The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (23 page)

During the season just past, which concluded with the Detroit Tigers’ stimulating seven-game, come-from-behind victory over the Cardinals in the World Series, I reread this list often, with a deepening incredulity; once an oddity (attributable in part to the jackrabbit ball), it suddenly had become a document of almost paleographic significance—a record of another sport, now clearly gone forever. The 1968 season has been named the Year of the Pitcher, which is only a kinder way of saying the Year of the Infield Pop-Up. The final records only confirm what so many fans, homeward bound after still another shutout, had already discovered for themselves; almost no one, it seemed, could hit the damn ball any more. The two leagues’ combined batting average of .236 was the lowest ever—four points below even the .240 compiled by the Mets in 1962, their first year of hilarious ineptitude. This year, there were three hundred and forty shutout games, as against a hundred and ninety-nine in 1962, and 1994 home runs, as against 3001. Only five National League batters finished over the .300 mark, and only one batter—Carl Yastrzemski—in the American; his average of .3005 was the lowest ever to win a batting title. Baseball owners and other positive thinkers will find more joy in studying these statistics from the pitcher’s mound, from which direction 1968 becomes a year of triumph. Denny McLain, of the Tigers, won thirty-one games and lost six, thus becoming the first thirty-game winner since 1934. Bob Gibson’s earned-run average of 1.12 was the lowest in the history of the National League. Don Drysdale ran off a record fifty-eight and one-third scoreless innings; a Mets rookie named Jerry Koosman pitched seven shutouts; Gaylord Perry, of the Giants, and Ray Washburn, of the Cardinals, threw no-hitters on consecutive days in the same ballpark; and there was only a minimal stir when a journeyman hurler, Catfish Hunter, of Oakland, achieved the ultimate rarity, a perfect game—no runs, no hits, no one on base, twenty-seven up and twenty-seven out.

Adding up zeros is not the most riveting of spectator sports and by mid-July this year it was plain to even the most inattentive or optimistic fans that something had gone wrong with their game. Why were the pitchers so good? Where were the .320 hitters? What had happened to the high-scoring slugfest, the late rally, the bases-clearing double? The answers to these questions are difficult and speculative, but some attempt must be made at them before we proceed to the releasing but somewhat irrelevant pleasures of the World Series. To begin with: Yes, the pitchers are better—or, rather,
pitching
is better. All the technical and strategic innovations of recent years have helped the defenses of baseball; none have favored the batter. Bigger ballparks with bigger outfields, the infielders’ enormous crab-claw gloves, more night games, the mastery of the relatively new slider pitch, the persistence of the relatively illegal spitter, and the instantaneous managerial finger-wag to the bullpen at the first hint of an enemy rally have all tipped the balance of this delicately balanced game. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that that young relief pitcher motoring in from the bullpen in a golf cart is significantly different from the man who walked the same distance twenty or thirty years ago, and so is the pitcher he is replacing on the mound. Like all young athletes, they are an inch or two taller and twenty or thirty pounds heavier than their counterparts of a generation ago, and they throw the ball harder. The batter waiting in the on-deck circle is also enormous, but all that heredity and orange juice are going to be of no help to him if he can’t meet the ball with his bat. And here, precisely, the batter is most disadvantaged, for hitting has nothing much to do with size or strength but is almost wholly a matter of reflexes. A number of thoughtful students of athletics, including Ted Williams, consider hitting a baseball to be the most difficult reflex—the hardest single act—in all sports.

Almost any strong and passably coordinated young man can learn to pitch, but batting is not generally teachable; even after a lifetime in the game, most pitchers still swing like their old aunties. The solid-gold reflex of the natural hitter is capable of some polishing, but only through many years of practice. There was a time when American boys so endowed spent most of their afternoons playing nothing but baseball, yearned only after a career in baseball, and once signed, spent at least three years in the minors learning their trade—that is, learning to hit. All this is changed. Boys have more afternoon diversions, many of which do not require seventeen companions and an empty sandlot, and baseball must now compete with pro football, basketball, and golf in signing up the best teen-age athletes. Even if the young phenom does choose baseball, he no longer enjoys the same lengthy apprenticeship. Expansion and television have dried up most of the minor leagues, and the baseball draft now makes it impossible for the parent club to train and protect a promising young slugger down in Rochester or El Paso for more than two years. Hurried through the minors, brushed up in the winter instructional leagues, the would-be Gehringer or Musial suddenly finds himself in the batter’s box in a big-league park, where he is expected to begin repaying at once the investment of his owners and the hopes of the fans. Unsurprisingly, he pops up.

Baseball executives might disagree with some of these observations, or place a different emphasis or interpretation on others, but it is difficult to believe that they are totally unaware of the problem itself. Yet their decisions in this decade not only have ignored the imbalance and the decline in quality of baseball but have directly and profoundly worsened it. The expansion of big-league baseball was inevitable and perhaps defensible, but the addition of two new teams to each eight-team league in 1962 permanently watered the quality of the game; the new teams were not permitted anything like a fair share of the available talent, and none of them have yet risen to full contention in their leagues. Since that time, of course, all twenty teams have had to scout and bid in a player market tightened by 25 per cent more buyers. At this moment, four new teams are being created—Montreal and San Diego in the National League and Kansas City and Seattle in the American—and both leagues next year will be divided into six-team Eastern and Western divisions. Every team will play an unbalanced schedule—eighteen games against each team in its own division and twelve against each team in the other division; the divisional champions in each league will meet in three-out-of-five game autumn playoffs to determine the pennant winners and World Series participants. However neatly or awkwardly this complex plan works in practice, and however rich a revenue the existing clubs will derive at once from the price of the new franchises and the attendance of fans in the new cities, there should be no illusions about the stature of the new teams or the true quality of the leagues. Each existing club lost six players to the new teams in the draft just concluded, but sympathy should be reserved for the fans of the Expos, the Padres, the Royals, and the Pilots, who will have to watch these stitched-together, rivet-necked monsters in action next year. The rosters of the new clubs have been assembled out of culls and spare parts—the sixteenth, twentieth, twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth, thirty-second, and thirty-sixth best ballplayers on each present club. One-third of all the players in the majors next April would have been minor-leaguers in unexpanded baseball.

A few owners have opposed expansion for precisely these reasons, but the majority are executives caught up in the old business fiction that says bigger is better. Their usual defense against charges of greed and shortsightedness is a dictum first propounded by Branch Rickey in the nineteen-fifties, which postulated that the increase in national population guaranteed an increase in the number of first-class ballplayers, thus justifying expansion. This year’s batting averages do not support the theory, for reasons I have suggested, and neither do the sharply declining attendance figures in the parks of some famous old teams that have not been in recent pennant contention. The new expansion, in the owners’ dreams, will remedy the attendance anemia, particularly in September, by doubling the number of pennant races and adding two new playoff extravaganzas before the Series itself. The scheduling of these playoffs means that baseball will now be extended into mid-October, and that there will be three full weekends of national television coverage right in the heart of the professional-football season. Clearly, the conservative owners—the non-expansionists—never had a chance. It is expected that baseball fans will somehow not notice that the new playoffs will make most of the long baseball season meaningless, and that the fans will accept at once a system that, had it been in effect this year, would have required the Detroit Tigers to qualify for the Series by winning a playoff against the sixth-place Oakland Athletics, who finished twenty-one games behind them in the standings.

The World Series just past carried an extraordinary burden of hopes. It was counted on to make up for everything—not only the deadly zeros of the Year of the Pitcher but the bad luck of two one-sided pennant races, whose winners were virtually decided by mid-July. This last pre-inflationary, pre-playoff Series meant the end of something, and there was pleasure in the knowledge that both champions represented ancient baseball capitals that had flown a total of eighteen previous pennants. Many of us could remember the last Tiger-Cardinal Series, in 1934, which went seven memorable games and concluded in a riot of acrimony and garbage. Each of the current rivals presented deep, experienced, and exciting teams, whose individual attributes were admirably designed for the dimensions of their home parks—the Cardinals, the defending world champions, quick on the bases, brilliant in defense, knowing in the subtleties of cutoff, sacrifice, and hit-and-run; the Tigers a band of free-swingers who had bashed a hundred and eighty-one homers and could eschew the delicate touch in the knowledge that their runs would come, probably late and in clusters. At almost every position, there were dead-even matchups of ability and reputation. Curt Flood and Mickey Stanley were the best center fielders in their leagues, and Tim McCarver and Bill Freehan the best catchers; Roger Maris, retiring this winter, would play opposite Al Kaline, now in his sixteenth year with the Tigers, who had finally been rewarded for his refusal ever to attend a Series except as a participant; at first base, Orlando Cepeda and Norm Cash presented faded but still formidable reputations as game-busting clean-up hitters. Best of all, the opening game (and probably the key fourth and seventh games) would offer what few sportswriters could resist calling a “meaningful confrontation” between Bob Gibson, the best pitcher in baseball, and Denny McLain, who had won more games in a season than anyone since Lefty Grove. With squads like these, neither Manager Red Schoendienst nor Manager Mayo Smith had been called on through the season to attempt more than minimal prestidigitation. Then, on the eve of the Series, Smith announced that he was moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop, a position he had played in only eight games in the majors. Some sort of shuffle like this was inescapable, because room had to be found in the outfield for Kaline, who had been injured too often of late to hold down a regular spot, but Mayo’s switch offered the heady possibility of disaster every time a ball was hit to the left side of the Tiger infield.

A sellout crowd of 54,692 turned out at St. Louis’s Busch Stadium for the meaningful confrontation. The meanings were there, if hard to decipher immediately. Gibson fanned two batters in the first, but he threw a lot of pitches and looked less imperious than he had against the Red Sox last fall. In the second, though, he settled into his astonishing, flailing delivery, which he finishes with a running lunge toward the first-base line, and struck out the side on eleven pitches. After four innings, he had eight strikeouts—halfway toward a new Series record. McLain, who stands hunchily on the mound, like an Irish middleweight in his ring corner, was mostly high and wild. He gave up an enormous triple to Tim McCarver in the second, but Mike Shannon and Julian Javier were too eager to nail his chin-level fast balls and went down swinging. McLain escaped again in the next inning, when Lou Brock was stranded at third after stealing second and sailing along to third when catcher Bill Freehan’s abysmal throw bounced behind the pitcher and on into center field. Freehan was known to have an ailing arm, but this frail peg promised something like a free visa to all bases for the Cards’ winged messengers. In the fourth, Maris and McCarver both walked on four pitches, and this time Shannon and Javier waited for pitches in the strike zone and then hit singles, good enough for three runs, because Willy Horton misplayed Shannon’s hit in left, moving up the runners. They were also good enough for the ball game. McLain vanished after the fifth, Brock hit a loud but superfluous homer in the seventh, and then there was nothing to watch but Gibson setting the new Series record of seventeen strikeouts.

It made memorable watching—not just the three last batters whiffed in the ninth but a whole lineup of fine hitters utterly dominated and destroyed by the man on the mound. Gibson worked so fast that I was constantly falling behind the actual ball-and-strike count. His concentration was total. Not once, it seemed, did he look at his outfielders, tug at his cap, twitch his sleeve; he didn’t even rub up the new ball after a foul. The instant he got his sign, he rocked, flailed, threw, staggered, put up his glove for the catcher’s throw back, and was ready again. He threw more curves than expected—good, sharp-breaking, down stuff—and though he always seemed to be working at a peak of energy, he had reserves when needed. In the sixth, after Dick McAuliffe singled with one out, he fanned Stanley on three pitches, and when Kaline then doubled down the left-field line he fanned Cash on five. He was tired by the ninth, and he had to throw twenty-eight pitches to four batters (Stanley singled, leading off), yet the count never went above two balls on any of them. Kaline went down swinging at a fast ball, which tied Sandy Koufax’s old Series record of fifteen strikeouts, and then, after many fouls, Gibson got Cash on a beautiful half-speed curve that may have been the best pitch of the game, and Horton on a called third strike that just nicked the back inside corner. Afterward, in the clubhouse, the Tigers sounded like survivors of the Mount Pelée disaster. “I was awed,” said McLain. “I was
awed
.” McAuliffe, asked to compare Gibson with some pitcher in his league, said, “There is no comparison. He doesn’t remind me of anybody. He’s all by himself.” Gibson proved just as difficult for the reporters as he had for the batters. He is a proud, edgy, intelligent, and sensitive man, very aware of his blackness and all its contemporary meanings. He could stand in front of a circle of fifty reporters and say something impossible, like “I’m never surprised at anything I do,” without making it seem anything less or more than truth. He smiled briefly when someone asked him if he had always been deeply competitive. “I guess you could say so,” he said. “I’ve played a couple of hundred games of ticktacktoe with my little daughter, and she hasn’t beaten me yet. I’ve always had to win. I’ve got to win.”