The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (103 page)

Most of the Orioles regulars are long-termers with the club (which in recent years has lost to free-agency only one player it hoped to keep, pitcher Don Stanhouse), and most of them talk about Baltimore style with the same tempered earnestness, but in each case, I felt, their views seemed to represent a private set of convictions or discoveries, with none of the numbing, faked-up “positive values” that the boyish Los Angeles varsity exudes when it expounds upon Dodger Blue. Ken Singleton, now in his ninth year with the club, who was converted from designated hitter to a pinch-hitter for this series, talked to the reporters about how much more difficult it was to get up on short notice and make a single crucial appearance at the plate, and expressed his awe of people like Dwyer and Ayala, who do it all the time. “There’s a certain atmosphere here that’s conducive to winning,” he said. “On other teams, guys get upset with their roles if they’re not playing all the time. Not here.” Dauer, who batted .235 this summer but maintained that he’d had a good year, said, “If we’re here, we must all be playing well. When you come up in an organization that’s had a Brooks Robinson and a Mark Belanger, the defensive part is instilled in you. You know that’s part of why you win.” And Jim Palmer: “We don’t have any ups and downs. We come out here and hope we’ll win. It’s a calm feeling. Earl Weaver had a lot to do with it. He never overreacted early in the season, so by September we’d be in business again. Joe is the same. We had two seven-game losing streaks this year, but, as he said, nobody pointed the finger at anyone else. Stable organizations don’t overreact. You do your best, send out good pitchers, and hope you can go on doing what you’ve done all year.”

Stable organizations run deep, and the calm Baltimore way of winning that Palmer was talking about seems to have grown out of a pattern of sound management that began with its first general manager, Paul Richards, who was steering things when the club came to Baltimore, in 1954. (It had been the hapless St. Louis Browns franchise.) He was succeeded by a near-Plantagenet line of brilliant executives: Lee MacPhail, Harry Dalton, Frank Cashen, and the incumbent (since 1975) G.M., Hank Peters. (Dalton is now the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, who won the A.L. pennant last year, and Cashen holds the same post with the up-and-coming Mets.) Above them, in the owner’s office, were Jerold C. Hoffberger and then (since 1979) Edward Bennett Williams—each an exception to the twin mold of drearily conservative or flamboyantly egocentric owners—and around them, so to speak, in various farm and coaching and scouting posts, was a passel of sound, much-admired field men: Jim McLaughlin, Lou Gorman, George Bamberger, Ray Poitevint, Ray Scarborough, and the present-day super-scout, Jim Russo. Some of these worthies have retired or moved along to higher posts with other clubs (Ray Scarborough died last year), but each of them, I think, must have felt a proprietary glow over the Orioles’ home-grown grand success this autumn.

In the Series, Eddie Murray and Mike Schmidt each ran into oppressive difficulties in trying to do what he had been doing all year, which was to hit the ball to distant parts and win ballgames. Schmidt talked at length with the writers about his failures (he was batting .063 after four games), and said that the Orioles pitchers were making him chase a lot of pitches that were up and out of the strike zone, and that he was making adjustments in his swing; Murray, for his part, said nothing and made no adjustments (he had had two singles so far, for .125), as is his custom, but it seemed certain that he was unhappily thinking back to the World Series of 1979, when he failed repeatedly at the plate while the O’s dropped the last three games in a row and lost to the Pirates. Now he came up in the second inning of the fifth game and whacked a monstrous homer into the upper tiers in right field—“It would have been a homer in Grand Canyon,” Pete Rose said later—and followed up in the fourth with an even longer, two-run job that bounced off the center-field scoreboard, where the ball just missed hitting the “M” of his own name up there at a moment when the message screen was listing the American League RBI leaders. Rick Dempsey hit a home run and also a double, and scored the last run, and the O’s, behind McGregor’s 5–0 shutout, were World Champions. Dempsey was voted the Most Valuable Player—a lovely choice. He is a first-rate catcher, durable and energetic, with a powerful arm and great agility behind the plate, but with few of the offensive abilities that usually go with the job. This summer, he batted .231, with four home runs—about average for him. Dempsey’s attitude toward the game has always been summed up for me by the way he wears his cap in the field—turned backward, because of the mask, but with the brim bent up in a cocky little flourish. Like most of his teammates, he seems to have an unquenchably high regard for himself. “I’ve got a lot of good hits for this club down the years,” he remarked early in the Series. “I get pinch-hit for a lot late in the game, so I’ve gone plenty of weeks when I was oh-for-two and then came out of the game. I figure if I’m hitting .250 here it’s the same as .280 someplace else. We just have a different way of doing things here.”

*
Righetti was moved to the bullpen the following year, where, as expected, he became the Yanks’ prime late-innings stopper.

—
Spring 1984

T
HERE’S NOTHING LIKE AN
all-expense-paid late-winter vacation under the palms and within sight and sound of batted baseballs to give a sensitive man a deeper appreciation of the nature of guilt. Each year in March, I journey to Arizona and then to Florida, or vice versa, to watch a sampling of the current and future major-league ballplayers do their morning stretching exercises on dew-dappled outfield lawns (lately these workouts are being done to bouncy aerobic-rock sounds and are led by a young woman in shorts and leg-warmers who is clearly in better shape than anyone else on the field) and then test and disport themselves in batting cages and on practice mounds-engaging in B.P. and Infield and Shagging and Flip—and eventually play a few innings of morning B-Squad ball or an afternoon exhibition game, and each year this excursion brings me such freshets of pleasure that I must find new excuses within myself to justify such dulcet bystanding. Duty, for instance. I am there at the camps as a reporter, to be sure, having been dispatched sunward to search out the news and the special sense of the coming season, and there is no sterner or more assiduous newshawk to be found on the demanding Scottsdale-to-Sarasota beat than yours truly. Even the most casual morning invitation to take a dip in my motel pool or to make a fourth at middle-aged doubles finds me puritanically glum. “Not a chance!” I cry. “I’m
working
today.” And work I do, carefully noting in my notebook the uniform number and the unremarkable batting mannerisms of some hulking young stranger now taking his hacks in the cage, and checking his thin line of stats (.266 and eight home runs in Danville in 1981) in my team press guide, and then eliciting clubhouse quotes from a grizzled bullpen millionaire about the current state of his damaged wing (“Hurts like a bastard….”), and, later in the day, raising my mid-game gaze from the diamond to observe the gauzy look of departing rain clouds lifting from the jagged rim of some distant desert peak, and then entering
that
in my notebook (with the pen slipping a little in my fingers, because of the dab of Sea & Ski I have just rubbed on my nose, now that the sun is out again and cooking us gently in the steep little grandstand behind third base). I watch and listen and write, filling up almost as much space in my copybooks as I do in October at the World Series, and entering on my score-card the names of third-string non-roster substitutes who filter into the game so late in the day that even the geezer fans and their geezerettes have begun to gather up their backrests and seat cushions and head off home for beer and naps. Guilt, as I have said, is the spur, for it is my secret Calvinist fear that baseball will run out on me someday and I will find nothing fresh at the morning camps, despite my notes and numberings, or go news-less on some sun-filled afternoon, and so at last lose this sweet franchise. Baseball saves me every time—not the news of it, perhaps, so much as its elegant and arduous complexity, its layered substrata of nuance and lesson and accumulated experience, which are the true substance of these sleepy, overfamiliar practice rituals, and which, if we know how and where to look for them, can later be seen to tip the scales of the closest, most wanted games of the summer. Almost everything in baseball looks easy and evident, but really learning the game, it turns out, can take a lifetime, even if you keep notes.

Let’s face it: spring training is a misnomer. Thanks to aerobics, racquetball, high-tech physical-fitness centers, California-chic wives, and a sensible wish to extend their very high salaries through as many years as possible, most major-league ballplayers stay in terrific shape all year round now. Back in the straw-suitcase days, it took a month to six weeks to work off winter beer bellies and firm up poolroom-pale bodies, but contemporary players have told me that a single week of batting practice and rundown drills would make them absolutely ready for Opening Day. What with performance records, autumn visits to the Instructional Leagues, and almost daily reports from the winter-ball leagues in Latin America, most managers have a pretty good notion of the capabilities of the rising minor leaguers in their organizations, and are not likely to be badly startled (or much convinced) by a .485 spring average put together by some anonymous rookie outfielder during the exhibitions. The pitchers, to be sure, do require all of March and a little bit more in order to get their arms in shape, and the process—early stretching and tossing, the first three-innings stints, then harder stuff and longer outings—cannot be hurried or shortened, since there must be days of recuperation after each game or batting-practice workout. Spring training is really for the pitchers, then—and for the writers, who need this slow, sleepy time in which to sweeten their characters and enlarge their perceptions of what truly matters in our old game. I offer as example an apothegm uttered by a friend from the
Chronicle,
a budding Solomon whose views have already been heard in these pages. It was in a week of dazzling weather in Arizona, and this time we were sitting side by side in the narrow press box of Scottsdale Stadium, watching the Giants vs. (I think) the Brewers. Late in the sixth inning, he looked irritably at his watch and said, “Damn. Yesterday’s game was already over by this time.”

“Right,” said I, arising and gathering up my notebook, media guides, pencils, and scorecard.
(My
deadline was weeks away.) “And thanks, Dave. See you at the pool.”

In Winter Haven, on the very first day of this spring jaunt, I found Ted Williams out in right-field foul ground teaching batting to Von Hayes—a curious business, since the Splendid Splinter, of course, is a spring batting instructor for the Red Sox, and Hayes is the incumbent center fielder of the Phillies. Hayes was accompanied by Deron Johnson, the Philadelphia batting coach, and the visit, I decided, was in the nature of medical referral—a courtesy second opinion extended by a great specialist to a colleague from a different hospital (or league). Von Hayes is a stringbean—six feet five, with elongated arms and legs—and his work at the plate this year will be the focus of anxious attention from the defending National League Champion Phillies, who are in the process of turning themselves from an old club into a young one in the shortest possible time. Since last fall, they have parted with (among others) Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, and veteran reliever Ron Reed, and later this spring they traded away Gary Matthews, their established left fielder (Matthews, in fact, was intently listening in on Ted Williams’ talk to his teammate Hayes), to the Cubs. Two years ago, in his first full year in the majors, Von Hayes hit fourteen homers and batted in eighty-two runs for the Cleveland Indians—sufficient promise to encourage the Phillies to give up five of their own players (including the wonderful old Manny Trillo and the wonderful young Julio Franco) for him. Last year, Hayes, troubled with injuries (and perhaps unsettled by the nickname Five-for-One, bestowed on him by Pete Rose), batted a middling-poor .265, with six homers—reason enough for a call to Dr. Ted.

“Lemme see that,” Ted Williams was saying, and he took Hayes’ bat and then hefted it lightly, like a man testing a new tennis racquet. “Well, all right, if you’re really strong enough,” he said, giving it back. “But you don’t need a great big bat, you know. Stan Musial always used a little bitty drugstore model. So what
do
you want? You know what Rogers Hornsby told me forty-five years ago? It was the best batting advice I ever got.
‘Get a good ball to hit!’
What does that mean? It means a ball that does not fool you, a ball that is not in a tough spot for you. So then when you are in a tough spot, concede a little to that pitcher when he’s got two strikes on you. Think of trying to hit it back up the middle. Try not to pull it every time. Harry Heilmann told me that he never became a great hitter until he learned to hit inside out. I used to have a lot of trouble in here”—he showed us an awkward inside dip at the ball with his own bat—“until I moved back in the box and got a little more time for myself. Try to get the bat reasonably inside as you swing, because it’s a hell of a lot harder to go from the outside in than it is to go the other way around.”

Hayes, who looked pale with concentration, essayed a couple of left-handed swings, and Willams said, “Keep a little movement going. Keep your ass loose. Try to keep in a quick position to swing. When your hands get out like that, you’re just making a bigger arc.”

Hayes swung again—harder this time—and Williams said, “That looks down to me. You’re swingin’ down on the ball.”

Hayes looked startled. “I thought it was straight up,” he said. He swung again, and then again.

“Well, it’s still down,” Ted said quietly. “And see where you’re looking when you swing. You’re looking at the ground about out here.” He touched the turf off to Hayes’s left with the tip of his bat. “Look out at that pitcher—don’t take your eyes off him. That and—” Williams cocked his hips and his right knee and swung at a couple of imaginary pitches, with his long, heavy body uncocking suddenly and thrillingly and then rotating with the smooth release of his hips. His hands, I saw now, were inside, close to his body, while Hayes’ hands had started much higher and could not come back for a low, inside pitch with anything like Ted’s ease and elegance. Nothing to it. Hayes, who has a long face, looked sepulchral now, and no wonder, for no major leaguer wants to retinker his swing—not in the springtime, not ever—and Williams, sensing something, changed his tone. “Just keep going,” he said gently to the young man. “Everybody gets better if they keep at it.”