The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (105 page)

“I often think about coming to the end,” he said. “It’s fairly real—it’s a possibility—and I can’t say it doesn’t bother me. It isn’t a big event or anything, but what I’d like now is to leave on my terms. If I had another year like last year—and that wasn’t a bad year, it was
horrible—then
I’d have to go. I’d feel defeated. It isn’t just slowing down, not being able to do what you’ve done—that’s understood and accepted. You can deal with that. But we’re talking about maybe not being able to play baseball at all—the end. In some ways, I won’t mind. The position I’ve been in is that of an offensive leader who is counted on to produce. If I play in a hundred and fifty games, I’m expected to put a number on the board in a hundred of those games. That’s the kind of pressure you don’t mind doing without, especially if you’ve accomplished some goals along the way. So if I can do what I think I can do this year—hit maybe twenty-five home runs and eighty-five RBIs, just get back in Reggie’s groove—then I don’t think I’d miss the game after that. But if I didn’t—if I was asked to leave—it would be a whole lot different. I’d miss baseball if it came to that It’s
how
you go.”

I asked if he felt that people expected him to fail now, where once they had expected him to succeed.

“I’m always under pressure,” he said. “I always feel that. Even in this game—a little B-game. I got that base hit and everybody reacted to that. I could feel it. Then I struck out—it was the first changeup I’d seen all year—and I could feel the pressure of
Uh-oh, you didn’t succeed. What are people thinking?
The pressure goes on and off for me now even from one at-bat to the next.”

Someone asked if most older players didn’t have to bear this sort of burden, and Reggie agreed.

“If you’re over thirty-five and you’ve done some things in this game, you develop—if I’m using the word right—you develop a certain braggadocio, a bravado about yourself, but you know you’re being watched in a special way, because this is a young man’s game. If you do have some bad games, people notice it and write about it and talk about it, and you begin to think, Hey, why are you knocking me now? Even when I’d had a good season, like two years ago, I’d be asked how I measured it, how I felt about it, and that brought defensive responses. You can understand that. So listen. If I get one more good year, give me a pat on the back. Give me a feather and I’ll wear it in my cap.”
*

One of the umpires in that morning game was Pam Postema—a quick, slim, cheerful arbiter from the Pacific Coast League, who is the only woman ump in the business. I’d seen her work some games last year. The word on her is that she is an outstanding ball-and-strike ump and that she doesn’t take any guff out there. At one point in the spring, there was a rhubarb on the field, and coach Herm Starrette, of the Giants, told her to go back to her needle and thread, and she threw him out of the game. Here in Phoenix, she was talking to some friends after the game—she said she’d been hit on the toe with a foul the day before and was dying to get off her feet—when a fan leaned out of the stands and handed her a ball to sign. “Just give me your autograph, will ya, honey?” the man said.

Postema took the ball and the pen and said, “You want me to sign it ‘Honey’ or do you want my name?”

Lucky kids get to be batboys in the spring games—mostly the sons of coaches or club executives or older players, who come and visit their fathers during the spring break at school. For a while in March, the Oakland batpersons were Kacey and Carey Schueler, the daughters of Ron Schueler, who is the pitching coach for the A’s. Another A’s sprout on hand was Jim Essian III, the son of the veteran backup catcher, who was the smallest batboy on view anywhere. He is four years old, and he wore a green sunsuit on the job, with manager Steve Boros’ No. 14 inked on it, fore and aft. He had all the moves out there. Dave Kingman, who has caught on with the club as a designated hitter this year, bombed a moon shot up onto the left-field embankment against the Cubs’ Scott Sanderson, and when Kong came around third James III was waiting about ten feet up the line from home, with Kingsman’s bat under his arm, and he gave him a high five—high for him, low for Dave—as he came by.

As it turned out, I did have a scheme of study this spring, and that was to listen to older ballplayers talk about their trade. I didn’t plan it that way, but once it began to happen I was ready to go back for more. Rookie fireball flingers and unknown nineteen-year-old sluggers who can hit the ball five hundred feet into the mangrove swamp are the prime drawing cards of spring baseball—the equivalent of royal palms to Florida or giant cactus to Arizona—but over the years I have discovered that while it is exciting to watch the kids and think about their futures, it does not nearly match the pleasure of listening to the older players tell you what they have learned over many thousands of major-league innings. Tom Seaver, Don Sutton, and Reggie Jackson don’t have much in common at first glance except their age and their long success, but what I picked up from them all was an absorbed pride in work that accompanies, and sometimes even exceeds, the self-pride and love of challenge that lie somewhere near the center of every professional athlete. We envy and admire ballplayers because they get to do brilliant things under contrived but excruciatingly difficult circumstances; if they like themselves in the end, we can forgive them, I think, for it is much clearer to them than to anyone else how truly hard it was, every day, to play this game well, or at all.

Rusty Staub, the old man of the young Mets, had an amazing season in 1983. Employed almost exclusively as a pinch-hitter, he batted .296 over a hundred and four games, and rapped twenty-four pinch hits—one short of the all-time record. His eight consecutive pinch hits, in June, tied another record, and so did his twenty-five pinch runs-batted-in for the season. All this came to pass in his twenty-first season; he started as an outfielder with Houston in 1963, when he played a full season, with more than five hundred at-bats, at the age of nineteen. Along the way, he became the first people’s favorite—
le Grand Orange—
with the newborn Montreal Expos; then held down right field for the Mets in the early seventies (I can still see him catching a drive by the Reds’ Dan Driessen and crashing heavily into the wall out there—and holding the ball), batting .423 in their second World Series, in 1973; then played for the Tigers, the Expos again, and the Rangers; and came back to the Mets in 1981. I talked with Staub one bright, breezy morning while we sat on a little green bench outside the clubhouse at Huggins-Stengel Field, where the Mets train. He is a large, thickly built man, with pink eyelashes and oddly pale skin and a self-contained, polite way of speaking. He was a few days short of his fortieth birthday.

“Most of the men who have played into their forties have been pitchers,” he said. “The players who have made it that long are a group that’s had talent and a tremendous dedication to staying in shape. People like Yastrzemski, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and myself took pride in how they played every day. They didn’t give. They never said the hell with today, we’ll get ’em tomorrow. Every game mattered. As my career went along, I saw a lot of players with great ability who didn’t stay in the game as long as they could have, because they seemed to lose their desire. Even way back when I was with Houston, people were saying I only had a couple of years left, but I knew better. I’m pleased and proud I’ve been able to stay in this game and still play with the young guys.”

Staub said that he had found it much easier to accept his role as a pinch-hitter once Keith Hernandez came over to the Mets from the Cardinals last June. Before that, Dave Kingman had been playing first, although Staub was convinced that he himself could have helped the club more at that position. Hernandez deserved the job, in Staub’s estimation, and that made a difference in his own mental adjustment to his limited duties. “You’ve really got to have a positive attitude about yourself to be a pinch-hitter,” he said. “As frustrating as hitting is, there’s just no comparison between it and pinch-hitting. You’re going to come up to bat in a great many situations where the game is on the line, and no matter what sort of streak you’re on you’re going to make some outs, and they’ll be outs that hurt. You’re going to let down your teammates. It’s wonderful when you do get up there and put your team back in the game, or get the hit that ties it up, or the hit that wins it, but when you make the out, that’s
tough.
You have to be mentally strong about it, because you can’t redeem yourself until the next opportunity, and that may not be until a week from now. You have to have a great belief in your own abilities and worth to go through that and not get down.”

He talked a little about the more technical side of the work—staying loose in the clubhouse during the game with exercises and a skip rope, so as to be in gear when called upon, and keeping his short stroke (a thing of beauty; how well I can see it!) at the plate. “If there’s anything I’ve worked at, it’s to be intelligent about the pitchers,” he said. “I try to give the outstanding pitchers full credit and not do too much with the ball. Take what’s there. If there’s a really good left-hander with a breaking ball”—Staub is a left-handed batter—“you can’t be up there wheeling for the fences. Most of the time when I’m up, I’m only after a base hit. Going after an extra-base hit is a little different, and sometimes you can have that in mind and succeed. Not a
lot,
though.” He shook his head.

“I don’t get to play in the field much now,” he went on, “but I used to work on that part of the game as much as I did on my hitting. It’s strange, but quite a few people who are known as hitters do the same thing. That’s why I spent so many hours thinking about the other aspects of the game. One of the greatest compliments I ever got was when Ron LeFlore called me one of his top ten base stealers in the game, not because of my record”—Staub has forty-seven lifetime stolen bases—“but because I’d studied it so much. I knew the pitchers and their moves, and I think I was able to help him become such an outstanding man on the base paths.”

I told Rusty that I’d always had the impression, watching him, that no part of the game had come naturally to him. Every aspect of it—running, hitting, picking up the ball and throwing it—looked to me as if it had been studied and practiced endlessly and somehow mastered.

“What you saw is right,” he said. “I discovered at a very early age that nothing was going to come easy for me, that I’d have to work to have any success. I compliment my dad and my mom and my kid coaches and high-school coaches, who all made me want to do things the right way—and to know myself.
That’s
the biggest challenge for any player: to know in what situation you might have a tendency to back off a little and not do very well—from an injury, say, or for any reason—and then to learn to overcome that. Learning to face the people you have to face and how to do things then. It’s—Well, I don’t think I want to get into that. It’s rough.”

What he did want to get into, it turned out, was the part of the game from which he is now exiled—playing outfield, that is. “I probably got as much pleasure from playing defense as anyone who ever played this game,” he said. He was smiling a little now. “I took great pride in being able to throw the ball hard and with real accuracy. For ten or twelve years there, I probably threw the ball from the outfield as well as anybody in my league, and I definitely threw as accurately as anyone. I know I made myself into an outstanding outfielder, and when I slowed down a little I found that I loved playing first base well. When I made an outstanding defensive play, that was as good as a base hit any day. As good or better.”

Afterword: Rusty retired after the 1985 season and so missed out on the Mets’ glorious pennant season and World Championship the following year; he has joined the Mets’ broadcasting crew. He rapped out nineteen more pinch hits over his last two seasons—each under extreme duress, for the Mets had risen into serious contention in their division by then, to me, his finest moments came in late September of 1984. I was at Shea Stadium when he smote an eighth-inning two-run pinch-hit single that beat the Phillies and clinched second place for the Mets. He came out of the dugout for a standing O (a practice he deplores), waved his cap, and disappeared—done for the year, I assumed.
Almost
done. The next night (I was away, worse luck), with the Mets again in the soup, manager Davey Johnson again rang for the specialist, and Staub whacked a game-winning two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. It was Rusty’s only home run of the year (and his two-hundred-and-ninety-first lifetime), and the first for him since he turned forty, back in April. He struck his very first home run back on June 3, 1963—Don Drysdale was pitching—when he was a nineteen-year-old first baseman with the Houston Colt .45s. Rusty Staub thus qualifies as the second player ever to hit major-league homers as a teen-ager and in his forties; his companion in this feat is Ty Cobb. Stat of the year.

*
See page 139 for the feather.

—
Summer 1983

O
NE DAY IN JUNE
last year, I took a ride on the BART subway line from the Embarcadero station, which is near the foot of the Bay Bridge in downtown San Francisco, all the way out to the Coliseum station, in Oakland. It was about a twenty-five minute trip, which took us under the bay and then out into the sunshine and along the East Bay shore, but it seemed a lot shorter than that. The BART (for Bay Area Rapid Transit) car I was in was clean and shiny and almost empty—it was early afternoon—and the train zipped along in a pleasing, slithery way, so quietly that you could converse with a friend in a living-room tone of voice. I was glad about that part, because Roy, my companion on the little trip, is a prime talker. Roy lives in San Francisco and I live in New York, and anybody sitting across the aisle from us in the BART car could have sorted us out in about four seconds. Roy was wearing faded tan corduroys, a pink Izod alligator T-shirt, and beat-up tennis shoes; the handle of a tennis racquet protruded from a blue canvas bag between his feet. His thick brown, casually cut hair covered the tops of his ears, and his long, interesting-looking nose was peeling a bit. He had a year-round sort of tan, and he was clearly in terrific shape: a Californian. Roy is forty-four, but he looks seven or eight years younger—ten years younger. He is a nonpracticing lawyer, a former coach of the University of California freshman crew, a former professor of law at Boalt Hall (the University of California law school at Berkeley), and an active Class A tennis player. I had agreed to pick him up at the Golden Gateway Tennis Club, where I turned up just too late to see him in action in a doubles match, but we didn’t talk tennis on the ride out to Oakland; we talked baseball.