The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (29 page)

Hodges, having demonstrated slow managing in the first game, showed how to manage fast in the last one. His starter, Gary Gentry, who had given up a two-run homer to the unquenchable Aaron in the first inning, surrendered a single and a double (this also by Aaron) in the third, and then threw a pitch to Rico Carty that the Atlanta outfielder bombed off the left-field wall on a line but about two feet foul. Hodges, instantly taking the new ball away from Gentry, gave it to Nolan Ryan, in from the bullpen, who thereupon struck out Carty with one pitch, walked Cepeda intentionally, fanned Clete Boyer, and retired Bob Didier on a fly. Agee responded in obligatory fashion, smashing the first pitch to him in the same inning for a homer, and Ken Boswell came through with a two-run job in the fourth, to give the Mets the lead. Cepeda, who so far had spent the series lunging slowly and unhappily at Met singles and doubles buzzing past him at first, then hit a home run well beyond the temporary stands behind the left-center-field fence, making it 4–3, Braves. Even he must have sensed by then what would happen next: Ryan, a .103 hitter, singled to lead off the home half; Garrett, who had hit but one home run all year, hit another into the right-field loges, for two runs; Jones and Boswell and Grote and Harrelson and Agee combined to fashion two insurance runs; Ryan fanned seven Braves in all, and won by 7–4. Just about everybody got into the act in the end—the turf-moles onto the field again, Nolan Ryan and Garrett under the kliegs, and Mayor Lindsay under the champagne. Forehandedly, he had worn a drip-dry.

After a season of such length and so many surprises, reason suggested that we would now be given a flat and perhaps one-sided World Series, won by the Orioles, who had swept their three playoff games with the Minnesota Twins, and whom reporters were calling the finest club of the decade. There would be honor enough for the Mets if they managed only to keep it close. None of this happened, of course, and the best news—the one
true
miracle—was not the Mets’ victory but the quality of those five games—an assemblage of brilliant parables illustrating every varied aspect of the beautiful game.

The Baltimore fans expected neither of these possibilities, for there were still plenty of tickets on sale before the opener at Memorial Stadium, and the first two Series games were played to less than capacity crowds. This is explicable only when one recalls that two other league champions from Baltimore—the football Colts and the basketball Bullets—had been humiliated by New York teams in postseason championships this year. Baltimore, in fact, is a city that no longer expects
any
good news. In the press box, however, the announcement of the opening lineups was received in predictable fashion (“Just
no
way …”), and I could only agree. The Orioles, who had won a hundred and nine games in the regular season, finishing nineteen games ahead of the next team and clinching their divisional title on September 13, were a poised and powerful veteran team that topped the Mets in every statistic and, man for man, at almost every position. Their three sluggers—Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, and Paul Blair—had hit a total of ninety-five homers, as against the Mets’
team
total of a hundred and nine. Their pitching staff owned a lower earned-run average than the Mets’ sterling corps. Their ace, screwballer Mike Cuellar, had won twenty-three games and led the staff in strikeouts; their second starter, Dave McNally, had won fifteen games in a row this year; the third man, Jim Palmer, had a record of 16–4, including a no-hitter. Since Cuellar and McNally are lefthanders, Hodges was forced to start his righty specialists (Clendenon, Charles, Swoboda, and Weis) and bench the hot left-handed hitters (Kranepool, Garrett, Shamsky, and Boswell) who had so badly damaged the Braves. Just
no
way.

Confirmation seemed instantaneous when Don Buford, the miniature Baltimore left fielder, hit Seaver’s second pitch of the game over the right-field fence, just above Swoboda’s leap. (Swoboda said later that his glove just ticked the ball “at my apogee.”) For a while after that, Seaver did better—pitched much more strongly than he had in Atlanta, in fact—but with two out in the Baltimore fourth the steam suddenly went out of his fast ball, and the Orioles racked up three more runs. The game, however, belonged not to Buford, or to the other Oriole hitters, or to Cuellar, but to Brooks Robinson, the perennial All Star Baltimore third baseman, who was giving us all a continuous lesson in how the position can be played. Almost from the beginning, I became aware of the pressure he puts on a right-handed batter with his aggressive stance (the hands are cocked up almost under his chin), his closeness to the plate, his eager appetite for the ball. His almost supernaturally quick reactions are helped by the fact that he is ambidextrous; he bats and throws right-handed, but eats, writes, plays ping-pong, and fields blue darters with his left. In the fifth, he retired Al Weis on a tough, deep chance that leaped up and into his ribs. In the seventh, after the Mets had scored once on a pair of singles and a fly, he crushed the rally when he sprinted in toward Rod Gaspar’s topped roller, snatched it up barehanded, and got off the throw, overhand, that retired Gaspar by yards. The Orioles won, 4–1, and Brooks had made it look easy for them.

The Mets were grim the next day (Frank Robinson had baited them after their loss, commenting on the silence in their dugout), and they played a grim, taut, riveting game. Brooks Robinson went on making fine plays, but he had plenty of company—an extraordinary catch and falling throw to second by Baltimore shortstop Mark Belanger, a base-robbing grab by gaunt little Bud Harrelson. (The tensions of the season had burned Harrelson down from a hundred and sixty-eight to a hundred and forty-five pounds.) The Mets led, 1–0, on Donn Clendenon’s wrong-field homer off McNally in the fourth, and Baltimore had no hits at all off Koosman until the bottom of the seventh, when Paul Blair led off with a single. Two outs later, Blair stole second on a change-up curve, and Brooks Robinson scored him with a single up the middle. The tie seemed only to make the crowd more apprehensive, and the Baltimore partisans seemed unamused when a large “
LETS GO, METS
!” banner appeared in the aisle behind home plate; it was carried by four Met wives—Mesdames Pfeil, Dyer, Ryan, and Seaver, smashers all, who had made it the night before out of a Sheraton bedsheet. There were two out in the top of the ninth before the Mets could act on this RSVP, winning the game on successive singles by Charles and Grote and a first-pitch hit to left by the .215 terror, Al Weis. Koosman, throwing mostly curves in the late going, walked two Orioles in the bottom half, but Ron Taylor came in to get the last out and save Jerry’s two-hit, 2–1, essential victory. It was a game that would have delighted John McGraw.

Back at Shea Stadium, before an uncharacteristically elegant but absolutely jam-packed audience, Tommie Agee rocked Jim Palmer with a lead-off first-inning homer—Agee’s fifth such discouragement this year. Gary Gentry, who had taken such a pounding from the Braves, was in fine form this time, challenging the big Baltimore sluggers with his hummer and comforted by a 3–0 lead after the second inning. He was further comforted in the fourth, when Tommie Agee, with two Orioles aboard, ran for several minutes toward deep left and finally, cross-handed, pulled down Elrod Hendricks’ drive just before colliding with the fence. Agee held on to the ball, though, and carried it all the way back to the infield like a trophy, still stuck in the topmost webbing of his glove. It was 4–0 for the home side by the seventh, when Gentry walked the bases full with two out and was succeeded by Nolan Ryan. Paul Blair hit his 0–2 pitch on a line to distant right. Three Orioles took wing for the plate, but Agee, running to his left this time, made a skidding dive just at the warning track and again came up with the ball. The entire crowd—all 56,335 of us—jumped to its feet in astonished, shouting tribute as he trotted off the field. The final score was 5–0, or, more accurately, 5–5—five runs for the Mets, five runs saved by Tommie Agee. Almost incidentally, it seemed, the Orioles were suddenly in deep trouble in the Series.

It was Cuellar and Seaver again the next day, and this time the early homer was provided by Donn Clendenon—a lead-off shot to the visitors’ bullpen in the second. Seaver, who had not pitched well in two weeks, was at last back in form, and Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, trying to rattle him and to arouse his own dormant warriors, who had scored only one run in the past twenty-four innings, got himself ejected from the game in the third for coming onto the field to protest a called strike. Weaver had a longish wait in his office before his sacrifice took effect, but in the top of the ninth, with the score still 1–0 and the tension at Shea nearly insupportable, Frank Robinson and Boog Powell singled in succession. Brooks Robinson then lined into an out that tied the game but simultaneously won the World Series for the Mets. It was a low, sinking drive, apparently hit cleanly through between Agee and right fielder Ron Swoboda. Ron, who was playing in close, hoping for a play at the plate, took three or four lunging steps to his right, dived onto his chest, stuck out his glove, caught the ball, and then skidded on his face and rolled completely over; Robinson scored, but that was all. This marvel settled a lengthy discussion held in Gil Hodges’ office the day before, when Gil and several writers had tried to decide whether Agee’s first or second feat was the finest Series catch of all time. Swoboda’s was. Oh, yes—the Mets won the game in the tenth, 2–1, when Grote doubled and his runner, Rod Gaspar, scored all the way from second on J.C. Martin’s perfect pinch bunt, which relief pitcher Pete Richert picked up and threw on a collision course with Martin’s left wrist. My wife, sitting in the upper left-field stands, could not see the ball roll free in the glazy late-afternoon dimness and thought that Martin’s leaping dance of joy on the base path meant that he had suddenly lost his mind.

So, at last, we came to the final game, and I don’t suppose many of us who had watched the Mets through this long and memorable season much doubted that they would win it, even when they fell behind, 0–3, on home runs hit by Dave McNally and Frank Robinson off Koosman in the third inning. Jerry steadied instantly, allowing one single the rest of the way, and the Orioles’ badly frayed nerves began to show when they protested long and ineffectually about a pitch in the top of the sixth that they claimed had hit Frank Robinson on the leg, and just as long and as ineffectually about a pitch in the bottom of the sixth that they claimed had
not
hit Cleon Jones on the foot. Hodges produced this second ball from his dugout and invited plate umpire Lou DiMuro to inspect a black scuff on it. DiMuro examined the mark with the air of a Maigret and proclaimed it the true Shinola, and a minute later Donn Clendenon damaged another ball by hitting it against the left-field façade for a two-run homer. Al Weis, again displaying his gift for modest but perfect contingency, hit his very first Shea Stadium homer to lead off the seventh and tie up the game, and the Mets won it in the eighth on doubles by Jones and Swoboda and a despairing but perfectly understandable Oriole double error at first base, all good for two runs and the famous 5–3 final victory.

I had no answer for the question posed by that youngster in the infield who held up—amid the crazily leaping crowds, the showers of noise and paper, the vermilion smoke-bomb clouds, and the vanishing lawns—a sign that said “
WHAT NEXT
?” What was past was good enough, and on my way down to the clubhouses it occurred to me that the Mets had won this great Series with just the same weapons they had employed all summer—with the Irregulars (Weis, Clendenon, and Swoboda had combined for four homers, eight runs batted in, and an average of .400); with fine pitching (Frank Robinson, Powell, and Paul Blair had been held to one homer, one RBI, and an average of .163); with defensive plays that some of us would remember for the rest of our lives; and with the very evident conviction that the year should not be permitted to end in boredom. Nothing was lost on this team, not even an awareness of the accompanying sadness of the victory—the knowledge that adulation and money and the winter disbanding of this true club would mean that the young Mets were now gone forever. In the clubhouse (Moët et Chandon this time), Ron Swoboda said it precisely for the TV cameras: “This is the first time. Nothing can ever be as sweet again.”

Later, in his quiet office, Earl Weaver was asked by a reporter if he hadn’t thought that the Orioles would hold on to their late lead in the last game and thus bring the Series back to Baltimore and maybe win it there. Weaver took a sip of beer and smiled and said, “No, that’s what you can never do in baseball. You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddam plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

—
October 1970

I
T WAS NOT A
year to treasure, nor yet one to forget too quickly. It was a baseball season of satisfactions rather than miracles, of reasonable rather than sudden successes, and a season of much loud foolishness. Attendance and litigation were up, the pennant races and the World Series fell a bit below the wonders of recent autumns, but still there was another long summer of immense noise and involving tension to remember, and hard disappointments, too, and some splendor in the AstroTurf. Most of all, perhaps, it was a year of baseball surprises, in which the bad news, as usual, was often more interesting than the good. The New York Yankees, for example, improved themselves admirably, finishing a solid second to the all-conquering Orioles in their division and compiling a 93–69 won-and-lost record that was bettered, in both leagues, only by the Orioles, the Reds, and the Twins. Their reward for this fine effort was to attract one and a half million fewer fans at home than the Mets drew at Shea Stadium in the course of winning ten fewer games and finishing an abject third in the National League East: the Mets’ gate of 2,697,479, in fact, was the second largest total in the history of baseball. Sharing a similarly curious fortune was a field general named Larry Shepard, who was fired a year ago as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates after his team had won eighty-eight games; his successor, Danny Murtaugh, brought the Pirates home this year with eighty-nine victories and was instantly named Manager of the Year. For Denny McLain, the now erstwhile Detroit ace pitcher who won a total of fifty-five games in the ’68 and ’69 seasons, there was scarcely any good fortune at all. Suspended three times (twice by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and once by the Tigers) for a variety of sins that ranged from a losing venture into illegal bookmaking to throwing ice water at two sportswriters, he appeared in fourteen games and won only three. At the end of the season, he was declared “not mentally ill” by the Commissioner and was then traded to the Washington Senators, against the wishes of that team’s manager, Ted Williams; McLain’s sole immediate consolation may be the thought that he is now the only right-hander in the American League who is officially sane. Commissioner Kuhn also found it necessary to reprimand another pitcher-flake, Jim Bouton, whose offense was the co-authorship of an absorbing and comical baseball book called
Ball Four
. The volume, which recounts Bouton’s somewhat descendant career as a pitcher with the Yankees, Pilots, and Astros, also includes frank passages about the pregame amphetamine-popping by his teammates, about their relaxed evening habits on the road, about race prejudice and minor cheating on the field, and about the habitual patronizing and financial bullying that most players come to expect from the front office. Commissioner Kuhn did not attack the veracity of anything in the book, but he indicated his extreme displeasure with this form of memoir—thus unerringly, if unconsciously, confirming much that Bouton had said about baseball’s closed mind and nervous clubbishness. Despite, or perhaps because of, this warning and the shrill accompanying cries of a good many Establishmentarian sports columnists (one of them described Bouton and his collaborator, Leonard Shecter, as “social lepers”),
Ball Four
remained at the upper levels of the best-seller lists all summer, and is likely to become the most successful sports book in publishing history. Thus variously rewarded, Bouton gave up his losing struggle to master the knuckleball, and is now a sportscaster with a local television station. The lepers are also at work on a new volume.