The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (5 page)

Eddie Stanky, a famously sharp-tongued and combustible manager (last summer he called Yastrzemski a “Most Valuable Player from the neck down”) has promised his wife to limit himself this year to “three or four aggravations.” He also told reporters in Florida that he would not attempt much lineup tinkering (in one game last September he used twelve pinch batters and base-runners in one-third of an inning), but would merely play his best hitters (“my big buffaloes”) every day. He has benefited from a series of remarkable trades in the past year, which has brought him such estimable senior buffaloes as Ken Boyer, Russ Snyder, Davis, and Aparicio while keeping his pitching intact, and it may be that he will at last be able to count on winning some ball games on base hits, instead of on nerve, defense, and opponent-baiting. When I last saw the White Sox—they beat the Orioles that day—Aparicio was batting .428 for the spring, Davis was at .417, the team average stood at .302, and Manager Stanky had not yet used up one of his aggravations. The most significant moment of preseason athletics for the Boston Red Sox took place not in Florida but on a mountain slope at Heavenly Valley, California, late in the afternoon of last December 24, when Jim Lonborg, taking a last run down an expert trail through heavy, crusty powder, crossed his right ski tip over his left while making an easy right-hand turn and fell slowly forward, snapping the anterior cruciate ligament of his left knee. The Knee, subsequently operated on and now slowly on the mend, was the object of intense daily ministrations, rituals, aspersions, invocations, and solemn preachments observed and participated in by the sixty-odd reporters at the Bosox camp in Winter Haven. Lonborg won twenty-four games last year, including the famous pennant-clincher and two World Series games, but his importance to the Sox may be even greater this year; most of his fellow staff members have shown only a minimum competence this spring, sometimes absorbing terrific pastings at the hands of such lightweights as the Senators and the Astros, and Lonborg’s value has seemed to rise every day, even though he has not yet thrown a pitch. When I saw him in March, he was lifting twenty-five pounds of weights strapped to a boot on his left foot, and had only slight flexibility of the leg. When he could lift forty pounds, he would be allowed to start throwing. He may be ready to pitch early in June, maybe later. Nobody knows, because baseball medicos have never had to study a skiing injury before, and ski-injury orthopedists rarely meet pitchers. The only person in Winter Haven who seemed interested in this sociomedical paradox (and the only one apparently able to look at the knee with something less than Trappist gloom) was Lonborg himself, a young man who is intensely interested in almost everything. He is even interested in skiing again. “You can understand the thrill of baseball,” he said, “but there’s something
mysterious
about skiing.” He told me that he could hardly wait to get back on skis, but added thoughtfully that there was an unspoken agreement between him and the Red Sox management that this moment should be postponed until after his baseball days were finished. This agreement is unspoken, I discovered, because Dick Williams, the Red Sox manager, can barely bring himself to say anything about Lonborg’s injury, the effect of Lonborg’s absence, the date of Lonborg’s return, or the permanence of Lonborg’s Killy-cure. Williams has spent his life in baseball, and the idea of a Cy Young Award winner’s risking his future for the mystery and joy to be found on a ski slope is beyond his experience. The generation gap is everywhere.

Morning training sessions at Chain-O’-Lakes Stadium, in Winter Haven, were studied with a mixture of excessive optimism and unjustified despondency by the immense Boston press corps, which has traditionally been made uneasy by success. Soft breezes carried a festive, wedding-cake fragrance across the diamond from an orange grove beyond the outfield, and three large cardboard golden crowns, suspended by wires and marked “BA .326,” “HR 44,” and “RBI 121,” swayed in the bright air above the boxes behind home. Yastrzemski, the inspiration for this impermanent trophy, seemed unconcerned by the almost visible rays of speculation that fell on him wherever he went in the field. Mostly, he was glad that the winter of his celebrity was over. He had been to too many banquets and benefits, once making seventeen appearances in the span of two days, and he told me that he now felt grateful when strangers in a restaurant waited until he had finished eating before coming up to introduce themselves. In Florida, he took long extra turns in the batting cage, sometimes staying for another hour of batting after playing a full game. He was admittedly tired, and he was having trouble with his timing. He knew, of course, that every pitcher in the league would have special plans for him this summer, that he would be the victim of shifts and stratagems and bases on balls, and, most of all, that even another great year at the plate could not bring him the same emotions and rewards. Yet as I watched him set himself again and again in the cage—settling his helmet and tugging at his belt and touching the bat to the ground and leveling his shoulders in exactly the same series of gestures, and then unleashing the flat, late, perfect swing—it came to me that all this was not just preparation for what was to come but that here, strangely, was a place where he could find privacy. Inside the cage, inside the game, he was alone, approachable only by his fellows and subject only to the demands of his hard profession.

Surrounded by more elders (the freshwater, or blue-gilled, geezer is almost indistinguishable from the Gulf variety), I watched the Red Sox split two games in Winter Haven, losing to Detroit by 13–3 and then beating the Phillies the next afternoon, 6–1. In the eighth inning of the game against the Tigers, while the visitors were batting around against a succession of unhappy Boston pitchers, I left the ballpark and walked back to the clubhouse, which lies beyond the stands in deep right field. Here, on a patch of grass in front of the locker rooms, in the midst of a smaller crowd, José Santiago was enjoying a moment of absolute triumph as a pitcher. Dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, his hair combed after his shower, he was tossing underhand to his four-year-old son, Alex, from a range of about ten feet. Alex was wearing a miniature Red Sox uniform, with his father’s number, 30, on the back, and he was swinging a plastic bat. As I counted, Alex took fourteen successive swings at the ball without even managing one foul tip. Watching this game were perhaps a dozen other players—some in uniform, some not, some in stocking feet or with towels draped around their necks—and a good many wives and children and babies. Several of the wives were pregnant, and all of them were very young. They had driven over to the park to pick up the husbands at the end of the day’s work. Now, at last, Alex Santiago hit the ball, and everybody cheered. His father let the ball roll through his legs and across the lawn, and Alex ran excitedly around an imaginary set of base paths, fell down once, and then made it safely home.

—
June 1962

T
HROUGH APRIL AND MAY,
I resisted frequent invitations, delivered via radio and television, to come up to the Polo Grounds and see “those amazin’ Mets.” I even resisted a particularly soft blandishment, extended by one of the Mets’ announcers on a Saturday afternoon, to “bring the wife and come on up tomorrow after church and brunch.” My nonattendance was not caused by any unwillingness to attach my loyalty to New York’s new National League team. The only amazement generated by the Mets had been their terrifying departure from the runway in a full nosedive—the team lost the first nine games of its regular season—and I had decided it would be wiser, and perhaps kinder, to postpone my initial visit until the novice crew had grasped the first principles of powered flight. By the middle of May, however, the Mets had developed a pleasing habit of coming from behind in late innings, and when they won both ends of a doubleheader in Milwaukee on May 20, I knew it was time to climb aboard. In the five days from Memorial Day through June 3, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants were scheduled to play seven games at the Polo Grounds, and, impelled by sentiment for the returning exiles, who would be revisiting the city for the first time since 1957, and by guilt over my delayed enthusiasm for the Mets, I impulsively bought seats for all five days. The resulting experience was amazin’, all right, but not quite in the manner expected by the Mets or by me or by any of the other 197,428 fans who saw those games.

I took my fourteen-year-old daughter to the opening doubleheader, against the Dodgers, and even before we arrived at the park it was clear that neither the city subway system nor the Mets themselves had really believed we were coming. By game time, there were standees three-deep behind the lower-deck stands, sitting-standees peering through the rafters from the ramps behind the upper deck, and opportunist-standees perched on telephone booths and lining the runways behind the bleachers. The shouts, the cheers, and the deep, steady roar made by 56,000-odd fans in excited conversation were comical and astonishing, and a cause for self-congratulation; just by coming out in such ridiculous numbers (ours was the biggest baseball crowd of the 1962 season, the biggest Polo Grounds crowd since September 6, 1942), we had heightened our own occasion, building a considerable phenomenon out of the attention and passion each of us had brought along for the games and for the players we were to see.

It must have been no more than an hour later when it first occurred to me that the crowds, rather than the baseball, might be the real news of the two series. The Dodgers ran up twelve runs between the second and the sixth innings. I was keeping score, and after I had jotted down the symbols for their seven singles, two doubles, one triple, three home runs, three bases on balls, and two stolen bases in that span, the Dodgers half of my scorecard looked as if a cloud of gnats had settled on it. I was pained for the Mets, and embarrassed as a fan.

“Baseball isn’t usually like this,” I explained to my daughter.

“Sometimes it is,” she said. “This is like the fifth grade against the sixth grade at school.”

For a time, the long, low “Oooh!” sound and the accompanying thunderclap of applause that greeted the cannon shots by Ron Fairly, Willie Davis, Frank Howard, and the other visitors convinced me that I was in an audience made up mostly of veteran Dodger loyalists. The Mets’ pitchers came and went in silence, and there were derisive cheers when the home team finally got the third out in the top of the fourth and came in to bat trailing 10–0. I didn’t change my mind even when I heard the explosive roar for the pop-fly homer by Gil Hodges that led off the home half; Hodges, after all, is an ex-Dodger and perhaps the most popular ballplayer in the major leagues today. Instantly, however, I learned how wrong I had been. Gil’s homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full, furious, happy shout of “Let’s go,
Mets!
Let’s go,
Mets!
” There were wild cries of encouragement before every pitch, boos for every called strike. This was no Dodger crowd, but a huge gathering of sentimental home-towners. Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible. When Hickman and Mantilla hit a double and a single for one run, and Christopher singled for another, the Mets fans screeched, yawped, pounded their palms, leaped up and down, and raised such a din that players in both dugouts ducked forward and peered nervously back over the dugout roofs at the vast assemblage that had suddenly gone daft behind them.

The fans’ hopes, of course,
were
insane. The Dodgers got two runs back almost instantly in the fifth, and in the top of the ninth their lead was 13–4. Undiscouraged, the spectators staged another screaming fit in the bottom half, and the Mets responded with four singles, good for two more runs, before Sandy Koufax, the Dodger pitcher, grinning with embarrassment and disbelief, got the last man out. It was the ninth successive victory for the Dodgers, the ninth successive defeat for the Mets, and the Mets had never been in the game, yet Koufax looked a little shaken.

The second game was infinitely better baseball, but the fans, either wearied by their own exercise or made fearful by legitimate tension, were noticeably more repressed. A close, sensible game seemed to make them more aware of reality and more afraid of defeat. The Mets spotted the Dodgers three runs in the first on Ron Fairly’s second homer of the afternoon, and then tied it in the third on homers by Hodges and Hickman. It was nearly seven o’clock and the lights had been turned on when Hodges, who was having a memorable day, put the Mets in the lead with still another home run. Suddenly convinced that this was the only moment in the day (and perhaps in the entire remainder of the season) when the Mets would find themselves ahead, I took my fellow fan reluctantly away to home and supper. This was the right decision in one respect (the game, tied at 4–4 and then at 5–5, was won by the Dodgers when Willie Davis hit a homer in the ninth) but the wrong one in another. A few minutes after we left the park, the Mets pulled off a triple play—something I have never seen in more than thirty years of watching big-league baseball. Sandy Koufax and I had learned the same odd lesson: It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won’t startle you in the process.

In the following four days, the Mets lost five ball games—one more to the Dodgers and all four to the Giants—to run their losing streak to fifteen. Some of the scores were close, some lopsided. In three of the games, the Mets displayed their perverse, enchanting habit of handing over clusters of runs to the enemy and then, always a little too late, clawing and scratching their way back into contention. Between these rallies, during the long, Gobi stretches of home-team fatuity, I gave myself over to admiration of the visiting stars. Both the Dodgers and the Giants, who are currently running away from the rest of the league, are stocked with large numbers of stimulating, astonishingly good ballplayers, and, along with the rest of their old admirers here, I was grateful for the chance to collect and store away a private visual album of the new West Coast sluggers and pitchers. Now I have them all: Frank Howard, the six-foot-seven Dodger monster, striding the outfield like a farmer stepping through a plowed field; Ron Fairly, a chunky, redheaded first baseman, exultantly carrying his hot bat up to the plate and flattening everything thrown at him; Maury Wills, a skinny, lizard-quick base-runner. In the Thursday-night game, Wills stole second base twice in the span of three minutes. He was called back after the first clean steal, because Jim Gilliam, the batter, had interfered with the catcher; two pitches later, he took off again, as everyone knew he would, and beat the throw by yards. Willie Davis, the Dodger center fielder, is the first player I have ever been tempted to compare to Willie Mays. Speed, sureness, a fine arm, power, a picture swing—he lacks nothing, and he shares with Mays the knack of shifting directly from lazy, loose-wristed relaxation into top gear with an instantaneous explosion of energy.