The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (97 page)

“Sometimes the little breaks of the game begin to go against your pitcher, and you can see him start to come apart out there. You have to watch for that and try to say something to him right off, because you can’t do much to settle down a pitcher once he really gets upset. If he’s sore, it means he’s lost his concentration and so he’s already in big trouble. You go out and try to get him to think about the next pitch, but you know he’s probably not going to be around much longer.”

The game flowed along quietly—nothing much, but not without its startlers. Orlando Mercado, batting against a Giants righthander named Segelke, in the fifth, spun away from a sailing fastball, but too late—the pitch caught him on the back of his batting helmet and he sagged to the ground. It looked bad for a minute—we’d all heard the ugly sound of the ball as it struck and ricocheted away—but in time Mercado got up, albeit a little groggily, and walked with a Mariner trainer back to his dugout, holding a towel to his ear, which had been cut by the edge of the helmet.

In another part of the game, the Seattle second baseman, Danny Tartabull, cued a high, twisting foul up over the Giants dugout. Milt May came back for it, but it was in the stands, close to the front rows somewhere, and as I peered up, squinting in the sun, I realized at last that it was
very
close to the good seats. I cringed away, holding my notebook over my dome, and Tom Haller stood up beside me and easily made the bare-handed catch. Sensation. The Giants dugout emptied as the San Francisco minions gave their boss a standing O and Haller’s friends in the stands—hundreds of them, by the sound of it—cheered noisily, and then a couple of former Giant managers, Wes Westrum and Charlie Fox (they are both scouts now), waved and called over to him from their seats nearby to express raucous awe. Haller flipped the ball to Bob Lurie, the Giants’ owner, who was in an adjoining box. “I think I just saved you three bucks,” he said. He was blushing with pleasure.

It had been a good five years since anything hit into the stands had come anywhere near that close to me—and, of course, it was the most
immediate
lesson in catching I was to get all year. Then I realized I’d missed the play again. “How did you take that ball, Tom?” I said. “I—”

He made a basket of his hands. “I was taught this way,” he said. “Then if you bobble it you can still bring it in to your chest.”

Haller’s paws are thick and gnarled, and there seems to be an extra angle in the little finger of his right hand. He saw me looking at it now, and held out the hand. “Richie Allen hit a foul and tore up that part,” he said. “I had a few dislocations and broken fingers along the line, and this split here needed seven stitches. Usually, you looked for blood, and if there wasn’t any that meant you were all right. You could pop a dislocation back in and stay in the game. We were trained to tuck your right thumb inside your fingers and curve the fingers around, so if there was a foul tip the ball would bend them back in the right direction. Nowadays, catchers can just hide that hand behind their leg, because of the new glove. So it has its advantages.”

Late in the game, the third Mariner catcher of the afternoon—a rookie named Bud Bulling—was struck by a foul that caromed into the dirt and up into his crotch. He remained on his knees in the dirt for a minute or two, waiting for that part of the day to be over, while the Giants players called to him in falsetto voices. “I got hit like that in the spring of my very first year up with the Giants,” Haller said. “I tried not to say anything, and when I got back to the clubhouse I took the cup out of my jock all in pieces. Each spring, you wait for that first shot between the legs and you think,
All
right, now I’m ready to start the season.”

The game ended (the Giants won it, and Chili Davis had racked up a homer, two doubles, and a single for the day), and as we stood up for the last time Haller called to a Mariner coach out on the grass. “I see some of us get old and gray!” Tom said.

“Yeah, I saw you,” the coach said. “Your hands still look pretty good!” He waved cheerfully.

“That’s Frank Funk,” Haller said to me. “Frank was my first roommate in organized ball. We were in spring training together in the Giants’ minor-league complex in Sanford, Florida, in 1958. He was a pitcher and I was a catcher, and they put us together to see if we could learn something.”

He’d had a great afternoon—you could see that. He was tickled.

No catcher of our time looks more imperious than Carlton Fisk, and none, I think, has so impressed his style and mannerisms on our sporting consciousness: his cutoff, bib-sized chest protector above those elegant Doric legs; his ritual pause in the batter’s box to inspect the label on his upright bat before he steps in for good; the tipped back mask balanced on top of his head as he stalks to the mound to consult his pitcher; the glove held akimbo on his left hip during a pause in the game. He is six-three, with a long back, and when he comes straight up out of the chute to make a throw to second base, you sometimes have the notion that you’re watching an aluminum extension ladder stretching for the house eaves; Bill Dickey, another straightback—he was the eminent receiver for the imperious Yankee teams of the thirties and forties—had that same household-contraption look to him when getting ready to throw. Fisk’s longitudinal New England face is eroded by reflection. He is a Vermonter, and although it has been three years now since he went over to the White Sox, he still looks out of the uniform to me without his Fenway habiliments. Pride is what he wears most visibly, though, and it’s also what you hear from him.

“I really resent that old phrase about ‘the tools of ignorance,’” he said to me in the White Sox dugout in Sarasota. “No catcher is ignorant. I’ve caught for pitchers who thought that if they won it’s because they did such a great job, and if they lost it’s because you called the wrong pitch. A lot of pitchers need to be led—taken to the point where they’re told what pitch to throw, where to throw it, when to throw it, and what to do after they’ve thrown it. The good pitcher knows that if you put down the fastball”—the catcher’s flashed signal: traditionally one finger for the fastball, two for a breaking ball, three for a changeup, and four for variants and specials—“it’s also meant to be down and in or down and away, and if you put down a breaking ball then it’s up to him to get that into some low-percentage area of the strike zone. The other kind just glance at the sign and fire the ball over the plate. That’s where you get that proverbial high hanger—and it’s your fault for calling it. But you know who the best pitchers are, and they know you. I worked with Luis Tiant as well as with anybody, and if he threw a fastball waist-high down the middle—well, it was nobody’s fault but his own, and he was the first to say so. Not many fans know the stats about catchers, but smart pitchers notice after a while that they’ll have a certain earned-run average with one catcher, and that it’ll be a point and a half higher with another catcher on the same club. Then they’ve begun to see that it isn’t just their talent that’s carrying them out there.”

There are some figures that even fans can understand, however: in 1980, Fisk’s last year in Boston, the Red Sox won sixty-eight games and lost forty-four when he was behind the plate but were fifteen and thirty-three when he was not. His bat helped, then and always (he is a lifetime .281 hitter, with two hundred and nine career homers, and of course he is the man whose twelfth-inning home run won the sixth game of the 1975 World Series—still a high-water mark of the October classic), but Fisk, in conversation, showed a splendid ambivalence about the two sides of his profession. Hitting mattered, but perhaps not as much as the quieter parts of the job.

“Catchers are involved every day,” he said, “and that’s one of the reasons why, over the years, they’ve been inconsistent in their productiveness. You can go a month and make a great offensive contribution, and then maybe a month and a half where there’s little or none. But because of the ongoing mental involvement in the pitcher-batter struggle you don’t have the luxury of being able to worry about your offensive problems. You just haven’t got time. I think catchers are better athletes than they used to be. They run better and they throw better, and more of them hit better than catchers once did. I’m not taking anything away from the Yogi Berras and the Elston Howards and the rest, but there never were too many of them. With the turn of the seventies, you began to get catchers like myself and Bench and Munson, and then Parrish and Sundberg and Carter, and then Pena—you go down the rosters and they’re all fine athletes. Bench started hitting home runs and Munson started hitting .300, and that old model of the slow, dumb catcher with low production numbers started to go out of date.”

Then there was the shift: “It always bothered me that catchers seemed defined by their offensive statistics—as if a catcher had no other value. Famous guys who hit twenty-five or thirty home runs or bat in a hundred runs may not have as much value as somebody hitting .250 or less—a Jerry Grote, say—but his pitchers and his teammates sure know. Look at Bill Preehan, with that good Detroit team back in the sixties and early seventies. He was a very average sort of runner, with an average, quick-release sort of arm, and nothing very startling offensively. But you just can’t
measure
what he did for that Tiger pitching staff—people like McLain and Lolich and Joe Coleman.”

He had brought up a side issue that has sometimes troubled me. There have been a hundred and seven Most Valuable Player awards since the annual honor was instituted by the Baseball Writers Association of America, in 1931, and thirteen of them have gone to catchers—very close to a one-in-nine proportion, which looks equitable. Catchers who are named MVPs tend to get named again—Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra won the award three times apiece, and Johnny Bench twice—but it is hard not to notice that almost every MVP catcher posted startling offensive figures in his award-winning summers: Gabby Hartnett batted .344 in 1935, Ernie Lombardi batted .342 in 1938, Bench had a hundred and forty-eight runs batted in in 1970. And so forth. Only one MVP catcher—Elston Howard, in 1963—had offensive statistics (.287 and eighty-five RBIs) that suggest that his work behind the plate had also been given full value by the voting scribes. The BBWAA is engaged in an interesting ongoing debate about whether pitchers should be eligible for the MVP award (as they are now), given the very special nature of their work. I think we should look at the other end of the battery and consider the possibility that, year in and year out, each of the well-established veteran catchers is almost surely the most valuable player on his club, for the reasons we have been looking at here.

Fisk cheered up a little after his musings. He tucked a nip of Skoal under his lower lip, and told me that catching left-handed pitchers had been the biggest adjustment he’d had to make when he went over to the White Sox. “Except for Bill Lee, we didn’t have that many left-handers my twelve years in Boston,” he said. “Because of the Wall. But there are good left-handers on this club, and that’s taken me a little time. When you’re calling a game with a left-handed pitcher against a lot of right-handed batters, you have to do it a little differently. A left-hander’s breaking ball always goes to my glove side, and his fastball and sinkerball run the other way. That fastball up over here, from a lefty pitcher, is a little harder for me to handle, for some reason. I’m still conscious of it, but I’m beginning to have a better time of it now.”

I thought about Fisk often and with great pleasure last summer, while his White Sox streaked away with the American League West divisional title. He batted .289, with twenty-six homers, for the year, and the Chicago pitchers (including LaMarr Hoyt, whose 24–10 and 3.66 record won him the Cy Young Award) outdid themselves. Fisk’s season ended in the White Sox’ excruciating 3–0 loss to the Orioles in the fourth game of the American League championship series, at Comiskey Park, in a game in which Britt Burns, the young left-handed Chicago starter, threw nine innings of shutout ball before succumbing in the tenth. Fisk had but one single in five at-bats in that game, but I think he found some rewards just the same. There in Sarasota, he’d said, “When things are working well and the pitcher stays with you the whole way and you’re getting guys out and keeping in the game—well, there’s just no more satisfying feeling. You want to win it and you want to get some hits, but if your pitcher is doing his best, inning after inning, then you know you’ve done your job. It doesn’t matter if I don’t get any hits, but if I was an outfielder in that same game and all I’d done was catch a couple of routine fly balls—why, men I wouldn’t have anything to hang my hat on that day.”

Tim McCarver also spoke of this sense of deeper involvement. Like many useful long-termers, he was moved to easier positions when the demands of the job began to wear him down, but he didn’t like it much not catching. “Joe Torre had been through that same shift,” he said to me, “and he told me that when I changed position I’d be amazed how much my mind would begin to wander. When I moved out to first base—I played more than seventy games there in 1973—I couldn’t believe it. I had to keep kicking myself to pay attention.”

Calling a game, of course, is the heart of it, and what that requires of a catcher, I came to understand at last, is not just a perfect memory for the batting strengths and weaknesses of every hitter on every other club—some hundred and sixty-five to a hundred and ninety-five batters, that is—but a sure knowledge of the capabilities of each pitcher on his staff. The latter is probably more important. Milt May said, “If I had a chance to play against a team I’d never seen before but with a pitcher I’d caught fifty times, I’d much rather have that than play against a team I’d played fifty times but with a pitcher I didn’t know at all.”

The other desideratum is a pitcher with good control—far rarer, even at the major-league level, than one might suppose. “There are very few guys who can really pitch to a hitter’s weakness,” May said. “Most of ’em just want to pitch their own strength. Young pitchers usually have good stuff—a good moving fastball—and they pitch to hitters in the same pattern. Most of their breaking balls are out of the strike zone, so they go back to the fastball when they’re behind, and of course if you’re up at bat you notice something like that.”