The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (18 page)

The
next
roofed stadium will probably appear in Detroit, where the Tigers have already signed a forty-year lease on a projected downtown dome. A Buffalo dome has apparently been scrubbed, but the idea of the roofed field as a cure-all for many of the ailments of sport remains widespread. In New York last summer, the enlargement and doming-over of Shea Stadium was proposed by the customarily cautious
New York Times
as a solution to the decay of Yankee Stadium and the unhappiness of the football Giants. What the price of this roof would be and who would pay it were not specified. Neither did the paper wonder whether any New York fans wanted indoor baseball and football.

The Houston scoreboard has been surpassed, by the way, by a three-million-dollar double-panel job in Philadelphia’s new Veterans Stadium. The home-run display, I am told, includes plashing fountains, the Liberty Bell, comical high-jinks by giant animated colonial dolls named Philadelphia Phil and Phyllis, and a guided tour of the downtown area, including Independence Hall, ending up with a lobster dinner at Bookbinder’s. Something like that, anyway.

—
October 1966

S
PECTATORS BACK FROM THIS
year’s minimum-sized World Series have been required to defend themselves against the repeated, baffled cry of “What
happened?
” The question, put by wives, office mates, cabdrivers, children, bartenders, and querulous grandfathers over the long-distance telephone, is at once redundant and very nearly unanswerable. Everyone knows what happened, of course: the American League’s Baltimore Orioles, a young and almost purely untested team of exuberant hitters and indifferent pitchers, humiliated the defending champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, possessors over the last decade of the best pitching staff and the best Series record in either league, in four straight games. The Dodgers scored no runs at all after the third inning of the opening game, thereby establishing a Series unrecord that may stand for the balance of the century. Contrariwise, two Baltimore starting pitchers and one relief man will now be able to open their contract negotiations next spring with the claim that their lifetime Series pitching records surpass those of Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. The brevity and inscrutability of this year’s Series were no less mysterious to eyewitnesses than to the millions who were done out of two or three happily wasted afternoons in front of their TV sets; fans and sportswriters straggling out of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium after the fourth game suggested theatergoers who had bought tickets to a famous melodrama only to find that the bill had been changed at the last minute to a one-acter by Samuel Beckett. Baseball of the Absurd, however, invites criticism and afterthoughts, and it is just possible that this Series will become more intelligible in retrospect.

One must begin with the suggestion that the turning point in a drama
can
appear three or four minutes after the curtain goes up. The Orioles moved into first place in the American League after the second week in June. By the end of July, they led the pack by the debilitating margin of thirteen games, and though they glided through the remainder of the season, winning twenty-eight games and losing twenty-eight, they finished in front by a comfortable nine without playing one game or series that could be called crucial. In all those weeks, the team’s numerous front-line youngsters—including catcher Andy Etchebarren, second baseman Dave Johnson, outfielders Paul Blair and Curt Blefary, and pitchers Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, and Wally Bunker—could only fill the languid hours with speculation about their coming test in the World Series. To be sure, they owned a large security blanket, made up of Frank Robinson, who was winning every important batting title in the league, the incomparable Brooks Robinson at third, and such unshakables as shortstop Luis Aparicio, ace pitcher Steve Barber, and reliever Stu Miller. But then Barber was lost with a sore arm, and Brooks Robinson fell into a horrendous slump at the plate, and waiting in October were the flutter and noise of the Series and the assured violence of whichever National League team survived a summer of daily warfare. The Dodgers, by contrast, won their race with the Pirates and the Giants in what has come to be obligatory style in the National League—a September catch-up, some last-minute stumbling, and the pennant on the final weekend (this time, in the final game) of the season. The superlative Dodger pitchers were perhaps a bit tired, but the champions walked onto the field for the first game in Los Angeles like a synod of elders proceeding to the front pews. For that matter, the only visible sign of pre-Series nerves among the Orioles as they took batting practice might have been the excessive cheerfulness of their manager, Hank Bauer, who exchanged quips with a thick cluster of sportswriters while his eyes followed his athletes with a preoccupied, headmasterish flicker. But the tension was there; a full hour before the ceremonies and the anthem, Curt Blefary said, “If this damned thing doesn’t start soon, I’m going to fly straight up into the air!”

The young Orioles’ first flying, it developed, was delightful, being merely up out of their seats in the dugout. Don Drysdale, the Dodger starter, walked Russ Snyder in the top of the first, and then Frank Robinson hit his second pitch into the left-field stands. A minute later, the other Robinson, Brooks, sailed one even farther, into a descending cone of unbelieving silence, and the visitors were able to take the field with that best of all tension-dissolvers, a three-run lead. They added another in the second, less spectacularly but with admirable neatness, when Etchebarren walked, was bunted along by McNally, and came across on Snyder’s single. McNally’s bunt was his last sign of competence. In the Dodger second, he gave up a gargantuan homer to Jim Lefebvre, a double to Wes Parker, and four straight balls to Jim Gilliam, and was saved from disaster only by a nifty running catch in right center by Russ Snyder. No one could help him in the third, when his control entirely evaporated. Etchebarren was leaping and diving for his pitches, and in a matter of minutes McNally walked the bases full, with one out, and then disappeared, having thrown sixty-three pitches, more or less in the style of a wedding guest heaving rice, and thus destroyed the pace and pattern of the game. His successor, Moe Drabowsky, struck out Parker, walked in a run, and then got Roseboro on a foul. That, it turned out, was the ball game.

Might Have Been is dull sport, but the Dodgers, who have been frequently disparaged for being a lucky team, suffered such appalling bad luck in this space of two innings that fairness now calls for some second-guessing. In the second inning, with Parker on second and Gilliam on first, Roseboro ducked away from a McNally wild pitch that was headed straight for Cary Grant in the celebrity boxes behind the backstop; the ball just ticked Roseboro’s bat, behind his head, and the runners had to stay planted. Without that freak, Parker would have scored easily from third on Roseboro’s long fly, which Snyder ran down. In the next inning, Drabowsky, after walking in one run, still had the bases loaded when he threw a fourth ball, inside, to Roseboro, who checked his swing but again saw the ball just tick his bat. Except for these two kisses from providence, the game would have now been tied, and—much more significantly—Drabowsky would have joined McNally in the showers. Drabowsky, a tall, experienced middle relief man, is a streaky pitcher, and now, miraculously unhooked, he streaked in the other direction. After Roseboro’s foul, he struck out the next six Dodgers in succession, to tie a Series record, and then established a wholly new Series mark for relievers by striking out a total of eleven Dodgers on the way to his easy 5–2 victory. Within an inning or two after he settled down, his dominance over the homeside was so evident that I was free to wander about in the back aisles of the ballpark and resume research on the monograph I may someday write about Dodger fans. Someday, that is, if I ever begin to understand them. The crowd that afternoon was the biggest in Dodger Stadium history, and it had paid more money for its seats than any previous Series audience, and yet the spectators sat there, inning after inning, in polite, unhappy silence, like parents at a rock concert. They were mostly middle-aged or elderly—men with long bellies and golf caps, women with elaborately waved white or dyed hair, their mahogany hands crossed in their laps. Their team was losing, but few hopeful or encouraging cries escaped their lips, and there were few children among them to venture a shout or two. Win was what they had come for, and, deprived of that, they sat in silence and listened to an amplified play-by-play description of the game that explained to them, by loudspeaker, what they were seeing. The bright field below, the running players, the game of baseball seemed a hundred miles away.

By good fortune, I had brought along to Los Angeles the ideal companion for a sometimes discouraging, sometimes embarrassing, and undeniably historic World Series—an almost perfect new baseball book called
The Glory of Their Times
, by Lawrence S. Ritter. The author, a professor of economics at New York University, has spent all his recent vacations tracking down famous old ballplayers and inducing them to reminisce about their youth and their extraordinary companions and the long-flown summer days they gave to the great game. The result is a vivid, gentle, and humorous narrative, accompanied by marvelous photographs, which is somehow both saddening and reassuring for the contemporary fan. That night, after the first game in Los Angeles, I read Tommy Leach’s account of the first World Series of all, played in 1903 between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Red Sox, then sometimes known as the Pilgrims. Leach, a small third baseman with that pirate team, recalls, “That was probably the wildest World Series ever played. Arguing all the time between the teams, between the players and the umpires, and especially between the players and the fans. That’s the truth. The fans were
part
of the game in those days. They’d pour right out onto the field and argue with the players and the umpires.… I think those Boston fans actually won that Series for the Red Sox.” He tells how the Red Sox partisans, who called themselves the Royal Rooters, drove the Pirates to the edge of distraction by their endless bawling of a hit song called “Tessie,” with extemporaneous insulting variations. “Sort of got on your nerves after a while,” Leach says. “And before we knew what happened, we’d lost the World Series.”

Today, of course, the gulf between the players and the everyday fan is almost immeasurable, especially at the Series, and most of the middle ground seems to be filled with distracters and explainers—play-by-play announcers, beer and razor-blade commercials, stop-action TV shots, and battalions of sportswriters. Baseball is perhaps the most perfectly visible sport ever devised, almost never requiring us to turn to a neighbor and ask “What happened?” And yet our joy is no longer instantaneous. Scoreboards tell us when to cheer, and the incredible catch, the famous pinch-hit double are not entirely real to us until we have seen them confirmed on the late news show and in the morning columns. Years from now, we may find it difficult to remember whether we were really there at all. Inevitably, the fame and richness of the Series make it more and more difficult for most of us to make the scene, since large areas of the two autumn ballparks are occupied by moneyed boxholders, the press, and the immense bureaucracy of baseball. The
Times
estimated that thirty-two thousand Series seats at Dodger Stadium this year had been sold to season-ticket holders, and that twelve thousand more were reserved for baseball executives and their employees and friends. There were a thousand accredited reporters, cameramen, and radio and TV personnel in Los Angeles. The postgame crush in the clubhouses has lately grown so dense that most Series teams, including both the Dodgers and Orioles, now stage formal postgame press conferences in chair-lined rooms, where I have seen a slugger approach the microphones like an Under-Secretary of State, clear his throat, and murmur, “Well, in answer to that, I’d say it was a fast ball, high and inside.” In the evenings during the Series week, the reporters and numerous, various-sized baseball wheels assemble at large cocktail-and-dinner gatherings thrown by the home club. These are loud, cheerful enough affairs, full of gossip and anecdote, old friends, and free provender, and yet I have never come away from one without a feeling of glumness. It is not just the annual presence there of so many down-on-their luck baseball men—fired managers, superfluous coaches, and deterritorialized scouts—all looking for the fortuitous handshake, the whisky-warmed happenstance that will readmit them, however distantly, to the sunshine game. Concealed in the hoarse rumors, recollected heroics, and comical dugout yarns of the baseball writers there is also a simultaneous adulation and bitter patronizing of the young and lucky that reveals how out of it all we reporters are, how second-hand. We, too, are hangers-on of baseball.

The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it. Sandy Koufax, although making his third start in eight days, including the pennant-nailer on Sunday, looked quick enough to lengthen his string of scoreless World Series innings indefinitely, and it seemed only a matter of time before his teammates would mark up some runs against the unpuzzling fast balls thrown by his opponent, the twenty-year-old right-hander Jim Palmer. For half the game, the only sign of twitchy nerves came from the Orioles. In the second, Frank Robinson stumbled as he fielded Lou Johnson’s hit to right field, and Johnson whizzed along to second; in the fourth, Robinson overran second on an error by Jim Gilliam and was thrown out easily. In the next inning, reality and the scoreless game came unstuck together. With Boog Powell on first and one out, Paul Blair lifted a high fly to center field, where Willie Davis, squinting up into the fierce, smog-glazed sun, allowed the ball to drop behind his left knee, and Powell and Blair each took two bases. The Dodgers thought so little of Andy Etchebarren, the next batter, that they decided to pitch to him, instead of putting him on and aiming for a double play. Their logic was perfect, but Etchebarren’s short fly subjected Davis to further corona observation, and he dropped it. Still shuddering under the weight of so many footcandles, Davis now pounced on the ball and made his first really unforgivable play—an angry Little League, heave into the Dodger dugout that scored the second run. Koufax, perhaps grieving for this teammate’s sudden arrival in the record books, gave up another run on a double by Aparicio, and disbelief was further stretched in the next inning, when Davis and Ron Fairly allowed Frank Robinson’s long drive to fall between them for three bases, and Powell scored him with a single. Struck dumb, the Dodgers stopped getting on base, and the game eventually ended with the score at 6–6—runs for Baltimore, errors for Los Angeles. It should be noted that the Dodger fans did not remain silent this time; full of spunk, they cheered bitterly every time Willie Davis caught the ball in the between-inning warmups. The day’s only display of gallantry came in the clubhouses after the game, where Willie Davis responded with grace to a reportorial cross-examination that would have done credit to Eichmann’s prosecutors. Only ballplayers understand how hard their game really is; over in the Oriole dressing room, Hank Bauer closed the accident report on Davis when he said, “If the Dodgers don’t want him, I’ll take him.”