The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (48 page)

A few nights later, the visitors to the Bronx were the Orioles, and the two teams—both participants in the stately quadrille then being enacted by the American League East, in which each dancer ascended by degrees to the head of the room and then gracefully gave way to another—played a nearly noiseless encounter: four hits and three runs for the O’s, to two hits and guess how many runs for the Yankees. Jim Palmer did not allow any pinstripes to reach second base. The winning blow was a shallow fly-ball home run to the right-field unused-furniture display, and was struck by the Baltimore catcher, Elrod Hendricks, who was up to bat for the second time this season. Hendricks got into the game only because the regular Oriole receiver, Earl Williams, got caught in traffic and was late getting to the ball park. Earl Weaver, the Baltimore manager, said, “He moves in mysterious ways”—apparently not a reference to either catcher. The Orioles, at that point batting .174 for their previous eight games, had apparently resumed the near-total batting slump that afflicted them all last season.

Real spring had come when I next dropped in on the Yanks; the visiting team was the Milwaukee Brewers, who, as it happened, were currently enjoying their turn in first place. It was a lovely, mild night, with several kites aloft in the still-bright Bronxian empyrean, and in the third inning I caught sight of a long, wavery pencil-line of migrating Canada geese far overhead. I pointed out this nonurban marvel to my neighbors in the press box, thus causing them to miss another wonder—a successful pick-off throw to third base by Thurman Munson. Luckily, the Yanks had other entertainments in store for us—four hits in the fourth, a nifty hit-and-run shot by Gene Michael that scored a man all the way from first, and a noisy, cheerful six-run outburst in the sixth. When Yankee starter Steve Kline suffered some arm twinges, Sparky Lyle came in and awed the Milwaukee hitters, at one point striking out five of them in succession with his downer. Munson wound up with a single, a double, a homer, and four runs batted in; the Yanks won by 11–4, and the Brewers gently took up a lower place in the dance.

Unburdened of my jinx, I tried manfully to deepen my appreciation of the Yankees, an experienced if less than dazzling team that had enriched its portfolio over the winter with the acquisition of a pair of tested regulars, Matty Alou and Graig Nettles. I wanted to care about the Yanks—I really did. There is more fan than critic in me, and I take far more pleasure in a game where I can yell for the good guys. I am also a confirmed front-runner, whose loyalty is hardly more selective than that of a Bide-a-Wee puppy. Still, I can’t quite attach myself to these Yankees, and to judge by the team’s home attendance this year, a lot of other people have been having the same difficulty. I think the problem is ghosts. As every fan knows, one of the strange particularities of our game is the vivid private image we retain of certain players we have seen, players we have watched with intensity. Hours or days after a game—sometimes years after—we recall a name, and in the same instant we
see
the man in perfect midafternoon memory. He doesn’t have to be a star or even a regular; all that is required is that we have watched him often enough or with sufficient emotion to make him our own. I can bring back Ed Charles, of the 1969 Mets, as precisely as Ted Williams; I can see Don Mueller or Tommy Byrne as readily as Stan Musial or Warren Spahn. Almost none of the Yankee stalwarts this year (and, to tell the truth, for several years) seem to have this spectral dimension. Bobby Murcer, Roy White, Mel Stottlemyre, Ron Blomberg, Sparky Lyle—I watch them with admiration, but when I come home from the Stadium and go to bed, what I see before sleep is Phil Rizzuto laying down a drag bunt, suddenly dipping the bat down by his belt buckle to tap the ball, and then whirring away down the line; Johnny Mize (a red, melonlike, country-farmer face) hulking over the plate; Yogi Berra lashing a bad outside pitch to the distant left-field corner; Allie Reynolds, in heavy trouble, glaring down at the hitter; or Joe DiMaggio motionless in the sunlight in center field, with his hands on his knees. Among the contemporary Yankees, only Thurman Munson has impinged on my picture show: stubborn, solid, dust-smeared, he straddles the plate, awaiting the arriving peg and an on-rushing enemy base runner, with his meaty arms and fat glove still casually at rest at his side—the catcher in a classic attitude, just before battle. This year’s Yankees have good power (Munson, Nettles, Murcer, Blomberg), fair defense, pretty good starting pitchers (Peterson, Stottlemyre, Doc Medich), firm direction (Ralph Houk), and irresolute competition (Detroit, Milwaukee, et al.); all they need now is an exorcist.

American league attendance is actually up a trifle, which is happy news indeed, and it is almost a certainty that the AL den leaders will claim that the designated-hitter innovation is responsible. I doubt this—partly because the only significant AL gate increases are in Milwaukee, California, Kansas City, and Chicago, where the local teams have only lately sprung into contention, and partly because I cannot imagine many hundreds of new fans suddenly clustering in to watch a .230 or .240 hitter strut his stuff. The truth is that, taken together, the anointed new men in the lineups have not been able to hit the ball any better than the eight other regulars—which is to say not well at all. They
have
outhit the pitchers-
cum
-pinch-hitters they replaced by a margin of .237 to .169. The real gain has been in home runs; the designees have hit out 107 so far, as against a full season’s total of 48 by the 1972 pitchers and pinch-hitters. It is probably useless to complain at length about the league’s shiny new thingummy, which was officially proclaimed a success almost on opening day, but one cannot forget that the game—the game itself, as played out there between the foul lines—has been wrenched out of shape. Gone now—in one league, at least—is that ancient and unique concept of a player’s total individual accountability, the requirement that he engage in and be measured at every aspect of this difficult sport. Vanished, too, is the strategic fulcrum of baseball—the painful decision about pinch-hitting for your pitcher when you are behind in late innings—and gone with it is the fans’ pleasure in vociferously sharing in and second-guessing this managerial bind. Now the game is farther away from us all, less human and less fun, and suddenly made easy. The DH was voted in after a minimal trial in the minors by executives who seem to believe that perpetual action is the name of this game, too, and who wish to make their sport resemble all other sports. Most of all, they are in the grip of what can be called the television state of mind—the conviction that all entertainments are the same and thus in absolute competition with each other, and that anything less than a No. 1 rating is clear warning that you must alter your product radically or prepare to throw it away.

For two decades, the central affliction of big-league baseball has been its sagging batting averages. Last year, the cumulative National League average stood at .248, and the American League at .239. These are figures to be taken seriously by any baseball fan or baseball magnate not just because they indicate that the game is declining in pleasure and energy but because they suggest that today’s big-league stars are less capable than their famous predecessors. It is this unspoken belief that has the most serious effect upon the game’s national popularity, and yet it is probably false. In every sport where comparable performances can be fairly measured—track and swimming come to mind—the modern athlete regularly and overwhelmingly exceeds the best marks recorded twenty or thirty years ago. There is no reason to assume that the strength and capabilities of contemporary baseball players are an exception. The hitting drought, then, is almost certainly due to a number of technical alterations in the game—night baseball, bigger ball parks, bigger infielders’ gloves, the slider, the size and strength of today’s pitchers, and the vastly increased and more effective use of relief pitchers. The redress should be minimal and precise—a further alteration of the strike zone, a livelier baseball, a more visible baseball, a shaving of the dimensions of the plate. By some means, baseball must bring back its long-lost hero, the .350 hitter—who is, in all likelihood, the same deserving young slugger now struggling so earnestly to maintain himself at .275. The designated-hitter ruling simply misses the point: it is the
batters
who have been killing the game at the plate, not the pitchers. The DH is a hype.

Wrigley Field, in Chicago, is a splendid argument against baseball chic. Built in 1914, it was originally intended as the home park for the Chicago Whales, of the outlaw Federal League, but has served instead, of course, as the honored family mansion of the Cubs. No Monday night games will be televised from Wrigley Field this summer (or any other summer soon), because the Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, has as yet found no reason to install floodlights in the park. He believes that baseball is a sunshine game, best played by athletes who can see both the top and bottom halves of a baseball in flight, and best enjoyed by a family audience, and he has absolutely resisted the game’s first and most radical alteration. With one exception, all the other major-league clubs now play the great majority of their games at night; a good many of them—the Dodgers, the Astros, and the Royals, for example—schedule
all
their home games, except for Sundays or holidays, at night. At least half of the Giants’ home games are held in the afternoon, because in the evening their stadium, Candlestick Park, is comfortably habitable only by penguins. A mere handful of the other teams, including the Mets and the Indians, have made any attempt to hold some vestige of balance between day and night games and their dissimilar audiences. With baseball’s declining attendance figures, the question of whether the game should continue to throw itself wholly and perpetually into competition with prime-time television and other night entertainments is no longer a dated or insignificant issue.

P. K. Wrigley is not entirely unadaptable. In contrast to many of his competitors, who severely restrict the telecasting of their teams’ home games in order to compel fans toward the turnstiles, Wrigley has decreed that all the Cubs’ home engagements are to be televised. This particular convenience, to be sure, is enjoyed by Wrigley himself, who never attends a game at Wrigley Field; an intensely private man, he recently told a Chicago reporter that he was sometimes tempted to drop in on his team but always thought better of it because he knew that too many ushers would fuss over him. The Wrigley eccentricities are endlessly discussed in high baseball circles, mostly because the Cubs’ attendance has remained so healthy over the years; last season, the Cubs and their downtown rivals, the White Sox, both finished second in their divisions, and yet the Cubs’ afternoon audience was a shade larger than the Sox’ nightpeople—1,299,163 to 1,177,318. Chicago is a terrific baseball town.

I happily renewed acquaintance with the Cubbies and their habitat in early June, during two weekday-afternoon games against the Dodgers. Wrigley Field is one of the few remaining enclosures that still merit the title of “ball park”—a grassland enclosed by an ancient red brick wall and a gentle, curving, spacious sweep of stands, two levels high along the foul lines, that is surmounted by a low, shadowy pavilion roof. Unlike many of the surviving original stadiums, the place is handsomely tended and painted—an estate that matches the charms of the Petit Palais of the East, Fenway Park. In the outfield, the brick wall is entirely overgrown with ivy and rises toward elevated banks of bleacher seats. In 1969, when the Cubs led the league for most of the distance—only to fall disastrously before the onrushing Mets in September—the bleachers were inhabited by vociferous, beery, baiting hordes wearing yellow hardhats; the left-field pack was sometimes led in organized cheering by a Cub relief pitcher named Dick Selma. After a Cub victory, everyone waited to scream in unison when Ron Santo performed a happy leap and click of the heels as the Cubbies streamed out to their clubhouse in left field. This year, most of the hardhats are gone, the bleachers are filled to overflowing with teen-agers, and Ron Santo has given up his
entrechats.
The Cubs, who lost so bitterly under their old manager, Leo Durocher, are winning in more modest, and perhaps more mature, fashion under his successor, Whitey Lockman, who took the helm last summer. The club’s fixed stars—Santo, Billy Williams, Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, Fergie Jenkins—are, in truth, a bit more than mature, and Lockman has so far performed a subtle orchestration of his famous elders and eager juniors. The first thirteen wins by the Cub pitching staff this year were recorded by ten different pitchers, and second baseman Glenn Beckert was rested six times during the course of a twenty-six-game hitting streak. Whitey Lockman is cheerful, low-key, and approachable, and, as more than one Chicago fan has observed, enjoys the enormous initial advantage in his new job of not being Leo.

My appreciation of the Cubs was at first deflected by the visiting team, the Dodgers, who, having just completed the most successful May record of any club this year, arrived in Chicago leading the league in both batting and pitching and were, in fact, ascending rapidly toward their suite at the Top o’ the West. They bolted from the mark in the first game, jumping on Fergie Jenkins for four lightning-fast runs in the first, mostly thanks to a homer propelled completely out of the park by Ron Cey, the Los Angeles third baseman. (A stiff breeze was blowing out toward center field—a frequent local meteorological phenomenon that causes National League pitchers to mutter in their sleep.) Cey, a compact, bunchily muscled youngster with a wad of sandy hair protruding from his helmet, was a stranger to me, as were the new second baseman—a jackrabbit named Dave Lopes—and the catcher, Joe Ferguson, who was the current league leader in runs batted in. Ferguson and Cey have solved the Dodgers’ perennial problems at their respective positions. In the third inning, Ferguson helped to fashion a run by flicking a dandy hit-and-run single to right, deposited so precisely that Glenn Beckert, the Chicago second baseman, fell to his knees in his attempt to reach the ball as it hopped through the spot he had just vacated. All the Dodgers seemed transported with confidence, bashing out fifteen hits in a runaway 10–1 win. The Cubs were flat. In the fifth, their right fielder, José Cardenal, ran down a long drive by Willie Davis, which he seemed to glove just as he got to the center-field wall; looking around happily, with his arms still deep in the ivy, Cardenal was startled to see Davis streaking past second, and only then discovered the ball lying behind his left foot: triple.