The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (9 page)

The first half of the Sunday doubleheader with the Cards was perhaps the most pleasing regular-season game I have seen in five years, as the Mets’ Tracy Stallard engaged Roger Craig, an old grad, in a stiff pitchers’ battle that brought out the best in everyone. In the seventh, the Cardinals, down 1–0, had White on third base and Boyer on first, and tried to tie it with a double steal; Jesse Gonder, the Mets’ catcher, whipped his peg to second, and Stallard, seeing White break for home, cut the throw off and nailed White at the plate in a rundown while Shea Stadium screeched in rapture. The Cards then tied it, 1–1, and the Mets untied it for good in the eighth, on homers by Rod Kanehl and Frank Thomas—exactly the way a pitchers’ battle ought to end. In the second game, Casey Stengel, who has been desperate for a fourth starting pitcher, tried Jerry Hinsley, who is nineteen years old and had never pitched an inning of organized baseball until this season. Hinsley retired the first eight Cardinals in order, and then, as he was probably beginning to think long thoughts about his contract demands next spring, was socked for five straight hits and four runs; his teammates were commiserating but unhelpful, and the Cards won, 10–1.

In splitting their last eight games, against the Braves at home and the Giants on the road, the Mets have alternated dizzyingly between hopelessness and downright competence. Met pitching in this stretch has held the opposition to less than three runs per game. The hitting has been, to put it mildly, mixed; after rapping out forty-one hits in a span of three games, the Met sluggers, exhausted by the unexpected demands of base-running, reverted to form and failed to produce a single run in the ensuing thirty-two innings. Go figure it.
*
I sense at least a new resiliency, an occasional touch of professionalism, that has been lacking in previous Met squads. That is why I have only small hesitation in stating that this team will not fall victim to so many of those long stretches of ennui and botchery that so pained Met rooters the past two summers. At the same time, I think it unlikely the Mets will escape the cellar this season, if only because at least six of the other National League teams also look stronger than they did last year.

The Mets are short on heroes. Their gamecock, their small nova, is Ron Hunt, the second baseman. Now in his second season, Hunt appears to be one of those rare ballplayers who improve from year to year. Four years ago, he batted .191 in the low minors. Last year, as a major-league rookie, he hit a solid .272, and so far in this young season a stream of modest singles and doubles has kept him constantly above the .300 mark. Originally a third baseman, he now has mastered the pivot at second and he fields with assurance, if not brilliance. His new partnership with Roy McMillan, the veteran shortstop just purchased from the Braves, cements the Mets’ infield. McMillan has slowed down a step or two and is having trouble at the plate, but he is a tough, tobacco-chewing, old-time pro and a boon to this young team.

This almost exhausts the good news. Rod Kanehl, Stengel’s slick handyman, has filled in splendidly in the outfield during a series of injuries and is currently batting .333. Tim Harkness, at first base, had an early hot streak at the plate but has now plummeted below .250. Jesse Gonder, a catcher, can hit but cannot catch; Hawk Taylor, another catcher, can catch but cannot hit. Amado Samuel and Charlie Smith, who have shared third base, have both shown that they can make hard plays and butcher easy ones; their combined batting average is below .200. Frank Thomas is an earnest but deadly slow outfielder who occasionally hits a homer.
**

The pitching staff, in spite of its recent parsimony, does not emerge much better from such a scrutiny. Al Jackson, its star, holds that spot only by default. On most teams, he would be the third pitcher in rotation, but as the Mets’ No. 1 he is constantly matched against the league’s best flamethrowers and consequently loses many low-run games. Carlton Willey, the best Met pitcher a year ago (his earned-run average was 3.10), suffered a broken jaw in spring training and has yet to pitch an inning this year. Larry Bearnarth and Tom Sturdivant, the relievers, have been uneven to date; the latter two might as well sleep with their rubber boots on, for they will be summoned to a lot of dangerous fires this summer. Stengel has also called on Jerry Hinsley and two other rookie pitchers, Bill Wakefield and Ron Locke, for spot duty. They have responded with eager gallantry—often of the kind once displayed by Eton sixth-formers taking to the air against Baron von Richthofen.

In 1963, the Mets, dead last all the way after their brief spring flurry, drew 1,080,108 spectators at the Polo Grounds, against a Yankee home attendance of 1,308,920. This season, the Mets have already drawn 21,128 more spectators to their home games than they had at this time last year, and even these figures do not tell the whole story, for the Mets have not yet played the Giants and the Dodgers at home, as they had last year before mid-May; those rich, nostalgic series will take place over the two weekends just ahead, and, given decent weather, they should be good for at least another two hundred thousand tickets. It is quite possible that the perennial moles will outdraw the perennial champions in New York this summer.

In my last report on the team, I speculated sadly that the move from the banks of the Harlem River to the shores of Flushing Bay might civilize the Mets fans, transforming them into a cautious, handclapping audience of suburban lawn-tenders. That alteration may be taking place, but it is slower than I had anticipated. There are more well-dressed, unexcitable, merely pleasant onlookers visible in the gleaming new stands, but a good many of the men are wearing cowboy boots and a good many of the women are carrying cameras, thus identifying themselves as Fair-goers who have wandered in to rest their feet. Some of them must have been startled during the night game with Cincinnati, when a dozen or so of the New Breed—the
old
New Breed—staged a rousing fistfight in the lower right-field stands, attracting roars of encouragement and subsequent boos for the fuzz.

Still, I doubt whether Shea Stadium will ever see the likes of those steamy old midsummer doubleheaders at the Polo Grounds, when visiting outfielders used to stare up in wonder at the screaming sans-culottes, and had to brave summer thunderstorms of trash and firecrackers while catching a fly. For one thing, the loudest, most phenomenal Metsian roars used to come when the team was at its very worst—eight runs down in the seventh inning, say. The Mets are too much improved to encourage that kind of fanaticism with any frequency this year. Some of the crazy pleasure has gone out of their games, for when they take the field one no longer has the stimulating, if awful, impression of watching a dotty inventor preparing to jump off the Eiffel Tower with a parachute made of pillowcases. Better baseball has also led to some disaffection. Unsuccessful pinch-hitters have been getting stiff boos. During one game when the Mets were having trouble hitting the ball beyond the pitcher’s mound, I overheard a new kind of remark from behind me about “our goddam sluggers.” And on another occasion, when Stengel went to the mound to yank a pitcher, I saw, to my shock, the first “Casey Must Go” banner, flaunted by two malcontents.

As must befall all fanatical movements, self-consciousness and formalization have overtaken the Met religion. Small pockets of Met fans are now visible on television at out-of-town ballparks, where they dutifully cry the old cry and wave banners identifying their cause and their home town. The thing is growing cute, like those Pogo for President clubs. Formalization and self-consciousness are also detectable in many of the banners displayed these days at Shea Stadium, which often look as if they had been created by art students or advertising men. In the old days, banners were made up overnight, out of old sheets and towels, and the messages were often misspelled or made jiggly by passion. This year, I saw a neatly printed sign that could have been a radio jingle:

In Los Angeles, they wade through smog;

Las Vegans lose their bets,

But we New Yorkers aren’t sad—

We have our New York Mets!

Then, too, there were the eight forehanded fans who turned up one afternoon with a group sign made up of eight separate letters. When Roy McMillan came up to bat, they stood up in a row, each holding one letter, and spelled out: “
WE LUV ROY
.” When Rod Kanehl appeared, the last letter had been changed and the sign read: “
WE LUV ROD
,” and a little later it was “
WE LUV RON
,” for Ron Hunt.
***
For a moment, I thought I had wandered into a California football game. And finally, to my dismay, I must report that the signs this year seem to have been made for the television cameras rather than for the team; mostly they are unfurled when a foul ball, with its attendant TV eye, comes into the stands, instead of when the Mets desperately need a run.

All this, I suppose, is the inevitable result of the Mets’ comparative maturity and comparative new success. The carefree unreality, the joyful bitterness, the self-identification with a brave but hopeless cause will become more and more difficult for Met rooters to sustain as their team draws closer to the rest of the league and faces the responsibilities and drudgery of an ordinary second-division team. As one sportswriter has observed, the only thing the Mets have to fear is mediocrity. This year, the Met cause reminds me of nothing so much as a party of young radical vegetarians who find they are on the point of being taken seriously and, somewhat anxiously, begin to understand that they are on the printed ballots at last and are thus capable of being beaten, instead of merely insulted and brushed aside. Without drawing any political parallel, it is my guess that reality will be postponed for the Mets at least for another year or two; they will be just bad enough to keep most of the “Go!” shouters shouting through this first summer in their new home.

*
Excellent advice. A few days later, after this had gone to press, the Mets beat the Cubs, at Wrigley Field, by the score of 19–1. The last six runs were scored in the ninth inning, and Tracy Stallard said afterward, “That’s when I knew we had ’em.”

**
Ed Kranepool was absent from the roster, having been sent down to the Mets’ Buffalo farm club for seasoning. A couple of weeks later, on Saturday, May 30, he was summoned back, just after playing in both ends of a doubleheader for Buffalo. He traveled at night, arriving at Shea in time to play right through both games of a Sunday doubleheader against the Giants. The Mets lost the first game, 5–3, and the second, 8–6, in twenty-three innings. Welcome home, Eddie!

***
This must have been inspired by a little band of Marv Throneberry admirers—five of them—who once turned up at the Polo Grounds wearing white T-shirts with different characters emblazoned on the back. When lined up properly, they spelled out “
MARV!
” Sometimes, of course, they spelled it “
VRAM!
”

—
October 1962

T
HIS AFTERNOON, IN THE
top of the ninth inning of the final playoff game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, Walter Alston, the Dodger manager, and Leo Durocher, his third-base coach, stalked slowly back and forth in their dugout, staring at their shoe tops and exuding an almost visible purple cloud of yearning; they wanted to have the National League season extended by a few more innings or a few more games. This wish, like so many other attitudes to be seen in this city, must be regarded as excessive. The teams on the field had already played more games in one season than any other two baseball teams in the history of mankind, and the quality of play demonstrated in the past three days by the twitchy, exhausted athletes on both squads was reminiscent of the action in the winter softball games played by septuagenarians in St. Petersburg, Florida. As everyone in this country must know by now, the newly elongated, hundred-and-sixty-two-game National League season proved insufficient to its purpose in its first year. The Dodgers, who led the Giants by four full games with a week to go, lost ten of their last thirteen games, including the last four in a row, and thus permitted their gasping pursuers to catch them on the final day. In the first playoff game, on Monday at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the Dodger team displayed the muscle, the frightfulness, and the total immobility of a woolly mammoth frozen in a glacier; the Giants, finding the beast inert, fell upon it with savage cries and chopped off steaks and rump roasts at will, winning 8–0. The feast continued here for a time yesterday, and after five and a half innings the Giants led, 5–0. At this point, the Dodgers scored their first run in thirty-six innings, and the Giants, aghast at this tiny evidence of life, stood transfixed, their stone axes dropping from their paws, while the monster heaved itself to its feet, scattering chunks of ice, and set about trampling its tormentors. The game, which the Dodgers eventually won, 8–7, is best described in metaphor and hyperbole, for there was no economy in it. It lasted four hours and eighteen minutes—a record for a nine-inning game. There were twenty hits, thirteen walks, three errors, two hit batsmen, and a total of forty-two ballplayers in action (also a record), and the only positive conviction among the spectators when it was over was that the Mets could have beaten both teams on the same afternoon.

Today was a little different. For one thing, there was a noisy, shirtsleeve crowd of 45,693 on hand, in contrast with the embarrassing acres of empty seats yesterday, when the park was barely half full. Los Angeles calls itself the Sports Capital of the World, but its confidence is easily shaken. Its loyalists are made uneasy by a team that appears likely to lose. Today, with a final chance at the pennant restored, the Dodger rooters were back, and there was a hopeful violence in their cries. Fans here seem to require electronic reassurance. One out of every three or four of them carries a transistor radio, in order to be told what he is seeing, and the din from these is so loud in the stands that every spectator can hear the voice of Vin Scully, the Dodger announcer, hovering about his ears throughout the game. There is also a huge, hexagonal electric sign in left field, on which boosterish messages appear from time to time. The fans respond to its instructions with alacrity, whether they are invited to sing “Baby Face” between innings or ordered to shout the Dodger battle cry of “
CHARGE
!” during a rally. Today the sign also carried news flashes about the orbital progress of Walter M. Schirra, Jr., thus enabling the crowd to enjoy both national pastimes—baseball and astronaut-watching—at the same time. This giant billboard, protruding above the left-field bleachers like a grocer’s price placard, was one of several indications to me that the new and impressive Dodger Stadium, which opened this spring, was designed by an admirer of suburban supermarkets. It has the same bright, uneasy colors (turquoise exterior walls, pale green outfield fences, odd yellows and ochers on the grandstand seats); the same superfluous decorative touches, such as the narrow rickrack roofs over the top row of the bleachers; the same preoccupation with easy access and with total use of interior space; and the same heaps of raw dirt around its vast parking lots. There is a special shelf for high-priced goods—a dugout behind home plate for movie and television stars, ballplayers’ wives, and transient millionaires. Outside, a complex system of concentric automobile ramps and colored signs—yellow for field boxes, green for reserved seats, and so forth—is intended to deliver the carborne fan to the proper gate, but on my two visits to O’Malley’s Safeway it was evident that the locals had not yet mastered their instructions, for a good many baseball shoppers wound up in the detergent aisle instead of in the cracker department, with a resultant loss of good feeling, and had to be ordered to go away and try again.