The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (35 page)

The National League playoffs, beginning in San Francisco (and seen by me on the tube), opened with a brisk, noisy entertainment, which the Giants finally won, 5–4, after some appallingly butterfingered work afield in the early innings. The Giant starter, the perennial Gaylord Perry, pitched resolutely and intelligently, and survived, while his younger opposite number, Steve Blass, pitched brilliantly and dashingly, and did not. Blass, posted to an early 2–0 lead, struck out no fewer than nine Giant batters in the first four innings, and was gone after the fifth, in which he gave up two two-run homers, the second an intercontinental ballistic missile launched by Willie McCovey. The Pirates evened matters the next afternoon, when they battered various Giant second-line pitchers for fifteen hits, including three home runs by first baseman Bob Robertson, and won 9–4. The Giants’
first
-line pitching had been reduced by this point in the season to Perry and Marichal (only one other starter or reliever won a game for them in their final sixteen decisions), and when Juan lost the third playoff game, in Pittsburgh, by 2–1, it was clear that the Giants were
in extremis
. Marichal gave up only four hits, but two of them were homers—by Robertson again and by Richie Hebner—and he was beaten by a fast-baller named Bob Johnson.

It was Perry and Blass once more the next day, and almost instantly the score stood at 5–5, the two teams having rapped out fourteen hits, three homers, and ten runs in the space of two innings. Blass departed, giving way to a skinny sidearmer named Bruce Kison, who set down the Westerners until his teammates ended the Giants’ long year with a four-run sixth inning—the last three runs coming home, in a cloud of confetti and yowling, on a three-run homer by Al Oliver. The Pirates had their well-earned pennant.

A missing name in this account, it may be noticed, is that of Willie Mays. He played in all four games and did not exactly or entirely fail: two doubles, one homer, a stolen base, four hits. But these totals do not suggest the true level of his contribution, and by this, for once, I mean that he was less of a player than the statistics suggest—a much older player, who looked every year and month of his forty years; a player gone quite gray-faced with exhaustion and pain and the pressures of leadership. Willie had seen all his splendid early-season triumphs worn away to bare competence; in the late going, he had managed but four hits in forty at-bats, had gone a whole month without a homer, and had been striking out almost half the time. He apologized to his fans at the end of the regular season. During the playoffs, after I had seen Mays taking called third strikes or trying to bunt his way aboard or slicing a weak little pop hit on a fast ball he could no longer get around on, I began—for the first time in my life, and with enormous sadness—not to want him to come up to the plate. I dreaded it, in fact, and I was embarrassed by the feeling, and ashamed of myself. But I still feel the same way, and I think it should be said: Hang them up, Willie, please. Retire.

In Baltimore, meanwhile, the sporting crowd filled the hotel lobbies with cigar smoke and gossip in anticipation of the opening playoff feature of Vida Meets the Birds—a drama that was delayed and deepened by an initial rainout. The Baltimore-Oakland collision was actually between two fine teams—the champs back for a crack at their third straight playoff sweep, having won over a hundred regular-season games for the third year in a row through the efforts of
four
twenty-game-winning pitchers, and the challengers a band of free-swinging youngsters who had found themselves this year under their new manager, Dick Williams, and had shattered their opposition to capture their demi-flag by a sixteen-game margin. All very well, but Vida Blue was what we had come for. The phenomenal young Oakland fireballer had beaten the Orioles twice in the early season, by 1–0 and 2–1; all his further meetings with them had been washed out by repeated bad weather. The new downpour added to Blue’s burdens, for it canceled the playoff’s only travel day and meant that he would not be sufficiently rested to pitch twice against the Orioles; the first game, in all likelihood, would be crucial. Blue’s statistics in this, his first full year in the majors, were admirable—twenty-four wins and eight losses, an earned-run average of 1.82, three hundred and one strikeouts, eight shutouts—but still somehow disappointing, for he trailed off considerably from the explosive early-season performance that had brought him to such sudden and total celebrity. He had won only four games since August 7, and the word was that his fast ball had lost a bit of its zing and that he could be beaten in late innings.

I hoped not. I had no particular emotional stake in this series, but I had noticed one other figure in Vida Blue’s hard-to-believe statistics for the year—three hundred and twelve innings pitched. The great majority of the big-league pitchers do not work as many as three hundred innings in a single season in their entire careers; the average innings-per-year figure, even if one ignores relief men and part-timers, must be much closer to two hundred. This season, in both leagues, there were only three pitchers (Ferguson Jenkins, Mickey Lolich, and Wilbur Wood) who appeared in more innings than Vida Blue, and all of them were far older than he. This last is the point, of course. Young pitchers’ arms are so fragile, so easily susceptible to permanent injury, that many clubs have various self-imposed rules to protect them. One team limits its youngsters to a maximum of a hundred pitches per game; another does not allow its pitchers to learn the slider until they are at the Class AAA level, and thus presumably into their twenties. Vida Blue turned twenty-two last July, and his left arm just might be the most valuable natural asset to turn-up in the majors in a decade. He has powerful legs, and thus throws without effort or strain; he has excellent control, and thus does not waste many pitches. In these and other ways, he reminds me at times of another left-hander, Jerry Koosman, who pitched in two hundred and sixty-three innings in
his
brilliant first full season, at the age of twenty-four, and has never since been able to throw a decent fast ball. Well, young pitchers are eager and forever anxious to get out there and fire; it is the management that decides when to call on them. Vida Blue made winners out of the A’s this summer and also, of course, brought out enormous crowds whenever he was slated to pitch. The true balance sheet and final assessment of his first season may not be known for another year or two.

The game arrived at last, and Oakland staked Vida to a quick two-run lead in the second inning, on a triple sandwiched between two doubles. The outfield at Memorial Stadium, which had been patched up and painted various shades of watery green, was still soggy, and anything hit to the corners died there, good for extra bases. With a man at second and none out, the A’s now elected to play some uncharacteristically uptight ball. Manager Williams had the runner, catcher Dave Duncan, sacrificed to third, and, with Blue now at bat, ordered a squeeze play; Duncan, however, set sail for the plate a fraction early, and the Oriole pitcher, Dave McNally, threw wide and outside. Blue stabbed helplessly at the ball with his bat, Duncan was chased down and tagged, and a moment later Vida fanned for the third out. It didn’t seem to matter much at the time, for Vida looked to be in form. His fast ball was flaring and jumping, and he dismissed the Oriole power—Merv Rettenmund, Frank Robinson, and Boog Powell—on successive swinging strikeouts. He was ahead by 3–1 when the seventh began. Now he gave up a walk and a single, and, with two out, another, run-scoring single, to Mark Belanger. The Oakland bullpen was working, but Vida, who had now thrown something like a hundred and twenty pitches in the game, was allowed to face pinch-hitter Curt Motton, who thereupon doubled, to tie the score. Still no one emerged from the visitors’ dugout to consult or console the young star, and a moment or two later Paul Blair hit another double, and the big first game was gone. It was a characteristic kind of victory for the Orioles, and a mysterious and deadening losing performance by the challengers.

In the clubhouse, Vida Blue sat on a trunk and submitted himself for the last time to the horde of reporters that has dogged him and surrounded him ever since early summer. His answers came almost in a whisper; in an agony of disappointment and anxiety, he kept sighing and staring at the ceiling. He looked terribly young, and then I realized, or remembered at last, that the rest of us, pushing in around him with our notebooks and our questions, were much older and supposedly grown up. Once again we were demanding too much of him; I went away.

The next day, it was Mike Cuellar against Oakland’s other twenty-game winner, Catfish Hunter, who likes to challenge hitters with his fast ball in tight situations, and who this time kept getting the gauntlet flung right back in his face. Four home runs—one each by Brooks Robinson and Ellie Hendricks, and two by Powell—accounted for all the Baltimore runs in a 5–1 win. Boog played with a badly banged-up wrist, and, in the eighth, tried twice to bunt a runner along; failing, he delivered him with his second round-tripper. After the game, Catfish Hunter shook his head and said, “People at home are going to ask me all damned
winter
how I could throw two home-run balls to a cripple.”

The A’s winter began late the next afternoon, in California. Baltimore’s Jim Palmer gave up three solo homers, two of them to Reggie Jackson, but five Oakland pitchers could not keep matters in order; Brooks Robinson hit a key single in a 5–3 victory that was never really close. The Orioles’ win was their fourteenth in a row, and they had swept the playoffs once again. Piece of cake.

This feeling persisted when the Series began in Baltimore and the home side moved off smartly and inexorably to a two-game lead. We had watched this same fine Oriole team winning so many games on so many October afternoons, going back to 1966, that the occasion had grown easy and familiar—less a contest than the renewal of a permanent autumn holiday. It had become the kind of regular reunion one used to have with the Yankees, the Baltimore fans, like their old counterparts in the Stadium, could pass the time by smugly discovering marvelous but insufficiently appreciated ballplayers hidden in their lineup—regulars like Belanger and Buford and Davey Johnson, who were not quite famous, but only because they played every day next to luminaries like Boog and Frank and Brooksie. Well, there were some other fine players here, too, on the other side—Roberto Clemente, naturally, and the large and dangerous Willie Stargell, who had led all the National League sluggers with forty-eight homers this year, and an exuberant young catcher, Manny Sanguillen. The Pirates, in fact, had led the Orioles in almost every offensive department during the season—runs, hits, and batting averages—but the Orioles’ unmistakable pitching advantage was the answer to
that
, and their edge in experience was, well, immeasurable. No one, then, was particularly worried when the visitors notched three runs in the second inning of the opener, all attributable to uncharacteristic Oriole mistakes—a wild pitch and two infield errors. Sure enough, Frank Robinson began the rebound with a lead-off, sky-scraping homer in the third, struck off Pittsburgh’s ace, Dock Ellis, and then, an inning later, Belanger and Buford singled and Merv Rettenmund lined a long, low drive that carried all the way to the Baltimore bullpen; Willie Stargell, the Pirate left fielder, ran up the wire fence like a squirrel, but the ball was beyond him, and the Orioles had gone ahead. They won, 5–3, and Dave McNally, who is sometimes unfairly known in Baltimore as McLucky, set down twenty-one of the last twenty-two Pirates to come to the plate.

Another Maryland monsoon washed out the Sunday game, but there was a rare sellout crowd of 53,239 partisans on hand the next afternoon, presumably to bid farewell to their heroes until springtime. Jim Palmer, working with remarkable haste or impatience, kept walking Pirate batters and then striking out their successors. His opposite number, Bob Johnson, barely survived the second inning, when three Baltimore snipers fired line shots at him—one off his foot, another just over his cap button, and one more that he flagged down in self-defense. He did not survive the fourth inning, and neither did his replacement, Bruce Kison. Then, in the fifth, the Orioles sent eleven batters to the plate, scoring six runs, and the game had become a laugher. The final tally was 11–3; Baltimore had fourteen hits, all singles. Roberto Clemente seemed notably unimpressed. Carrying his bat up to the plate like a surveyor setting up his transit, he precisely measured out a low single, a high line drive that was caught, and a long, beautiful geodetic line straight to the foot of the right-field barrier, good for two bases. In the field, he whirled and threw a burning strike from deep right all the way to third base; this was during the ridiculous goings-on of the fifth inning, but Clemente has no sense of humor about baseball.

As the teams moved along to Pittsburgh, it seemed there was nothing to do but commiserate with the Pirate manager, Danny Murtaugh. His best pitcher, Dock Ellis, was finished for the year with a sore elbow; all his remaining starters had been recently shelled or injured. His big bat, Willie Stargell, was deep in a slump that had gripped him since the onset of the playoffs. His team, badly beaten in two games, had been entirely unable to employ one of its true assets—speed on the bases. Murtaugh—a seamed, tobacco-chewing, contemplative pilot—could only murmur that his outfit was at home now and did not seem to have lost any of its confidence. Baltimore had been terrific, he said, but still, perhaps … These are managerial bromides, but accurate enough in their way, for in this sport, game plans and rousing rhetoric are of no use; managers must wait, like the rest of us, for the disclosures and marvels of each new game. The marvel of the third game played in the immense plastic cylinder called Three Rivers Stadium, was Steve Blass. Pitching this time with an almost surgical finesse, and using his slider and changeup in textbook fashion to set up the fast ball, he dispatched the Orioles, inning by inning, in minutes. His rival, Mike Cuellar, was almost as fine, and by the bottom of the seventh inning the Pirates were leading by a minimal 2–1. It was a glazy, beautiful late-summer day, hot in the sunshine and cool and autumnal in the shaded stands. Each infielder moved in company with his etched attendant shadow on the ground, and a hushed, blurred quiet, broken by an occasional clank of cowbells, had fallen over the anxious multitude. It was ended by a groan and then a sudden shout: Roberto Clemente, swinging for the seats this time, half topped a pitch and sent an easy bouncer back to the mound. Cuellar turned to make the leisurely toss and was astonished to discover Clemente running out the play at top speed; now hurrying, Cuellar flipped the ball high, pulling Powell off the bag, and Roberto was on. Disconcerted, Cuellar walked Stargell, and an instant later Bob Robertson, the dour and muscular Pirate first baseman, sailed a drive over the fence in deepest right center, to put the game away at 5–1. Ecstasy along the Monongahela. Robertson, it turned out, had missed a bunt sign when he hit the homer, but Danny Murtaugh somehow forgave him.