The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (99 page)

“Our other catcher, Steve Lake, was in the game, so I didn’t talk to him. He was in the fire, and we were lookin’ into it. But that’s all there is to it, you know. Does the man back there know what’s going on? If he does, he can throw bad and he can run bad and block bad, but he’s still the single most important player on the field.”

*
On September 16th, 1987, Bob Boone caught his 1919th major-league game, thereby surpassing the all-time receivers’ record held by Ai Lopez. Although he didn’t sign with the Angels until May 1st, he worked behind the plate in more than one hundred games, as usual, and threw out just under fifty percent of enemy base runners. He is forty years old, and his mind is prepared to go right on catching.

—
Fall 1983

C
ARL YASTRZEMSKI, ENCIRCLED FOR
the last time by the Fenway Park multitudes, stood at a microphone in the first-base coaching box before the game and waved his cap to the crowd. He turned slowly to face the left-field stands, the cap held high, with the green of the underside of its bill showing, and then slowly back in the other direction, toward right field, and then to face out toward the bleachers, and the waves of clapping and cheers seemed to move and swirl around him, almost visible in the damp afternoon air. He gestured toward the home dugout, and his teammates came up and out onto the field, in their white uniforms and shiny dark warmup jackets, to surround him and shake his hand, and he and Jim Rice embraced; then the Red Sox pitchers and catchers and coaches left the bullpen and came walking and running across the grass to join him and be near him. The cheering rose again (it went on all afternoon, really), and Yaz approached the microphone with a piece of paper in his hand. “Thank you very much,” he said, but then he stopped and walked a little distance out onto the diamond and waved his hand, with his head down. He was crying.

This was the last day of the 1983 season and Carl Yastrzemski’s last day in uniform; his 3,308th game, more games than anyone else has played in baseball; and the end of his twenty-third year as a player. I am not much for the pomp and ceremonies of the sport, but I had made a promise with myself way back last winter to keep this date, when it was clear that Yaz at last would be stepping down. Flying up on the shuttle in the morning, I thought about all those years of Yaz and all those different lifetime, all-time statistics (third in times at bat, behind Hank Aaron; seventh in hits, behind Honus Wagner; sixth in total bases, behind Babe Ruth; and so forth) and all the scores of times I had seen him play (I have no idea how many), and it came to me that the pervasive, unshakable image of Carl Yastrzemski that I carry inside me is of his making an out in a game, in some demanding or critical situation—a pop-up instead of a base hit, or perhaps an easy grounder chopped toward a waiting infielder—with Yaz dropping his head in sudden disappointment and self-disgust as he flips the bat away and starts up the line, his chance gone once again. Often he did come through, of course—the homers (four hundred and fifty-two of them, all told); the long doubles caromed off the left-center-field part of the wall; the sure and splendid catches; the deadly, rally-destroying pegs from the closed-in left-field corner; the whole sustained, unmatched performance in the late-pennant scramble and then the World Series in 1967—and I have all that in mind as well, but it seems inevitable that I should remember him, rather, in the act of failing, for no other great ballplayer I have seen was more burdened by the difficulties of this most unforgiving of all sports, and by the ceaseless demands he made on his own skills, and by the expectations that we had of him in every game and almost every at-bat of that long stretch of seasons that was now ended. Playing any sport well at the upper levels requires violent concentration, which is why professional athletes display such glum countenances as they go about their work; Yaz wasn’t glum, he was funereal. None of it had ever looked easy for him, or even like much fun, and late this summer, when he began to reflect about his career and its meanings, he put aside some of the preoccupied silence that often enwrapped him in the clubhouse and talked a little more freely with reporters about what it had been like for him. He agreed with what we had seen and sensed. “I loved the game, I loved the competition, but I never enjoyed it,” he said. “It was all hard work, all the time. I let the game dominate me. It even got harder as I got older, because then I had more to prove.” He said this, or some variation of it, many times, and sometimes with an odd lightness, almost an air of relief, but even then he did not let down or enjoy himself much. A
Times
reporter, Steve Cady, called on him in the clubhouse at Fenway Park in late September and saw a recent message that Yaz had written to himself taped on the back of his locker: “In box with left leg and all weight on it. Nothing on front leg.
WAIT.
Stay back. Relax.” Right to the end, he was learning his trade.

There were other notable farewells this year. Jim Kaat stepped down after twenty-five years as a major-league hurler, most recently with the Cardinals—the longest pitching career on the books. Vida Blue, only thirty-four, was dropped by the Royals in midseason and subsequently entered treatment at a drug-rehabilitation center: a different kind of departure, but one that should not make us forget that effulgent first full summer of his, back in 1971, when, just turned twenty-two, Vida Blue stood the baseball world on its ear with a 24–8 and 1.82 record for the Oakland A’s, and won the Cy Young Award and the Most Valuable Player Award in his league, all in his first full year. Finally, Johnny Bench hung up his spikes, after seventeen years with the Reds and a hatful of records: twice MVP and the most lifetime home runs hit by a catcher (three hundred and twenty-five, out of his all-positions total of three hundred and eighty-nine). He was the centerpiece of the memorable Cincinnati Big Red Machine of the early nineteen-seventies. He quit catching a couple of years ago, when the wear and tear of the position became too much, and played first base and third base instead, but he will be remembered most, I think, for his skills behind the plate. He came to the fore just when the much smaller hinged catching mitt first became popular, and his shortstop-quick hands and his smoothness and balance and mobility behind the bat instantly caused all the catchers in the land to imitate his one-handed style, but none of them, then or now, could touch him.

Bench and Yastrzemski made their last road trips around their leagues in the styles that suited their personalities, with the extroverted Bench cheerfully accepting gifts and trophies and appearing at center-diamond rituals during “Day”s in his honor in a great many ballparks. Yaz declined, only at last agreeing to the one home-park official “Yaz Day”—a great outpouring of flowers and gifts and tears and speeches at Fenway Park on the day before that last Sunday. It was like Yaz, I think, to want one more game after that, so that he could go out playing before fans who preferred to come for the baseball rather than for the party. On that last afternoon, he let it be known, he wanted to go back to his old position in left field, where he had not played in the past three years, instead of just appearing once again as the D.H. Before the game, Bosox manager Ralph Houk was talking in his office to a few writers about the kind of player Yaz had been. “Unlike some people we’ve voted into the Hall of Fame, he could beat you a lot of different ways,” Houk said. “He’d move a man from first to third with no outs, make a great play in the outfield, steal a base when he had to, break up the double play out there in the middle of a big game, or throw out a runner who seemed to have the base made—the whole thing. He hit for average, hit for power, ran the bases—whatever. Even now, if you put a man on first, Yaz will make some kind of contact up at the plate. I sure hope he don’t hurt himself today, playing out in the field, out there on that wet grass.” Houk threw up his hands—his trademark gesture. “Well, if he does, we’ll just shoot him and drag him off the field, like an old race horse,” he said. “He’s come this fucking far, he’ll go one more game.” So he did, and the game—a meaningless little engagement between the sixth-place Bosox and the last-place Indians—was all right, too, and even fun after a while, because Jim Rice whacked a three-run homer that drove in all the Boston runs (the home side won, 3–1) and tied him with Cecil Cooper (who was having a great afternoon against the Tigers, it turned out) for the RBI title, and the Fenwayites gave Jim a mighty standing O of his own in his final turn at the plate. Yaz got his hit—a trifling wrong-side single past the third baseman, in the third—and that was all that anyone really cared about, in the end. He came up for the last time in the seventh, and again paused for our pelting cheers and applause, holding his cap aloft and turning to face every part of the stands. He badly wanted a homer, of course, but the Cleveland pitcher, Dan Spillner, was so nervous out there, so intent on not spoiling things with a base on balls, that he very nearly
did
walk him, and Yaz had to take his last flailing cut at a pitch that was up by his ears, and popped it up harmlessly to second. He ran out to left field for the top of the eighth, but came off immediately for a substitute, sent out by Ralph Houk to give us one more chance to say goodbye, and the fans waved their handkerchiefs this time, to “Auld Lang Syne,” with tears everywhere now, even in the press box. Later, when the game was over, Yaz, summoned back, came out onto the darkening field once again, and this time he trotted slowly around the perimeter of the field, touching the hands of the fans in the low front rows as he went by. He knew at last—I think the realization must have come to him very late, maybe only days or weeks before, breaking into the web of his concentration and pressured shyness and pride in work: he knew what he had meant to New England fans, and was trying to tell us that the feelings ran deep and in both directions. I did not expect such a thing of him—it did not seem in his nature to have worked this all out the way he did—but the fact that he could do it meant that he was still in the game all the way, even on his last day. He had indicated as much in his little speech at the beginning of the afternoon, when he said (this was the whole speech), “I saw the sign that said ‘Say It Ain’t So, Yaz,’ and I wish it weren’t. This is the last day of my career as a player, and I want to thank all of you for being here with me today. It has been a great privilege to wear the Red Sox uniform the past twenty-three years and to have played in Fenway in front of you great fans. I’ll miss you and I’ll never forget you.”

There was a postgame press conference up in the Red Sox press lounge on top of the roof behind home plate, and when Yaz finally turned up there he was applauded by the writers, too. He was in his uniform pants and long-sleeved undershirt now, with a towel around his neck. “I feel super—the best I’ve felt in a long, long time,” he said. “I feel ten years younger than I did fifteen minutes ago. Now I don’t have to do all that again.” He paused and shook his head, and a sudden, almost boyish smile lit up his face. He looked restored—his own age at last. He is forty-four.

Midsummer baseball feels as if it would last forever; late-season baseball becomes quicker and terser, as if sensing its coming end, and sometimes, if we are lucky, it explodes into thrilling terminal colors, leaving bright pictures in memory to carry us through the miserable months to come. Not this year. This time, the long campaigns closed almost silently, never producing that two-team or three-team, final-weekend rush to the wire that we have come to expect in at least a couple of divisions. In the Championship Series—those brusque, dangerous best-of-five playoffs—the Chicago White Sox scored but one run in their last twenty-seven innings of the year and fell dead before the Baltimore Orioles, while the Dodgers, it will be recalled, performed even more feebly in losing to the Phillies; both winners needed only four games to wrap up their pennants. This sort of preamble sometimes sets the stage for a protracted and melodramatic World Series, as happened in 1979, when the Pirates overcame a two-game deficit to put down the Orioles; in 1975, when we had that incomparable seven-game Series—the “War and Peace” of baseball—between the Red Sox and the ultimately victorious Cincinnati Reds; and last year, when the Cardinals hung on to win a dishevelled seven-game alley-fight with the Milwaukee Brewers. This year, however, the Phillies put up such a minimal offense in the Series—mostly the little popping sounds of solo home runs—that as the games went along our attention shifted away from the events on the field and toward the very different team personae and styles of play of the two clubs: a useful baseball seminar, to be sure, but not quite the entertainment we had wished for. The Orioles, after dropping the opener by 2–1, swept the next four games behind some exemplary sustained staff pitching, concluding with a numbing 5–0 shutout by Scott McGregor, which not only closed the lid on the Phillies but seemed to put away this particular baseball year altogether, quickly and for good. Such a last act does not require a grand retrospective, but these 1983 playoffs and Series do afford us a chance to look at the sport in a more discriminating fashion, undistracted by heroics and mere brilliance, and so perhaps pick up a better sense of how games are really won and lost.

Fans in some unlikely places will have much to savor, once they recover from the sting of their ultimate disappointments of this season. In Toronto, there were those weeks in mid-July when the Blue Jays, who had tied for last place in 1982, were leading the pack in the A.L; East and everyone in town was talking about the young pitchers Dave Stieb, Jim Clancy, and Luis Leal (a new Tiant, it sometimes seemed), and first baseman Willie Upshaw, and the dashing Lloyd Moseby, in center, and the late-blooming slugger Jesse Barfield, and the club’s utterly unexpected show of power. (The Blue Jays led their league in batting this year, and fell two homers short of taking the home-run title as well.) The Jays stayed in the thick of things until a road trip in late August, when they were beaten in the tenth inning on three successive nights; the following week, in deep shock, they gave up winning runs in the ninth, ninth, and twelfth innings and dropped out of the race for good. They will be back, surely, and so will their politely exuberant fans, who turned out in amazing numbers (1,930,292) at the little local ball yard, Exhibition Stadium, which was built for football and thus seats its bleacher fans in stands that angle oddly away from the center of the diamond. Baseball attendance over all was at a record high of 45,565,910 this summer—almost a million more than last year. Seven teams set new attendance marks, and ten clubs drew more than two million fans apiece.