The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (113 page)

There has rarely been a better vintage of rookies and baseball Yuppies, with a minimal rundown requiring mention of the Mariners’ Alan Davis (twenty-seven homers, a hundred and sixteen RBIs); center fielder Kirby Puckett, of the Twins; second baseman Marty Barrett (also of the Bosox); and outfielders Dan Gladden (Giants) and Jeff Stone (Phillies), who batted .351 and .362, respectively, in less than full seasons. The new pitchers were almost better: the aforementioned Messrs. Gooden and Darling, of the Mets; Mark Langston, of the Mariners (17–10, with two hundred and four strikeouts); Roger Clemens, of the Red Sox; Orel Hershiser, of the Dodgers; and Bret Saberhagen and Mark Gubicza, of the Royals. (The funny-name team title went to the Cincinnati Reds, by the way, in a landslide: a roster that included the possible law firm of Knicely, Krenchicki, Bilardello, Esasky & Redus. A trade might even land them Doug Gwosdz—pronounced “Goosh”—of the Padres, who is known to his teammates as Eye-Chart.) And let us conclude our rosters by not naming the eleven managers who were released, or allowed to depart, during the season or just after it—a casualty (or scapegoat) list that inspired the ineffable George Steinbrenner (who has canned ten managers—but not ten
different
managers—in his twelve years with the Yankees) to remark, “It’s getting so you can’t make news anymore when you make a change. The lack of stability is alarming.” Steinbrenner then gave his incumbent, Yogi Berra, a vote of confidence that reminded me of the three-finger handshake that W. C. Fields received from his boss in “The Bank Dick”: “Yogi did a very creditable job.”

Reggie Jackson, now almost exclusively employed as a designated hitter by the Angels, struck his five hundredth lifetime home run—a vast relief to everyone who knows what pride he takes in such matters. I am not very fond of these Landmarks Commission records, which so often seem to burn out or put down an aging player as he struggles toward some arbitrary plateau. I well remember the repeated mound embarrassments that Lefty Grove experienced when he was straining to notch his three-hundredth victory, and, twenty years later, the sadness and disconcertion we felt as we watched Early Wynn go through the same process; each of them made the grade at last, and instantly retired, diminished by his triumph. Reggie has persisted, however, and has surprised us once again. He knocked No. 500 (his twenty-second of the year, on September 17, against the Royals, out of an eventual twenty-five), thereby joining a most exclusive gents’ club; eleven of its twelve previous members are in the Hall of Fame. Reggie, now thirty-eight and with no more real challenges in sight, will be back for at least one more season—clear sailing at last, with a few splendid targets (Mel Ott, with 511 lifetime homers; Ernie Banks and Eddie Mathews, each with 512; and Ted Williams and Willie McCovey, with 521 apiece) in plain view.

A few sweepings remain here on the floor of the Archive Room. Here is the box-score pitching line left by George Frazier, a Cubs long reliever, after a painful outing against the Mets in September:

Box scores never lie, and the apparent typo in Frazier’s little row of embarrassments—a strikeout but no outs (the out would show as “1/3” under the innings-pitched symbol)—is absolutely correct: Darryl Strawberry struck out on a Frazier wild pitch that bounced away from the catcher, and made it easily to first. Another genuine curio is not in the record books but deserves enshrinement somewhere—the umpire’s ruling that enjoined Indians outfielder Mel Hall from coming up to the plate with three batting gloves dangling from each hip pocket; an errant pitch might flick one of the gloves, the arbiter decided, and unfairly allow Hall a free pass to first base. This was a sad loss to the game, for Mel Hall does not actually
wear
a batting glove when at the plate. The six white mitts, dangling prettily on his haunches and all aflutter whenever he ran the bases, were purely decorative: the beautiful badge of a hotdog. And, finally, we should probably not forget the midsummer news that three members of the Padres’ pitching staff—Eric Show, Mark Thurmond, and Dave Dravecky—were found to be full-fledged, signed-up members of the John Birch Society. Much was made of this in the press, and the hurlers defended their politics stoutly, but I couldn’t fit it in anywhere. Everything in baseball means something, but this one eluded me. Two of the pitchers were starters, one was a reliever….Two were left-handed but one of these, Dravecky, was
a left-hander who bats right-handed
….Something is afoot here, clearly, but what? I leave the matter to Bill James, the demon Sabermetrician, who must now devise the first Birchfactor formula and thereby return our game to the pure world of numbers, where it belongs.

Early on the day of the first Cubs-Padres playoff game, Jim Frey went to his bedroom window to check the wind—
too
early, it turned out, for it was four-thirty in the morning and still pitch-black out there. He went back to bed. He got what he wanted, though, for there was a lovely Cubs wind at Wrigley Field by game time that afternoon—blowing straight out, that is, at a good twenty miles an hour—and throughout the day you could hear the shuffle and pop of the flags snapping in the breeze. The scoops of bunting set around the gray-blue facing of the steep upper deck were also astir, and, farther out, the tall center-field flagpole above the great gray-green scoreboard and the rising pyramid of bleachers flew a double row of pennants (team flags, in the order of finish, top to bottom of the National League divisions), which kept up a gala, regattalike flutter all through the shining afternoon. The famous ivy, thickly overgrowing the outfield walls from pole to pole, showed October tints, and the graceful old brickwork of the inner-field facade suggested football weather as well. There were treetops swaying out along Waveland Avenue, beyond left field, and Sheffield Avenue, beyond right, and other flags were aloft on the rooftops of the low neighborhood houses there, with a fine range of colors and loyalties to choose among: Old Glory, Israel, Ireland, Puerto Rico, and, of course, the Cubs. In among the flags, a couple of big tethered balloons shifted and shouldered in the moving air, and the parapets and extemporaneous stands on the roofs were jammed with unticketed, opportunistic fans, who counted themselves lucky to be close enough to pick up glimpses of the game along with the sounds and sense of it. The angling, early-autumn sunlight illuminated white-and-blue Cubs pennants in the stands around the park and silhouetted a long, sweeping line of heads and shoulders of the spectators in the topmost row of the lower deck, and when the Cubs’ center fielder, Bob Dernier, sprinted to his left and abruptly bent low to pull in a line drive, early on, there was a sudden gleam, a dart of light, from his dark glasses as he made the grab. Even the noises of the day—the deep, happy roaring of the fans; the ancient, carny-show strains of the Wrigley Field organ (sometimes playing upbeat old airs like Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On”)—seemed to reach us with washed and wonderful clarity, and in my seat in the airy, down-sloping lower left-field stands (an overflow press sector), I kept tight hold on my rustling scorecard and stat sheets, and felt at one with the weather and the world. It was as if the entire baseball season—all those hundreds of games and thousands of innings—had happened, just this one time, in order to bring this afternoon to pass; a championship game and the Cubs, for once, in it. Only one possibility could spoil things on a day like this—and I could almost see the same thought on the faces of the holiday throngs pushing along under the stands before game time: the unexpected, awful shadow of a doubt—and even that was taken care of in the quickest possible way. Dernier, leading off against the Padres’ Eric Show in the bottom of the first, rocketed the second pitch to him into the screen above the left-field bleachers, and a bare moment or two later Gary Matthews got another shot up into the wind, which landed above and beyond the ivy in left center, a good four hundred feet away. Rick Sutcliffe came up to bat in the third, and
his
homer—a low, hurrying, near line drive over the right-side bleachers: a
shot—
didn’t need the wind at all, and it told us, if any doubt remained, what kind of day this was meant to be. Chicago won, 13–0.

Before we say goodbye to the Cubs, who are about to make their sudden departure from this season and this account (they won again the next afternoon, this time playing shortball—speed and defense and the extra base—for a neat 4–2 decision), another lingering look at the Friendly Confines and its team may be forgiven. The Cubs’ great success in 1984 and their abrupt termination in the championships can best be appreciated if we remind ourselves about the team’s unique place in the sport. The Cubs are the Smithsonian of baseball, a caucus of institutions, many of which were on view during the playoff festivities. “Mr. Cub,” Ernie Banks, who put in nineteen years’ distinguished service at shortstop and first base, reappeared in uniform as an honorary member of the 1984 team and threw out the first ball (a trick flip from behind his back on the mound) before the first game. The next day, the ritual was performed by Jack Brickhouse, who had broadcast thirty-four years of Cub games before his retirement, in 1982; his successor in the booth, the incumbent Harry Caray, is a
transferred
institution, who had previously put in eleven years’ work with the White Sox. Bill Veeck, who sat in the center-field bleachers through the season and the playoffs (I spotted him there through my binoculars, with a Vincent van Gogh straw hat on his bean, a beer in his hand, and his pegleg comfortably out in the aisle, while a stream of friends and writers and well-wishers came by to shake his hand and spoil his view),
*
was most recently in baseball as the owner and chief executive of the White Sox, but his father, William Veeck, Sr., was president of the Cubs from 1919 to 1933, and Veeck the Younger grew up in Wrigley Field and had his first job in the business with the team thereafter. It was Bill Veeck, in fact, who persuaded the Wrigleys to plant ivy out along the outfield walls, in 1938. Steve Trout, the southpaw who pitched and won the second playoff game against the Padres, is a son of Dizzy Trout, who pitched and won a game against the Cubs in their last previous postseason adventure, the 1945 World Series, against Detroit. And so on. The best-known Cub fixture, of course—almost an honored institution—is defeat. No other club has had a manager who described his team’s home fans as unemployables, as did a recent incumbent named Lee Elia, and no other franchise has taken so mild a view of its own fortunes as to allow its team to amble along with no manager at all, as the Cubs did from 1961 to 1965, when the day-to-day direction was handled by a rotating board of coaches. Leo Durocher took over after that and whipped the team up into second place a couple of times, but the last pennant, in ’45, is still so vivid in the memory of the fans that this year in Chicago I kept hearing references to Hank Borowy, the pitcher who won the first and sixth games of that World Series, and lost the fifth and seventh.

We won’t know for some time where the 1984 Cubs will fit into this sweet, dismal history, but I think we can already do honor to the principals—Dallas Green and Jim Frey, and the newborn or new-bought stars on the field—for reversing this deep-running tide so precipitately. There was no preparation for this at the beginning of the year, when the Cubs, fifth-place finishers the year before, lost eleven straight games in spring training, but some late trades suddenly filled the team’s needs—a leadoff man, a center fielder, more speed (Bob Dernier, who came from the Phillies on March 27th, took care of all three), more and then still more pitching—and they began to win and began to be noticed. On June 23rd, before a national television audience, the Cubs beat the Cardinals, 12–11, in eleven innings, in a game in which Ryne Sandberg, their remarkable young star, hit two home runs against Bruce Sutter—one in the ninth and another in the tenth (with two out and a man aboard), each time retying the score. “Sandberg is the best player I have ever seen,” Cardinal manager Whitey Herzog said afterward.

It is the cub fans who will have to sort out this season—most of all, the unshirted, violently partisan multitudes in the Wrigley Field bleachers, who sustain the closest fan-to-player attachment anywhere in baseball—and I will not patronize them by claiming a share of their happiness during the summer or pretending to understand their pain and shock at its end. Baseball, as I have sometimes suggested, is above all a matter of belonging, and belonging to the Cubs takes a lifetime. But to Chicago the Cubs are something more than just a team. Wrigley Field is almost the last of the old neighborhood ballparks, and the antiquity of the place (it was built in 1914, two years after Fenway Park opened for business in Boston) and the absence of night ball there (the Wrigley family believed that the crowds and the noise would be an affront to the nearby residents) remind us what the game once felt like and how it fitted into the patterns of city life. I took a little stroll around the blocks off to the north and east of Wrigley Field one morning before game time and fell into conversation with a short, cheerful young woman named Debra Price, who was out jogging. She was wearing a sweatshirt with huge Cubs emblazoning, and was accompanied by her black cat, Dufus, who runs with her. She told me she had lived just around the corner, on Kenmore Avenue, until August, when she took a job in Denver (she is in labor relations), but had come back for the games because her old roommate, Karen Miller, had been lucky enough to get hold of a pair of tickets. “I was going through a bad Cubs withdrawal out there,” she said. “It used to be incredibly convenient living so close to the park here. You could walk over at nine in the morning and pick up your seats for that afternoon. It was always easy to get seats, because the team wasn’t going anywhere. I can’t quite believe this whole year, or understand it. I’m a little young to be a real Cubs fan, but I think I qualify. I was there two years ago the day Bill Buckner got his two-hundredth hit of the season, and Jody Davis has been sort of a constant for me. There’s a lot of character and sentimentality in what the Cubs are. They’ve always seemed older than the White Sox in this town—I don’t know why. They have this kind of
humor
about them. The Cubs are outside the realm.”