The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (16 page)

There were two more homers to remember with gratitude. Bob Allison’s, in the sixth game, must have been at least a momentary salve for the unimaginable tortures he had suffered at the plate this year in his endless batting slump. And then, on the final afternoon, there was Lou Johnson’s homer—a looping, dying blow to left that actually caromed off the foul pole. It came in the fourth inning, with no score and the bases empty, but it demolished Jim Kaat and the Twins, for Koufax had already struck out six batters and again appeared untouchable. Ron Fairly doubled on the next pitch, and Parker singled him home, but Johnson had really done the job. Lou Johnson is a somewhat shopworn Negro outfielder (he even looks a little tattered, because of an automobile accident years ago that cost him the top of his right ear) who has spent most of the past twelve years in the minors; he took over left field when Tommy Davis was injured, and hung on with the Dodgers as a regular by playing the best ball of his career. The sound, the weight, the feel and flight of that home run will stay with Johnson, I would bet, for at least twelve years to come.

Koufax’s three-hit, ten-strikeout shutout in the final game was in many ways his finest feat, for he pulled it off without his curve ball. Discovering somewhere in the first or second inning that his curve was unreliable, perhaps because he was at last exhausted, he simply did without it; he threw the fast ball and challenged the Twin batters to touch him. Again he was too much. In the ninth, Killebrew reached first on a single, with one out, and the homeside zealots aroused themselves for some final, crepuscular yelling. Earl Battey struck out on three pitches. Bob Allison fouled one, took two balls, swung and missed, swung and missed, and winter descended on the northlands. As the Minnesotans filed out of Metropolitan Stadium in awful silence, I suddenly thought of the optimistic cabdriver who had driven me to the ballpark on the first day of the Series. I hope by now he has added another line to his little speech: “Anyway, we were beaten by the best—maybe the best pitcher in the whole history of baseball!”

—
May 1966

W
ITH TWO OUT IN
the top of the first inning on the afternoon of May 23, 1965, Jimmy Wynn, the center fielder of the Houston Astros, moved under a fly ball just struck by Jim Ray Hart, of the visiting San Francisco Giants. Looking upward, Wynn pounded his glove confidently, then anxiously, and then froze in horror. The ball had vanished into a pure Monet cloud of overhead beams, newly painted off-white skylights, and diffused Texas sunlight, and now it suddenly rematerialized a good distance behind Wynn and plumped to earth like a thrombosed pigeon. Three runs scored, the Giants eventually won, 5–2, and the next day a squad of workmen ascended the skies and, with paint guns, made the final severance between Houston baseball and the outdoors. Up to the moment of Hart’s fly, it might have been assumed that the summer sport played last year in Houston’s gigantic new air-conditioned Astrodome, which is the world’s first indoor ballpark, was merely baseball under glass—the same old game, now happily sheltered from the voracious mosquitoes and dismaying swelter of the Texas Gulf Coast. However, the unexpected local discovery that sunshine had become inimical to the national pastime (in preseason practices and exhibition games, before the initial coat of paint was slapped on the skylights, a few players had begun wearing their batting helmets in the outfield) only completed what actually was a radical break with baseball’s past and hastened further changes. Through the rest of last season, the grass in the crepuscular dome yellowed and withered, was painted green in the infield, and finally had to be replaced with new sodding, which fared no better. When ballplayers reconvened in the Astrodome this spring, they stepped out onto an infield made of new green plastic carpeting called AstroTurf.

It was not just the prospect of witnessing weatherless baseball played on Chemstrand grass under an acrylic-painted Lucite sky that induced me to travel to Houston last month to see the Astros open their first 1966 home stand. There was also the fact that the Astros’ first indoor season had been a rousing success, in spite of their customary ninth-place finish. Houston jumped from a 1964 home attendance of 725,773, smallest in the National League, to a gate of 2,151,470, barely second to that of the World Champion Dodgers, and more than six hundred thousand higher than the best American League home draw. Since half of the majors’ twenty teams have been born or have moved to new cities in the past twelve years, all in panting search of new audiences, these figures were of remarkable interest; Houston seemed on its way to becoming the capital of Baseball’s Age of Alteration.

So it was that I found myself, early in the evening of April 18, sitting in a cushioned deep-purple loge seat in left field of the Harris County Domed Stadium (as the Astrodome is formally named) and listening to the Jeff Davis High School band’s pre-game rendition of “The Good Old Summertime.” The only good and old object in view at the time was Robin Roberts, the erstwhile ace of the Phillies and Orioles and now the Astros’ senior mound statesman, who was warming up near the right-field stands preparatory to taking on the Dodgers. He toiled earnestly, though surrounded by distractions. A group of female scholars from Tyler Junior College assembled along the foul lines and did some high kicks in unison, wearing cowboy hats and peach satin body stockings. The groundkeepers smoothing the base paths were dressed in fake bright orange space suits and fake white plastic space helmets. Each level of the stands was painted a different color—royal blue, gold, purple, black, tangerine, and crimson—and I had the momentary sensation that I was sinking slowly through the blackberry-brandy layer of a pousse-café. The AstroTurf infield was green, but more the shade of a billiard table than a lawn. Only the outfield grass (which will be replaced with AstroTurf later this year) was reassuring; it looked like any Westchester back yard after a five-year drought. The lacy overhead pattern of beams and cloudy panes arching up from the brilliant circle of field lights made a soft and surprising sky above me. Leaning back in my theater seat, I measured its height by eye and saw that it was far above the reach of any fly ball, and then I wondered why someone hadn’t placed an altitude mark at the apex of the roof, to match the “340,” “390,” and “406” signs along the outfield wall and thus supply us with baseball’s latest statistic.

The elegant stands slowly filled, the ceremonials slipped by (the National League president with a plaque, Dinah Shore with the anthem, a county judge with the first ball), and baseball was allowed to begin. It turned out to be the same old game, the same game as ever. I could tell, because there was Robin Roberts out on the mound fiddling with his right pants leg between pitches. There, too, were the Dodgers, the champions, instantly ripping off singles, bunting, scurrying for the extra base, taking charge of the game from the very beginning, just as they did in the World Series last fall. Only the fact that Maury Wills was thrown out stealing second kept them down on two runs in the first inning and sustained the hopes of the locals. I presumed that the Houston fans were hopeful, but it was hard to be certain. It was a thinnish turnout for an opening game—just over twenty-five thousands—and the spectators near me, who were remarkably well dressed, also appeared to be unaccustomed to indoor shouting. It developed, however, that they were merely waiting for directions. With two out in the home half of the first, Jimmy Wynn drew a base on balls, and the center screen of the Astrodome’s huge, three-panel electronic scoreboard above the outfield pavilion seats burst forth with a noisy, animated depiction of a bugle bugling, followed by the lettered command “
CHARGE
!” “
Charge!
” responded the crowd with one voice. The fans near me were still laughing over this display of
a capella
ferocity when Joe Morgan flied out and the tiny rally came to a close.

Several scoreboards in big-league parks are now wired for bugle calls and
CHARGE
! injunctions (the device was born, I believe, in Los Angeles), but comic cavalry attacks are only the beginning of the Houston scoreboard’s repertoire. The thing is four hundred and seventy-four feet long and cost two million dollars, and there is room on its various partitions for simultaneous presentation of the game’s lineups and scoring, out-of-town baseball results, messages of welcome to fan groups, plugs for Astro souvenirs, and gigantic animated commercials. These last flash on between innings—routine cartoon plugs for potato chips, gasoline, an airline, and so forth, accompanied by sound effects but without a spoken message. This is the only mercy, for the giant set is impossible not to look at, and there is no “off” switch. Actually, there was plenty to watch and enjoy on the field in that first game, in which Roberts, in search of his two-hundred-and-eighty-second major-league win, was throwing a potpourri of soft junk and being outpitched by a twenty-one-year-old Dodger rookie named Don Sutton, who has been in organized baseball for exactly one year, but the scoreboard and its busy screen seemed anxious to improve on the baseball. In the second inning, second baseman Morgan and third baseman Bob Aspromonte came up with successive brilliant stops for the Astros, to rob Jim Lefebvre and Lou Johnson of base hits; there were shouts and applause in the stands, but the scoreboard commanded “
OLÉ
!” and was obeyed. By the middle innings, I found that I was giving the game only half my attention; along with everyone else, I kept lifting my eyes to that immense, waiting presence above the players. In the eighth, with the Astros behind, 5–1, Sonny Jackson led off the home half with a nifty bunt, and when Morgan singled him along, some fans began a hopeful, rhythmic clapping, instantly surpassed by the appearance on the screen of a giant female silhouette dancing the Frug, and then the words “
GO-GO
.” The Astros went-went for two runs, but the Dodgers added another of their own and won the game, 6–3. As I walked down the broad ramps of the Astrodome and, oddly, stepped outdoors, I heard a good many Texans around me still talking about something that had taken place way back in the second inning, when Chuck Harrison had doubled off the left-field wall, for the Astros’ first hit. The man in charge of the scoreboard evidently thought the ball had gone into the stands, for he pressed the button touching off the board’s home-run celebration display—an immense, multicolor, forty-five-second extravaganza depicting an exploding ballpark, shooting cowboys, ricocheting bullets, a snorting steer with flags on his horns, a mounted cowboy with lariat, and a fusillade of skyrockets. This time, when it was all over Harrison was still standing on second, and the screen boffed the crowd with its next message, “
OPPS
.” A minute or two later, catcher John Bateman also doubled, and the home team scored, but no one in the postgame crowd seemed to remember that. The board had been the big hit of the evening.

Baseball, of course, is not the only main event at the Domed Stadium. In the past year, it has put on such disparate attractions as Judy Garland, the Ringling Brothers circus, a rodeo, a boat show, a polo match, the home football games of the University of Houston, a bloodless bullfight, and a Billy Graham crusade. Some of these bombed and some did excellent business, but what emerged most startlingly was the fact that the Astrodome itself is its own best attraction. In the first year, close to four hundred and ninety thousand visitors paid a dollar apiece just to walk around inside the place. Most of these were out-of-towners, but in Houston itself the Astrodome seems to rank second only to the nearby Manned Spacecraft Center as a source of self-congratulation. Certainly there is far more conversational enthusiasm about the building than about the sport it was built to house; a local sportswriter told me he had never heard
anyone
say, “I’m an Astro fan.” During my stay, I found that when I forced myself to look at the Astrodome as a work of art, my admiration for the improbable cool bubble grew with each visit. The exterior is especially pleasing—a broad, white-screened shell of such excellent proportions that you doubt its true dimensions until you stand at its base. The Astrodome is the world’s biggest indoor arena, but its ramps are gentle, its portals and aisles brilliantly marked, and its various levels so stacked and tilted that immensity is reduced and made undiscouraging. There are almost no bad seats in the house, and the floors are so antiseptically clean that one hesitates before parting with a peanut shell or a cigarette butt.

Ballplayers like the Astrodome, too. Descending to the playing field during batting practices (I tried to pull up a blade of AstroTurf to chew on while standing behind the batting cage, but the stuff is pluckproof), I talked to various Dodgers and Astros and found them unanimous in the view that the lighting is now excellent, the prefab infield very fast but perhaps not as fast as Dodger Stadium’s brickyard, but the chilled, windless air profoundly unconducive to the long ball. Last year, only fifty-seven homers were struck in Houston, which is only a third of the total in most parks. Wes Parker, the young Dodger first baseman, said, “It’s a park for singles-hitters. Hit the ball on the ground,
ffft
, and it’ll likely go through. Good for our kind of team. I’ll tell you, though, I just discovered something funny about this fake grass. Watch bunts on it. Watch what happens to them.” I studied the next dozen-odd bunts laid down in practice, and each time, the spinning ball, catching the nap of the AstroTurf, suddenly veered off toward first base, like a marble dropped on the floor in a housing development. Later, after practice, I went out and walked around on the new surface, which has the consistency of an immense doormat. I dug down with my fingers and found the spine of one of the hidden foul-line-to-foul-line zippers that hold the new infield together; I had the sudden feeling that if I unzipped it, I might uncover the world’s first plastic worm.

The worst seats for baseball in the Astrodome are the most expensive—the narrow topmost ring of “Sky Boxes,” which are sold on a season-long basis in blocks of twenty-four or thirty seats. Such an investment in the national pastime costs a minimum of $14,784 per season, and entitles the boxholder to approximately the same view of the ballplayers as he might have of a herd of prize cattle seen from a private plane. There are other perquisites, though, including membership in the Skydome Club, a private snuggery in the Astrodome that offers Lucite womb chairs, a picture-window view of downtown Houston, and an Oriental restaurant equipped with kimono-clad Japanese waitresses and electric
hibachi
stoves. (Buyers of single season tickets have to make do with membership at the Astrodome Club, a capacious Turkey-red lounge and restaurant, with beaded curtains, swinging saloon doors, and the longest bar in Texas.) Each Sky Box is connected to an individual small apartment containing a living room, bathroom, refrigerator, and closed-circuit TV set. These roomettes are heavily decorated in Texas provincial, motel Tudor, and other “themes,” and I can only say I found them immensely glum—sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen. The institution is popular, however; women who are invited to a Sky Box dinner party and game can sometimes find their names in the society columns the next day, and a Texas businessman standing behind the Sky Box seats, with his foot on a railing, a glass of bourbon in his hand, and a ball game in progress far below, is sometimes in the mood for a little wheeling and dealing with the other good old boys he finds up there at the top level of the biggest new arena in the world.