The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (93 page)

I imagine everyone who thinks of himself or herself as an Expo fan still clings to that moment, for the team lost the next two games—lost them late, under grindingly painful circumstances—to miss out on the World Series, and sank into a long baseball torpor. Sometimes it’s wiser to remember the byplay of big games—the songs and the rest of it—instead of their outcome, because losing hurts so much. Players understand this all too well. A day or two before the end, Steve Rogers, talking about all the singing and happiness in the Montreal stands, shook his head a little and said, “Yes, it’s beautiful, but—well, euphoria is not always the name of the game.”

People who don’t follow baseball very closely assume that fans care only about their own club. I don’t agree. Whenever I happen upon a Little League game or a high-school game or a Sunday game in Central Park between a couple of East Harlem amateur nines, it only takes me an inning or so before I find myself privately rooting for one of the teams out there. I have no idea how this choice is arrived at, but the process is more fun if the two sides offer a visible, almost moral, clash of styles and purpose, and—even better—if each seems to be personified by one of its players. At that 1982 Cardinals-Brewers World Series, York and Lancaster were brilliantly depicted by the rival center fielders; the frail, popeyed, apologetic-looking Cardinal rookie, Willie McGee; and the hulking, raggedy-ass veteran Brewer slugger, Gorman Thomas. McGee had a great series, it turned out, both at the plate and in the field; in the third game, which the Cardinals won, 6–2, he smacked home runs in two successive at-bats, and in the ninth he pulled down a mighty poke by Gorman Thomas (of
course)
after running at full tilt from mid-center field into deep left center and then to the top of the wall there all in one flowing, waterlike motion—a cat up a tree—with no pause or accelerations near the end to adjust for the catch; at the top of his leap, with his back to the field, he put his glove up and bit to his left, and the ball, in the same instant, arrived. The play almost broke my heart, for I had already somehow chosen the Brewers and Gorman Thomas as my own. Thomas, as it happened, did nothing much in the Series-three little singles, and this after a summer in which he had hit a league-leading thirty-nine home runs—so I certainly wasn’t front-running. The frowsy Thomas was a walking strip mine; he had worn the same pair of uniform stockings, now as threadbare as the Shroud of Turin, since opening day of 1978. I recall a moment in the Brewer clubhouse during the Series when a group of us were chatting with Thomas’s father—he was the retired postmaster of Charleston, South Carolina—and some genius reporter asked what Gorman’s room had looked like back when he was a teen-ager. “Tumble!” Thomas
pére
said, wincing at the thought. “Why, I could hahdly make myself look in theah!”

Events on the field qualify in the life, as well; they only have to be a little special. In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after
that,
he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 6–6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 3–2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly’s accountbook for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driven in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, “This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone.” I wasn’t at Candlestick that day, but I don’t care; I have this one by heart.

Or consider an earlier concatenation that began when Phil Garner, a stalwart Pirate outfielder, struck a grand slam home run against the Cardinals at Three Rivers Stadium one evening in 1978. Every professional player can recall each grand slam in his career, but this one was a blue-plate special, because Garner, who is not overmuscled, had never hit a bases-loaded home run before—not in Little League play; not in Legion or high-school ball; not in four years with the University of Tennessee nine; not in five years in the minors; not in six hundred and fifty-one prior major-league games, over two leagues and five summers. Never.

We must now try to envisage—perhaps in playlet form—the events at the Garner place when Phil came home that evening:

P.G.
(enters left, with a certain swing in his step):
Hi, honey.

Mrs. P.G.—or C.G. (her name is Carol): Hi. How’d it go?

P.G.: O.K. (pause) Well?

C.G.: Well, what?

P.G.: What! You mean…

C.G.:
(alarmed): What
what? What’s going on?

P.G.: I can’t believe it. You missed it….

Yes, she had missed it, although Carol was and is a baseball fan and a fan of Phil’s, as well as his wife, and was in the custom of attending most of the Pirates’ home games and following the others by radio or television. When he told her the news, she was delighted but appalled.

C.G.: I can’t get over not seeing it. You can’t imagine how bad I feel.

P.G.:
(grandly):
Oh, that’s O.K., honey. I’ll hit another one for you tomorrow.

And so he did.

Attention must be paid. In March, 1984, I watched a talented left-handed Blue Jay rookie pitcher named John Cerutti work three middle innings against the Red Sox at Winter Haven; at one point he struck out Jim Rice with a dandy little slider in under his fists. I talked to Cerutti after the game and learned that he was four credits away from his B.A. degree in economics at Amherst (he has since graduated) and that his senior thesis had to do with the role of agents in major-league player salaries. I also discovered that he had a baseball hero: Ron Guidry.

“I don’t have many fond memories of baseball until I was about eighteen and pitching for the Christian Brothers Academy, in Albany,” he said. “Then I got the notion that I might make it in the game someday. I had a real good year that year—it was 1978—and, of course, that was the same time that Guidry had
his
great year. I was a Yankee fan—always had been—so naturally I followed him and pulled for him, and that spring I began to notice that something weird was happening to us. I mean, I won seven games in a row, and he won his first seven. Then I was 9–0 when he was exactly the same—we were winning together, me and
Ron Guidry!
School ended and I graduated, but I went on pitching in American Legion ball. I was 13–0 when I lost my first game, and I thought, Uh-oh, that’s the end of it, but that very same night Guidry lost, too, for the first time—I was watching on TV—so we were still the same. Well, I guess you know he finished up the year with a 25–3 record, and was the Cy Young winner and all, and I ended at 25–2. So you could say we both had pretty good years. That affinity began.”

Cerutti said all this a little offhandedly—with a trace of college-cool irony, perhaps—but his face was alight with humor and good cheer.

“So do you want to know my dream now?” he went on. “My dream is that first I make this club some day, and then I end up pitching a game against Ron Guidry. It’s a big, big game—a Saturday afternoon at the Stadium, one of those big crowds, with a lot riding on it—and I beat him, 1–0. It could just happen.”

“I know,” I said.

“Keep watching,” he said.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Making the Blue Jays took a little longer than Cerutti had expected, but when he was called up from Syracuse in the spring of 1986, it was noticed that he had his stuff together at last; he went 9–4 for the season, with a shutout along the way, and took up his place in the Toronto starting rotation. I was happy about the promotion (I had renewed acquaintance with him briefly a couple of times in the interim, mostly in Florida), and in June this summer I watched him work a game against the Yankees in New York one evening—watched him over the tube, I mean. It was a significant game for both clubs, since the Blue Jays were a half game up on the Yankees at the top of the American League East. There I was, with my dinner and a drink before me and with John Cerutti, big as life, up there on the screen, when several rusty synapses clicked on at last. “My God!” I cried. “It’s Guidry, too. It’s happened.”

I had blown our date, but Cerutti kept his, all right, beating the Yankees by 7–2, it turned out, to solidify his teams’s hold on first place. Not Cerutti’s plan
exactly,
but close enough. I considered rushing up to the stadium to catch the later innings, but I didn’t. I got there early the next evening, however, and at batting practice a couple of writer friends said, “You see John Cerutti? He was looking for you last night.”

He came in from the field at last—he had been doing his sprints out there—and found me in the dugout. “Hey,” he said cheerfully. “Where were you?”

“I blew it,” I said. “I’m sorry, John—I stood you up. I feel bad about it. Only you said it would be a
Saturday.”

“Well, I looked for you,” he said. “Everyone else was here. I heard a couple of days ago that it might be me and the Gator, so I called my mom and she came down for it. In the end, I had to leave sixteen tickets for people from home. They knew how long I’d been waiting. It was all just the way I’d dreamed about it. In the first couple of innings, I kept thinking, Here I am, with my spikes on the same pitching rubber where Ron Guidry’s spikes were a minute ago. It was a thrill.”

“I know—I saw it at home,” I said miserably. “There’s no excuse, only well, you know…I didn’t believe it. Life isn’t
like
this.”

“I know,” he said. “But this is different.”

“This is baseball, you mean.”

“That’s right,” he said. “In baseball—well, stuff can happen.

*
Quite right, and the job, it turned out, was managing the Orioles. Earl took up the reins again in midseason of 1985, and helped steer his old club to a second-place finish. The next year, however, everything went sour—most of all, the pitching—as the team slipped into the cellar of the American League East, and when it was over Earl stepped down for good. In retrospect, I think I should have known that the first retirement wouldn’t work. Earlier in 1982, I recall, I asked him in a casual sort of way if he was truly ready to leave—and in particular if he’d be able to stick to his promise to stay out of baseball altogether. Wasn’t it possible that he’d end up coaching a college team or even a high-school team somewhere, the way so many other retired skippers had done? “I
hate
kids and I hate fucking kid baseball!” he barked, startling us both into laughter. He wanted the real thing, nothing less.

—
Winter 1984

C
ONSIDER THE CATCHER. BULKY
, thought-burdened, unclean, he retrieves his cap and mask from the ground (where he has flung them, moments ago, in mid-crisis) and moves slowly again to his workplace. He whacks the cap against his leg, producing a puff of dust, and settles it in place, its bill astern, with an oddly feminine gesture and then, reversing the movement, pulls on the mask and firms it with a soldierly downward tug. Armored, he sinks into his squat, punches his mitt, and becomes wary, balanced, and ominous; his bare right hand rests casually on his thigh while he regards, through the portcullis, the field and deployed fielders, the batter, the base runner, his pitcher, and the state of the world, which he now, for a waiting instant, holds in sway. The hand dips between his thighs, semaphoring a plan, and all of us—players and umpires and we in the stands—lean imperceptibly closer, zoom-lensing to a focus, as the pitcher begins his motion and the catcher half rises and puts up his thick little target, tensing himself to deal with whatever comes next, to end what he has begun. These motions—or most of them, anyway—are repeated a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty times by each of the catchers in the course of a single game, and are the most familiar and the least noticed gestures in the myriad patterns of baseball. The catcher has more equipment and more attributes than players at the other positions. He must be large, brave, intelligent, alert, stolid, foresighted, resilient, fatherly, quick, efficient, intuitive, and impregnable. These scoutmaster traits are counterbalanced, however, by one additional entry—catching’s bottom line. Most of all, the catcher is invisible. He does more things and (except for the batter) more difficult things than anyone else on the field, yet our eyes and our full attention rest upon him only at the moment when he must stand alone, upright and unmoving, on the third-base side of home and prepare to deal simultaneously with the urgently flung or relayed incoming peg and the onthundering base runner—to handle the one with delicate precision and then, at once, the other violently and stubbornly, at whatever risk to himself. But that big play at home is relatively rare. Sometimes three or four games go by without its ever coming up, or coming to completion: the whole thing, the street accident—the slide and the catch, the crash and the tag and the flying bodies, with the peering ump holding back his signal until he determines that the ball has been held or knocked loose there in the dust, and then the wordless exchanged glances (“That all you got?”…“You think that
hurt,
man?”) between the slowly arising survivors. Even when the catcher has a play on the foul fly—whipping around from the plate and staring up until he locates the ball and then, with the mask flipped carefully behind him, out of harm’s way, following its ampersand rise and fall and poising himself for that crazy last little swerve—our eyes inevitably go to the ball at the final instant and thus mostly miss catch and catcher.