The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (73 page)

“Willie Mays first reported to us in New York carrying a toilet kit and three bats,” Stoneham said. His face was lit up. “But the first time I saw him play was way before that. He was with Trenton, in a Class B league, and we’d just played a game in Philadelphia, and some of us rented a car and drove out to watch him play. They had a little press box, just about the size of this box. Bill McKechnie, Jr., was the general manager there, and Chick Genovese was manager, and Bill warned us that Mays might be a little tight because of our being there. Well, Willie got about two hits in the first few innings, and in the seventh he came up and hit a ball into a gas station that was across the street beyond the left-field fence. That’s how tight he was.

“Henry Thompson had seen him play in exhibitions, and he told me how Willie sometimes ran after a ball in the outfield and caught it in his bare hand. I said, ‘Oh, sure.’ You know—I didn’t believe it. And then, of course, he did it lots of times for us. I missed his greatest play, when he made an unbelievable catch like that in Brooklyn, just as he crashed into the outfield wall. And I remember after Willie had been with us a couple of years I was out watching our farm club at St. Cloud, Minnesota, and I saw all the young players—Willie Kirkland and Orlando Cepeda and Andre Rodgers—making those basket catches in the outfield, and I said ‘Hey, who loused up all these kids?’ It was Willie, of course—they’d seen him on the television and they were all trying to imitate him. Nobody else had those reflexes, though, and nobody else could get away with what he did.”

Stoneham left his seat for a few minutes to talk to some visitors who had been brought up to the box to be introduced, and then he made a couple of telephone calls. When he sat down again, we were in the eighth inning and the Giants were ahead by 6–1.

“We were talking about Juan Marichal,” he said. “Well, one of the remarkable things about him was that even when he first came up he knew everything there was to know about the game of baseball. He came from the Dominican Republic, and young General Trujillo—the big man’s son, I mean—he’d put Juan into the Air Force there in order to have him play on his team. There must have been some great coach or manager in that Air Force who taught Juan, because he did everything right from the beginning.

“I think we were the first club that signed players from that whole area. They’d have their winter leagues in the fall, and after the World Series we’d take a couple of scouts and go down and see our friends. I think the first time I ever saw Jose Pagan play—he came in a game to pinch-hit—he was fourteen years old. Our scout down there was Alex Pompez, who was a Cuban. He saw Fidel Castro play ball when Castro was a young fellow, and sent us a report on him. Castro was a right-handed pitcher. When he came up—you know, came into power—we checked back in our files, and it was the same Castro. A good ballplayer. I think if he’d stayed in the game he’d have made it to the majors. You know what a fan he is.”

Bobby Murcer, the Giants’ right fielder, doubled in a run, and a minute or two later Chris Speier drove in another. It was a Giants afternoon.

“I just hope fellows like Chris and Bobby get a break in the All-Star Game balloting,” Stoneham said. “Bobby’s done everything we expected when we got him from the Yankees—everything and more. He’s a fine man. But the fans tend to overlook this year’s play on their ballots, you know. They vote on reputation. Well, I’m not going to the All-Star Game this year anyway. They’re having business meetings all day, before the game. Who wants
that?
That used to be a holiday. You’d go to the game and then you’d see your friends in the evening. It’s the same way at our board meetings. When I first came on our board, all the conversation was about baseball. We’d sit and talk about the game. Now the lawyers outnumber the baseball people. In the old days, it was nothing but baseball people on the ball clubs—it was a personal thing. Even with somebody like Mr. Wrigley, it was him that owned the team, not the company.”

The Padres came up in the ninth, trailing by 8–1, and Stoneham clapped his hands.

“Who would you pick on an All-Time Giants team?” he said. Then he answered his own question. “I’d have Travis Jackson at short,” he said. “Travis never got in the Hall of Fame, but he came up with us and took Dave Bancroft’s job away from him. Terry’s the best first baseman. Can I play Frisch at second
and
at third? Mays and Ott and Ross Youngs in the outfield. But Monte Irvin’s got to be out there somewhere, too. If Monte had come up from the Negro leagues a few years sooner, he’d be known now as one of the great ballplayers of all time. And we can’t leave off Irish Meusel, either. Frank Snyder is catching. But Gus Mancuso was a great defensive catcher, and so was Wes Westrum.”

Montefusco, who looked tired, walked his second Padre batter of the inning, and then threw a pitch past his catcher. “He’s trying to aim the ball,” Stoneham said. He stood up. “Come on, John!” he pleaded. Then he turned and said, “Oh, I almost forgot Willie McCovey. Where do we play him? Or Joe Moore, our best leadoff man. You’d try to bat him third and he’d hit .250. Put him back up top there and he’d hit .330.”

His all-time roster was growing by the minute, but now there was a swift double play on the field, and the game ended. “All
right,”
Stoneham said. The Giants had won.

We went back to Stoneham’s office. I took off the polo coat, and Stoneham hung it up in the closet again. I suddenly wondered how many Giants games it had seen. Stoneham signed a couple of letters that were waiting on his desk, and buzzed his secretary on the intercom. “I’m getting a haircut in the morning,” he told her, “so I’ll be a little late getting in. Good night, Florence.”

We went outside and walked down a ramp in the sunshine. The wind had dropped, and the low hills around the Bay were all alight. It was one of those afternoons when you felt that summer might never end. I started to say something to Stoneham about his parting with the Giants and how I felt about it, but he smiled and cut me off.

“You can’t get discouraged over a few bad breaks,” he said. “In this game, you’re always losing sometimes. You can’t let yourself complain or feel sorry for yourself.”

He walked me to my car in the parking lot, and we shook hands and said goodbye.

*
It was, in fact, a great deal lower, since the Japanese sportsmen never let anyone see the color of their yen, and the deal fell through. For the true further adventures of Mr. Lurie and the elusive San Francisco franchise, see page 336
et seq.

**
The trend continued in 1975, when the A’s drew 1,075,518 for the season, against the Giants’ 522,919.

—
October 1975

T
ARRY, DELIGHT, SO SELDOM
met.… The games have ended, the heroes are dispersed, and another summer has died late in Boston, but still one yearns for them and wishes them back, so great was their pleasure. The adventures and discoveries and reversals of last month’s World Series, which was ultimately won by the Cincinnati Reds in the final inning of the seventh and final game, were of such brilliance and unlikelihood that, even as they happened, those of us who were there in the stands and those who were there on the field were driven again and again not just to cries of excitement but to exclamations of wonder about what we were watching and sharing. Pete Rose, coming up to bat for the Reds in the tenth inning of the tied and retied sixth game, turned to Carlton Fisk, the Red Sox catcher, and said, “Say, this is some kind of game, isn’t it?” And when that evening ended at last, after further abrupt and remarkable events, everyone—winners and losers and watchers—left the Fens in exaltation and disarray. “I went home,” the Reds’ manager, Sparky Anderson, said later, “and I was stunned.”

The next day, during the last batting practice of the year, there was extended debate among the writers and players on the Fenway sidelines as to whether game six had been the greatest in Series history and whether we were not, in fact, in on the best Series of them all. Grizzled coaches and senior scribes recalled other famous Octobers—1929, when the Athletics, trailing the Cubs by eight runs in the fourth game, scored ten runs in the seventh inning and won; 1947, when Cookie Lavagetto’s double with two out in the ninth ended Yankee pitcher Bill Bevens’ bid for a no-hitter and won the fourth game for the Dodgers; 1960, when Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning homer for the Pirates threw down the lordly Yankees. There is no answer to these barroom syllogisms, of course, but any recapitulation and reexamination of the 1975 Series suggests that at the very least we may conclude that there has never been a better one. Much is expected of the World Series, and in recent years much has been received. In the past decade, we have had the memorable and abrading seven-game struggles between the Red Sox and the Cardinals in 1967, the Cardinals and the Tigers in 1968, and the Orioles and the Pirates in 1971, and the astounding five-game upset of the Orioles by the Mets in 1969. Until this year, my own solid favorite—because of the Pirates’ comeback and the effulgent play of Roberto Clemente—was the 1971 classic, but now I am no longer certain. Comebacks and late rallies are actually extremely scarce in baseball, and an excellent guaranteed cash-producing long-term investment is to wager that the winning team in any game will score more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in nine. In this Series, however, the line scores alone reveal the rarity of what we saw:

In six of the seven games, the winning team came from behind.

In one of the games, the winning team came from behind twice.

In five games, the winning margin was one run.

There were two extra-inning games, and two games were settled in the ninth inning.

Overall, the games were retied or saw the lead reversed thirteen times.

No other Series—not even the celebrated Giants–Red Sox thriller of 1912—can match these figures.

It is best, however, not to press this search for the greatest Series any farther. There is something sterile and diminishing about our need for these superlatives, and the game of baseball, of course, is so rich and various that it cannot begin to be encompassed in any set of seven games. This Series, for example, produced not one low-hit, low-score pitching duel—the classic and agonizing parade of double zeros that strains teams and managers and true fans to their limits as the inevitable crack in the porcelain is searched out and the game at last broken open. This year, too, the Reds batted poorly through most of the early play and offered indifferent front-line pitching, while the Red Sox made too many mistakes on the base paths, were unable to defend against Cincinnati’s team speed, and committed some significant (and in the end fatal) errors in the infield. One of the games was seriously marred by a highly debatable umpire’s decision, which may have altered its outcome. It was not a perfect Series. Let us conclude then—before we take a swift look at the season and the playoffs; before we return to Morgan leading away and stealing, to Yaz catching and whirling and throwing, to Eastwick blazing a fastball and Tiant turning his back and offering up a fluttering outside curve, to Evans’ catch and Lynn’s leap and fall, to Perez’s bombs and Pete Rose’s defiant, exuberant glare—and say only that this year the splendid autumn affair rose to our utmost expectations and then surpassed them, attaining at last such a level of excellence and emotional reward that it seems likely that the participants—the members of the deservedly winning, champion Reds and of the sorely disappointed, almost-champion Red Sox—will in time remember this Series not for its outcome but for the honor of having played in it, for having made it happen.

Although the four divisions produced between them only one semblance of a close pennant race—the Red Sox and Orioles in the American League East—the baseball summer never languished. I traveled about this year more than is my custom, and wherever I went strangers and friends (many of them minimal fans) talked avidly about baseball and the pleasures that the game was bringing this year. Various reasons for this suggest themselves—a post-Watergate unseriousness, the economy (a baseball ticket, by comparison with tickets to most other entertainments, is easily available and relatively cheap), the overexposure via television of so many inferior rival sports—but it seems to me that the most noticeable new assets of baseball are the wide distribution of its true stars among so many different teams, and the sudden and heartening emergence of so many remarkable young ballplayers. Rod Carew and Bill Madlock, the 1975 batting champions, play, respectively, for the noncontending Twins and Cubs; the best pitcher in the National League, Randy Jones, performed for the Padres, and the best in the American League, Jim Palmer, for the Orioles. The Phillies had the NL’s home-run champion (Mike Schmidt) and RBI leader (Greg Luzinski); their counterparts in the AL were Reggie Jackson, of the Oakland A’s, and the delightful George Scott, of the Milwaukee Brewers. Al Hrabosky, an utterly commanding relief pitcher, ran off a won-lost mark of 13–3 and an earned-run average of 1.67 for the Cardinals; Mickey Rivers stole seventy bases for the California Angels; Dave Kingman bopped thirty-six homers for the Mets. And so on. Carew’s batting title, by the way, was his fourth in succession, and he led his nearest pursuer in the averages, Fred Lynn, by .359 to .331. Last year, he hit .364, as against .316 for the next man, and the year before that the margin was .350 to .306. No previous hitter except Rogers Hornsby has ever dominated his league in this fashion. The refreshing and sometimes startling youngsters—rookies, most of them—included pitchers John Montefusco and Ed Halicki (Giants), Rawly Eastwick (Reds), John Candelaria (Pirates), Dennis Eckersley (Indians), and Frank Tanana (Angels), and hitters Mike Vail (Mets), George Brett (Royals), Mike Hargrove (Rangers), Claudell Washington (A’s), and Fred Lynn and Jim Rice (Red Sox).

Baseball among the have-nots was often riveting. The most entertaining games I saw prior to the World Series were part of a set that I happened to catch in Anaheim in June between the Angels and the Rangers, neither of which was going anywhere in the American League West. In the opener, the Angels fell behind by 6–0, rallied to lead by 8–7, were tied at 8–8, gave up three runs to the visitors in the top of the eleventh, and won it with four runs in the
bottom
of the eleventh. There were thirty-seven hits, including innumerable singles chopped by speedy young Angels—Jerry Remy, Mickey Rivers, Dave Collins—off their cementlike infield. The pitching left something to be desired, but the next afternoon, in the opener of a twi-night doubleheader, Frank Tanana struck out seventeen Texas batters, thereby establishing a new American League one-game mark for left-handers. (Tanana, a curveballer, went on to win the AL’s strikeout crown with 269 whiffs, thus succeeding his teammate, Nolan Ryan, who fell victim to injuries this year and went through a bone-chip operation on his right arm. Before going into drydock, Ryan pitched a no-hit game against the Orioles—his fourth no-hitter in four seasons, which ties the record held by Sandy Koufax and approached by no other pitcher in the history of the game.) In the nightcap, the Angels led, then trailed, then tied, and then lost, 6–5, on a homer in the ninth. The next two days, after my ill-advised departure, the Angels won, 1–0, on a two-hitter by Ed Figueroa, and lost, 1–0, in thirteen innings, after the two starters, Steve Hargan for the Rangers and Bill Singer for the Angels, threw shutout ball for eleven innings. The Angels hit 55 homers this year—I mean 55 as a team, or six fewer than Roger Maris in 1961—but they stole 220 bases, and while watching them in action I developed a new preference for the latter means of advancement. There is something
stately
about the home run.