The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (41 page)

One lively, long-range proposal to increase attendance is a suggested future realignment of all twenty-four major-league clubs into new leagues—possibly a regional lineup of three eight-team leagues: Eastern, Central, and Southern-Western. A further, accompanying alteration would be the introduction of a limited number of interleague games during the regular season, arranged so that every big-league ballplayer could be seen by fans in every big-league city within the span of two seasons. The plan is startling and perhaps imperfect, but it is surely worth hopeful scrutiny at the top levels of baseball. I am convinced, however, that traditionalists need have no fear that it will be adopted. Any amalgamation would require all the owners to subdue their differences, to delegate real authority, to accept change, and to admit that they share an equal responsibility for everything that happens to their game. And that, to judge by their past record and by their performance in the strike, is exactly what they will never do.

Most recently, the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the antitrust implications of baseball’s reserve clause, which was challenged in Curt Flood’s suit, means without a doubt that this difficult and inflammatory issue will now be thrown down between the owners and the Players Association. It will form a central area of contention when the overall players’ agreement, governing every aspect of their profession, comes up for renegotiation this winter. Congress is holding a number of hearings on the monopolistic aspects of professional sports, but few congressmen in an election year are anxious to shiver the foundations of a national institution like baseball. Next winter could be another long one, and coming seasons are already clouded with foreboding.

Home stand: Shea Stadium was instant compensation for the emptiness of early April. I first got there for an afternoon game with the Cubs that matched up Tom Seaver and a junior right-hander named Burt Hooton, who in his previous start had startled the nation’s news-famished fans by pitching an opening-day no-hitter against the Phillies. Any statistical anxiety he may have brought with him because of this feat was dispersed by Bud Harrelson, who hit his third pitch of the game to left field for a double. Hooton throws an anomaly called the knuckle curve—a unique private invention that causes the pitched ball to drop into the catcher’s glove like a coin into a pay telephone—and he now began retiring Mets in clusters. Seaver responded with plain but honest All-American fastballs, and in one stretch twenty-one successive Mets and Cubs (both clubs, admittedly, devout practitioners of nonviolence at the plate) between them managed two outfield flies before Eddie Kranepool finally singled in the fifth and came around to score the first run in Seaver’s 2–0, four-hit win. There were some new faces in the Mets’ lineup, and one painfully missed figure in the dugout: Manager Gil Hodges, who had collapsed and died two days after the end of spring training. There must be very few of us who exulted through the Mets’ triumphant campaign of 1969 who do not retain some common permanent portrait of Gil Hodges—enormous hands thrust inside the pockets of his blue windbreaker; his heavy, determinedly expressionless face under the long-billed cap; and his pale, intelligent gaze that presided over that turbulent summer and somehow made it come right for his young team and for us all.

Two stimulating comeback wins over the Dodgers and the Giants in the same week in May began to suggest to me the resourcefulness of this particular Met team, already surprisingly settled into first place in its division. On a frigid leftover-winter night, the Los Angelenos surprised the Mets’ rookie starter, Jon Matlack, with eight hits and four runs in the first four innings, one score coming on a home run by Frank Robinson, the famous ex-Oriole. It was a Robby Special—a first-pitch line drive jerked to left with the loud and terminal
“whock!”
that causes sensitive pitchers instantly to avert their gaze, as if from a grade-crossing accident. In the fourth, however, the Mets executed a dandy outfield peg and relay—Agee to Martinez to Grote—that wiped out a Dodger runner at the plate, and Matlack, thus heartened, pitched obdurately while his teammates caught up. The tying run came on Rusty Staub’s homer in the eighth inning, and the winning run—deep in the stilly night, hours after the last hot coffee had run out at Shea—came in the fourteenth, on a tiny two-out infield poke by Teddy Martinez, who outran the peg to first while Harrelson scored from third.

Two nights later, with the Giants at Shea, everyone in the park took out his pencil and put a circle around Willie Mays’ name on the left-hand, San Francisco side of the scorecard and then drew a long line and an arrow that moved it over to the right-hand roster. Willie had been signed up by the Mets the day before, and was on the field as a non-Giant for the first time in his life. It was a strange feeling; something fixed in our baseball universe had been taken down. He did not play that night, but the subtraction of Mays and the injured McCovey from the Giants’ lineup gave that team an entirely new aspect; they were suddenly a young, fast, largely unknown club, far from contention now but full of new promise. The Mays deal, one sensed, had been right for them, too. Their next star was well in evidence. He is Dave Kingman, an angular, six-foot-six, uppercutting power hitter with a reputation for frequent bad strikeouts and occasional moon-shot home runs; showing us some speed on the bases as well, he rapped out a double and two singles.

The Mets, I could see, had been considerably altered by the
addition
of two names this season—Staub and Jim Fregosi, the latter a useful and experienced All-Star infielder acquired from the Angels.
**
For the first time in recent memory, the Mets’ batting order seemed to have both a top and a bottom. Its middle—the No. 4 man—is Staub, late of the Montreal Expos, a large, marmalade-colored right fielder, who invariably plays bare-armed, catches fly balls one-handed, and hits against left- and right-handed pitchers in the same fashion—that is, with consistency, adequate power, and a burning, almost exultant concentration. He should be a sporting deity in New York for years to come.

In that Giant game, the Mets were shy a run in the bottom of the eighth when the pitcher was due to bat, and enormous cries of “We want Willie!” now rose in the night air. Manager Yogi Berra, however, resisted the invitation and sent up a left-handed hitter, John Milner, who walked and was duly moved up and neatly scored. In the ninth, the bottom of the order finished it off—walk to Jones, single by Fregosi, and the game-winning hit up the middle by Grote. The Mets, winning by 2–1, were on their way to what eventually became an eleven-game victory streak. Two days later, Willie Mays made his debut as a Met, playing against his old team. Displaying his customary sense of occasion, always as close to perfect as that of Mme. Perle Mesta, he smashed a fifth-inning home run that won the game.

(Miniquiz: Willie Mays had always worn No. 24 on his uniform. The same number was worn this spring by a reserve outfielder for the Mets named Jim Beauchamp. Q: When Willie became a Met, which of them was asked to change his uniform number?
Answer next week.
)

On the road: I began my first road trip one day too late. The night before I arrived in Los Angeles, the Houston Astros had beaten the Dodgers with a three-run catch-up homer struck with two out in the ninth by Astro third baseman Doug Rader, and then a bases-loaded squeeze bunt by Tommy Helms in the eleventh. I saw the same teams in three taut, edgy pitchers’ duels—the Dodgers winning the first two by 2–1 and 3–0, to recapture a fractional lead in their division, which they then lost right back to the visitors in the last game, 2–1. Excellent baseball, I had to admit, if a bit austere. And not all
that
austere, either, since Dodger manager Walt Alston was trying out an infield—third baseman Steve Garvey, shortstop Bill Russell, second baseman Bobby Valentine, and first baseman Bill Buckner—that averages twenty-two and a half years old and plays electrifying, in more than one sense of the word, ball. Buckner won the first game with a two-run double, making up for a run flung away by Garvey; Valentine and Garvey drove in two of the three runs the next day, atoning for an egregious bobble and an embarrassing wild heave by Russell. The Dodger pitchers in those games, Claude Osteen and Al Downing, threw a lot of sinker balls, which the Astro batters helpfully hammered into the dirt, thus giving the home-team kiddies plenty of infield practice.

That second game, on Saturday, was actually settled on Houston hurler Dave Roberts’ first pitch of the evening, which Bobby Valentine hit over the center-field fence. Everybody was swinging at first pitches, it turned out, and the game went by so quickly that there was scarcely time for a visiting Easterner to appreciate the soft, late sunshine gilding the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, or for the Dodger promotion corps to get all its messages up on the scoreboard:
“HAPPY ANNIVERSARY NO. 1 TO THE KEITH GUSTAVSONS.”
…
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BRUCE GERSON, SPENDING HIS 8TH STRAIGHT BIRTHDAY AT A DODGER GAME.”
…
“WELCOME TO DORITH ZACHAIM, SEEING THE DODGERS SHE READ ABOUT IN HAIFA, ISRAEL.”
Downing whizzed through the Astro lineup, giving up but two singles, and the game was over in exactly ninety minutes, a new Dodger Stadium record (“I don’t think we ought to get paid for that one,” Wes Parker said) and probably the quickest game of baseball that Bruce Gerson or any of the rest of us there will see in our lifetimes.

The Houston infield, though less winsome than the Los Angeles youth movement, is splendidly accomplished. It is half home-grown—Doug Rader and a redoubtable shortstop named Roger Metzger—and half imported—Tommy Helms at second and the dangerous Lee May at first, the latter two having arrived from Cincinnati last winter in a trade that has vivified the lackadaisical Houstons. Whatever the adventures of the Astros this summer, none of them will immediately forget the ending of the final Dodger game. Walter Alston, with his club down by a run in the bottom of the ninth, now began to make use of his varsity. Wes Parker (who had played the entire game at first) led off with a single—only the fifth hit off Astro starter Jerry Reuss. Maury Wills, pinch-hitting, sacrificed Parker to second. Jim Lefebvre, pinch-hitting, ripped a scorching grounder past Doug Rader at third base. It
was
past, between Rader and the bag, but Rader dived full-length to his right, flinging out his glove cross-handed as he skidded in the dirt, and came up with the ball. He sprang up, losing his cap, and managed a colliding tag of the astonished Wes Parker, who was on his way in from second with the sure tying run. The game ended a minute later, and afterward Walt Alston, now in his nineteenth year at the Dodger helm, said, “That may be the greatest infield play I’ve ever seen.” Doug Rader, a sharp-faced young man, burnished with freckles, said, “Ah, I made one just as good back with Durham in ’65.” Joke. Rader had also hit that two-out homer in the first game of the series, and now he said, “Everything is so damned
different
when you’re with a club up on top. It’s great, isn’t it? Isn’t it great? Oh, I hope it’s like this all year.”
***
I hung up the Rader catch in my gallery—in the small inner room, between an early Clete Boyer and a couple of Brooks Robinsons.

Motown: you never can tell. Approaching Detroit, my next stop, I told myself that a couple of upcoming mismatches between the Tigers and the cellar-dwelling Milwaukee Brewers, a club then batting .184, would at least offer a chance to watch such celebrated veteran Detroit sluggers as Al Kaline, Norm Cash, and Jim Northrup strut their stuff. The only stuff on view the first night, it turned out, was some marvelous pitching by the Brewers’ Jim Lonborg, the erstwhile Boston ace, who entirely dominated the evening. It was a warm late-May night, summer having finally caught up with baseball, and the smallish crowd, having nothing much to cheer about, fell into a soft, languid murmuration. Tiger Stadium is an old-style city ball park, an ancient green chamber, and the sounds of baseball enclosed there seemed to come out of the past—the click of the news ticker in the rooftop press box, an infielder’s whistle, a brief little burst of clapping from somewhere down the third-base line, and then some laughter in the stands following a mighty strike call
(“Streuahh!”)
by the home-plate ump. The baseball writers were eating ice cream. In time, a cool evening breeze sprang up, and the Brewers scored a pair of runs in the seventh, and Lonborg, with his sinking fastball reminding us of his great summer of 1967, wrapped up his four-hit shutout. Just another baseball evening, but in Detroit there is a dreadful hovering possibility that evenings like this may not continue. I heard much talk there that within three or four years the Tigers will give up their park (formerly known as Briggs Stadium, Navin Field, and—way back—Bennett Park), where they have always played ball, and move into a new enclosed stadium on Detroit’s waterfront. A domed palace, however, may be almost beyond the city’s economic reach, and we may hope, with the utmost selfishness and good sense, that a continuation of the current business recession and dollar inflation may ensure another decade or two of life for the Tigers’ grassy old boathouse.

The Tigers won the next night, but not in style. In the sixth, their starter, Les Cain, was sailing along, still untouched, when he suddenly lost all poise and control, walked the bases full, and was yanked, shockingly, while still working on a no-hitter. There were other causes for dismay—errors by the Brewer infield and unfervent play by the Tiger outfield—before Detroit came from behind for a 5–3 win.

The quiet I observed in the stands during this two-game set was not wholly attributable to the torpid play. Now and then, an evening zephyr brought me unmistakable emanations of Acapulco and other sunny climes, and when I inquired about it, a Tiger front-office man smiled and said yes, the bleacher crowds did now include large numbers of young fans from Wayne State and other nearby centers of learning who seemed to be heightening their worship of the god Kaline with certain holy substances. “We leave ’em alone,” he told me. “To tell you the truth, we have a lot more trouble with the beer-drinkers from the auto plants.”