The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (53 page)

Since then, Bert has suffered the diminution of Cesar Gutierrez at the hands of Rennie Stennett, and one day last summer, when he was idly skimming the box scores, it suddenly came to him that Ed Figueroa, the Yankee pitcher, has all five vowels in his
last
name. “Goodbye, Aurelio,” Bert wrote in a letter to Max. “I still can’t believe the whole thing.”

Don Shapiro gave up on the Tigers in the terrible season of 1975, when they lost 102 games and finished 37
½
games behind the division-leading Red Sox. “I hated myself,” he says, “but I couldn’t help it. They were literally killing me.” Last year, when the young Tigers suddenly began knocking off the Yankees and the champion Red Sox in surprising fashion, Don allowed himself to be won back. He called me late in the summer and told me that he and Bert were going to Tiger Stadium that night. “This Mark Fidrych is pitching,” he said, “and he’s got a little color, you know. At least, I think he does—we’re not used to that sort of thing here in Detroit, so it’s hard to tell. And Ralph Houk [the incumbent Detroit manager] is so lackluster that it has this deadening effect on everybody, especially me. But I’m getting optimistic again, I think. I really am. The fires are being stoked.”

*
Bert Gordon’s pleasure in the Gutierrez miracle was expunged on September 16, 1975, when Rennie Stennett, second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, went seven for seven against the Chicago Cubs, in a game at Wrigley Field that the Pirates won by the score of 22–0. Gutierrez had set his mark in a twelve-inning game, but Stennett’s seven straight hits—four singles, two doubles, and a triple—came in the regulation distance; actually, Stennett wrapped up his day’s work in
eight
innings, and then was allowed to sit out the ninth. The next day, Stennett singled on his first two trips to the plate and then at last popped out, after nine straight safeties. The first (and only other) seven-for-seven performance was achieved in 1892 by Wilbert Robinson, of the Baltimore Orioles, which was at that time a National League club. Gutierrez—as Bert now sometimes murmurs to himself—still holds the American League consecutive-hit record for one game.

—
October 1973

A
LL SPORTING MEMORIES ARE
suspect—the colors too bright, the players and their feats magnified in our wishful recapturing. The surprising rally or splendid catch becomes incomparable by the time we fight free of the parking lot, epochal before bedtime, transcendental by breakfast. Quickly, then, before we do damage to the crowded and happy events of the late summer and early autumn, it should be agreed that this was not absolutely the best of all baseball years. The absorbing, disheveled seven-game World Series that was won by the defending Oakland A’s, who had to come from behind to put down the tatterdemalion Mets, was probably not up to the quality of the seven low-scoring games contested by the A’s and the Cincinnati Reds last year, or even comparable to three or four other classics we have been given in the past dozen Octobers. As for the Mets, the general rejoicing over their deserved victory in their league did not match the passions or disbelief of 1969, when the Amazin’s did it all first and better; these 1973 Mets finished their season with a won-lost percentage of .509, the lowest ever recorded by a winner or demiwinner in either league. Not a vintage year, then, but not a vapid one by any means. Both the league playoffs went to the full five games, as they did last year, with the Orioles and the Reds going down bitterly at the very end. The unforgiving brevity of these Championship Series, which can sink a proud summer flagship in the space of three unlucky afternoons, is just beginning to be understood by the players, who now look on them with far more concern and apprehension than they do the World Series. It was during the playoffs, it will be remembered, when the Mets’ and Reds’ squads threw themselves to scuffling and punching in the infield dirt, when showers of trash came out of the left-field stands of Shea Stadium, and when the Met fans, at the very pinnacle of their joy, fell into hysteria and violence. All of this, to be sure, made for some wonderfully eventful and discussable days and weeks—a time in which baseball almost seemed to return to its central place in our autumn attention.

There were many fresh discoveries and speculations to be found in the season’s statistics. Nolan Ryan, the California Angels’ fireballing right-hander, and an ex-Met (
there’s
a speculation!), struck out 383 batters, to erase (by one whiff) Sandy Koufax’s old one-season record. The White Sox, early leaders in the American League West, collapsed after an injury to their star slugger, Dick Allen, and attained a startling low when two of their pitchers, Wilbur Wood and Stan Bahnsen, became twenty-game losers in the same season. The Yankees, leading their division at the All-Star Game break, lost drearily and implacably through August and September, and finished seventeen games off the pace; in the end, they also lost not only their manager, Ralph Houk, who resigned and moved along, probably to pilot the Tigers next season, but their ball park, which will be closed for alterations for the next two years. Suddenly the poorest of poor cousins, the Yankees will now have to share Shea Stadium with the National League Champion Mets—their first clear shot at likableness in forty years.

The season-long assault mounted by Hank Aaron against Babe Ruth’s lifetime total of 714 home runs—perhaps the most widely memorized figure in baseball—utterly captivated the sporting press. Aaron’s progress was so numbingly over-reported that the real news was not his season-ending total of 713, one shy of the Babe, but the fact that he was able to function at all on the field in the presence of a hovering daily horde of newsmen, network camera crews, photographers, publicity flacks, souvenir hunters, advertising moguls, league officials, and other assorted All-American irritants and distracters. All those magazine cover stories, wire-service bulletins, and breathlessly updated daily figures were curious indeed, because Aaron’s splendid consistency at the plate and his remarkable athletic longevity have made his arrival at the sacred plateau very nearly inevitable for the past two or three years. Since there was no immediate time element in this particular achievement, the story had none of the tension and excitement of, say, Roger Maris’s attack on Ruth’s one-season mark of sixty homers. The next couple of clicks on the Aaron meter will come in April or May, then, and the only cause for concern will be whether the new numbers and the old hoopla will not somehow again obscure the kind of man and the kind of ballplayer Hank Aaron is. Observers back from the Atlanta tent show have told me that Aaron sustained a three-month-long attack on his privacy and concentration with absolute patience and good humor. Playing under these conditions, at the age of thirty-nine, he enjoyed an exceptional season at the plate—40 home runs and a batting average of .301. Skipping the second games of doubleheaders and afternoon games played after night games, he struck his 40 round-trippers in only 392 official at-bats—a rate of production exceeded only six times in baseball history. Let it be noted, too, that Aaron and Ruth and Willie Mays, who retired last month with 660 homers to his credit, are the only three ballplayers to attain even 600 lifetime home runs; the next nearest, Harmon Killebrew, is more than a hundred back of Mays, with 546. Aaron’s over-.300 season—his fourteenth in twenty years in the majors—was achieved despite a miserable start; from June 15 on, he batted .354. A wonderful year, then, but very nearly an ordinary one for Hank Aaron. His cumulative home-run totals have been ticked off, year after year, with almost machinelike regularity. Never hitting as many as 50 in a single season, he has averaged (since his first three warm-up seasons) very close to 36 or 37 per year for every three-year span over the past seventeen seasons; that level is actually up a bit in the past five years, when he has averaged 40 per year. To look at this another way, he notched his 100-homer marks in his fourth, seventh, tenth, thirteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth summers. Next summer, his twenty-first (showing us, as always, the perfect daily temperament for this most daily of all sports, and that familiar grooved, elegant, iron-wristed, late,
late
swing), he not only will pass the Babe in homers but will probably also move up to first place in times at bat and runs batted in, adding these to his present records of most extra-base hits and most total bases. What else? Well, one more statistic: Hank Aaron, soon to possess the No. 1 record attainable in his sport, also ranks No. 1 alphabetically; his is the very first name on the all-time roster of the thousands and thousands of players recorded in big-league box scores. Figuring the odds against
that
meaningless wonder should take us all a good way along toward spring training.

The Mets—ah, the Mets! Superlatives do not quite fit them, but now, just as in 1969, the name alone is enough to bring back that rare inner smile that so many of us wore as the summer ended. The memory of what these Mets were in mid-season and the knowledge of what they became suggest that they are in the peculiar position of being simultaneously overrated and patronized in our recollection. Their microscopic winning margin at the end of the regular season and their frightful, groaning struggles to get their chin up over the .500 bar should not obscure their startling march from the bottom to very nearly the top of the baseball world in the space of two months. This sustained burst of winning, stouthearted play took them to within a single game of the world championship, though they appeared to have been frighteningly outmanned all along the way. They were lucky and persevering and optimistic, but far less inspired by their own unlikelihood than the startled young heroes of ’69 were. This time was a lot harder. “I’ve never known a season that was any more work than this one,” shortstop Bud Harrelson said one night near the end. “We played our asses off.
No one
in this club had an easy year, and almost every game—even the big wins—seemed like hard, hard work. We deserve everything we get this time.” Rusty Staub, just after his splendid four-hit, five-runs-batted-in performance in the fourth game of the World Series, soberly explained that it was the result of “concentration and hard work,” and Wayne Garrett, after an essential September win over the Pirates, made a pushing, snowplow gesture with both hands and said, “Games like this—all these games—you’ve got to …
wedge
it out.”

In the middle of August, hard work did not appear to offer much of an answer. Dead last in their division, the Mets were a team flattened by injuries and abandoned by their fans. At one time or another, eight of their players were on the disabled list. Catcher Jerry Grote broke his wrist. Bud Harrelson broke his hand and then his breastbone. Left-handed ace Jon Matlack was struck by a line drive and suffered a hairline fracture of the skull. John Milner, Cleon Jones, Rusty Staub, George Theodore, and Willie Mays were sidelined with ailments, and ace reliever Tug McGraw, with an earned-run average over the past two seasons of 1.70, was suddenly and mysteriously unable to get anybody out—and, in the words of Manager Yogi Berra, “if you ain’t got a bullpen, you ain’t got nothin’.” Yogi himself was said to be on the way out—a charming relic, insufficient in ideas and words. His one tenet was the repeated and miserably evident observation that the Mets had not yet made their move.

The first tiny stirring was McGraw’s good outing against the Giants on August 11—in a game the Mets finally lost in the thirteenth inning. On August 18, Bud Harrelson, the infield’s main man, returned to the lineup, and the Mets whacked the powerful Reds by 12–1. That began the time of hard labors—a close, heartening win or two, a terribly discouraging loss—but now the pitching (Seaver, Matlack, Koosman, George Stone, and McGraw and rookie Harry Parker in the bullpen) was clearly terrific at last, and everybody knew that if this club was going to go anywhere it would be on its pitching. Weirdly, though the Mets were still twelve under the .500 level late in the month, they trailed the division-leading Cardinals by a mere six and a half games. On the last day of August, the Mets climbed over the Phillies and into fifth place. Belief (“You gotta be-leeve!”—
The Sayings of Chairman McGraw
) had begun.

In September, the NL East was a crowded and dangerous tenement. The Cardinals led for a while and then gave way to the Pirates, who had made a hunchy late change of managers, replacing Bill Virdon with his predecessor, Danny Murtaugh. The Cubs, a team of elders that had wasted an enormous early-summer lead, had still not expired, and in among them all was the true surprise of the year—the Montreal Expos, who were suddenly getting wonderful pitching from a rookie named Steve Rogers and from relief man Mike Marshall, and some long-ball hitting by a former Met, Ken Singleton. On September 7, the Mets won a chilly, edgy doubleheader in Montreal by 1–0 and 4–2; the nightcap was 1–1 through fourteen innings, and that Met run had come in after Expo infielder Pepe Frias dropped an easy pop fly. The next day, Steve Rogers outpitched Seaver, winning 3–1, and the ravished, wintry Montreal fans dreamed their
drapeau
dreams again.

A week later, the Mets beat the Cubs, 4–3, at Shea on a suicide squeeze bunt by Jerry Grote. They were in fourth place, but only two and a half games behind the first-place Pirates, and the five immediately upcoming games with Pittsburgh—two away and then three back at home—would settle
something.
An insupportable something, perhaps, for the Pittsburgh sluggers bombed Tom Seaver that opening Monday, winning by 10–3, and then the next night the Pirates led again, by 4–1, in the top of the ninth. Here, however, the Mets pushed across five runs—the essential hits coming from benchpersons Jim Beauchamp and Ron Hodges. Since Tug McGraw had already completed his evening’s outing, Yogi now entrusted this trembling lead to Bob Apodaca, a youngster just one day up from the minors, who instantly walked the first two major-league batters of his life, and was succeeded by Buzz Capra, who gave up a sacrifice, a run-scoring infield out, an intentional walk, an unintentional walk, and (to Manny Sanguillen, with the bases loaded) a strike, three balls, and, at excruciatingly long last, the fly-ball out that ended the game. Every Met, from that evening on, claimed that this was the inning that did it all.