The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (19 page)

I could have provided further comfort for Willie Davis, had he needed it, from the lively memoirs contained in
The Glory of Their Times
, which I continued to read on the plane back to Baltimore. The book is packed with disasters. I learned that Roger Peckinpaugh, the Most Valuable Player in the American League in 1925, committed
eight
errors for the Senators in the World Series that year. I read several descriptions of the infamous “$100,000 Muff” by Fred Snodgrass that cost the Giants the 1912 Series with the Red Sox, and then Snodgrass’s own assessment: “For over half a century I’ve had to live with the fact that I dropped a ball in the World Series—‘Oh, you’re the guy that dropped that fly ball, aren’t you?’—and for years and years, whenever I’d be introduced to somebody, they’d start to say something and then stop, you know, afraid of hurting my feelings. But nevertheless, those were wonderful years, and if I had the chance I’d gladly do it all over again, every bit of it.” Snodgrass is stoutly defended by other witnesses, who point out that he also saved the game with a magnificent running catch on the next play and that the championship was actually lost when the Giant infield then misplayed a foul pop, thus permitting Tris Speaker to stay alive and drive in the winning run. Later, thinking back to Sandy Koufax and recalling the anxiety that stabs one when watching him pitch his flaring fast balls with an arthritic arm that may end his baseball days at any instant, I read Smoky Joe Wood’s lacerating account of the sore arm that finished him as a pitcher after he had won thirty-four games for the Red Sox in 1912, and of his long struggle back to the majors and to the World Series as an outfielder with the Cleveland Indians. Half asleep during the soft, deadening trip from one unlovely city to another, I read about the dusty American small towns where so many of these past heroes had begun their baseball—Wahoo and Freemont, Nebraska; Princeton, Indiana; and Ness City, Ellis, Bazine, and WaKeeny, Kansas. Sam Crawford, the old Tiger immortal, can remember when baseball was still a game for country boys:

Every town had its own town team in those days. I remember when I made my first baseball trip. A bunch of us from around Wahoo, all between sixteen and eighteen years old, made a trip overland in a wagon drawn by a team of horses. One of the boys got his father to let us take the wagon. It was a lumber wagon, with four wheels, the kind they used to haul the grain to the elevator, and was pulled by a team of two horses. It had room to seat all of us—I think there were eleven or twelve of us—and we just started out and went from town to town, playing their teams.… We were gone three or four weeks. Lived on bread and beefsteak the whole time. We’d take up a collection at the games—pass the hat, you know—and that paid our expenses. Or some of them, anyway. One of the boys was the cook, but all he could cook was round steak. We’d get twelve pounds for a dollar and have a feast. We’d drive along the country roads, and if we came to a stream we’d go swimming; if we came to an apple orchard, we’d fill up on apples. We’d sleep anywhere. Sometimes in a tent, lots of times on the ground, out in the open. If we were near some fairgrounds, we’d slip in there. If we were near a barn, well …

Two unexpected wins had Baltimore jumping. Airport redcaps, cabdrivers, waitresses, storefronts, bank windows, and even a church or two were decked out in buttons or banners exhorting “Bomb ’em Birds!” and indoor strippers and outdoor revivalists in the downtown honky-tonk area known as The Block staged extra shows Friday night for the visiting sports. Most of the crowd turned up early at Memorial Stadium the next morning, in plenty of time to watch batting practice, and the tootling of extemporaneous bands in the parking lots, the hawkers selling chrysanthemums and orange-and-black pennants, and the excited faces of young boys hurrying their fathers along to their seats made me think for a minute that I was walking into Palmer Stadium. Out on the field, it was the other side that was now trying to smother its nerves. “I don’t think any team can be really down for a Series,” Ron Fairly said to me, but he seemed uncertain about it, and then Maury Wills lost his famous cool for a moment and threw angry imprecations at a sportswriter for an unfavorable phrase in a column. The Robinson team, by contrast, posed arm in arm for the photographers, laughing and hamming it up, and when it was over, Frank Robinson, who is, of course, black, said to Brooks, who was born in Arkansas, “If they print that down home, man, you’ll
never
get back.” Noisy, elated fans streamed into the stands wearing Oriole boaters and sunshades boosting a gubernatorial candidate named Agnew, and outside the park, beyond the center-field scoreboard and the jammed parking lot, a scattering of ticketless partisans had taken over a grassy knoll, from which they might get a glimpse of an occasional fly ball and hear the deep cries of the crowd.

It was a brisk game, marvelously enjoyable, and the innings flew by to the accompaniment of hopeful toots on a hundred horns in the stands and a flurry of witticisms in the press rows about Willie Davis’s attack of stone hands in Los Angeles. The game was half gone after an hour, and there was nothing to choose between the teams—no runs, two hits apiece, and identical football blocks thrown at second base by the Dodgers’ Lou Johnson and the Orioles’ Luis Aparicio, which both spoiled double plays. If anything, I thought that the Dodger pitcher, Claude Osteen, was throwing harder and lower than the Orioles’ Wally Bunker, and I went on thinking so even after Paul Blair, the part-time Oriole center fielder, hammered a ball deep into the left-field stands in the fifth. It was a good pitch, down and away—the kind that any pitcher will occasionally see pickled even on his best days. Any pitcher, that is, but an Oriole in October. The Dodgers made agonized efforts to move their base-runners along, but they now seemed to be guessing at the plate. Their last flutter came in the eighth, with Tommy Davis on second, when a committee of Orioles gathered under Parker’s fly in left field and almost tabled it. Aparicio made the grab, and minutes later the Dodgers clumped wearily back to their clubhouse, their eyes still all goose eggs.

The fourth game, before a cheerful, faintly incredulous shirtsleeved crowd, rematched Drysdale and McNally, but in tone and flavor it much more resembled the previous day’s game than the slack opener—the same good pitching, the same fast, scoreless early innings, the same slick infield play. It was as if the two teams had only knocked off for a tea interval before continuing the same encounter. Drysdale, although his fast ball was not tailing off like a cast fishing plug, the way it does when he is at his sharpest, was pitching with immense determination, and McNally, on his home mound, had his control back and now could share his fellow Orioles’ mad conviction that the Dodgers might not score another run until, say, late July in 1967. That remains a possibility to this day, of course, but this knowledge should not keep anyone from remembering how close the Series still looked early on that final afternoon. If Drysdale could win, if the Dodgers could stop drowning in two feet of water, Koufax would pitch that next game, and only members of the Flat Earth Society are prepared to bet that Koufax can lose two Series games in a row. Then the Series would move back to Los Angeles, surely at no worse than even odds. This quick, close, yet one-sided Series was so mystifying that in the early innings on Sunday the representatives of the magazine
Sport
, which awards a sports car each year to the outstanding player in the Series, were helplessly asking for nominees in the press rows. The most sensible suggestion, assuming a Baltimore victory that day, was to permit each of the Orioles to drive it for a week and to donate the safety belt to Willie Davis.

The resolver—of the game, the Series, and the
Sport
editors’ dilemma—was Frank Robinson, who hit a Drysdale fast ball four hundred and ten feet into the left-field stands in the fourth inning. Robinson, a tall, solidly built right-handed slugger with long legs and gigantic forearms, stands in the batter’s box with his left foot almost touching the back corner of the plate; his quick forward stride throws all his weight into the pitch, and he swings with such violence that his third-base coach, Billy Hunter, has learned to bail out rapidly on the frequent occasions when Robinson’s bat comes whirring through his place of business. Robinson’s plate-crowding invites pitchers to throw at his left ear—a game that Drysdale enjoys—but this was no occasion for games. Drysdale’s pitch was a good, live fast ball, but right over the middle, and after the explosive
whock!
of Robinson’s bat Drysdale didn’t bother to turn and follow the ball; instead, he kicked the mound violently, exactly the way he did in the first inning of the first game. Robinson sailed around the infield, touching bases and counting his self-made blessings—Series hero; league-leading batting mark of .316; forty-nine homers, and a hundred and twenty-two runs batted in; certain attainment of the Most Valuable Player award; and, perhaps most comforting of all, the knowledge that the Cincinnati Reds, who sold him to the Orioles last winter after he had terrorized National League pitchers for a decade, had been stuck with the most foolish baseball trade in memory.

The game went on, instantly growing in omens and tension. With two out in the same inning, Boog Powell, the immense doorstop who plays first base for the Orioles, powered a drive to deep straightaway center. I watched Willie Davis lope back until he bumped into the wire fence at the 410-foot sign, and when he dropped his arms I thought he had given up. He was merely coiling himself, however, and at the last moment he sailed straight up, hung in midair for an instant like a drip-dry shirt on a line, and came down with the ball in his glove.

This kind of third-out catch is the classic baseball signal for a turnabout, and the Dodgers reacted with alacrity. Lefebvre singled, and then Wes Parker hit a hard, high-bouncing hopper that seemed headed through the infield between third and short. It didn’t get through. Brooks Robinson charged the ball and fielded it, half staggering, just above his shoe tops, and then whipped it over to second to start the double play. It was the second-best fielding play of the Series (Davis made the best, and the worst), and the Dodgers died right there. Drysdale pitched grimly, Lefebvre almost came up with a tying homer in the eighth, and the Dodgers put two runners on base in the ninth, but they went down in the end, sinking under a prodigal weight of zeros.

The Dodger collapse at the plate should not invite any corollary murmuring to the effect that the Orioles do not deserve their new status as champions. Although their own team batting average of .200 is a new low for a Series winner, they played perfect, errorless ball, which is also a new team Series record. They had excellent pitching, and the two Robinsons did what so few team leaders accomplish in October: they led. Best of all, the Orioles’ victory restores prestige and interest to the recently flabby American League, and may help destroy the current misconception that only National League teams are worth the price of a ticket. At the same time, I doubt whether even the most Birds-mad Baltimore twelve-year-old would claim that the Oriole pitching was quite
that
good. The four pitchers who won three shutouts and ran up thirty-three consecutive scoreless innings in the Series managed only one shutout all season and pitched fewer complete games than Sandy Koufax alone. The only answer to that question “What
happened?
” is that the Dodgers stopped hitting, and the only explanation must be that baseball is still the most difficult, and thus the most unpredictable and interesting, of all professional sports. For all its statistics, the game does not yield itself readily to the form player or the expert; only two out of two hundred members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America correctly picked both pennant winners this year. There are so many surprises in baseball and so many precedents for this unexpected Series result that one must conclude that the only reliable precedent in baseball is surprise itself.

Old ballplayers know the game best, and the most appropriate autumn garland for the 1966 World Series comes from
The Glory of Their Times
.

Heinie Groh, of McGraw’s Giants: “So much of baseball is mental, you know, up there in the old head. You always have to be careful not to let it get you. Do you know that I was scared to death every time I went into a World Series? Every single one, after I’d been in so many. It’s a terrific strain.”

Rube Bressler, of Connie Mack’s early Athletics: “Baseball … is not a game of inches, like you hear people say. It’s a game of
hundredths
of inches. Any time you have a bat only that big around, and a ball that small, traveling at such tremendous rates of speed, an inch is way too large a margin for error.” And “[The Athletics] won four pennants in five years, and
three
World Championships.… The only one they lost was that 1914 one—to George Stallings’ ‘miracle’ Boston Braves, of all teams. The weakest of them all. And we lost it in four straight games too.”

Sam Jones, of the Yankees, on the 1923 World Series: “Art Nehf and I both pitched shutouts through six innings, but then in the seventh Casey Stengel hit one of my fast balls into the right-field stands. That was the only run of the game, and Nehf beat me, 1–0. Oh, that really hurt!”

Paul Waner, of the Pirates, on losing the 1927 Series to the Yankees in four straight: “Out in right field I was stunned. And that instant, as the run that beat us crossed the plate, it struck me that I’d actually played in a World Series. It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? I didn’t think, ‘It’s all over and we lost.’ What I thought was, ‘Gee, I’ve just played in a World Series.’”

Waner was in his second year with the Pirates in 1927, and he batted .333 in that Series. He remained in the big leagues for twenty years more, with a lifetime average of .333, but he never got into another World Series. Baseball is a hard game.

—
October 1967

T
HE LAURELS ALL ARE
cut, the year draws in the day, and we’ll to the Fens no more. A great baseball season—the most intense and absorbing of our times—is over, the St. Louis Cardinals stand as champions of the world, and hundreds of thousands of New Englanders must winter sadly on a feast of memory. The autumn quiet that now afflicts so many of us has almost nothing to do with the Red Sox defeat in the last game of the World Series, for every Boston fan has grown up with that dour Indian-pudding taste in his mouth. New England’s loss is not of a game or a Series but of the baseball summer just past—a season that will not come again, not ever quite the same. What will be remembered this winter, I think, is not so much a particular victory (Elston Howard blocking off the last White Sox base-runner at the plate one night in Chicago, Carl Yastrzemski’s eleventh-inning homer at Yankee Stadium) or a nearly insupportable loss (all those Baltimore games in September) as the shared joy and ridiculous hope of this summer’s long adventure. I resisted at first, but it caught me up, and then I was sorry for anyone who was too old or too careful to care. Almost everyone on the sea board was caught up in the end, it seemed. Forty-four New England radio stations poured out the news from the Fenway, and home-game telecasts by Ken Coleman, Mel Parnell, and Ned Martin made for late bedtimes from eastern Long Island to the Gaspé. Maine lobstermen pulling their traps off Saddleback Ledge called the news of the previous night’s game from boat to boat through the foggy dawn air. The moderator of an August town meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, interrupted a hot budget debate to cry, “The Sox are leading, 2–1, in the sixth!” Three hikers descending the Brook Trail on Mount Chocorua, in New Hampshire, caught the afternoon score from a transistorized ascending climber. Sunday sailors off Manchester Harbor, on Boston’s North Shore, hailed a winning rally with foghorns and salvos of cherry bombs, and then cheered when a power yacht broke out a large flag emblazoned “
THINK PENNANT
!” Late in August, a patient recovering from surgery stood at the window of his room in the New England Baptist Hospital night after night, watching the lights of Fenway Park across the city and hearing the sudden double roar of the crowd—first over his radio and then, in a deep echo, through the warm night air. The sense of belonging was best in the crowded streets near the ballpark before game time. Up out of the subway on Commonwealth Avenue, up Brookline Avenue and over the expressway bridge, past the Pennant Grille, past the button-hawkers (“
GO
, Sox!”) and the icecream wagons and the police horses; carried along in a mass of children and parents, old ladies in straw porkpies, pretty girls with pennants, South Boston and Dorchester youths in high-school windbreakers, a party of nuns; then pushed and jammed, laughing at the crush, through the turnstiles and into the damp gloom under the stands; and out at last to that first electric glimpse of green outfield and white bases—this is the way baseball is remembered, and the way it truly was, for once, in the summer of the Red Sox.