Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (13 page)

Max and Bert are telephone addicts, and have made several thousand calls to each other in the past four or five years (Bert: “Think how many if we
liked
each other!”), mostly to exchange baseball talk. In a recent call, Max baited Bert for having inexplicably forgotten that Don Heffner had played in six games for the Tigers in 1944, long before beginning his tenure as a Detroit coach. “Now we’re even for Milt Boiling, right?” he said. “It must be a
year
you haven’t let me up because I forgot Milt and Frank Boiling played together that once for us in the fifties.” In time, they went on to bubble-gum cards. “I never saw the Waners, because they were in the wrong league, but I know how they each looked up at the plate,” Max said. “Both were lefty hitters, of course, but Lloyd held the bat sort of out in front of him when he was up, and Paul’s bat was tipped sideways and back. That’s the way it was on my cards, anyway. Listen, what were the worst baseball cards you used to have—you know, the ones you always had so many of you couldn’t get rid of them? … Harlond Clift? Oh, yes, my God, you’re right, Bert! I’d absolutely forgotten. But with me it was always too many Hudlins. Willis Hudlin, the old Cleveland twirler—right? I think I had a hundred Willis Hudlins.… What were the
best
baseball cards? You mean like the Gehringers and … Oh, the rarest ones. Let me see.… I guess they were so rare I never got one. I mean, I can’t remember. Probably some good ballplayer on a terrible team. Somebody on the old Athletics who’d get overlooked there. Like—oh, like Bob Johnson. You remember him—Indian Bob. He used to
kill
us.… I think we talked about this once already, but let’s talk about it some more, OK?”

By agreement among the three, Max holds the post of official historian, Don is entrusted with tactics, and Bert is the statistician, though none of them is reticent about intruding upon another’s turf of expertise. Like most long-term fans, they are absolutely opposed to the American League’s new designated-hitter rule, but Bert Gordon may be the first classicist to point out that the addition of the tenth man means that the pregame public announcement of the team lineups now takes 11.1 percent longer to complete than it did last year. His avidity for figures seems to remove him a little from the day-to-day adventures of his team, but he keeps his Kaline statistics warm, and this summer he spent a good many hours extrapolating the day on which Kaline would pass Charlie Gehringer as the player with the third-highest number of base hits (behind Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford) in Tiger history. Early in June, Bert settled on August 17 as the likely date for the event, but later revised it to August 9; the epochal Kaline hit actually came on August 8—a single against Oakland that was probably appreciated more quickly and more deeply by Bert Gordon than by the man who struck it. Bert polishes such Tiger events and figures in his mind—the unmatched Ty Cobb records; Harry Heilmann’s odd-year batting championships, in 1921, ’23, ’25, and ’27; Denny McLain’s startling 31–6 year in 1968—but the one Tiger record he believes to be absolutely unassailable was made in an afternoon game on June 21, 1970, when a modestly talented Tiger infielder named Cesar Gutierrez hit safely in seven consecutive times at bat. “For one thing, you have to send fifty-five men to the plate in the game before the thing even becomes statistically possible,” Bert said recently. “Why, only two men in the entire history of this game, out of all the thousands and thousands that have played big-league ball, have ever gone seven for seven. Just think about that for a minute.” He lit a Lucky Strike and thought about it for a minute, humming happily under his breath. “You know something about that Gutierrez?” he said, and an enormous laugh convulsed him. “Oh, boy, was he ever
lucky!”
*

Max Lapides, by his own careful, historian’s estimate, has attended at least twelve hundred Tiger games. Looking back from this Everest over a baseball landscape of almost forty years, he still has no difficulty in selecting the greatest Tiger games of his time; in the spring of 1967, acting out of a pure, Thucydidean sense of duty, he wrote a considerable monograph on the two—or, in strict fact, three—battles that remained brightest in his memory. (Today, he has said, he might have to add either the fifth or the seventh game of the 1968 World Series, when the Tigers came back from an almost hopeless disadvantage to defeat the Cardinals for the World Championship.) On the night of June 23, 1950, playing at home, the Tigers gave up four home runs to the Yankees in the first four innings, to fall behind by 6–0; in their half of the fourth they hit four home runs of their own, including a grand slam by pitcher Dizzy Trout, altogether good for eight runs. Homers by Joe DiMaggio and Tommy Henrich again put the visitors ahead, by 9–8, but Hoot Evers won the thing with a two-run inside-the-park homer in the bottom of the ninth. This Waterloo—eleven homers, sixty-two total bases, all nineteen runs the result of home runs—still holds a number of all-time baseball records (perhaps including “Frightened Pitchers, Most”), but Max’s true fanly preference falls upon quite a different game, a two-part event of almost total austerity that began on July 21, 1945, when the Tigers and the Athletics played a twenty-four-inning, 1–1 standoff in Philadelphia. (Max Lapides happened to see this afternoon of mime because he had just begun his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. He also happened to see every game played by the Tigers at Shibe Park during his undergraduate years. Later in the summer of 1945, he and a college friend took a train to Washington to see a significant series between the Tigers and the Senators, who were then neck and neck in the pennant race; the students slept on park benches, subsisted on hot dogs and cornflakes, and saw five games in three days.) That 1–1 game was rescheduled for September 12, 1945, and again the Tigers and Athletics froze at 1–1 after nine innings, and then at 2–2 after eleven. The A’s won at last, in the sixteenth inning, and Max’s precise and admirable account—his prose style may owe something to a press-box titan of his boyhood, H. G. Salsinger, of the Detroit
News
—concludes ringingly:

It was a fatal move. The exhausted Dazzler [Dizzy Trout] had nothing left—even in the dark shadows of Shibe Park.… Next came the troublesome Estalella, always a thorn in the Tiger paw.… Roberto and Diz battled to a full count and then, swinging late in the murky dusk, the Cuban sliced a sharp line drive to the right-field corner. Cullenbine, shading center field for the righthanded batter, never had a chance as Smith raced around to score the winning run and wrap up the “longest game” in baseball history after forty innings of play.

Two days later, whatever justice there was for the Tigers came when Leslie Mueller defeated the Athletics 1–0 in a five-inning game, while allowing only two hits.

On a Saturday morning late last May, Bert Gordon and Don Shapiro drove to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport to meet Max Lapides, who was returning from Chicago to attend his first Tiger game of the year with his old friends. Max’s wife and their two young daughters were staying in their Detroit home, in the suburban Birmingham section, until the end of the school year, so Max’s exile was still leavened by weekend paroles. On the way to the airport, Bert and Don considered the awful possibility that Max might someday be converted to the White Sox, but the subject died of unlikelihood, and in time the two began comparing some Tiger managers. Red Rolfe (1949–52), it was agreed, had been decent; Fred Hutchinson (1952–54) had been sound but touched with temper; Charlie Dressen (1963–66) had been deep in knowledge but past his prime. Surprisingly, the vote for the best manager since Mickey Cochrane (1934–38) went to the incumbent, Billy Martin, who had taken an aged Tiger team into the playoffs the previous fall, and who had the same seniors currently, if barely, at the top of their division again. “He’s winning ball games,” said Don, “and that’s absolutely all that counts.”

“Plus he’s exciting,” said Bert. “This is the first time since I was eleven years old that you see a Tiger base runner go from second to third on a fly ball.”

Another passenger inquired about Mayo Smith, the pilot who brought the Tigers to within one game of a pennant in 1967, and who won it all the following year. There was a painful pause, and then Don Shapiro, the resident strategist, said, “Listen, there were times when Mayo Smith was managing, and he would call in somebody from the bullpen, and I would know who he had chosen and I knew that he was going to be wrong. I knew the game was down the drain, and so did everybody else in the ball park. Why, that sense of impending disaster was so strong you could almost chart it. It was palpable. And then the disaster would happen. Mayo Smith absolutely lacked that mystical foreknowledge of baseball events, and as a manager you
have
to have that. Oh, this man was a monkey on my back for so long, and the worst part of it was that everybody loved Mayo Smith, because he was such a nice guy and such a charming guy. Mayo the nice poker companion, Mayo the great drinking companion—nobody had anything bad to say about him, and it was all absolutely true except for one thing: the man was overwhelmingly inept. Oh, boy, I hated that man, and I hated myself for hating him. I probably would have
killed
him if I’d run into him in ’67 after he blew the pennant for us.” The Tigers lost a famous three-way race on the last day of the 1967 season, when the Red Sox won the pennant by beating the Minnesota Twins while the Tigers lost the second game of a doubleheader to the California Angels at home. “That last game, he did everything wrong,” Don went on. “He let our pitcher stay in, and I was standing up on my seat screaming, ‘Take him out! Take him out!’ I was blind with rage. I can still see what happened next—that pitch coming in to the Angels’ Fregosi, and Fregosi getting ready to hit it—and I can see the ball going through the hole between short and third, and I can see the man coming around third to put them ahead. And then, like everybody else in this town, I can still see Dick McAuliffe, in the ninth, hitting into only his second double play of the entire season, to end it all. Listen, I’m like a dying man; I can see that whole game flashing before my eyes. It was like a scene out of Fellini, because right in back of me this guy is sitting there and listening to a
football
game—it was a Sunday, and football was on—and his radio is blaring football as the runner is rounding third base, and Mayo Smith is standing there, riveted to that post of his, holding up the dugout.” He shook his head and laughed hollowly. “That was the day I came home and went down in the basement and broke all our flowerpots.”

Bert, from the front seat, said, “Think about something happier. Think about 1968.”

“The trouble with you is you don’t suffer enough,” Don said.

“I don’t
suffer
enough!” said Bert, shouting with laughter. “I’m Jewish, I’m short, I’m fat, I’m poor, I’m ugly—what else do you want me to suffer?”

“That’s all true,” Don said, looking at his friend affectionately. “A man like you probably can’t bear the necessary onus of suffering. After all, this isn’t just a game of ours. It isn’t just a preoccupation. It isn’t an obsession. It’s a—well, it’s a—”

They said it together: “It’s an obsession.”

At the airport, Max was met and hugged, and the car aimed back toward the ball park. Suddenly, it was a party.

“Everything is fine, I guess,” Max said. “Only, I miss my friends, now I’m with them again. I like this so much I may do it every week. But things are not fine back there, really. Listen, the other night when we beat the Yanks I turned on the TV in Chicago and the guy forgot to give the Tigers’ score. He absolutely forgot. I couldn’t get to sleep until four in the morning. Nobody knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, ‘N.Y. at Detroit (n.).’ I mean, doesn’t a man have a Constitutional right to the box scores?” He said that he was sometimes able to pick up Ernie Harwell on his car radio. “It only happens a little bit outside the city, on the north side,” he added. “Sometimes it’s only a snatch of the game broadcast, with a lot of static, but I can always tell from Ernie’s voice how we’re doing. Anyway, that’s how come we bought the new house in Highland Park—so I can get the broadcasts and be closer to drive to all the Tiger games in Milwaukee. Fortunately, my wife likes the area.”

At the ball park, the three friends sat in their accustomed place, in Section 24, between first and home; Tiger Stadium is an ancient, squared-off green pleasance, and the view was splendid. None of the three bought scorecards. (“The thing to do,” Bert said, “is
remember.”
) The World Champion Oakland A’s, who had barely beaten out the Tigers in a violent five-game playoff the previous fall, were the opposition, and a modest but enthusiastic audience was filling up the nearby seats. Don Shapiro has a dark, vivid face—a downturned mustache, some lines of pain, some lines of hope—and he now looked about with satisfaction and clapped his hands. “Well!” he said. “Well, well. What could be nicer than this? I mean that. I really mean it. I’m supremely happy. I like this park even better than my Eames chair.” He caught sight of the Oakland starting pitcher, Ken Holtzman, warming up, and his face fell.
“Uh
-oh,” he said. “A very tough man, and now I’ve got some ethnic problems, too. A Jewish pitcher against our guys.”

The game was a quiet, almost eventless affair for the first few innings, but Don was a restless spectator, twisting and bending in his seat, grimacing, groaning occasionally, leaping up for almost every enemy out. In the fifth, Gene Tenace, the Oakland first baseman, hit a home run into the left-field stands, and Shapiro fell back into his seat. He stared at the concrete floor in silence. “God damn it,” he muttered at last. “This is
serious.”
The A’s added two more runs off the Detroit starter, Woodie Fryman, but in the bottom half the Tigers put together two singles, a walk, and a third single, by Bill Freehan, the Detroit catcher, to tie it up, and the party was delighted.

“That was a good little rally,” Max said. “Just right. Lots of running, and we have a tie.”

“Yes, I don’t like that
one
big blow,” Bert said.