The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (47 page)

“Thank you, Cy!” said the principal, coming to the center of the stage. “That was splendid. Now, I know the boys want to ask you a lot of questions, and I wonder if you could give us a few more minutes out of your busy day?”

Cy nodded graciously.

“Fine, fine,” said the principal. “Perhaps I could just start things off with a question of my own. I think the boys would be really interested to know what you took when you were at school here. Can you recall, Cy?”

Tatum looked faintly surprised, but he recovered himself quickly. “Mostly,” he said, “it was overcoats.”

Tom LaSorda’s story also begins in boyhood. LaSorda, of course, is the long-term third-base coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers who recently was named the successor to Walter Alston as the Dodger manager, after Alston’s twenty-third season on the job. LaSorda, it can be proved, is a patient sort of man. He grew up in Morristown, Pennsylvania, and became a serious baseball fan at an early age. When he was twelve or thirteen, he volunteered for duty as a crossing guard at his parochial school because he knew that the reward for this service was a free trip to a big-league ball game—an event he had yet to witness. The great day came at last, the sun shone, and the party of nuns and junior fuzz repaired to Shibe Park, where the Phillies were playing the Giants. Young Tom LaSorda had a wonderful afternoon, and just before the game ended he and some of his colleagues forehandedly stationed themselves beside a runway under the stands, where they could collect autographs from the players coming off the field. The game ended, the Giants came clattering by, and Tom extended his scorecard to the first hulking, bespiked hero to come in out of the sunshine.

“C’n I have your autograph, please, mister?” he said.

“Outta my way, kid,” the Giant said, brushing past the boy.

When Tom LaSorda tells the story now, the shock of this moment is still visible on his face. “I couldn’t
believe
it,” he says. “Here was the first big-league player I’d ever seen up close—the first one I ever dared speak to—and what he did was shove me up against the wall. I think tears came to my eyes. I watched the guy as he went away toward the clubhouse and I noticed the number on his back—you know, like taking the license of a hit-and-run car. Later on, I looked at my program and got his name. It was Buster Maynard, who was an outfielder with the Giants then. I never forgot it.”

Seven or eight years went swiftly by (as they do in instructive, moral tales), during which time Tom LaSorda grew up to become a promising young pitcher in the Dodger organization. In the spring of 1949, he was a star with the Dodger farm team in Greenville, North Carolina, in the Sally League, and took the mound for the opening game of the season at Augusta, Georgia, facing the Augusta Yankees. Tom retired the first two batters, and then studied the third, a beefy right-handed veteran, as he stepped up to the box.

The park loudspeaker made the introduction: “Now coming up to bat for the Yankees, Buster May-narrd, right field!”

LaSorda was transfixed. “I looked in,” he says, “and
it was the same man!”

The first pitch to Maynard nearly removed the button from the top of his cap. The second, behind his knees, inspired a beautiful sudden
entrechat.
The third, under his Adam’s apple, confirmed the message, and Maynard threw away his bat and charged the mound like a fighting bull entering the plaza in Seville. The squads spilled out onto the field and separated the two men, and only after a lengthy and disorderly interval was baseball resumed.

After the game, LaSorda was dressing in the visitors’ locker room when he was told that he had a caller at the door. It was Buster Maynard, who wore a peaceable but puzzled expression. “Listen, kid,” he said to LaSorda, “did I ever meet you before?”

“Not exactly,” Tom said.

“Did I bat against you someplace, maybe?”

“Nope.”

“Well, why were you tryin’ to take my head off out there?”

LaSorda spread his hands wide. “You didn’t give me your autograph,” he said.

Tom LaSorda tells this story each spring to the new young players who make the Dodger club.
“Always
give an autograph when somebody asks you,” he says gravely. “You never can tell. In baseball, anything can happen.”

—
July 1973

O
NCE A PASTIME, BASEBALL
is becoming another national anomaly—an institution that is less and less recognizable as it grows in age and familiarity. The executives of the game, displaying their customary blend of irresolution, impulsiveness, and inflexibility, failed this year even to agree on the basic rules, presenting us with one league of teams playing ten men on a side and another offering the more customary nine. Thus inspired, the leagues have responded with three months of stimulating but inexplicable competition, which has been reflected in team standings of unmatched discombobulation. At times this spring, even the most resilient fan must have felt his grip on things begin to loosen when he opened his morning paper and turned to the good old standings. In mid-May, a full month into the campaign, the six teams in the American League East were separated by the span of a single game. Splendid, total competition, one could conclude, and especially heartening for the supporters of the downtrodden Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers—until one noticed that every one of the six clubs had lost more games than it had won, and that the race in fact constituted nothing more than a flabby bulge below the waistline of .500 ball. A month later, the American League East
and
West had reached parallel levels of irresolution, having sorted out one clear loser in each division—Cleveland (East) and Texas (West)—and ten other clubs so closely bunched that the standings could be absolutely reversed in the space of a single weekend. Milwaukee, Boston, New York, and Detroit had all taken turns at the top of the East, which most resembled a diorama of heaving stegosauri in a tar pit. Just recently, almost halfway through the long season, the AL East has discovered one club apparently capable of a sustained upright posture—the Yankees, of all people, whose sudden recent successes have brought back unexpected visions of the kind of quiet, well-ordered Yankee summers we all grew up on.

The National League has so far managed a more commonplace arrangement of leaders, contenders, and stragglers, although its certified powers, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, have been out of the sunshine this spring; the Pirates (who were badly shaken by the death of their great star, Roberto Clemente, in a plane crash last winter) appear to have lost the mysterious group energy that vitalizes winning clubs. The true aristocracy of baseball at present is probably represented by the National League West, which is topped by the Dodgers, with their enormous margin (at this writing) of twenty-one games over the .500 level. The most interesting journey to date has to be that of the Cardinals, who fell into a well by losing twenty of their first twenty-five games, and then instantly resurfaced, looking barely damp, after winning sixteen of their next eighteen.

Back in the AL, the world champion Oakland A’s have pushed to the fore after a notoriously languid start; their surprising opposition in the West has come from the Kansas City Royals, a newly muscled entrant that scores runs and gives up runs in thick, juicy clusters. The Royals’ main man, John Mayberry, is an entertaining new slugger whose style at the plate features a forward-spinning airplane-propeller windup with the bat just before the pitch arrives—a perfect replica of Willie Stargell’s countdown procedures. If Mayberry has in fact decided to model himself on Willie Stargell, he has picked a superior model. Stargell, I sometimes think, may be one of the last baseball men in whom we can still glimpse the hero. He not only hits the ball often and for great distances—he is currently leading both leagues in home runs—but comports himself in all days and weathers with immense style. I remember watching Stargell in October of 1971, when he was suffering an epochal slump at the plate, brought on in part by painful injuries to both knees. He went hitless through all four games of the playoffs and did scarcely better in the famous World Series against the Orioles, batting in only one run in the seven games. Stargell had led his league in homers that year and had knocked in 125 runs, and he was accustomed to playing a large, even triumphant, part in Pirate affairs, and yet he endured those repeated humiliations at the plate with total composure, trudging back to the dugout after still another strikeout or pop-up without the smallest gesture of distress or despair. I remember coming up to him in the clubhouse after one of those empty afternoons and asking him how it was possible for a proud, intensely competitive man to put up with that kind of disappointment without giving way to anger or explanation. Stargell’s four-year-old son, Wilver, Jr., was playing on the floor of his cubicle, and Stargell made a gesture toward him and said, “There’s a time in life when a man has to decide if he’s going to
be
a man.” Later, I realized that this was probably a true Hellenic answer: one couldn’t say whether one most admired the principle or the philosopher’s way of expounding it.

A few traditions, thank heaven, remain fixed in the summer state of things—the June collapse of the Giants, Gaylord Perry throwing (or not throwing) spitballs, Hank Aaron hitting homers, and the commissioner … well, commissioning. The Giants, after leading the National League West from the very beginning of the season, lost fourteen games out of twenty-seven in the month of June—a pattern as predictable as the spring ascension of Ursa Major. Pitching, as usual, was the problem, and the San Francisco manager, Charlie Fox, confessed, “Our earned-run average looks like the national debt.” Gaylord Perry, who formerly did not (or did) throw wet pitches for Charlie Fox, now performs similarly for the Indians, eliciting from American League batters the same howls of outrage that he used to inspire in the National. Bobby Murcer complained so vehemently about the umpires’ failure to prosecute Perry for the illegal pitch that he was called in and fined two hundred and fifty dollars by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Murcer paid up—and struck a game-winning homer off Perry that night, while the sporting press speculated like Peter Wimseys about the nature of Perry’s glop (K-Y Jelly is the leading suspect) and its hiding place (inside the neckband, perhaps) on Perry’s person. Perry has professed innocence, but retains his familiar mannerisms—viz.: right fingers to the bill of the cap, to the side of the cap, to the back of the cap, to the right sideburn, to the hair above the right ear, to the hair behind the right ear, to the neck—before delivering each pitch to each quivering batter. Is Perry throwing the spitter? Did the Commissioner’s fine constitute an unfair incentive to Bobby Murcer—and if so, should not each slugger on every contending team be similarly docked before going out to face the horrid Perry predilection? Does Gaylord Perry have a tiny vial of water from the Dead Sea concealed inside his eustachian tube? The Supreme Court is expected to rule on these burning issues before their summer recess.

Hank Aaron, now thirty-nine years old, is batting only .221 but has perfected an admirable habit of conservation, since almost half of his hits this year have been homers. His total of 23 to date has brought his lifetime to 696, which means that he is within striking distance this season of Babe Ruth’s all-hallowed lifetime mark of 714—a possibility that excites everybody but his fellow townspeople. The Braves’ attendance so far strongly suggests that if Hank should waft the record-breaker during a home game the deed will be witnessed by more mediapersons than Atlantans. National League pitchers have already begun to speculate about which one of them will be the victim of No. 715, and thus be propelled into the history books in the manner of a Balaclava cavalryman or a Joe Louis knockee. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, on hearing of this bullpen chatter, issued a stern warning that he would fine any pitcher guilty of not trying his best to get Aaron out on the historic day. The commissioner has been in splendid moral fettle this year. During spring training, when the news came out that two Yankee pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, were terminating their marriages in order to make new domestic arrangements with each other’s wives, Mr. Kuhn issued an advisory opinion on the matter—not marital counseling, it turned out, but an expression of concern for the image of the game. Fritz Peterson promised the commissioner he would try not to do it again.

The coming eminence of the Yankees was not detectable during my early calls at the Stadium, where I found the customary acres of empty blue grandstand seats and the customary earnest but unavailing competence on the field. In four of my first seven Yankee games this year, the Bronxites scored no runs at all. This jinx has nothing to do with the Stadium, because I have also seen the Yanks lose just as convincingly on the road. (Cf. against Mickey Lolich in Detroit, May 24: Tigers 4, Yankees 0.) On my first call at Yankee Stadium, the beneficiaries of my whammy were the White Sox, who bashed out thirteen hits and three homers in the course of demolishing Fritz Peterson, 8–4. The day also provided my first look at the American League’s new designated hitters—the tenth man in the lineup, who bats in place of the pitcher. The incumbents—Mike Andrews for the White Sox and Jim Ray Hart for the Yanks—bopped two doubles, two singles, and some line-drive outs, thus running their early DH averages to .429 and .529, respectively, and blunting my moldy-fig objections to the innovations, at least for a time. The other true first, for me and perhaps for everyone there, was the moment in the eighth inning when Yankee catcher Thurman Munson and third baseman Graig Nettles, converging on a bunt by Jorge Orta, made simultaneous bare-handed grabs at the ball and came up holding hands.

I went back the next afternoon and saw the Yankees shut out again, but I cannot take all the credit for the 3–0 loss, since the White Sox pitcher was Wilbur Wood, the knuckleballer, who had unmanned the Yankees on his five most recent outings against them; he beat them four times last year, allowing just two earned runs in thirty-six innings. At the time of this first 1973 visit to the Bronx, the Sox were batting over .300 as a team, and with Wood flipping up his flighty, sailing, fingertip junk, the eventual 3–0 margin looked like a mismatch. Everything about Wilbur Wood is disarming. On the mound, he displays a comfortable expanse of turn and the stiffish-looking knees of a confirmed indoorsman, and thus resembles a left-handed accountant or pastry chef on a Sunday outing. Even the knuckler—which he throws, sensibly, on nearly every pitch—looks almost modest, for it does not leap and quiver like Hoyt Wilhelm’s old hooked trout. Like all knuckle-bailers, Wood works with little strain, and, at the age of thirty-one, he may be just approaching his best years. He pitched 377 innings last year. The Yankee shutout came after Wood had rested for only two days—a frequent custom of his, inaugurated by the iconoclastic Chicago pitching coach, Johnny Sain. After the game, Wood sat comfortably in the corner of the clubhouse and drank several beers and smoked several cigarettes while he talked cheerfully to the reporters in a mild Bahst’n accent (he is from Cambridge), explaining that the only difficult part of his difficult pitch is learning to throw it softer, rather than harder, when he is in trouble. “He has the
perfect
disposition for the knuckleball,” Sain said, looking on with evident affection. “He’s always like this. He has as fine a control over himself as any athlete I’ve ever seen.”