The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (22 page)

Detroit led for a while in its last game, and then the Angels caught up and went ahead, but the clubhouse maternity ward was an unhappy place. Players in bits and pieces of uniform pretended to play cards, pretended to sleep. Then, at last, it was the ninth inning, with the Angels leading, 8–5, and the Red Sox formed a silent circle, all staring up at the radio on the wall. The Tigers put men on base, and I could see the strain of every pitch on the faces around me. Suddenly there was a double-play ball that might end it, and when the announcer said, “… over to first,
in
time for the out,” every one of the Boston players came off the floor and straight up into the air together, like a ballet troupe. Players and coaches and reporters and relatives and owner Yawkey and manager Williams hugged and shook hands and hugged again, and I saw Ricky Williams trying to push through the mob to get at his father. He was crying. He reached him at last and jumped into his arms and kissed him again and again; he could not stop kissing him. The champagne arrived in a giant barrel of ice, and for an instant I was disappointed with Mr. Yawkey when I saw that it was Great Western. But I had forgotten what pennant champagne is for. In two minutes, the clubhouse looked like a YMCA water-polo meet, and it was everybody into the pool.

Cardinal fans who have managed to keep their seats through this interminable first feature will probably not be placated by my delayed compliments to their heroes. The Cardinals not only were the best ball club I saw this season but struck me as being in many ways the most admirable team I can remember in recent years. The new champions have considerable long-ball power, but they know the subtleties of opposite-field hitting, base-running, and defense that are the delight of the game. Their quickness is stimulating, their batting strength is distributed menacingly throughout the lineup (they won the Series with almost no help from their No. 4 and No. 5 hitters, Cepeda and McCarver, while their seventh-place batter, Javier, batted .360), they are nearly impregnable in up-the-middle defense, and their pitching was strong enough to win them a pennant even though their ace, Bob Gibson, was lost for the second half of the season after his right leg was broken by a line drive. In retrospect, the wonder of the Series is that the Cards did not make it a runaway, as they so often seemed on the point of doing.

Fenway Park was a different kind of place on the first day of the Series. Ceremonies and bunting and boxfuls of professional Series-goers had displaced the anxious watchers of the weekend. Yastrzemski, staring behind the dugout before the game, said, “Where
is
everybody? These aren’t the people who were here all summer.” The game quickly produced its own anxieties, however, when Lou Brock, the Cardinals’ lead-off man, singled in the first and stole second on the next pitch. Though we did not recognize it, this was only a first dose of what was to follow throughout the Series, for Brock was a tiny little time pill that kept going off at intervals during the entire week. He failed to score that time, but he led off the third with another single, zipped along to third on Flood’s double, and scored on Maris’s infield out. The Cardinals kept threatening to extinguish Santiago, the Red Sox starter, but bad St. Louis luck and good Boston fielding kept it close. Gibson, hardly taking a deep breath between pitches, was simply overpowering, throwing fast balls past the hitters with his sweeping right-handed delivery, which he finishes with a sudden lunge toward first base. He struck out six of the first ten batters to face him and seemed unaffronted when Santiago somehow got his bat in the path of one of his pitches and lofted the ball into the screen in left center. It was a one-sided but still tied ball game when Brock led off the seventh (he was perpetually leading off, it seemed) with another single, stole second again, went to third on an infield out, and scored on Roger Maris’s deep bouncer to second. That 2–1 lead was enough for Gibson, who blew the Boston batters down; he struck out Petrocelli three times, on ten pitches. The crowd walking out in the soft autumn sunshine seemed utterly undisappointed. They had seen their Sox in a Series game at last, and that was enough.

Five members of the Red Sox had signed up to write byline stories about the Series for the newspapers, and Jim Lonborg, not yet ready to pitch after his Sunday stint, kept notes for his column as he sat on the bench during the opener. He must have remembered to look at those earlier memoranda on his glove, however, for his first pitch of the second game flew rapidly in the suddenly vacated environs of Lou Brock’s neck. It was Lonborg’s only high pitch of the afternoon, and was fully as effective in it’s own way as the knee-high curves and sinking fast balls he threw the rest of the way. None of the Cardinals reached first until Flood walked in the seventh, and by that time Yastrzemski had stroked a curving drive into the seats just past the right-field foul pole for one run, and two walks and an error had brought in another for the Beantowners. There were marvelous fielding plays by both teams—Brock and Javier for the Cards, Petrocelli and Adair for the Sox—to keep the game taut, and then Yaz, who had taken extra batting practice right after the first game, hit another in the seventh: a three-run job, way,
way
up in the bleachers. After that, there was nothing to stay for except the excruciating business of Lonborg’s possible no-hitter. He was within four outs of it when Javier doubled, solidly and irretrievably, in the eighth, to the accompaniment of a 35,188-man groan. (Lonborg said later that it felt exactly like being in an automobile wreck.) When Lonborg came in after that inning, the crowd stood and clapped for a long, respectful two minutes, like the audience at a Horowitz recital.

Everyone in St. Louis was ready for the third game except the scoreboard-keeper, who initially had the Cardinals playing Detroit. More than fifty-four thousand partisans, the biggest sporting crowd in local history, arrived early at Busch Memorial Stadium, most of them bearing heraldic devices honoring “El Birdos”—a relentlessly publicized neologism supposedly coined by Orlando Cepeda. Home-town pride was also centered on El Ballparko, a steep, elegant gray concrete pile that forms part of the new downtown complex being built around the celebrated Saarinen archway. I admired everything about this open-face mine except its shape, which is circular and thus keeps all upper-deck patrons at a dismaying distance from the infielders within the right angles of the diamond. The game, like its predecessors, went off like a pistol, with Lou Brock tripling on the first pitch of the home half. After two innings, Gary Bell, the Boston starter, was allowed to sit down, having given up five hits and three runs to the first nine Cardinal batters. That was the ball game, it turned out (the Cards won, 5–2), but there were some memorable diversions along the way. Nelson Briles, the Cards’ starter, decked Yastrzemski in the first with a pitch that nailed him on the calf. Lou Brock, having led off the sixth with a single, got himself plunked in the back with a justifiably nervous pick-off throw by pitcher Lee Stange, and chugged along to third, from where he scored on a single by Maris.
L’affaire Yaz
was the subject of extended seminars with the press after the game. St. Louis Manager Red Schoendienst stated that inside pitches were part of the game but that his little band of clean-living Americans did not know how to hit batters on purpose. Pitcher Briles stated that the sight of Yastrzemski caused him to squeeze the ball too hard and thus lose control of its direction. (He had improved afterward, not walking a man all day.) Manager Williams pointed out that a pitcher wishing to hit a batter, as against merely startling him, will throw not at his head but behind his knees, which was the address on Briles’ special-delivery package. This seemed to close the debate locally, but that night the publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire,
Union Leader
wrote an editorial demanding that the Cardinals be forced to forfeit the game, “as an indication that the great American sport of baseball will not allow itself to be besmirched by anyone who wants to play dirty ball.”

The great American sport survived it all, but it almost expired during the next game, a 6–0 laugher played on a windy, gray winter afternoon. The Cardinals had all their runs after the first three innings, and the only man in the park who found a way to keep warm was Brock, who did it by running bases. He beat out a third-base tap in the first and went on to score, and subsequently doubled off the wall and stole another base. Gibson, the winner, was not as fast as he had been in the opener, but his shutout won even more admiration from the Red Sox batters, who had discovered that he was not merely a thrower but a pitcher.

The Red Sox, now one game away from extinction, looked doomed after that one, but Yastrzemski pointed out to me that most of his teammates, being in their early twenties, had the advantage of not recognizing the current odds against them. “Lonborg goes tomorrow,” he said, “and then it’s back to Boston, back to the lion’s den.” Lonborg went indeed, in a marvelously close and absorbing game, that I watched mostly through Kleenex, having caught a pip of a cold in the winter exercises of the previous day. The Red Sox won, 3–1; two former Yankees settled it. In the Boston ninth, Elston Howard, who can no longer get his bat around on fast balls, looped a dying single to right to score two runs—a heartwarming and, it turned out, essential piece of luck, because Roger Maris hit a homer in the bottom half, to end Lonborg’s string of seventeen scoreless innings. Maris, freed from his recent years of Yankee Stadium opprobrium, was having a brilliant Series.

Laid low by too much baseball and a National League virus, I was unable to make it back to the lion’s den, and thus missed the noisiest and most exciting game of the Series. I saw it on television, between sneezes and commercials. This was the game, it will be recalled, in which the Red Sox led by 1–0, trailed by 2–1, rallied to 4–2, were tied at 4–4, and won finally, 8–4, burying the Cardinal relief pitchers with six hits and four runs in the seventh. Brock had a single, a stolen base, and a home run. Yastrzemski had two singles and a left-field homer. Reggie Smith hit a homer; Rico Petrocelli hit
two
homers. This was the first Series game since the Cardinal-Yankee encounters in 1964 in which any team rallied to recapture a lost lead, which may account for the rather stately nature of most of the recent fall classics. My admiration went out not only to the Red Sox, for evening the Series after being two games down, but to Dick Williams, for having the extraordinary foresight to start a young pitcher named Gary Waslewski, who had spent most of the season in the minors, had not started a Boston game since July 29, and had never completed a game in the major leagues. Waslewski didn’t finish this one, either, but he held the Cards off until the sixth, which was enough. Williams’ choice, which would have exposed him to venomous second-guessing if it had backfired, is the kind of courageous, intelligent patchworking that held his young, lightly manned team together over such an immense distance. In the opinion of a good many baseball people, his managerial performance this year is the best since Leo Durocher’s miracles with the Giants in the early nineteen-fifties.

Nothing could keep me away from the final game of the year, the obligatory scene in which Lonborg, on only two days’ rest, would face Gibson at last. Fenway Park, packed to the rafters, seemed so quiet in the early innings that I at first attributed the silence to my stuffed-up ears. It was real, though—the silence of foreboding that descended on all of us when Lou Brock hit a long drive off Lonborg in the first, which Yastrzemski just managed to chase down. Lonborg, when he is strong and his fast ball is dipping, does not give up high-hit balls to enemy batters in the early going. After that, everyone sat there glumly and watched it happen. Maxvill, the unferocious Cardinal shortstop, banged a triple off the wall in the third and then scored, and another run ensued when Lonborg uncorked a wild pitch. In time, it grew merely sad, and almost the only sounds in the park were the cries and horns from Cardinal owner Gussie Busch’s box, next to the St. Louis dugout. Lonborg, pushing the ball and trying so hard that at times his cap flew off, gave up a homer to Gibson in the fifth, and then Brock singled, stole second, stole third, and came in on a fly by Maris. A fire broke out in a boxcar parked on a railway siding beyond left field, and several dozen sportswriters, looking for their leads, scribbled the note, “… as Boston championship hopes went up in smoke.” Manager Williams, out of pitchers and ideas, stayed too long with his exhausted hero, and Javier hit a three-run homer in the sixth to finish Lonborg and end the long summer’s adventure. The final score was 7–2. Gibson, nearly worn out at the end, held on and finished, winning his fifth successive Series victory (counting two against the Yankees in 1964), and the Cardinals had the championship they deserved. I visited both clubhouses, but I had seen enough champagne and emotion for one year, and I left quickly. Just before I went out to hunt for a cab, though, I ducked up one of the runways for a last look around Fenway Park, and discovered several thousand fans still sitting in the sloping stands around me. They sat there quietly, staring out through the half-darkness at the littered, empty field and the big wall and the bare flagpoles. They were mourning the Red Sox and the end of the great season.

—
October 1968

S
OME YEARS AGO, DURING
a spell of hot-stove mooning for summer and baseball, I jotted down on a slip of yellow paper the names and batting averages of the top National League hitters in the year 1930. I have carried the slip in my wallet ever since, and on occasion, when comfortably surrounded with fellow baseball bores, I produce it. While being unmemorable in every other way, 1930 was a hitters’ year. The combined National League batting average was .303, and the top finishers, all full-time regulars, were:

Bill Terry .401

Babe Herman .393

Chuck Klein .386

Lefty O’Doul .383

Freddy Lindstrom .379

Paul Waner .368

Riggs Stephenson .367

Lloyd Waner .362

Kiki Cuyler .355