The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (55 page)

The finale, the tie breaker, was less good as a game, better as a pageant. Rusty Staub, his right shoulder damaged by his smash into the wall, was replaced by Eddie Kranepool, the only surviving Met from the original 1962 light-opera company, and nobody present could have been entirely surprised to see the bases loaded when Eddie stepped up in the first inning, or absolutely astounded when he rapped the first pitch to him on a line into left field for two runs. It was going to be that kind of an afternoon. Tom Seaver, without his fastball this time, pitched with restraint and intelligence—curves, sliders, hard work. The Reds labored, too, and Pete Rose doubled and then came around to tie the score in the fifth. Minutes later, Garrett doubled and then Jones doubled and Milner walked, and the bases were loaded, and Willie Mays—yes, of course,
that
kind of day—batted for Kranepool. Over-swinging, fooled by the pitch, Willie hammered the ball straight into the dirt (or perhaps off the plate itself), so that it bounded high up in the air and came down, thirty feet up the third-base line, far too late for Clay Carroll, the unhappy pitcher, to make a play anywhere, and another run was in. It was the shortest heroic blow in memory, but, as Mays suggested after the game, box scores and record books do not show the distance of hits, or their luck. Two more runs ensued, and in the sixth Tom Seaver hit a double that Pete Rose ran and dived in the dirt for, all in vain, and then Tom came around and scored, of course—7–2 now—and grins and cheers and smiles and hugs and handshakes broke out everywhere, and all of us believed.

Somehow it should have ended there, when the scoring stopped, but there were three more innings to be played, which is a long time to put off a party. The cries of joy became chants, the shadows deepened, and there were clouds of paper on the grass, and sudden ripping sounds in the stands as strings of firecrackers went off. The ninth began, and the waves of waiting celebrants pushed forward in the lower stands, filling up the lower aisles and crowding the railings. There was some enormous urgency visible here—a yearning for the field itself, a need to belong to this event in a deeper way. A temporary fence out beyond the home dugout collapsed with a tearing noise, and then there was a long, tension-filled wait as some frightened wives in the official Cincinnati party were led from their overrun box seats and out through the visitors’ dugout. It
was
frightening, in a way, and so was the enormous horde let loose by the final out, and the sight of Reds and Mets alike (Tug McGraw from the mound, Pete Rose from the base path) running and dodging, as if for their lives, through hundreds upon hundreds of grasping hands, past hundreds of passionate, shouting faces. Streamers and papers (and one sudden red flare) and other things came down from the upper deck, and then a great cloud of dust rose and hung over the entire field as chunks of turf began to be torn up and taken away. This sort of riotous unleashing has almost grown into an institution in our sports in recent years, and what one makes of it all probably depends on what each of us thinks about a great many complex matters, the very least of which is baseball. Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson, for instance, was disappointed that the police did not take matters in hand, and he said, “Can you imagine this happening in America?” The answer to
that,
at least, seems easy.

The convention opened gently in Oakland. Both clubs, recovering from playoffs of bruising intensity, were plainly glad to be in the World Series at all, and they regarded each other with congratulatory speculation. (The A’s had won an eleven-inning squeaker over the Orioles’ Mike Cuellar; had lost 5–4, going down before a shocking five-run Baltimore rally; and then had taken their flag on a 3–0 shutout by Catfish Hunter.) Any other outcome of the playoffs would have produced teams that had already faced each other in a recent World Series, but A’s vs. Mets was new and promising. I was grateful, too, to have the defending champs back—the grand White Shoes, with their cheerful dash, their proud quarrelsomeness, and the vivid quality of their play. The A’s were probably an even better club than they had been the previous October, with deeper pitching, more speed, and some useful new second-line players purchased with the customary sudden midseason disbursement of cash by owner Charles O. Finley. Their fine young center fielder, Bill North, who had stolen fifty-three bases, was out with a sprained ankle, but this was less of a handicap than the sidelining of Reggie Jackson in last year’s Series. This year, Reggie had just concluded a brilliant season—32 homers, 117 RBIs and a certain coming award as the Most Valuable Player in his league. The Mets, we could all see, were outmanned again.

In the opener, the Oakland left-hander Ken Holtzman pitched extremely well and won, while Jon Matlack pitched even better and lost. The day contained a bare few minutes of news. Matlack, falling to a 3–2 count on Holtzman in the third, came in with a fastball that Holtzman rapped into left field for two bases—and a vivid concurrent editorial on the designated-hitter artifice. Bert Campaneris now hit an easy roller to second, which the almost infallible Felix Millan missed cleanly, for an error and a run; it seemed to me that Campaneris’s burning speed up the line distracted Millan. That same threat now distracted Matlack, who caught Campy leaning the wrong way at first but flung his pick-off throw high, allowing Campaneris to motor safely along to second, from where he scored Oakland’s second and final run, on a single by Joe Rudi. The Mets responded in the next half—a double by Cleon Jones, a run-scoring single by John Milner—but then Reggie Jackson, playing center field for the first time this year, got a splendid jump on Jerry Grote’s line drive and made a dazzling, going-away catch, to amputate the only Met hopes of the day.

Having been given a canapé for the opener, we came back the next day for a gigantic goulash of mistakes and wonders that the Mets finally won, 10–7, in twelve innings. It was the longest World Series game in captivity, and one that absolutely defies elucidation. (A friend of mine, driving his wife and children from New Hampshire to New York City that afternoon, tuned in to the game on the car radio, grateful that it would help pass the early miles of the trip; the entertainment concluded four hours and thirteen minutes later, exactly at his apartment door.) The excessive happenings included several fly balls falling untouched out of the dazzling California cerulean for extra-base hits, homers by Garrett and Jones, triples by Campaneris and Bando and Jackson, five Oakland errors, four cannonlike hits by Reggie Jackson, Willie Mays stumbling on the base path, Willie Mays falling twice in the outfield, three hit batsmen, twelve A’s left on base, fifteen Mets left on base, 49,151 disbelieving fans. The sway of the game went first toward the hometowners, who led early by 3–1 and would have led by more except for a misbegotten squeeze play; then toward the Mets, who put six straight men aboard in the sixth, scurrying around the bases on looped hits and little hoppers and an appalling wild throw past the plate by pitcher Darold Knowles; then back to the A’s again, who tied the game at 6–6 by bringing across two runs with two out in the ninth inning. The Mets displayed gallantry of their own, to be sure, surviving a bad call at the plate (I still think) by umpire Augie Donatelli that cost them a run in the tenth, and the excruciating tension that falls upon the visiting team in an extra-innings free-for-all like this. In the end, the thing seemed to come down to a clear confrontation between a classic undermanager and an inveterate overmanager. Yogi Berra stayed with his ace reliever, McGraw, for six full innings, during which time he surrendered the tying ninth-inning runs; Tug, as usual, was both tough and brilliant—sighing heavily, cocking his chin at the enemy hitter, staring in for the sign, plucking the ball from his upheld glove like a cup from a tray, and then firing the screwball over the top for the strikeout.

Endless games produce endless possibilities, and so the twelfth brought us Willie Mays up at bat with two out and two on; he broke the tie with another bounced single—barely over the pitcher’s head this time, and barely through second. It was the last hit and last triumph of his career. Jones singled, and the next two Met batters hit sure outs to second baseman Mike Andrews, who misplayed them both—a grounder right through the wickets, a terrible throw to first—allowing the last three Met runs to come in. Andrews is not known as a fielder, but he was there because Dick Williams, the impatient Oakland manager, had used up two better second basemen along the way. Tom Seaver summed things up a few minutes later in the Mets’ clamorous clubhouse. “You couldn’t write a book about this one that would tell anybody how to play this game,” he said.

There is some temptation to omit any mention of the two central figures of the third meeting, back at Shea Stadium, since neither of them was in uniform. The Mets lost the game by 3–2 in eleven innings, but most of the emotion of the evening centered on the errant and unfortunate Mike Andrews, who was languishing at his home in Peabody, Massachusetts, and on Charles O. Finley, the Oakland vizier, who had subjected Andrews to a medical examination immediately after the conclusion of the twelve-inning debacle and had then dropped him from the squad. The vindictiveness of this maneuver exceeded several low marks previously held by the excessive Mr. Finley, and this time his troops came to the very edge of mutiny. Fortunately, the commissioner quickly restored Andrews, and Manager Williams held a camp meeting for his players, at which he declared his own coming voluntary retirement and total disaffiliation with Finley and the A’s after the end of the season. This may seem a curious form of encouragement for a team in the very midst of a World Series, but it should be understood that the vivid, what-the-hell morale of the A’s has always been built out of a shared abhorrence of the man at the top. They display the utter unity of a pack of ragged and sequestered Dickensian schoolboys, and Charlie Finley is their Gradgrind.

In the game—which was played on a subarctic evening—the Mets burst from the mark with a leadoff homer by Garrett, a single by Millan, and an exquisite wrong-field hit-and-run poke by Staub. Catfish Hunter now let the second run slip in on a wild pitch, but then slammed the door shut for good. Tom Seaver, his opposite, struck out nine Oaklands in the first five innings, and then, suddenly bereft of his fastball, was whacked for some frightening line drives in the sixth, somehow surrendering only one counter. Campaneris became the tying run in the eighth: a single, a steal of second off Tom’s big motion and a super-slide under Grote’s super-peg, a trip home on Joe Rudi’s single. In the eleventh, after a succession of frigid agonies, Campy happened again. Met relief man Harry Parker walked Ted Kubiak but fanned Angel Mangual, swinging, with a pitch that utterly fooled Jerry Grote as well. The passed ball put Kubiak on second and brought Campaneris to the plate; he whistled a single up the middle, sending Kubiak and, shortly thereafter, all the rest of us home.

Two misapprehensions about this heartbreaker seem possible—that Seaver should have done better, and that the visitors’ win was somehow undeserved, because of the Mets’ mistakes. Seaver came into this game after 307 innings of work this season—an enormous and exhausting burden for a man who throws as hard as he does. Furthermore, he had never fully recovered from the tender right shoulder that afflicted him in September. Pitching well under all conditions is one hallmark of a $140,000-a-year pitcher, and Tom, at far less than his best, very nearly pulled off a masterpiece—giving up two runs on seven hits, twelve strikeouts, and one walk. Oddly enough, the last figure suggests the aspect of Seaver’s pitching that most awes his fellow professionals. Most big-league hurlers never record a full season in which their combined total of walks and hits given up is lower than the total number of innings they have worked. Among the great fastball pitchers, Walter Johnson accomplished this feat nine times, Sandy Koufax four times, and Grover Cleveland Alexander three. Seaver did it this summer for the third time in his brief seven-year career, which puts him in pretty good company. As for the quality of the Oakland victory, it might be noted that this strategy of waiting for small errors (Seaver’s failure to hold Campaneris close to first, Grote’s passed ball) and then having the right man on the spot to capitalize (Campaneris, Rudi, Campaneris again) was the killing habit, the essential technique of victory, that kept the Yankees on top for more than four decades.

Subtleties were dispensed with the next night, which produced enormous ovations for three heroes—Rusty Staub, who hit a three-run homer in the first, a two-run single in the fourth, and two subsequent safeties; Jon Matlack, who surrendered three grudging hits and one unearned run; and Mike Andrews, miraculously restored, who was sent up to bat in the eighth (ah, there, Charlie Finley!) and shortly trotted back to the dugout in the midst of the loudest and longest accolade ever bestowed upon a pinch-hitter grounding into an infield out. The Mets won by 6–1, retying the Series. Staub’s socko performance at the plate was achieved in spite of the shoulder injury he had sustained in the penultimate playoff game, which still made it impossible for him to throw overhand. He was also the only person on the frigid premises in bare-armed décolletage—not an affectation for a player who had survived three seasons in Montreal, where, as he explained later, outfield weather conditions can be toughening, sometimes even requiring the ingestion of a little cognac after a night game. For Mr. Finley, the evening must have seemed a mite draggy. When he stood up for the visitors’ seventh-inning stretch, the Mets’ folding-sign man flashed him a
“SIT DOWN, YA BUM!,”
and when Andrews came up to bat in the eighth, there were rolling, defiant waves of applause from every part of the park. Finley clapped a bit, too, and then waved his green-and-gold banner. Caligula never had a night like that.

The last winter exercise—the final game in New York, and the coldest baseball game in my memory—offered various perceptions and rewards. This Series, though more crowded and eventful than a samurai drama, had not yet brought us a single game of top quality; between them, the two clubs had so far committed thirteen errors (with a good many other transgressions going forgiven) and had left eighty-four men on base. Strangely, the Mets had outhit the dangerous A’s, who had yet to record a homer; the Mets had won the two free-hitting affairs and, strangest of all, had lost the two close ones because of poor defense. Now we were owed something better. The business at hand began in lively fashion when Rusty Staub, batting against Vida Blue in the bottom of the first, knocked off a burning line foul that entered my part of the mezzanine like a SAM missile and caught a late-coming male patron in the back of the right thigh. He sagged to the steps, while nearby patrons explained, “Staub hit that! Staub did it!” The fan looked pained but ecstatic, like a man who has just received a personal message from Jove.