The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (92 page)

The following day at the Fens, Earl was sitting beside Jim Palmer during the dugout levee and, in response to some question or other, unwarily said, “I watch a game with my mind completely blank. Most of the time, I’m only thinking that I’m glad I don’t have to make a decision.” Palmer, nodding his head happily, said, “Me, too, Earl. I’m always glad about that.” The next exchanges have slipped my mind, but when Palmer picked up his glove and went up onto the field I noticed how Weaver followed him with his gaze. The little manager and the tall pitcher have been together on the Orioles ever since the summer of 1969—over two thousand games now—and they have had some celebrated disagreements. Most of the time, though, they remind me of a father and son who have been forced to spend too many days and hours together behind the counter in the family stationery store or delicatessen. There are hundreds of shared anecdotes that they tell differently and squabble over, and a few serious, semi-public differences of opinion between them about business strategy and comportment, but mostly they convey the pleasingly complicated impression that while they can hardly bear each other’s company for a single day longer, they care about and count on each other more than either one can admit. The moment one of them is out of earshot of the other, what you hear is a compliment. This time, Earl turned to one of the Baltimore writers and said, “Do you remember Jim pitching that day against Oakland—the old Oakland team, when they were so tough—when he started rearranging our outfielders, the way he does? Bando is coming up, with men on base, and he’s a right-handed hitter, of course, and Jimmy begins to move our
right
fielder—I think it’s Rettenmund—in, and then over a step, and then
back
a half step, like a goddam photographer arranging a picture, and then he holds up his hands—Hold it! Right there!—and the next pitch, the very next goddam pitch, Bando hits a
shot
out to right, and the fielder goes like this and like this, bending in and leaning back while he’s watching the ball, but he never has to take a single goddam step, and he makes the catch. Jim Frey was coaching with us then, and he turns to me on the bench and says, ‘Well, now I’ve seen everything.’” Weaver laughed and coughed, and shook his head at the memory of it. “Nobody like Jim Palmer,” he said.

One spring in Mesa, Arizona, I ran into Gene Autry, the owner of the California Angels, who was chatting with some of his players in the visiting-team dugout. He was wearing cowboy boots and a narrow string tie. He looked gentle and old and agreeable, the way he always does. When the Angels lost the American League playoff in 1982 by dropping three games in a row to the Brewers (after winning the first two games), and then threw away another championship series in 1986 under even more unlikely and scarifying circumstances, everybody in baseball felt bad, I think, because they so wanted a Gene Autry team in a World Series. We chatted a little, and he told me about his baseball beginnings. “I was always a Cardinals fan then,” he said, “because I came from Oklahoma, and they had the Dean brothers and Pepper Martin and all those other Okies playing for them. Then I followed the Cubs, because I’d started in singing over Station WLS, in Chicago. The Gabby Hartnett–Charlie Grimm Cubs, I mean. Oh, I had a lot of baseball friends. I have a photo at home of me and Casey Stengel and Mantle and Whitey Ford. I wouldn’t take anything in the world for that photo. You know, I was thinking just the other day about the old days down home, when we’d listen to Bob Kelley, who did those game recreations from the Coast over the radio, from a telegraph ticker. You don’t remember that, I imagine. There’d be nothing, and then you’d hear the ticker begin to go and you’d know something was happening in the game, and then he’d describe it. He could bring it all alive for you.”

But I did remember. I still do—me, at ten or eleven, with my ear next to the illuminated, innerly-warmed gold celluloid dial of the chunky, polished-wood family radio, from which there emerges, after an anxious silence, the rickety, train-depot sounds of a telegraph instrument suddenly bursting with news. Then a quick, closer
tock!—
the announcer or some studio hand rapping on the mike with a pencil, I suppose—and the re-creator, perched in his imaginary press box, says, “Uh-oh….Hafey really got hold of that delivery from Fat Freddie. The ball is rolling all the way to the wall in left, and here come two more Cardinal runs across the plate….” The front door slams—my father home from work, with the New York
Sun
under his arm (and the early-inning zeros of that same Giants road game on the front page, with the little white boxes for the rest of the line score still blank), and I get up to meet him with the bad news.

Spring training is the life. One march day in Phoenix Municipal Stadium, I strolled slowly away from the batting cage in the dazzling desert sunlight and climbed the shallow grandstand steps behind the Oakland home dugout, on my way to grab a pre-game hamburger and a cold Coors at the little free-load picnic grounds for the media out by left field. The fans were coming in—old folks carrying seat cushions and score-cards, college kids in T-shirts and cutoff jeans, young women in sandals with serious tans and white “A’s”-emblazoned painter’s caps, kids balancing mammoth cups of popcorn—and unhurriedly scouting around for good seats in the unreserved rows. A last fly ball rose and dropped untouched behind second, where an Oakland coach and a batboy were picking up the batting-practice balls and dropping them into a green plastic laundry basket. The first visiting ballplayers, fresh off their bus, were playing catch over in front of their dugout; it was the Giants this time, and I was looking forward to seeing Al Oliver again and to watching this kid pitcher Garrelts (if he did work on this day, as promised) and a couple of others, but there was no hurry about the game’s starting, of course, and nothing to worry about even if I did miss a few pitches and plays while I lingered over my lunch. A friend of mine, a beat man with the San Francisco
Chronicle,
came along and fell into step beside me. Smiling a little behind his shades, he nodded toward the field and the players and the filling-up stands and murmured, “You know, it’s a shame to have to mess all this up with the regular season.” Teams in Arizona and Florida play with identical rules and before the same sort of audiences, but the two spring flavors are quite different. I don’t understand it. Florida ball seems more citified, hurried, and temporary; no matter how rustic the setting, I always have the sense that the regular season impends, and that these humid, sunny afternoons are just postcards, to be glanced at later on and then thrown away. Arizona baseball is slower, sweeter, and somehow better fixed in memory. For one thing, there seem to be more young children in attendance at the western parks; the stands are stuffed with babies and toddlers—or else I just notice them more. In Phoenix one afternoon, a small barefoot creature came slowly and gravely up the aisle behind the home dugout wearing nothing but a Pamper. Six- or seven-year-old home-team batboys are already veterans of two or three Arizona seasons. In one game at Scottsdale, matters were suspended briefly when a very young rookie bat-person in pigtails went out on the field after a base on balls, picked up the bat (they were both the same length: the thirty-three-inch model), and paused, staring slowly back and fourth, until she remembered which dugout she had come from, and then returned there, smiling in triumph. The home-plate umpire, I noticed, made a good call, holding up one hand and watching over his shoulder until we were ready for baseball once again. It wouldn’t have happened in Florida.

For me, Arizona baseball is personified by a young woman vender at Phoenix Stadium I came to recognize, after several springs, by her call. She would slowly make her way down an aisle carrying her basket and then sing out a gentle, musical
“Hot
dog!…
Hot
dog!”—a half note and then down four steps to a whole note. She’d go away, and later you heard the same pausing, repeated cry at a different distance, like the cry of a single bird working the edge of a meadow on a warm summer afternoon.
“Hot
dog!”

Old fans and senior scribes want the spring camps to remain exactly the same; they should be like our vacation cottages at the lake or the shore—a fusty and familiar vicinity in which we discover, every year, the sparkle and renewing freshness of another summer. The wish is doomed, of course. Each succeeding March, the small ballparks are visibly more crowded and the audiences younger and more upscale, with affluent, Hertz-borne suburban families on the kids’ spring break lately beginning to outnumber the cushion-carrying retirees in the stands. Authors and television crews cram the sidelines at the morning workouts, and by game time the venders at the souvenir stands look like Bloomingdale’s salesgirls during Christmas week. Spring training is “in,” worse luck, and even the most remote baseball bivouacs are incipient Nantuckets. Out in Mesa, descending hordes of Cubs fans absolutely swamp little HoHoKam Park every game day, lining up at breakfast time to buy up the twenty-three hundred unreserved seats that go on sale at ten o’clock; the park put in new bleacher seats in 1985, enlarging its capacity to eight thousand, but this was insufficient to handle the numbers of the new faithful. A friend of mine—a retired Chicago baseball writer who lives in Arizona now—told me that he drove over to the Cubs training complex on the very first day of spring training that same year, when only the pitchers and catchers had reported, and counted license plates from twenty-six states in the parking lot. “There were maybe a thousand fans at the workout,” he said. “A thousand, easy, just watching the pitchers doing sit-ups.”

Chain O’Lakes Park, the Red Sox training site in Winter Haven, is less frantic, but it has changed, too. It was an inning or two into my first game there in 1985 when I saw the difference: the old, fragrant orange grove out beyond the right-field and center-field fences was gone, replaced by a cluster of low, not quite finished white buildings, with a drooping banner out front that said
“LAKEFRONT CONDOMINIUMS.”
I gestured miserably at this phenomenon, and my seatmate, a Boston writer, said, “Yes, I know. Remember when we used to write ‘and Yaz hit it into the orchard’? Now what do we say?”

Trying to perk me up, he pointed out that the two nesting ospreys I had seen here on prior spring trips were still in residence in their big, slovenly nest on top of the light pole in short right-field foul ground; just the day before, he said, a batter with the visiting Reds had skied a foul ball that had landed in the nest—landed and stayed there, that is—but the birds did not seem discomposed. I kept an eye out, and over the next few innings I saw one or perhaps both of them depart and return to their perch, coming in with a last flutter of their great wings and then settling down on whatever they were keeping there above the field. Someday soon, I decided, we would hear about the first confirmed sighting of a young red-stitched osprey
(Pandion ueberrothiensis)
here, hard by the banks of Lake Lulu. I cheered up. A little later in that game, we had a brief shower—the first rain in weeks, I was told—and some of the older fans got up from their unprotected seats along the left- and right-field lines and came and stood in the aisles of the roofed grandstand, out of the wet. The game went on, with the sitting and standing fans quietly taking it in, and I had a sudden, oddly familiar impression (this has hit me before, in this park at this time of year) that I had found my way into a large henhouse somewhere and was surrounded by elderly farmyard fowls. We perched there together, smelling the aroma of mixed dust and rain, and waited for the sun to come out again.

The life—baseball as a side order, so to speak—is not necessarily slow or reflective. What I remember about an October now seven years gone isn’t an unmemorable World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees (the Dodgers won it) but the crowds at the Stade Olympique, up in Montreal, during the stirring Dodgers-Expos playoff games there. All that is still clean the middle innings of Game Three, say (the clubs had come back from Los Angeles with the series tied), with the Dodgers’ Jerry Reuss and the Expos’ Steve Rogers locked in hard combat, and the Dodgers up a run—the only run of the game so far—and the encircling, in-leaning rows upon rows of avid, baseball-mad Canadians, seeming to sway and shudder and groan and cry in the chilly northern night air with every pitch and movement of the fray. And to sing. When I wrote about this, several days later, I still half heard in the dusty back chambers of my head the vapid, endlessly repeated chorus of that damnable Expo marching song—
“Val-de-ri! Val-de-rah!”—
that the locals bellowed together, in enormous and echoing cacophony, at every imaginable stitch and wrinkle of the games’ fabric. The song is not some famous indigenous voyageurs’ chantey, as one might suppose, but only the old, implacably jolly “Happy Wanderer” hiking ditty that generations of sub-adolescents across the continent have had to warble through (“Val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) during mosquitoey marshmallow roasts at Camp Pineaway. But the Montrealers sang it with a will—sang it because they
wanted
to, of all things—and they won my heart. I didn’t even mind the weather, which was unsuitable, if never quite unbearable, or the appalling ballpark. The round, thick-lipped, inward-tilted concrete upper wall of the Stade Olympique appears to hang over the stands and the glum, Astro-Turfed field in a glowering, almost threatening way, shutting out the sky, and fastballs and hard-hit grounders are so hard to see from above, for some reason, that the accompanying noise from the crowd is always an instant or two out of sync. This time I didn’t care, because the teams and the players and the quality of play were all so good that every part of the games mattered and made you glad you were there and no place else in the world just then.

In the sixth inning of that third game, the Expos tied things up with a single and a walk and a little roller by Larry Parrish,
just
through between Cey and Russell at third and short. Reuss, perhaps ever so slightly distracted by the blizzards of torn-up
journeaux,
and the layered explosions of noise, and the illuminated “PLUS FORT!” up on the scoreboard, and the back-and- forth billowings of an enormous white Québecois flag, and the hundredth or perhaps thousandth bellowed cascade of
“Val-de-ri!’s”
and
“Val-de-rah!’s”
—now got a fastball a millimeter or two higher than he wanted to against the next batter, outfielder Jerry White, who socked the ball up and out into the left-field stands for a homer and three more runs and, it turned out, the game.