The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (34 page)

The two pitchers, thus quickly relieved of several of their statistical burdens, now settled into stride. Vida Blue, I discovered, is a pitcher in a hurry. Each inning, he ran to the pitcher’s mound to begin his work and ran back to the dugout when it was done. (He also ran to the batter’s box to take his licks—and ran back, three times, after striking out.) In the field, he worked with immense dispatch, barely pausing to get his catcher’s sign before firing; this habit, which he shares with Bob Gibson and a few others, adds a pleasing momentum to the game. His motion looked to be without effort or mannerism: a quick, lithe body-twist toward first base, a high lift and crook of the right leg, a swift forward stride—almost a leap—and the ball, delivered about three-quarters over the top, abruptly arrived, a flick of white at the plate. His pitches, mostly fast balls and always in or very close to the strike zone, did not look especially dangerous, but the quick, late cuts that most of the Red Sox batters were offering suggested what they were up against. Siebert, for his part, was retiring batters just as easily, but with a greater variety of stuff; he fanned Dave Duncan once on three pitches delivered with a sensitive yet thoughtful selection of tempi—
presto
,
largo
, and
allegro
,
ma non troppo
.

Now, in the bottom of the sixth, Vida made his first mistakes. (The Petrocelli homer had been struck off an excellent fast ball.) Yastrzemski lashed violently at a high first-pitch delivery and, catching it just a fraction too low, flied out to Rick Monday in deep center. Petrocelli then swung quickly and economically at the very next pitch and stroked the ball into the screen above the left-field wall. 3–1. All at once, the game had altered; it no longer belonged to the pitchers. Moments later, in the Oakland seventh, Dave Duncan sailed a Siebert delivery even higher into the screen, to bring things back to 3–2, and in the bottom of the same inning Siebert himself drove Reggie Jackson all the way to the bullpen to collar his line drive. Jackson was similarly disappointed in the top of the eighth, when Billy Conigliaro, with his back flattened against the fence, pulled down his shot to center. In the home half, Smith singled, and Dick Williams came out to the mound, patted his pitcher on the rump, and excused him for the rest of the evening. The happy cries of the Boston fans turned to prolonged waves of applause as Vida left the field. George Scott then brought Smith home with a little roller, hit off Bob Locker, that just got through between Bando and Campaneris.

Almost over now. Everyone was standing, clapping, laughing. Oops!—there went
another
Oakland home run into the screen, this one by Bando, to make it only 4–3. With two out, the count on Dave Duncan ran to three balls and one strike, the last two pitches floating up to the plate with so little zing that it was suddenly plain that Siebert had used up his arm. He departed, amid plaudits, and Bob Bolin took his place on the mound. Warmed up, he stretched and threw, and Duncan rocketed the pitch to left, up and out and—a long pause—
foul!
The consensus was four inches. Bolin threw, and Duncan whacked another foul into the upper darkness—four feet, maybe five. Bolin threw again, Duncan swung and just ticked the ball, and catcher Duane Josephson held it and jumped straight up into the air, with ball and glove held high.

The season hastens toward its summer discoveries. Vida Blue, drawing enormous audiences on the road, has launched a new winning streak, now three games long. The Red Sox, after beating Vida that Friday, lost five games in a row and eventually surrendered first place to the Orioles, perhaps forever. The Giants’ June swoon—at one point, eight losses in nine games—is in full flower. One of their few recent successes was a victory over the Mets that was achieved almost entirely by their first baseman, who tied the game with a home run in the eighth inning, saved it three times in the next two innings with spectacular infield plays, and then scored the winning run in the eleventh. The first baseman, filling in for McCovey, was Willie Mays. Six days later, Mays beat the Phillies with a home run in the bottom of the twelfth inning. The leader is still leading.

—
October 1971

B
ASEBALL HAS CONCLUDED ITS
annual exercises in the obligatory fashion—with another World Series and another franchise shift. A riot followed the wrong event. A long evening of window-breaking, car-burning, and assorted carnage in downtown Pittsburgh was touched off by a marvel of good news—the Pirates’ stimulating victory over the Orioles in a turnabout seven-game Series—while the atrocious circumstances surrounding the Washington Senators’ sudden removal from the capital to a roadside stand west of Dallas were greeted not with the torch but a shrug. The latter happening, to be sure, was followed by some legislative rumblings and an editorial outcry that was nearly unanimous outside Texas, but most fans or ex-fans I have talked to about the matter can summon up only a cynical and helpless grimace over this latest and apparently most arrogant corporate flourish by the owners of the old game. Since 1953, baseball loyalists in nine other cities, from Boston to Seattle (
ten
cities, actually, since Washington lost its original Senators to Minneapolis after 1960 and was given a substitute, Inflato model for the next season), have had to watch such abrupt departures, and the ugly style and detail of this latest decampment are so familiar that the temptation is merely to ignore the whole thing and turn our attention at once to the loud surprises of the Series. But this is surely what the baseball moguls would prefer us to do. (“Wow, sonny, how about those Buccos!”)

Meeting with his fellow American League owners in Boston in mid-September, Bob Short, a Minneapolis millionaire who purchased the Senators three years ago, cited dropping attendance (a falloff of 169,633 ticket-buyers from last year’s unawesome total of 824,789) and rising debts (he claims to have taken a three-million-dollar bath in the Potomac) as compelling reasons for his pulling up stakes instanter. Previously, he had sought redress from Congress and the District of Columbia, offering to stay put in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in return for impossible rent concessions or, alternatively, to unload the team on the first buyer who came forward with twelve million dollars. He also made ungracious remarks about the loyalty of Washington fans, whom he had stuck with the highest ticket prices and perhaps the dullest team in the majors. (Mr. Short had helped put his own mark on the club by trading away most of his infield last year in return for Denny McLain, a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year pitcher who lost twenty-two games for the Senators this summer.) There was also the long-range handicap of the World Champion Baltimore Orioles next door, and, very close-range, an imminently payable note of two million dollars. Help for such problems, one might suppose, comes only from Heaven, but Texas sometimes does just as well. Better. At the Boston meeting, Mr. Short introduced the mayor of Arlington, Texas, a hamlet midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, who offered safe harbor to the Senators, along with a low-interest, delayed-amortization seven-and-a-half-million-dollar bank loan; a one-dollar lease on a ballpark called Turnpike Stadium, which could be enlarged to forty-five thousand seats within two years; and a million-dollar television-and-radio contract. Unspoken but also guaranteed was the certainty that, with the eyes of Texas upon them, the same somnolent Senator ball team—now renamed the Rangers or the Horns or the Rustlers or the Spurs, or perhaps the Absconders, and improved if not by the purchase of any new ballplayers then surely by a set of those far-out double-knit Mod uniforms and a winter of heavy down-home public relations (Frank Howard in a ten-gallon Stetson! Manager Ted Williams astride a prize Hereford heifer!)—would surpass the old Washington box-office figures by God only knew what unimaginable margins for … well, at least for a couple of years. The American League owners voted, ten to two, to accept the offer.

They did so, it must be added, with pain and distress. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn fought a long, almost frontal campaign against the switch, and the final meeting dragged along for thirteen and a half hours as the executives considered and finally rejected a counter-offer of nine and a half million dollars (from the owner of a chain of Washington supermarkets) that turned out to be incompletely financed. After the vote, American League President Joe Cronin said, “Our conscience is clear,” but it is fair to suppose that no one there was untroubled by the sudden erasure of such an ancient and affectionately regarded franchise (“First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”), or by the implications of the disappearance of baseball from the baseball nation’s capital. One may look on the event with anger, or with sentimentality (President Nixon said he was heartbroken), or with sociological dispassion, seeing it as merely another case history in the economic shift away from the black inner city and toward the white, autoborne, and nearly cityless suburban middle class—the Turnpike People. Strangely, the act seems least defensible when it is regarded from the baseball owners’ point of view—as a straight business deal. Professional baseball
is
a national business, and the abandonment of the capital territory must therefore be taken as a confession of enormous corporate ineptitude. Furthermore, even the most muttonheaded investor might have doubts about a concern that proposes to save a losing line simply by changing its name and then trying to fob off the same shabby item on unsuspecting consumers in a different territory.

The truth of the matter, it would seem, is that the other baseball owners have absolutely no defense against an impatient and reckless entrepreneur like Bob Short, because they insist on reserving for themselves the same last-ditch privilege they extended to him in September—the right to run a franchise into the ground and then merely move it along to another address, the right to bail out when the going gets bumpy. The fundamental and now very widespread complaint against the owners and operators of baseball does not really concern any
planned
expansion of their business or any reasonable alteration of it in response to new tastes or population trends; it does concern their actual motives and record in these matters, and their sensitivity to the public’s interest. Sustaining baseball in Washington may have become a difficult proposition, to be sure, and perhaps, in the end, an impossible one, but it is clear that in recent years it was never really tried. The idea of building a clientele by building a better ball team apparently did not occur to anybody. Two years ago, the Senators became a competitive club for a time, mostly in response to the presence and tutelage of their new manager, Ted Williams, and improved on their previous year’s record by more than twenty games; attendance in Washington that summer rose from 546,661 to 918,106—a gain of sixty-eight per cent. This year, two recently floundering American League teams, the Chicago White Sox and the Kansas City Royals, bettered themselves dramatically on the field and, between them, picked up more than half a million new customers. The best recent example of what can be done in the business of baseball with a modicum of patient hard work and intelligent planning is the Baltimore Orioles, who arrived on the Senators’ back doorstep as tattered orphans—the erstwhile St. Louis Browns—in 1954. Encountering many of the same regional problems that have bedeviled the Washington team, and competing for the same cramped regional audience, the Orioles struggled for several years, losing consistently on the field and at the gate, but they have since become the most powerful club in baseball, the winners of four pennants in the past six years, and the operators of a farm system that has captured twenty minor-league pennants in the past decade. Jerold C. Hoffberger, who owns the Orioles, was one of the two men who voted against the Senators’ shift to Texas.

The real victim of the owners’ nineteenth-century doctrine of total public unaccountability is, of course, the fan, whose financial and emotional expenditures in baseball and other professional sports remain wholly unprotected. He is not only the consumer in the enormous business of sports but also, in areas where municipal funds have helped to build new stadiums and arenas, a co-investor. Yet in the absence of any federal regulation of sports—an athletic Securities and Exchange Commission, a bleacherite Food and Drug Act—he continues to receive Short shrift. It is barely possible that this may not continue forever. To one degree or another, all professional sports are monopolies, controlling exclusive regional franchises and exclusive contractual rights to their athletes’ services only because of Congressional and judicial leniency. These often violated privileges are now being challenged by the Curt Flood suit, which the Supreme Court will hear during this session, and by Congressional inquiries into such matters as the proposed merger of the two professional basketball leagues and the football Giants’ announced shift from Yankee Stadium to the Jersey Meadows. Senator Sam Ervin, of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already said that if sports do indeed require their existent monopolies to sustain themselves, they must expect the same federal supervision of profits and practices that now regulates public utilities. If he is right—and it seems impossible not to agree with him—the appropriate laws should be enacted. Then sports reporters will happily stop sounding like Dickens on the workhouse, the baseball owners may be saved from their own mad laissez-faire dreams, and the Washington Senators will not have Gone West entirely in vain.

For the first time since the leagues split in half in 1969, some true expectation centered on the divisional playoffs this year (only TV announcers refer to them by their full, Avenue of the Americas title, “the Championship Series”), because all four pennant races had fallen so flat. By early August, the Orioles, the Pirates, the A’s, and the Giants had opened fat, dull leads over their respective opponents, and only the descent of a near fatal catalepsy upon the San Franciscans provided a late
frisson
of interest. The Giants and the Dodgers played two wildly exciting games at Candlestick Park in the middle of September—batters knocked sprawling, fighting players ejected, late-inning homers flying, old rages soaring—and the Dodgers, winning both, fought to within a game of the leaders. Unfortunately, neither team could do better than split the remaining fourteen games of its schedule, and what had become a pennant race suggested thereafter nothing so much as two men walking side by side down an up escalator; the final Giant margin, preserved by a Marichal win over San Diego on the last night, was still that one game.