The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (50 page)

Don. Don and his wife, Susan, are attending a performance of
The Marriage of Figaro
by the touring Metropolitan Opera company at the Masonic Temple Auditorium in Detroit. They are both very fond of the theater, and they go to a play or an opera whenever they can manage it. As usual, Don has bought seats near the back of the balcony, where he knows the radio reception is better. The two of them are following the opera attentively, but Don is also holding a small transistor radio up to his left ear. (He is left-eared all the way.) Through long training, he is able to hear both the opera and (because of the good reception) the voice of Ernie Harwell, the sports broadcaster for Station WJR, who is at this moment describing the action at Tiger Stadium, where the Brewers are leading the Tigers 1–0 in the top of the fourth. A woman sitting directly behind Don and Susan is unable to restrain her curiosity, and during a recitative she leans forward and taps Don on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she whispers. “I was just wondering what you’re listening to on that little radio.”

Don half turns in his seat. “Simultaneous translation,” he whispers.

In this country’s long love affair with professional sports, the athlete has more and more come to resemble the inamorata—an object of unceasing scrutiny, rapturous adoration, and expensive adornment—while the suitor, or fan, remains forever loyal, shabby, and unknown. Sports fans are thought of as a mass—statistics that are noticed only when they do not fall within their predicted norms—but the individual fan (except for a few self-made celebrities, like Hilda Chester, the Ebbets Field bell ringer, or the Knicks’ Dancing Harry, or the Mets’ folding-sign man) is a loner, a transient cipher, whose streaks and slumps go unrecorded in the annals of his game. Every sport, however, has its great fans as well as its great athletes—classic performers whose exceptional powers set them apart from the journeyman spectator. They are veterans who deserve notice if only for the fact that their record of attachment and service to their game and their club often exceeds that of any player down on the field. The home team, in their belief, belongs to them more than to this passing manager or to that arriviste owner, and they are often cranky possessors, trembling with memory and pride and frustration, as ridiculous and touching as any lovers. These rare ones make up a fraction of every sporting audience, but they seem to cluster more thickly in the homes of the older, well-entrenched franchises. The three Detroit nonpareils are a vivid constellation of contemporary baseball fandom: Maxwell H. Lapides, a businessman who went to work last spring as a vice-president of a national collection agency in Chicago, thus painfully exiling himself from his friends and his ball team; Bertram Gordon, whose real-estate agency specializes in finding and leasing business and shopping-center locations in the areas of thickening population outside the central city; and Dr. Donald N. Shapiro, a distinguished oral surgeon. They are intimate friends, united by their ages (middle to upper forties), their similar backgrounds and styles of life, their neighboring families, their Jewishness, and their wit and intelligence, but most of all by their consuming passion for the Detroit Tigers. None of the three is willing to accept the cheerfully patronizing tone that nonsporting friends and relatives usually direct toward the baseball-bitten; none of the three, for that matter, regards himself as a baseball fan at all. “Right from the beginning, I have been a Tiger fan and nothing else,” Max Lapides said this summer. “Other men can happily go to ball games wherever they happen to find themselves—not me. My interest is the Tigers. They are the sun, and all the twenty-three other teams are satellites. You can’t begin to understand or appreciate this game unless you have an intense involvement.”

Dr. Donald Shapiro, in spite of the demands imposed by his successful and extensive practice, by his family (he is married and has three children), by his writing for medical and dental journals, by his sideline in theatricals (he played a small part in a Hollywood gangster film shot in Detroit last winter), by his weekend career as a highly competitive Class A tennis player, and by his voluminous, wide-ranging reading, manages to keep abreast of the Tigers’ news almost inning by inning throughout their 162-game season. Evenings, friends at his house or at their own have taught themselves to ignore the fact that his left ear, like van Gogh’s, is of no immediate social use; in the spring, when a good many ball games are played in the afternoon, Shapiro tries to schedule his surgical appointments in hospital operating rooms that he knows to have an acceptable interior Harwell-level. (Sinai Hospital has the worst reception in Detroit.) When all else fails, he calls his baseball friends, and Bert Gordon has come to recognize the sound of Don’s telephone voice, blurred with haste and a surgical mask, asking, “How’re we doing?” One afternoon in 1970, Bert answered his phone and heard Don whisper, “This is probably a violation of every professional canon, but I can’t help it. Guess who I’ve got in the chair!”

“Who?” said Bert.

“Chet Laabs!”

“Chet Laabs!”

“Chet Laabs!”

They hung up. (Chet Laabs, a chunky, unremarkable outfielder, played for the Tigers from 1937 to 1939.)

This kind of belonging brooks no alternatives. “When I’m listening to a game, there is nothing that annoys me as much as somebody who clearly doesn’t care coming up to me and smiling and saying ‘How’s it going?’” Don says,
“How’s it going!
Why, don’t they understand that for a real fan it’s always a matter of suffering and ecstasy? What we’re involved with here is exaltation!”

Bert Gordon, in turn, detected a crucial slight in the midst of a recent bridge-table conversation, and demanded, “How come you’re a bridge authority and your partner’s an art aficionado but I’m a baseball nut?”

Bert and Don are lifelong friends who grew up in the near-northwest section of Detroit and graduated from Central High together in the class of 1942. Max Lapides, who is forty-five years old—three and a half years younger than the others—did not live in the same neighborhood, and thus the triumvirate was not completed until early in the nineteen sixties, although they have subsequently established the fact that they were fellow witnesses, usually in person, of innumerable famous moments in Tiger history: Goose Goslin’s championship-winning single in the ninth inning of the sixth game in the 1935 Series; an unknown thirty-year-old rookie named Floyd Giebell outpitching Bob Feller in Cleveland on the second-to-last day of the 1940 season to nail down the pennant for Detroit; Rudy York and Pinky Higgins hitting two-run homers in the same inning against the Reds in the Series that fall; Earl Torgeson stealing home in the bottom of the tenth inning to defeat the hated Yanks in 1955; Joe DiMaggio hammering a grounder that broke George Kell’s jaw—and Kell picking up the ball and stepping on the bag to force the runner from second before collapsing in front of third base. Don and Max met at last in 1960, when a friend in common brought them together at a dinner party, having assured each one beforehand that the other was a Tiger fan of surpassing tenacity and knowledge. Both of them, of course, utterly ignored the proffered
bona fides,
and the marriage very nearly expired on the spot. Late in the evening, however, the two chanced to arrive at the drinks table together. Don Shapiro, regarding Max with evident distrust, ventured a minute opening. “R.L.,” he said.

“R.L.?” returned Max.

Don nodded, watching his man.

“Why, Roxie Lawson,” said Max. (Roxie Lawson was a right-handed pitcher for the Tigers in the mid-thirties.) “Of course.”

They fell into each other’s arms.

In recent years, the three-way entente has deepened in complexity, ritual, and affection. Max Lapides, who has regularly attended about thirty or thirty-five Tiger home games every year, often to the extent of going to the park alone (“He even likes a night game against the Texas Rangers in the last week of September,” says Bert Gordon), has been an energizing catalyst for the three, organizing baseball dates and tickets, nudging baseball memories, berating the Tiger management, comparing active and erstwhile ballplayers, inventing bets and interior games, finding causes for contention and laughter. Since each of the three friends sustains an almost permanent state of transcendental baseball meditation, they are forever making and sharing new discoveries. Last year, for instance, Bert startled Max with the sudden announcement that Aurelio Rodriguez, the present Tiger third baseman, is the only major-league infielder with all five vowels in his first name.

Max and Bert are telephone addicts, and have made several thousand calls to each other in the past four or five years (Bert: “Think how many if we
liked
each other!”), mostly to exchange baseball talk. In a recent call, Max baited Bert for having inexplicably forgotten that Don Heffner had played in six games for the Tigers in 1944, long before beginning his tenure as a Detroit coach. “Now we’re even for Milt Boiling, right?” he said. “It must be a
year
you haven’t let me up because I forgot Milt and Frank Boiling played together that once for us in the fifties.” In time, they went on to bubble-gum cards. “I never saw the Waners, because they were in the wrong league, but I know how they each looked up at the plate,” Max said. “Both were lefty hitters, of course, but Lloyd held the bat sort of out in front of him when he was up, and Paul’s bat was tipped sideways and back. That’s the way it was on my cards, anyway. Listen, what were the worst baseball cards you used to have—you know, the ones you always had so many of you couldn’t get rid of them? … Harlond Clift? Oh, yes, my God, you’re right, Bert! I’d absolutely forgotten. But with me it was always too many Hudlins. Willis Hudlin, the old Cleveland twirler—right? I think I had a hundred Willis Hudlins.… What were the
best
baseball cards? You mean like the Gehringers and … Oh, the rarest ones. Let me see.… I guess they were so rare I never got one. I mean, I can’t remember. Probably some good ballplayer on a terrible team. Somebody on the old Athletics who’d get overlooked there. Like—oh, like Bob Johnson. You remember him—Indian Bob. He used to
kill
us.… I think we talked about this once already, but let’s talk about it some more, OK?”

By agreement among the three, Max holds the post of official historian, Don is entrusted with tactics, and Bert is the statistician, though none of them is reticent about intruding upon another’s turf of expertise. Like most long-term fans, they are absolutely opposed to the American League’s new designated-hitter rule, but Bert Gordon may be the first classicist to point out that the addition of the tenth man means that the pregame public announcement of the team lineups now takes 11.1 percent longer to complete than it did last year. His avidity for figures seems to remove him a little from the day-to-day adventures of his team, but he keeps his Kaline statistics warm, and this summer he spent a good many hours extrapolating the day on which Kaline would pass Charlie Gehringer as the player with the third-highest number of base hits (behind Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford) in Tiger history. Early in June, Bert settled on August 17 as the likely date for the event, but later revised it to August 9; the epochal Kaline hit actually came on August 8—a single against Oakland that was probably appreciated more quickly and more deeply by Bert Gordon than by the man who struck it. Bert polishes such Tiger events and figures in his mind—the unmatched Ty Cobb records; Harry Heilmann’s odd-year batting championships, in 1921, ’23, ’25, and ’27; Denny McLain’s startling 31–6 year in 1968—but the one Tiger record he believes to be absolutely unassailable was made in an afternoon game on June 21, 1970, when a modestly talented Tiger infielder named Cesar Gutierrez hit safely in seven consecutive times at bat. “For one thing, you have to send fifty-five men to the plate in the game before the thing even becomes statistically possible,” Bert said recently. “Why, only two men in the entire history of this game, out of all the thousands and thousands that have played big-league ball, have ever gone seven for seven. Just think about that for a minute.” He lit a Lucky Strike and thought about it for a minute, humming happily under his breath. “You know something about that Gutierrez?” he said, and an enormous laugh convulsed him. “Oh, boy, was he ever
lucky!”
*

Max Lapides, by his own careful, historian’s estimate, has attended at least twelve hundred Tiger games. Looking back from this Everest over a baseball landscape of almost forty years, he still has no difficulty in selecting the greatest Tiger games of his time; in the spring of 1967, acting out of a pure, Thucydidean sense of duty, he wrote a considerable monograph on the two—or, in strict fact, three—battles that remained brightest in his memory. (Today, he has said, he might have to add either the fifth or the seventh game of the 1968 World Series, when the Tigers came back from an almost hopeless disadvantage to defeat the Cardinals for the World Championship.) On the night of June 23, 1950, playing at home, the Tigers gave up four home runs to the Yankees in the first four innings, to fall behind by 6–0; in their half of the fourth they hit four home runs of their own, including a grand slam by pitcher Dizzy Trout, altogether good for eight runs. Homers by Joe DiMaggio and Tommy Henrich again put the visitors ahead, by 9–8, but Hoot Evers won the thing with a two-run inside-the-park homer in the bottom of the ninth. This Waterloo—eleven homers, sixty-two total bases, all nineteen runs the result of home runs—still holds a number of all-time baseball records (perhaps including “Frightened Pitchers, Most”), but Max’s true fanly preference falls upon quite a different game, a two-part event of almost total austerity that began on July 21, 1945, when the Tigers and the Athletics played a twenty-four-inning, 1–1 standoff in Philadelphia. (Max Lapides happened to see this afternoon of mime because he had just begun his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. He also happened to see every game played by the Tigers at Shibe Park during his undergraduate years. Later in the summer of 1945, he and a college friend took a train to Washington to see a significant series between the Tigers and the Senators, who were then neck and neck in the pennant race; the students slept on park benches, subsisted on hot dogs and cornflakes, and saw five games in three days.) That 1–1 game was rescheduled for September 12, 1945, and again the Tigers and Athletics froze at 1–1 after nine innings, and then at 2–2 after eleven. The A’s won at last, in the sixteenth inning, and Max’s precise and admirable account—his prose style may owe something to a press-box titan of his boyhood, H. G. Salsinger, of the Detroit
News
—concludes ringingly: