The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (21 page)

The next day, a summery Sunday afternoon, Stanky got his sweep as Gary Peters shut out the Twins with four hits and won, 4–0. The cheerful family crowd got as much pleasure from the scoreboard as from the game; it showed the Tigers losing to Washington, and the Red Sox in the process of dropping their third straight to Baltimore. The Tigers now led Chicago by half a game and the Twins and Red Sox by one, and I passed the time during my flight to Detroit that night trying to fathom the recently announced schedule for postseason playoffs that might be needed to determine a winner; it listed eleven different possibilities for the teams and sites involved in two-way, three-way, or four-way playoffs. The World Series might never happen.

There was an enormous, noisy crowd the next night for the first of the Tigers’ two-game series with Boston, and Tiger Stadium instantly justified its reputation as a hitters’ park when the Red Sox jumped off to a three-run lead in the first. But no lead and no pitcher was safe for long on this particular evening; the hits flew through the night air like enraged deerflies, and the infielders seemed to be using their gloves mostly in self-defense. The Tigers tied it in the second with a cluster of hits, including a homer by Norm Cash, but the Red Sox instantly went one up, 4–3, after Yastrzemski’s bulletlike single up the middle nearly nailed the second baseman on the ear. Cash’s second homer retied it in the sixth, and then the rackety, exhausting contest seemed settled by Kaline’s single and Northrup’s double in the eighth, which put the home side in front for the first time. Just before that, though, in the Boston half of the eighth, there had been an extraordinary moment of baseball. With none out and Petrocelli at first and Dalton Jones on third, the Boston catcher, Russ Gibson, hit a sharp grounder to Dick McAuliffe at second, McAuliffe glanced over at third, freezing Jones there. Petrocelli, hoping for a rundown that would permit the run to score, stopped dead on the base path, and McAuliffe, ball in hand, ran him back toward first, tagged him, and stepped on the bag in time to retire Gibson for an unassisted double play at first base. No one in the park—at least, none of the ballplayers and none of the sportswriters—had ever seen a play like it.

Yastrzemski came up in the ninth with one out and none on. He already had two hits for the night, and was in the home stretch of an extraordinary season at the plate and in the field, which had made him the favorite to win the Most Valuable Player award in his league. Boston sportswriters, however, are famously unimpressionable, especially when the Red Sox are behind. “Go on!” one of them shouted bitterly from the press box at this moment. “Prove you’re the MVP! Prove it to
me!
Hit a homer!” Yastrzemski hit a homer. In the tenth, Dalton Jones, a part-time infielder inserted in the Red Sox lineup that night only because he hits mysteriously well in Tiger Stadium, won it, 6–5, with another homer. There were some seven hundred members of the Polish National Alliance staying at my hotel, and the delegates’ celebrations in the lobby that night made it clear that Yaz’s homer, his fortieth of the year, had been voted the finest Polish-American achievement since Cornel Wilde wrote the “Polonaise Militaire.”

The next evening’s game, mercifully, was a more languid affair, in which the Tigers kept putting men on base and allowing them to die there. In the third, they hit three successive singles without issue. The Sox had managed on scratchy run in the early going, but the Tigers’ fine left-hander, Mickey Lolich, was striking out Boston batters in clusters, and he seemed sure of his seventh straight win after Jim Northrup hit a prodigious two-run homer onto the roof, ninety feet above the right-field wall. Detroit loaded the bases in the eighth with none out but again failed to score, and its lead was somehow only 2–1 when Jerry Adair led off the Boston ninth with a single. Lolich, working like a man opening a basket of cobras, walked Yastrzemski, and then George Scott, after botching up two tries at a sacrifice, singled up the middle to tie it. Earl Wilson, the ace of the Detroit staff, came on in relief for the first time in the year, and gave up a sacrifice to Reggie Smith and an intentional pass to Jones. He then threw a wild pitch, and Yastrzemski sailed in from third. Gibson’s fly scored Scott, who slid under Kaline’s peg in a cloud of dust and unbelieving silence. Boston won the game, 4–2, and I came home with my first solid conviction about the pennant race: The Tigers could not win it.

No one, it appeared, wanted that pennant in the end. The four teams fell toward the wire in a flurry of failures, in one stretch losing ten out of twelve games against weaker clubs. With three days to go, the White Sox needed only wins against the Athletics and Senators to make up their one-game deficit. Chicago, pitching its two aces, Gary Peters and Joel Horlen, lost both ends of a doubleheader to Kansas City on Wednesday, and then fell out of the race when it lost to the Senators two nights later. That
coup de grâce
administered by the A’s, a last-place club that had lost both its franchise and its manager in recent weeks, was an act of defiant pride that everyone in baseball, with the possible exception of Eddie Stanky, could admire. Three teams, then, for the final weekend. Minnesota, a game up on Boston, could eliminate the Red Sox by winning either of its two games at Fenway Park. The Tigers, facing two doubleheaders at home against the Angels, would gain at least a tie and a playoff by sweeping the four games.

There was perhaps less expectancy than gratitude in the enormous crowd that threw itself into Fenway Park that sunny Saturday. The possibility of winning two games from the Twins while the Tigers lost two looked to be beyond even New England hopes, but there was the plain joy of being there and seeing the old, low-roofed, country-style grandstand and the humpbacked bleachers choked with that enormous sitting and standing assemblage of zealots, all there to shout for the team that had given them such a summer. There was a flurry of governors and dignitaries behind the home dugout, and a much more interesting swarm of kids balanced precariously on top of an immense Old Grand Dad billboard across the street behind the left-field fence. That pale-green, too close fence looked dangerous today—a target for the Twins’ Harmon Killebrew, who was tied with Yastrzemski for the home-run lead, at forty-three each.

Then the game began, and all the Twins looked dangerous. They scored an instant run off Santiago in the top of the first, and only a line drive out to the third baseman saved further damage. Jim Kaat, the Twins’ enormous left-hander, struck out four of the first nine Boston batters, looking as formidable as he did two years ago, when he beat Sandy Koufax in a World Series game. Kaat’s last strikeout, however, was an immense misfortune for the Twins, because he pulled a tendon in his pitching arm and was forced to leave the game. The import of this blow, however, was not immediately visible. Kaat’s replacement, Jim Perry, went on fanning the home side, while Santiago continued his anxious-making practice of pitching into and barely out of fearsome difficulties.

It was still 1–0, Twins, when Reggie Smith led off the Boston fifth with a double to the left-field wall, and then Dalton Jones, pinch-hitting, was miraculously safe when his grounder to Carew suddenly leaped up and struck the second baseman in the face. Adair tied the game with a soft Texas leaguer. Yastrzemski then sent a low shot that went past the diving Killebrew but was fielded by Carew in short right. Perry, perhaps still brooding about Boston luck, failed to cover first, leaving no one for Carew to throw to, and the Sox led, 2–1. The Twins tied it in the sixth, but Perry vanished, necessarily, for a pinch-hitter, and George Scott bombed reliever Ron Kline’s first pitch into the center-field stands. Baseball luck creates intolerable pressure in a close game, and in the seventh the pressure of the luck and the tie destroyed the Twins. Mike Andrews was safe on a topped roller that trickled about twenty feet toward third, and a moment later shortstop Zoilo Versalles dropped Kline’s peg in the middle of an easy double play, making all hands safe. All hands then came home on Yastrzemski’s homer off Jim Merritt, which landed beyond the bullpen, and the Red Sox players, leading by 6–2, attempted to pound their hero into biscuit dough as he returned to the dugout. The ensuing Fenway din was diminished only faintly when Killebrew hit a two-run homer over the screen in the ninth off Gary Bell, tying Yaz for the title and bringing the game back to 6–4. It ended that way, but I had to wait until almost nine o’clock that night before my hunch about the Tigers was rejustified, via TV, as they lost their second game. Now there was one day left.

There was no reticence in Boston the next day. A woman calling the Ritz-Carlton that morning suddenly found herself in conversation with the hotel telephone operator, who exclaimed, “What if the bases had been loaded when Killebrew hit that ball? My heart can’t
stand
it!” Bad nerves took me to Fenway Park early, and on the way I spotted an empty hearse with a fresh “
GO
, SOX!” sticker on the rear bumper. At the ballpark, several hundred reporters could watch Ricky Williams, the manager’s ten-year-old son, working out in uniform at first base during batting practice. I took this to be a last, brilliant managerial hunch by his father: Ricky had accompanied the squad during its all-winning road trip in July. “Look at him,” Ken Harrelson said admiringly as the boy made a nifty, Gil Hodges pickup. “The kid has all the moves.”

The big boys played the game, though—Chance against Lonborg—and the weight of it kept the crowd silent. The weight of it also seemed too much for the Red Sox. In the top of the first, Killebrew walked and Oliva doubled, and George Scott, relaying, threw the ball over the catcher’s head for the first Minnesota run. In the third, there was another walk, and Yastrzemski let Killebrew’s single into left field hop between his legs for another error and another run. The Red Sox managed a hit in each of the first four innings but could not advance the runners. Lonborg pitched on grimly, keeping the ball low. The immense crowd was so quiet that one could hear the snarling and baying of the Minnesota bench wolves between every pitch. The scoreboard reported Detroit ahead in its first game.

It was still 2–0 for the outlanders when Lonborg, leading off the sixth, laid down a sudden bunt on the first pitch and hoofed it out. Adair hit the next pitch through second. Dalton Jones fouled off his first attempt at a sacrifice bunt and then, seeing Killebrew and Tovar, the third baseman, charging in like cavalrymen, socked the next pitch past Tovar and into left, to load the bases for Yaz with none out. The screeching in the park was almost insupportable: “
Go! Go!
GO!” Yastrzemski tied the game with a single up the middle. When the count went to three and two on Harrelson, Yaz took off with the pitch, arriving at second just before Harrelson’s high chopper got to Versalles behind the bag; utterly unstrung, Versalles threw home, far too late to get anybody. Dean Chance, unstrung, departed. Worthington, unstrung, came in and threw two wild pitches, letting in another run. The fifth scored when Reggie Smith’s hot grounder bounced off the unstrung (or perhaps only unhappy) Killebrew’s knee.

It was growing dark, but the dangerous season had one or two moments left. Jerry Adair collided with the oncoming Versalles on the base path in the eighth, but held on to the ball and flipped out of the dust to first for a double play. The Twins, still fighting, followed with two singles. Allison then lined a hit to left; Yastrzemski charged the ball, hesitated only an instant at the sight of the runner racing for home, and then threw brilliantly to second to cut down the flying Allison. You could see it all happening in the same twilight instant—the ball coming in a deadly line, and Allison’s desperate, skidding slide, and the tag, and the umpire’s arm shooting up, and the game and the season saved. One more inning, and then there was nothing more to be saved except Lonborg, who had to be extricated—sans sweatshirt, buttons, and cap—from the hands of the local citizenry, who evidently wanted to mount him in the State House beside the sacred cod.

The Boston locker room presented a classic autumn scene—shouts, embraces, beer showers, shaving cream in the hair, television lights, statements to the press. (“Never,” said Lonborg, “do I remember a more … ecstatic and …
vigorous
moment.”) But then it all sagged and stopped, for this was still only a half-triumph. Detroit had won its first game, and now we had to wait for the radio news of the second game to know whether this was the pennant or whether there would be a playoff with the Tigers the next afternoon.

During that long, painful interval in the clubhouse, there was time to look back on Yastrzemski’s season. He had won the triple crown—a batting average of .326, a hundred and twenty-one runs batted in, forty-four homers—but this was not all. Other fine hitters, including Frank Robinson last season, had finished with comparable statistics. But no other player in memory had so clearly pushed a team to such a height in the final days of a difficult season. The Allison peg was typical of Yastrzemski’s ardent outfield play. In the final two weeks at the plate, Yaz had hammered twenty-three hits in forty-four times at bat, including four doubles and five home runs, and had driven in sixteen runs. In those two games against the Twins, he went seven for eight and hit a game-winning homer. This sort of performance would be hard to countenance in a Ralph Henry Barbour novel, and I found it difficult to make the connection between the epic and the person of the pleasant, twenty-eight-year-old young man of unheroic dimensions who was now explaining to reporters, with articulate dispassion, that his great leap forward this year might have been the result of a small change in batting style—a blocking of the right hip and a slightly more open stance—which was urged on him in spring training by Ted Williams. There was something sad here—perhaps the thought that for Yastrzemski, more than for anyone else, this summer could not come again. He had become a famous star, with all the prizes and ugly burdens we force on the victims of celebrity, and from now on he would be set apart from us and his teammates and the easy time of his youth.