Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (19 page)

The statistics of baseball form the critical dimensions of the game. Invisible but ineluctable, they swarm and hover above the head of every pitcher, every fielder, every batter, every team, recording every play with an accompanying silent shift of digits. The true, grinding difficulty of this sport is to be found in its unwinking figures, and ballplayers on the field are in competition not just with the pitchers and sluggers of the opposing team but with every pitcher or batter who ever played the game, including their past selves. Some aspects of fielding are not perfectly measurable, and good or bad managerial thinking is similarly obscure, but each pitcher and hitter is absolutely without illusion about the current level of his professional competence and the likely curve of its continuation. The red-hot spring hitter
knows
he will not stay up there at .472; the averages will get him. The veteran knows he will break out of his 0-for-22 slump—but when,
when?
At night, in his hotel room on the road, the manager rereads the day’s new cumulative team stats and thinks about his not so dazzling rookie outfielder: the figures spell Tulsa. In the next room, a thirty-two-year-old pitcher slowly rubs his aching shoulder and silently reruns his numbers (ERA 3.81; W
5
–L 8; HR 12; CG 0), which are beginning to say something to him about his next year’s salary and his chances of a ten-year-man’s pension. Only the superstar, with his years of averages and numbers safely banked in the record books, has longer thoughts—perhaps about his precise eventual place in the history of this game, and about the players (some of them now old, some of them now dead) who at this moment bracket his name in the all-time totals. His figures may have begun to spell another destination: Cooperstown. None of this is secret; none of it is hard to understand. The averages are there for us all to read and to ponder, and they admit us to the innermost company of baseball. On that same evening, the true fan, comfortably at home with his newspapers and
The Sporting News
and his “Official Baseball Guide”s and his various record books and histories, notes the day’s and the week’s new figures, and draws his conclusions, and then plunges onward, deeper into the puzzles and pleasures of his game.

A: Jim and Gaylord Perry.

Q: Which pair of brothers have together pitched the most winning games in the major leagues?

Ah, friends, this one hurts. The answer here is a brand-new one—a mark hung up on April 23 of this year, when Gaylord Perry, on his way to a dazzlingly successful early season, won his second game of the year for the Cleveland Indians. Gaylord, now thirty-five, has subsequently run his record to 14–1, and tops all pitchers in both leagues with an earned-run average of 1.27. His achievement so far is curious as well as astounding, since he seems to have abandoned the infamous spitball with which he used to fan so many batters, enrage so many managers, and mystify so many umpires. Faced with a new ad-hoc (and
con
-Gaylord) ruling this year which permits an umpire to call an automatic ball on any pitch that appears even faintly perspiring in its flight, and to eject a hurler for a second offense, Perry (or so he claims) has gone to a fork ball that behaves very much like its damp cousin as it crosses the plate—that is, like a diving pelican. Wet or dry, Gaylord Perry deserves homage, but one cannot entirely help wishing that he had stayed down on the family farm in Williamston, North Carolina, this summer. The new brother-pitcher record—composed of Gaylord’s pre-1974 lifetime mark of 177 wins, plus his first two this year, and Jim Perry’s 194, plus his first this year (also for the Indians)—erased an ancient mark much beloved of press-box historians and other baseball loonies: the 373 victories scored by Christy and Henry Mathewson. The latter sibling was not quite as effective as his celebrated bro, having appeared in a total of three games for the Giants during the seasons of 1906 and 1907, during which he ripped off a lifetime mark of zero wins and one defeat. That sum, carefully added to Christy’s 373, had topped all comers until now. There was a brief further flurry this spring when some statistical mole discovered that
three
brothers—Dad and John and Walter Clarkson—pitching in baseball’s Pleistocene era, had put together a lifetime conglomerate of 386 wins. But the Perrys have now topped that, too, and the last word on the foolish matter may have been said by a visiting baseball writer at Shea Stadium last month who murmured, “Cy Young and his sister have still got them all beat.”

A: Al Benton and Bobo Newsom and (in a way) Satchel Paige.

Q: Name two (or three) pitchers who pitched to both Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle.

Benton’s and Newsom’s careers as hurlers encompassed both 1934 and 1952, which were, respectively, Ruth’s last and Mantle’s first full years in the majors. Paige is perhaps subject to challenge, since the big leagues’ old racial barriers made it impossible for him to pitch against the Babe in anything but exhibition games.

A: Dan Brouthers, Nick Altrock, Bobo Newsom, Mickey Vernon, Early Wynn, Ted Williams.

Q: How many players can you name whose active careers spanned at least four calendar decades?

An infuriating question, answerable only by zealots wearing bottle-bottom eyeglasses who have wasted their lives groveling in the fine print of the baseball record books. Brouthers, a Hall of Fame slugger and first baseman, appeared in his first big-league game in 1879 and his last in 1904. Newsom’s career stretched from 1929 to 1953, Vernon’s and Williams’ from 1939 to 1960, Wynn’s from 1939 to 1963. Nick Altrock’s span is 1898 to 1924, or maybe even 1933, but he barely merits inclusion, since most of his appearances after 1912 (he was a left-handed pitcher) were token affairs—an inning or two per year. He may be remembered by a few elders (including this scribe) as a beloved long-time coach with the Senators who used to team with Al Schacht in a clown act between the games of doubleheaders in baseball’s sunshine days.
*

More infuriation?

A: Dodgers, Cubs, Browns, Senators, Red Sox, Senators, Browns, Tigers, Browns, Tigers, Senators, Dodgers, Browns, Senators, Dodgers, Athletics, Senators, Yankees, Senators, Giants, Athletics, Senators, Athletics.

Anybody got the question? Oh, come on, this one is easy.

Q: Name in order all the major-league teams for which Bobo Newsom pitched. (Or, variantly, name the pitcher who served more terms as a Senator than Strom Thurmond.)

A: c, King Kelly; 1b, Ted Kluszewski; 2b, Harvey Kuenn; 3b, George Kell; ss, Don Kessinger; of, Willie Keeler, Al Kaline, Ralph Kiner; p. Sandy Koufax, Tim Keefe, Jim Kaat, Jerry Koosman.

Q: Name an all-time-best lineup of players with names beginning with “K.”

No single answer is right here, but this is a game that can be played for hours on end among badly bitten fans or, solo, by insomniac baseball freaks in the darkest hours of the night. Utterly useless disputes and time-wasting reveries can ensue, thus providing some of the true secret rewards of fandom. Your team, of course, can play for any letter of the alphabet; if you start with “C,” for instance, it is possible to come up with an All-Hall-of-Fame lineup. “K” is more rewarding than one might think at first, however. It isn’t easy to relegate Chuck Klein, Charlie Keller, Harmon Killebrew, Ken Keltner, Tony Kubek, or Highpockets Kelly to the bench, as I have done, but with pinch-hitters like that, one probably doesn’t need a very deep bullpen: Jim Konstanty, Ray Kremer, Ellis Kinder, and Alex Kellner. (Harvey Kuenn, incidentally, never did play second base, but my manager, Eddie Kasko, is not afraid to experiment a little with a lifetime .303 hitter like Harv.) Let’s add Eddie Kranepool to the club, for good luck, and the back-up catcher, of course, is Clyde Kluttz. Probably I have left somebody out. If you need a little help in scouting him, take along Paul Krichell.

And just one more—absolutely the final one.

A: Three feet seven inches.

Q: How tall was Eddie Gaedel, the midget whom Bill Veeck sent up to bat as a pinch-hitter for the St. Louis Browns against the Tigers on August 19, 1951?

Gaedel walked, of course (which was the whole idea), and the rules of the game were instantly changed to prohibit such high unseriousness. The story is not complete, however, unless one adds:

A: Pearl du Monville. (Yes, I know, I know, but this is part of the same question. Stop complaining.)

Q: Name the midget who was signed up to pinch-hit for a big-league team in James Thurber’s
Saturday Evening Post
story “You Could Look It Up,” published a full decade before Veeck’s coup.

You could look it up.

This interrogative outburst has been inspired by the recent publication of two significant (and significantly different) volumes of baseball records. One is the long-awaited new edition of
The Baseball Encyclopedia
(Macmillan; $17.95), which attempts to update the epochal first edition, of 1969. The other is
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball
(Grosset & Dunlap; $5.95 paperback, $14.95 in the regular edition), which presents the essential data of the game in year-by-year rather than biographical fashion. Macmillan’s original
Baseball Encyclopedia
was recognized almost from the instant of its publication as the most accurate and rewarding book of baseball records ever compiled. The original edition (let’s call it “Mac I”) had its beginnings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when a group of young computer scientists who had allied themselves as Information Concepts, Inc., approached Robert Markel, an executive editor at Macmillan, and suggested that it was high time that the new capabilities of computer science be permitted to go to work on the vast, almost oceanic depths of essential baseball statistics that had accumulated over the years. They had found the perfect partner, for Markel had previously published a number of original and most successful sports books, including
The Glory of Their Times,
by Lawrence S. Ritter, which is a glowing re-creation of the early days of big-league baseball as told by some surviving Nestors of the game. Markel was enthusiastic about the new proposal, and became even more enthusiastic when he learned that ICI had independent financial backing that would begin to support the enormous costs of programming the work and building the essential data bank—a Fort Knox of stats. The ICI planners—notably, two men named Paul Funkhouser and David S. Neft—had in mind an eventual computerization of baseball that would hook up the scoreboards in all the big-league parks to a single central electronic brain, which would also pick up and print and store all the statistics of the game as they happened. In computer circles, this is known as “real-time” work. It could also be called dream-time work, for the costs of the scheme were admittedly phenomenal, and organized baseball is not known for its instant response to brand-new ideas or to unexpected financial disbursements of any nature. In any case, the cost of the preparation of the data for Mac I sailed right through the independent financial backing and up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, effectively postponing the advent of ICI as an instantaneous electronic sports colossus, but not before it had provided Macmillan with a data bank of incomparable value and interest. The primary source of the data was the daily “official sheets” of baseball statistics kept by the American League (since 1905) and by the National League (since 1902). For corroborative evidence and for the statistics of all the nineteenth-century contests, the compilers consulted local libraries and ancient newspaper files, and the precious records of famous baseball students like the late Lee Allen, the official historian of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, and John Tattersall, a Philadelphia steamship executive. (Tattersall has compiled a history of every home run ever struck in major-league competition, including the inning, the number of men on base, and the pitcher.) All this digging yielded a formidable body of figures (the first-draft specifications came to eight thousand pages), and included a few corrections of famous old individual statistics: Ty Cobb’s hallowed Most Hits was raised from 4,191 to 4,192, as the result of two previously overlooked games he played in 1906.

Mac I came out in the fall of 1969, to instant success. Priced at twenty-five dollars, it eventually sold some fifty thousand copies in the bookstores, plus another fifty or sixty thousand via book clubs and mail orders. It is an elegantly organized, beautifully printed and laid-out volume of 2,337 pages, containing (among a great many other things) a statistical summary of the changing team averages over the years; a summary of individual leaders in batting, pitching, fielding, and so on; a year-by-year roster of all the teams and their players and statistics (the dates, here and elsewhere, go back to the National League of 1876, and also include vanished big leagues like the Players League, the American Association, the Union Association, and the outlaw Federal League); an alphabetical roster of every major-league player and his batting record; an alphabetical roster of all pitchers and their pitching records; a register of managers; and a description of every World Series game, with accompanying data. The book, in short, was a self-certifying classic that made its fortunate purchasers wonder how they and the game had ever got along without it. My own copy, its spine lettering almost worn away by my ceaseless browsings and burrowings, is now kept under lock and key, for the volume is irreplaceable.

Irreplaceable, alas, despite its official replacement, Mac II, which came out in June. My first misgivings about the new edition were instantaneous when I noticed that the price had been dropped to $17.95 and the number of pages cut by more than a third, to 1,532. How, I wondered, could anyone have enforced a diet upon a book that carried an additional five years of new players and new records? One could understand the need to keep the price of the new book beneath a range acceptable only to independently languid bibliophiles, but the attempt at a more popular price suggested that the current editors of the work did not understand the necessary dimensions and classic purposes of a basic reference work. The makers of Mac II have skimped and shaved, sometimes sensibly but more often oddly or arbitrarily or thoughtlessly. New listings of no-hit games and Hall of Fame members are welcome, and so are descriptions of the new Championship Series games, which were first played after Mac I. Gone, however, is the essential year-by-year roster of all the teams and all their players—the section in Mac I that most warmed and pleased old fans, since it repopulated the playing fields of their recollection with long-forgotten batteries, ancient double-play combinations, and nearly vanished bench-warmers. (Hello, Gene Desautels!
Ave,
Russ van Atta!) Gone from each player’s statistical biography are mentions of important injuries and of years lost to military service. Gone, appallingly, are his accompanying World Series figures—as if these were somehow not germane to the man’s total performance.