The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (121 page)

Dave Stieb, Toronto’s king of the hill, was scheduled to start the next Red Sox game, a Saturday-afternoon affair, but manager Cox, having got word from the weatherman of the imminent arrival of heavy rainstorms, held back his ace at the last moment and sent out a young right-hander, Ron Musselman, to essay his very first major-league start. Cox, of course, did not want to waste an outing by Stieb—a hard-luck pitcher (and legendary moaner), whose record at the moment stood a bare 6–5, despite an earned-run average of 2.16—in a possible rainout, and he very nearly got away with his gamble. Musselman confined the scary Boston sluggers to a couple of runs during his stint; Tony Fernandez delivered the catch-up and go-ahead runs for the home side with a two-run round-tripper, to make for a 3–2 Blue Jay lead in the bottom of the fourth; and the spattering rains held off just long enough to force the dawdling, languishing, heavenward-hoping Bostons to make their third out in the top of the fifth before the players were forced to take shelter—a legal victory, of course, if play were to stop there for the day. Then it rained—downward and side-blown sheets and skeins of water that streamed down the glass fronting of the press box, puddled and then ponded on the lumpy, too green AstroTurf playing field before us, and emptied the roofless grandstand around the diamond. Glum descendant clouds swept in, accompanied by a panoply of Lake Ontario ring-billed gulls (a celebrated and accursed local phenomenon), who took up late-comer places upon the long rows of backless aluminum benches in outer right field and then settled themselves thickly across the outfield swamplands as well, where they all stood facing to windward, ready for a fly ball, or perhaps for a visiting impressionist French film director (“Quai des Jays,” “Toronto Mon Amour”) to start shooting. Rain delays are hard on writers, who cannot just go home—as most of the intelligent Toronto fans were now deciding to do—and are enjoined from visiting the clubhouses or asking the umpire in charge (it was Joe Brinkman) why he won’t reconsult his bunions and call the damned thing once and for all. I had plenty of time (three hours and sixteen minutes, as it turned out) to work up my notes; to share in the tepid, on running press-box jokes (there had been a guest party of Ojibway Indians at the game, it was discovered, and we worked over the rain-dance variations at excruciating length); to catch up on local baseball history (Babe Ruth hit his very first home run as a professional into the waters of Lake Ontario in 1914, while playing for the visiting minor-league Providence Grays against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the long-defunct park at Hanlan’s Point); and to memorize the unlikely configurations of the Blue Jays’ Exhibition Stadium. The place is the home field of the Toronto Argonauts, of the Canadian Football League, and the baseball diamond has been tucked off into one corner of the rectangle, with an added-on, boomerang-shaped grandstand section adjacent to the diamond and a temporary curving outfield wall that cuts oddly across the long gridiron, forestalling rolling eight-hundred-foot home runs but imparting an unhappy, overnight-tent-show look to the place. General-admission seats are in the roofed football grandstand, which begins out by the left-field foul pole but then, since it adjoins the football sidelines, departs from the baseball premises at an ever-widening-and-disimproving angle. Fans do sit there, however, even in its farthest reaches—there were some there now, patiently waiting out the deluge under cover. I asked a resident writer how far it was from home plate to the top row of the outmost grandstand sector, and he said, “That’s Section 51. I don’t think anybody’s ever paced it off, but I tried using a little trigonometry once and I made it out to be around a thousand feet. The folks in the lower rows out there are even worse off, because they can’t see over the outfield fence, but you see them down there, too, sometimes. I think they bring radios.”

The Toronto fans, I need hardly add,
are fans.
Even in the closer sectors of Exhibition Stadium, the seats are uncomfortable and sight lines abominable, but the rooters turn out in very large numbers (2,110,009 of them last year) to cram themselves into the intimately serried, knee-creasing grandstand rows and to cheer with more discriminating loyalty and sensible hope than they used to back in the early days of the franchise. Ontario fans—particularly those off to the west of Toronto, in sectors like Wingham and London—used to be Tiger rooters, but most of them have switched over in the last couple of seasons, and the Blue Jays have supplanted the hapless hockey Maple Leafs as the No. 1 team in town. The seventh-inning stretch (to return to the stadium) is a wholesome little session of sing-along calisthenics, directed by numerous Ken and Barbie look-alikes in sweatsuits, to a fight song called “O.K., Blue Jays!,” and almost everyone joins in happily. Happily and for the most part soberly, if only because each row in the stands is forty-one seats wide, aisle to aisle, making beer vending an impossibility. A new stadium—a dome, perhaps with a retractable roof—has been promised by the province, but it sounds years away. A World Series played at Exhibition Stadium would hurry the project wonderfully.

Around suppertime, the rain lessened and then turned itself off, the fog banks began to show pinkish gleams (greeted by “Here Comes the Sun” on the loudspeaker), the Zamboni—after a brief, embarrassing breakdown—thrummed back and forth across the green carpet, sucking up water and spouting it off-field, the gulls flapped off to other engagements, and a handful of fans (kids, mostly) reappeared and filled up the good seats around home: not enough of them to make a Wave, for once. The game resumed, with new pitchers, and the Blue Jays lost, 5–3—almost a foregone conclusion, it seemed, although I wasn’t quite sure why. Bobby Cox, who can’t
stand
to lose, missed the second part of the odd little double header, having become embroiled during the delay in argument with Brinkman the Rain King, who gave him the heave-ho. None of it could have happened on grass.

The next afternoon, in the Sunday sunshine, Stieb had at the Red Sox at last, and whipped them, 8–1, impatiently setting down their hitters with his tough fastball, a biting slider, and some unsettling off-speed stuff as well; he didn’t give up a hit until the sixth inning. Tony Fernandez hit a triple and a double-to date, he was sixteen for twenty-seven against the Boston pitchers for the year—and Ranee Mulliniks, who switches with Iorg at third base (they were both well over .300 so far), socked a home run. Fernandez, who is twenty-two years old, gets rid of the ball at short with an oiled swiftness that makes you catch your breath; he switch-hits, starting with his hands held high but then dipping at the last moment to a smooth, late, flat-bat stroke that meets the ball in classic inside-out style and drives it, often to the opposite field, with power and elegance. There are others in the Blue Jays lineup whom I admire and enjoy, including the crisp Damo Garcia, at second, and the quick, strong young outfielders Bell and Moseby (they and the regular right fielder, Jesse Barfield, who didn’t start on this day, will all turn twenty-six within two weeks of each other this fall), but, watching them here, I still could not envision them and their teammates holding on through the summer against the likes of the Tigers and the tough oncoming Yankees, and then playing in and perhaps winning a championship elimination or a World Series. I had discussed this feeling just before the game with Tony Kubek, who handles the Jays’ color commentary over the CTV television network (he also works the backup “Game of the Week” shows on NBC), and then with Buck Martinez, the veteran Blue Jays catcher, who replaces Ernie Whitt against the lefties. In different ways, both of them echoed the same doubts.

“There’s nobody on the club who scares you, which is what you see on so many other teams in this division,” Kubek said. “Or, rather,
two
guys scare you—Parrish and Gibson with the Tigers, Murray and Ripken on the Orioles, Winfield and Baylor on the Yanks. Maybe it’ll happen here, maybe somebody will come along, but I don’t quite see it. You know, a lot of people picked us to win this year, and that changes how a club thinks about itself. Some of the guys have become a little defensive in their thinking. You can see that Gillick built this team to fit this ballpark. It’s a hitter’s park, with the carpet and the short fences, but I always feel we’re a little light when we get into those bigger parks on the road.”

Martinez said, “I cut that photograph out of the paper yesterday that showed Bill Buckner putting a flying block on Garcia in the Thursday game and showed it to some guys in the clubhouse. I said, ‘This is the difference between winning and being a bunch of good guys, which is what we are so far.’ I played five years on the Royals, with people like George Brett and Hal McRae, and I saw how they play this game. McRae always said, ‘If you can’t be good, you got to be rough.’ You remember that slide he put on Willie Randolph in the playoffs, don’t you? Now the game has changed a little, and the people take that sort of thing more personally, almost. But that’s the kind of play that can get into an infielder’s mind and maybe make for a moment of hesitation later on and win a game for you. Stieb is like that for us, but he’s a pitcher and too often it’s directed against himself. There were times on our last road trip when we could have used a little more of that McRae stuff, that Thurman Munson personality—somebody who’ll get a leadoff double when you want it most, or knock somebody down at second. Maybe it’ll come—you never know.”

Ah, yes. Yogi Berra has enunciated this same great principle (“In baseball, you don’t know nothin”), and so, too, in his own field, did the late Fats Waller (“One never knows, do one?”). With one out in the bottom of the fourth, I lifted my gaze from my scorecard to see, on the instant, a fastball delivered by the Boston hurler, Bruce Kison, ricochet off the shoulder—
high
on the shoulder—of the Toronto batter, George Bell. A certain testiness had been evident all along in this series-going back to Doyle Alexander’s very first pitch on Thursday evening, which had nailed leadoff man Steve Lyons right on the chest (or, more precisely, on the “S” of his
“BOSTON”
road-uniform logo)—but Bell’s response, even under such duress, was surprising. Batless, he reached the mound in full sprint and aimed a sudden high, right-legged karate kick at Kison, which mostly missed its mark. Bell then spun quickly and landed a fairish one-two combination (fists, this time) to the chops of Rich Gedman, the pursuing Boston catcher. Now batting .666 for this one turn at bat (if we may agree that he had fouled out against Kison), Bell retreated toward third base in a wary backward-boogie style, apparently inviting other participants, just emerging from their dugouts, to share the action, which they did, in typically earnest but inefficient fashion. When it was over, Bell was banished from the proceedings and Kison permitted to continue, though under admonishment. A tall, bony right-hander, now in his fifteenth season in the bigs, Kison knows the outs and ins of his profession, and earlier in the game he had somehow allowed a little off-speed pitch to sail behind the head of Ernie Whitt, who here stepped up to bag again—and walked, muttering. An end to the affair, one might have imagined, but writers of these summer operettas do like that last, excessive twist to the plot. Whitt, coming up to bat again, with one out in the sixth, found Kison still on hand, although tottering, for he had just walked the bases full. Whitt poled the first pitch over the right-field fence—it was the first grand slam of his entire baseball career—and circled the bases talkatively, taking time to direct the appropriate phrasings and rhetorical flourishes toward the mound as he went. The tableau looked like an eccentric windup toy from Bavaria, with the circling outer figure, in the white uniform, twitching his arms and waggling his jaw as he went from base to base, and the central inner player—the little man in gray—rotating more slowly but in perfect concentric rhythm, so as to keep his back turned to the other chap all the way around. I much preferred this baseball keepsake to the George Bell model, but of course it will take the rest of the summer to learn what it meant, if anything, to the Blue Jays.

As it turned out, an even more vivid exemplification of that McRae stuff, that Thurman Munson personality, was presented to the Blue Jays by the man who had enunciated the need for it in the first place, Buck Martinez. While behind the plate for the Jays in a game out in Seattle (I saw the moment on a television replay that night, a couple of weeks after my visit to Toronto), Martinez took a peg from the outfield and attempted to tag an onflying Mariner base runner, Phil Bradley, who collided violently with the catcher. Martinez, knocked onto his back, suffered a broken right fibula and dislocated ankle. Somehow, he held on to the ball and made the out, and then, half rising, threw toward third base, where another Seattle base runner, Gorman Thomas, was now swiftly approaching. The throw went wild, and Thomas turned third and headed for the plate. George Bell picked up the ball in left field and fired it home, where the dazed and badly injured Martinez, still down and writhing, caught it on the bounce and tagged the runner, thus accounting for both putouts in the double play—possibly the last but certainly the most extraordinary moment of his baseball career.

Hitting is the hovering central mystery of this sport, and continues to invite wonder. Tommy Herr, a decent singles-and doubles-hitting second baseman with the Cardinals, batted .276 last year and drove in forty-nine runs—almost exactly matching his career averages, compiled in the previous five summers. This year, batting third in a much altered lineup, he has led the league in hitting over most of the first half (he is at .330 at this writing) and has sent teammates already on base scurrying home in great numbers; his three home runs and seventy runs batted in to date have turned the writers to the
Baseball Encyclopedia,
where they have divined that he may well become the first National League to bat in a hundred runs or more while hitting fewer than ten home runs in the process since Dixie Walker did it (116, with nine) for the Dodgers in 1946. Some contributing reasons for Herr’s sudden prosperity will be presented a little farther along, when we take a closer look at the Cardinals, but I love to think about the absolute unpredictability of this almost typical turnabout; every year, it seems to me, something of this sort comes along and is then made to look logical and almost inevitable by us scholars and explainers of the game—none of whom, of course, had any idea beforehand where and to whom it would happen. Baseball, to its credit, confirms continuity and revolution in equal parts, thus keeping its followers contented but attentive. Pedro Guerrero, unhappy all spring at third base with the Dodgers, was returned to his old position in the outfield on June 1st, and responded by whacking fifteen home runs in the month of June, a new National League record—a new record,
of course.
Carlton Fisk has hit twenty-six homers for the White Sox so far this year, thereby tying his full-season best in a career stretching back over sixteen major-league summers; he leads both leagues in downtowners to date and seems a good bet to erase Lance Parrish’s one-season total of thirty-two homers, the most by any American League catcher.
*
Sudden extraordinary performance at the plate is never truly explicable, then, and even the batters themselves aren’t much help. “I’m in a good groove,” “I’m in that realm,” or “I’m seeing the ball real good” is what you hear, and the words are accompanied with an almost apologetic little shrug.