Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (20 page)

What this means in terms of day-to-day usefulness is dismaying. I can imagine, for example, a young fan spending an hour or two musing over Ted Williams’ lifetime records. How good
was
the Splendid Splinter? In the new volume, he would not be able to learn that Williams missed out on some 450 games of major-league action because of his military service in 1943–45, and some 250 more games for the same reason in 1952–53. Extrapolating his prime-season figures, the sprout might have discovered that this duty time represented a possible loss of 160 career home runs, which would have brought Williams to a lifetime total of 681—right up there in Aaron-Ruth country.

When
was
it that Dizzy Dean had his toe broken by a line drive in an All-Star Game, and then ruined his arm forever by pitching before it was quite healed? When was Eddie Waitkus shot by that unknown female admirer? How many World Series games did it take for Lou Brock to steal his record-breaking fourteen bases? When, and for whom, did Rogers Hornsby play in the World Series? Why did Sandy Koufax quit so suddenly? Why did Nemo Gaines require special permission to attempt a career in the majors? How many at-bats did Walter Alston have in the majors? How tall was Eddie Gaedel? Mac I says; Mac II either doesn’t say or mumbles. It’s a pity.
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The Grosset & Dunlap volume, which turned up about the same time as Mac II, is a reference work built primarily around the old yearbooks of the game—every name and every offensive statistic of every season. Career averages are to be found in five “era summaries,” and several ingenious codes supply much of the quirky individual details that Mac II has dropped. The “career-interruption” code, for instance, lists seventy-three separate forms of bad news, including “LA—Leg amputated”; “SU—Suspended for hitting or abusing umpire”; “JL—Returned to Japanese league”; and “JA—In jail for assault.” The printing and paper and typography are not up to the quality of the Macmillan volumes, but there are a number of counterweighing innovations, possibly even including the sizable and rather fervently written descriptions of each major-league season and its happenings. The best new material here is some averages I have never seen before, including lifetime
differences
in winning percentages for pitchers and the winning percentages of the teams they played for. The simple lifetime percentages for pitchers, for instance, find Jim Palmer first on the list of currently active players, with .682, and Tom Seaver second, with .640. The lifetime difference list, by contrast, places Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal at the top of the active list, and Palmer and Seaver don’t show up on it at all. Here, too, at last, are the very first comparative performance figures for black, white, and Latin players, which confirm what has so far been only broadly perceptible: a huge overall increase in numbers of black and Latin players since 1947 (but a much smaller one among pitchers); batting averages, slugging averages, and stolen bases notably higher for non-white players than for whites; a clustering of black and Latin stars at the top levels of baseball accomplishment. These figures, as
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball
counsels, open enormous areas of speculation that should be explored with care and in the company of sociologists and other experts.

The new reference book, primarily intended for paperback sale, is also the work of Robert Markel, now the editor-in-chief at Grosset & Dunlap, who reunited David Neft and some of the other ICI alumni to put together a different sort of “Fan’s Companion.” The data bank compiled for Macmillan was no longer available to them, of course, and the figures in the new work were put together by hand—with a resulting proofreading bill of ten thousand dollars and oculists’ fees as yet unknown.

A few moving figures have been observed amid the digit-thickets. On a sunny afternoon in the middle of April, I welcomed the Red Sox in their first visit to the Yankees’ sublet, Shea Stadium, and watched Mel Stottlemyre beat Luis Tiant, 2–1, in a game that was full of early-season false hints. The young Bosox, who had dropped Orlando Cepeda and Luis Aparicio at the end of spring training, showed none of the speed and power and confidence that subsequently distinguished their campaign this year, and the two Yankee scores came about as the result of malfeasances—a wild peg to first by the Boston catcher, and a hit batsman and bases-loaded walk by Tiant. (Tiant, who has the most entertaining and effective move to first base of any right-hander, did not pick anybody off this day. Once, I congratulated him on this highly specialized talent, and he grinned and said, “Oh, my father he had a much better move than me. [Tiant
père
was a celebrated Cuban hurler of his day.] He say he used to strike out batters with it.”) Further evidences of springtime were the three straight singles rapped out by Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles. Normally a docile batsman, Nettles was enjoying an almost Faustian prosperity at the plate, which eventually brought him eleven home runs in the month of April, tying a league record. He was at a loss to explain this. “I don’t know,” he said in the clubhouse. “I’m just seeing the ball better, or s
omething.”
He looked embarrassed—the proper expression of a player waiting for the averages to bite him.

A month later, there were a lot of new Yankee faces in the dugout, as the result of a wave of late trades by Yankee president Gabe Paul. One old Yankee face, Ralph Houk, was on hand in his fresh guise as the Detroit manager; he seemed genuinely touched by the wave of boos that greeted him as he carried out his lineup card. None of the Yankees, new or old, could do much with Mickey Lolich, who set them down with three hits and won by 5–2. Chris Chambliss, the large new first baseman whom the Yankees had just acquired from Cleveland, swung mightily and smote several eleven-hop infield grounders. It was the fourth straight Yankee loss.

The next visiting southpaw observed by me was Mike Cuellar, of the Orioles, who even outdid Lolich, surrendering two hits and a single run. This was late May, and the Yanks, now engaged upon an entirely different five-game losing streak, had fallen to last place. They looked dispirited, especially while swinging against Cuellar’s junky screwballs and curves. At its best, Cuellar’s attack on the plate reminds one of a master butcher preparing a standing roast of beef—a sliver excised here, a morsel trimmed off the bottom, two or three superfluous swishes of the knife through the air, and then a final slice of white off the ribs:
Voilà!

I caught the Orioles again a few days later, by television, when I saw the Kansas City Royals inflict frightful indignities on Jim Palmer, the Baltimore ace. Palmer, last year’s Cy Young Award winner in the American League, was gone after two and two-thirds innings, having surrendered seven hits and five runs. It was his sixth loss of the year, against two wins, and his record has subsequently gone to three and eight. He is suffering from a bad elbow. Mike Cuellar is still capable of some excellent outings, as I had observed, but he is thirty-seven years old and cannot last for many more summers. Dave McNally, the third member of the celebrated Baltimore corps of starters, is currently bumping along at 7–6 and a 4.30 ERA, and it may well be that this marvelous triumvirate is nearing the end of its reign. Before it goes, attention and honor should be paid.

McNally, a left-hander, came up to the Orioles from the minors in 1962, at the age of twenty; Palmer, who is right-handed, arrived in 1965, also at the age of twenty, although he was to spend the better part of the 1967 and 1968 seasons in the minors, recovering from an arm injury. The trio was completed at the beginning of the 1969 season when Cuellar, a veteran already in his thirties, came over from the Astros. In the five full seasons since then, the three pitchers have won 297 games while losing 150—a winning percentage of .664, which puts them up among the most effective and famous three-man staffs in history. These would include Eddie Lopat, Allie Reynolds, and Vic Raschi, who won 307 games and lost 143 (or .682) for the Yankees between 1948 and 1953; Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Mike Garcia, whose nine-year record for the Indians from 1949 to 1957 was 473–293, or .617; and, going back a bit, Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw, and Rube Walberg, who toiled together for Connie Mack’s Athletics from 1928 to 1933: 344–169, good for .670. No other more recent corps of starters suggests itself.

A more spectacular and perhaps fairer way to measure these splendid inner teams is to compare their cumulative performance during their three
peak
years together—a performance that in each case resulted in at least one pennant for the pitchers’ clubs. It comes out this way:

Those Athletics’ records, it should be explained, mean mostly Grove. His three-year stats for the selected time were 79 wins and only 15 losses, and an earned-run average of 2.47. Looking back to earlier times, one finds some dazzling three-year, three-man totals for games won—196 for Ed Walsh, Frank Smith, and Doc White, of the 1907–09 White Sox; 197 for Christy Mathewson, Rube Marquard, and Jeff Tesreau, of the 1912–14 Giants; and 231 for Mathewson, Joe McGinnity, and Dummy Taylor, of the 1903–05 Giants. Since old-time hurling staffs included very few relief pitchers, most of the pitchers of the era worked many more innings than modern stars do, and absorbed more losses, with consequent damage to their winning percentages.

So far this summer, Met-watching has been an excruciating pastime, especially when one remembers the tenacity and verve of the same club last autumn. At this writing, the World Series runners-up are in last place in the East, with the worst record in their league—worse than the Padres’. Ten games behind and fourteen games below the .500 level would suggest a summer best forgotten if it were not for the fact that their division again lacks a consistent leader. At less than their top form, the Mets have always looked abysmal. Their good years have been built on splendid pitching, from both starters and relievers; an airtight defense; and a patient attack that rarely produces more than the minimum necessary runs—in sum, a little twenty-one-jewel mechanism that works perfectly or not at all. The Mets have also never won without a top performance from Tom Seaver, and Seaver, in sixteen starts, stands at 4–6, with an earned-run average of 3.64; he is second in the league in strikeouts, and first in homers given up—fifteen.

I have watched Seaver work three times this year—a big, dominant win over Montreal, a sudden late-inning loss to the Giants on a three-run homer conked over the center-field fence at Shea by Gary Matthews, and a middling no-decision performance against the Reds. He has looked overpowering at times, the genuine Tom Terrific (during one twelve-inning outing in Los Angeles he fanned sixteen Dodgers), and decidedly ordinary at others. He has a formidable pitching intelligence, and knows how to employ all the talents he possesses on any given day, but this year he has sometimes been let down by his big strikeout pitch, the high fastball. (As we all know, the high hummer that is even a fraction short often ends up in the parking lot.) Seaver claims that his arm has never felt better, but it may be that he is suffering more than he wants to admit from a sciatic hip, which recently caused him to miss several starts. He may be at the time when we should begin to speculate about his future.

Seaver has had seven years in the majors to date, winning 135 games and losing 76 (up to 1974), with an ERA of 2.38. He has led the league three times in strikeouts (also registering the lowest ERA in each of those three years). Last summer, he pitched the Mets to a pennant and won his second Cy Young Award, but he was admittedly an arm-weary pitcher in the late going. He is twenty-nine years old. This is still young for a ballplayer, but not quite so young, the records suggest, for a strikeout pitcher. Hal Newhouser, the Tigers’ left-handed star of three decades ago, twice led his league in strikeouts and twice in ERA, and averaged close to three hundred innings pitched for six years, but was finished as a winner at the age of twenty-nine. Sudden Sam McDowell, while with the Cleveland Indians, kept his fastball for six years, five times topping the American League in whiffs, and then declined rapidly, never recording a significant winning season after the age of twenty-eight.

Robin Roberts, not exactly a flamethrower, lasted for nineteen years in the majors. He, too, had six top seasons—winning more than twenty games per year (and pitching over three hundred innings) from 1950 to 1955. He performed capably after that, but he was a much diminished pitcher after the age of twenty-nine. Bob Feller was a nonpareil fastball pitcher for seven years (not including a four-year wartime interruption)—seven years tops in Ks, five years tops in innings pitched and games won. But players who batted against him always mention the fact that Feller also possessed a magnificent curve, and it was this pitch that kept him in the majors for eighteen years; the fastball was in decline by the time he entered his thirties.

There is some evidence to the contrary, as well—famous iron-arms who threw hard and fast for a decade or more: Walter Johnson (twelve times the league strikeout leader, the last time in his thirty-seventh year), Dazzy Vance (who also led in strikeouts at the age of thirty-seven), Warren Spahn, Bob Gibson. And then, unforgettably, there is Sandy Koufax, who toiled ineffectively for six years, then gave us six astounding summers—five years tops in ERA, four years tops in strikeouts, three years tops in games won, no-hitters in four consecutive seasons—and then vanished like a spent rocket, his arm gone at the age of thirty.

It is certainly not suggested here that Seaver’s career is nearing its conclusion, or even that he is in decline as a consistent big winner. He is, however, at a stage in his professional life where he may soon have to become a different kind of pitcher—a process that is always extremely interesting to watch. It may be that the flaring Seaver fastball is about to disappear—gone, not so mysteriously, after some two thousand big-league innings and eighteen hundred whiffs. Let it go. Seaver seems to have the skills and temperament to stay on top, one way or another, for years to come—and here, too, the records are helpful. In 1927, Grover Cleveland Alexander, then forty years old, won 21 games for the Cardinals and lost only 10; he pitched 268 innings and fanned no more than 48 batters. There is more than one way to skin the game of one o’ cat.
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