The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (119 page)

Fair enough. Baseball skills at the major-league level are astronomically beyond the abilities of us in the stands, as I have said, and it is somehow good news that we can never really or wholly understand how the great plays are done, either, no matter how hard we try. If we knew it all, the game would seem less, rather than more. But steadiness, day-to-day accomplishment at the skill positions, is something we can grasp, and now, perhaps, look upon with deeper respect. I should add, too, that I haven’t taken up anything like the full range of infield skills and maneuvers in this brief field trip. Rundowns, relays and cutoffs, pickoffs, and the pure mechanics of gloving the ball and men getting rid of it must await some later lessons. If I learned anything from my talks this spring, it was to try to pay closer attention to the game, even to its quickest and yet most familiar moments. Frank White took some time in the Royals clubhouse one day to show me how he makes the tag play at second against a stealing base runner. He wants the base between his feet, he said, and the catcher’s throw should be taken in the center line of his own body, and the glove and ball should men be swept straight down—you don’t reach out for the incoming ball and pull it back and down, because that takes longer. If the man stealing is a slovenly, spikes-up slider, White may try the play with the base just outside his left foot as he faces the base runner, and then, taking the ball down from a bit more to his left now, make the tag higher up, on the man’s thigh, to stay out of trouble. Yes, of course, I understood. A day or two later, I saw Dave Concepcion make that play against Tony Fernandez in a Reds-Blue Jays game in Dunedin. Concepcion took the peg from his catcher, Brad Gulden, a foot or so above the bag and let his mitt droop down toward Fernandez’ incoming foot, but at the same instant he leaned his right leg and the entire right side of his body away from the play, toward left field, as he began to depart the scene even while arriving there. Fernandez, sliding, tagged himself out and never made contact with the shortstop at all. He simply wasn’t there. It’s magic.

Near the end, I found comfort in Florida, too—at Terry Park, in Fort Myers, where the Royals get their spring work done. Fort Myers is seventy-five miles down U.S. 41 from the next-nearest Gulf Coast diamond (at Sarasota), and this distance seems to have preserved the sweetness that I had lately missed in some other spring parks. Dowager nineteen-twenties palms line the narrow downtown avenues of Fort Myers, and some of the old folks coming into the stadium at game time tote little plastic bags of seashells that they have plucked from the beach that morning.
*
In the park, there is AstroTurf within the bases and green grass beyond—possibly a metaphor representing the 1985 Royals, who have very young pitching and a comfortably mature defense. One afternoon in the press box (an upright, boxy shack that perches on top of the grandstand roof like a diner on a siding), I was startled by a stentorian squawking—
“Whooh!”…“Whooh!”…“Whoo-ooh!”—
that progressed by slow degrees around the stands below me, from right field to left. I made inquiry, and was told that this was the Screecher, an ancient local species of fan, who had not missed a Terry Park game for many years. He was Mr. Bruce McAllister, who brought his unique avian rooting here more than twenty years earlier, back when the Pirates were the spring incumbents; before that, I learned, he had screeched at old Forbes Field, in Pittsburgh.

Earlier that day, I had a rewarding conversation with Joe Cunniff, a Chicago teacher who takes the winter semester off every year in order to be near baseball. He is a spring assistant to the Royals’ P.R. people, watching over things in the press box, keeping statistics, and the like. The rest of the year, he teaches music and art at De Paul University and the City Colleges of Chicago—adult-education courses, for the most part. He told me that his baseball vacation at Fort Myers was a cultural counterpart of his fellow pedagogues’ summer trips to Greece and Italy. Cunniff is in his upper thirties—an engaging, thick-set baseball zealot with a black mustache and a shy, polite way of talking.

“I love that sound of bats cracking in the morning air,” he said at one point. (We were sitting in the cool, shady Royals dugout during batting practice.) “Every year, you see a new player in the games here who sticks out in your mind. Last year, Jack Morris came down here with the Tigers and struck out six of our batters in three or four innings, and I called my brother in Chicago that night and told him that Morris would be unbeatable during the season. Sure enough, Morris came to Comiskey Park in the first week of the season and threw a no-hitter against the White Sox. My brother was
impressed.”

Cunniff said that he’d started out as a White Sox fan as a boy in Chicago, but that in recent years he had become entranced by the pleasures of the bleachers at Wrigley Field and had just about made the great moral switchover to the Cubs. “I suspect that if most people in Chicago really told the truth they’d admit that they’re perfectly happy when either team does well, and that they secretly shift over and begin to root for that team and claim it as their own,” he said. “Baseball’s really about fun, you know, and I don’t think we have to have these deep antagonisms. But now the suburbs have discovered the Cubs, and I think it’s going to be different from here on. I almost preferred it when they were in last place, and we regulars would be out there in center field, cheering them on. It’s the best life you can imagine. Down here, I care about the Royals—they’re a great team and a great organization. I go see them and root for them when they come to Chicago, and that way I get to see the writers I know and my other friends in the press box.”

One of those friends, Tracy Ringolsby, of the Kansas City
Star-Times,
told me about his favorite moment of spring training at Terry Park last year. An hour or more after the final game of the 1984 spring season, he and a
Star-Times
colleague, Mike Fish, were alone in the press box, clicking out their final preseason wrapups, when they noticed a lone figure out on the diamond. The stands were empty, the players and the grounds-keepers had long since left the field, the bases were up, and an angling sun illuminated the field below. The man out there was not in uniform, and he had no glove, but he had stationed himself at shortstop and was taking infield practice—the last workout of the year. It was Joe Cunniff. Unnoticed in their perch, Ringolsby and Fish watched, mesmerized (“It was beautiful,” Ringolsby told me. “It took your breath away.”), as Cunniff charged an invisible slow hopper and flipped sidearm over to second. Then he grabbed a bullet line drive down by his heels and whipped the ball over to first quickly, trying to double off a runner. Then he flew into the hole, far to his right, pulled down the hard grounder, planted his foot, and made the long peg over to first, waiting an instant for the ump’s call over there, and then slapping his fist into his phantom glove in triumph:
out!
He had made the hardest play at the hardest position in the game.

*
These happy grounds are now lost to big-league baseball. The Royals gave up their Fort Myers camp in 1987 and moved to Orlando, where their spring workouts form part of a “Boardwalk and Baseball” theme park.

—
Summer 1985

M
IDSEASON BASEBALL IS A
picnic at the beach. What the experienced visitor cares about just now is not so much the water sports or who is ahead in the young people’s relay races but the great family chowder cooking here just above the tideline: a warm upbubbling of innumerable tasty ingredients—some hearty and reassuring, others tantalizing and sharp-flavored—which requires many anticipatory sniffings and discussions, and perhaps an icy beer or two to deepen the long afternoon. The metaphor will not be extended by references to the ominous thunderheads gathering off to the west (Will they strike and spoil things?) or to the unpleasant behavior of the picnickers on the next dune. No half season in recent memory has presented so few clear conclusions or has rewarded us more generously. The standings at this writing show three muscular teams in fierce contention in the American League East (in descending order, the Blue Jays, Yankees, and—back a bit now—the Tigers), with the Orioles and the Red Sox only lately beginning to slip from reasonable hope; the California Angels ahead of a plodding pack in the A.L. West; the Padres and Dodgers shoving and shouldering past each other by turns at the top of the National League West; and four attractive competitors (the Cardinals, Mets, Expos, and Cubs) having at each other, often in astounding fashion, in the excellent N.L. East, with the Cubs now falling a bit to the rear. But nothing seems fixed or certain in this summer of 1985 except the certainty of surprise; winning streaks and losing streaks have turned up like summer lightning, exciting or scaring the citizenry and leaving the nearby landscape with an abruptly altered look and feeling. The Minnesota Twins lost nine games in a row and then won ten in a row in the early going; then they
lost
ten in a row. The Toronto Blue Jays, six and a half games in front of their bunch by the first week in June, helpfully dropped six straight games, while the Red Sox, more or less at the same time, suddenly turned savage and won six straight; neither performance proved characteristic. (Bobby Cox, the Toronto manager, ended his team’s downturn by managing a Blue Jays game from a seat in the visiting-team bullpen in Milwaukee—“A terrible view,” he said later, “but I’d tried everything else.”) The Cubs, who won so often and so vividly last summer, got in the spirit of things by losing thirteen straight in the middle of June—and tying an all-time club record. I have consulted a good many front-office and dugout and press-box experts in recent weeks, but no one has seemed to know quite what to make of all these zigs and zags; I lean toward the Gnostic explanation put forward by Fra Wade Boggs, of the Red Sox: “It’s the moon.”

The Mets, with a six-game and two four-game losing streaks and then a league-high winning spurt of nine straight to their credit so far, have looked as loony as anyone. Loonier. On June 11th, in Philadelphia, they lost to the Phillies by 26–7. The winners’ total was the largest number of runs scored by a National League club in forty-one years. Von Hayes, the Philadelphia leadoff man, hit two homers in the first inning, the second one a grand slam, as the Phillies, who had scored twenty-five runs in their previous nine games, put sixteen on the board in their first two turns at bat. And so on—on, perhaps, to the rain-interrupted Mets-Braves game in Atlanta on July Fourth, which was settled at 3:55
A.M.
with the Mets on top by 16–13, after nineteen innings; almost everybody (including fourteen pitchers) got to play—which is what one likes to see in these holiday pick-up affairs—and the postgame fireworks began right on the dot of 4:01
A.M.
I partook of this encounter at home, and turned off my set well after midnight, after watching the Mets bullpen blow a three-run lead in the bottom of the eighth inning: a decision rivalling Brown v. Board of Education in its wisdom and foresight.

A season of this jumbly sort does not yield to summary or invite extended speculations about the multiple off-the-field issues and crises that continue to afflict the pastime, and neither will be offered here. Like many other fans this summer, I have been going out to the park more often than has been my early custom (attendance is up by seven percent over 1983’s banner total and, if we are given an uninterrupted season, seems certain to exceed a total of fifty million for the first time ever), and I can hardly wait to get back there again. What follows, in any case, is a seining of the notes and scorecards and clips and moments that I kept during a couple of busy weeks at the old ball game.

I was there at Shea Stadium when Ron Darling, the best right-handed part-Chinese Yale history major among the Mets starters, shut out the Cubs, 2–0, in the opener of a spirited four-game set in the middle of June. It was the first meeting of the year between the two clubs, and forty-two thousand of us turned out for the fun and angst. Darling’s opposite was Rick Sutcliffe, the bearded, six-foot-seven Chicago right-hander, who beat the Mets three times last year in the course of his dazzling 16–1 Cy Young summer and seemed to personify his team’s absolute dominance over the young Gotham nine after midseason in 1984. Both squads on hand this time looked a bit frayed, thanks to many recent injuries and losses, and the series, which had lately seemed certain to be fought around the parapets of first place, turned out to be for second and fourth. No matter. There was enough intransigency and mutual dislike on view to hold our attention, with Darling spilling the red-hot Leon Durham with an inside pitch in the second, and Sutcliffe, in a responsive reading, nailing Clint Hurdle in the neck (after two outs: Cy Young pitchers are no dummies) in the bottom half. It seemed to me that Sutcliffe, who had just returned to action after a hamstring pull, was a mite below his best out there, but there was nothing easy or offhand about the Mets’ win, with their runs coming on a fourth-inning solo homer by Gary Carter and a fifth-inning double by Danny Heep, which scored the hastening Wally Backman all the way from first. An inning or two later, with matters still at 2–0, Frank Cashen, the Mets general manager, paused by my chair in the press box and murmured, “Typical game for us—right? Another laugher.” He wasn’t laughing. The Mets, who were then batting a team .230, have been starving for runs all year, and pulling for them has sometimes seemed like rooting for low-cost housing or a higher literacy rate: a good cause but not much fun.

Darling, who went the full nine, repeatedly ran up high counts (or “deep” counts, in the current cant) on the batters, but I noticed that he was often able to deliver his breaking pitches for strikes in such straits, and that he threw first-pitch strikes when defending a lead in the late innings—certifying marks of the arrived, professional moundsman. Now in his second full season as a starter, Darling has put aside some of the reflective self-doubt that he sometimes displayed on the mound when things weren’t quite going his way (the rap against him, which I used to hear even in his own clubhouse, was always that he might be “too smart” to be an effective big-league pitcher), and his post-game interviews are less winsome as well. “In the past, I’ve let walks bother me, but I’m a better pitcher now,” he said. “It’s a natural evolution—I’d worry about myself if I wasn’t.”