Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (27 page)

I watched this bright-eyed entering class in action against the World Champion A’s, whom they defeated by 7–2, thus pleasing an underflow crowd of 2,802 and persuading me that another summer of high, dashed hopes was in the making at Candlestick Park. Steve Ontiveros, a former outfielder, does not exactly pick it at third base for the Giants; in the fourth inning, he played a one-hopper by Joe Rudi off his shoulder, and he later threw the ball away while attempting an easy double play. (The Giants have had forty-six third basemen since they came to the Coast in 1958.) The A’s, for their part, seemed to be suffering from similar tinkering. Joe Rudi, the best defensive left fielder in the American League, has been moved to first base in order to make room for Claudell Washington, who is a fine hitter but cannot field much. He played a fly ball by Matthews into a double and later threw behind a runner. The best poke of the day was a triple in the fifth by Bobby Murcer—a Murcer Special into the deepest right-field corner. A week or two earlier, Bobby had delivered himself of a bad-tempered public blast against the Yankees for shipping him off to San Francisco in the Bonds trade, but now, after the game, he appeared to be in splendid humor, as befits a man currently batting .500. I asked him if the trade might not in fact be one of those that ended up helping both principals. “Don’t know,” he said. “Ask me in September.”

The most heavily reported news at the Indians’ camp in Tucson this spring was fundamentally unreportable—the fact that Frank Robinson, the new Cleveland manager, is black. Like several dozen visiting scribes before me this year, I sought him out in his office at Hi Corbett Field (where he was lunching on two Cokes and some saltines crumbled into a cup of soup), shook hands, asked him some questions, and concluded that he was going about his duties in a responsible if inescapably predictable fashion. He admitted to some innovations—no team curfew, the appointment of two team captains (one white, one black; or, rather, as Robinson put it, one an outfielder and one an infielder)—and said he had turned over a great deal of detail work to his coaches, so that he might have more time to watch and get to know his players. “I want things done right,” he said. “That is, I want them done my way.”

He hadn’t had time to do much batting himself, and thus prepare himself for his additional duties as a designated hitter. Robinson spoke with alternate gravity and humor, exuding the same sense of weight and presence I have always observed in him. We chatted a little, and then I said goodbye and wished him luck, and made room for three more out-of-town reporters, who had come for the same unspoken and unspeakable purpose: How does a black manager manage? What is black managing? How does it, uh,
feel
to be the first black manager?

It was nice and hot in Tucson, and I sat in the stands that afternoon and caught some rays. There was a grove of trees out beyond center field, and the distant outfield fences were covered with old-style billboards—Jim Click Ford, Coors Beer, Ralph Hays Roofing, Patio Pools. (Arizona outfields are spacious, to make room for the great distances that fly balls carry through the dry, desert air; a few years ago, in Mesa, Curt Blefary ducked away from an inside pitch, and the ball struck his bat and flew over the right-field fence for a homer.) Two veteran flingers, the Indians’ Fritz Peterson and the Angels’ Chuck Dobson, had at each other, with the visitors enjoying all the best of things. The Angels have only speed and pitching, and their left fielder, Mickey Rivers, a skinny blur on the base paths, stretched two routine singles into doubles. In the California fourth, Cleveland center fielder George Hendrick fielded a single and threw the ball over the cutoff man’s head. The Indians, who have insufficient pitching, may have a long summer of it.

There was a good mix taking the sun in the stands that day: high-school girls with long, clean hair; a lot of young men—probably students at the University of Arizona—with beards and tanned bare chests and cutoff jeans and silver bracelets; and, of course, old folks. At one point, somebody behind me said, “I understand they gave Homer a pacemaker, but it was sort of out of pace with his heart.” A pause, and then “Oh, well, Homer has more money than Carter has little pills.”

Just before I left, in the seventh, I recorded a personal baseball first: Most Fans Seen Wheeling a Bicycle up Aisle of Grandstand—1.

Friends have told me that they find the Oakland A’s insufferable. I find this a mystery. The three-time World Champions have not only more talent but more interesting troubles and more lively conversationalists than anybody else around. This year, their problems may be sufficient to keep them from their customary October rendezvous, for Charlie Finley’s fiscal irresiliency has cost them not only Catfish Hunter but the services of their second baseman, Dick Green, a twelve-year veteran who retired rather than accept Finley’s kind of emolument for another year.

I had heard about the infamous conditions at the home park of the A’s, in Mesa, but I was still not quite ready for the dim, cluttered, corridorlike room there that serves as the champions’ clubhouse. Team trunks were stacked everywhere, and sweatshirts hung from the overhead pipes and rafters. There was one fan, and the place suggested nothing so much as a migrant-labor-camp barracks. Joe Rudi must have seen my expression, because he laughed and said, “You know how it is with Charlie—first-class all the way.” (Finley, it should be added, was not on hand; he rarely comes to Arizona—or, for that matter, to Oakland.)

In the past, the captain of the A’s, Sal Bando, has been more gentle about his employer than most of his teammates, but this spring he emerged the loser in a vituperative salary arbitration, and he has joined the bad-mouth majority. Finley won four of six arbitration cases this year; whatever the issues, the effect of this was to deny real raises, after a third world championship, to Bando, Ken Holtzman, Ray Fosse, and Reggie Jackson.

“Until this year,” Bando said to me, “I found it hard to understand how low and upset he could make a player feel. Now I understand. The big thing is his lack of respect for other people, and the lack of communication in the whole organization. I said last winter that the front office was a one-man show, and he used this as an excuse to call in the press and demean me. [Finley stated, among other things, that his team captain was the eleventh-best third baseman in the league.] To me, this is like a car dealer buying time on TV and saying he has the worst cars in town. No wonder people don’t come to see us play. We win on this team only because each of us has a sense of pride—which is exactly what he wants to take away from us. Winning is what holds this team together.”

Winning and, he might have added, great baseball and, inexplicably, great good cheer. In spite of their celebrated squabbles, the A’s have always struck me as having the most ebullient dugout in the game. On this afternoon, Bando finished his Finleyan discourse by suddenly leaping off the bench and tipping Pat Bourque’s cap over his eyes and grabbing the ball he was about to catch in warm-up. Then young Phil Garner, the rookie who will replace Green at second base this year, came down the steps and said, “My luck’s really runnin’ good. My wife went to the doc this morning, and he said the baby isn’t coming until July. And … well, he said it sounds like there’s more than one heartbeat in there.”

Bourque and Ray Fosse and Rollie Fingers took up the topic with alacrity.

“Uh
-oh! You better get Charlie on the phone right now. Tell him you’re holding out for more. Play on his sympathy.”

“‘More than one’? Listen, that doesn’t mean two, does it? Think about that a little, Phil.”

“Yes, if your wife’s been messin’ with those fertility pills, you’d better get out there and hit about .310 this year and a hundred and fifty runs batted in. At
least!”

In the game that day, against the Padres, Phil Garner made three errors. The A’s had other troubles, too—including Reggie Jackson running his spring average to one for fifteen, or .066—but Gene Tenace hit a homer and a double, and Bando and Claudell Washington and Ted Kubiak doubled, too, and the miserable A’s cheerfully won the game, 4–2.

POSTCARDS

A group of big-league scouts—Dario Lodigiani, Al Hollingsworth, Haywood Sullivan, and some others—turned up at most of the games I saw. Apparently by agreement, they always seemed to come to the same games, and they always sat together, watching the play and writing notes in their notebooks. Reminded you of Second World War spies taking their apéritifs together at Estoril.

Spotted Alvin Dark’s car parked outside Rendezvous Park, in Mesa—a big, mocha-colored Imperial LeBaron, with Florida plates and two rear bumper stickers. “A’s, World Champions” was on the left side and “Jesus Is Coming Soon! Every Knee Shall Bow” on the right. Dark, the Oakland manager, is a direct man. Last winter, he mailed several revivalist tracts to Ron Bergman, who covers the team for the Oakland
Tribune.
Bergman is Jewish.

Rollie Fingers, watching the Padres take infield practice: “There’s that Hernandez, at short. I’ll never forget that year he had five hundred and something at-bats and drove in twelve runs.”

Ray Fosse:
“What?
That’s impossible.”

Fingers: “Look it up.”

I looked it up. The year was 1971. Enzo Hernandez drove in twelve runs in 549 trips to the plate.

Before an Indians-Brewers game at Sun City, Gaylord Perry, the Cleveland pitcher who is starting his fourteenth year in the majors, spotted Del Crandall, who put in sixteen years as a player and is starting his fourth year as the Brewers’ manager.

“Hey there, Big Del,” Perry said. “I see we made it to another year.”

“Yeah,” Crandall said. “Let’s hope it don’t run out on us.”

March was winding down, and my holiday was nearly over. The penultimate stop was a Giants-Brewers night game, which I witnessed from the stands in the company of seventy or eighty members of the Giants Boosters Club. Surrounded by orange-and-black caps and buttons and pennants, I yelled for every San Francisco grounder and fly ball, and felt a lively sense of accomplishment over the eventual 3–1 win by the Good Guys. As one might imagine, given their team’s recent record, the Boosters don’t know the meaning of quit. There are some four thousand of them in all, mostly season-ticket holders at Candlestick Park, and a lot of them sign up for road trips, too, accompanying their boys to Los Angeles or as far as the East Coast, and even once to Japan. The Boosters are middling-old, and not many of them, I noticed, keep score. This is not a sign of amateurish fandom, however; the Boosters are too busy simultaneously yelling and socializing to do any writing. All Giants are addressed,
fortissimo,
by their first names, but some criticism is permitted within the family, too. After Ontiveros threw out a Milwaukee base runner, a woman next to me leaned over and murmured, “Every time Steve throws the ball, I shudder.” At one point, I asked another lady near me what she thought about the recent news that Juan Marichal, the longtime Giants mound ace, had signed up with the Dodgers. She pondered the question, and then said, “Well, I’m sort of sorry for Juan. You can’t tell me he
liked
doing that.”

The winning two-run Giants rally, sparked by a Derrel Thomas double, interrupted a lengthy discussion of home states (“You’re from
Montana?
Why, I was born in Butte.…”), and then we all anxiously discussed the Giants’ relief pitcher David Heaverlo, who was summoned in to protect the lead. Heaverlo, a young nonroster flinger, was so delighted at being invited to camp this year that he shaved all the hair off his head. Tonight, it turned out, he was throwing nothing but BBs out there. “Heave her low, Heaverlo!” we shouted, and he did, and we went home hoarse but happy.

On, then, the next afternoon, for the Indians and the Brewers, at Sun City. This is a retirement community, a vast walled city of low, white bungalows, which, viewed from the non-vantage point of the ceaseless desert plain, looks as big as Benares. The ball park appears to have been dug out of one end of a parking lot—an arrangement I finally understood when I realized that it allowed all the fans to walk down to their seats; a number of them spared themselves even this minimal strain by watching the proceedings from parked golf carts. On this particular day, however, there were a good many younger adults and children mixed in with the geezers—Easter-vacation visitors, perhaps. Hank Aaron, baseball’s most celebrated active codger, started for the home team as the designated hitter, and began a six-run Milwaukee outburst in the fourth with a single off Gaylord Perry. Aaron batting and Perry pitching would make a terrific energy-conservation poster.

The afternoon had begun with wind and threatening low clouds. As the game wore on, the clouds began to break up, but the wind blew and blew. The clear desert air became dusty-red, and later that afternoon there were reports of forty- and fifty-mile-an-hour gusts nearby. The wind began to blow away the ball game. Three fly balls got up into the river of air above us and sailed out beyond the fence for homers; one of them was a grand slam. The sun came out at last, and the sun and the wind made me restless, and I got up and walked out to the deepest part of the stands along the right-field foul line and sat down. There was a flagpole on an embankment above me, and the great wind had nailed the two flags in the air up there—the Arizona state flag under the Stars and Stripes—making them stand out like planks. There was no one near me but a couple of county cops in brown uniforms, and three boys and one girl in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers—they looked about ten or twelve years old—and, just down below us, a young Cleveland pitcher and bullpen catcher, sitting motionless on folding chairs in their warm-up jackets.

My trip was ending, and I was beginning to feel sad about it. In these ten days on the road, it had become clear to me that there is almost no reason for the spring baseball schedule. Most baseball people I had talked to seemed to agree with Ray Sadecki that only the pitchers really needed the full six weeks in which to prepare themselves; Frank Robinson told me that the games were an interruption and that he could have used the same time to better advantage for straight instruction. Strangest of all, it seemed to me, was the fact that the baseball establishment has hardly ever tried to promote spring-training games, or to inflate them beyond their evident usefulness as a publicity device. They are still called exhibitions. Spring baseball, I had to conclude, continues for the strangest of all possible reasons—because everyone enjoys it. It is a relic—sport pure and simple, or the closest we can come to that now. Sport for the joy of it.