The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (122 page)

It’s all right, then, for the rest of us to feel the same way. The two hottest hitters of 1985 are Rickey Henderson and George Brett, and while I thought that I was seeing them real good during several turns at bat this year, I still don’t know how they do it. Henderson, facing the Orioles’ Mike Boddicker and Sammy Stewart one night up at the Stadium, rapped three singles and drove in three runs (he also stole a base) in the course of the Yankees’ 7–4 victory, and somehow looked a bit off his form in the process. A week earlier, while the Yankees were administering a frightful three-game pasting to these same Orioles down in Baltimore (they had forty-four hits along the way), Henderson went eight for nine in the first two games, and ten for thirteen over the three, at one stretch getting to first base safely ten straight times. Like a perfectly cooked roast, his June statistics look wonderful no matter where you slice them: a three-for-four night against the Tigers, with two home runs; a one-for-three effort against the Orioles again, with four stolen bases again; and so forth. It is this almost unique combination of batting eye, power, and speed that makes him so dangerous, and when you see him approach the plate (with that preliminary little baton-twirler mannerism, during which he alternately taps the head and the heel of the bat with his gloved hand) and then fold himself down into his odd, knock-kneed, doubled-over posture as he awaits the pitch you suddenly perceive what a mean little knot of problems he presents to the pitcher. His scrunched-down strike zone means that he is almost always ahead on the count (Earl Weaver has said that Henderson draws walks as well as anyone he has ever seen in the majors), but the pitcher, uncomfortably aware of his devastating quickness on the base paths, is unwilling to settle for ball four and thus very often gives up a line drive instead. Again, these explanations look easy—except for the last part: the hitting. His stroke is at once so quick—almost an upward and outward jump at the ball—and yet so full and flashing…Well, I give up. The Stadium throngs love him, of course, and he has been very much at the center of the Yankees’ vivid drive to the fore
(almost
to the fore) in the past two months.

I saw Brett in a stretch of three games against the Angels in Kansas City, at a time when he had just returned to the Royals lineup after a spell on the bench with a hamstring pull. He has always been prone to injury, and almost always seems to return to action at full bore—this time with ten hits in his first twenty at-bats. Brett, who is thirty-two, took off twenty pounds over the winter, and looked younger and more cheerful than I had seen him in years. He was meeting the ball well (here we go again) when I saw him, showing that full, exuberant cut every time, and was hitting a lot of long fouls, but he didn’t do much, except for a three-for-three performance in one fourteen-inning game, finally captured by the Royals—almost an amazing day, at that, since he walked on his four other appearances, thus ending up on base seven times. A couple of days later, after I’d left town, Brett went three for three against the A’s with two three-run homers; starting there, he ran off a .538 week, with three doubles, two homers, a triple, and eleven runs batted in. I have written so often about Brett’s batting style—going back to his great .390 summer in 1980, and before—that I will not attempt another likeness here of that uniquely pausing, balanced, and then suddenly free and whirling grace. Observing him repeatedly at work there on his home field, though, it did seem to me that one part of his swing—the cocked, attentive tilt of his head as he awaits the ball, and the abrupt downward tuck of his chin as he watches his bat drive through at the pitch—is especially satisfying to an onlooker. In some strange fashion, Brett always appears to be watching himself being a hitter. There is a considering, almost intellectual presence there, even during the most violent and difficult unleashing of forces, and it suggests—it almost
looks like—
that waiting and expectant inner self, the critical watcher, who remains at rest within each of us and is spectator to all our movements and doings, however grand or trifling. Even crossing a street, we can find ourselves in that good groove sometimes, and take note of it with secret surprise.

By the time July came around, everyone was talking about the Cardinals—about their wonderful combination of fine pitching and good hitting (they have been leading the league both ways); about the rookie flier, Vince Coleman, who plays left field and has been stealing bases at such an amazing clip; about Tommy Herr and about the big cleanup hitter, Jack Clark, who came over from the Giants in a trade during the winter; and—oh, yes—about Willie McGee, in center, who bats second and has thus done a few things that help account for Coleman’s success on the bases, just behind. This is the way ball teams should
work,
it suddenly seems.

I kept missing the Cardinals—their baseball schedule always had them going off in the opposite direction from mine. But then I saw my chance and jumped on a plane and went up to see them play the Expos in Montreal in an afternoon game—went up and came home again the same day, just for the game—and caught up on my studies. Vince Coleman, who is muscled like a cheetah, hit a single and stole a base; he is less flashy than Rickey Henderson on the bases, but the man can scamper. Tommy Herr hit a single and got a base three times; Ozzie Smith made a couple of lazily beautiful plays at short, easy as pie; and Willie McGee had a single and a double and a home run and a stolen base—the same silent, scrawny-necked, semi-apologetic Willie McGee who so pleased and surprised us all back in the World Series of 1982, just before we forgot him again. (The last time I looked—as this was written—McGee had passed his teammate Tommy Herr, and was leading the National League in batting, at .339.) The day in Montreal went as promised, I mean, and I even found time to congratulate Whitey Herzog, an old favorite of mine, for the kind of team he had this time, and for the way he had put it together—even trading away an excellent, established left fielder, Lonnie Smith, the moment he was sure about Coleman. “This team is all right, for my park,” Herzog admitted—his park, Busch Stadium, has the artificial carpet—“but if I was playing at Wrigley Field or Fenway I wouldn’t want to go this way. Geography makes all the difference in baseball these days.”

It was a holiday in Montreal (Dominion Day—or Canada Day, as they now call it), and there was a nice medium-small crowd (everyone else was at the shore, I decided) cheering vociferously down below me in the deep, echoey circular strip mine of Olympic Stadium. A great blazing-white horseshoe of sunlight slid slowly across the billiard-table-green mat below, and I again recalled a remark once made by the long-gone, unforgotten Dick Allen: “If a horse can’t eat it, I don’t want to play on it.”

There was the game, too, and in time—very quickly, in fact—that took over, and though I was glad to have Herr and Coleman and McGee and others in plain view at last (I almost felt like a scout, because of my trip), I also began to pay attention to the Montreal pitcher, a fledgling righty (he had just turned twenty-one) named Floyd Youmans, who was making his major-league debut. He, too, was there just for the day, having been called up from the club’s Class AA Jacksonville team to make an emergency appearance on the mound when the Expos had found themselves with an inordinate number of pitchers invalided to their
liste des blesses,
but he had been told before the game that his next stop would be back down at the Indianapolis AAA farm, no matter how well he did here today. Perhaps freed by this news, he resolutely worked his way once and then twice through the tough Cardinal batting order, giving up an occasional base on balls or a longish fly-ball out, and here and there a base hit, but also fanning a Cardinal or two, including Jack Clark, whenever he most needed the out. He had the Cardinals shut out after six innings, by which time the Expos were ahead by 2–0. Then Coleman touched him up in the seventh with a single through the middle—his first time on first base. Vince took an enormous lead, paused, and then flew away on the hit-and-run—an awesome jump, as promised—and Willie McGee socked a high, sailing home run into the Montreal bullpen to tie it. Youmans departed, and the disappointed Expos fans saw him off with a grateful, stand-up round of applause and then sat down quietly and tried to regather hope. I was happy when their team hung in and won the game at last, 3–2, on a single off the third baseman’s glove by the grand old Montreal favorite Andre Dawson, in the bottom of the tenth. It was only the Expos’ fourth hit of the game—four hits amassed against
six
Cardinal pitchers: I’d never heard of such a thing. Whitey’s bullpen is a Sargasso for National League hitters this summer—no end to it and not much fun.

On my way home, I kept thinking about the Cards and their new look, and I recalled how Jim Frey, whose Cubs had lately dropped three games to the Cardinals at home, kept returning to the Redbirds in conversation one day. “This Coleman reminds you of a lot of fast young guys in their first year up,” he said. “He plays like Tim Raines did, or like Willie Wilson did in his first two years. You look around and he’s up at bat and the other team has got the third baseman playing in, the second baseman is in by two full strides, and the first baseman’s up on the grass. You got no choice. The way the man’s going, he’s going to steal a hundred and twenty bases in his very first year up. When the season started, everybody was sayin’ they got seven leadoff men and Jack Clark, but you can throw that out the window now, because of Coleman and the way they’re hitting. The whole club is always going from first to third. The one who’s overlooked is McGee. He can run as good as anybody. He can bunt the ball, he can top the ball and get on base, he can hit the ball for distance, and he can run and catch the ball in the outfield. He’s like No. 2 in everything on that club. You look over at Coleman, with McGee at bat, and he’s got that big lead, and you can’t make him back off an
inch.
He always gets that amazing jump. In a couple of years, they’ll be calling him a great left fielder—you wait and see.”

Only self-assured veteran managers talk about rival teams and players in this fashion, and when you listen to a Jim Frey or a Whitey Herzog in midseason, you begin to sense that they are perpetually involved in two levels of baseball—the game at hand or just ahead, which they are trying to win, and the deeper difficulties and returns and surprises of the other game; baseball as a discourse or discipline, baseball as a way of thinking. Earl Weaver talks this side of baseball more gracefully than anyone I know; in his postgame chats he compliments the writers by including them in his inner excursions and musings, and by the time he’s done you’re convinced, at least for a glimmering instant or two, that you’ve seen how this game works. The little man was in splendid form up at Yankee Stadium during the Orioles-Yankees game I have mentioned, in spite of his team’s failings. He had only just come back from his two-year self-retirement—brought back, it has been hinted, by a half-million-dollar salary and the offer of another chance to work in the Baltimore organization, where he has passed the better part of his working life. (He said he had turned down several previous bids from other clubs.) His postgame seminars were a treat, as usual. Any day now, I expect to walk into Weaver’s office after a game and find waiting ushers, with programs and flashlights. One night there at the Stadium, he was simultaneously stripping a chicken leg and himself as he fielded our questions, usually cutting them off before they were quite finished—he is quick—and then fitting his answers into the main discourse of the evening. Weaver is the only mid-size, middle-aged executive I know who can sit behind a desk with no clothes on, as naked as a trout, and never lose the thread of his thinking.

Here he reconsidered a brilliant peg by Dave Winfield that had cut down an Orioles base runner, Ripken, at the plate—the big play of the game, it turned out—and wondered along with his questioner, whether it had been right to send him home. “Yes, it was an outstanding throw,” he said, “but still…” He paused, considering, and then put the matter to rest: “What the hell—if he scores, it’s a great play.” In the eighth inning of the game, with his club well behind, Weaver had unexpectedly employed an Oriole outfielder, John Shelby, at second base, where he filled in for the weak-hitting Dauer, who had departed for a pinch-hitter. (This was a few days before the Orioles signed Alan Wiggins, the talented former Padre second baseman, who had been permitted to leave that club after revealing his continuing difficulties with cocaine addiction.) Shelby had looked adequate on one chance out there, and more than a bit awkward on another, which went by him, or
off him,
for a base hit. “On the second ball, he tried to get in front of it, though it’s way off to his right.” Weaver said. “That’s what you’re taught to do in high school, and maybe he’s never had that play since he was in high school. I know about this because I used to manage in Class C ball and D ball, where you have kids who come to you right out of high school. But up here if that ball’s hit over to your right”—he was suddenly on his feet, wearing only his shower clogs—“you just get over this far and backhand the ball, like this. You don’t try to make a great play, or anything, but if you time it right you look real good. If you don’t time it right you look silly. Oh, I
love
this stuff….”He resumed his seat, for the tactics. “If we’re losing, Shelby at second gives us an extra move, and I’ll go with it. That way, I got his bat in there, and if we tie or go ahead then Lennie Sakata goes out to hold things down. But if I bat for Dauer the old way, then Lennie goes in right away. This is an extra move for me. If you’re losing, go for offense. Look for that move.” His eyes were shining.

*
Fisk set the new record with thirty-seven homers, four of which came while he was in the lineup as a designated hitter—a record, that is, but just barely.

—
Late Summer 1985

T
ROUBLE IN THE NINTH.
The visiting team has just scored, to draw within a run of the home side, and there are base runners at first and third, with one out and the heavy part of the batting order just coming up. Even before the runner crossed the plate, the manager was on his way to the mound, and now he turns toward his bullpen and touched his right arm. The murmurous noises of anxiety in the park give way to applause and the fans’ relishing cries of an outcome now almost foreseen as the bullpen car arrives and yields up its famous passenger, the great reliever. He is whiskered and hulking, and his impatient right-handed warmup pitches—seven seeds and a final down-busting curveball—bring gasps and little bursts of laughter in the stands. The No. 3 batter stands in and takes an instantaneous called strike—a fastball under his fists. He lays off the next pitch—a breaking ball, away—then swings hard at the next fastball and ticks it foul to the screen. Another fastball arrives, and he swings late and raised a feeble little pop foul, which is devoured by the first baseman. Two out now. The cleanup hitter, a large left-handed slugger, digs in and takes a ball, takes a strike. He cuts violently at the next delivery, a letter-high fastball, and misses, swinging cleanly through the pitch and then half-stumbling in the box to keep his balance. The first-base and third-base coaches clap their hands reassuringly—hang in there, big guy—but thirty thousand fans are on their feet now, screaming for the K. A slider here would break this batter in half, but the man on the mound has no such idea. Glowering, he leans in for the sign, stretches and stares, and delivers the inexorable heater—up and out of the strike zone, actually, but the bat has flashed and come around just the same, and the game is over. Ovations and euphoria. Handshakes and high fives in the infield, hugs in the stands. Aw
right,
we did it again!