The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (139 page)

This, I realized, was the long view—the experienced Cubs-person’s caution—but there was no cynicism or artificiality in it that I could see. Tim nodded happily when Dunston and then Dave Martinez whacked windblown back-to-back homers in the fifth, with the Cubs scoring four more times and going ahead for good in the game, but when we sat down again he said, “I think all these pop-fly home runs in this park hurt the Cubs in the end. It’s the reason we never seem to have any speed on the team, or any real defense. It’s the same kind of team the Red Sox have always been, because of that wall at Fenway. Those big innings distract you from building a real ball team. I think we may have the best defensive stats in the league right now, but that’s only because we’re so slow in the infield that we never even get to the hard chances. It’s an illusion.”

Sandberg homered in the eighth, and Leon Durham bombed a triple into the ivy a moment or two later, and the Cubs won the thing by 11–6. I was happy for my new friend, but what I had discovered about him was that he was a baseball fan first and a Cubs fan—and a dedicated one—well after that. Maybe that was part of the secret about winning and losing—the fan’s part. “What I love about Roger Craig is the way he’s always in the game,” Tim had said at one point. “He calls all the Giant pitchouts and pick-offs, you know. You remember how he used to do that when he was with the Tigers, I’m sure.” I did remember, because he had reminded me. Then, a little later—an
instant
later—the Giant pitcher Krukow picked Sandberg off first on a move (I checked it later) signalled by Craig from the dugout. It took the Cubs out of an inning, but I noticed that Shanahan clapped for the slick move just the same. He was in the game, too.

Now I began to worry about the Giants. Their division lead was gone—Houston had won again—and after the game Craig spoke urgently about the necessity of getting out of town with a split in the series. Matters looked even graver the next afternoon—a beautiful day, a bit cooler, with a noisy family crowd on hand for a Sunday picnic of baseball—when the Cubs went up by 4–1 in the third inning; two pitches by Giants starter Roger Mason bounced by Bob Brenly for passed balls in the three-run second (both split-finger specials, by the look of them), and further damage was avoided only by a nifty pitchout, wigwagged by Craig, which allowed Brenly to cut down a base stealer with two Cubs on and no outs. Craig, in fact, was managing up a storm, at one point sending up a pinch-hitter for a batter in mid at-bat, with the count 3–1 (it didn’t work); the day before, he had relieved one of his relievers in the middle of the count. What did work on this day for the Giants was a brilliant turn at the plate in the fourth by first baseman Harry Spilman, who ran the count to 3–2 against the Cubs’ Dennis Eckersley and then fought off four outstanding sliders for fouls before Eckersley made a mistake, a fastball up, which Spilman hit into the right-field stands for a two-run homer. Spilman, an early-season pickup by the Giants after he was dropped by the Tigers, had been filling in elegantly for the injured and slumping rookie first baseman Will Clark, who had been sent down to Phoenix for rehabilitation. After the game, Spilman said, “That was probably the best at-bat I’ve ever had in the big leagues.”

The Cubs were still up by a run when another Giants sub, Randy Kutcher, led off the eighth with a rocket to short, which Chicago shortstop Dunston fielded brilliantly and then horribly threw away, to put the tying run aboard. The Cubs infield defended in classic fashion against the inevitable upcoming bunt, but the batter, Robbie Thompson, pushed the ball beautifully to right, fast enough to get it past the pitcher and the onrushing first baseman, Durham, and short enough to allow the covering second baseman, Sandberg, no chance in the world to make a play. The bunt—a pearl of great price—went untouched, and a moment or two farther along Thompson outdid himself, pausing for an instant on the base path in order to hinder Durham’s view of Leonard’s weakly nubbed, lucky wrong-field infield bouncer to right. Durham lunged for the ball and barely missed it as it wobbled off into short right, and the game was tied, with Thompson on third; his run—he scored on a sacrifice fly by Brown, to put the Giants ahead—held up because Scott Garrelts, in from the pen, set down the six remaining Chicago batters in order, on fastballs that all measured in the mid-ninety-m.p.h. range. The Giants wound up with a 5–4 win and the split they had to have.

How you assessed such a game depended on which clubhouse you visited. Eckersley, who had pitched very well indeed—he struck out nine Giants—was bitter about the fact that manager Gene Michael had allowed him to come up to bat in the seventh, with one out and a teammate on second, instead of wheeling in a pinch-hitter to try to deliver an insurance run. The loss ran Eckersley’s record to 3–6 for the year, and the Cubs’ to 38–50. “It’s just frustrating,” the Eck said. “I know everyone here feels the way I do, so why am I going to sit here and cry about it? It’s just been a terrible year for all of us.”

In the Giants’ clubhouse, Roger Craig lit up his old-fashioned hook-stem pipe and blew a cloud of sweet smoke at the ceiling. “Humm baby,” he said.

The teams I found on the grassy field at the Oakland Coliseum at the outset of their three-game series had come through such different terrain in this baseball summer as to make them resemble the principals in some morality play about reward and punishment, good fortune and bad. The Red Sox, here in the midst of their longest road trip of the summer, had just lost three out of four games at the Seattle Kingdome but still held a comfortable six-game lead over the second-place Yankees. At their high-water mark, ten days earlier, the Sox had led the pack by eight games and—to employ the statistic by which most baseball people measure team success or the lack of it—stood twenty-six games above the .500 mark. They had the league’s best pitcher in Clemens (then at 16–2) and the top batter in Wade Boggs (.365). The A’s, in horrendous contrast, had slipped into the abyssal deep (a level at which the only light is provided by anglerfish and a few weirdly phosphorescent umpires), fifteen and a half games behind the West-leading Angels, but had lately managed a few feeble upward strokes under then-new manager, LaRussa, and now stood thirteen and a half back although still dead last. Their only current celebrity was Jose Canseco, the enormous, thick-armed rookie slugger, who was leading the league with twenty-three homers and seventy-eight runs batted in. June held very different memories for the two teams. The Bosox had begun that month with feelings of great trepidation, having lost their most experienced starting pitcher, Bruce Hurst, who had just gone on the disabled list with a groin injury, at a time when they were already making do without the services of another strong starter, Al Nipper, who was recovering from a severe spike wound suffered in a collision at home plate two weeks before. The Sox came through June with a fairish 15–10 record for the month, but somehow increased then-divisional lead from two and a half to eight games in the process. A five-game losing skid by the Yankees late in the month helped considerably, and so did Roger Clemens’ six consecutive June wins—Nos. 9 through 14. The word “stopper,” which is what Clemens is, doesn’t just mean that the man out there on the mound keeps the other team from scoring; what he really stops is his own club’s two-game and three-game losing streaks, which can suddenly become something much more damaging if not snipped short. The Bosox had swept a three-game series against the Yankees in mid-June and another three-game set against the Orioles at the end of the month, but that swoon by the Yankees was the kind of pure good fortune that all hot teams seem to experience, and even come to count on as being almost then-due. Back in May, the Red Sox had beaten the Indians, 2–0, in a game at Cleveland that was called after six innings—called by
fog.
Later on, they beat Toronto when a Blue Jay pitcher walked in the winning run in the tenth, and then, in a July game, they completed a four-run twelfth-inning rally against the Angels when the California pitcher was called for a balk that brought in the winning run.

Oakland’s moments were of a different nature: a series in Cleveland when the team blew leads of four runs, six runs, and three runs on successive days, losing all three games; a night in Kansas City when Rickey Peters, under the mistaken impression that the bases were loaded, trotted homeward after a base on balls and was tagged out to end the inning; a nine-run second inning by the Rangers at Arlington. This last was the low point, in the estimation of Bill King, the veteran A’s television commentator. “It summed us up at that point,” he told me. “It was a microcosm. Every play seemed a violation of some baseball principle. There were two misplayed line drives in the outfield, people failed to cover bases, and there was an inside-the-park home run. Another run scored while our pitcher was arguing with the first-base ump over a call and Canseco twisted his knee when his spikes caught on the wall padding in right field. Jackie Moore said it was the most embarrassing game in his baseball career. Three days later, Jackie was gone—no one blamed him for that one game, of course—and I think in a way he was almost relieved.”

Bruce Bochte, the Oakland first baseman, said, “The month didn’t feel like a collapse, because most of the time we kept playing just bad enough to lose. In a way, that’s worse. It was like we were in a twilight zone. I guess the only regular player we didn’t lose to injuries at some point was Alfredo”—Alfredo Griffin, the shortstop. “Even so, we should have played close to .500, and we didn’t come close. It was an avalanche. When everything’s going bad like that, you never think about baseball when you’re away from the park. It isn’t in your mind at all. It’s harder to come to the park than it should be. You think you’re tireder than you really are, and your injuries hurt more. When the game starts, the effort is there, but there’s sort of a doubtful attitude. You’re looking around almost in anticipation of what’s going to go wrong.”

Bochte and Sandy Alderson and most of the other A’s agree that the most damaging stretch was a three-game series against the White Sox at Chicago early in the month, when two starting pitchers, Joaquin Andujar and Moose Haas, were disabled on successive days, at a time when the team was already trying to make do without its bullpen ace, Jay Howell, and its center fielder and team leader, Dwayne Murphy. Patchwork now became a daily necessity. Pitchers were wheeled in from the minors and, in some cases, wheeled back again; long relievers became starters; one starter, the young strikeout artist Jose Rijo, was tried in short relief—a mistake, everyone agreed later.

“After the injuries, things became very difficult,” Alderson said. “The bad news seemed relentless. I remember one time when we were losing here and all the teams in our farm system lost, too, so we had an oh-for-seven day for the whole Oakland operation. But there was never any despair. You try to keep some distance in your mind at times like that, to be objective and keep your judgment, but in all our meetings here with our coaches and scouts and others in the organization we never concluded that there was something wrong with our system, that we’d made bad trades, or that any of our components—scouting, minor-league operations, or the major-league operation—were seriously flawed or at fault. Maybe there was a lack of team chemistry or a lack of effort—it’s hard to judge—but when Tony got here he felt it was just a lack of talent. We’d lost too many players. At some point, it got out of control and something had to be done. You can’t change twenty-five people, so we changed one—the manager.”

Alderson didn’t say so, but others on the Oakland club intimated that the crippling of the team which led to the deadly June losing streaks—nine in a row and the record fifteen straight losses on the road—probably delayed the firing of Jackie Moore, instead of hastening it. It seemed plainly unfair to dismiss a manager who was making do with a daily lineup half full of Class AAA ballplayers. Even before the downslide, however, there was a conviction that Moore had delegated too many responsibilities to his coaches; the pitching rotations and the decision about when to take a struggling pitcher out of a game were being made by pitching coach Wes Stock, and players had understandably begun to feel that there was no visible leadership or center of force on the club. (The new manager, Tony LaRussa, is more private and more intellectual than Moore—or than most major-league pilots, for that matter he holds a law degree from Florida State University—but there is visible steel there as well. He had managed the White Sox for eight seasons, bringing them to a divisional pennant in 1983, and his departure from that club this summer is generally viewed as the result of a clash of personalities with the flamboyant new Chicago executive vice-president, Hawk Harrelson.) In any case, there is probably no proper time to fire a manager, if it must be done during the season. Jackie Moore’s dismissal came just two days after the repellent and embarrassing rat episode (Dave Kingman, the brooding and misanthropic Oakland designated hitter, arranged to have a live rat delivered to Susan Fornoff, a beat writer from the Sacramento
Bee,
as a signal of his dislike of her presence in the clubhouse) and one day after the club at last broke its horrific fifteen-game road losing streak with a win over the Royals at Kansas City. LaRussa took charge after an interval when the club was directed by fill-in manager Jeff Newman, and by the time I arrived in Oakland the team had won six games and lost five under its new skipper.

Anybody can explain baseball, of course; the trick is to predict it. What happened now—what happened
of course—
was that the A’s swept the series against the Red Sox, winning quite handily, in fact, only once falling behind in one of the games, by a lone early run. The A’s also got the better of things in every department, including pitching (the Bosox never put together more than two hits in an inning in any of the contests); hitting (Carney Lansford, the Oakland third baseman, went eight for twelve, with two home runs); and defense (silky plays by Griffin and a marvelous 3-6-1 double play in a tight moment of the Tom Seaver-vs.-Joaquin Andujar middle game, which brought a sudden shout of pleasure from the Oakland crowd). The breaks had changed, too—a telling shift of ground. In the final game, Dusty Baker, the Oakland outfielder, made a full-length airborne dive to grab a drive by Bill Buckner inches above the grass in left center (“Last month, that’s a triple,” announced Bill Rigney, the senior Oakland baseball adviser, who was sitting with me); and in the bottom of the same stanza Tony Phillips’ hard rap up the line bounced past Buckner at first base and into the right-field corner for a two-run double (“Last month, that’s the other team at bat,” said Rig). Baseball’s inexorable cycle had swung the other way, and suddenly it was Boston’s turn to play with a very short deck. Injuries and unexpected misfortunes had depleted the lineup; in the summer so far, the club had been forced to call up nine different minor-league replacements from its Pawtucket farm club. In the games I saw, Hurst and Nipper, each recently out of drydock (it was Hurst’s first turn since his injury, and Nipper’s sixth), were cruelly treated by the Oakland offense; they had been hurried back because of the absence of Oil Can Boyd, an 11–6 starter for the Red Sox, who was under suspension for various infractions and instabilities. The hard-hitting outfielders Tony Armas and Jim Rice were aching and unable to play at all in the Oakland games, and the bullpen was without stalwarts Sammy Stewart and Steve Crawford. Wade Boggs was aching with a lame back, and Buckner’s bad ankles limited him to service as a designated hitter in the first two games. The customary D.H., Don Baylor, was filling in for Jim Rice in left field, where his feeble arm cost the Bosox an important run in the second game. By the time the series was over, the Red Sox lead was down to three games, and manager John McNamara was terse and careworn in his office. “We’ve got to show our character and just play our way through it,” he murmured. “I don’t know—maybe we’re trying too hard.” The day before, he had said, “Thank God we’ve got some leeway, but you can run out of leeway.”