The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (58 page)

A month later, there were a lot of new Yankee faces in the dugout, as the result of a wave of late trades by Yankee president Gabe Paul. One old Yankee face, Ralph Houk, was on hand in his fresh guise as the Detroit manager; he seemed genuinely touched by the wave of boos that greeted him as he carried out his lineup card. None of the Yankees, new or old, could do much with Mickey Lolich, who set them down with three hits and won by 5–2. Chris Chambliss, the large new first baseman whom the Yankees had just acquired from Cleveland, swung mightily and smote several eleven-hop infield grounders. It was the fourth straight Yankee loss.

The next visiting southpaw observed by me was Mike Cuellar, of the Orioles, who even outdid Lolich, surrendering two hits and a single run. This was late May, and the Yanks, now engaged upon an entirely different five-game losing streak, had fallen to last place. They looked dispirited, especially while swinging against Cuellar’s junky screwballs and curves. At its best, Cuellar’s attack on the plate reminds one of a master butcher preparing a standing roast of beef—a sliver excised here, a morsel trimmed off the bottom, two or three superfluous swishes of the knife through the air, and then a final slice of white off the ribs:
Voilà!

I caught the Orioles again a few days later, by television, when I saw the Kansas City Royals inflict frightful indignities on Jim Palmer, the Baltimore ace. Palmer, last year’s Cy Young Award winner in the American League, was gone after two and two-thirds innings, having surrendered seven hits and five runs. It was his sixth loss of the year, against two wins, and his record has subsequently gone to three and eight. He is suffering from a bad elbow. Mike Cuellar is still capable of some excellent outings, as I had observed, but he is thirty-seven years old and cannot last for many more summers. Dave McNally, the third member of the celebrated Baltimore corps of starters, is currently bumping along at 7–6 and a 4.30 ERA, and it may well be that this marvelous triumvirate is nearing the end of its reign. Before it goes, attention and honor should be paid.

McNally, a left-hander, came up to the Orioles from the minors in 1962, at the age of twenty; Palmer, who is right-handed, arrived in 1965, also at the age of twenty, although he was to spend the better part of the 1967 and 1968 seasons in the minors, recovering from an arm injury. The trio was completed at the beginning of the 1969 season when Cuellar, a veteran already in his thirties, came over from the Astros. In the five full seasons since then, the three pitchers have won 297 games while losing 150—a winning percentage of .664, which puts them up among the most effective and famous three-man staffs in history. These would include Eddie Lopat, Allie Reynolds, and Vic Raschi, who won 307 games and lost 143 (or .682) for the Yankees between 1948 and 1953; Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Mike Garcia, whose nine-year record for the Indians from 1949 to 1957 was 473–293, or .617; and, going back a bit, Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw, and Rube Walberg, who toiled together for Connie Mack’s Athletics from 1928 to 1933: 344–169, good for .670. No other more recent corps of starters suggests itself.

A more spectacular and perhaps fairer way to measure these splendid inner teams is to compare their cumulative performance during their three
peak
years together—a performance that in each case resulted in at least one pennant for the pitchers’ clubs. It comes out this way:

Those Athletics’ records, it should be explained, mean mostly Grove. His three-year stats for the selected time were 79 wins and only 15 losses, and an earned-run average of 2.47. Looking back to earlier times, one finds some dazzling three-year, three-man totals for games won—196 for Ed Walsh, Frank Smith, and Doc White, of the 1907–09 White Sox; 197 for Christy Mathewson, Rube Marquard, and Jeff Tesreau, of the 1912–14 Giants; and 231 for Mathewson, Joe McGinnity, and Dummy Taylor, of the 1903–05 Giants. Since old-time hurling staffs included very few relief pitchers, most of the pitchers of the era worked many more innings than modern stars do, and absorbed more losses, with consequent damage to their winning percentages.

So far this summer, Met-watching has been an excruciating pastime, especially when one remembers the tenacity and verve of the same club last autumn. At this writing, the World Series runners-up are in last place in the East, with the worst record in their league—worse than the Padres’. Ten games behind and fourteen games below the .500 level would suggest a summer best forgotten if it were not for the fact that their division again lacks a consistent leader. At less than their top form, the Mets have always looked abysmal. Their good years have been built on splendid pitching, from both starters and relievers; an airtight defense; and a patient attack that rarely produces more than the minimum necessary runs—in sum, a little twenty-one-jewel mechanism that works perfectly or not at all. The Mets have also never won without a top performance from Tom Seaver, and Seaver, in sixteen starts, stands at 4–6, with an earned-run average of 3.64; he is second in the league in strikeouts, and first in homers given up—fifteen.

I have watched Seaver work three times this year—a big, dominant win over Montreal, a sudden late-inning loss to the Giants on a three-run homer conked over the center-field fence at Shea by Gary Matthews, and a middling no-decision performance against the Reds. He has looked overpowering at times, the genuine Tom Terrific (during one twelve-inning outing in Los Angeles he fanned sixteen Dodgers), and decidedly ordinary at others. He has a formidable pitching intelligence, and knows how to employ all the talents he possesses on any given day, but this year he has sometimes been let down by his big strikeout pitch, the high fastball. (As we all know, the high hummer that is even a fraction short often ends up in the parking lot.) Seaver claims that his arm has never felt better, but it may be that he is suffering more than he wants to admit from a sciatic hip, which recently caused him to miss several starts. He may be at the time when we should begin to speculate about his future.

Seaver has had seven years in the majors to date, winning 135 games and losing 76 (up to 1974), with an ERA of 2.38. He has led the league three times in strikeouts (also registering the lowest ERA in each of those three years). Last summer, he pitched the Mets to a pennant and won his second Cy Young Award, but he was admittedly an arm-weary pitcher in the late going. He is twenty-nine years old. This is still young for a ballplayer, but not quite so young, the records suggest, for a strikeout pitcher. Hal Newhouser, the Tigers’ left-handed star of three decades ago, twice led his league in strikeouts and twice in ERA, and averaged close to three hundred innings pitched for six years, but was finished as a winner at the age of twenty-nine. Sudden Sam McDowell, while with the Cleveland Indians, kept his fastball for six years, five times topping the American League in whiffs, and then declined rapidly, never recording a significant winning season after the age of twenty-eight.

Robin Roberts, not exactly a flamethrower, lasted for nineteen years in the majors. He, too, had six top seasons—winning more than twenty games per year (and pitching over three hundred innings) from 1950 to 1955. He performed capably after that, but he was a much diminished pitcher after the age of twenty-nine. Bob Feller was a nonpareil fastball pitcher for seven years (not including a four-year wartime interruption)—seven years tops in Ks, five years tops in innings pitched and games won. But players who batted against him always mention the fact that Feller also possessed a magnificent curve, and it was this pitch that kept him in the majors for eighteen years; the fastball was in decline by the time he entered his thirties.

There is some evidence to the contrary, as well—famous iron-arms who threw hard and fast for a decade or more: Walter Johnson (twelve times the league strikeout leader, the last time in his thirty-seventh year), Dazzy Vance (who also led in strikeouts at the age of thirty-seven), Warren Spahn, Bob Gibson. And then, unforgettably, there is Sandy Koufax, who toiled ineffectively for six years, then gave us six astounding summers—five years tops in ERA, four years tops in strikeouts, three years tops in games won, no-hitters in four consecutive seasons—and then vanished like a spent rocket, his arm gone at the age of thirty.

It is certainly not suggested here that Seaver’s career is nearing its conclusion, or even that he is in decline as a consistent big winner. He is, however, at a stage in his professional life where he may soon have to become a different kind of pitcher—a process that is always extremely interesting to watch. It may be that the flaring Seaver fastball is about to disappear—gone, not so mysteriously, after some two thousand big-league innings and eighteen hundred whiffs. Let it go. Seaver seems to have the skills and temperament to stay on top, one way or another, for years to come—and here, too, the records are helpful. In 1927, Grover Cleveland Alexander, then forty years old, won 21 games for the Cardinals and lost only 10; he pitched 268 innings and fanned no more than 48 batters. There is more than one way to skin the game of one o’ cat.
***

A good many of the surprises and spectacles of this season have eluded me. So far, I have not caught up with the surprising Phillies and their suddenly terrific third baseman, Mike Schmidt; with the surprising Texas Rangers and their league-leading run-producer, Jeff Burroughs; or with the briefly surprising Milwaukee Brewers, whose shortstop, Robin Yount, is eighteen years old.

I did get away for one quick field trip to Chavez Ravine, where the Dodgers, leading the National League West by eight games in early June, had put together some statistics that seemed about to go right off the top of the charts—an eight-game lead over the Reds, a .700 winning percentage, league-leading batting totals of .284, fifty-seven homers, sixty-four stolen bases, and an average of ten base hits per game. (Their pinch-hitters as a group were batting. 324.) The Dodger pitching stats showed league-leading totals in earned-run average (2.82) and complete games and shutouts. Four of their pitchers—Tommy John, Charlie Hough, Andy Messersmith, and Doug Rau—were clustered at the top of the league’s won-lost records, with a combined mark of 26–6, and one of their catchers, Steve Yeager, had caused the invention of a new stat, inasmuch as he had yet to play in a losing game, and stood at 24–0 for the year.

First place is a nice neighborhood—large family crowds of happy front-runners (whose expressions bore none of the anxieties and irritable passions of the Metsian-fan face), Pacific evening sunshine slanting across the capacious and beautiful O’Malley palazzo (with some Eastern results, already up on the scoreboard, suggesting the terrible struggles of the other clubs to keep up), and smiles and youthful shouts in the clubhouse. Steve Garvey, the powerful and extremely polite young first baseman who was leading the league in runs batted in, said, “This kind of big jump at the start makes every game a whole lot easier. We know we can win a different way every night—thirteen to nothing, or one to nothing, or everything in in the bottom of the ninth. You can hardly wait to get to the ball park every day.”

I asked Walter Alston about this year and last, when the Dodgers lost an early lead of eight and a half games and finally gave way to the onrushing Cincinnati Reds. Alston, now in his twenty-first year at the Dodger helm and a man of mountainous calm, murmured, “The difference is that last year we had three regulars who were playing their first full year in the majors [third baseman Ron Cey, second baseman Davey Lopes, catcher Joe Ferguson]. Garvey was playing first for the first time, and we were still trying to make a big-league shortstop out of Bill Russell. Young players can get down on themselves—a little slump, a few injuries—and the pitchers are tougher the second or third time around. But we’ve been through all that together, and we know what it’s like now. Experience is more valuable than anything you can buy—except maybe Jim Wynn.”

Jimmy Wynn, the stubby and mightily muscled Dodger center fielder, has been leading the league in homers all summer, and in a recent series against the Padres he bashed out thirteen hits in eighteen times at bat. In this case, however, sudden success is probably less attributable to a statistical anomaly than to plain gratitude. Wynn came over to the upwardly mobile Dodgers last winter in a trade from the hapless Astros, and was thus relieved of his discouraging long-term work of trying to slug balls into the seats through the mudlike imprisoned air of the Astrodome.

“I’m happy to be here in every way I can think of,” he said to me. “Winning makes you happy all day—you know that? I also like the fans. They were nice to me from the first day I played here.”

I asked him how he had done in the Dodgers’ home opener, against the Padres.

“I did all right—three for five. A home run.”

What about the next day?

“One for three.”

What about the third day?

“Three for five.” He smiled. “Well, I guess I
helped
those fans a little. Made it easier for them to be happy with me.”

Happiness abounding—except that the Dodgers, of course, lost the two games I had come for, going down before the admirable Cardinals, 1–0 and 6–3, on successive nights. Andy Messersmith surrendered four meager singles in the opener, but he was up against young Lynn McGlothen, the combative right-hander whom the Cards picked up from the Red Sox last winter. McGlothen has a fine, quick curve and an impatient, gimme-that-ball manner that are reminiscent of his new teammate Bob Gibson. Steve Yeager, behind the plate for the Dodgers, helped break his own undefeated streak when he inadvertently tipped Lou Brock’s bat in the sixth, putting Brock on base with what was to become the only run of the evening.
****
The next evening, all sorts of misadventures befell the Dodgers—a two-run homer by the Cards’ Joe Torre; some stout pitching by another Red Sox alumnus, John Curtis; a dismaying outing by the Dodger starter, Don Sutton (who has been badly off form of late); and a Lou Brock line-drive triple that was utterly misjudged by Jimmy Wynn in center field. Afterward, Walt Alston, probably quoting Agamemnon, said, “The averages are beginning to even up a little. There’s still a long way to go.” Flying home, I tried to figure out my own stats—4,902 miles flown, round-trip, for a total of three Dodger runs observed, or a run-per-mile average of .000612.