The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (117 page)

Dave Concepcion has been the Cincinnati Reds’ short-stop ever since 1970. He played in four World Series and five league-championship playoffs in the nineteen-seventies—the glory days of the Big Red Machine—and he has won five Gold Gloves and has been tapped for nine All-Star Games. Nowadays, other shortstops—Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, Cal Ripken, Robin Yount (who has moved to left field this year for the Brewers, because of a shoulder problem), Tony Fernandez—are mentioned before he is in most press-box comparative-lit seminars, but none of them has played as well for as long as he has. (It is the opinion of a lot of front-office people, by the way, that there has rarely been an era in the game when there were as many remarkable athletes on view in the middle-infield positions as there are right now.) Concepcion, in any case, is approaching the end of his career. He had bone chips removed from the elbow of his throwing arm in 1980 and an operation on his left shoulder in 1983. He is thirty-six years old, and looks it—a rangy, narrow infielder (he is six-one), with bony shoulders and a careworn expression. He is a Venezuelan, and speaks with a slight accent. He seemed a bit reticent in talking about his position, but then so was I; perhaps we both felt that playing short is almost too difficult to be put into words.

“For me,” he said at one point, “the hard play is always the ball that’s hit easy and right at you. You don’t know if you should charge it or stay back. You’re on your heels, and sometimes you have to stop, so the ball can come to you. The hard ground ball, it comes with the bounces right there, and you can always play the right one—the one you have to. You see what I mean?”

I asked about the play in the hole—the difficult chance that sends the shortstop far to his right to grab the ball and simultaneously plant his right foot for the long, quick throw.

“It’s tough, because you got to stretch yourself to get to the ball and right away try to make that good throw. You got no time to get yourself set. Making the throw—that’s the main thing. Be quick
and make a good throw.
”

Riverfront Stadium has AstroTurf, and for some years now Concepcion has been making his longer pegs over to first base—especially on plays from the hole—by bouncing the ball on the infield carpet. He does this only on artificial grass, where the bounce is true. The innovation seemed controversial at first, perhaps because it looked so much less pleasing and powerful than the full, airborne throw, but now a few other shortstops have taken it up; some players believe that a bounced throw actually picks up speed as it skips off the carpet. “I use it a lot of the time on AstroTurf now,” Concepcion said. “I first saw that when Brooks Robinson did it at Riverfront in the World Series of 1970. He got a ball hit down the line way behind third and got rid at it,
bang!”—
he slapped his hands together—“like only he could do. It bounced, but Boog Powell dug it out, and they got the runner. I couldn’t hardly believe it. It was in the second game of that Series, I think. I don’t think Brooksie meant it—he had no chance, you know—but I thought about it that winter. I could still see the play. Then I had elbow trouble the next spring, so I began trying it—but on purpose, you know, to protect my arm. Our first baseman—it was Lee May; Perez was later—didn’t complain, and I kept on with it. On turf, it’s a good play. Brooks Robinson started it, but I registered the patent.”

We discussed some other matters—grabbing seams, relaying the catcher’s signals to the third baseman, what it was like to play with Joe Morgan at second base all those years (it was great), why you should always get to the bag early if you’re making the throw from second on a double play (because you may throw low but you’ll never throw wide that way)—and then there was a pause. “Defense, it always meant a lot to me,” he said unexpectedly, glancing at me to be sure I understood. “Batting gives you some great moments, but defense, it’s—Defense is a joy to me every day. I think fans like defense next best to the home runs. I really think that. A lot of guys can catch the ball and make the great play, but not a lot can throw the ball with control. Decent hands and a steady arm is what you want. You got that, you got it made.”

Keith Hernandez is more outspoken and more intense than Concepcion—he exudes confidence and precision in conversation, just as he does on the field—but you hear the same pride in his work when he talks defense. “I can win a game with my glove just as easy as I can with my bat,” he said to me. “The most difficult thing when you’re a young player and you’re trying to establish yourself is to learn to separate that part of it from the rest of your game. You get in a slump and you tend to take it with you out onto the field. Now when I’m going bad up at bat I make it a point to be good at what I’m doing on defense.”

Hernandez, of course, is
very
good at what he’s doing at all levels of the game. He batted .311 for the Mets last year, and finished second to the Cubs’ second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, in the postseason balloting for the league’s Most Valuable Player. I have hesitated to mention defensive statistics here, since there are so many variables (team pitching, grass and artificial playing surfaces, and so on), but the easiest way to convey Hernandez’ exceptional range and mobility is to point out that he had one hundred and forty-two assists in 1984
,
while the nearest National League first baseman had fewer than a hundred. Hernandez committed eight errors last year; Steve Garvey, who plays first for the Padres, did not make an error all year, but he accounted for only eighty-seven assists.

Not quite believing such evidence, I once asked Hernandez’ manager, Davey Johnson, how he appraised the man’s work. “That’s easy,” Johnson said. “He’s the best I ever saw.”

“I’ll make more plays than some, because I’m willing to go so far in the hole” is the way Hernandez explained it. “The hard play for me is when I have to throw overhand from the hole back to a pitcher who’s breaking for the bag. It’s like being a quarterback throwing to an end on a look-in pattern in football. I want to try to get the ball to him before he gets to the bag—about two steps before, if I can—so he can catch it and then look for the bag. The 3-6-3”—this is the pleasing play when the first baseman takes a grounder, wheels to the shortstop to retire a base runner going down to second, and gets back to his base in time to take the return throw to beat the batter—“used to be tough for me, but it’s not so bad now. About six years into my career, I suddenly realized—it just came to me—that there was no point in my waiting around to see if I’d made a good throw in that situation. If I’ve thrown it away, I’ve thrown it away. Now I throw the ball and then turn my back and run straight to the bag. You want to be there to take that throw back, because it’s the hardest thing in the world for the
pitcher
to get all the way over and make that catch.”

I asked if any other first basemen made the 3-6-3 that way.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” he said.

What I understood in time—it just came to me—is that there is nothing defensive about Keith Hernandez’ thinking about defense. “How many right-handed hitters can hit the ball up the line to right?” he asked me at one point, and then answered his question at once. “A few. Sandberg does it very well. Moreland does it. Maybe a couple of others. It’s funny, but almost nobody who bats left-handed in my league can really pull the ball down the line. If that’s true, there’s just no point in playing the line so close. In the late innings, you’re supposed to stay up next to the line if you’re defending a one-run lead, so you won’t let a ball get by you for extra bases. Everybody knows that—it’s almost a rule—so you see them all playing three feet from the line. But I’ll be six feet or more away from it, depending on the batter and the pitch, and that’s fine with Davey Johnson—we agree. If you ask most players and managers about it, they’ll say yes, of course, you get beat more on balls hit into the hole—it’s nine times out of ten, I think—but they don’t play it that way. It’s ridiculous.”

Playing the infield requires a perpetually honed anticipation, and if you make yourself watch for them you can almost always notice the little quirks and twitches that each player at an infield position uses to bring himself onto his toes at the instant the pitch is delivered, with his body poised in preparation for a ball suddenly smashed in his direction. (Frank White believes that this constantly repeated preliminary little hop, made thousands of times over a season, wears down infielders’ knees and quadriceps muscles over the years, and may be even more damaging in the long run than playing on AstroTurf.) What you can’t pick up, for the most part, is the accompanying small dialogue of signals that constantly flies about this four-man perimeter a moment or two before that—the language of defense. As I have indicated, both the shortstop and the second baseman peer in at the catcher to pick up his sign to the pitcher about the next pitch—a sign that cannot be seen by the first or third baseman, of course. They—the middle pair, I mean—will lead or edge a bit to one side or the other in response, and if the pitch is to be a breaking ball, one or the other will also relay the message to the infielder at his corner—to the first baseman if there’s a left-handed hitter up, or to the third sacker if it’s a right-handed hitter. A word will do it: if Leon Durham, a left-handed swinger with the Cubs, is to see a breaking ball from Ron Darling on the next pitch, let’s say, Keith Hernandez will hear his second baseman, Wally Backman, say “Keith!” at the instant that Darling is at the top of his windup. It’s a trifle—perhaps only a mental knock-on-wood—and probably doesn’t help much, but it’s there if the first baseman or third baseman wants it. Some
don’t
want to know. Jerry Remy said that one of his Boston first sackers, George Scott, never wanted the signal; another, Carl Yastrzemski (he often played first in the latter stages of his career), did want it. There are other messages as well—notably the hand signal or glove flick or special glance between the shortstop and the second baseman with a base runner on first, which determines who is to cover second on the coming play. This, too, is a response to the catcher’s sign to the pitcher, for the man who covers will be the one less likely to have the next pitch hit to his side. A common semaphore here is a quick grimace flashed by one man or the other to his partner behind his raised glove—a closed-mouth mime for “Me” or an open mouth for “You.” It’s nothing much—kids might make up a code like this—but it can be needed thirty or forty times in a game, and it’s always done. The keystone pair must also understand which of them is to make the first try at a ball that is chopped over the pitcher’s head and short of second—a very hard chance that is usually taken by the shortstop, since his momentum is toward first base. But they must
know.
Frank White said that all this comes as second nature to him by now, but that sometimes the burden of so many repeated and altered fragments of intelligence—letting the shortstop know, letting the first baseman know, and sometimes relaying signals from the bench to the Royals outfielders about which direction to shade in a tough situation—can suddenly be too much. “I get a mental blowout now and then,” he said. “I can’t handle it, and then I tell my coaches I’m going to beg off from that for a couple of days and let the shortstop be the main man. The mental strain is unbelievable sometimes.”

Buddy Bell, the Texas Rangers’ third baseman, doesn’t want to know the next pitch to the batter. “I gave up looking for signs on breaking balls, because I found I was cheating too much,” he told me. “I was counting on it, and I’d begun putting myself out of position. I’d rather just go on the situation and what I know about the batter.” Then he added, “Besides, we’ve had a big turnover of pitchers on this club in the past few years.” This took me a minute: Bell was saying that there weren’t many Ranger pitchers just now whom he trusted to put the ball where it was meant to go on the next pitch—to throw what the catcher had asked for.

Bill Rigney had already mentioned the same thing. Rig (he is sixty-six years old, but still has the eager gaze and lanky quickness of gesture of the born infielder) said that he had noticed a recent decline in strategic conversations between infielders and pitchers in hard situations—the moment when a shortstop or third baseman might step over to the mound in a jam and murmur, “Where do you want me? How are we going to come at this guy?” Rigney said, “I can remember times on the Giants when there were men on base and all, and I’d go in and ask Sal Maglie or Larry Jansen, and they’d say, ‘With this guy, play him in the hole, because the way I pitch him, that’s where he’s going to hit it.’ But I noticed with some other pitchers we had, they’d always say, ‘Play him straight away.’ That was because they didn’t know
what
the batter was going to do, or where the pitch would be. They had no idea.”

Buddy Bell is the nonpareil third baseman in his league—perhaps in both leagues. He looks all wrong for an infielder—he’s six feet two, with powerful shoulders and a long upper body; with his blond hair and mild blue eyes, he reminds you of a Southern Cal football player. Actually, he grew up in Cincinnati, and is the son of the Reds’ (and dawn-Mets’) outfielder-slugger Gus Bell. Buddy Bell played third for seven years with the Indians and is now starting his seventh season with the Rangers at the same position. He’s thirty-three years old, and last year batted .315 and picked up his sixth consecutive Gold Glove. He has an outstanding arm, he is durable (he plays about a hundred and fifty games, year after year), and his manner is efficient, pleasantly brusque, and (you learn in conversation with him) ironic—essential attributes for a third baseman, it seems, if you stop and think about the position a little: they must deal with those bazooka shots that are lined past them or
at
them, and must also cope with the sneaky, skulking bunt down the line, baseball’s shiv in the ribs. When they fail, as they often must, they look terrible—flat on their bellies in the dirt behind the bag, or foolishly grabbing at the bunted ball in the grass…and missing it altogether.

“I play a deeper third than most,” Bell said to me, “and that kind of takes the do-or-die away from the play on that hard-hit ball down the line. You can cover more ground if you’re back a little deeper and can still make the throw. Third basemen need a rock-hard body—I hope we’re getting away from the rock-hard hands a little. No, you really need some kind of hands to play the position now. The infields aren’t as good as they used to be, and with the artificial turf now…” He winced and shook his head. “Defense is the most important part of the game. If you don’t believe that when you start out, you learn it pretty soon playing third. You let a ball go through, and it’s probably the ballgame. I’d say that ninety-five percent of the pitchers have serious trouble in a game if there’s been an error at third and a ball’s gone through that shouldn’t have. Most of ’em sort of blow up after that. So you’re out there not only protecting yourself and your team but knowing that the pitcher is relying on you to do well. Dimensional ballplayers”—he meant the ones who can play all aspects of the game—“are easy to find, because there aren’t all that many of them.”