The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (118 page)

I asked how he tried to defend against the obligatory-bunt situation—the strategic late-inning tangle that begins with base runners on first and second, no outs, and an unthreatening, bottom-of-the-order batter up at the plate.

“On that play—well, first, it depends on who the runner is coming down to third, and who the pitcher is,” he said. “Then, if the ball’s bunted down toward me I try to draw an imaginary line up the infield between the pitcher’s mound and the third-base line, and anything that’s hit to the right of it should be mine. Either way, I’ve got to call it—yell to the pitcher which one of us is going to make the play, or try to. But that’s a tough, tough chance. You have to make the decision, and if you don’t make it right you may not get the runner you want—you may not get
anybody.
I don’t mind the swinging bunt”—the sudden surprise tap, for a base hit—“so much, because it’s just a yes-or-no thing: you make the play or you don’t. There’s no think in it.”

Rigney had said that there was more of an effort being made these days to defend against that late-inning must-bunt situation than there had been in his time, and he cited the Chinese-fire-drill set plays that send the first and third basemen charging in on the squared-around bunter, with the second baseman dashing to cover first and the shortstop whirling over to race the front base runner down to third base.

Clete Boyer agreed. “Baseball is a lot of little things,” he said. “You keep learning them and trying them out. There’s always something new.”

Clete is forty-eight now and looks a little heavier than he was when he was playing third base for the Yankees and the Braves, back in the sixties—he put in sixteen years at the hot corner, in all—but it’s hard to think of him in anything but a baseball uniform. He and his brothers, Ken and Cloyd, make up one of baseball’s first families. (Ken, who died a couple of years ago, also played third base, of course, mostly for the Cardinals, and later managed the Cards, too; Cloyd, a pitcher, is now a coach with the Syracuse Chiefs.) Clete talks baseball almost stolidly, with a little Ozark legato in his husky voice—the family comes from western Missouri—but his face lights up wonderfully once he gets into it a little.

“There are those bunt situations you plan about, and all,” he said to me one morning in Phoenix, “but I still think the hardest play at third is when you’ve got a man on second who can steal a base and a left-handed batter up at the plate who can bunt. You’ve got to play up front on the grass and you know what they’re thinkin’. My great example for that kind of trouble is Aparicio and Nellie Fox”—Luis Aparicio, the Hall of Fame shortstop with the White Sox and the Orioles in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and his stellar Chicago second-base teammate, Nelson Fox. “They could work that just perfect. If there’s none out or one out, I’ve got to guess on each pitch if Luis is going to steal or if Nellie’s up there to bunt. If I think Luis is stealing and he breaks, I got to get back and cover third, and then if Fox bunts the ball it’s a base hit. If I break in two steps instead of one toward the plate, I can’t get back—it’s all over. Fans look at you playing back on the grass and grabbing that big line drive, but that play’s routine, really. The other part is where the game is played.”

We went back to the must-bunt a bit, and after a while I suddenly realized that Clete had changed sides in the midst of the conversation. He was like a chess Grand Master expounding upon the Nimzowitsch Defense who had shifted over to the white pieces. “You can’t always protect against that bunt in the same way, you know,” he said. “You can’t always charge, or stuff like that, because I can kill you once I see that. I think you might have your third baseman charge that bunt two or three times in a season, but not more, and that would depend on who you had running at second base. We”—he meant the Oakland A’s—“beat Cleveland three times in the last two years because they always charged their third baseman and first baseman. When that happens, I tell the batter either to take the pitch or else hit away. Forget the bunt, and if you swing don’t give me a little half-assed effort up there. Don’t fall into their trap. Mike Heath hit a ball that went three inches past Toby Harrah’s head one day, and we win the game. Last year, Tony Phillips hit a little plinker up the middle for us, but their second baseman was goin’ over to first to cover, and the shortstop is way down here by third, and nobody can get near the ball. We got five runs in the inning.”

The school term is over, but I think we should call back our distinguished infield faculty for a few more pointers. I did not talk to these players and coaches in a group, of course, but the same subjects kept coming up. There was a great deal of talk about infield surfaces, for instance—grass versus artificial turf. (Six parks in the National League now have the chemical carpet, while six have grass; in the American League, there are four synthetic-turf diamonds and ten natural.) “If you got a turf field, you have to have middle infielders who can move—people who can cover a degree of ground very quickly,” Frank White said. “I’ve played on turf all my career. It’s a cleaner game—no bad hops, no dust blowin’ in your face, or stuff like that. Turf shows all your natural ability—your quickness, your leg strength, your range. Most of all, it tests your durability, because it does wear you down. You also find out that when you’re planting your foot to make the throw over to first you almost have to take an extra little jab-step on turf. It grabs your leg so quick you’ll lose your balance without that, and
that’s
hard on your legs, too. My biggest complaint about turf is the pounding you take.”

Jerry Remy likes the better bounce on the carpet, too, but almost nothing else. Ground balls hit right at him are less of a strain on turf, he said
(everyone
said this), but the ball seems to pick up speed after the bounce. “I hold my glove a little looser playing on turf, because the ball can spin right out,” he said. “I play back, of course—sometimes I’m so deep I wonder if I can ever get the ball over to first in time. But even then somebody will hit a little bouncer up the middle that goes right by you, and you think, My God, how did
that
go through? I like to hit on artificial grass, but I don’t like to field on it.”

Bill Rigney told me that, as a group, the athletes playing the middle infield now were undoubtedly better than the ones who had played in his time, and that this was due in great part to the demands of artificial turf. “A few years back, a lot of clubs were just making do at short and second, but that’s impossible nowadays,” he said. “If you think about it, you begin to notice that the teams who get to play in the Rose Bowl every year”—this is Rigneyese for playing in the World Series—“are the ones who can put an Ozzie Smith or a Cal Ripken out there. Yount and Frank White and Trammell and Sandberg and that little Whitaker—there’s a whole gang of them. I admire them—even though Mr. Ozzie has made so many kids coming up try to play one-handed, the way he does. But, you know, there’s been a price. That pretty play by a shortstop or a second baseman on a ball hit over second is just about gone. That was one of the nicest things in the game—you enjoyed it—but now almost anything that’s through the box is gone. It’s a base hit.”

Steve Garvey, whom I saw for a few minutes before a Padres-Giants game in Arizona, told me that it was the shifting back and forth from one surface to another that took it out of your legs in time. “I’m fortunate that I’ve always played on grass at home, but you go out on the road and onto AstroTurf, and your legs suddenly get that pounding,” he said. “Then you come back to grass again and your legs stretch out more, and on the second day you’ll have a lot of soreness, no matter how good condition you’re in. It’s like running on pavement and then on the beach.” Wet AstroTurf is more slippery than grass, he added—or, rather, is slippery in a special way. Relays from the outfield that strike wet tuff become hockey pucks that can shoot right past the cutoff man.

White said that it seemed to take him three or four days of playing on a different surface, either grass or fake grass, before he was quite comfortable again. “What I hate,” he said, “is being at home for a couple of weeks and then arriving at a grass-field park on the road, and there’s been rain there, or else there’s a ceremony before the game or something, so you don’t get any infield practice. I just wonder what I’m going to be able to do out there. It shakes you up.”

Infields have a barbered look, and infielders compare notes about the “cut” of the various parks—the dimensions of the circular pattern of infield dirt, that is. Municipal Stadium, in Cleveland, recently enlarged its cut; before that, Remy said, it was ridiculously small—almost like a Little League field. “Nobody wants to be back on the grass, so that cut really limited your play,” he said. “Anaheim has a big cut, which gives you much better range. I like that, but it’s kind of strange there, because everybody looks farther apart. It’s like you’re playing a different game.”

Artificial infields used to be all the same—hard and quick—but now there are variations. The surface at the Metrodome, in Minneapolis, is called SuperTurf, which is softer and spongier than AstroTurf, and thus more forgiving to the infielders’ legs, but the bounce is ridiculously high; an infield chop can sail ten feet over the first baseman’s head on the first ricochet. For all that, Remy said, he found the bounce there a trifle more consistent than it is on the AstroTurf at Toronto, for instance. Frank White told me he was looking forward to the brand-new turf at Royals Stadium, which has just been refinished with a softer, quick-drying carpet—AstroTurf-8 Drainthru—which is said to offer the closest resemblance to real grass that has yet emerged from the laboratories.

Yankee Stadium has real grass, of course, but Remy dislikes the hump-backed infield there. “The whole thing slopes away toward the outfield,” he said. “It’s worst of all from the pitcher’s mound on down to the second baseman. Sometimes I get the feeling there that the batter is standing
above
me. You’ve got to stay real low on a ground ball, or else it can shoot under your glove. You even see that happen to Willie Randolph sometimes.” Remy paused and then smiled a little. “Look,” he went on, “don’t get me wrong about Yankee Stadium. I’d rather play there than anywhere, because of all it means. I
love
to play there.”

Infields, whether grass or turf, are as interestingly various as the men who play on them. The grass infield at Jack Murphy Stadium, in San Diego, for instance, is famously unreliable, possibly because its groundskeepers are employees of the city’s Parks Department. Garvey told me that it played differently during each Padre home stand last year. “They never could seem to find the right composition,” he said. “One time, you’d come home and find that the dirt was so firm that your cleats could hardly dig into it. The next time it would be low tide at the shore. They say it will be better this year, but we’ve heard that before.”

Jerry Remy likes the Fenway Park infield, where the grass is thick and well watered; the bounce there is low but consistent. The dirt at Tiger Stadium is a little quicker than at his home field, he told me, but the grass is slow and kept high—an advantage from a defensive point of view but not much fun to hit on. American League players have complained for years about the infield at Arlington Stadium, the Rangers’ home park, where the midsummer Texas sun bakes the dirt to a brick-hard finish, but Remy said it didn’t bother him much. “You just expect it to be fast, and it is,” he said. “It’s like spring training—
all
spring training infields are hard. I think Oakland gives me more trouble than any of the other parks. The dark infield dirt there is OK for the first couple of innings, but for some reason it gets chopped up during the game—by the base runners and all—and by the sixth or seventh inning it’s like a plowed field. I always figured I was lucky if I finished a series there with nothing against me.”

Interdependence was another persistent topic on my “Meet the Infield” show—a recognition that a brilliant pitching staff or an outstanding defensive infielder would in time add to the reputation of adjoining players on the team. “I’ve always thought it was that super Baltimore pitching staff that’s made Dauer such a good defensive second baseman over the years,” Clete Boyer said. “He knows where to play, and with those pitchers—Flanagan and Palmer and McGregor and the rest—he’s playing right, because of their location. It’s always the same. Whitey Ford made me a great third baseman. Mel Stottlemyre made me a great third baseman.”

Rig mentioned the Baltimore pitchers, too, but added that Dauer’s partners at shortstop for Baltimore—the extraordinary Mark Belanger and his successor, Ripken—hadn’t exactly handicapped the man. All my consultants brought up Belanger sooner or later, and almost everyone added, as an afterthought, that Belanger would probably have had a much harder time making it in the major leagues today, because of his inferior batting. Belanger, who won gasps and laurels for his range and sureness at shortstop over an eighteen-year career that ended in 1982, was a lifetime .228 hitter. Infielders nowadays are expected to contribute more offense, and Ripken and Ryne Sandberg are shining role models for the eighties: two years ago, Ripken batted .318 for the Orioles, with twenty-seven home runs and a hundred and two runs batted in; last summer, Sandberg hit .314 with the Cubs, with nineteen homers and nineteen triples. Each won a Most Valuable Player award for his efforts. “In my eleven years, I never saw anybody play shortstop better than Mark Belanger, but he’ll never make the Hall of Fame,” White said. “At least, I don’t
think
he will. Nobody is called a great ballplayer now unless he can hit. But home-run hitters who can’t really play in the field at all are called great all the time—you notice that.”

Ripken and Ozzie Smith, Whitaker and Trammell and Sandberg—the same names and Gold Gloves popped up again and again in my interviews, while the older men often went back to Belanger and Aparicio, and also to Brooks Robinson, and to Bill Mazeroski, the splendid Pirates second baseman of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and to Marty Marion, the tall, elegant Cardinal shortstop of the era just previous. There was no surprise in this, of course, but what I noticed was that my consultants, almost as a group, would then quickly make mention of less celebrated practitioners in their trade and go out of their way to say warm things about them. They almost
preferred
them, it seemed, because their skills were on a more mortal level. (I had observed this same phenomenon a couple of years ago when I was talking to catchers; many of them made an initial respectful reference to Johnny Bench but then spoke much more warmly and happily about other, and perhaps lesser, men in that hard trade.) Rigney, for his part, brought up Manny Trillo (“Such an
easy
player, with those great hands and that good instinct for the game—one look and he always knew where the play was”), and Clete Boyer mentioned Larry Bowa and Bucky Dent. “Bowa can catch the ball hit to him and throw the man out,” he said, in his plain, positive fashion. “Bucky could make all the plays. Doesn’t have a great arm, doesn’t have great speed, but he gets the ball hit to him, and he knows the hitters. That’s what you need to get those twenty-seven outs. The fan appreciates the great play, but the coaches and managers sitting in the dugout appreciate the everyday play.”