The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (138 page)

I had seen the Giants suffer an infinitely more painful loss earlier in the season, I now recalled. Back on May 30th, at Shea Stadium, the club had stood on the verge of a hard-earned one-run victory over the Mets in the bottom of the tenth inning. Then, with two out and two Mets aboard, Giants shortstop Jose Uribe and second baseman Rob Thompson somehow collided under a harmless infield fly; the ball popped loose and the winning run came in. A killing defeat, one felt, since it dropped the Giants three games behind the Astros and suddenly ran their string of losses to four straight, all on the road; last year, the Giants lost fifty-seven on the road, on the way to their last-place, worst-ever 62–100 finish. “Same old Giants,” a San Francisco writer muttered as we waited for the Shea press-box elevator down to the clubhouses.

Only they weren’t. That night, the Giants manager, Roger Craig, closed his clubhouse to exhort his young troops. That game was gone, he told them, and mourning or anger wouldn’t bring it back or turn the score around. The team’s young second-base combination had already won at least six games for the team with their gloves, so what had just happened only meant that they were 6–1 for the year. Tomorrow’s game was the one that mattered now. And so forth. It worked—
something
worked. The Giants won the next day, knocking off Bob Ojeda; Rob Thompson was involved in four double plays for the afternoon and singled three times, and Uribe came through with a two-run double. The Giants won again the day after that, handing Ron Darling his first defeat of the year. The team then moved along to Montreal, swept two games there, and headed home with a suddenly satisfying 4–4 record for the road swing.

In Chicago, I talked to Giants catcher Bob Brenly about the turnaround. “That game in New York was the one that did it,” he said. “You know, for any team there can come a day when you decide that this is going to be just another year, just like it was before. Losing can happen so fast. You lose a game, and you think, OK, we’re stuck all right. You lose the next day, and you think, Well, that was a tough one—no way we could have gone against the breaks there. Then you get blown out, say, and the day after that maybe you get beat 2–1, and before you know it it’s five or six in a row and you’ve slid down a couple of places in the standings. But Roger prepared us for that sort of thing this year. We know we’re a better team. We know we have that resiliency. Roger has done it—give him the credit. He’s got guys bunting, doing the hit-and-run, guys hitting the ball to the right side of the infield who never bothered to learn that kind of ball. He’s got
me
running, and I’m a catcher. Nobody’s exempt, nobody’s ahead on the ball club, and it’s all from Roger. Call him a guru, call him a positive guy, call him a man—a grown-up human being. You know, almost every professional athlete has had one great coach in high school or college that he remembers and thinks of most highly. I had a high-school basketball coach back at Coshocton High named Bill Bowman, who always seemed like he could pull about ten percent more out of you than you thought you had. Well, that’s the way Roger is for everybody in this room. We’ve talked about it. He reminds you of somebody important in your life. He makes you think winning is something you can be personally responsible for. The biggest difference is we’re having fun. You can hear it in the air around here. I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and come to the ballpark. Last year was mostly just a personal thing, and I think that down feeling, that first bad day, came almost on Opening Day. Baseball is a team game, and once you lose that you’ve lost all concept. Some of our guys had a pretty good year in 1985, but I don’t think they were enjoying it any. It all got washed away by the team. Roger wants it the other way now. I’ve never learned so much from one person.”

The one great coach that Roger Craig reminds me of is himself—a tall, engaging, noble-nosed North Carolinian who when last seen by me was accepting congratulations in the champagne-soaked Detroit Tigers clubhouse for his part in the making of that 1984 World Champion team. As pitching coach, he had brought the Detroit staff along from eleventh-best to best in the league in the space of two years, in considerable part through his teaching of the split-fingered fastball, a deadly little down-diver that he perfected some years ago while running a baseball school for teenagers. Craig retired from baseball after the Tigers’ triumph and went home to his horse ranch and his family in Southern California, but came back to take over as Giants manager in mid-September of last year, as part of a fresh regime headed by an incoming general manager, Al Rosen. Craig also had a previous two-year tenure as manager of the Padres, in 1978 and ’79. This summer, he has been teaching the split-finger to anyone on the Giants staff who is interested—to Roger Mason and Mike Krukow and Mark Davis and Vida Blue (who has had trouble with it, because his fingers aren’t very long), and even to Steve Carlton.

Whatever ballpark he is in, Craig is implored by the local writers to talk about his defeats as well as his successes—in particular, about the forty-six games he lost in two years while pitching for the newborn and disastrous New York Mets, near the close of his career. “Aw, I don’t want to dwell on that story all the time,” he said in the casbah of the Wrigley Field dugout early one afternoon. But then, because he’s an obliging fellow, he talked about it just the same. He confirmed his most famous statistic, registered in 1963—eighteen consecutive mound losses, which tied an ancient mark. “I think the record still stands,” he said now, “but maybe I’ll pitch tomorrow and break it.” He lost five games by the score of 1–0 in that stretch—also a record. “I kept telling the guys to go out and get me one run and we’d win,” he told us. “Then, one time, I remember, it got to be about the fifth or sixth inning and I said, ‘All right, just get me half a run!’ You know, I always felt I pitched well those years. I got a raise at the end of both years, and I deserved it. I had twenty-seven complete games over those two seasons, and every game I started I expected to win.”

Craig said he thought the Mets trauma had helped him as a manager. “I know all about the things that can make you lose, and all about the things that can help you win. A lot of my coaching is from that. If a guy gets on a losing streak on the mound or goes oh-for-four up at bat a few days, I can identify with that. He knows I’ve been there before him. But he also knows that I’ve been in five World Series and I got four winning World Series rings to show for it. At first, the guys on this club thought I was crazy when I said I could show them how to win, but now they’ve got the idea. If you’ve got some talent, you
can
win. Sure, we’ve lost some games, but I’m happier right now than I’ve ever been before in baseball.” He paused, squinting in the sun. “Well, maybe you always say that. The first year I was with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a major-league pitcher, I didn’t feel I could be any happier than that. But as an old man—I’m fifty-six—as an old man, right now I’m very happy. I’ve got outstanding coaches and a fine young ball club, and that’s all you can ask for.”

This summer in San Francisco, I’ve been told, you can sometimes spot five or six Giants caps at the same time among the noonday crowds waiting for the lights to change on the corner of Kearny and Post Streets. Attendance at Candlestick Park (which will not be torn down or domed over in the near future, as had been much rumored in recent years) is up by a hundred and thirteen percent, and people at cocktail parties in Mill Valley or at dinner downtown at the Washington Square Bar & Grill sometimes refer to the Giants as “the lads” now, just as the sports columns do. Now and then, on the courts at the Berkeley Tennis Club, you can hear somebody out there yell “Humm baby!” when his partner pulls off a winning backhand shot down the alley. The expression comes from Roger Craig, and it means “Great play!” or “Wow!” or perhaps, as a noun, a pretty young woman across the street. Back in June, somebody took down the office-door sign at Candlestick that said
“NO. 33-CRAIG.”
Now it says
“HUMM BABY.”

The Cubs were less talkative, and no wonder. Dallas Green had recently suggested that he was prepared to dispense with almost anyone on his roster of well-paid underachievers (anyone but all-league second baseman Ryne Sandberg, one must assume, or the brilliant young shortstop Shawon Dunston, or perhaps Lee Smith), although there are cynics who claim he wouldn’t find many takers, because of the lavish contracts that were given to the stars of ’84. In any case, I had very little relish at the prospect of worming out losers’ confessions in the Chicago clubhouse. Ron Cey, who had been riding the bench in recent weeks, probably because of his Rodinesque responses to hard-hit ground balls around third base, was polite but distant. Now thirty-eight years old, he had played nineteen hundred and fifty-three games at third base and hit three hundred and six home runs over ten full seasons with the Dodgers and three-plus with the Cubs, and he was not prepared to be forthcoming about unsuccess. “You’d have to ask players who have been on teams that have been out of it a lot of years,” he said stiffly. “It’s not a situation I’m familiar with—I don’t qualify. I’m used to being up there in the midst of things. When you’re in contention, you
contest.
It’s what you’re here for—why you exist as a professional. Now—well, not playing much and being with a team that’s out of it, the way we ate, is not an enviable position. I’m in a different place than I’m used to.”
*

Forehandedly, I had arranged for further testimony about the Cubs from the best source possible—a fan. Cubs fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer, and hope, in exquisite proportions. The Cubs sold a million and a half tickets before Opening Day this year, and the sellout Saturday crowd on this second day of my trip would put them over the million mark in admissions on the second-earliest date in their long history. My companion at the game was a baseball pen pal of mine named Tim Shanahan, a young and friendly (it turned out) professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He grew up in Detroit and still sustains an ancient passion for the Tigers (“It’s very, very unlikely that they’ll ever end up playing the Cubs in the World Series,” he said when I asked about his ultimate loyalty), and followed the Phillies closely when attending graduate school in Delaware. His attachment to the Cubs is of only six years’ duration, which barely puts him on the waiting list for admission to the True Cubs Sodality, but he clearly belongs nevertheless. A few weeks earlier, he and his wife and two young daughters had turned up at Wrigley for a Sunday game, to find that the remaining tickets were only for standing room. “My older daughter Erin is six, and she said that was fine with her,” Shanahan said. “She’s been coming to games with us for years. But Meagan is three, and after my wife and I and the girls stood around outside the gate for about an hour we finally decided that it might be a little hard on her to be held in our arms for three hours at her very first game.
I
wouldn’t have minded, of course, but—” He was still thinking it over.

Shanahan and I had good seats in the deep stands just behind home, and, with the temperature back in the nineties, I did not respond when he suggested that we probably should have sat in the bleachers if I was in search of some
real
Cubs fans. We drank some beer, and he brought me up to date on the franchise gossip. The White Sox, who have been traditionally seen as drawing most of their fans from within the city, were probably moving out of Comiskey Park at last, he said; they were negotiating a move to the western suburb of Addison, if the financing could be worked out for a new ballpark there. “The strange thing is that most of the Cubs fans are from the suburbs, even though Wrigley Field is a city ballpark,” he said. “Most of the White Sox fans cheer for the Cubs when the Cubs are in first place, but Cubs fans never, never cheer for the White Sox. They sort of don’t notice them.”

Wrigley Field seemed to have survived the great lights crisis, Tim told me. After the winning 1984 season, the club had threatened to move the team elsewhere, so that it could conform with the league’s network-television contracts, which called for night games in post-season play. The city and state ordinances forbidding lights at Wrigley held firm under court testing, but now Dallas Green was talking about adding twenty thousand new seats to the park (which now holds thirty-eight thousand)—a move that seemed certain to destroy its airy vistas and rural ambience. It is reported that Green also wants the club to buy up some of the cozy, tree-shaded blocks of ancient houses that surround the field and convert them into parking lots. Shanahan thought the lights controversy would be settled by compromise: the lights would go in, but would be turned on for only fifteen or twenty games during the regular season. “Nobody likes the idea,” he said, “but it may be the only way to keep Wrigley Field. People care about this place.”

The game began—the Giants’ veteran ace Mike Krukow taking on the Cubs’ left-handed Steve Trout—and what Shanahan noticed almost instantly was an innocuous fly ball out to left field struck by the second Giant batter of the day, Rob Thompson. “Bad,” he announced. “Anything hit in the air like that against Trout means he’s going to get killed. And look at those flags.” I looked, and saw the pennants on the scoreboard and up on top of the upper deck in right field beginning to stir and lift. They were pointing away from us: local storm warnings for lakeside pitchers. Shanahan was wrong in one way, it turned out: the Giants didn’t exactly kill Trout as much as discourage him to death, finally dispatching him in the third, when he got nobody out while giving up a passel of singles, a walk, and a terminal double by the young power-hitting third baseman, Chris Brown, which ran the score to 5–1, San Francisco. But nothing is forever on windy days at Wrigley, and the Cubs responded at once with four safe knocks, including a home run by Gary Matthews that sailed five or six rows beyond the ivy at left-center. “It’s
Sandberg
that’s the difference,” Shanahan said, referring to Matthews’ immediate predecessor in the lineup. “They’ve finally got him back where he belongs. He’s got to bat second like this if we’re going to score runs. It’s vital to the whole thing.”