Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (5 page)

Next day. Mgr. Tanner soft-spoken yet volub. skipper. Young, bronzed face, snowy sideburns. Credits many for Chisox rise, incl. famed pitching coach J. Sain, known for unorth. methods. Much-traveled Sain the grand guru of 20-game winners. Tanner emphs. defense, shows tactical charts kept of every opp. AL hitter. Charts color-coded accord. to Chi. pitchers, show site of every fair ball hit in season, suggest defens. shifts. No wonder modern bat. aves. so low! Tanner on Allen: Finest BB player anywhere. Will go from Chisox straight into Hall of Fame, etc. Does not comment on Allen’s distaste for reg. hours, public appearances, batting pract., spring training, etc. Tanner knows right thing to know about Allen: Superstar.

Chisox take on Bosox again in afternoon. Chisox now play all home Wed. games in sunshine, for night workers, children, etc. Commendable. V. pop. Chisox broadcaster Harry Caray also works Wed. games from seat in CF bleachers, delighting kids. Kids further delighted now when Dick Allen rips 1st inn. pitch to CF for triple & RBI. Whew. Game then runs down, stops, dies, thanks to Luis Tiant, Bost. pitcher. Tiant, noted for odd pitching mannerisms, is also a famous mound dawdler. Stands on hill like sunstruck archeologist at Knossos. Regards ruins. Studies sun. Studies landscape. Looks at artifact in hand. Wonders: Keep this potsherd or throw it away? Does Smithsonian want it? Hmm. Prepares to throw it away. Pauses. Sudd. discovers
writing
on object. Hmm. Possible Linear B inscript.? Sighs. Decides. Throws. Wipes face. Repeats whole thing. Innings & hours creep by. Spectators clap, yawn, droop, expire. In stands, 57 disloc. jaws set new modern AL record, single game. Somebody wins game in end, can’t remember who.
****

Belonging: Arriving late for an afternoon game against the Reds, I found the Shea parking lot filled and was forced to explore some of the distant Queens outback before finding an empty space in front of a lumberyard. The game was already under way when I came hurrying across the lot past acres of metal heating in the sun. Looking up around the big scoreboard, I could see crowds packing the steep, curving stands against the sky. Tom Seaver was starting for the Mets, so I wasn’t worried about missing much, but then, as I came closer, I heard the voice of the public-address announcer from inside the stadium: “Batting for Cincinnati in the fourth poh-sition …” Bad. The Reds had a man on, at least. There were confused cries, and I heard “Batting in the fifth poh-sition …” I had never before realized that a public-address man omits all the essential information about a game. I began to run. More noises, more cries. “Batting in the sixth poh-sition …” What was going
on?
Maybe there had been a last-minute switch in the Mets’ pitching rotation. Maybe—There was a long ascending roar, suddenly cut off. Now I was almost next to the stands in left. Sweating, I stopped and tried to peer back at the face of the scoreboard, but the angle was still wrong. “Batting in the seventh poh-sition …”

It was all true. In time, I got to my seat and saw the big “4” up on the board for the Reds’ first. I picked up the details of the disaster from my neighbors: three singles, a sacrifice, and then a two-run homer,
just
fair, by Joe Hague. All this off Tom Seaver. It looked like a ruined day, but things picked up a little when the Mets scratched out a run in the first, and when Seaver fanned Bench and Perez, both on big, swinging strikes, in the third. Then Willie Mays, leading off in the fifth, banged a single off Cincinnati pitcher Ross Grimsley’s leg. Bud Harrelson, going with an outside pitch, doubled off the left-field wall, and then Rusty Staub lined a low shot that Joe Morgan leaped for and missed, and the score was suddenly up to 4–3, and the noise at Shea insupportable.

So much and then no more. A double play ended that part of things, and in the sixth John Milner’s bid for a pinch-hit home run was pulled down a few feet short. He had batted for Seaver, necessarily, and a few minutes later Tony Perez hit a 1-1 pitch by Danny Frisella over the 371-foot mark in right center, and the game was gone, this time for good. All that for nothing, and later, as I walked back to the lumberyard and then fought my way slowly home through the traffic, there were other troubles to think about. This was the eighth straight game that Seaver had failed to finish, and his earned-run average, the best in the league last year, was way up. Jerry Koosman’s arm was still untested, and the rest of the Mets’ starting corps was unsteady at best. The team had now lost its last two series and most of its lead; the Pirates were only a couple of games back. In contrast to the familiar and often frail-looking home hitters (flash of Bud Harrelson leaning across the plate and flicking that double over third base), the Reds had looked frightening—Rose and then those two cool, quick batsmen Morgan and Tolan, and then the sluggers Bench and Perez. And yet the Pirates looked even better. Stargell and Clemente and Sanguillen …
Seven
of their regulars were batting over .300. And the Cubs were coming on fast, too.…

Cares abound among other teams, of course, and also some hopes. Just lately, the Orioles won nine straight games, but still trail the Tigers by one. The White Sox are still second to Oakland, but slipping back. The Dodgers have fallen behind Houston; Houston has fallen behind Cincinnati. The Giants are seventeen games down. Yaz is back, and hitting a little. Three, maybe four, real pennant races are under way. Somehow, after that ridiculous and painful afternoon against the Reds, it all mattered to me again. Anxiety and difficulties afflict me, a fortunate fan, and this baseball season has begun to happen after all.

*
The qualitative difference between the two leagues has diminished since this gloomy report was written. The AL continues to trail the NL in attendance, but the disparity is now down to about two million, and since 1973, when the American League invented the designated hitter, it has usually slightly surpassed the National League in homers and batting average.

**
Met fans should be forgiven if they are overtaken here by groans or a sudden wish to lie down. Fregosi, who was in fact well past the best summers of his playing career, lasted for a season and a half with the Mets. To acquire him, the club had sent California a young, hopelessly wild right-handed pitcher whose lifetime record stood at 29–38. Once on the side of the Angels, the pitcher (it was Nolan Ryan) became a certified twenty-game winner, led his league in strikeouts for three years running, and set other notable records, thus establishing himself as one of the greatest fastball pitchers in the annals of the game.

***
It wasn’t. The Astros and the Dodgers finished the season in a tie for second place, ten and a half games behind the Cincinnati Reds.

****
What Tiant was probably thinking about out there was his control, which he was in the process of recovering after a succession of injuries and poor performances, which had at one time driven him down to the minors. Once he got back his poise, he became a livelier pitcher to watch—the most entertaining, in fact, in baseball.

October 1972

I
T WAS A SPLENDID
year for losers. The Oakland A’s, the first (and possibly the last) big-league team to wear green-and-gold uniforms and white shoes, and also (if one thinks of them by their old and infinitely better sobriquet and thus considers them a continuance of the erstwhile Kansas City, and previously erstwhile Philadelphia, Athletics) a team unrewarded by a pennant over the past forty-one consecutive summers, and also (if one has watched them play important but truly lonely games at home at all times of the season) a team almost entirely without a following, and also (if one has been there even briefly) a team spiritually representing the losers’ capital of the West
and
the East—the A’s stand undisputed as Champions of the World. Elsewhere, Steve Carlton, a pitcher with the last-place (in the National League East) Phillies, won 27 games while losing 10, thereby accounting for nearly half of his team’s total victories for the year (59), and also led his league in complete games (30), innings pitched (346), strikeouts (310), and earned-run average (1.98). The White Sox’ unpredictable Dick Allen, a capricious slugger hastily traded away by three different teams in the last three years, led
his
league in home runs (37) and runs batted in (113), and will presumably be permitted to wear the same uniform again next year. Among the top pitchers in the American League was Luis Tiant, of the Red Sox, who last year was dropped by the Minnesota Twins, toiled for two minor-league clubs, and finally ran up a 1–7 record with Boston; this year he won 15 games (including 6 shutouts) while losing 6, and led all the pitchers in the majors with an earned-run average of 1.91. Then, too, there was the totally mysterious season-long batting slump that afflicted the Baltimore Orioles, heretofore considered the best team in baseball, whose falling-off in all offensive categories not only unseated them as the perpetual American League Series defenders but also permitted an unexpected and wonderfully welcome down-to-the-wire pennant race in their division. Finally, and most splendidly of all, this baseball year concluded in two violently contested five-game playoffs and then in an absolutely first-class World Series, which went the full seven games and produced baseball of such prolonged and grating intensity that, perhaps for the first time, the pain of losing became as vivid and memorable to us, the fans, as the more familiar, leaping joys of victory in October.

The Yankees, surely the most conspicuous losers of the past half-decade, lost again, but this time with distinction, remaining in real contention in that AL East scramble until the last few days, and finishing a bare six and a half games behind the Tigers. Their true defeat, to be sure, was at the hands of the Mets, in the box-office standings; the Mets, although a far less stimulating team than the Yanks in the second half of the year, outdrew them again, this time by the shocking margin of 2,134,185 to 967,715. The hardy little band of Yankee fans enjoyed a summer of modest entertainments. There was a pleasing outburst of long hits by the illustrious Bobby Murcer, who wound up with thirty-three homers. There was a startling doubleheader against Kansas City late in August in which the usually docile Bronxites rapped out forty hits; two days later, in a twi-nighter against Texas, they recorded twenty-six more, for a four-game total possibly unmatched even by the old Yankee Murderers’ Row. More often, the script would call for a couple of scratchy runs fashioned by such uncelebrities as Ron Blomberg or Roy White or young Charlie Spikes (a rare new issue for the album of felicitous baseball names) and then defended by earnest but modestly talented infielders like Horace Clarke and Celerino Sanchez—all building to the obligatory scene in the eighth or ninth when the dangerous visiting team would put the tying or winning runs aboard, and Manager Houk, out on the mound, would gesture with his left arm to the bullpen, summoning forth, to a crescendo of happy screaming, the pin-striped white Datsun and its celebrated cargo. As the organ struck up “Pomp and Circumstance,” Sparky Lyle, the lefty reliever
sans peur et sans reproche,
would emerge from his cloud-car, hand his jacket to the ball boy, stalk to the mound, and (clamping down on his tobacco wad) fling a few warm-up pitches as the cries of “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” rose from the bleachers, and then in no time (most of the time) the game would be over and (almost always) won.

Up in Boston, the Red Sox fans seemed to resist such pleasures, even after their team took over first place from the Tigers early in September. Made wary by the Sox’ miserable early showing, and perhaps disaffected by a petty and senseless campaign of vilification mounted against the Boston manager, Eddie Kasko, by some of the local sportswriters and radio broadcasters, they kept a certain distance until the evening of September 20. On that night, playing at home, the Beantowners swept a doubleheader from Baltimore, defeating Oriole aces Jim Palmer and Mike Cuellar in succession and, in effect, killing off the old champions for the season. Luis Tiant, walking in from the bullpen to start the nightcap (he threw another shutout), was greeted with a rolling, continuous wave of applause, and after the game was over the writers and venders in Fenway Park could hear the sounds of homeward celebration rising up from the railway bridge and from Kenmore Square, exactly as they did in the great summer of 1967. The triumph was short, for the pursuing Tigers came in the next night and humiliated the Red Sox, scoring four runs in the first inning of a 10–3 game that reduced the Boston lead to .0006 in the standings. Watching these two celebrated powers (both old favorites of mine) that evening, I could detect subtle and contrasting styles and motives of play. Almost surely, the Tigers were driven by a sense of the years descending. With the exception of the left side of their infield—the estimable Brinkman and Rodriguez—this was the same lineup of veterans that had upset the Cardinals in the World Series in 1968; their line soldiers—Kaline, Cash, McAuliffe, Gates Brown, Freehan, Stanley, and Northrup—were all in their thirties now, and they knew that this was a late-season campaign to win, because it was most unlikely that they would ever find themselves in another. The Red Sox offered some old reliables, too—Smith, Petrocelli, and Yastrzemski—but there were a lot of new faces and new hopes on this squad. The following night, the Boston pitcher was a youngster named Lynn McGlothen, who works in a fever of optimistic energy on the mound—all twitches, glances, shrugs, and impatience—and one of the Sox’ early runs was initiated by a hit by Carlton Fisk, their rookie catcher. The third and last Sox run came on a rare homer by Yastrzemski—rare because Yaz (who plays first base now) has consciously altered his stroke, after years of diminishing effectiveness, and become a singles hitter. The three runs barely held up in a game that came down to two marvelous moments. In the eighth, the Tigers loaded the bases with none out, and the next batter, Eddie Brinkman, whacked a hard bouncer just over third base, where Rico Petrocelli barely gloved the ball, stepped on third, and threw home in time to complete a double play of Smithsonian rarity. Jim Northrup then hit a fly to short right, which Rick Miller caught in his webbing after a frantic sprint and a slide on his knees, and the Tiger dugout erupted helmets, towels, gloves, and disgust. In the next two days, the teams split the last two games of the set, and broke off the engagement exactly where they had started.