The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (20 page)

Even a restrained backward look at this season and this Series must appear hyperbolic; already there is the odd temptation simply not to believe one’s recollection or the record. The Cardinals, sixth-place finishers last year, lost their best pitcher for half the season and still won their pennant easily, entirely dominating the other powerful contenders that had given the National League its recent reputation for late-season violence. The Red Sox, who finished the 1966 season one-half game out of the cellar, captured the American League pennant on the last afternoon of the year by winning the second of two consecutive essential victories over the Twins and then waiting for the Tigers to lose their last game. The Baltimore Orioles, who won the 1966 World Series in four straight games, fell to sixth place this year, while the Red Sox, Twins, Tigers, and White Sox clawed and clung to each other like rival mountain climbers at the topmost escarpment of the American League for more than two months, in the closest pennant race in baseball history. The White Sox fell only two days before the end, at a moment when it appeared that they had the best chance to take the flag and the Red Sox the worst. Finally, the World Series, which promised only to be a numb, one-sided anticlimax, went the full seven games, producing some of the best baseball of the year, and was won at last by the better team.

An appreciation of the Cardinals must be postponed in this account until their appearance, in due course, in the World Series. An appreciation of the Red Sox must begin with a look at their prospects last April, which seemed inadequate even to sustain the wild vernal hopes that leap every year, jonquil-like, in the hearts of their followers. The Sox were a young team, probably a better one than their ninth-place finish indicated, but a review of the troops suggested only that hostilities should somehow be postponed. The up-the-middle strength, the traditional spine of a ball team, consisted of an earnest but light-hitting young catcher named Mike Ryan and two rookies—second baseman Mike Andrews and center fielder Reggie Smith. Third baseman Joe Foy and shortstop Rico Petrocelli could hit an occasional fly ball into the Fenway’s short left-field screen, but both were subject to fatal spells of introspection when approaching ground balls. The large, slick-fielding George Scott was set at first, but last year, after making the All Star team with his early slugging, he had apparently determined to hit every subsequent pitch out of the park, and wound up leading the league only in strikeouts. The two other outfielders—Tony Conigliaro in right and Yastrzemski in left—enjoyed star billing, but neither came close to .300 last year. Yaz, who had won the batting title in 1963, finished at .278, with sixteen home runs; he had never hit more than twenty homers in one season. There was, to be sure, a new manager—Dick Williams, up from two successful years with the Toronto farm—but a new manager in Boston has the same approximate hopes for tenure as a titled Balkan bridegroom in a Hollywood marriage. Any manager, however deep-browed, hates to do much thinking in the first two or three innings, and thus must own a pitching staff. The Red Sox had none, having failed in the winter to improve the corps that was the worst in the league last year. Their best starter, the youthful Jim Lonborg, could strike out batters but had proved too gentlemanly in the clutch ever to enjoy a winning season in the majors. There was one strong late reliever, John Wyatt, and some passable middle-innings men, but absolutely no other starters in sight.

Reasonable hope cannot be constructed out of such a sad pile of feathers, but the lifelong Red Sox fan is not a reasonable man. In him is the perpetual memory of a dozen seasons when the best of hopes went for nothing, so why is he not to believe that the worst of prospects may suddenly reward his fealty? If he is middle-aged, he remembers when, in the early nineteen-thirties, the team’s owner, Tom Yawkey, acquired the Sox and almost bought a pennant within a few years, at an immense price, with a team built around such stalwarts as Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, and a lanky young outfielder named Ted Williams. He remembers the homegrown squad of the mid-nineteen-forties, which included William, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr. Those teams were wonderfully talented and exciting, but unfortunately they coexisted with two Yankee teams that were among the best in league history. There is one Boston pennant to treasure, in 1946, but that memory is accompanied by the awful vision of Enos Slaughter, of the Cardinals, racing all the way home from first on a double by Harry Walker and scoring the winning run of the Series while Johnny Pesky hesitated with the relay at short. There was a tie for first with the Indians in 1948, but the starting Red Sox pitcher for the one-game playoff was an aging journey man named Denny Galehouse, who instantly unjustified the hunch. Since then, the Sox have been more at home in the second division than in the first. There are other interior daguerreotypes to sustain the New Englander—Ted Williams towering over the plate and grinding the bat between his fists before pulling an outside pitch into the bullpen, Dick Radatz fanning the side in relief—but these are matched by darker plates: Williams hitting .200 in that 1946 Series, Williams never hitting much against the Yankees, Walt Dropo and several other immobile croquet wickets letting grounders bounce between their legs at first, a dozen assorted infielders messing up a thousand double plays. I have studied the diehard Boston fan for many summers. I have seen the tiny, mineral-hard gleam of hope in his eye as he pumps gas under the blighted elms of a New Hampshire village or sells a pair of moccasins to a tourist in the balsam-smelling dimness of his Down East store, listening the while to the unceasing ribbon of bad news by radio from Fenway Park. Inside his head, I am sure, there is a perpetual accompanying broadcast of painful and maddening import—a lifetime’s amalgam of ill-digested sports headlines, between-innings commercials, and Fenway Park bleacher cries:

“Hi, neigh-bor, have a Gansett! …
DOUBLE-X 9 GAMES AHEAD OF BABE’S SWAT PACE
… Oh, God,
look
—Slaughter’s going for home! C’mon, Pesky, throw the ball, throw the
ball!
…
YAWKEY VOWS PENNANT
… but the lowly A’s, rising for three runs in the eighth, nipped the Hose in the nightcap.… Hi, neigh-bor.…
SPLINTER DEFIES SHIFT
… and now trail the Yankees by two in the all-important lost column.…
He’s better than his brother Joe
—
Domi-nic DiMaggio!
…
RADATZ IN NINETEENTH RELIEF STINT
… and if Pesky takes the ball over his
right
shoulder, Enos is dead, I’m telling you …
GOODMAN NEARS BAT CROWN
… Fenway scribes stated that Ted’s refusal to doff his cap is nothing less than …
HIGGINS SEES PENNANT WITHIN TWO YEARS
… and Doc Cramer’s shotgun arm
just
fails to cut down Averill at third …
DID NOT SPIT, KID SWEARS
… the aging shortstop-manager, lately known in the press box as The Ancient Mariner (‘who stoppeth one in three’) …
ZARILLA TRADE STRENGTHENS O.F.
…
better than his brother Joe
—
Domi-nic DiMaggio!
…
HIGGINS, REHIRED, VOWS
… A bright spot in the Bosox seventh-place finish was Pete Runnels’ consistent …
TED FIRST A.L. SLUGGER TO TOP .400 SINCE
… but Schilling dropped the ball … delicious Narragansett Ale. So,
hi
, neigh-bor … and Keller matched Gordon’s awesome poke over the inviting left-field screen with …
MALZONE TRADE RUMORS DENIED
… and Slaughter, running all the way, beat the startled Pesky’s hurried …
CRONIN, NEW MGR, VOWS
… the hotly fought junior-circuit gonfalon …
FOXX NEARS SWAT MARK
… as Slaughter crosses the plate.…”

By Memorial Day, the Red Sox were only a game above the .500 level, but Manager Williams and the front office had seen enough signs of life on the field to decide that their young enlistees would benefit from the assistance of some experienced noncoms. Successive deals in June brought Gary Bell, a strong right-handed starter, from the Indians and infielder Jerry Adair from the White Sox. Later in the summer, Elston Howard was bought from the Yankees to help behind the plate, and then Ken Harrelson, a brash, hog-dog outfielder with the Kansas City Athletics, signed aboard for a large bonus, after having so enraged the owner of the A’s, Charles O. Finley, during a squabble that Finley threw him over the side.

Just before the All Star Game, in mid-July, Lonborg ended a five-game losing streak with a 3–0 shutout over the Tigers. Dick Williams said that this game marked Lonborg’s arrival as a great pitcher, but it is likely that Lonborg’s immense subsequent season was more the result of his decision in spring training to throw an occasional fast ball in the direction of the hitters’ chins. “Keep count of how many batters I hit this year,” Lonborg whispered to a sportswriter in April. Lonborg also kept count himself, recording the plunkees in ink on the back of his glove, like a fighter pilot pasting confirmed-kill decals on his plane’s fusilage. The final bag came to nineteen, with several dozen near-misses, and the message got around the league that Lonborg was no longer a fine, friendly fellow to swing against. He finished the year with twenty-two wins, nine losses, and two hundred and forty-five strikeouts. Meanwhile, pitchers like Bell, Lee Stange, and José Santiago began showing signs of equal obduracy. Petrocelli, Conigliaro, and Yastrzemski were all off to fine seasons, the rookies Andrews and Smith proved to be quick and unflappable, and Dick Williams established his directorship once and for all by benching George Scott during three essential games because he was overweight. Late in July, the Sox won ten straight games, came home from a road trip in second place, and were met at Logan Airport by ten thousand true believers.

I refused to believe what was happening. Unpleasantly cool, I told Boston friends to keep their eyes on the other teams—the White Sox, who were clinging to first place on the strength of nothing but a fine pitching staff and some hilarious needling of the opposition by their manager, Eddie Stanky; the Twins, obviously the class of the league, who were just beginning their move; and the Tigers, who showed signs at last of wanting the pennant they had seemed capable of winning for the past two years. Then, too, I was waiting for the Red Sox bad break—the moment of ill fortune, the undeserved loss, that so often cracks the heart of a young team playing over its head. The break came on August 18 and was infinitely worse than I had imagined. A fast ball thrown by the Angels’ Jack Hamilton struck Tony Conigliaro on the cheekbone, finishing him for the season. In that instant, the Sox lost their right fielder, a bat that had already delivered twenty home runs and sixty-seven runs batted in, and the only man on the team who could fill the key fourth spot in the batting order. In a few days, I could see, the Red Sox would … In the next few days, the Red Sox overcame an 0–8 deficit in one game and won it, 9–8, jumped off on what proved to be a seven-game winning streak, and climbed from fourth place to within one game of the Twins and White Sox, at the top. I gave up; from that week on, I belonged.

Even to neutralists, the last weeks of the American League race must have seemed excessive. On any given evening late in August, knowing the leader often depended on which edition of the papers one happened to buy. In the first week of September, the four teams reshuffled themselves nervously, the Red Sox lost three games without giving up much ground, and on Labor Day at Yankee Stadium Eddie Stanky had to tackle one of his infielders, Pete Ward, to keep him from punching an umpire and thus being ruled off the turf for the rest of the way. On September 7, there was a four-way tie for first. My baseball nerves had grown too raw to permit me to keep out of it, and a few days later I flew west to see the four top teams in action. When I arrived in Chicago on September 16, the Twins, Red Sox, and Tigers were still even-up, and the White Sox, who had slipped a trifle, were making up lost ground brilliantly. Two days before, they had beaten the Indians with a tenth-inning grand-slam home run, and the previous night they had won the first of a three-game series with the Twins, which they had to sweep in order to stay alive. That night, even the half-empty bleachers in White Sox Park (racial troubles on Chicago’s South Side cut heavily into the White Sox attendance this year) failed to diminish the wonderful baseball tension in the boxy old stadium. With two weeks to go, the season had narrowed down to the point where each pitched ball seemed heavy with omens, and spectators greeted the most routine enemy pop fly with nervous laughter and applause. The Twins’ ace, Dean Chance, was seeking his nineteenth win, and after watching him jam the White Sox batters with his jumping fast balls and low curves I concluded that I was in on a mismatch. Looking confident and workmanlike, the Twins loaded the bases in the fifth on a hit batsman, a single, a sacrifice, and an intentional walk. The White Sox pitcher, Tommy John, then leaped anxiously after a hopper by Ted Uhlaender, managing only to deflect it, and threw the ball past first, as two runs scored. A third came in a moment later on a single, and a fourth in the next inning on a home run by Bob Allison, which the Chicago outfielders studied in flight like junior astronomers. In the bottom of the ninth, it was 4–1, Twins, and the crowd managed only a few imploring cheers for their dying banjo hitters. The first Chicago batter, McCraw, singled, and took third on Ron Hansen’s single and Oliva’s subsequent error in right. Colavito then hit a perfect double-play ball, which manager Stanky or some other deity caused to bound suddenly over the third baseman’s head, scoring a run. Josephson, the catcher, now dropped an unsurprising sacrifice bunt along the third-base line. Chance pounced on it eagerly, dropped it, cuffed it, scuffled with it, patted it, and finally merely glared at it as it lay between his feet like a kitten. The score was now 4–2, with none out and the bases full, and wild bird cries rose into the night. Manager Stanky dispatched his third pinch-runner of the inning to first, and Wayne Causey, batting in the pitcher’s spot, came to the plate. Manager Cal Ermer of the Twins called in Jim Kaat, who threw a wild pitch, scoring a run and moving up the runners. Causey tied the game with a fly to right. More strategy ensued. Worthington came in to pitch. Smoky Burgess pinch-hit and was intentionally passed, giving way to another pinch-runner. Buford was also walked, to set up the force at all bases, and Pete Ward, the twelfth Chicago player to appear in this one-third of an inning, came to the plate. He had been hitless in his previous twenty-one times at bat, but he lined the 2–2 pitch smartly off Killebrew’s glove and trotted to first, clapping his hands over his head all the way, as the scoreboard rocket display went off. Afterward, in the noisy Chicago clubhouse, I saw two Chicago coaches, Kerby Farrell and Marv Grissom, sitting silently side by side in front of their lockers. They had their pants and spikes off, their feet were propped up, and they were comfortably balancing paper cups of beer on their stomachs. Their seamed, down-home country faces were still alight with the game. As I passed, Farrell nodded his head once and said, “Hum-
dinger
.”