The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (12 page)

Languishing, I studied the pictures on the wall—shots of Ketchel fighting Billy Papke, Dempsey knocking out Jess Willard—and wished I were at ringside. Then I found a framed motto and studied
that:

Life is like a journey taken on a train

With a pair of travelers at each window pane.

I may sit beside you all the journey through,

Or I may sit elsewhere never knowing you.

But if fate should mark me to sit by your side

Let’s be pleasant travelers, it’s so short a ride.

—A Thought

I straightened my tie and looked about for someone to be pleasant to, but the nearest fellow-traveler was fourteen feet down the bar and totally occupied in making rings on the mahogany with his beer glass. I had to finish this particular part of life’s journey, a longish one, alone with Mel Allen. Eventually, Podres (“The Witherbee, New York, Wonder!”) won, 4–1, with a little help in the ninth from Perranoski, and the Series (“America’s
greatest sporting spectacle!
”) removed itself to California.

I was understandably anxious for company during the next game, and I found it at the Cameo, a Yorkville snuggery at Eighty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue. The U-shaped bar, which enclosed two bartenders, two islands of bottles, and the TV set, was almost full when I came in, and everyone there seemed to know everyone else. It was a good big-city gumbo—men and women, Irishmen and Negroes and Jews and Germans, most of them older than the spectators I had encountered downtown. This was a Saturday afternoon, and the game, being played in Los Angeles, began at four o’clock, which is drinking time on Yorkville weekends. Boilermakers were the favorite, but there were interesting deviations, including one belt I had never seen before—a shot glass of gin with lemon juice squeezed into it. Everybody kept his drinking money out on the bar in front of him. With their club down two games, Yankee fans had grown reticent, but there was one brave holdout, a woman in her late forties named Millie, who was relying on voodoo. She had fashioned a tiny Dodger image out of rolled and folded paper napkins held together with elastic bands, and throughout the game she kept jabbing it viciously and hopefully with toothpicks. When Jim Gilliam came up in the bottom of the first, she stuck a toothpick in each of the doll’s arms. “He’s a switch-hitter,” she explained, “so I gotta get him both ways.”

The arrows failed to reach Los Angeles in time, though. Gilliam walked and then took second when Jim Bouton, the Yankees’ sophomore fast-baller, threw a bullet all the way to the foul screen behind home plate. Tommy Davis hit a ball that bounced off the pitcher’s mound and then off Bobby Richardson’s shin, and Gilliam scored. The Yankees were again behind in the very first inning (as it turned out, they never led in a single game of the Series), and the Dodger glee club in the Cameo was in full voice. “None of that sweet sugar for the Yanks
this
year!” one man exclaimed.

In the next few innings, I evolved the theory that the Dodger pitching staff had made a large pre-Series bet on their comparative abilities, because Don Drysdale, the handsome home-team pitcher, was easily surpassing both Koufax and Podres. His fast ball and his astonishing curves, pitched three-quarters overhand from the apparent vicinity of third base, had the Yankee batters bobbing and swaying like Little Leaguers. Even so, it was an exciting, lively afternoon, because Bouton, although in a lather of nerves, kept pitching his way out of one jam after another, and the game, if not the entire Series, now almost surely hung on that one run. In the seventh, the Dodgers seemed certain to widen the gap when they put Roseboro on third and Tracewski on second, with none out. The combination of tension and boilermakers proved too much for one fan at this juncture. “This Roseboro’s gonna blast one,” he announced loudly. “Just watch and see.”

“What’s the matter with you?” his companion said, embarrassed. “Roseboro’s standing on third. What are you—bagged or something?”

“That’s what I
said
,” the other insisted. “He’s gonna hit a homer. Roseboro’s gonna hit a homer.”

What did happen was almost as unlikely. Drysdale hit a sharp grounder between second and first, which Richardson ran down with his back to the plate and pegged to Pepitone for the out at first. Pepitone then jogged happily across the infield, having found both Roseboro and Tracewski hopefully toeing third base. Roseboro had held up, Tracewski had run, and it was a double play. The man on the bar stool just to my right, who had told me that he once played semi-pro ball, was disgusted. “What’s the
matter
with that Roseboro?” he said in disbelief. “No outs and the ball’s hit hard to right, you got to run. You don’t even look—you just
go!
That’s baseball. Everybody knows that.”

As it turned out, the insurance run was unnecessary. With two out in the top of the ninth, Pepitone hit a high smash that seemed to be headed for the bleachers. The Cameo’s Yankee fans gave their only yell of the afternoon, but Ron Fairly, with his back almost against the right-field wall, put up his hands and made the catch that ended the game. Millie shook her head slowly and then crumpled her doll into a wet ball on the bar.

The next afternoon, I witnessed the obsequies in the bar of the Croydon, a genteel residential hotel on Eighty-sixth Street just off Madison Avenue. Surrounded almost entirely by women, but joined from time to time by bellboys and doormen and waiters who dropped into the bar to catch the action, I saw Frank Howard, the Dodger monster, apparently swing with one hand as he hit a hyperbolic home run into the second tier in left field—a blow that Mickey Mantle almost matched with his tying poke in the seventh. Whitey Ford pitched perhaps the best of all his twenty-one World Series games, giving the Dodgers only two hits, but he was up against Koufax again, and the Yankee hitters remained hopelessly polite. In the seventh, Clete Boyer’s throw to Pepitone went through the Yankee first baseman as if he had been made of ectoplasm, and Gilliam steamed all the way around to third on the error, immediately scoring on Willie Davis’s fly. At this juncture, the talk in the bar, which had been pro-Dodger (when it was not concerned with
haute couture
, Madame Nhu, Elizabeth Taylor, and lower-abdominal surgery), took a sharp, shocked swerve toward disbelief and sadness. Even a lifelong Dodger fan who had come with me to the Croydon was affected. “I never thought the Yankees would go out like this, without winning one damned game,” he said, shaking his head. He sounded like a tormented foretopman who had just learned that Captain Bligh was dying of seasickness. The demise came quickly. Richardson singled, but Tresh and then Mantle took third strikes with their bats resting comfortably on their shoulders. There was an error by Tracewski, but Lopez dribbled to Wills for the last out, and the Dodger squad galloped out and tried to tear souvenir chunks off their baby, Koufax.

As drama, the 1963 World Series was wanting in structure and development. This lack of catharsis was sensed, I am sure, even by Dodger supporters. This disappointment, the small, persistent resentment, about the outcome of the Series which is felt (or so I believe) by Yankee fans is at least partly a result of the fact that they had to wait through a long summer of vapid American League baseball, in which the Yankees walked over such feeble and acquiescent challengers as the Chicago White Sox, the Minnesota Twins, and the Baltimore Orioles. The only crucial series for the Yanks in 1963 was the last one, and they muffed it shockingly.

Those millions of us who saw the Series on television were left with the emptiest balloon of all. There is a small paradox here, because these were pitchers’ games, and the television camera, hovering over the home-plate empire’s shoulder and peering down the back of the pitcher’s neck, gives a far better view of each ball and strike than any spectator can get from the stands. But baseball is not just pitching. A low-scoring series of games is stirring only if one can sense the almost unbearable pressure it puts on base-running and defense, and this cannot be conveyed even by highly skilled cameramen. This World Series was lost by a handful of Yankee mistakes, most of which were either not visible or not really understandable to television-watchers. The cameras were on the hitter when Maris fell in the second game. The grounder that bounced off Richardson in the third game and Pepitone’s astonishing fluff in the final game caused everyone near me to ask “What
happened?
” On the same two-dimensional screen, it looked as if the throw to Pepitone had hit the dirt, instead of skidding off his wrist, as it did. It is the lack of the third dimension on TV that makes baseball seem less than half the game it is, that actually deprives it of its essential beauty, clarity, and excitement.

Yankee fans grew increasingly invisible as the Series progressed, and now they must nurse their winter puzzlement and disappointment with whatever grudging grace they can muster; to do otherwise would seem ungrateful in the face of their team’s nine world championships and thirteen American League pennants in the past fifteen years. But it must be clear to them now that this Yankee team is not the brilliant, almost incomparable squad that many baseball writers claimed it was. No team can be judged entirely on one series, and the Yankees were not disgraced, for all the games were close; this was nothing like the dreary one-sided pasting that the Yankees gave the Cincinnati Reds in five games in 1961. And the Dodgers’ pitching, opportunism, and nerve were magnificent. But fine pitching inevitably means bad batting; the terms are synonymous. Hard luck and injuries notwithstanding, the Yankees’ best and most publicized athletes have not been of much help to them in recent Octobers. Mickey Mantle has batted .167, .120, and .133 in his last three Series; Roger Maris has hit .105, .174, and .000 in the same span. Whitey Ford has failed to win one of the last four Series games he has pitched. There is something wrong here—too little day-to-day opposition, perhaps a tiny lack of pride, perhaps a trace of moneyed smugness. Whatever it is, it probably explains this year’s collapse and makes it certain that this Yankee team cannot be compared to the Ruffing-Gehrig-Dickey teams of the nineteen-thirties or the DiMaggio-Henrich-Rizzuto Yanks of the nineteen-forties and fifties. What made those Yankee teams so fearsome, so admirable, so hated was typified by the death-ray scowl that Allie Reynolds, their ace right-handed pitcher a decade ago, used to aim at an enemy slugger stepping into the box in a crucial game. I can think of no member of the current team capable of such emotion, such combative pride. I suspect that local Yankee fans sensed the absence of this ingredient almost unconsciously, even before the Series began. That would explain, most of all, why the deepest passions and noisiest pleasures of baseball were so conspicuously absent in the bars and streets and offices of the city this autumn.

—
October 1964

A
S WE ALL KNOW,
when the typical American business executive turns out his bedside light he devotes his next-to-last thought of the day to his corporate image—that elusive and essential ideal vision of his company which shimmers, or
should
shimmer, in the minds of consumers. Do they like us, he wonders. Do we look respectable? Honest? Lovable? Hmm. He sighs, stretches out, and tries to find sleep by once again striking out the entire batting order of the New York Yankees. As he works the count to three and two on Tom Tresh, it may suddenly occur to this well-paid insomniac that baseball itself has the most enviable corporate image in the world. Its evocations, overtones, and loyalties, firmly planted in the mind of every American male during childhood and nurtured thereafter by millions of words of free newspaper publicity, appear to be unassailable. It is the national pastime. It is youth, springtime, a trip to the country, part of our past. It is the roaring excitement of huge urban crowds and the sleepy green afternoon silences of midsummer. Without effort, it engenders and thrives on heroes, legends, self-identification, and home-town pride. For six months of the year, it intrudes cheerfully into every American home, then frequently rises to a point of nearly insupportable tension and absorption, and concludes in the happy explosion of the country’s favorite sporting spectacle, the World Series. Given these ancient and self-sustaining attributes, it would seem impossible that the executives of such a business could injure it to any profound degree through their own carelessness and greed, yet this is exactly what has happened to baseball in the past ten years. The season that just ended in two improbably close pennant races and in the victory of the Cardinals over the Yankees in a memorable seven-game World Series was also the most shameful and destructive year the game has experienced since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

The fervent loyalties of baseball are almost, but not quite, indestructible. I know a New York lady, now in her seventies, whose heart slowly bleeds through the summer over the misadventures of the Boston Red Sox, a team representing the home town she left in 1915. With immense difficulty, I have sustained something of that affection for the San Francisco Giants, once my New York team, but I know that my attachment will not survive the eventual departure of Willie Mays. Since 1953, six teams have changed their names and four entirely new teams have been born, so exactly half of the twenty major-league teams must count on a loyalty that is less than a dozen years old. Further expansion of both leagues is already being discussed, and at this writing it seems entirely possible that faltering attendance will cause three more franchises—Cleveland, Kansas City, and Milwaukee—to shift to new cities within the next two seasons. Another team, the Angels, will conclude its brief tenancy in Los Angeles at the end of next year; starting in 1966, it will represent Anaheim, California, which is the home of Disneyland.

The irritation and dismay that I share with most baseball fans over this queasy state of affairs is not caused entirely by the appearance in our ballparks of so many semi-anonymous ballplayers with unfamiliar insignia on their shirtfronts, or by the inept play of so many of the new teams, or even by the ridiculously expanded new schedules, which now require the majors to play 1620 games, as against the old 1232, before they can determine two winners. Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark. He was followed at once by Horace Stoneham, who took his Giants to San Francisco while piously denying that he had any understanding with O’Malley, although every schoolboy knew that National League schedules required the presence of two teams on the West Coast. Within a few days, the largest and most vociferously involved baseball audience in the country was deprived of its two oldest franchises and left with the new knowledge that baseball’s executives cared only for the profits inherent in novelty and new audiences, and sensed no obligation whatever—not even the obligation of candor—to the fans who had built their business.