The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (54 page)

Back to Shea then, and a brisk, heartening 7–3 Metsian victory that brought them to third place, one and a half back. Heartening because Cleon Jones, their brooding and enigmatic left fielder, whacked two homers and drove in five runs. Jones, one of the streakiest hitters imaginable, had apparently ended his season-long unstreak. The next night, the Mets came from behind three times, scoring one run each time, to tie at 3–3—more hard work—but then suddenly the sea parted, as it did so often in 1969, and one could sense that this week was going to be shining and famous. In the top of the thirteenth, the visitors’ Richie Zisk singled off Ray Sadecki, and then Dave Augustine rocketed a deep, high sailer over Cleon Jones’ head in left; the ball, descending implacably toward the bullpen, struck the very top of the fence—a fraction of an inch shy of a home run—and rebounded on a line into Cleon’s grasp. Startled, Jones whirled and threw to Garrett, who relayed to Ron Hodges at the plate, who collided with the sliding and truly startled Richie Zisk and tagged him out. One knew—one
knew
—that Hodges would then drive in the winning run in the bottom of the same inning.

This kind of baseball electrification changes everything, and the Pirates never looked like the same team after that ricochet. At Shea the next night, you could see fans—and, in their dugout, Pirates, too—pointing to the landmark spot just above the “5” in the middle of the “358” sign on the fence, where the Augustine carom shot had struck. Wayne Garrett then singled on the first Pittsburgh pitch of the evening, and the Mets ripped out eight hits and six runs in the first three innings, providing Tom Seaver with his first easy ride in weeks. An enormous crowd, most of them trooping in late after an epochal traffic jam, came to roar in exultation, and there were Met hits that bounced up into the faces of Pirate infielders and through the pitcher’s legs and off the bag at third base, and there were resounding homers by Milner and Garrett and Staub, and the fans shouted “We’re No. 1!” and Jane Jarvis played “You’re the Top” on the organ, and the sign man held up a sign that said
“ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!”
and the scoreboard showed that Montreal had lost again—their fifth straight defeat—and when it was over (Mets 10, Pirates 2), the Mets really
were
No. 1: the first team in baseball history to go into first place and arrive at the .500 level on the same evening in September.

From then on—a week and a little more—every Met fan was caught up in a double sport, simultaneously catching the out-of-town news on the scoreboard and watching the dangerous business at hand. It was a time of almost continuous baseball excitement—hazard and reward, silence and shouted relief—from which each of us could select games and moments to store away: Matlack fanning the first three batters of the day, all swinging, and then utterly stifling the Cardinals in a swift, almost eventless 2–0 shutout; an enormous Sunday conviviality as the biggest crowd of the year celebrated a comeback 5–2 win over the Cards, nailed down at last by Garrett’s triple and Cleon’s homer and sterling long relief by Parker and short relief by Tug McGraw and the cheerful air full of windblown paper and hundreds upon hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies; Willie Mays Night—he was retiring at last, at the end of the season—with speeches and tears and awkwardness and felicity (Willie, wiping his eyes: “I look at the kids over here, and the way they’re playing and the way they’re fighting for themselves, and that say one thing to me: ‘Willie, say goodbye to America’”), and finally the release of the game, against Montreal and Steve Rogers, a 2–1 bleeder won twice by Cleon Jones, first with a homer and then with a breathtaking running catch in the deepest left-field corner, to save two runs; and then the sad, heavy letdown of an ominous loss to the Expos in the last regular-season game at Shea, with Seaver tired and wild and gone after two, and the Mets’ fine comeback from a five-run deficit all for nothing, and the suddenly revived awful doubt (with the cushion down to a bare half game) about whether there would be any more baseball back here this autumn after all.

The crucial final weekend, it will be remembered, was not so crucial after all, because the Pirates miserably and helpfully lost three close games in a row while the Mets waited through two rainouts in Chicago, and by the time play finally resumed there on Sunday the four barely breathing contenders—and the distant, astounding possibility of a five-way final tie—seemed to offer only a statistical menace. Matlack lost a painful 1–0 duel with the Cubs’ Rick Reuschel, but then Koosman had a happier time of it in the nightcap—an error-filled 9–2 affair that finally did in the Cubs, as Montreal expired, too, in Pittsburgh. Tom Seaver pitched the clincher in the rain on Monday—6–4 over the Cubs (with whole sectors of the wet, shining stands there absolutely empty)—and Cleon fittingly hit another home run (his seventh in eleven days), and McGraw fittingly got the save (his twelfth, plus four wins, in his last seventeen outings), and the champagne corks flew at last. A final scoreboard study suggests that four teams certainly lost this tattered half pennant but that the fifth just as surely won it. From mid-August on—after August 20, that is—the Cardinals (who finished second, one and a half games back) won 18 games and lost 20, while the terrible exertions of the Pirates, Expos, and Cubs brought them respective records of 21–21, 20–20, and 19–19—deadly, dead-even ball. The Mets, by contrast, went 27–13 after August 20, including 21 victories in their last 29 games, which translates out to .675: championship work in any league.

Since it was clear to this experienced fan that the opening games of the American League playoffs between the Oakland A’s and the Baltimore Orioles would offer a not-to-be-missed collision between the two best pitching staffs in baseball, I hopped the Metroliner to Baltimore, confidently postponing the Mets and Reds until the Shea Stadium part of their playoffs—and thereby missing, it turned out, the two best-pitched games of the month. In Baltimore, on an incomparable autumn afternoon and before the customarily comparable hometown crowd, Jim Palmer, the presiding Oriole right-hander, fanned six Oakland batters in the first two innings and went on to whiff six more in the course of shutting out the hairy green-and-gold defending champs by 6–0. This result was not wholly unexpected, since Palmer had won twenty-two games this year (it was his fourth straight twenty-game season) and his earned-run average of 2.40 was the best in his league. Dick Williams, the Oakland cogitator, attempted to counter these odds by opening with Vida Blue, the third-best of his three twenty-game winners. The presence of Blue, a southpaw, would deprive the Birds of Rich Coggins and Alonza Bumbry, two swift rookie outfielders, who both batted well above .300 this year, but who, being lefties, regularly played only against right-handed pitchers. This was typical baseball strategy, deeply moving in its beauty and profundity, and almost typical in its results: Baltimore batted around in the first inning, driving out Vida and scoring four runs, two of which were registered by Bumbry’s and Coggins’ replacements. Palmer’s only difficulties were with his control—he threw more than 150 pitches—and with a terrifying line single by Oakland’s Reggie Jackson, which he barely deflected, throwing himself backward on the mound just before it struck him in the face.

The next afternoon, Bumbry and Coggins combined in the first inning to help fashion a Baltimore run, and in the top of the third Bumbry gathered himself at the foot of the left-field fence—staring up and tensing and poising like a cat about to leap onto a bureau—and ascended perfectly to pluck back Sal Bando’s drive just as it was departing the premises. Bando found balm for this disappointment by knocking two subsequent pitches a good deal higher and deeper, both well beyond Bumbry’s reach and into the seats; the second of these was the fourth Oakland homer of the afternoon, and was sufficient to do in the Oriole pitcher, Dave McNally, on the wrong end of an eventual 6–3 score. Catfish Hunter, the splendid Oakland ace (he was 21–5 this year), gave us a characteristically low-key winning performance—working in and out, flicking the corners, tugging on his oversized cap between pitches, and, in the hard places, striking out batters with his dipping curve.

What I was missing was even better, of course. By the time I got back to my hotel-room TV set on the first afternoon, it was the seventh inning in Cincinnati, and I found that, for the first time in weeks, Tom Seaver’s fastball was alive and well. He was leading by 1–0 and had fanned nine batters, and within a minute or two he added numbers ten and eleven. My heart sank. Seaver’s hummer comes in to a batter about letter-high; at its best, it is very nearly untouchable, and the way Tom throws it past a hitter—with his powerful body dropping low and driving forward at the instant of delivery—is one of the ornaments of modern baseball. He relies heavily on the fastball on its good days, always seeming to challenge a batter to beat his best with one blow. As strategy, this is straightforward, courageous, and stubborn—and also, in view of Seaver’s record and proud nature, probably unarguable. It is extremely scary to watch, and sometimes, in the late innings of a low-score game against a team of proud and famous sluggers,
too
scary. With one out in the eighth, Pete Rose hit a homer; with one out in the ninth, Johnny Bench hit another, to win it.

When I caught up with the Mets again the next afternoon (this time via a tiny TV set perched in a corner of a Union News Company stand in Baltimore’s dusty, ancient Pennsylvania Station), they were engaged in another character-builder, once again leading by a bare 1–0 in the seventh. The pitcher was Matlack, who looked even more commanding than Seaver had the day before; his fastball was riding in on the fists of the right-handed Cincinnati batters, and he was pouring over some scimitarlike curves as well. Between innings, I exchanged glances with some fellow Met freaks in the little crowd of standees, and we shook our heads wordlessly: not enough runs. Wrong again. In the top of the ninth, the Mets put together two walks and a tiny fusillade of singles, most of them just over second base, for four more runs and the game and the tie—and, now, some solid hope.

Another squeaker seemed insupportable, and Rusty Staub took care of
that
quickly the next afternoon, at Shea, with a first-inning home run over the Manufacturers Hanover sign in center, and a second-inning home run above the right-field auxiliary scoreboard. The latter poke came while the Mets were happily batting around, and a little later Jerry Koosman drove in a run with his second hit of the afternoon, and the Reds began throwing the ball away in rather discouraged fashion, and the score went to 9–2, and the Gotham hordes were laughing at the Cincinnati pitchers. This kind of breaking apart is perfectly commonplace, of course, though not perfectly or equally acceptable to all participants. And so in the top of the fifth, Bud Harrelson, airborne in the middle part of a lovely 3-6-3 double play, came down a bit heavily on the sliding Pete Rose, and Pete Rose came up a trifle irritably with an elbow, and then Bud and Pete were rolling and punching in the dirt, and all 53,967 of us came to our feet shouting. First the benches emptied and then the bullpens, with the galloping Met battalion being led—
ta-ra!
—by Teddy R. McGraw. As ancient custom dictates in these matters, there was a great deal of milling and shouldering but really not much doing—until Cincinnati relief man Pedro Borbon fetched New York relief man Buzz Capra an unexpected clout on the right temple, to which Capra (who had not worked since mid-September) responded vigorously but with understandably poor control. In time, they all streamed slowly off the field, and Borbon, discovering a Met cap on his head (it was Capra’s), furiously snatched it off, bit it, tore it in half, and flung it away. Eventually, Pete Rose resumed his post in left field, to an accolade of garbage and abuse (he outweighs Harrelson by forty or fifty pounds, and Bud is … well,
ours
), but when a whiskey bottle plumped to the ground near him, he sensibly withdrew, and Manager Sparky Anderson waved his troops from the untidy field. Shouting and chaos, but no baseball. Then spake the president of the tribe of the Nationals, the goodly Chub Feeney, and so it came to pass that forth from the home dugout emerged a holy company—Yogi, Cleon, Rusty, Tom, and, yea, Willie himself—and right swiftly did they hie themselves toward the troubled multitudes, and sweetly did they remind them, with upraised arms and pleading visages, of the hospitality and courtly good will owed the visiting gentle knights, and also of the score, which stood so fairly for the forces of right and good, and of the power of dark-garbed arbiters to erase and reverse such a score in the face of undue hubbub. And lo! the multitudes were hushed and the play resumed and the memorable foolishness at last concluded.

In the batting cage the next afternoon, the trailing Reds seemed loose and cheerful, while the Mets, now only a game away from the pennant, looked pale and grim. Some of the Reds stared up at the new banners unfurling in the upper deck—
“ROSE IS A WEED,” “THIS ROSE SMELLS,”
and others less elegant—and Johnny Bench murmured, “The best thing you can do is get Pete Rose mad.” This Rose had led his league (for the third time) with a batting average of .338, rapping out 230 hits (his sixth 200-hit season); by instructive contrast, Felix Millan established a new club record for the Mets this year with 185 hits. When play began, the left-field pack again bayed vociferously at Rose, but then the tension of the game caught everyone up, and a remarkable quiet descended. It was 1–0, Mets, but then 1–1 after Tony Perez’ homer in the seventh—a waiting, silent sort of game, too close for pleasure. Tug McGraw came on in relief of George Stone and repeatedly pitched himself into terrible difficulties, loading the bases in the ninth and again in the tenth—and somehow wriggled free, helped in no small part by the Reds’ inordinate difficulties when bunting. Twice, Tug tiptoed past the wolves’ lair at the top of the Cincinnati batting order, releasing screeching cries of hope from the upper decks, but the Met hitters were being utterly smothered by the Cincinnati relief men. In the eleventh, with two out and two on, the visitors’ Dan Driessen poled a line drive deep to right; Rusty Staub, running hard, hard, pulled the ball in over his left shoulder and collided heavily with the wall, falling onto his back with the ball still clutched in his glove. Enough Tug for this day, clearly, and when Pete Rose came up in the twelfth, the new pitcher was young Harry Parker. Rose had been on base three times without result, but this time he made sure, whacking a high fastball out over the right-field fence and under the scoreboard. He circled the bases with his right fist held high.