The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (43 page)

****
What Tiant was probably thinking about out there was his control, which he was in the process of recovering after a succession of injuries and poor performances, which had at one time driven him down to the minors. Once he got back his poise, he became a livelier pitcher to watch—the most entertaining, in fact, in baseball.

—
October 1972

I
T WAS A SPLENDID
year for losers. The Oakland A’s, the first (and possibly the last) big-league team to wear green-and-gold uniforms and white shoes, and also (if one thinks of them by their old and infinitely better sobriquet and thus considers them a continuance of the erstwhile Kansas City, and previously erstwhile Philadelphia, Athletics) a team unrewarded by a pennant over the past forty-one consecutive summers, and also (if one has watched them play important but truly lonely games at home at all times of the season) a team almost entirely without a following, and also (if one has been there even briefly) a team spiritually representing the losers’ capital of the West
and
the East—the A’s stand undisputed as Champions of the World. Elsewhere, Steve Carlton, a pitcher with the last-place (in the National League East) Phillies, won 27 games while losing 10, thereby accounting for nearly half of his team’s total victories for the year (59), and also led his league in complete games (30), innings pitched (346), strikeouts (310), and earned-run average (1.98). The White Sox’ unpredictable Dick Allen, a capricious slugger hastily traded away by three different teams in the last three years, led
his
league in home runs (37) and runs batted in (113), and will presumably be permitted to wear the same uniform again next year. Among the top pitchers in the American League was Luis Tiant, of the Red Sox, who last year was dropped by the Minnesota Twins, toiled for two minor-league clubs, and finally ran up a 1–7 record with Boston; this year he won 15 games (including 6 shutouts) while losing 6, and led all the pitchers in the majors with an earned-run average of 1.91. Then, too, there was the totally mysterious season-long batting slump that afflicted the Baltimore Orioles, heretofore considered the best team in baseball, whose falling-off in all offensive categories not only unseated them as the perpetual American League Series defenders but also permitted an unexpected and wonderfully welcome down-to-the-wire pennant race in their division. Finally, and most splendidly of all, this baseball year concluded in two violently contested five-game playoffs and then in an absolutely first-class World Series, which went the full seven games and produced baseball of such prolonged and grating intensity that, perhaps for the first time, the pain of losing became as vivid and memorable to us, the fans, as the more familiar, leaping joys of victory in October.

The Yankees, surely the most conspicuous losers of the past half-decade, lost again, but this time with distinction, remaining in real contention in that AL East scramble until the last few days, and finishing a bare six and a half games behind the Tigers. Their true defeat, to be sure, was at the hands of the Mets, in the box-office standings; the Mets, although a far less stimulating team than the Yanks in the second half of the year, outdrew them again, this time by the shocking margin of 2,134,185 to 967,715. The hardy little band of Yankee fans enjoyed a summer of modest entertainments. There was a pleasing outburst of long hits by the illustrious Bobby Murcer, who wound up with thirty-three homers. There was a startling doubleheader against Kansas City late in August in which the usually docile Bronxites rapped out forty hits; two days later, in a twi-nighter against Texas, they recorded twenty-six more, for a four-game total possibly unmatched even by the old Yankee Murderers’ Row. More often, the script would call for a couple of scratchy runs fashioned by such uncelebrities as Ron Blomberg or Roy White or young Charlie Spikes (a rare new issue for the album of felicitous baseball names) and then defended by earnest but modestly talented infielders like Horace Clarke and Celerino Sanchez—all building to the obligatory scene in the eighth or ninth when the dangerous visiting team would put the tying or winning runs aboard, and Manager Houk, out on the mound, would gesture with his left arm to the bullpen, summoning forth, to a crescendo of happy screaming, the pin-striped white Datsun and its celebrated cargo. As the organ struck up “Pomp and Circumstance,” Sparky Lyle, the lefty reliever
sans peur et sans reproche,
would emerge from his cloud-car, hand his jacket to the ball boy, stalk to the mound, and (clamping down on his tobacco wad) fling a few warm-up pitches as the cries of “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” rose from the bleachers, and then in no time (most of the time) the game would be over and (almost always) won.

Up in Boston, the Red Sox fans seemed to resist such pleasures, even after their team took over first place from the Tigers early in September. Made wary by the Sox’ miserable early showing, and perhaps disaffected by a petty and senseless campaign of vilification mounted against the Boston manager, Eddie Kasko, by some of the local sportswriters and radio broadcasters, they kept a certain distance until the evening of September 20. On that night, playing at home, the Beantowners swept a doubleheader from Baltimore, defeating Oriole aces Jim Palmer and Mike Cuellar in succession and, in effect, killing off the old champions for the season. Luis Tiant, walking in from the bullpen to start the nightcap (he threw another shutout), was greeted with a rolling, continuous wave of applause, and after the game was over the writers and venders in Fenway Park could hear the sounds of homeward celebration rising up from the railway bridge and from Kenmore Square, exactly as they did in the great summer of 1967. The triumph was short, for the pursuing Tigers came in the next night and humiliated the Red Sox, scoring four runs in the first inning of a 10–3 game that reduced the Boston lead to .0006 in the standings. Watching these two celebrated powers (both old favorites of mine) that evening, I could detect subtle and contrasting styles and motives of play. Almost surely, the Tigers were driven by a sense of the years descending. With the exception of the left side of their infield—the estimable Brinkman and Rodriguez—this was the same lineup of veterans that had upset the Cardinals in the World Series in 1968; their line soldiers—Kaline, Cash, McAuliffe, Gates Brown, Freehan, Stanley, and Northrup—were all in their thirties now, and they knew that this was a late-season campaign to win, because it was most unlikely that they would ever find themselves in another. The Red Sox offered some old reliables, too—Smith, Petrocelli, and Yastrzemski—but there were a lot of new faces and new hopes on this squad. The following night, the Boston pitcher was a youngster named Lynn McGlothen, who works in a fever of optimistic energy on the mound—all twitches, glances, shrugs, and impatience—and one of the Sox’ early runs was initiated by a hit by Carlton Fisk, their rookie catcher. The third and last Sox run came on a rare homer by Yastrzemski—rare because Yaz (who plays first base now) has consciously altered his stroke, after years of diminishing effectiveness, and become a singles hitter. The three runs barely held up in a game that came down to two marvelous moments. In the eighth, the Tigers loaded the bases with none out, and the next batter, Eddie Brinkman, whacked a hard bouncer just over third base, where Rico Petrocelli barely gloved the ball, stepped on third, and threw home in time to complete a double play of Smithsonian rarity. Jim Northrup then hit a fly to short right, which Rick Miller caught in his webbing after a frantic sprint and a slide on his knees, and the Tiger dugout erupted helmets, towels, gloves, and disgust. In the next two days, the teams split the last two games of the set, and broke off the engagement exactly where they had started.

Eight days later, the Red Sox were still holding a bare half-game lead as the two teams, now in Detroit, began the final series of the regular season. The old Tigers, it turned out, still had a couple of bites left. They won the essential first game, 4–1, on the pitching of Mickey Lolich and three hits by Al Kaline, and took over first place. There had been a strange moment in the third inning when the Red Sox’ Luis Aparicio stumbled on the way home and then retreated, winding up on third base with another base runner, Carl Yastrzemski, and thus killing a promising inning. The next evening, before a game that the Sox now had to win if they were to avoid extinction, a writer reminded Eddie Kasko that the same embarrassing accident, involving exactly the same base runners, had also happened in Detroit on the very first day of the season, in a game that Lolich also won. Kasko, a quiet and gentle man with a perpetually mournful visage, nodded forlornly and sought comfort in the classics. “I know,” he said. “How does that thing go? Oh, yes—‘If
ifs
and
buts
were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas.’”

Tiant pitched for Boston, and his opposite was Woodie Fryman, another wonderfully revived elder, who had won nine games for the Tigers after coming over from the Phillies early in August. They had at each other in characteristic style—Tiant wheeling almost toward center field with each pitch and bobbing his head, changing speeds and nicking the corners; Fryman firing quickly, throwing sliders and inside fastballs—and for half the game the only rift in the fabric was a little error that allowed a Boston run in the first inning. The Tigers tied it in the sixth, on a walk, a sacrifice, and a single by Northrup, who waved his cap gaily amid a flurry of confetti when he resumed his place in center field. In the seventh, McAuliffe doubled and then scored on a single by Al Kaline—to an enormous noise, a deluge of noise—and the third and last run came in when Yastrzemski failed to hold on to a little infield chopper off Cash’s bat, on which he had a play at the plate. The ball popped loose just in front of the mound, and Yaz, distraught, flung back his head in agony. Another handful of outs, and Detroit had its half-pennant. Yastrzemski wept in the clubhouse, his head hidden in his locker. The loss did seem almost insupportable, for Boston, after this long and exhausting campaign, had achieved very close to nothing—second place in a six-team league. Al Kaline would have wept, too, I believe, if the result had been reversed. He had, in fact, absolutely distinguished himself; the winning blow had been his twenty-second hit in his last forty-four at-bats. During the celebrations in the Detroit clubhouse, somebody mentioned Kaline’s extraordinary eyes, which are protuberant and pale and somehow lynxlike. Manager Billy Martin nodded. “He’s got sniper’s eyes,” he said. “He’s out to
kill
you.”

To a fan who had given most of his recent attention to the American League, the first two games of the National League playoffs suggested that the principals were engaged in a different and rather more dangerous sport. Each of the teams—the Cincinnati Reds and the World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates—had entirely flattened the opposition in its half-league by the end of August, and their similar credentials (power, speed, experience, depth, adequate pitching, and enormous competitive pride) had given birth to a smug cliché that one heard in both dugouts: This, in fact if not in name, was the true World Series, between the two best teams in baseball; the subsequent encounter, involving the American League winner, would be an anticlimactic formality. In the opener, at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, the Reds’ Joe Morgan hit the first pitch to him over the right-field wall. In the bottom of the first, the Pirates banged two singles, a double, and a triple off Red starter Don Gullett, good for three runs. They added two more in the fifth, on a homer by Al Oliver. This was scary baseball. Oliver was one of nine Pirate players to register more than a hundred hits during the regular season; the Mets, by instructive contrast, had had none. The Pirates won the game, 5–1 (a
close
5–1 game, if that is possible), and the Reds lost their manager, Sparky Anderson, after a fourth-inning line drive by Cincinnati’s Cesar Geronimo caromed off the rump of umpire Ken Burkhart, behind first base. Burkhart, even while groveling on the Tartan Turf, called the ball foul, and then quickly added a codicil, expunging Anderson for the energy of his dissent. This drama was positively Sophoclean in its overtones, for Burkhart and Anderson had been among the principals in another autumn catastrophe, during the 1970 World Series, in which Burkhart and a Cincinnati base runner and a Baltimore catcher and a high-chopped ground ball had all mingled in an untidy puree in front of home plate; Anderson lost that appeal, too. After this game, Burkhart, meeting the press in the umpires’ dressing room, delicately lowered his towel and revealed a pink contusion about the size of a tea rose on his left haunch. “This was in fair territory,” he said, pointing, “but my
hip
was in foul territory, so under the rules the ball was foul.”

The following afternoon, the Reds got off the mark even more briskly, as the first five batters smashed out base hits—two singles, three doubles—scoring four runs and eliminating the Pittsburgh starter, Bob Moose, before he could register an out. This not only settled the ball game but offered a useful lesson in the Cincinnati style of winning. It is a system of wonderful simplicity, merely requiring the top three batters to get on base and the next two to drive them home, but rarely has any ball club managed it so effectively over an entire season. The Reds’ top three—Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Bobby Tolan—got on base an average of five times per game throughout the year (not counting force plays) and scored just over two runs per game—statistics to make any self-respecting pitcher retch. This efficiency was thanks in considerable part to the No. 4 hitter, Johnny Bench (40 homers, 125 runs batted in), and the No. 5 man, Tony Perez (21 homers, 90 RBI). The key part in this assembly was probably Joe Morgan, an assertive and powerful little second baseman, who had arrived from Houston during the winter in a major trade that revivified the Big Red Machine. Here, in the eighth inning, Morgan bashed his second homer in two days; the Reds won, 5–3, and the teams moved along to Cincinnati all even.

I moved along home—not out of a wish to watch less baseball, but more. The encounters I had seen, coupled with the news from the West Coast that the A’s had captured the first two games of their playoff with the Tigers in stimulating fashion, suggested to me that we might be in for a rare double festival of baseball, which could best be absorbed on television. The Oakland hostilities had begun with a splendid pitching duel between Mickey Lolich and Catfish Hunter that had gone 1–1 through ten innings; a homer by Al Kaline in the eleventh seemed to settle it, but the A’s responded swiftly, scoring the tying run on a pinch single and the winning run after a throw by Kaline skipped past third base. The next game was an easy 5–0 win for the A’s, but the participants had been electrified when Dagoberto Campaneris, the veteran Oakland shortstop, after repeated dustings at the plate, tried to even matters by sailing his bat at the Detroit pitcher’s skull. He was ruled off the turf for the remainder of the playoffs, amid a fluster of official deplorings that made the moral plain: Plunking an enemy with a thrown ball, rather than a thrown bat, is (a) more efficient and (b) the American Way.