The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (157 page)

Monte Irvin
(played in the Negro Leagues and then for seven years with the Giants and, briefly, the Cubs; he batted .458 in the 1951 World Series; tall and dignified):
Ray Dandrige played third base with style and class. He had the quickest hands—I never saw anybody come in and sweep up the swinging bunt the way he could do it. He’s in a class with Brooks Robinson…. If the major leagues had integrated ten years earlier, you’d have seen the great Negro League stars in their prime—Satchel, Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson. We had some sure Hall of Fame pitchers you probably never heard of—Roy Partlow, Raymond Brown, and Leon Day. Leon is here this weekend, you should talk to him… Back then, you had to go easy at the beginning with your team, because there’d likely be an old-timer holding down your spot. He’d say, “Boy, this position belongs to
me—
go play somewhere else.” So you learned to play all over the place.

Ted Williams
(no description needed; he talked about hitting, of all things):
The man who made that statue of me noticed something most people never did: I shortened up on the bat. I knew I was smarter than ninety-nine percent of the other hitters—not mentally but baseballically. I said to myself, “The quicker I am, the longer I can wait. The longer I can wait, the less I’m likely to get fooled. So how can I be quick? Don’t get too heavy a bat. Don’t swing from the end of the bat. And with two strikes don’t try to pull the ball all the time. And
get a good pitch to hit.”
That’s all there is to it! When I was first in the Pacific Coast League, I went to see Lefty O’Doul, because I was a student of hitting. I talked to him one afternoon—he was with the Seals—when he was sitting on the grass out in center field, taking some sun. He said, “Kid, don’t let anybody ever change you.” And that’s when I thought, Boy, I must be pretty good!

Ernie Banks
(still narrow as a slat at fifty-six; still talking, here to led Williams, in the next chair in the autographing tent):
You should be a Rhodes Scholar, Ted—baseball’s never had one. We need a Rhodes Scholar, because this game takes brains. You even
look
smart, so you could have done it. You and me, we’re the same kind of players. We like people who focus on the task, not the results. It’s not the gold, it’s the getting.

Billy Williams
(eavesdropping from the next chair in line):
Oh, no. Not again. I was Ernie’s roommate, so I heard this stuff for sixteen years. But
I’m
all right. I’ll survive it.

Joe Sewell
(eighty-eight years old, and probably an inch or two under his listed height of five feet back with the Indians in the twenties; struck out only three times in 1930 and again in 1932, and only a hundred and fourteen times lifetime, in more than seven thousand at-bats; wears thick glasses now and carried nine pens and pencils in his shirt pocket):
I have the bat at home that I used for fourteen years. The same bat. It weighs forty ounces. I never cracked it, because I knew how to swing the right way. I took good care of it—worked on it every single day. I rubbed it with a chicken bone and a plug of tobacco, and then I’d roll it up and down with a smooth bottle. The bat was your tool, so you took care of it. They wanted that bat up here at the Hall, but I’m keeping it.

Catfish Hunter
(at forty-one, he is the second-youngest player—second to Koufax—ever to attain the Hall; he looks even better than he did when he was out there painting the corners):
I don’t miss the game, because I’m still in it, coaching my boys. One son, Todd, I coached up from Little League right on through Legion ball. Now he’s graduating, so I’m going back to wait for my son Paul, who’ll be ready for Little League in a couple of years. I’m a Little League groundskeeper right now. Some parents think Little League pressure is too much for kids, but you got to get used to pressure sometime if you’re going to want to play… My wife and my three kids are here. My three sisters will be here tomorrow, and three of my four brothers, and
their
kids. There’s two busloads and ten or twenty carloads of folks coming from North Carolina, so my home town—there’s twenty-five hundred inhabitants, same as when I was a kid—will be not at home tomorrow.

Leon Day
(he is not young—he must be in his late seventies—but is broad, low, and still powerful-looking, with long arms; sunny disposition; many believe he will be the next player from the Negro Leagues to attain the Hall):
With the Newark Eagles, we played every day it didn’t rain. Played all kinds of teams, in the league and out of the league. One Fourth of July, we played at Bay Ridge Parkway, in Brooklyn, in the morning—I think it was the Bushwicks that game. Then we played a league double-header in the afternoon at Ebbets Field—the Dodgers were away on the road. Then we played another game someplace that night. The same pitcher, a fellow named Jackman, started all four games. He got knocked out of the box each time, but he’d say “Gimme the ball, I can beat these guys,” so he ended up losing four games on the same day…. I had the reputation of being the kind of pitcher who’d knock you down if you’d got a hit off of me, but I wouldn’t always do it on the first pitch. Maybe I’d throw you a knuckleball instead. Then a curveball. Then a nice change of pace. You’d start to think, Good, he forgot about that hit, and right then—
whop—
down you’d go.
(Laughs delightedly.)

Each of the Hall of Famers had his own round table at the banquet that night, and the Lefty Gomez party made room for me and my wife. I had brought along my old 1930 box score—I had to read it to Gomez, who had forgotten his reading glasses—and he thanked me and said, “My God, I was six feet two and I weighed a hundred and forty-nine pounds that year. I was a
ghost.”
He looked around the crowded, cheerful room and said, “When I was a kid in the game, the older players would talk about all the famous guys that had once played with them or against them, but I never listened. I just wasn’t interested. Now that’s all I ever do.”

I sat next to a delightful daughter of Lefty’s who told me that she was Vernona Lois Gomez (Lefty is Vernon) and that the name had been selected after her parents had held personal consultations with the editor of a “Your Baby’s Name” feature in the Boston
Post.
I asked her what the runner-up handle had been. “Juanita,” she said.

Then I looked across the table at her slim and radiant mother, and a buried line or two of five-decades-old sports-page chatter came paddling up out of my memory: “The Gay Castilian [Lefty Gomez, in the sports parlance of that day], accompanied by his fiancée, Broadway’s beautiful June O’Dea…”

“Is your mother the beautiful June O’Dea?” I asked Vernona.

“She certainly is,” she said.

A little later, the B.J.O’D. told me that she and Lefty had met in a night club, the Woodmansten Inn, up in the Bronx, and that he had been absolutely tongue-tied that first evening. “We were engaged in two weeks, but we didn’t get married for two years,” she said. “I was playing in ‘Of Thee I Sing’ by then. We had a one-night honeymoon in Atlantic City, and the next morning he said, ‘So long, sweetheart, I’m going to spring training,’ and I didn’t lay eyes on him for six weeks. That was fifty-four years ago, so I guess you could say we worked it out.”

When the gala party moved over to the Hall for dessert and drinks, there were crowds of fans jammed together on the sidewalk and beside the front steps there, waiting to cheer for the old stars as they came in; it reminded you a little of the mobs at the Oscar awards, in Los Angeles, but without the kitsch and the craziness. The players had the museum to themselves that night; the Catfish Hunters just about wiped out the souvenir shop single-handed.

I chatted with Warren Spahn in the Gallery, and at one point he made a little gesture toward the party and the plaques and said, “There’s such a
feeling
to this place. I go to Washington a lot—I was there last week—and I always get a thrill when I see the Capitol or visit the Congress. I feel the same way here. It’s awe. I look around and I see all these men who played the game so well—great players, you know—and did it for peanuts, because they loved to play. I’m lucky to be part of something like that. I’ll be back next year. I always come back.”

When my wife and I left—it was after eleven o’clock—it happened that we walked out of the Hall directly behind Cool Papa Bell, who went carefully down the steps on the arm of his daughter. He is eighty-four now. There were still some fans outside, waiting in the warm summer night, and when they saw who it was they came forward and gave him a terrific round of applause, and Cool Papa shifted his cane to the other hand and waved to them in reply.

The induction ceremonies the next day were more of the same, really: it was as if the party had gone on into the following afternoon. The weather gave us a break at last, and there was a gusty fresh breeze moving in the thick, tall trees in Cooper Park, where the thousands of sitting and standing fans almost engulfed the handsome verdigris-green statue of James Fenimore Cooper. Up on the steps of the library, the Hall of Famers were introduced, one by one. Ted Williams was wearing a bright-green blazer. Willie Mays—or maybe Roy Campanella—got the biggest hand. The sun shone, and the speeches and encomiums were sweet and boring and almost not too long. The Commissioner reminded us that Catfish Hunter had played for both Charlie Finley and George Steinbrenner (they were both there, down front with the V.I.P.s), which was enough in itself, he said, to put a man into the Hall of Fame. Jack Lang was teary, and Jack Buck (the voice of the Cardinals, who received the Ford C. Frick Award for his long career in baseball broadcasting) was lengthily grateful. Each of the inductees introduced all the members of his family after he received his plaque, and then delivered an acceptance address. Hunter told us about his long-ago contract negotiations with the Yankees; and Billy Williams, who had memorized and also copyrighted his speech, said it was high time that baseball became fully integrated by giving blacks and other minorities a chance at jobs in the front office and as managers. This day, he said, was “the most precious thing in my life.” Ray Dandridge was the best. “The only thing I ever wanted to do was to put one foot into the major leagues, but they didn’t want it,” he told us. “Now I can thank each and every veteran on the committee for allowing me to smell the roses… I love baseball, and today it looks like baseball loves me.

There is a Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts; a College Football Hall of Fame in Kings Island, Ohio; a Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio; a Bowling Hall of Fame in St. Louis, but I don’t think they are quite the same as the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’d be surprised if they worked the same way. These thoughts came to me back in June, during the evening of the two-day visit that Charles and Ben and I made to Cooperstown. It was a muggy night, with some thundershowers, and after dinner the three of us gathered in the living room of the handsome old inn where we were staying and sat with some other guests there and watched a ballgame on television—a “Monday Night Baseball” game in Oakland between the Kansas City Royals and the Oakland Athletics. Ben went off to bed after a couple of innings, but Charles and I stayed to the end. It was a good game, because the Athletics hung tough and beat Bret Saberhagen, the Royals’ ace, whose record coming into the game was an amazing 12–1 for the 1987 season. Reggie Jackson, who had been having a discouraging sort of summer so far—he is retiring at the end of this year—whacked a home run (No. 556, lifetime) in the second inning, and Charles and I instantly remarked to each other that somebody would have to change the digits beside his name in the basement of the Hall the next morning. Reggie will make the Hall of Fame easily, probably on the first ballot.

I began thinking about the other players in the game we were watching, and I decided that George Brett had a good shot at the Hall, too, with his lifetime .314 batting average to date and that wonderful .390 season a few years ago. I wouldn’t bet against Saberhagen, either, although it’s much too early to tell, and no one in the world could say yet what kind of slugger the Oakland first baseman, Mark McGwire, might turn out to be. Already he had twenty-two homers in this, his first full season; he has been all the rage this year, but, of course, he is only a rookie.

With two outs in the eighth inning and the Royals trailing by 2–1, Dan Quisenberry came in to pitch for Kansas City, with a man on base. He fell behind on the count and then came in a hair too high with a breaking pitch, and Tony Phillips hit the ball over the right-field fence, to put the game out of reach. Quisenberry is a submarine relief specialist, with an odd, looping delivery, and his total of two hundred and thirty-six official saves is already the fourth best in baseball history. I spent some time with him two years ago while preparing an article about him; he was then on his way to his fourth consecutive Fireman of the Year award in his league. I thought at the time that he might be headed for the Hall of Fame, but he has gone into a sharp decline in the past two seasons—no one quite knows why—and I don’t think anyone gives him much of a chance for Cooperstown now. I have suffered for him last year and this year (we are friends), and I was unhappy about his difficulties, but Quis himself had reminded me—even then, at the peak of his powers and success—that relief pitching is tricky and unpredictable, and that baseball, of course, is always tough to figure in advance. “The great ones are the ones who get it up year after year,” he said.

Most of us fans fall in love with baseball when we are children, and those who come aboard as adults often do so in a rush of affection and attachment to a local team that has begun to win. These infatuations are ferociously battered and eroded by various forces—by the schlocky macho posturing and gossip and exaggerations of the media; by the failure of many players to live up to our expectations for them, both on the field and off the field; and, most of all, by the wearisome, heartbreaking difficulty of the sport, which inexorably throws down last years’s champions, exposes rookie marvels as disappointing journeymen, and turns lithe young stars into straining old men, all in a very short space of time. Baseball is absorbing and sometimes thrilling, but it is also unrelenting; it is rarely pure fun for any of us, players or fans, for very long. Except at Cooperstown. The artifacts and exhibits in the Hall remind us, vividly and with feeling, of our hopes for bygone seasons and teams and players. Memories are jogged, even jolted; colors become brighter, and we laugh or sigh, remembering good times gone by. But the Hall of Famers themselves, with their plaques and pictures and citations, are the heart of something larger, for they tell us that there exists a handful of baseball players—it comes out to a bit over one percent of the thirteen thousand-odd men who have ever played major-league ball—who really did come close to our expectations. They played so well and so long, succeeding eventually at this almost impossible game, that we can think of them as something more useful than gods or heroes. We know they are there, tucked away up-country and in the back of our minds: old men, and younger ones on the way, who prove and sustain the elegance of our baseball dreams.