The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (49 page)

The Cubs kept their self-possession, winning the next day. (One-game losing streaks have been their specialty this year.) They amputated another potential big first inning by the visitors with a fine peg and relay to third, wiping out Ferguson, who had overrun the bag by a foot or two, and then came back to knock out Don Sutton with two runs in the fifth and with four more in the sixth; along the way, we were given a picture double play—a lovely pastoral by the Chicago-school Old Masters, Beckert and Kessinger. The Cubs won, 6–4, surviving a ninth-inning scare by the scary Dodgers, and Cubs fans—opinionated adult critics with the sparrowlike alertness of old Brooklyn fans, and
swarms
of youngsters, including perhaps every eleven-year-old boy in the greater Chicago area—nearly split themselves in appreciation. I was grateful, too—for these fans and these teams, and for Mr. Wrigley. The day before, there had been a brief rain delay in the seventh inning—a mild shower that held things up for about twenty minutes. The people down front came up under the roof, and the ground crew put the tarp on and took it off and then put it on again, and some of the teen-age couples stayed in their seats, squashing happily together under newspapers and pieces of plastic. The little kids, their hair plastered down with rain, ran about in the aisles with their heads cricked back, catching rain in their open mouths. The organist kept playing (“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”), and the rest of us stayed in our seats and stretched and waited—no place to go, and nothing to hurry for—and in time the sun came out and lit up the wet, deep-green grass in the outfield. It was nothing—a summer moment, but part of other summers, too.

Baseball, we sometimes need reminding, is meant to be played by the young. This homely truth came back to me during some illustrated lectures by the visiting Giants at Shea Stadium. Although on the decline (this was mid-June, and the team had just lost three straight to Montreal), the San Francisco touring kindergarten, the youngest team in the majors, still included Dave Kingman, who is twenty-four, along with five .300 hitters among their regulars, and a dazzling new outfield—Gary Matthews, Garry Maddox, and Bobby Bonds—whose averages came out to twenty-four (age), .331 (batting), and 9.4 (hundred-yard dash, unofficial). I am a lifelong Giants fan, and since I understand that the unique quality of my club (even more distinctive than the June swoon) is its habit of discovering outstanding young baseball talent and then perversely trading it away (Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Jose Pagan, Gaylord Perry, the three Alou brothers, etc.), I looked on these new prodigies with what I can only call anticipatory nostalgia, as I prepared to say goodbye to them even in the act of saying hello. They did look dashing, particularly in the first game against the Mets. In the third inning, shortstop Chris Speier darted to his right to scoop up a grounder and somehow released the ball, all in the same instant, back over his shoulder to second base, in time for a force. A moment later, Gary Matthews ran back in deep left field for Felix Millan’s long drive, made a twisting, last-second leap, and plucked back the ball after it had cleared the bullpen fence. Speier, who is twenty-three, has range and a tremendous arm, and is something like a continuous surprise on the field. With the fading of Brooks Robinson, he is almost my favorite infielder.

The Mets persevered, dropping that first game by 2–1 and then capturing the brief series with 5–4 and 3–1 wins. They are, however, a team now so afflicted with injuries, bad luck, weak hitting, and disappointing pitching (especially by the bullpen) that even their victories are almost dispiriting. Their injury list, this year as last year, encompasses almost the entire club roster, and the current absence of Bud Harrelson, out with a broken wrist, has finally extinguished the last, low fires of 1969. No team can be blamed for injuries, but the Mets are suffering just as much from a plain dearth of talent; when compared with other clubs in their league—not just the Dodgers and Giants but also the likes of the new Phillies—they are a team truly without prospects.
*
One of their problems, it must be admitted, is Willie Mays, who is now, at forty-two, the oldest player in the National League and has so far resisted the clear evidence that he should retire. He plays sporadically, whenever he is well and rested, and gives his best, but his batting reflexes are gone, and so is his arm. In that opening game against the Giants, the first San Francisco run came in on a long double to the left-center-field fence struck by young Ed Goodson, the Giants’ third baseman. Mays chased down the ball at the fence, picked it up, and unexpectedly flipped it to his left fielder, George Theodore, an, innocent spectator of the action. Theodore was so surprised that he bobbled the ball for an instant before making the throw, far too late, to third. I had never seen such a thing. Theodore was given an error, but the horrible truth of the matter was that Mays was simply incapable of making the play. In the bottom of the same inning, Mays grounded out to short, and his batting average for the year slipped below .100. He has subsequently done a little better—.202, with three homers, at this writing—but his failings are now so cruel to watch that I am relieved when he is not in the lineup. It is hard enough for the rest of us to fall apart quite on our own; heroes should depart.

July 4: Boston at N.Y. (2): Ah, friends, can this be the real thing at last? The Yanks, in first place at the traditional mid-season milepost, in a holiday doubleheader against their ancient enemies the Red Sox! Our boys (strengthened by the recent purchase of two strong and combat-tested starting pitchers, Pat Dobson and Sam McDowell) have run off a record of 30–15 since May 20, winning fourteen of the last fifteen at home. How
about
that, fans? Yes, the crowds have materialized at last, in thickening numbers, and the Fourth is to be their reward—the first proper baseball celebration in the Bronx in almost a decade … and also the last Fourth here for some years to come, while the old ballyard is closed for major alterations. So come
on,
everybody. Nothing can spoil this day!

Well, almost nothing. As it turned out, our hosts for the afternoon, having gone to such pains to provide us with a memorable party, first dropped the watermelon off the back of the truck and then forgot to bring the fireworks—losing the first game by 2–1, on errors, and the second by 1–0, on vapid hitting. A miserable Fourth, in short, for most of the 41,693 of us who made the scene. The crowd itself was the only happening of the day—a hoarse, eager, sweating, half-dressed multitude that cheered hopefully and then derisively, that ate and drank without cease, flew paper airplanes, scattered trash, dropped showers of beer from the upper deck, set off salvos of firecrackers and ashcans, got into fights, roused itself again and again for shouted encouragement, and lapsed at last into irritated torpor. Handmade banners flew from the railings (“We Love You Bobby #1” for Bobby Murcer; “BA Boomer” for Ron Blomberg, who was leading the league in batting), and there were heads visible along the back wall of the very top deck—the sure sign of a huge, old-fashioned Stadium crowd, right out of the nineteen forties or fifties. All began eagerly and happily, with the home-team hitters—almost dangerous now, in our renewed and hopeful estimation—swinging for some hard, deep outs off the Boston starter, Ray Culp, and with Mel Stottlemyre setting down the visitors without strain. In the fourth inning, a wonderful baying of pleasure welcomed Bobby Murcer’s low homer into the right-field bullpen—a Yankee run that would have earned a longer commemoration if its unique nature had been appreciated at the time. The hot, damp afternoon wore along, and the audience, preoccupied with feeding its face and mopping its brow, sustained an uninterrupted cheerful racket, a deep undertow of noise, that suggested little anxiety about the difficult event at hand. Then, in the top of the ninth, Stottlemyre gave up a leadoff single to Reggie Smith—the cue, of course, for the Datsun and Sparky Lyle, the fabled reliever. Yastrzemski singled on Lyle’s second pitch. Cries of “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” from the top deck—a plea now utterly ignored by the Yankees. Cepeda dropped a tiny, unsurprising bunt in front of the plate that Thurman Munson somehow kicked away. Petrocelli fanned, but with the bases still loaded, Fisk rapped a bouncer to Nettles, who seemed to consider various options—Throw home? Step on third and then throw to first?—and finally chose the wrong one: a peg to second in time for one out but not nearly in time for the essential relay to first. That throw got away from Blomberg, who chased down the ball, saw Yastrzemski sprinting in from third, and bounced a wild heave past Munson which allowed the second run to score. Disaster. The Yanks, in their half, put their lead runner aboard, but Matty Alou’s pinch-hit bunt was too deep, ruining the sacrifice, and a few minutes later, the shouting was over—a game literally thrown away.

The nightcap was a game of Still Pond No More Moving, featuring some impressive pitching by the Yanks’ Doc Medich and the Red Sox’ Roger Moret, and a lone score in the fifth, a mini-run fashioned out of a walk to Rick Miller, a stolen base, and a little single by Yastrzemski. The Yanks’ hitting, so boisterous in recent weeks, had fallen away to a mutter—six scattered and unferocious blows—and the run-famished crowd stared out at some of the out-of-town scores now going up on the board: St. Louis 11, Pittsburgh 3; Baltimore 6, Milwaukee 4; Baltimore 10, Milwaukee 7. Those two Oriole wins could move them up to within two games of the Yankees.

Firecrackers were banging and popping all over the park now, and there were some boos for the Yankee hitters. Empty seats were beginning to show up. I got up and wandered around, in search of some action and a breeze. From the back of the lower deck, I watched that old and wonderful New York baseball panorama—the Stadium playing field viewed as a narrow, skyless slot of intense green, framed between the black of the overhanging mezzanine above and the black of the seated crowd below: a game-vista that an auto mechanic might have from under a stalled DeSoto. I kept going, and sat down at last in an empty seat way out in Section 34, beyond the foul pole. From here, I looked out across the immense distances of deep left field—Gionfriddoland—and on to the distant, tiny figures of the players. From this vantage, the infielders’ throws over to first swooped and dipped at odd angles, and whenever a batter hit a ball there was a pause long enough to measure—
one
…
two
—before the high, thin sound reached us. The crowd out here was quieter—mostly older men sitting alone, with a space of a few seats and rows between each of them. One of them was holding a radio to his ear. Then a man down in front of me stood up and came slowly up the aisle, folding his
News
under his arm. “Ah, well,” he said as he came by. He was quite right; we could forget this particular day. There was a lot of this season still to come, still plenty of baseball for us to watch and care about in the weeks ahead. It was time to head home.

*
All absolutely true, and the fact that the Mets later in 1973 won their divisional title and then the National League pennant and very nearly won the World Series should not detract from the brilliance of this appraisal.

—
September 1973

M
AX. IT IS LUNCHTIME
at Gene & Georgetti’s Restaurant, on North Franklin Street in downtown Chicago. It is the middle of the week, and the place is pretty full. A lot of businessmen eat here: Bloody Marys, chopped sirloin or the veal scallopini, salad, coffee, shoptalk. At one table—a party of three—somebody mentions the St. Louis Browns, the old American League baseball club that moved to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles. A man rises from a nearby table, approaches the threesome, and bows. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he says. They look up. He is a sandy-haired, bright-eyed man—still a bit below middle age, one would guess—with a small cigar in his hand; his eyeglasses are in the new aviator-goggle style. “Excuse me,” he says again, smiling cheerfully. “I just overheard one of you mention the old St. Louis Browns, and I’m sure you would all like to be reminded of the lineup of the 1944 Brownies, which, as you will recall, was the only Browns team ever to win the AL pennant, and which lost that World Series, of course, to their hometown rivals, the Cardinals, in six games. It was one of the two World Series, in fact, in which both participating teams came from west of the Mississippi River. The Browns’ regular lineup in 1944 went: catcher, Frank Mancuso; first base, George McQuinn; second base, Don Gutteridge; third base, Mark Christman …” He runs through the eight names (one of the least celebrated lineups in the history of the game), adds starting pitchers Jack Kramer, Sig Jakucki, Bob Muncrief, and Denny Galehouse and, for good measure, throws in a second-string catcher named Red Hayworth. “You probably remember,” he says, still smiling, “that Red Hayworth and the regular catcher, Frank Mancuso, both had brothers who were also major-league catchers and, in both cases,
better
catchers. Thank you.” He bows and departs.

The three men at the table look at one another, and then one of them calls after their informant. “Hey!” he says. “Do you come from St. Louis?”

“No,” says the stranger. “Detroit.”

He sits down at his table again, but he has stopped smiling. He has just remembered that he lives in Chicago now—away from Detroit, away from the Tigers.

Bert. A little after nine-thirty on a Monday morning in June, Bert walks into his ground-floor office in Oak Park, Michigan, which is a suburb on the north side of Detroit. His name is on the door: “Bert Gordon, Realty.” He says good morning to his secretary and to his assistant, Barbara Rosenthal, and goes on into his own office, which looks out on a parking strip and, beyond that, onto Greenfield Road. He sits down at his desk, leans forward and takes off his shoes, and slides his feet into a pair of faded blue espadrilles. Then he swings his swivel chair to the right, so that he is facing a desk-model calculator on a side table, and punches out on it the numbers “2922” and “1596.” The first figure is the total number of days of President Nixon’s two terms in the White House; the second is the number of days the President has served to date. He hits another button, and the answer slot at the top of the machine offers up “54.62” in illuminated green numbers. Bert is a member of the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee, and he has just figured (as he figures every weekday morning) the expired percentage of President Nixon’s two terms of office. Now Bert clears the machine and punches out the numbers “9345” and “2806.” (Since Friday morning, the first number has gone up by seven and the second by one: Al Kaline, the veteran star outfielder for the Detroit Tigers, hit one single in seven official times at bat against the Minnesota Twins over the weekend.) The machine silently presents another set of green numbers; today Kaline’s lifetime major-league batting average stands at .3000267. Bert sighs, erases the figure, and picks up his telephone. He is ready to start his day.