The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (148 page)

Davey Johnson also has some baseball smarts, and in this last game he showed us, if we needed showing, how far ahead he had been all along. Sid Fernandez, the Mets’ dumpling left-handed strikeout pitcher—their fourth starter this year, and during some stretches their best—came into the game in the fourth inning, with the Mets down by 3–0, and stopped the Sox dead in their tracks: a base on balls and then seven outs in succession, with four strikeouts. “That did it,” Keith said afterward. “When Sid was in there, we began to feel that we might win this game after all. He was the necessary hero.” Johnson had passed over Fernandez as a starter in the Series (he is streaky and emotional), but he had brought him along, all right. Fernandez had pitched a shaky one-third of an inning in Game Two, surrendering three hits and a run late in a losing cause; in Game Five, which the Mets also lost, he had pitched four shutout innings, with five strikeouts. He was Series-tested by the end, and he became Johnson’s last and best move.

The Sox, for their part, mounted a courageous rally in their eighth inning, when three successive solid blows accounted for two runs and closed the score to 6–5 before Orosco came in and shot them down for good. By this time, the Mets hitters had done away with Schiraldi and were loose in the Boston bullpen—John McNamara’s worst dream come true. Strawberry’s homer and the cascade of Mets runs at the end released the fans at last, and their celebrations during the final outs of the year—the packed thousands together chanting, roaring out the Freddie Mercury rock chorus “We will, we will…
ROCK YOU!”
while pointing together at the Boston bench—were terrific fun. There was a great city party there at Shea, and then all over town, which went on into the parade and the ticker tape (it’s computer paper now) the following afternoon, but when it was all over I think that most of us, perhaps all of us, realized that the victory celebration didn’t come up to the wonderful, endless sixteen innings of Game Six, back during the playoffs. As one friend of mine said later, “For me, that night was the whole thing. Whatever there was to win had been won.”

There was a surprise for me, there at the end. I am a Mets fan. I had no idea how this private Series would come out, but when the Mets almost lost the next-to-last game of the Series I suddenly realized that my pain and foreboding were even deeper than what I had felt when the Red Sox came to the very brink out in Anaheim. I suppose most of my old Red Sox friends will attack me for perfidy, and perhaps accuse me of front-running and other failures of character, but there is no help for it. I don’t think much has been lost, to tell the truth. I will root and suffer for the Sox and the Mets next summer and the summers after that, and if they ever come up against each other again in the World Series—well, who knows? Ask me again in a hundred and sixty-seven years.

—
Spring 1987

T
HE LESSER WONDERS OF
baseball—the sacrifice fly, the three-six-three double play, the wrong-side hit-and-run bouncer through a vacated infield sector, the right-field-to-third-base peg that cuts down a lead runner, the extended turn at bat against an obdurate pitcher that ends with a crucial single squiggled through the middle—are most appreciated by the experienced fan, who may in time also come to understand that expertise is the best defense against partisanship. This game can break your heart. No other sport elucidates failure so plainly (no other sport comes close), or presents it in such painful and unexpected variety. My favorite team, the Mets, won a World Championship last fall, but the pleasure of that drained away much more quickly than I thought it would, and now, in company with their millions of other fans, I am stuck with the increased anxieties and diminished pleasures of a possible repeat performance. The 1986 league championships and World Series produced so many excruciations and twists of the knife that these, I suspect, are now remembered more vividly than anything else: the Mets’ and Astros’ day-into-night sixth game, which brought the Mets their pennant after sixteen innings of nearly insupportable tension and ennui; the fifth game of the American League playoff, when the California Angels, three outs away from their first World Series, surrendered four runs in the Boston ninth on a pair of home runs and a hit batsman, and eventually lost both game and championship; and, of course, Game Six of the World Series, in which the Mets, trailing in the tenth by two runs, came down to their last out of the year with nobody on base, and then—I still don’t believe it—beat the Red Sox on three singles, a wild pitch, and an ugly little error, and went on to take the last game as well. Hundreds of thousands of TV spectators must have fallen in love with baseball in the course of watching these soap operas, but during the winter I sometimes wondered how many of those newborn fans would stay with the game once they perceived its slower and less melodramatic midsummer flow, and whether (if they were Mets rooters) they were giving thought to the lingering, inexorably recalled off-season sufferings of the worthy (and, together, much more numerous) fans of the Astros and the Angels and the Red Sox, some of whom or all of whom may have to wait for many seasons—decades, perhaps—before they find better luck and a shot at redress. There are easy days and lesser rewards for every fan, of course, but losing, rather than winning, is what baseball is about, and why, in the end, it is a game for adults.

Spring training is meant to bring surcease to such dour notions. There are young faces and fresh arms, the northbound sun is delicious, and the games, which mean nothing, are apprehension-free. This year, as is my custom, I toured the March camps in Arizona and Florida and tasted these old pleasures, but restoration came slowly. Some old friends and familiar faces were missing. Tom Seaver was gone, after twenty major-league seasons; he required a knee operation last fall, to repair an injury that kept him from pitching for the Red Sox in the playoffs and the World Series, and no team had invited him to camp this year. Absent as well were the free agents who had been closed out of the sport, at least for the time being, by the owners’ apparently concerted plan to avoid competitive bidding for the services of any player who had chosen to take his chance in the marketplace this year rather than sign up again. By the time the season opened, a couple of dozen teams with an ostensible interest in winning a pennant had found no use at all for the likes of Tim Raines, Bob Boone, Ron Guidry, Rich Gedman, Bob Horner, Lonnie Smith, and Doyle Alexander. According to the rules governing such matters, these men would be free to rejoin their original clubs on May 1st, possibly chastened by the knowledge that they weren’t worth as much as they (and we) thought they were. Raines, by the way, has been a lifetime .305 hitter for the Montreal Expos, with four hundred and sixty-one stolen bases. A teammate and fellow free agent of his, Andre Dawson—who has batted .280 over eleven years, with two hundred and twenty-five home runs—was so disgusted with the freeze-out that he instructed his agent to accept any offer that the Chicago Cubs wished to make him, and signed on for five hundred thousand dollars (with some further incentives contingent upon his durability), which was five hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars less than his previous year’s stipend. Just recently, Bob Horner, of the Braves, went off to play for the Yakult Swallows, in Japan. Earlier, Lance Parrish, a fixture behind the plate for the Tigers over the past decade, signed with the Phillies, in the only unblemished deal of its kind this year. A batterymate of his, the Detroit ace Jack Morris, who has won more games in this decade than any other pitcher, gave up on free agency even before the bidding season began, in January, when he and his lawyer discovered that no other team was interested in his wares; he took the Tigers to salary arbitration instead, and won a salary raise to a million eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Both Raines and the Red Sox’ Gedman, by the further way, also agreed this spring to accept less money than they had been offered by their previous clubs, but when they did, the teams with whom they were negotiating inexplicably withdrew or altered their perhaps less than serious offers. I take no pleasure in these ironies, but the owners, I am convinced, don’t give a damn about what we fans feel; they wish us to believe that the free agents and the rest of the players are paid far too much and should be taught a lesson—a lesson in economics, I suppose. I sympathize with the owners’ wish to lower their payrolls and balance their books, but what they are doing looks to me like an unfunny coincidence, of Thoreau’s trout-in-the-milk variety. The matter is now in the hands of an arbitrator, who will rule on a grievance plea on this issue brought last year by the Players Association. Lawyers tell me that collusion is hard to prove and almost impossible to police, even if a finding of conspiracy is made, but what is all too plain is that this is the weather pattern that may bring baseball to another strike two years hence, when the present agreement concludes. I did find a scattering of rookies to admire, but not nearly as many as last spring, in the great vintage year of ’86, when I had my first, awed look at the Angels’ Wally Joyner, the Rangers’ Pete Incaviglia (an even better Texas youngster, Ruben Siena, didn’t join the club until midseason), the Giants’ Will Clark, and the Athletics’ (“the A’s” has undergone official unabbreviation) Jose Canseco. This year’s sprouts appear to have a little less ability and, for a change, a lot less size. Joey Cora, the Padres’ new second baseman, and Luis Polonia, a future Oakland outfielder, are both five feet eight inches tail, and Casey Candaele (it’s pronounced “Candell”), a young backup in-fielder for Montreal, goes five-nine; all three are switch hitters, and exude the glitter and elan of players who show us the best of themselves at every instant. I was at Winter Haven one afternoon when Candaele made some slick plays afield and went four for five against the Red Sox’ pitchers, with a home run and three runs batted in. (“Who
was
that little guy at second base?” Boston manager John McNamara asked the writers when the game was over.) Jose Canseco (six feet three inches) has gained twenty pounds since last spring, when he was listed at two hundred and ten—all muscle, by the look of him, and most of that in his arms, which now resemble pipeline sections. Last spring, I saw him waft several pitches into distant sectors of Arizona real estate (he went on to hit thirty-three home runs and bat in a hundred and seventeen runs, and was voted the American League’s rookie of the year), but this time around I arrived a day too late for a memorable pair of home runs he hit against the Cubs at their home park, in Mesa. Joe Rudi, now an Oakland coach, told me that the first of these blows, which sailed over his head in the visitors’ bullpen, in left field, was easily the longest homer he had ever seen; the next one, on about the same arc and flight plan, was a bit longer. Canseco didn’t oblige me with any homers this year, but he startled me in other ways. He kept hitting rocketlike singles through the infield, he bunted once for a base hit and a run batted in, and he struck out only twice in the twelve at-bats I saw. He may be a ballplayer as well as a legend.

Back in Florida, I spent much of my time with the Red Sox and the Mets, as might be expected, but I noticed that my baseball holiday was less fun as the season got closer and the teams got better. The Bostons had resumed the sour, withdrawn misanthropy that had made up such a traditional part of their team psyche before last summer (Jim Rice and Don Baylor were not speaking, I was told), and anxiety over Roger Clemens’ absence (he was holding out—nothing to do with free agency—and agreed to a new two-year and perhaps two-million-dollar contract only a day or two after the new season began) seemed to haunt their doings on the field. The Mets were more cheerful and optimistic, as is their nature, but their vast attendant media corps added an air of frazzled, election-year foolishness to their comings and goings; one morning, I counted fourteen writers encircling Keith Hernandez as he talked about Darryl Strawberry’s brief, petulant walkout when he was fined for missing practice. All this, to be sure, was before the very bad news came about Dwight Gooden’s cocaine troubles, and his departure from baseball while he embarked upon a course of drug rehabilitation that may keep him off the field for months, and perhaps for a full season. The pain and sadness we feel about this are off to one side of baseball, I think—or should be—but there is a sense of loss that reminds us of the kind of wishful hero worship that every real fan has within him or her, even in middle age; we think we have outgrown it, but in truth we can hardly wait for the next shy and shining, extraordinarily talented young man to come along and make the game thrilling for us once again. Doc will return to baseball, I’m sure, and I hope he will be as good as or better than before, but it will be a little while, I think, before I will be able to love a ballplayer in quite that way again—to make him a man and myself a boy. To be fair about it, we should remind ourselves that the players have not agreed to these ancient but unwritten conditions of our affiliation, and may not understand them at all. Addiction in any form is a mystery.

Trying to learn the game, as I have suggested, protects us from its overattachments and repeated buffetings, and for me, as the years go by, this has become almost the best part of baseball. This spring and last spring, I passed many hours in the company of coaches and managers and players—older players, for the most part—as I tried to learn a bit more about pitching. I wasn’t so much concerned with strategy—where the ball is pitched, and with what intention, to different batters in different game situations (the heart of the game, in fact)—for that art is better pursued during the regular season, when each pitch matters. Rawer, I wanted to learn for certain how the different pitches are thrown and why; how the ball is held and what happens to it in flight and which styles in pitching and pitchers’ thinking are undergoing alteration. (In the course of these talks, I often found myself moving a ball this way and that in my right hand—I pitch and write righty—while some pitcher or coach tried to arrange my fingers around it in different ways, and I would suggest to readers who wish to accompany me closely over the ensuing paragraphs that they might do well to hunt around the house for an old baseball and keep it close by as a teaching aid.)