The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (112 page)

The Mets’ season, as we know, did not end quite so happily, but Dwight Gooden never stopped. He wound up the year at 17–9 (third best in the league), with an earned-run average of 2.60 (second best), and two hundred and seventy-six strikeouts—the most in baseball this year and the most by a rookie pitcher ever. He pitched two innings in the All-Star Game (he struck out the side in the first one), and finished his season in awesome fashion, winning eight of his last nine decisions and posting a 1.07 earned-run average for that span, with a one-hitter and two sixteen-strikeout games along the way. The most frequent baseball question I hear is “Is he
really
that good?” Yes, he is. Most major-league scouts and managers I have consulted state without hesitation that Gooden is the best young pitcher they have ever seen at a comparable stage—better than Tom Seaver, better than Bob Gibson, better than Herb Score, better than Bob Feller. He is the most vivid first-year hurler
I
can bring to mind since Vida Blue set the American League afire with his twenty-four victories and 1.82 earned-run mark for the Oakland A’s, back in 1971, but Blue was twenty-two years old (and technically past his rookie status) and, as I recall, did not quite have the command of his pitches that Gooden has. The Gooden fastball is the genuine article, regularly up in the 92-to-96-m.p.h. range, and delivered with a tight spin that makes the ball look smaller and quicker as it bites through the strike zone; his curve breaks late and sharply downward; and at times he has a first-class change-up, which he can also deliver for strikes, to the deep discouragement of the hitters. I remember a 2–1 shutout he pitched against the Dodgers in Los Angeles early in May (I was watching on television), which he concluded by fanning the side in the ninth, with a changeup in there that Pedro Guerrero swung at and missed by—Well, he would have missed it with a canoe paddle. Gooden is six feet three and about two hundred pounds, with amazingly long legs, arms, hands, and fingers. His motion begins with an exaggerated leg-lift, which brings his knee up higher than his front-side elbow, but everything about the launching is nonetheless balanced, smooth, unforced, and pleasing. It requires some concentration before you begin to pick up his gargantuan opening strike on the mound and the abrupt downward tilt of the left shoulder which inaugurates the mostly over-the-top (about NNW, I make it) delivery, and also pulls his whole body swoopingly to his left just as the ball is released.

For all these elegant kinesthetics, I think I most admire Gooden’s thoughtful and untroubled attitude while he is working—the absence of gesture or mannerism on the mound (now and then he flicks the sweat from his face with a downward swipe of his right palm), and his ability to adjust and improve his performance on a given day as the game progresses. Often this past summer, I saw him struggle and sometimes begin to overthrow in the middle innings of a tough game, and I would nod wisely to myself and think, Well, not much longer for you this time, kid—only to watch him recapture his poise and rhythm within a batter or two and resume the little string of “K”s on my score-card. His notable weakness so far is his inability to hold runners on first (forty-seven out of forty-nine would-be base stealers were successful against him), but the Met coaches are convinced that a slight tinkering with his delivery in the Instructional League during the off-season will clear up the problem. Davey Johnson, the Mets manager, spoke often and warmly about the youngster’s maturity and his continuing eagerness to learn as the season went along. Gooden is reserved and quiet in the clubhouse, and a bit shy with reporters and TV crews, and there is no suggestion that further fame and a great deal more money down the line will much alter him. He is in the habit of calling his father, down home in Tampa, after each game he has pitched. He is nineteen years old, and this was his second full season in professional ball. He will be better next year.

Another manager—Jim Frey, of the Cubs—was being asked about Gooden one July afternoon in the dugout at Shea, after Gooden had shut down his club by 2–1, on four hits, the previous evening. Frey, who was a coach with the Mets last season, was complimentary about the phenom, but when most of the reporters had gone away he sighed and spat and murmured, “If there’s one thing I get tired of, it’s all these questions about Dwight Gooden’s poise. Anybody who can throw the ball across the plate at ninety-five miles an hour up
here
and then comes back with a breaking ball that drops a foot and still comes over down
there
for a strike—why, damn, that man doesn’t need poise! But ask me about a pitcher who’s just been taken to the back of the bullpen twice in the same inning, then I’ll show you a man who needs
poise!”

AS IT HAPPENED, I
didn’t see a major fight on the field this year, or many brushbacks or knockdown pitches of the kind that eventually empty the benches, but it was a testy, bad-tempered sort of season nevertheless—by mid-September, the National League counted twenty-six official warnings to pitchers and/or brawls, which was up by one-third from the total of the previous summer. News shows and editorials have gravely taken up the “beanball epidemic,” which they seem to view as a true threat to the pastime, but I am less alarmed. For one thing, “beanball” is a misnomer: no, or very few, big-league pitchers aim for a batter’s head (it is too dangerous to a fellow-professional, or, conversely, the head is too small a target if malice is actually intended). For another, the war between the pitcher and the batter for control of the plate (more precisely, for the outside three or four inches of the plate) is the center of the game, of course, and the pitcher’s best weapon in that unending contest is a whistling fastball up and in, close to the body or under the chin, that will make the batsman give ground—in his mind or in the batter’s box—when the next pitch arrives. “Show me a pitcher who can’t pitch inside and I’ll show you a loser,” the sweet-mannered Sandy Koufax once said. Sometimes, given a certain pitcher and batter at a certain moment in the long, nerve-abrading season, the pitch is to the ribs or the knees, and the batter goes down. Retaliation is then in order, although the rules forbid it and umpires now have the power, as they did not up until seven years ago, to issue warnings to one side or both and to eject a pitcher or a manager for an ensuing provocation. Even this form of peace-keeping is not wholly endorsed by some classicists of the sport, who also dislike the American League’s designated-hitter rule, because it exempts the pitcher from ever coming to bat, and thus makes him unavailable for direct retribution if he has plunked somebody. Don Drysdale, the dominating, Hall of Fame Dodger right-hander, believes that the D.H. and the umpires’ new pitcher-banishment power have actually increased the chances of some batter’s being seriously injured. He points out that more batters are digging in at the plate and that they are much more aggressive in attacking the outer sector of the plate. Because they have forgotten about bailing out, he says, they are forever at risk against an inside fastball that gets away from the pitcher. Someone’s going to get hurt.

The matter is usually less grave on the field, as the great Atlanta brawl of August 12th seems to illustrate. This Thermopylae began briskly when the Braves’ Pascual Perez drilled the visiting Padres’ leadoff hitter, Alan Wiggins, with the very first pitch of the game, and it extended itself lengthily, with many skirmishings and rasslings along the way—mostly because it took three San Diego pitchers four Perez at-bats to nail him in return, in the eighth. Then there was a counter-counter essay of honor in the ninth, when a Braves reliever, Donnie Moore, nicked the Padre third baseman, Graig Nettles, which again emptied the dugouts. By the time the firefight was over, sixteen members, including both managers, had been officially excused for the day, and league president Chub Feeney eventually parcelled out eighteen fines and suspensions, including a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a ten-day suspension for Padre manager Dick Williams.

Stern stuff, but once again I sense a decline in the quality of hostilities in comparison with some earlier eras of the game—at the very least, a decline in the language of hard feelings. After the Atlanta fracas, Atlanta manager Joe Torre said that Dick Williams was “Hitler-like,” and Williams, in riposte, referred to Torre as “Benito.” A couple of weeks later, during an A’s-White Sox game at Oakland, Dave Kingman was nailed by a pitch, with a brief ensuing flareup, apparently because somebody in the home dugout had called the White Sox pitcher a “jerk,” and Chicago manager Tony LaRussa, swinging from the heels, retaliated by describing the A’s as “pimps.” Or consider the horrid outbreak of rudeness between the Minnesota Twins and the California Angels, in which there were taunting references made to Angel catcher Bob Boone’s celebrated wine collection, and Twins manager Billy Gardner stated flatly that there was enough cork in the bat of Angel third baseman Doug DeCinces to make a fishing bob. It’s enough to make one long for the bad old days. The late Ray Scarborough, a redoubtable right-handed pitcher with the Senators and several other A.L. clubs in the nineteen-forties and fifties, once told me that when he was toiling for the Tigers against the Red Sox one afternoon his manager, Fred Hutchinson, was baited from the field by the flamboyant and somewhat unreliable Jimmy Piersall, then a Bosox outfielder. As it happened, Piersall was due to lead off the next half inning at bat, and when the sides changed and Scarborough started out of the dugout to take the field, he muttered, “I know, I know,” to his skipper. Hutchinson, a famously dour and direct competitor, beckoned him back. “What you don’t know,” he said, “is that it will cost you a hundred if you don’t hit him.” This was a first, as far as Scarborough knew, but he went manfully at the job, only to find himself quickly behind in the count, by 3–0, when Piersall proved wonderfully lithe and rabbitlike under fire. “I sure couldn’t afford to walk him,” Ray said to me, “so I bore down on the next two pitches, which were called strikes. Then I threw the next pitch behind his back, and Jimmy guessed wrong.” He held up two fingers. “Two broken ribs,” he announced.

Some surprising names made their way onto the dean’s list at the end of the term this year, including Tony Gwynn, of the Padres, and Don Mattingly, of the Yankees, who won the league batting tides with averages of .351 and .343, respectively. Mattingly, it will be recalled, pulled it off by rapping out four hits in the Yankees’ very last game of the season, thereby nudging his way past his teammate Dave Winfield, who had begun the day two points ahead. There is no right way to hit, of course, and the two Yankees’ month-long day-by-day pursuit of the title offered a wonderful contrast in styles—Mattingly always taking a level, thoughtful cut at the ball, with his arms beautifully extended at the point of contact (he bats from the left side, with his head tilted back oddly as he stares out at the pitcher), while Winfield, as always, looked lunging and prodigal up there, with the various parts of his gigantic six-foot-six frame seeming to depart the launching pad separately, starting with the shoulders, but then all somehow coming together again in the midst of his scary swing (sometimes when he misses a pitch he has to take a twisting leap in the air to keep his balance and comes down yards in front of the plate, like a broad jumper landing). To put it another way, I am always as surprised when Winfield bangs out a base hit as I am when Mattingly doesn’t.

Tony Armas, of the Red Sox, led the American League with forty-three home runs, while Mike Schmidt, of the Phillies, and Dale Murphy, of the Braves, wound up together at the top of the N.L., with thirty-six homers apiece. (Murphy is in a rut; this was his third straight thirty-six-homer season.) The American League appears to be working up a monopoly in power hitters, with ten of its sluggers driving in a hundred runs or more during the summer, as against three in the National League; eight A.L. hitters weighed in with more than thirty homers, while only Schmidt and Murphy made the grade in the other league. Boston outfielders Armas, Jim Rice, and Dwight Evans each finished with more than a hundred runs batted in—the first time any outfield picket line had turned that trick since the Cubs’ Hack Wilson, Kiki Cuyler, and Riggs Stephenson did it in 1929.

A new American League bopper was Dave Kingman, who joined the Oakland A’s this spring after the Mets had given up on him because of his sulks and strikeouts (he batted .198 last year, with thirteen homers) and released him. Freed from New York and the New York writers, which he claimed to despise equally, Kingman came through with a ravishing year as a designated hitter: thirty-five home runs and a hundred and eighteen runs batted in. (He was also quite a bargain for the A’s, who paid him only the major-league minimum salary of forty thousand dollars, while the Mets continued to mail him the installments due on the rest of his six-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar unexpired annual contract.) Sky King has always been a famously (or infamously) streaky hitter, but his performance during a nine-game road trip in April must have been his best—a three-homer night in Seattle, two subsequent two-homer games, and eight home runs and nineteen runs batted in, over all. Some of the travelling A’s on that trip—second baseman Joe Morgan and coaches Clete Boyer and Billy Williams—have watched a fair assortment of the game’s best in action over the past twenty or thirty years, and all three said they’d never seen a hot spell to match it. Most of us probably remember Kingman for some enormous downtowner we once saw, but I think we don’t yet realize how many of these there have been over the years and how fast they have come. He has hit three hundred and seventy-seven homers in fourteen seasons—one for each 14.65 times at bat. This is the fourth-best ratio in the history of the game, putting him behind only Babe Ruth, Ralph Kiner, and Harmon Killebrew. He has some firsts as well. In May, he hit a stratospheric, straight-up fly ball that disappeared through a ventilating aperture in the tentlike roof of the Metro-dome, in Minneapolis, and never came down: a sky-rule double.

Joaquin Andujar, of the Cardinals, and Mike Boddicker, of the Orioles, were the only official twenty-game winners among all the pitchers (Boddicker was 20–11, and Andujar went 20–14, after a 6–16 season a year ago), but Rick Sutcliffe, it should be noted, did even better in his split season (which doesn’t count in the record books): 4–5 with the Indians and 16–1 with the Cubs. One might even claim that Bert Blyleven had the best totals of all—a 19–7 and 2.87 year, compiled while pitching, from start to finish, for the lowly Indians. Mike Witt, of the Angels, belongs on this honor roll as well, for the perfect game—no hits, nobody on base at all—that he threw against the Rangers on the very last day of the season. Dan Quisenberry had forty-four saves for the Royals, and Bruce Sutter forty-five (a new National League record) for the Cards: no surprise
there,
at least. The Pirates led the National League in team pitching and somehow also finished last in their division, while the Manager’s Averted Eyes Award (given here for the very first time) went to Juan Samuel, the rookie second baseman with the Phillies, who had fifteen homers, nineteen triples, and seventy-two stolen bases (a major-league rookie record), but also struck out a hundred and sixty-eight times and committed thirty-three errors.