Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (43 page)

During a Giants-Indians game at Municipal Stadium in Phoenix, I slipped into a seat beside Bud Herseth in a box right behind the Giants’ dugout. Herseth had been conversing in a loud and friendly way with most of the fans in the section where he was sitting, so it seemed all right to join him. He was wearing black shoes, black trousers, horn-rimmed spectacles, a Giants cap, and an eye-bending Hawaiian shirt. If I had had any remaining doubts about his identity, I could have consulted his wide, tooled-leather belt, which was cut in back so that it spelled
“BUD HERSETH, PHOENIX, ARIZ.”
above his hip pockets. Although Herseth’s understanding with his new partner is that the day-to-day baseball operations of the Giants will be Lurie’s exclusive concern, I had heard that Herseth had awakened the new Giant manager, Bill Rigney, that day with a telephone call just before six o’clock in the morning to ask whom he was planning to pitch. (“Who
is
this?” Rigney cried, in disbelief.) Now I asked Herseth if he often made calls at that time of day.

“Six in the morning isn’t a bit early for me,” he said rapidly. “I’m down at my feedlot way before five every day, seven days a week, about fifty weeks in the year. Sundays and every other day. We kill two hundred and fifty head a day, and there’s a lot to do—get out the sick cattle, turn on the lights, get the cooler going, clean out the irrigation ditches. I fill in if anybody gets drunk and don’t show up. I’ll do anything. Hell, I been doing this all my life, I’m fifty-five years old, and I figure it’s time I had a little fun. That’s why I bought me this team—half a team. Six o’clock—why, hell, I bought me a little Vega before
five
in the morning the other day. Needed it for a friend of mine. Paid seven hundred and fifty in cash. It runs real good.”

He kept his eyes on the game while he talked, and I noticed that he was keeping score. I asked him how long he had been interested in baseball.

“All my life,” he said. “I can remember coming down with my dad from Aberdeen—Aberdeen, South Dakota—in ’32 and going to Chicago, where we saw the Series game where Charlie Root pitched against Babe Ruth, and the Babe pointed to the stands before he hit that home run. You’ve heard of that? I was there. I’ve been a Giants fan from a long time back. Even back when they had those pitchers like Grove and Earnshaw and Parmelee and—Schumacher, wasn’t it?”

He looked at his program and clapped vigorously for the Giant hitter just coming up to bat. “This is Bobby Murcer,” he said. “He’s the highest-priced player we have.” He frowned momentarily and then corrected himself. “It wasn’t Grove and Earnshaw on those Giants,” he said. “It was Hubbell and Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons. Carl Hubbell. I knew that all along, but I got it wrong the first time.”

He had been consulting from time to time with an associate over the terms of a contract with some radio station that would form part of the network carrying the Giants’ games this year, and now the man came back down the aisle and told him that the deal seemed to be off.

“I damn well don’t understand that!” Herseth said loudly. “We make a deal, and now they go and change their mind. I’m glad I don’t buy cattle that way. I buy three, four thousand head at a time, and nobody has to worry if I’m going to pay off. My word is my bond—just ask anybody. I pay off like a slot machine. I know what these radio people are. I won’t say it, though, because there are ladies present. I’ll just write it down here on my program.” He wrote something and showed me his program. He had written “S.O.B.”

There was action on the field, and Herseth cried, “Hit-and-run! Hit-and-run! Right through the hole! You know, these kids may not hit homers, but they sure look like they hit steady. I’d like to get back that big guy we had who hits all those home runs—that Dave Kingman.
He’d
help this club.”

I said that Kingman also struck out a lot.

“Is that so?” Herseth said. “I didn’t know that.” He shook his head again. “I just can’t understand those radio people,” he said. “I don’t go for that kind of stuff.”

I asked him if he had ever played much baseball.

“Sure I did,” he said. “I grew up in Houghton, South Dakota—my dad had five quarters there, about eight hundred acres—but I went to high school in Hecla, South Dakota, which was on down the line. I batted cleanup on the team there for two years. I hit .400-and-something my junior year, and .666 all year when I was a senior. I played in a regional tournament then, and I remember a fellow called Al Face struck me out four times in one game. That was when I knew I wasn’t a real ballplayer. I still hear from Al Face. Once a year, he sells me a calf. He sent me a picture that somebody took of us back then, and I was wearing striped overalls. You know, by the time I was ten years old I could guess the weight of a steer right within a few pounds.”

He stood up and called out to Bobby Winkles, the Giants’ third-base coach, “Hey, Bobby, how come you’re chewin’ and spittin’ out there? What kind of example is that for my young players, hey?” He laughed uproariously, and Winkles waved and smiled.

I was about to ask Bud Herseth what he thought about the reserve clause and player salaries and the lockout and Marvin Miller, but then I decided not to. He was having too much fun. Instead, I asked him how many of the Giants’ games he hoped to see at Candlestick Park this year.

“The good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” he said, “all of them.”

Two weeks later, with the season under way, I took a subway up to the Bronx for the Yankees’ home opener. It was a big day, because it marked the reopening of Yankee Stadium—a homecoming for the famous team to the famous old park, which had been rebuilt by the City of New York over the past two years. The new place looked fine. The overhanging roof around the top deck was gone, and the old thick supporting columns and girders had disappeared, giving us a new, clean triple sweep of bright-blue seats from right field all the way around to left. The whole place was blue and white, and it sparkled. There were three new banks of escalators, and a new, tree-lined promenade outside the first-base side of the Stadium, where a street used to be. The playing field had been lowered and its outlines altered a little, but most of that enormous green pasture in left was there, so you knew it was still the Stadium, all right. There were some big new scoreboards out behind the bleachers, with a white scrim on top in the shape of the lacy coppery-green top-deck façade of the old park. The wall of scoreboards cut off our view of the elevated-station platform and the nearby apartment-house roofs, where in the old days you could always spot a few neighborhood fans watching from a great distance. The new Stadium is cut off from the city around it, and nobody can watch baseball casually there anymore.

There were 54,010 of us there for the opener. Three bands played, and the sun shone, and a lot of celebrities—Joe Louis, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Mrs. Lou Gehrig and Mrs. Babe Ruth, and some others—were introduced, and then the Yankees played the Twins and beat them, 11–4, coming back from a four-run deficit. The Yankees have a sprightly, quick-running team this year, with a marvelous-looking new young second baseman named Willie Randolph, and they may be in the thick of things all summer long in their tough division. There was a lot of hopeful noise at the Stadium that first afternoon—a terrific amount of cheering—but the truth is I didn’t have much fun. I don’t know what to make of the new Yankee Stadium. It cost the city a hundred million dollars to rebuild and finance, and the city can’t pay its bills, can’t pay for new schools or hospitals, can’t pay its teachers, can’t keep its streets or its neighborhoods up; the South Bronx, where Yankee Stadium stands, is a disaster area. These are the realities and insolubles that we all know so well, and maybe they are the things that make us give so much attention to sports in the first place—why we need these long diversions at the ball park. I don’t think we should use sports as a hiding place, but I have always been willing to try to carry the two conflicting realities in my head at the same time—poor cities and rich sports, a lot of unnoticed kids playing in burned-out playgrounds, and a few men playing before great crowds in a new sports palace. As the paradox deepens, however, it begins to seem as if we are trying to make the irony disappear—that we are hoping to rub out one side of the equation by vastly increasing the other. By spending more and more millions of dollars on sports, we may be trying to tell ourselves that sports matter almost more than anything else simply because we do spend so much money on them. The name for this is addiction. I’ll probably get used to the Stadium in time, but on the first afternoon all I could think of was the quiet, slow afternoons I had just spent in Bradenton and Winter Haven and Scottsdale and Phoenix, and the games I had seen there. Those games seemed like elegies now. It was strange to be sitting in Yankee Stadium, where I had grown up watching baseball, and no longer feeling at home there. I don’t know what to think, because it may be that the money and the size of sport have grown too big for me after all.

July 1976

B
ASEBALL HAS SO ALTERED
in recent years that many of the classic prototypes of the game seem on the point of disappearing altogether. The rookie pitcher called up to the parent club in midseason does not arrive with cinders in his hair and a straw suitcase in his freckled paw but strolls into the carpeted, air-conditioned big-league clubhouse with a calfskin flight bag over his shoulder (and a Kurt Vonnegut paperback in the bag), where he is greeted by some teammates who played college ball with him or against him a year or two earlier in southern California. Over in the corner, the club’s famous slugger, having just prolonged his slump by going 0 for 5 in a nationally televised game, now abandons his attempt to find surcease in transcendental meditation and suddenly seizes his hair-dryer and bashes it to smithereens against the wall. The manager, dressing in his office, asks a writer about the commotion, smiles and shakes his head, then slaps a little cologne on his ungrizzled cheeks and steps into his fawn leisure suit. His telephone rings: the general manager wants him to stop by upstairs for a minute to hear about the latest meeting with the personal agent of the angry (and still unsigned) famous slugger. If these contemporary patterns are startling, it is probably only because they contrast so vividly with the images of baseball’s dramatis personae that most of us memorized in our youth. Over the years, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes willingly, I have gradually given up my boyhood impressions of baseball stars, and of baseball veterans and owners and writers, until only one old portrait remains. In this scene, a man sits alone on a splintery plank bleacher seat, with a foot cocked up on the row in front of him and his chin resting on one hand as he gazes intently at some young ballplayers in action on a bumpy, weed-strewn country ballfield. He sits motionless in the hot sunshine, with a shapeless canvas hat cocked over his eyes. At last, responding to something on the field not perceptible to the rest of us, he takes out a little notebook and writes a few words in it, and then replaces it in his windbreaker pocket. The players steal a glance at the lone stranger as they come in from the field at the end of a half inning; the managers pretend to ignore him. Nobody knows his name, but everybody recognizes him, for he is a figure of profound, almost occult knowledge, with a great power over the future. He is a baseball scout.

I have often noticed scouts at spring-training games, where they appear in numbers and always seem to roost together, and now and then I have spotted one at a big-league park, but I never tried to penetrate their arcane company. This spring, it occurred to me that these brooding, silent birds might constitute another threatened species, and I decided to attempt some field studies. Several baseball friends advised me to look up Ray Scarborough, who is a regional and special-assignment scout for the California Angels. Scarborough, I was told, was a veteran field man, with a high reputation for his baseball knowledge and his exceptional independence of judgment. He had been a member of the outstanding scouting staff put together by Harry Dalton, who was responsible in great part for assembling the formidable Baltimore teams that dominated the American League in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. Dalton had moved along to the Angels in 1971 to take the pivotal general manager’s position, and soon thereafter he sent for Ray Scarborough and five other stalwarts of his Baltimore G-2. Early in May, I reached Scarborough by telephone at his home in Mount Olive, North Carolina, and proposed myself as a traveling companion on his next safari. Scarborough, who talks in an attractive Tarheel legato, responded with such alacrity and friendliness that it occurred to me for the first time that the life of a baseball scout might be a lonely one. He told me that I had caught him in a rare moment at home during the busiest part of his year—the weeks just prior to organized baseball’s annual June talent draft—during which he was scouting free agents: high-school and college players who appeared promising and were about to graduate or otherwise surrender their amateur athletic status. He was leaving soon to look over a young pitching prospect in Kentucky and another in Michigan, and he invited me to come scouting with him.

Two days later, as I waited by the gate in the Louisville airport where Ray Scarborough’s inbound morning flight had been announced, I began to wonder how I would recognize him. I remembered him as a big, hardworking, right-handed curveball pitcher with the Washington Senators—and later the Red Sox and the Yankees—but that had been a good twenty-five years back. I needn’t have worried. Scarborough is a heavy, energetic, deep-chested man, with an exuberant nose (his baseball contemporaries called him Horn), curly black hair, and a sunburst smile, and the moment I spotted him among the arriving passengers my baseball unconscious offered up some instant corroboration: a younger Ray Scarborough, in baggy old-fashioned baseball pants, wheeling and firing on the mound; Scarborough in an old-style, low-crowned baseball cap emblazoned with a big “W,” staring out at me in black-and-white from some ancient sports page. We greeted each other and retrieved his bags, and in a few minutes we were in our rented wheels, rolling south through some lovely, soft-green Kentucky hill country, and Scarborough had made me feel that we were already old friends. He told me that we were headed for Elizabethtown, some forty miles away, to see a young pitcher named Tim Brandenburg, a lefty who would be starting that afternoon for his Elizabethtown High School team in a state district tournament game. I asked Ray how he had heard about Brandenburg (I had in mind a whispered midnight telephone call from a back-country baseball sleuth, or a scribbled note from some old teammate of Scarborough’s now buried in the boonies), and then I learned that scouting, like everything else in baseball, is undergoing some revolutionary changes.