Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (3 page)

June 1972

J
UNE IS WHEN BASEBALL REALLY
begins. Now partisanship deepens, and we come to the time when the good weather and the sights and sounds of the game are no longer quite enough. In June, even casual semi-fans begin to watch the standings, and true believers—adherents of free silver and the Expos and similar causes—secretly put aside some of their wild April hopes as they see that this season, like the others, will be mostly pain and misadventure, and that part of their attention must now be given to the leaders and the other principals in the long pennant drama. For me, at least, all this has been slow to happen this year. Part of that is attributable to the bitter, unprecedented strike called by the Players Association at the end of March, which wiped out the first two weeks of the season and did away with most of the anticipation and good cheer of baseball’s spring. But I have begun to notice I am more hesitant than I once was to give my full attention to the games and adventures of the early season, and more inclined to linger on the one that is just past. This year, April and May seemed to deepen my recollection of last October, when the Pirates and Orioles played that brilliant and breathless turnabout seven-game World Series, which was won in the end by the hitting and throwing and the burning will of Pittsburgh’s Roberto Clemente. It was a Series especially worth thinking about and putting to memory, but I suspect that many fans may suffer from a similar nostalgia every spring. We are afraid to commit ourselves too quickly or eagerly to the time at hand. We hold back a bit, remembering the passions and rewards of the season just past, remembering how we cared, and wondering if this new season can matter as much to us. It’s almost like being in school—being back in college again. Can this term be as good as the last one? Who will my friends be? Will I fall in love again? Will these new courses be any good? Waiting, we watch and take notes.

Scorecard: Early June. July and midseason creeping up, yet baseball year still at loose ends. Distracting sort of campaign, suggesting no-score ball game in which 15 base runners stranded in first 4 innings; eventful yet forgettable. To date: Hank Aaron wafts 1 doz. homers, passing W. Mays and running maybe 1l/2 seasons short of the Babe’s 714. Willie probably relieved. Willie also rejuvenated & rejoicing as new Met, out from under heavy 20-yr. burden as Giants’ deity & leader, plays occasional 1B or OF for Metsies, signs autogs., runs bases like a 10-speed bike, wins games. Maysless Giants (also McCoveyless, thanks to broken McC. wing) plummet to NL West cellar. Similar early fatuity for a while afflicts Baltimore, perennial AL Ozymandias (now down to 1 Robinson, after winter trade of F. Robby to Dodgers), whose grizzled vets rarely hit ball beyond infield, let alone into stands. Total early Oriole departure from race prevented only by lack of consist. or zing among other AL East clubs. Cleveland like a mayfly—takes early wing, expires on same afternoon. Tigers like bullfrog escaping a well—jumps up three feet, slips back two. Yankees … Yankees like nothing in nature. Most sedative BB team in memory, so uninspired as to suggest bestowal of new sobriquet: Bronx Sashweights? CBS Plastercasts? Red Sox, diminished by tradeoff of dissidents & gripers, lose injured Yastrzemski for early going; Yaz previously heavily booed at Fenway, has not hit much for almost 1 yr. Mystery.

Unhappy celebs also include Giants’ Juan Marichal, in bed with aching back after early 1 win–8 loss record, and Cards’ Bob Gibson, now back on track after early zip–5 mark. But prime addition this yr. to annals’ human fatuity is to be seen in utter inability to retire major-league hitters (and later, in and around bushes of Birmingham, Ala.,
minor
-league hitters) displ. by once colorful, now pathetic Denny McLain. Denny’s extinguishment nearly accompanied by similar disapp. of Vida Blue, last year’s Lochinvar & this year’s toilet-fixture exec., who took new employment during long salary holdout vs. Oakland boss Charles O. Finley (chance here to use word “ineffable”)—the
ineffable
Charles O. Finley, whose difficulties with help are legend.
All
BB owners’ difficulties with help now legend. Owners mostly, almost wholly, respons. for players’ strike. (Chance here to use other descript. adjectives. Resist impulse.) Strike wipes out 1st 2 weeks of play, gets season off to unstart that prob. still casts aforesaid sense of distraction & foolishness over entire BB scene.

(Historical note, proving game no longer hobbled by hoary traditions, superstitions: Phillies, in midst of terrible losing streak, refuse to fire manager. Fire
general
manager instead. Go on losing.)

The strike: There will be no attempt here to recapitulate all the issues in that painful and tedious dispute, but it does seem essential to recall that the Players Association from the beginning offered to compromise or submit to arbitration its ultimate point of difference with the owners—the use of accumulated funds in the players’ pension plan to increase the benefits currently being paid out. The owners declared any accommodation to be an absolute impossibility until a total of eighty-six games and several million dollars in revenue had drained away, whereupon they compromised, exactly as they could have done before the deadlock set in. A last-minute modicum of patience on both sides might have averted the whole thing, but not everyone wanted peace. It is clear that some of the more dedicated Cro-Magnons among the owners (including the Cardinals’ Gussie Busch, the Reds’ Frank Dale, the Mets’ Donald Grant, and the Royals’ Ewing Kauffman) saw the strike as a precious opportunity to strain, and perhaps crack, the labor union of their upstart, ungrateful young employees and, above all, to discredit its executive director, Marvin Miller. Most of the owners, to be sure, would deny such an intention, but the unchanging and apparently unchangeable characteristic of their fraternity is its total distaste for self-discipline—a flaw that anarchizes the entire body and repeatedly renders it victim to its loudest and least responsible minority. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who has been criticized for not playing a stronger hand in settling the strike, does not in fact have any power over the owners in such a crucial situation; these businessmen, in contrast to the players, chose to remain undirected and largely unadvised throughout the crisis.

The corporate masochism of baseball scarcely ranks as news, and neither labor relations nor the size of players’ pensions is the end of the game’s problems. Among the other hovering anxieties is the deepening disparity in quality and attendance between the two major leagues. Last year’s record total attendance did not conceal the fact that the National League outdrew the American by nearly five and a half million customers—17,324,857 to 11,858,560. The gap is widening this year, with the NL running ahead of last season’s comparable attendance figures, and the AL behind. The difference between the leagues in quality and attractiveness of play is harder to prove, but it can be suggested: so far this spring, National League batters have hit over one hundred more home runs than their American League counterparts. New ball parks attract new customers: the American League has four modern parks (counting the stadium to be opened next year in Kansas City), but with the exception of Wrigley Field, every park in the National League is less than fifteen years old. I am not attracted to this means of rebalancing, however, because I detest the appearance and flavor of most modern ball parks, which seem to have sprung from the same architectural tradition that brought us the shopping mall. I also believe that fans would respond with pleasure and alacrity to a more challenging but far less expensive solution to the American League’s problems—better ball teams.
*

One lively, long-range proposal to increase attendance is a suggested future realignment of all twenty-four major-league clubs into new leagues—possibly a regional lineup of three eight-team leagues: Eastern, Central, and Southern-Western. A further, accompanying alteration would be the introduction of a limited number of interleague games during the regular season, arranged so that every big-league ballplayer could be seen by fans in every big-league city within the span of two seasons. The plan is startling and perhaps imperfect, but it is surely worth hopeful scrutiny at the top levels of baseball. I am convinced, however, that traditionalists need have no fear that it will be adopted. Any amalgamation would require all the owners to subdue their differences, to delegate real authority, to accept change, and to admit that they share an equal responsibility for everything that happens to their game. And that, to judge by their past record and by their performance in the strike, is exactly what they will never do.

Most recently, the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the antitrust implications of baseball’s reserve clause, which was challenged in Curt Flood’s suit, means without a doubt that this difficult and inflammatory issue will now be thrown down between the owners and the Players Association. It will form a central area of contention when the overall players’ agreement, governing every aspect of their profession, comes up for renegotiation this winter. Congress is holding a number of hearings on the monopolistic aspects of professional sports, but few congressmen in an election year are anxious to shiver the foundations of a national institution like baseball. Next winter could be another long one, and coming seasons are already clouded with foreboding.

Home stand: Shea Stadium was instant compensation for the emptiness of early April. I first got there for an afternoon game with the Cubs that matched up Tom Seaver and a junior right-hander named Burt Hooton, who in his previous start had startled the nation’s news-famished fans by pitching an opening-day no-hitter against the Phillies. Any statistical anxiety he may have brought with him because of this feat was dispersed by Bud Harrelson, who hit his third pitch of the game to left field for a double. Hooton throws an anomaly called the knuckle curve—a unique private invention that causes the pitched ball to drop into the catcher’s glove like a coin into a pay telephone—and he now began retiring Mets in clusters. Seaver responded with plain but honest All-American fastballs, and in one stretch twenty-one successive Mets and Cubs (both clubs, admittedly, devout practitioners of nonviolence at the plate) between them managed two outfield flies before Eddie Kranepool finally singled in the fifth and came around to score the first run in Seaver’s 2–0, four-hit win. There were some new faces in the Mets’ lineup, and one painfully missed figure in the dugout: Manager Gil Hodges, who had collapsed and died two days after the end of spring training. There must be very few of us who exulted through the Mets’ triumphant campaign of 1969 who do not retain some common permanent portrait of Gil Hodges—enormous hands thrust inside the pockets of his blue windbreaker; his heavy, determinedly expressionless face under the long-billed cap; and his pale, intelligent gaze that presided over that turbulent summer and somehow made it come right for his young team and for us all.

Two stimulating comeback wins over the Dodgers and the Giants in the same week in May began to suggest to me the resourcefulness of this particular Met team, already surprisingly settled into first place in its division. On a frigid leftover-winter night, the Los Angelenos surprised the Mets’ rookie starter, Jon Matlack, with eight hits and four runs in the first four innings, one score coming on a home run by Frank Robinson, the famous ex-Oriole. It was a Robby Special—a first-pitch line drive jerked to left with the loud and terminal
“whock!”
that causes sensitive pitchers instantly to avert their gaze, as if from a grade-crossing accident. In the fourth, however, the Mets executed a dandy outfield peg and relay—Agee to Martinez to Grote—that wiped out a Dodger runner at the plate, and Matlack, thus heartened, pitched obdurately while his teammates caught up. The tying run came on Rusty Staub’s homer in the eighth inning, and the winning run—deep in the stilly night, hours after the last hot coffee had run out at Shea—came in the fourteenth, on a tiny two-out infield poke by Teddy Martinez, who outran the peg to first while Harrelson scored from third.

Two nights later, with the Giants at Shea, everyone in the park took out his pencil and put a circle around Willie Mays’ name on the left-hand, San Francisco side of the scorecard and then drew a long line and an arrow that moved it over to the right-hand roster. Willie had been signed up by the Mets the day before, and was on the field as a non-Giant for the first time in his life. It was a strange feeling; something fixed in our baseball universe had been taken down. He did not play that night, but the subtraction of Mays and the injured McCovey from the Giants’ lineup gave that team an entirely new aspect; they were suddenly a young, fast, largely unknown club, far from contention now but full of new promise. The Mays deal, one sensed, had been right for them, too. Their next star was well in evidence. He is Dave Kingman, an angular, six-foot-six, uppercutting power hitter with a reputation for frequent bad strikeouts and occasional moon-shot home runs; showing us some speed on the bases as well, he rapped out a double and two singles.

The Mets, I could see, had been considerably altered by the
addition
of two names this season—Staub and Jim Fregosi, the latter a useful and experienced All-Star infielder acquired from the Angels.
**
For the first time in recent memory, the Mets’ batting order seemed to have both a top and a bottom. Its middle—the No. 4 man—is Staub, late of the Montreal Expos, a large, marmalade-colored right fielder, who invariably plays bare-armed, catches fly balls one-handed, and hits against left- and right-handed pitchers in the same fashion—that is, with consistency, adequate power, and a burning, almost exultant concentration. He should be a sporting deity in New York for years to come.

In that Giant game, the Mets were shy a run in the bottom of the eighth when the pitcher was due to bat, and enormous cries of “We want Willie!” now rose in the night air. Manager Yogi Berra, however, resisted the invitation and sent up a left-handed hitter, John Milner, who walked and was duly moved up and neatly scored. In the ninth, the bottom of the order finished it off—walk to Jones, single by Fregosi, and the game-winning hit up the middle by Grote. The Mets, winning by 2–1, were on their way to what eventually became an eleven-game victory streak. Two days later, Willie Mays made his debut as a Met, playing against his old team. Displaying his customary sense of occasion, always as close to perfect as that of Mme. Perle Mesta, he smashed a fifth-inning home run that won the game.