The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (102 page)

She had begun to glare at me. Then she said, “You know, I
hate
it that the White Sox finally won after I’d left town. It’s just like them to do that. I’ll bet they’re not going to win the playoffs—or if they do they’ll lose the World Series. You’ll see. I can’t stand it when they lose, but I’m ready for it. You have to hold back at times like this. You have to know about the Sox if you’re going to care about them.”

The World Series, so clear in form and outcome, will be revisited only briefly here. Its neighbor-city participants had inspired a few writers to call it the Amtrak Series, and the first two games—a swift, neat opening 2–1 win by the Phillies, followed by a 4–1 Baltimore victory the next evening—went by so quickly that they suggested two Metroliners swooshing past each other in opposite directions on some marshy Chesapeake-side straightaway. Three unencumbered home runs—by Joe Morgan and Garry Maddox, of the Phils, and Jim Dwyer, of the Orioles—produced all the scoring in Game One, in which the Phils’ John Denny, their best pitcher this year, threw his curveball on the corners all evening, setting down the O’s in neat little packages of three and getting the home crowd home (and out of a drizzly rain) in less than two and a half hours. The jammed-together, cheerful (under the circs) Baltimore fans were again conducted in their noise-making by their self-appointed leader, Bill Hagy, a local cabdriver, who has announced his retirement from the tummler post next season. (Unlike some of his counterparts and imitators in other cities, he is not paid by the team, and, indeed, has refused any emolument for his work.) He is the inventor of the unique Orioles letter-cheer, executed in body language, and I noticed that his handwriting has become minimal and blurry over the years, like the signatures of other famous men. Game Two brought back Mike Boddicker, who outpitched the other junior, Hudson, and won by 4–1—another impeccable outing for him, since the only Philadelphia run was unearned. The Baltimore staff at this juncture had surrendered four earned runs in fifty-four postseason innings. Boddicker did not look quite as awesome as he had against the White Sox, but when I thought about it I realized that this was probably only because he had stuck more closely to Ray Miller’s ideal—striking out a mere six batters and, of course, walking none. After the game, Jim Palmer was in ecstasies of appreciation of his young teammate’s stuff. “That change of speeds reminds you of Stu Miller, the old slowball pitcher years ago,” he said. “I remember batting against Stu in a spring-training game when I was nineteen years old, and he suddenly came in with a fastball up
here,
and I almost had a stroke. But it’s Mike’s curveball and his control of it that gets me. I charted pitches for five of the games he pitched this year, and I was amazed. Steve Stone had that one great year for us when he threw all curveballs, but this was even better. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years in baseball.”

The Baltimore offense, which had not been getting much lift from its third and fourth batters, Cal Ripkin and Eddie Murray, was given a leg up by John Lowenstein, who had a single, a double, and a home run for his day’s work. As everyone knows by now, he plays half of left field for the O’s, giving way to Gary Roenicke on days when the other team has a left-hander on the mound. (Lowenstein is an original. When a young reporter asked him one day if anyone knew the origin of the one-handed catch now universally practiced by outfielders, Lowenstein said he was pretty sure it had begun with a player named Pete Gray—yes, the Pete Gray who played a season for the wartime St. Louis Browns in spite of having only one arm. When he is asked from time to time if he might be willing to talk about how it feels to be a Jewish major-league ballplayer, Lowenstein usually obliges with a thoughtful, in-depth probing of his feelings on the matter, with appreciative references to great baseball forebears like Moe Berg and Hank Greenberg and so forth, without ever quite explaining that he himself, as it happens, is not Jewish.) Here Brother Low, as he is called in the clubhouse, responded to the clamorous press with the low-key eloquence that has become an Orioles’ trademark. “There’s never any talk around here about a platoon system,” he said. “That would be too glamorous. We don’t have a Jim Rice on this ball club, so it works very well for us to have two or three men in left field. We just relish the accomplishment that different people can bring to the position.” All right, but it should be added that Baltimore
almost
has a Jim Rice out there in left. Between them, Roenicke and Lowenstein accounted for thirty-four homers and a hundred and twenty-four RBIs during the regular season, which is nice work for a committee.

And so we went to Philadelphia and to Game Three—the hard game of the Series for both sides, I think—and when it was over, with Baltimore the winner by 3–2, there was a sudden sense in me and many other onlookers about how the rest of the week might go. The immediate problem for Baltimore in the game was Steve Carlton, who had been resting from his winning appearance in the Phillies’ final playoff game. On this day, I noticed, he seemed to be missing one part of his repertoire, which is a three-quarter-speed rainbow slider that suddenly drops out of the strike zone like a mouse behind the sink, and he gave up some uncharacteristic hard-hit blows, pulled to the left side (mostly for outs), in the early innings. Carlton, like most great pitchers, is an indomitable closer—very hard to beat in the late innings no matter what stuff he may have—and it seemed forehanded and lucky that the O’s got him out of there in the seventh, with a double by Rick Dempsey and a pulled hard single by pinch-hitter Benny Ayala, which tied the game at 2–2. (Ayala’s stated batting philosophy, by the way, is a bit simpler than Yaz’s multipart cogitations: “I look for something white moving through.”) Ayala then became the winning run, scoring a moment or two later when Dan Ford’s hard grounder skidded on a wet patch of the infield carpet and ricocheted off shortstop Ivan DeJesus’ glove: a no-fault error. One prime recipient of this gift was Jim Palmer, who was in the game in relief of Mike Flanagan and thus gained the win. He had endured a difficult season, suffering back problems and tendinitis, and at one point had been sent down to the Orioles’ Class A Hagerstown team to recover his form. He took this all in good part, becoming a stand-by bullpen operative in the postseason, and his work in this game, by his own admission, looked more like throwing—
careful
throwing—than pitching, but he was delighted with the win. When he and Carlton were in the game against each other for a few minutes there, we were looking at five hundred and sixty-eight lifetime victories.

The particular problem for the Phillies—or a symbol of the problem, at least—was Pete Rose, who got into the game as a pinch-hitter in the ninth after spending most of it sombrely watching the proceedings from the top step of the dugout, with his white-gloved fists tensely clenching and unclenching. He had been benched by Philadelphia manager Paul Owens, who put Tony Perez on first in hopes of getting a little sock into the lineup—not an inconceivable turn of events, since Pete had had one single to his credit so far—but Rose was at no great pains to conceal his distress and irritation over the demotion. The press hordes made much of the little scandal, of course, and Joe Morgan uncharacteristically lost his temper in the postgame clubhouse when the reporters, after Rose’s swift departure, turned their questions toward the gentle Perez. Morgan’s sense of propriety was offended; he felt that professionals (including Rose, although he did not say so) should have handled all this more calmly. Rose, in fact, had previously embarrassed the club by not admitting a fielding lapse in Game Two, when he left first base uncovered in a bunt situation that specifically called for him to stay in place: no play was made, the bunt helped win the game, and the fans mistakenly blamed Morgan for the uncovered base.

These trifling contretemps are set forth here because they tell us about a much deeper problem that afflicted the Phillies all year. Paul Owens became the Philadelphia manager in the middle of July, replacing Pat Corrales at a moment when the club was in first place in the flaccid N.L. East but scraping along just one game above the .500 level. Owens, the incumbent general manager, took on the field directorship because the Philadelphia front office foresaw that only a man with his authority and reputation would be able to enforce some difficult alterations in the Phillie lineup of famous and very well-paid older stars, who by now had made it plain that they weren’t good enough to win. Owens installed a platoon system of his own, resting Pete Rose and veteran outfielders Gary Matthews and Garry Maddox whenever it seemed advantageous to do so, and reshuffling his batting order. Everyone in the lineup but catcher Bo Diaz, third baseman Mike Schmidt, and shortstop Ivan DeJesus became a replaceable part, in fact, and Owens made frequent use of the lesser-known outfielder Joe Lefebvre and, later on, of a rookie first baseman, Len Matuszek, and outfielder Sixto Lezcano. None of this was easy (Rose’s first benching ended a seven-hundred-and-forty-five-consecutive-game streak for him), and no one on the club took it with particular grace. In September, Mike Schmidt indulged himself in a public outburst of criticism of Owens’ managing (it came at the moment when the club was embarking on its eleven-game winning streak), and even during the Series, after it had become plain to everyone that the changes had worked and that the team had outdone itself at the end, there were mumbles and grousings from some of the famous principals. Owens himself—he is a tall, stooped, gentle-spoken man, with odd white eyelashes, who carries a packet of Gelusil in his uniform pocket—summed up his club during the playoffs with a musing little aside: “We have an old team and a middle-aged team and a young team.” Three teams from which to make one—to make a Baltimore, say.

Pete Rose and Joe Morgan were given their release by the Phillies in the week after the Series ended, and it is expected that Joe Morgan will soon decide whether to retire or to join the Oakland A’s for a final season as a designated hitter. It is painful for us to see old players go, and infinitely harder when they prolong the inevitable process. Morgan went into September at the bottom of the National League batting averages, but then took fire, at one point running off thirteen hits in eighteen at-bats, and on his fortieth birthday enjoying a four-for-five game with two homers—a beautiful goodbye, if he can but see it that way. Pete Rose, who has slowed down perceptibly in the field, batted .245 this year—sixty-three points below his lifetime average. He will be forty-three next spring, by which time he will have signed on with some club or other, for he is in obdurate pursuit of Ty Cobb’s 4,191 lifetime hits. He needs eleven more hits to pass the four-thousand mark, where only Cobb has gone before him, and two hundred and two more to set the new mark. I hope he can do it in one great last rush—an eleventh two-hundred-hit season, with great festivals at its close—but I suspect it may be a much longer journey for him, and for the rest of us as well.

Rose, in any case, was back in the lineup for Game Four, and had two hits and scored a run and batted in another—not quite enough to win it. You could say that the Orioles’ pitching (Storm Davis, plus Sammy Stewart and Tippy Martinez) won again, or else that it was Orioles second baseman Rich Dauer who did it, with his three hits and three runs batted in and a neatly turned double play to stop a big Philadelphia inning. It was a taut, hard game, in any case, with the Orioles pulling it out by 5–4, and if I believed that managers ever actually win ballgames I would say that Baltimore manager Joe Altobelli won this one, because of what he and his accomplished bench (the “role-players,” as they like to call themselves) pulled off in the sixth inning. Trailing John Denny (a right-hander, remember) by 3–2, with Oriole base runners at second and third, he unexpectedly wheeled in the left-side-swinger Joe Nolan as a pinch-hitter; when Nolan was intentionally walked, Altobelli produced Ken Singleton, who switch-hits and was thus proof against any Philadelphia countermove to a lefty pitcher. Singleton walked, driving in a run and tying the game (Sakata came in to run for him), and when Hernandez, a left-hander, did at last come in to pitch, the batter awaiting him was John Shelby, who also switches, and who now, batting right-handed, hit a sacrifice fly that drove in the lead run. Baltimore’s fourth successive pinch-hitter, Dan Ford, fanned for the last out, but the marionette show was not quite done, since Altobelli, by moving one incumbent fielder, Dauer, from second base to third base, found room in his defensive deployment for two of the pinch-hitters and for Sakata, too (but none at the same position as the man he had replaced), in the bottom half of the inning. I apologize for this digression, which perhaps needs an accompanying flow chart, but for those of us who were keeping score Altobelli’s moves suddenly looked like the moment onstage when the shining red balls vanish from the cup and reappear—count them!—in the magician’s fingers, and there was a further glow of pleasure when we suddenly realized that Altobelli somehow still had his three best right-handed backup hitters—Roenicke, Ayala, and Landrum—available on the bench for later use, if needed. Managers try this sort of stuff all the time, but rarely does it work out as elegantly and inexorably as it did here. To be sure, there is always some luck involved in such maneuvers (think of Altobelli’s embarrassment in that August game against the Blue Jays, when he ran out of catchers and had to play Sakata behind the plate), but when things come out right you see behind them a kind of nerve and a games intelligence that freshen our appreciation of the sport. Chess is harder, but anyone who thinks these managerial moves are a snap should think back to 1981—another year when the American League had to make do without a designated hitter in the Series—and how Yankee manager Bob Lemon and his staff, in losing to the Dodgers, repeatedly found themselves flustered and outmaneuvered in these old games of pinch and switch.

Joe Altobelli, who put in fourteen years as a minor-league player, coach, and manager in the Baltimore system (he later managed the Giants for three years and then coached at third base for the Yanks, before taking up his post last winter), has a strong instinct for the Baltimore outlook on baseball. “My moves weren’t
that
hard to make,” he said mildly. “It wasn’t the result of meditation, or anything. I had the players available, and that’s the big thing. And how hard is it to send Singleton up to pinch-hit, when he’s had five hundred at-bats, or Shelby, who’s been in there all year for us?”