The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (101 page)

Hindsight is easy, but nothing about the Orioles-Yankees weekend surprised me (except for Gossage’s throwing six fast-balls in a row to a good left-handed hitter). Indeed, the games perfectly confirmed what we have all known for so long but have somehow failed to understand in its entirety. The Orioles, not the Yankees, are the dominant American League team of our time. They had come into the Yankee series on a roll: twenty victories in their past twenty-five games. This was an entirely typical sort of momentum for them in the late going; their September-October record this year (21–12), under manager Joe Altobelli, sustained almost exactly the same killing late-season winning percentage (.638) that they had compiled during the previous fifteen years, under Earl Weaver, who retired last fall. Since their first pennant, in 1966, the Orioles have won three World Series and lost three, while the Yankees are 2–2 in that same span, but the Orioles have taken seven divisional titles since the split-league plan went into effect, fourteen years ago, as against five for the Yanks. The Orioles, in fact, have won more games than any other team in the majors in the past five years and in the past ten years and (someone went to great pains to dig
this
out) in the past twenty-seven years. Why this is so is something we can get to shortly, when talking about the playoffs and the World Series, but the heart of it, clearly, is that the Orioles always cling to and personify the idea of a team, while the Yankees, by declaration and policy, prefer the idea of winning. Stated this way, the rival propositions seem to tilt unfairly toward the selfless, semi-anonymous, all-for-one fellowship of the O’s, if only because so many of us were taught to strive for such an ideal back when we were in school. But the celebrated and extremely successful Yankees, with their purchased stars, enormous salaries, and bumptious, self-publicizing ownership and management, have given such a good account of themselves in competition that they have taught us—or should have taught us by now—that sweetness and selflessness are not automatically better. The many strands that go into the fabric of a winning or losing franchise include the club’s market area and audience potential, the financial resources of its owners, its scouting personnel and minor-league program, its luck (above all, its luck in avoiding injuries to significant players), and, in the end, its baseball philosophy. Fans incline toward the current personality and practices of their chosen team, as long as it shows sporadic faint signs of life, but I think we in the stands are capable of a little distance as well, and perhaps even a baseball philosophy of our own. The brusquely capable Baltimore style perfectly suits my own fancy, for the Orioles, by long observation, have proved both approachable and thoughtful, patient and combative. Their players instinctively avoid the attitudes of moneyed sullenness that so many teams fall victim to once they experience good fortune, but they also remember what matters in the end. They win.

In the quick, flattish National League playoffs, the visiting East Coast champs presented the first-day Los Angeles audience with a gemlike miniature sample of Philadelphia-style basic baseball: a 1–0 shutout by Steve Carlton (with a bit of help from the bullpen), built upon—cantilevered upon, perhaps—a solo first-inning home run by Mike Schmidt. The unsatisfaction of such an opener was probably not entirely dispelled in the next night’s game, which the Dodgers won by 4–1, since three of the Dodger tallies resulted directly or secondarily from Phillie errors. Fernando Valenzuela, never quite dominant, hung tough and got the win, as he so often does. Game Three, played on the chemical lawns of Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, also lacked zing, since the Dodger starter, Bob Welch, was forced to depart the scene in the second inning, when he was laid low by a recurrence of a hip affliction—a terminal blow to the Dodgers’ hopes in the series, I think. The Phillies got a good outing from their starter, the tall twenty-four-year-old curveballing rookie Charles Hudson (he had pitched in a postseason playoff game last year, too: between the Peninsula Pilots and the Durham Bulls, of the Class A Carolina League), and won by 7–2. Gary Matthews, a veteran Philadelphia left fielder, who had been frequently benched during the regular season, had himself a day: two runs, a homer, two singles, a base on balls, and four runs batted in. The next evening, he resumed at once, with a first-inning three-run homer bombed into the central sector of the left-field loge seats, which more or less settled the game and the National League pennant right there, since Carlton was back on hand and (with his compeers) cruised to win, again by 7–2. This is not, to be sure, a very extensive summary of these semifinals, but the truth of the matter is that the Dodgers never distinguished themselves or looked even vaguely like champions in this little stretch of games. This was a problem-marred, transitional year for the Dodgers, in which they had to make do with a slow, weak-armed outfield, an error-prone infield (with a converted outfielder, Pedro Guerrero, at third), and a catcher, Jack Fimple, who was hurried up from the minors because of injuries to his predecessors on the job. They will all do better in the coming seasons, and God or their other skipper, Tom Lasorda, deserves awe for bringing them so far in this one.

The American League championships, although concluded in the same short span, were more
like
it, starting as they did with a successive pair of genuine pitching masterpieces—the rain-soaked opening 2–1 win by the White Sox ace, LaMarr Hoyt, and its riposte the next evening, when Baltimore’s rookie righthander Mike Boddicker fanned fourteen Chicago batters in the course of a 4–0 shutout. Hoyt, tough and tubby, showed us his specialty, which is zipping the ball over the plate: he threw first-pitch strikes to twenty-six of the thirty-one batters he faced, never fell behind in the mid-counts, and walked no one. Boddicker, who is slim and dark-haired, dismissed batters by the handful without ever really overpowering anyone. A prime new graduate of the Baltimore School of Sensible Pitching, he relies upon a couple of curves, a modest fastball, a slider, and a changeup-sinker thing, and, above all, upon the perfectly controlled changing speeds with which he offers up his repertoire. The two games, in addition to these heroics, seemed to offer multiple hints and lessons. Right from the start, I felt certain that LaMarr Hoyt would win, as he did, but it was odd that his teammates could never quite break things open in that first game; leading against Scott McGregor by 2–0 at the mid-way point, they somehow contrived to put ten base runners aboard in the last three innings without scoring any of them. Baltimore, for its part, at last scored a run in the bottom of the ninth, on a double by Dan Ford and then a single by Cal Ripken, and thus had the typing run aboard when Eddie Murray grounded into a force for the last out. Insufficient rallies are rarely brought up or dwelt upon in losing clubhouses, and it was more than interesting that several of the Oriole players and coaches pointed out this ending after the game and spoke of it almost with satisfaction. The Orioles’ dispassionate group perception of baseball is not something I have previously encountered; it’s as if there are twenty-five academicians out there with birdies on their caps. They had lost this game, to be sure, but they had kept things close, even against a LaMarr Hoyt, and had had a chance to win it at the end, with their best man up at bat. A tying double or a winning homer cannot be counted upon in that situation, of course, but the chance for one had been made, which is the way Baltimore likes to do things.

The next evening, just after Boddicker’s memorable outing, I talked with his pitching coach, Ray Miller (he was wearing a faded T-shirt that advertised his pitching precepts: “
31 SAYS
[Miller is No. 31]
WORK FAST, THROW STRIKES, CHANGE SPEEDS, HOLD ’EM CLOSE
”), who professed himself not quite ravished by Boddicker’s fourteen strikeouts, since he so much prefers the more energy-efficient mode of dismissing batters on ground balls and pop-ups. What he did like, however, was Boddicker’s beautifully modulated tempos. “He’s got a range of from sixty-four to eighty-six miles per hour, from low on his slider to high on his fastball, which is what you’re after in this business,” he said. “The whole concept is to know what the guy up at bat is looking for but to throw it at a different speed than he expects.” Someone said that the Chicago batters, over in their clubhouse, were saying that they had been less than awed by Boddicker’s heat, and Miller smiled contentedly and said, “That’s just music to my ears. I love it when the other batters complain about our pitchers throwing nothing.”

The third game (which I had to watch, to my dismay, from a distance, by television) brought out some mid-game rumbles when Chicago’s rookie slugger Ron Kittle was accidentally plunked on the knee by Mike Flanagan and when Rich Dotson, the Chicago hurler, then hit Cal Ripken and brushed back Eddie Murray in response, but the deeper cries of pain came from the overflowing throngs of Chicago fans when the Orioles, profiting from long blows and an inordinate number of bases on balls from the Chicago pitchers, blew away the Pale Hose, 11–1. The next game—the last of the year for the White Sox, it turned out—was distressing to watch and wait through, so edgy and exciting in its multiple crises and endlessly prolonged resolution that I was almost glad I was not on the scene to see and hear and taste such fierce and enveloping anxiety and hope and ultimate heartbreak. (Players have told me, by the way, that it is infinitely easier to be in such a game than to have to sit and watch it, since the concentration and physical movements of playing release one, a little, from the pain of waiting and speculation.) Inning after inning, the two teams put up zeros on the scoreboard, with the accidents and adventures of play seeming to sway first in one direction and then in the other, yet there was so little to choose between the two that after six full innings each team had come to precisely the same point in its batting order, with four hits and five stranded base runners apiece. Britt Burns, the big, heavy-bodied Chicago left-hander, pitched out of a frightful situation in the sixth and another one in the eighth, to baying cries of relief from the Comiskey Park faithful, while his Baltimore counterpart, Storm Davis, gave way to Tippy Martinez on the mound in the bottom of the seventh. This was when the White Sox blew their best chance of the day. I think in retrospect that the key to the game was not just some very bad base-running by the White Sox—which turned three hits and a successful hit-and-run play and an Oriole balk into no runs at all—but the icily executed Baltimore defensive play in the middle of this crisis: a cutoff peg and a waiting, watching-over-the-shoulder rundown between short and second that was suddenly redirected into a 7–5-4–2 out at the plate. That and the scarcely noticed fact that the Orioles had changed pitchers, while the Sox had not. When Chicago failed to score in the eighth (a fine running catch by John Shelby in deep center field took an extra-base hit away from Carlton Fisk) and again in the ninth (Martinez struck out Rudy Law, with two on), the feel of the game was wholly altered, for it was clear that Britt Burns must be close to exhaustion and that his manager, Tony LaRussa, did not have enough confidence in his bullpen to bring in a successor. In the end, it was one of those special but not wholly rare games that are settled by some players who never get into the lineup at all—in this case the left-handed Baltimore pinch-hitters Jim Dwyer and John Lowenstein, waiting in the dugout, whose presence and reputation persuaded LaRussa to try to stay with Burns for at least one or two batters more. (A light sometimes clicks on, I have found, if I can remind myself to think about the movable pieces, on the bench and in the clubhouse, that remain available to each manager in the latter stretches of a close game.) With one out in the top of the tenth, the Oriole right fielder, Tito Landrum, whacked a home run into the left-field upper deck, and then three successive singles and a sacrifice, all struck against Burns’ successors, made it 3–0, and turned out the arcs in Comiskey Park until the spring. In spite of White Sox malfeasances on the bases and near-total collapse of their power hitters Kittle, Paciorek, Luzinski, Fisk, and Baines (who in four games batted a collective .183, with one run batted in), there was a nobility to this last game that should bring pride to the White Sox players in time, and balm to their supporters. It was the game of the year.

Those Comiskey Park fans had more fun than anyone this past summer. Their club, for a wonder, did not adhere to its ancient tradition of a second-half collapse but went quite the other way, surviving a very rocky start and then suddenly finding itself at midseason and thundering home with a 22–9 record in August, followed by a 22–6 September. The turnaround seemed to begin on June 15th, with LaRussa’s decision to move Carlton Fisk up to the No. 2 slot in the order. Fisk batted .319 in the second half, and probably helped even more with his handling of the pitchers; three starters—Hoyt, Dotson, and Floyd Bannister—had a combined record of forty-two wins and five losses in the second half. The best things of the year seemed to happen at home, where Greg Luzinski three times bombed a home run up onto the left-field roof (no one had ever done it more than once in a season), and Kittle put two up there, too, and had thirty-three others for the season. And then there was the evening when Fisk and Luzinski and Paciorek hit back-to-back-to-back (well, I guess not, but something like that) home runs in the first inning. The noisy Chicago style became known as “winning ugly”—a numbingly publicized slogan picked up from an oxy-moronic slur about the club made by Ranger manager Doug Rader. Anyway, by the time the last home stand was over, 2,132,821 fans had come to the old white pagoda of Comiskey to see the Sox—the most in any summer since they began to play ball there, back in 1910.

I missed the whole scene, and I’m sorry I did. I’m not certain that I’ve ever appreciated the Chicago White Sox enough, since I did not grow up in that great baseball city and never joined the holy order of Sox believers. Loving the White Sox, it should be understood, means hating the Cubs; there can be no middle ground. I learned this years ago from a friend in college, who lived and (much more often) died for Ted Lyons and Luke Appling, and this year in September I talked with a White Sox fan in exile—a woman now living in New York (she is in television news) who grew up in Chicago in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties—who told me that matters still stood the same back home. “For me, the White Sox have the same image that Chicago does,” she said. “That
grittiness.
There’s nothing lovely about it. When most people I know think about Chicago, they sort of mean the Cubs and the North Side. I mean, they don’t know the city at all. The Cubs are just one safe elevated ride away, but we Sox people were way off on the dangerous South Side. I
hate
it that the Cubs don’t have lights. It’s typical—they just don’t think they have to do anything for their fans. Who can go to games in the daytime, anyway? Just rich people and kids. The Cubs are so damned boring. They don’t have that street feeling. Did you know that Harry Caray, the broadcast guy, has gone over to the Cubs from the White Sox? Can you
believe
that? That’s like changing sides in the middle of the war. It’s like joining the Nazis.”