Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (21 page)

A good many of the surprises and spectacles of this season have eluded me. So far, I have not caught up with the surprising Phillies and their suddenly terrific third baseman, Mike Schmidt; with the surprising Texas Rangers and their league-leading run-producer, Jeff Burroughs; or with the briefly surprising Milwaukee Brewers, whose shortstop, Robin Yount, is eighteen years old.

I did get away for one quick field trip to Chavez Ravine, where the Dodgers, leading the National League West by eight games in early June, had put together some statistics that seemed about to go right off the top of the charts—an eight-game lead over the Reds, a .700 winning percentage, league-leading batting totals of .284, fifty-seven homers, sixty-four stolen bases, and an average of ten base hits per game. (Their pinch-hitters as a group were batting. 324.) The Dodger pitching stats showed league-leading totals in earned-run average (2.82) and complete games and shutouts. Four of their pitchers—Tommy John, Charlie Hough, Andy Messersmith, and Doug Rau—were clustered at the top of the league’s won-lost records, with a combined mark of 26–6, and one of their catchers, Steve Yeager, had caused the invention of a new stat, inasmuch as he had yet to play in a losing game, and stood at 24–0 for the year.

First place is a nice neighborhood—large family crowds of happy front-runners (whose expressions bore none of the anxieties and irritable passions of the Metsian-fan face), Pacific evening sunshine slanting across the capacious and beautiful O’Malley palazzo (with some Eastern results, already up on the scoreboard, suggesting the terrible struggles of the other clubs to keep up), and smiles and youthful shouts in the clubhouse. Steve Garvey, the powerful and extremely polite young first baseman who was leading the league in runs batted in, said, “This kind of big jump at the start makes every game a whole lot easier. We know we can win a different way every night—thirteen to nothing, or one to nothing, or everything in in the bottom of the ninth. You can hardly wait to get to the ball park every day.”

I asked Walter Alston about this year and last, when the Dodgers lost an early lead of eight and a half games and finally gave way to the onrushing Cincinnati Reds. Alston, now in his twenty-first year at the Dodger helm and a man of mountainous calm, murmured, “The difference is that last year we had three regulars who were playing their first full year in the majors [third baseman Ron Cey, second baseman Davey Lopes, catcher Joe Ferguson]. Garvey was playing first for the first time, and we were still trying to make a big-league shortstop out of Bill Russell. Young players can get down on themselves—a little slump, a few injuries—and the pitchers are tougher the second or third time around. But we’ve been through all that together, and we know what it’s like now. Experience is more valuable than anything you can buy—except maybe Jim Wynn.”

Jimmy Wynn, the stubby and mightily muscled Dodger center fielder, has been leading the league in homers all summer, and in a recent series against the Padres he bashed out thirteen hits in eighteen times at bat. In this case, however, sudden success is probably less attributable to a statistical anomaly than to plain gratitude. Wynn came over to the upwardly mobile Dodgers last winter in a trade from the hapless Astros, and was thus relieved of his discouraging long-term work of trying to slug balls into the seats through the mudlike imprisoned air of the Astrodome.

“I’m happy to be here in every way I can think of,” he said to me. “Winning makes you happy all day—you know that? I also like the fans. They were nice to me from the first day I played here.”

I asked him how he had done in the Dodgers’ home opener, against the Padres.

“I did all right—three for five. A home run.”

What about the next day?

“One for three.”

What about the third day?

“Three for five.” He smiled. “Well, I guess I
helped
those fans a little. Made it easier for them to be happy with me.”

Happiness abounding—except that the Dodgers, of course, lost the two games I had come for, going down before the admirable Cardinals, 1–0 and 6–3, on successive nights. Andy Messersmith surrendered four meager singles in the opener, but he was up against young Lynn McGlothen, the combative right-hander whom the Cards picked up from the Red Sox last winter. McGlothen has a fine, quick curve and an impatient, gimme-that-ball manner that are reminiscent of his new teammate Bob Gibson. Steve Yeager, behind the plate for the Dodgers, helped break his own undefeated streak when he inadvertently tipped Lou Brock’s bat in the sixth, putting Brock on base with what was to become the only run of the evening.
****
The next evening, all sorts of misadventures befell the Dodgers—a two-run homer by the Cards’ Joe Torre; some stout pitching by another Red Sox alumnus, John Curtis; a dismaying outing by the Dodger starter, Don Sutton (who has been badly off form of late); and a Lou Brock line-drive triple that was utterly misjudged by Jimmy Wynn in center field. Afterward, Walt Alston, probably quoting Agamemnon, said, “The averages are beginning to even up a little. There’s still a long way to go.” Flying home, I tried to figure out my own stats—4,902 miles flown, round-trip, for a total of three Dodger runs observed, or a run-per-mile average of .000612.

Two nights later, back at Shea Stadium, predictability returned when the Mets, crippled and down on their luck, lost to the Dodgers by 3–2. Tommy John gave up six hits and ran his record to 10–1; Jon Matlack gave up six hits and ran his to 5–4. Misery abounding. The winning run, it turned out, was surrendered in the ninth inning by Tug McGraw, just off the disabled list, who thereby kept his earned-run average for the year at an even 9.00. The last out of the night was a strikeout by Mike Marshall, the indefatigable relief man whom the Dodgers picked up from Montreal this year. Marshall (a stocky, heavily sideburned veteran who is a Ph.D. candidate in physiology) toweled his face after the game and said, “Sure, we’ve had a fantastic start, but I’m glad there’s still a long way to go. This is the time of year when baseball is most exciting. I enjoy it. The hitters are ready now, and the pitchers at their best. June, July, and August—this is the best part of the baseball year.”

June, July, August … How to salute this season in its passage, except with a further and final selection from
The Baseball Encyclopedia
—this time not in numbers? Come, let us have a little music, a quiet coda of baseball names upon the summer air. Carden Gillenwater. Alban Glossop. Johnny (Hippity) Hopp. Donie Bush, Guy Bush, Bullet Joe Bush. Alpha Brazle. Jimmy Ring. Dupee Shaw. Buck (Leaky) Fausett. Estel Crabtree. Victory Faust. Chief Yellowhorse. Emil Yde.

Mordecai Peter Centennial (Three-Finger) (Miner) Brown.

Saturnino Orestes Arrieta Armas (Minnie) Minoso.

Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma (Cal) McLish.

Flint Rhem. Bibb Falk. Jewel Ens.

Urban Shocker. Urbane Pickering.

Dummy Deegan, Dummy Murphy, Dummy Hoy, Dummy Taylor, Silent John Titus, and Silent George Twombly.

Sunny Jim Bottomley.

Dutch Ruether, Dutch Leonard, Dutch Leonard, Dutch Hartman, Dutch Wilson, Germany Schaefer, Heinie Manush.

Dusty Miller. Zack Wheat. Hod Lisenbee.

Robert Barton (Dusty) Rhoads. William Clarence (Dusty) Rhodes. James Lamar (Dusty) Rhodes. John Gordon (Dusty) Rhodes. Charlie Rhodes.

Fielder Jones. Orator Shaffer. Socks Seibold. Shoeless Joe Jackson. Tillie Shafer. Dolly Stark. Sadie McMahon.

Kitty Brashear, Kitty Bransfield, Rabbit Maranville, Rabbit Warstler, Pig House, Possum Whitted, Chicken Wolf, Doggie Miller, and Hank (Bow Wow) Arft.

Frank Chance, the Peerless Leader.

Spec Shea, the Naugatuck Nugget.

Roger Bresnahan, the Duke of Tralee.

Vic Raschi, the Springfield Rifle.

Arlie Latham, the Freshest Man on Earth.

Amos Rusie, the Hoosier Thunderbolt.

Welcome Gaston. Eppa Rixey. Garland Buckeye.

Hank Aaron. Babe Ruth.

*
A new, if tainted, addition to the four-decade set is Minnie Minoso, who was coaching for the White Sox last year when he was activated, at the age of fifty-three, into a designated hitter. This was a gate-hype, of course, thought up by Chicago owner Bill Veeck. A self-proclaimed current aspirant to this strange brotherhood is Ron Fairly, the veteran National League outfielder and first baseman, who was purchased from the Cardinals by the Oakland A’s late last summer. Fairly, who came up with the Dodgers in 1958, is in excellent shape; he will only be forty-one years old when the opening day of the 1980 season comes along, which suggests that a little good luck and three comfortable summers in a designated-hitter’s rocking chair should see him home.

**
Further bad-tempered complaints of mine about Mac II have been deleted here, for good reason. In the spring of 1976, Macmillan brought forth a third edition of
The Baseball Encyclopedia,
which restores almost all of the unfortunate omissions and economies of Mac II. The year-by-year team rosters are back, and so are the full records of players with less than twenty-five major-league at-bats (thus preserving for the ages the news that Walter Alston’s lifetime batting record was one at-bat and no hits). Individual World Series batting records have also reappeared, although only in summary form. Furthermore, Mac III contains some brand-new data—a club-by-club all-time roster of players and managers, and a greatly expanded section listing lifetime leaders in most conceivable batting and pitching attainments, which in itself provides fuel for many long nights of hot-stove musings. Here, for instance, one finds the names of all the 139 players with a lifetime batting average of .300 or better (Rod Carew, with .328, is in twenty-eighth place; Pete Rose, at .310, is eightieth); here are the 117 players with more than a thousand runs batted in; here are the leaders in most strikeouts per times at bat, with Reggie Jackson, Bobby Bonds, and Dick Allen in hot competition for the number-one spot. Farther along, we find all 70 pitchers who won more than 200 games (Jim Kaat, with 235 wins, leads the active members); all 96 pitchers (from Walter Johnson on down to Bobo Newsom) who threw 30 shutouts or more; and Nolan Ryan leading all pitchers—all pitchers
ever
—in two separate lifetime categories: most strikeouts per nine innings (9.58), and fewest hits per nine innings (6.25). And so on.

This latest edition of
The Baseball Encyclopedia
has gone up to 2,142 pages, and it is miraculously priced at twenty-five dollars. The principal editor of this restored classic, Mr. Fred Honig, now ranks somewhere near the top on the all-time list of friends of baseball, and seems to be the ideal curator for the essential future editions.

***
Tom Seaver continued to have an unhappy time of it in 1974, finishing with a record of 11–11, but he quickly resumed his pedestal at the top of his league the following year, when he wound up at 23–11 and took home his third Cy Young Award. My anxieties about the Seaver fastball were happily premature, for he struck out over two hundred batters in 1974, ’75, and ’76, thus establishing a significant new record: nine consecutive seasons of two hundred whiffs or more. Pete Rose, a devout student of pitching, is of the opinion that Seaver’s fastball is still the prime article and that Seaver is still the paramount pitcher in the National League. Last summer, one could see that Tom was going to his breaking stuff earlier in a game than he used to, and that he was throwing the hummer less often but perhaps to greater effect than ever.

****
I failed to mention here the only certifiably historic sight of my baseball summer—a steal of second base by Lou Brock, in the eighth inning. The theft, Brock’s fortieth of the year, was a typically efficient piece of Brockery, but it did not alter the score or the game. There was no way for me to know, of course, that Lou was on his way to a new all-time record of 118 stolen bases in one season. Like statesmen or actors, celebrated stats are not easy to recognize in their youth.

October 1974

T
HE SUMMER’S IMMENSE BUSINESS
is at last shut down, the Oakland A’s stand bemedaled as the three-time champions of the world and first-time champions of California, and the sound of baseball silence is upon the land. The World Series, in which the familiar green-and-yellow team—Sal and Reggie and Joe, Rollie and Ken and Campy and Cat, and all the other dashing Octobermen—knocked off the young Dodgers in five games, and the preceding league playoffs, which both concluded in four, were mercifully brisk and decisive. They constituted the only visible signs of economy in a season of excess, which must now be sorted out somehow. O for a Muse of fire! Or, rather, O for a competent certified public accountant, who at least might begin to bring order out of the untidy profligacy of baseball news and records and races, baseball achievement and failure and unlikelihood, that made the late summer and early fall of 1974 so crowded and busy and ridiculously entertaining for us all. On the chance of such help, we can at least pick out a few preliminary clips and jottings from this year’s crowded files.

NOTES FOR A STONECUTTER:
Hank Aaron, who started off briskly with those two April home runs that took him past Babe Ruth’s ancient roadmark of 714, concluded his labors for the year with 20 homers, or 733 lifetime. This year, he also took over first place on the all-time roster for games played (3,076) and times at bat (11,628), and added to his first-place figures for lifetime total bases (6,591) and extra-base hits (1,429). Aaron is retiring from the Atlanta Braves, but if he succeeds with his reported plan to sign on with the Milwaukee Brewers as a designated hitter, he will have a clear shot next year at Ruth’s first-place standard of 2,217 runs batted in. Aaron has now passed Ty Cobb as the holder of more lifetime batting records than anyone in baseball history.

LEGS:
Lou Brock, of the Cardinals, stole 118 bases this summer, thus wiping out the old one-season mark of 104 thefts held by Maury Wills. Brock’s pursuit of the new record was a macrocosm of one of his accelerated journeys between first and second base. After a good early-season jump, he stole 18 bases in June, 17 in July, 29 in August, and 24 in September. He was caught stealing 33 times. Brock is thirty-five years old, and he estimates that he is two or three feet slower between bases than he was at his youthful peak, which suggests that the real contest on the base paths is mostly cerebral and strategic—the runner’s experience versus the pitcher’s nerves. The other essential ingredients for the remarkable new record were Brock’s batting average of .306 for the year (he had to get on some base in order to set about stealing the next one) and the batting judgment and protection provided by the next man in the Cardinal lineup, Ted Sizemore. Watching Lou Brock taking a lead off first base is the best fun in baseball.