miles of the trip; the entertainment concluded four hours and thirteen minutes later, exactly at his apartment door.) The excessive happenings included several fly balls falling untouched out of the dazzling California cerulean for extra-base hits, homers by Garrett and Jones, triples by Campaneris and Bando and Jackson, five Oakland errors, four cannonlike hits by Reggie Jackson, Willie Mays stumbling on the base path, Willie Mays falling twice in the outfield, three hit batsmen, twelve A’s left on base, fifteen Mets left on base, 49,151 disbelieving fans. The sway of the game went first toward the hometowners, who led early by 3–1 and would have led by more except for a misbegotten squeeze play; then toward the Mets, who put six straight men aboard in the sixth, scurrying around the bases on looped hits and little hoppers and an appalling wild throw past the plate by pitcher Darold Knowles; then back to the A’s again, who tied the game at 6–6 by bringing across two runs with two out in the ninth inning. The Mets displayed gallantry of their own, to be sure, surviving a bad call at the plate (I still think) by umpire Augie Donatelli that cost them a run in the tenth, and the excruciating tension that falls upon the visiting team in an extra-innings free-for-all like this. In the end, the thing seemed to come down to a clear confrontation between a classic undermanager and an inveterate overmanager. Yogi Berra stayed with his ace reliever, McGraw, for six full innings, during which time he surrendered the tying ninth-inning runs; Tug, as usual, was both tough and brilliant—sighing heavily, cocking his chin at the enemy hitter, staring in for the sign, plucking the ball from his upheld glove like a cup from a tray, and then firing the screwball over the top for the strikeout.

Endless games produce endless possibilities, and so the twelfth brought us Willie Mays up at bat with two out and two on; he broke the tie with another bounced single—barely over the pitcher’s head this time, and barely through second. It was the last hit and last triumph of his career. Jones singled, and the next two Met batters hit sure outs to second baseman Mike Andrews, who misplayed them both—a grounder right through the wickets, a terrible throw to first—allowing the last three Met runs to come in. Andrews is not known as a fielder, but he was there because Dick Williams, the impatient Oakland manager, had used up two better second basemen along the way. Tom Seaver summed things up a few minutes later in the Mets’ clamorous clubhouse. “You couldn’t write a book about this one that would tell anybody how to play this game,” he said.

There is some temptation to omit any mention of the two central figures of the third meeting, back at Shea Stadium, since neither of them was in uniform. The Mets lost the game by 3–2 in eleven innings, but most of the emotion of the evening centered on the errant and unfortunate Mike Andrews, who was languishing at his home in Peabody, Massachusetts, and on Charles O. Finley, the Oakland vizier, who had subjected Andrews to a medical examination immediately after the conclusion of the twelve-inning debacle and had then dropped him from the squad. The vindictiveness of this maneuver exceeded several low marks previously held by the excessive Mr. Finley, and this time his troops came to the very edge of mutiny. Fortunately, the commissioner quickly restored Andrews, and Manager Williams held a camp meeting for his players, at which he declared his own coming voluntary retirement and total disaffiliation with Finley and the A’s after the end of the season. This may seem a curious form of encouragement for a team in the very midst of a World Series, but it should be understood that the vivid, what-the-hell morale of the A’s has always been built out of a shared abhorrence of the man at the top. They display the utter unity of a pack of ragged and sequestered Dickensian schoolboys, and Charlie Finley is their Gradgrind.