Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (42 page)

“We really needed the full training period. We have five center fielders and we don’t know if any of them can hit, and we have a mess of young pitchers who all deserve our consideration. None of us here has the slightest idea of what is happening in this club. To say we are in a state of confusion is putting it mildly.”

He laughed delightedly and lit another cigarette, and then autographed a program for a waiting white-haired gentleman, who was wearing a visor. “I’ve been a Chicago fan since 1916,” the man said, shaking Veeck’s hand. “Now we’re going someplace again.”

The game that afternoon was a windy, sleepy, languorous affair against a visiting half-squad of Red Sox. Cleon Jones, who had been dropped by the Mets last year, rapped out four solid hits for the White Sox, but neither team was able to move its base runners along. Several of those young Chicago pitchers came on and proved in turn why they were not yet ready for the majors, but the score remained stuck at 1–1 for many innings. Up in the sunstruck, cratelike press box, the writers yawned and stretched and made jokes, and then began to bait Harry Caray, who was broadcasting the game back to Station WMAQ, in Chicago, from the adjoining booth. “Oh,
Har-ry!”
one shouted over in a loud falsetto. “Yoo-hoo, Harry
Ca-ray!”
Another tried cat noises.
“Mee-ow!”
he called.
“Meee-iouww,
Harry!
Arf-arf!”
The writers doubled over laughing. In time—at last,
weeks
later—the two teams ran out of pitchers, and the thing was called at 1–1, after fifteen innings. The only flicker of excitement had come when one of Caray’s broadcasting assistants burst into the press box and threw himself head first over the front row of typewriters—an apparent suicide. “Grab my legs!” he called back at the last instant, and we did. Finally he reappeared, smiling and red-faced, holding two pieces of paper he had retrieved from the foul screen below us. “Commercials,” he explained.

On another day, the Mets and the visiting Yankees had at each other at Campbell Park, in St. Petersburg’s black ghetto—a stylish little green bandbox that served the Mets and the Cardinals this year while their regular park, Al Lang Field, was being totally rebuilt. Tom Seaver, who had gone through a long but fruitless contract-bargaining session with Met general manager Joe McDonald that morning, was slightly cuffed about by the Yanks, but it was plain that he was not yet cutting loose with his fastball. In the fourth, though, with the Yankees’ new, extremely quick center fielder, Mickey Rivers, on third base, Seaver speared a comeback grounder hit to the mound by Roy White, and whirled and ran directly at Rivers, who had stopped twenty feet down the line and now looked like a rabbit lost on a freeway. Tom made the tag and then spun and threw out White at second base—threw him out a mile. Tom Seaver
executes.
Later in the afternoon, Dave Kingman hit a two-run homer to tie up the game in the ninth, and then totally missed an attempted sliding catch in right field, in the tenth, to help untie it—a perfect preview, perhaps, of coming events at Shea Stadium this summer.

I was up very early the next morning to catch a plane to Phoenix, and as I left the cashier’s counter at the St. Petersburg Hilton I spotted Jesus Alou standing alone on the other side of the lobby, with a suitcase beside him. Eddie Yost, a Met coach, stepped out of the elevator, saw Alou, and came over and shook his hand. “What do you think you’ll do?” Yost said.

“Go home,” Alou said. “Then I’ll see.”

He had been released the day before—the end of the Alou brothers in big-league ball. He looked in terrific shape.

I didn’t entirely forget about the other side of baseball during spring training—the lockout and the rest of it. It would have been impossible, in any case, because the players themselves, both in Florida and in the Arizona camps, seemed so anxious to talk about it. Listening to them, I became aware of a common theme—a word that they mentioned with equal frequency when they talked about their performance on the field and their relationship with their parent club and with the owners in general. Pride is the spur.

Joe Morgan, second baseman, Cincinnati Reds; National League’s Most Valuable Player for 1975: “I don’t think ballplayers are paid too much. The price of everything has gone up. The presidents of big corporations make more money than we do—we’re just getting the going rate. If the highest-paid players got only thirty thousand, that would be OK with me. I played ball a long time for free and enjoyed it—maybe I enjoyed it even more then than now. Money puts more pressure on you. I’ll play for free again in a few years and enjoy that. I’ll go back to the sandlots and have a lot of fun. Nobody on our team plays just for the money—they play because they like it, and to
win.
That’s the thing. I’d be just as happy to play in the World Series for no money at all, just for the chance to be the champions. The pride of being the champions—that’s what matters. In time, the money for the Series will be gone, but I will be a world champion forever. Maybe it’s gone already, but that don’t matter. Years from now, people will read the
Baseball Encyclopedia
and see us in there—‘Champions of the World, 1975’—and nobody will care how much money I made.”

Dave Giusti, relief pitcher, Pittsburgh Pirates: “Money is always a motivating factor for a pro. I’ve heard players say they never think about money once their contract is signed, but I think about next year all the time. But pride comes first, of course. You don’t want to embarrass yourself out there. Most players want to hold to a level, I think—play up to their own best. That’s what it’s all about.”

Rick Monday, center fielder, Chicago Cubs: “I’m tickled to death to have signed my contract. They’re back in business, I’m back in business. I don’t enjoy haggling with a general manager—it makes me feel like a prize heifer. No player likes that part of it, because it almost seems to demean him. Once I put on my uniform, the last thing I think about is money. This game is hard enough as it is—trying to hit that little ball that’s coming in on you faster every year. Every time I look up, there’s some kid out there about five inches taller and throwing that thing at me, so I’m not out there thinking about
money.
It’s the day-in-day-out challenge that keeps you out there. If you’ve played forty straight games—played with an injury half the time—you’ve got to have something in the well to keep you going. Money doesn’t help at all.”

Maury Wills, retired shortstop, six-time National League base-stealing leader, now base-running coach for the Cubs, the Padres, and other teams; forty-three years old: “I never dreamed we’d see the end of the reserve clause. It was always being discussed back when I was playing. That was the biggie on the list, and bit by bit we chipped away at it. At contract time, I only wanted to be rewarded for my hard work, but once it was signed I forgot about it. I think I was always underpaid a little, but it didn’t bother me. Now you can get the figures and find out if you’re being properly taken care of.

“Nowadays, you keep hearing that playing should be fun. Enjoy yourself and all that. A lot of young players have that wrong—they think it should be fun, ha-ha, as if it’s some kind of joke. My satisfaction all came from succeeding. I wasn’t out there on the field being sociable. I never talked to anybody on the other team—the pitcher who was about to deck me, the catcher who was about to rack me up for making him look bad. The only man I ever talked to was Joe Torre. Once, he was playing first for the Cardinals and guarding the bag against me—trying to hold me off. I slid back in and cut him up, about eight stitches worth. He never complained, never said a word, because he knew I was only taking what was mine by rights. He was a professional, and I respected him. I talked to him after that, but not the others.

“I don’t know why the owners have been doing all this complaining. Football has had the one-year play-out-your-option thing for a long time, and you don’t see the big-city clubs grabbing off everybody. I think management should be grateful to have the money issues handled by negotiators and by the players’ business agents. It doesn’t help to have the GM butting heads with a player every year. It’s distracting, and it leaves bitterness. I’ve always thought baseball was the victim of custom and tradition. Any change and they think the world is coming to an end. I remember when a new kind of spikes were being tried out, and there was a
panic
about it.”

Scottsdale, Arizona, is a rich next-door sister of Phoenix, and almost the only shabby part of it is Scottsdale Stadium, where the Cubs train. The dark-green outfield wall there is so rickety you can see daylight between the planks. The wood of the fence is aged to a pitch of low C, and Reggie Jackson, leading off for the visiting A’s in the sixth inning of a game there, whacked a double off the wall that made it resound like a plucked cello. Like so many hard-hit balls I have seen Jackson smash over the years, this one struck the distant fence almost before I could pick it up in its flight. It
leaped
to the wall. It was the last line drive I was to see Jackson hit for the Oakland A’s, and I remembered it a couple of days later, when I read in the papers about his trade. Then I tried to think if I had ever seen him do anything dull on the field—or, come to think of it,
off
the field. The day before the game in Scottsdale, Reggie had let it drop to an Oakland reporter that he had just signed with Finley—a five-year contract for a million and a quarter. The writer sprinted for his typewriter, wrote the story, and then, for no particular reason, checked back with Reggie just before filing his copy. Jackson laughed, and said well, no, it wasn’t entirely true. It wasn’t
exactly
the truth. In fact, none of it was. Most of all, perhaps, Reggie Jackson is an actor.

The trade that sent Jackson and Holtzman to the Orioles in return for Don Baylor, Mike Torrez, and an extremely promising young pitcher named Paul Mitchell is generally regarded as an act of retribution by Charlie Finley. Holtzman was deeply involved in the Players Association negotiations this year, and Jackson has always belonged only to himself. As usual, no one claims to understand what Charlie Finley is up to this year. The latest addition to the Oakland roster is a team astrologer.

Baseball-watchers need spring training, too. During an insignificant game between the have-not Cubs and Padres at Scottsdale, I sat in the sun-drenched open grandstand behind first base and allowed my interior clock to begin slowing itself to the pace of summer, to baseball time. As I watched the movements and patterns on the field, my interest in the game merged imperceptibly with my pleasure in the place and the weather. The sunlight was dazing, almost a weight on my head and arms, and my shadow, thrown on the empty bench to my right, had edge and substance. After an infield play, I wrote “4–3” with my pencil in a box on the scorecard on my lap, and a drop of sweat fell from my wrist and made its own blurry entry on the same page. The Cub coaches sat together on a row of folding chairs outside the home-plate end of their dugout, leaning back against the foul screen with their arms folded and their caps tipped low over their foreheads, and the Padre brain trust, over on the first-base side, made an identical frieze. We were a scattered, inattentive crowd, at times nearly silent, and between pitches we stared off at the jagged, blue-tan silhouettes of low desert peaks set about the distant rim of our gaze.

I half-closed my eyes and became aware at once that the afternoon silence was not quite perfect but contained a running pattern of innocuous baseball sounds. I could hear the murmurous play-by-play of some radio announcer up in the press box—the words undistinguishable but their groups and phrases making a kind of sense just the same—and this was accompanied by the unending sea-sound of the crowd itself, which sometimes rose to shouts or broke apart into separate words and cries. “Hey, OK!” …
Clap, clap, clap, clap …
“Hot dogs here” … “Hey, peanuts and hot dogs!” …
Clap, clap, clap … Whoo-wheet!
(a whistle from some player in the infield).
Whoo-wheet! … Clap-clap, clap-clap, clap-clap …
“The next batter, Number One, is … Hosay
Carr
denal, right field!” (The p.a. announcer was giving it his best—the big, Vegas-style introduction—and the crowd tried to respond.) “OK,
Ho-
say!” … “Hey-hey!” … “Let’s
go,
Ho-say!” …
Clapclapclapclap … Wheet!
There was a sudden short flat noise:
Whocck!
—the same sound you would hear if you let go of one end of a long one-by-eight plank, allowing it to fall back on top of a loose stack of boards. I leaned forward and watched Cardenal sprinting for first. He slowed as he took his turn and then speeded up again as he saw the ball still free in the outfield, pulling into second base with a standup double. Real cheering now, as the next batter stood in (“… Number Eighteen, Bill
Mad-
lock, thirrd base!”), but soon the game wound down again and the afternoon sounds resumed.
Clap, clap, clap …
“Hey, Cokes!
Get
yer ice-cold Cokes here!” …
Clap, clap, clap, clap
… A telephone rang and rang in the press box—
pring-pring, pring-pring, pring-pring:
a faraway, next-door-cottage sort of noise.
Clap, clap, clap …
“Hey, Tim! Hey, Tim!” (a girl’s voice). “Hey, Tim, over
here!” … Clap, clap …
“Streeough!” … “Aw, come
on,
Ump!” …
Clap, clap, clapclapclap …
“Get yer Cokes! Ice-cold Cokes here” …
Whoo-wheet! … Clapclap … “Ice-
cold.” Then there was another noise, a regular, smothered slapping sound, with intervals in between:
Whug! … Whup! … Whug! … Whup!
—a baseball thrown back and forth by two Padre infielders warming up in short-right-field foul territory, getting ready to come into the game. The sounds flowed over me—nothing really worth remembering, but impossible entirely to forget. They were the sounds I had missed all winter, without ever knowing it.

The most exciting last-minute rally in baseball this season came on March 2, in San Francisco, when Robert A. Lurie, a local real-estate nabob, put through a telephone call to Arizona and talked to Arthur (Bud) Herseth, a Phoenix meat-packer, whose name he had first heard just a few minutes before. Lurie asked Herseth if by any chance he would like to put up four million dollars and become half owner of the San Francisco Giants. Herseth asked a few questions and then said sure, why not? The deal was made, in something like that fashion, less than three hours before the expiration of a National League deadline that would have sent the Giants to Toronto. Bob Lurie had been waiting to buy the Giants for several years, and when the longtime owner of the Giants, Horace C. Stoneham, finally put the club on the market last year, Lurie, who had four million dollars of his own to invest in the team, undertook an intensive search for a partner who could deliver the other half of the necessary capital. He tried to come to terms with a group of Japanese financiers, and then almost closed with the owners of the Pizza Hut fast-food chain. Nothing worked, and only a last-minute injunction obtained by the San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, in February, kept the team from being whisked away by the Toronto carpetbaggers. Lurie then formed a partnership with Bob Short, the erstwhile owner of the Texas Rangers (né Washington Senators), but this quickly fell through, because of a dispute over team control. All seemed lost, until, lo, a Herseth arose from out of the desert.