The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (111 page)

Three of the four divisions, in fact, sorted out their eventual winners by the first week in August, a full two months too soon, while the fourth, the American League West (the “Mild West,” it was sometimes called, or the “American League Worst”), produced a pennant winner of sorts in the final week, when the Kansas City Royals fell fainting across the finish line, with the only above-.500 record in their sector. The Padres, in the National League West, profited from a similar fatuousness in their opponents, since their nearest pursuers, the Braves and the Astros, wound up in a tie, twelve games back and two below the waterline. The Cubs, who overtook the surprising Mets at the beginning of August and whomped them regularly thereafter (they won eight of the nine games against New York at Wrigley Field), were easily the most popular winners of the year, thanks to their antiquity (Tinker to Evers to Ernie Banks et al.); their charming vine-covered and sunlit (there are no lights, no night games) neighborhood ballpark; their long and frightful predisposition to defeat (they led and lost a World Series in 1945 and horribly blew a sure pennant in 1969); and their mighty electronic audience, which tunes in the Cubbies by television in forty-nine states and five foreign countries, via cable station WGN. Suddenly, even the most casual, late-summer sports bystanders perked up at the possibility of a sonorous and perhaps epochal World Series between two famous clubs—the Cubs and the Tigers—played on grass diamonds in venerable city enclosures where teams and heroes were playing baseball when each of us, no matter what our age, first became aware of the game. The Tigers took care of their part of the date by brushing aside the Royals in three quick meetings in the American League championship series, but the Cubs, after administering a pair of quick, wonderfully appreciated drubbings to the Padres at Wrigley Field, went west to finish the job and there fell into a well, or a hot tub, losing by 7–1, 7–5 (an extraordinary game, an all-timer), and 6–3, after leading in each game.
Eheu,
as Mike Royko did not write,
fugaces.

The sense of unsatisfaction, of diminished expectation and lowered reward, that attached itself to the latter stages of the 1984 season may not be wholly attributable to the one-sided World Series or to the sad and shocking expunging of the Cubs. I think we should remind ourselves that not one of the four teams involved in the league playoffs this year was a finalist in the 1983 playoffs, in which the Phillies defeated the Dodgers, and the Orioles (who went on to win the World Series) eliminated the White Sox, and that not one of
those
four teams had won its division the previous year, 1982, when we saw the Cardinals and the Braves in one playoff and the Brewers and the Angels in the other, with the Cardinals overcoming the Brewers in a seven-game Series. Team inconsistency, a lack of continuity and pattern, has become a pattern all its own in recent years. In the past six full seasons—1979 through 1984—eight different American League clubs have filled the twelve playoff slots, with the Royals, the Orioles, the Angels, and the Yankees making two appearances each; while ten different National League clubs have qualified for post-season play, with only the Phillies and the Dodgers repeating. In all, eighteen of the twenty-six clubs that make up the major leagues have appeared in postseason play in the past six Octobers, and ten different teams have played in the World Series; none has repeated as World Champions.

Some of the reasons for this instability are broadly understood, since they arise, in one form or another, from the central alterations to the game brought about by free agency and salary arbitration: enormous payrolls (averaging in the neighborhood of eight million dollars per club) and the consequent shifting, by trades or by loss to the free-agent market, of older, more expensive players from one club to another, with a resultant smudging of team identity from one season to the next. I don’t propose to examine this phenomenon in depth here, since the responses to high salaries and limited-year contracts would require us to explore a very wide range of club philosophies, resources, needs, and plans. To illustrate just a bit, though, a team with a limited audience and small immediate prospects (the Indians, let’s say) will often try to trade off a star player near the end of his contract, since it may be unwilling to offer him big enough fresh sums to keep him out of the free-agent market; in return, it will look for some first-class rookie prospects from the other club involved in the trade, thus saving itself the long-range cost of maintaining a full-scale scouting and farm system. Another team (try the Padres or the Angels) will habitually seek to pick up established older players, at whatever price, to fill precise needs in a roster that seems close to becoming a genuine pennant contender. Elsewhere, a change of ownership can inspire a depressed, fiscally cautious club (yes, the Cubs) to plunge headlong into the trading place with fistfuls of dollars and players, while, for its part, a wealthy, conservative franchise with a high record of success may begin to unload some famous but aging regulars in order to make room for shining rookies whom its field personnel now consider to be ready for daily play: the Phillies and the Dodgers both recently embarked on such a course, with unhappy results so far.

A glance through the lineups of some of this year’s divisional winners offers useful lessons and variations on these themes. First baseman Steve Garvey, who is thirty-five, joined the Padres two years ago as a free agent at $1.3 million per year, and third baseman Graig Nettles and the famous short reliever Goose Gossage (they are forty and thirty-three years old, respectively) came over in a trade with the Yankees last spring, adding some $2.7 million per year to the San Diego payroll. The 1984 Cubs are virtually a short-order team, grabbed up over the past two years, mostly via the trade route, by their vigorous general manager, Dallas Green, who has put twenty-two new players in place on the club since his arrival in 1981, the year that the team was bought by the Chicago
Tribune’s
parent corporation. Six of Green’s regulars, including the entire starting outfield, played for him on his former club, the Phillies. Three fixtures in his 1984 lineup—third baseman Ron Cey, shortstop Larry Bowa, and left fielder Gary Matthews—are in their mid-thirties, and achieved their high reputations and high salaries (they all earn a base pay in excess of six hundred thousand dollars per year, with considerable increments in the form of bonuses and deferred payments) while playing for other clubs that have appeared in the fall championships within the last four years—Cey with the Dodgers, Bowa and Matthews on the Phillies. Dallas Green’s most brilliant acquisition for the Cubs has been then-youthful second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, this year’s Most Valuable Player in the National League, who was virtually a throw-in in a trade of shortstops that brought Bowa from Philadelphia in 1982, but the deal that won the division was the Cubs’ acquisition of Rick Sutcliffe, who came over from the Indians on June 13th in a multi-player swap; he won sixteen of seventeen decisions for Chicago over the remainder of the summer, and captured the Cy Young Award as the league’s best pitcher. An established, dominant right-handed starter, Sutcliffe was playing out the final months of a contract that released him as a free agent a couple of weeks ago, and at this writing it is not at all certain that the Cubs will decide to bid against the eight clubs that have obtained negotiating rights to him and are expected to drive his salary up to or over the one-and-a-half-million-dollar level. He may even sign with the Padres. The Cubs’ No. 2 starter, Steve Trout, is also a free agent, and so are Dennis Eckersley and reliever Tim Stoddard—which suggests that the Chicago pitching staff may have a very different look and capability come Opening Day next spring. And so it goes. The newly crowned Tigers are a stable, mostly homegrown team, as such matters are measured nowadays, but
their
key addition in 1984 was the left-handed short reliever Willie Hernandez, who was successful in thirty-two out of the thirty-three late-inning game-saving situations in which he worked for Detroit, and thereby emerged at the top of the balloting for both the Cy Young and the MVP awards in the American League.

I should add that there are some front-office people and managers and coaches (and baseball writers, too) who see a different cause for the pattern of vapid play by contemporary pennant-winning clubs in the years just subsequent to their championships. Last year’s World Series contestants—the Orioles and the Phillies—finished nineteen games and fifteen and a half games, respectively, behind their divisional leaders this year; the 1982 pennant winners—the Cardinals and the Brewers—wound up twelve and a half and thirty-six and a half games to the bad this year. The baseball thinkers I have mentioned find all this attributable much less to the shifting of personnel from one club to another than to a smugness and a waning of desire among players who have been very highly rewarded at the pay windows as a result of their October triumphs. The notion has a certain logic, and if I resist it to some degree it is because it is so often put forward by some of the arch-conservatives of the game, including the Tigers’ manager, Sparky Anderson. I will follow Sparky all the way, however, when he says (as he did in the Tiger dugout before the third Series game this year) that what the sport now badly wants is a consistent winner—a dynasty, if you will. “It’s fine for the fans in all those different cities to have a different team in the playoffs each year,” he said, “but you also need one
particular
team in there that half the people in the country love and half of them hate: the Yankees, the great Oakland club back in the seventies, the Cincinnati team we had”—Anderson managed the Big Red Machine that appeared in five playoffs and four World Series between 1970 and 1976—“which used to break all those attendance records wherever we played. There should be a club like that in the World Series about half the time. What baseball needs right now is a Muhammad Ali.”

Anderson delivered all this in cheerfully matter-of-fact tones (he also insisted he did not blame the players for taking the loot that has been coming their way), and I wish I could persuade some of my friends who are part-time baseball followers to adopt a similarly calm and unpenitent view of money and trades and baseball as a business. It’s my impression that it is the late-summer soldiers—the fans who don’t pay much attention until the campaigns slip into mid-September, and “magic numbers” and MVP talk begin to turn up in the sports pages—who are most upset by the ironies and realities of contemporary baseball. They are probably the ones who most want an imperial and dynastic old club in the series every October, for that will add a morality-play savor to their tube-watching for a couple of weeks, and will also seem to confirm that nothing much has changed in the old game, which is a lie. For my part, I will happily welcome a defending champion in the October games when one turns up, but I don’t think that a brusque, rather slovenly World Series or three flatfish pennant races are much cause for gloom. One should not go thirsty at dinner for want of a Chateau Margaux, and the happier fans, I think, are the ones who find time actually to go to games every so often throughout the season. This summer, I kept leaving baseball and men coming back to it—dropping in on the game, so to speak—and I had as much fun, from first to last, as I ever did. The sport didn’t seem particularly Homeric this year—no clanging swordplay in the dust under ancient walls—but more resembled a collage, a ragbag, or perhaps a meadow: bits and swatches jumbled together for our pleasure, and color everywhere.

The closest meadow for me was Shea Stadium, of course, and I dropped in on the Mets again and again—not just for those enormous games with the Cubs in midseason but earlier, when the team’s repeated successes were still so new and refreshing that a sudden Mets rally to retake the lead or a dandy double play that began with still another elegant move or unlikely stop by Keith Hernandez from deep behind first base would be greeted not only by roars and cheers and applause but by great bursts of delighted laughter all around the stands. Following the Mets back then was like watching a child of yours suddenly being good in a school play or a junior tennis tournament; you didn’t know he had it in him. I was at Shea in the middle of June when the Mets beat the Phillies and slipped past them into first place in the National League East—a ridiculous, obstreperous game in which the Mets led by 6–1, then trailed by 7–6 (the clubs took turns batting around, and there were thirty hits for the afternoon), and finally prevailed by 10–7.1 was back again the next night, when the downy Dwight Gooden struck out eleven Montreal batters but lost by 2–1 to the dewy Bill Gullickson; and I was there (along with fifty-one thousand and nine others) to celebrate the Glorious Fourth with fireworks and maybe first place again, huzzah!—except that the visiting Astros put a damper on the party by bonking out seven hits (bloops and nubbers, for the most part), good for five runs, in the very first inning, and took it by 10–5. A couple of nights later, the Mets swept a double-header from the Reds, with Ron Darling knocking off his seventh straight win with a 1–0 shutout in the opener (he had a most disappointing second half of the season, partly because the club scored so few runs behind him, and wound up at 12–9 for the year), and the next night it was Gooden again and first place regained, in a great gala, as the Mets hitters dealt most severely with the formidable Mario Soto, battering him for eight runs in four innings, with homers by Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry, and with the firecrackers going off in the upper deck again, and the non-stop cheering, and the banner wavers and sign carriers at work, just like the grand old days of 1969 and 1973. In the stands, the new Gooden strikeout tabulators kept busy, hanging up their big red-on-white “K” placards, one after another, on the front-row railing of the top left-field deck, and I noticed that the custom had spread around the park, with folks waving “K”s scrawled on newspapers and paper napkins and scorecards. I spotted a kid, down a couple of rows from me in the stands, who would write a “K” in ballpoint on one of his fingertips whenever Dwight struck out another batter, and then waggle his hands in the air for us to see. Then, out on the right-field side, two men put up a huge black “K” done on cardboard—as big as a garage door by the look of it—and held it swayingly aloft. As it happened, this wasn’t a particularly brilliant outing for Dwight, and he was allowed to sit down after the sixth, by which point he was ahead by 12–2 in the game, with eight “K”s up on the rails. It turned out to be Mookie Wilson’s night—four hits and four RBIs, with that homer and a stolen base thrown in—and he got the best sign, too: a couple of kids strolling the lower-deck main aisle and holding up “
PARTY AT MOOKIE’S!
”