The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (144 page)

Home in fine fettle after the Mets’ sudden resurrection that Saturday, I had a drink and some dinner, and took my ease in front of the set, where my Red Sox, out in the late sunshine at Anaheim Stadium, played resolute, patient ball in their almost boring Game Four, eventually dispatching the ancient and wily Don Sutton in the seventh inning. (I should explain that the two sets of playoffs never exactly overlapped in their progression, thanks to the vagaries of the network schedulers.) The Sox’ 3–0 lead midway through the ninth looked safe as houses, for their pitcher was Roger Clemens, their soon-to-be winner of both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player awards in his league; he had gone 24–4 for the season, after winning his first fourteen decisions in a row, and had also established a new all-time record by striking out twenty batters in an April game against the Seattle Mariners. So far in this game, Clemens had simply brushed aside the Angels, allowing no one to reach third base; three more outs would bring the teams even in their playoff, at two games apiece. But in fact Clemens was running out of gas, and after a leadoff home run by Doug DeCinces in the ninth and one-out singles by Dick Schofield and Bob Boone he was abruptly gone. His successor, the young fastballer Calvin Schiraldi, suffered a nasty shock when a well-hit but catchable fly by Gary Pettis became a run-scoring double because Jim Rice lost the ball in the lights. With the score now 3–2, and with the bases loaded after an intentional pass, Schiraldi fanned Bobby Grich and went to two strikes and one ball on Brian Downing, but then hit him on the thigh with his overreaching next pitch (“Oh,
no!”
I cried, badly startling the snoozing terrier at my feet as I sailed up out of my chair, to the invisible balletic accompaniment of three or four million Sox fans to the north and east of me—along with
their
dogs, I suppose), to force in the tying run. The Angels won it in the eleventh (oh, yes), bringing exquisite joy to their rooters but ruin to my overcrowded baseball day.

Game Five, played out lengthily at Anaheim the next afternoon, has already taken its place on the little list of Absolute All-Timers, and I must assume that its immoderate events are known by heart by even the most casual followers of the pastime. The Angels pitched their main man, Mike Witt, a spidery righthander with an exceptional curveball, which he throws in two variant modes; he had eaten up the Red Sox batters in the playoff opener, retiring the first seventeen in a row. Now he survived a two-run homer by Rich Gedman in the early going and was still in command as the ninth began, with his club ahead by 5–2, three outs away from a pennant. The last two California runs had come in when Dave Henderson, the second Boston center fielder of the day (he had entered the game after Tony Armas twisted an ankle), made a fine running catch of Grich’s deep drive, only to have the momentum of his effort carry the ball up over the top of the center-field wall and, appallingly, out of his glove for a home run. In the ninth, Witt gave up a single to Bill Buckner, fanned Rice, and then threw a pretty good breaking ball, down and away, to Don Baylor, who reached out and drove it over the left-field fence: a sobering moment there in Southern California.
*
Dwight Evans popped up for the second out, though, and manager Gene Mauch called in a left-hander, Gary Lucas, to pitch to the left-side batter Gedman, in search of one more out and a championship. The tactic, arguably logical (and arguably the only appropriate occasion for “arguably” ever to see print), since Gedman had ripped Witt for a homer, a double, and a single for the day, didn’t work, because Lucas plunked Gedman on the hand with his first pitch, thereby setting up the next confrontation, between Dave Henderson and the Angels’ less than imperious right-handed relief stopper Donnie Moore, who had thrown well in his most recent appearance. With the crowd putting up an insupportable din, with the ushers arrayed along the baselines and police stuffing the dugouts and bullpens, with the Angels up on their topmost dugout step for the pennant spring and the huggings and the champagne, Henderson worked the count to two and two, fouled off two fastballs, and then hit the next delivery—a forkball, perhaps—into the left-field seats. Silence and disbelief out there. Exultation on the opposite coast. The Angels, it will be recalled, quickly made up the new one-run deficit in their half of the ninth, and even had the next winning run—the pennant-winner once again—poised at third base when DeCinces popped to short right field and Grich lined out softly to the pitcher. These extended melodramatics had settled nothing so far (Al Michaels, the exemplary ABC television play-by-play man, summed things up along about here by saying, “If you’re just tuning in, too bad”), but now it suddenly seemed clear that the Red Sox
would
win, although that took a couple of innings: a hit batsman (it was Baylor), a single, an unplayable bunt by Gedman, and the winning sacrifice fly to center—by Henderson, of course. Schiraldi came in at the end and got the save. The Angels repacked their gear and de-iced the champagne (I guess) and returned to Boston, where they lost their last two games of the year, 10–4 and 8–1. “I don’t think we ever should have had to come back here,” Donnie Moore said when it was all over.

My eagle-eye view of Game Five was not nearly as clear as I have depicted it, since duty forced me to leave my TV set in the middle of the ninth that evening and head back to Shea for the fourth Mets-Astros affray, and I picked up most of the amazing and extended events in Anaheim over my car radio while tooling along op the Grand Central Parkway. Taking pity on his old man, my son taped the action on our VCR, and when I got home very late that night (the Mets had lost again to Mike Scott, just as I had feared) I played the last three innings over for myself, and, sure enough, the Red Sox won, 7–6, in eleven innings. It was the first time all month I didn’t have to keep score.

I thought back on this game many times after the Red Sox had won their championship and the Angels had packed up and gone home for the winter, but with a good deal less than pure pleasure. These last-moment reprieves and reversals are so anguishing for the losing players and coaches (and the fans, too, to be sure) that one’s thoughts return to them unbidden, long after the winners’ celebrations have been forgotten. Players in the winning clubhouse always look like boys (and not just because they are behaving like infants), while the ones in the other clubhouse resemble veteran combat soldiers who have barely survived some dreadful firefight. They look worse after a playoff defeat than after the World Series, because the losing team in a championship elimination has won nothing at all; it has become a trivia question. Even the Red Sox players, I noticed later on, talked about their narrow escape in Game Five with dire, near-funereal images. “We were on our deathbed,” Roger Clemens said. “The heartbeat meter was on a straight line.” John McNamara, who has a whispery, monsignorlike habit of speech, said to me, “We were dead and buried. When Henderson went to two strikes and the police were all set to go, I looked over and saw Reggie taking off his glasses in their dugout, getting ready for the celebration. That’s how close we were.”

I feel bad about the Angels, who were a team made up of some distinguished, or very well-known, older players—Don Sutton, Reggie Jackson, Doug DeCinces, Bob Boone, Brian Downing, George Hendrick, Rick Burleson, and Bobby Grich (Sutton and Jackson are in their forties, and the others in their upper thirties)—who fitted well with younger stars like Dick Schofield, Gary Pettis, Mike Witt, Kirk McCaskill, and the splendid rookie first baseman Wally Joyner. (He missed all but the first game of the playoffs with a leg infection.) I see that I have just referred to the Angels in the past tense, which is understandable, for this particular Angels team has ceased to exist. Grich has already retired, Jackson is a free agent—with no assurance that anyone will pick him up for next season—and so are Downing, Boone, and DeCinces, and management has been extremely quiet about which of the other expensive old-timers we will see in Anaheim next summer. I feel sorry for Gene Autry, the seventy-nine-year-old president and chairman of the board, who is revered in the game (he is known as the Cowboy) and has owned the still pennantless team ever since its inception, as an expansion club, in 1961.

I even feel bad about the Angels fans. There is a popular dumb theory here in the East that there is no such thing as a California Angels fan, and that those two-and-a-half-million-attendance totals at Anaheim Stadium, year after year, are made up of moonlighting sunbathers and foot-weary families resting up from Disneyland. This is parochial nonsense, of course, and it’s about time we old-franchise inheritors admitted the Angelvolk to the ranks of the true sufferers—the flagellants, the hay-in-the-hair believers, the sungazers, the Indians-worshippers, the Cubs coo-coos, the Twins-keepers, the Red Sox Calvinists:
the fans.
I have heard from a few of them by mail. One pen pal, a professor of Byzantine history from Canoga Park, California, sent me a five-page single-spaced typed letter delineating his pains and his heroes down the years, starting in 1961, when the Angels played at the Pacific Coast League Wrigley Field, in Los Angeles, and won seventy games in their very first season. “Now we know that rooting for the Angels is just like rooting for the Red Sox,” he wrote. “One does it guardedly, always looking over one’s shoulder.” Another Angels correspondent, a medical-journal editor who lives in San Francisco, sent along his scorecards for the A.L. playoff games this fall—beautifully detailed, meticulously executed, pitch-by-pitch delineations of the seven games, which concluded with a gigantic, smudgy execration of Gene Mauch scrawled across the bottom of the seventh-game score-card: the last Angels loss of the year. My correspondent apologized for this in a covering note: “I’m sorry—I was very upset. I still am.”

I feel bad about Gene Mauch, too—
everybody
feels bad about Mauch by now—who has managed in the majors for twenty-five years without ever setting foot in the World Series, although he had come excruciatingly close before this. In 1964, his Phillies led the National League (this was before divisional play) by six and a half games with two weeks to go, and then lost ten of their last twelve games and, on the last day, the pennant. Four years ago, his Angels led the Milwaukee Brewers in the five-game American League playoffs by two games to one but lost—an outcome so painful that Mauch moved up to the front office for a couple of seasons, and took up the managerial burdens again only last year. He is a dour, unapologetic baseball chancellor (a former colleague of his told me that he’d never heard Mauch ask an opinion or invite a discussion about any move he had made, on or off the field), who has acquired a sharply divided body of passionate loyalists and dedicated doubters in the press boxes and front offices of the game. He has also been second-guessed as much as anyone in his hard profession, but this, I have come to believe, is due not so much to his hard-shell exterior or to his reputation for over-managing as to a deep wish, however unconscious, among other managers and players and watchers of the game to prove that baseball really is more tractable, more manageable in its results, more amenable to tactics and patience and clear thinking, than it seems to have been for him. All of us—even us fans—want the game to be kinder to us than it has been to Gene Mauch, and we are terribly anxious to find how that could be made to happen. No group of games in recent memory had produced anything like the second-guessing of managers that one heard at these two championships, but this is explained, to my way of thinking, by the fact that five of the thirteen games were settled in the ninth inning or later—in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and sixteenth, to be precise—and that prolonging reties were also produced, twice in a ninth inning and once in a fourteenth.

Mauch’s moves during Boston’s ninth inning of that fifth game, when the three-run Angels lead was converted to a one-run deficit, will be a Gettysburg for tactical thinkers for years to come. An old friend of mine who has managed extensively in both leagues was in Anaheim that afternoon, and later on I asked him what it was like when it all began to come apart for the Angels out there, and what he would have done in the same circumstances.

“When Baylor hit his home run, the game still didn’t have that feeling of doom,” he said. “You thought, All right, you don’t win 5–2, you win 5–4. There were so many different directions Gene could have gone—he just chose the one that didn’t work. Gedman looked like the problem, because he’d gone three for three against Witt. But for me, the one to worry about, the key batter, is the
next
guy, the right-handed hitter Henderson, and I’m not too worried about him, because my very best right-handed pitcher—my best pitcher of all—is still in the game. Mike Witt, I mean. He’s just struck out Rice and popped up Evans, so he can’t be all that tired. If he loses Gedman somehow, he just needs to get Henderson out, and if he can’t do
that,
then we don’t deserve the pennant. And Henderson would have a whole lot more trouble against him than against a Donnie Moore.

“We know that Gene went to Lucas, and Lucas came in and hit Gedman. Gene’s move could have worked, but I think
the wrong man hit Gedman.
If Witt hits him, it’s a very different story. With Witt on the mound and Gedman coming up to bat and all eager for that next rip at my pitcher, I would have walked out to Witt and said, “Look, the
next
batter is the one you want. Don’t worry about Mr. Gedman. Hit him on the hip with your first pitch, and if you miss go back and hit him with the next one. Then go after Henderson and we’re out of this and into the World Series.’

“You know, when Donnie Moore came in after Lucas, I had the same little feeling I’d had back in Milwaukee when Gene’s Angels got so close in ’82: Now,
wait
a minute: this is ours, but it isn’t quite ours yet—let’s not gather the bats. And then it all happened again. The fans took it hard, but I think they felt, Well, OK, we still just need one of the two games back in Boston. But you only had to look at the players’ faces to know that it had gotten away from them and it might never come back. Once that phoenix gets out of the ashes, he wants to fly.”