Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (22 page)

ARMS:
Mike Marshall, the muscular, muttonchopped relief man for the Los Angeles Dodgers, appeared in 106 games for the year, thus wiping out his own previous one-season mark of 92, which he set last year with the Expos. To judge by his effectiveness (15 wins, 21 saves, an earned-run average of 2.42), his combativeness, and his habit of pitching batting practice for the Dodgers after just one day of idleness, he is perfectly capable of raising this mark by twenty or thirty games, if Walter Alston and the Dodger starters should so require.

Nolan Ryan, the California Angels’ fireballer, pitched his third no-hit game in two years, attaining a lifetime level reached by only five other pitchers. (Sandy Koufax notched four.) Ryan also struck out nineteen batters in a single game, to tie a record previously held by Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver. Ryan, however, did this
three times
this year. He struck out more than three hundred hitters (376) in a single season for the third time. One of his deliveries was timed by an electronic device at 100.8 miles per hour, which exceeded Bob Feller’s old speed mark (recorded on a different machine) of 98.6 mph. Another Ryan pitch struck Red Sox second baseman Doug Griffin above the ear, retiring him from competition for two months; the next game in which Griffin faced Ryan, he hit two singles. No award or trophy for courage was offered to either man.

Ryan was one of nine American League pitchers to achieve twenty wins this year—a new record mostly attributable to the designated-hitter artifice, which allows starting pitchers to stay in a game until their ears are knocked off. In the American League, the traditional level of pitching effectiveness probably should now be raised from twenty to twenty-five games—a more exclusive neighborhood, inhabited this summer only by Ferguson Jenkins and Catfish Hunter.

ARRIVAL:
The day after the regular season ended, Frank Robinson was named manager of the Cleveland Indians. He is the first black manager in the majors, and the belated, much publicized appointment confirms the inflexibility and down-home cronyism that still pervade most of the business side of baseball—a world in which black executives and women executives are equally invisible. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and the two league presidents had pressured the clubs to make such an appointment, and after it happened Kuhn said, “I don’t think that baseball should be exceptionally proud of this day. It’s been long overdue.” Robinson, who will take over a feeble and (to judge by its play in late September) demoralized club, will have his work cut out for him, but he is qualified for the job. He was a true team leader during his six years with the Orioles, where his manager was Earl Weaver, one of the best and most accessible baseball thinkers of our time. Robinson has also managed the Santurce Crabbers in Puerto Rico for five winter seasons, and an observer of his performance there has told me that he was unexcitable, tough, and effective, not hesitating on occasion to take down such superstars as Reggie Jackson (who is black) and such prima donnas as Dave Kingman (who is white). Frank Robinson is probably even qualified to become the first black manager in the majors to be fired.

DEPARTURES:
Dick Allen, the highest-paid player in the game, at $225,000 per year, announced his retirement from the White Sox at the age of thirty-two. He may change his mind and return to baseball; he may not. No one knows what Dick Allen will do next, probably not even Dick Allen. He has been an odd and enigmatic eminence—a great hitter and superior fielder who disdained or ignored every aspect of baseball except occasionally the actual playing of it, the game on the field. He could scarcely bear to give his attention to spring training, to the press, to bus and plane schedules, or, in the end, even to batting practice. Unsurprisingly, he exhausted the patience of several managers and owners, but when at last he was traded to Chicago, in 1972, his new manager, Chuck Tanner, announced that any private drumbeat heard by Dick Allen was perfectly acceptable to him, since Allen was obviously the best player anywhere. Allen responded with one splendid season—a .308 average, 37 homers, and 113 RBIs—which won him his only Most Valuable Player award. The next year, he broke a leg, and since then his other preoccupations—late hours, breeding race horses, silence, indifference—have kept him from the almost limitless baseball heights that could have been his. It is a strange, sad business. Although he quit the sport with two weeks remaining in the season, his thirty-two home runs were tops in his league this year.

Al Kaline retired, after twenty-two memorable years with the Tigers. Here there should be no gloom. On September 24, Kaline rapped out a single and a double against the Orioles and thus surpassed his announced final goal in baseball—3,000 lifetime hits. He finished up with 3,007, which places him eleventh on the all-time list of hitters—a most distinguished gentlemen’s club. In temperament and talent, he was almost exactly the opposite of Dick Allen. Never a superstar or a true slugger (his lifetime batting average is a shade under .300), he seemed always able to play at a level very close to the peak of his ability, and the fealty he aroused was almost religious in its ardor. The week after the season ended, I received a four-page letter about him from one of his lifelong fans, a professor at the University of Michigan, who said, among other things, “He did everything perfectly—fielding, throwing, running, judgment, bunting, advancing runners, hitting the ball.… I am sorry to see him go, because he may be the last of the complete ballplayers.” I heard almost the same words from Eddie Kasko, the former Boston manager and now a super-scout for the Red Sox, who added, “I even liked watching him take outfield practice. He did the whole thing, every part of the game, the way it should be done. If he was throwing to third, say, he would line up his body, take the ball just right, and get off the throw like a picture. You
enjoyed
it.” (Not until this summer, by the way, did I suddenly become aware of the marvel of Al Kaline’s name. Somewhere in the world, I wonder—perhaps in Spain—could there be an outfielder named A. Cid?)

DISCORD:
It was a famous year for fights—commotions in the stands, embroilments on the field, scuffles in clubhouses, ructions on the road. Early in the summer, some fans celebrated Beer Night at the Cleveland ball park with such energy that it cost the Indians a forfeited game; on the last night of the season, Pittsburgh fans celebrated a pennant by showering visiting Cub outfielders with obscenities and empty bottles. The contumelious world-champion A’s staged a main-event clubhouse one-rounder between outfielders Reggie Jackson and Bill North, which sidelined catcher (and would-be peacemaker) Ray Fosse for half the season. The Yankees may have lost their chance at a pennant when an alcoholic battle between two second-line players in the lobby of the Pfister Hotel, in Milwaukee, resulted in an injury to Bobby Murcer (also a non-combatant) which kept him out of a late-season game that the Yankees had to win.

Most baseball scuffles, of course, are purely entertaining. On September 22, in Busch Stadium, the visiting Cubs were batting in the ninth against the Cardinals in a critical game, then tied at 5–5. The Cardinals’ pitcher was their ace reliever, Al Hrabosky, who has the habit of withdrawing from the mound between deliveries and walking halfway to second base, where he holds visible converse with himself until he attains a point of confidence and batter-hatred that will allow him to return and offer up the next pitch. On this edgy occasion, the Cub batter, Bill Madlock, waited until Hrabosky had completed his psychic countdown, and then reversed the process, walking halfway to his dugout and turning his back on the field while he tapped dirt from his shoes and muttered mutters. Plate umpire Shag Crawford observed this parody and then briskly ordered Madlock back to his place of business. Madlock protested, and so did the Cub manager, Jim Marshall. Crawford signaled to Hrabosky to proceed. Hrabosky threw at the unguarded plate, and Crawford called a strike—an automatic call, under the rules. Hrabosky, delighted, got the ball back and fired again, just as Madlock and the on-deck Cub hitter, José Cardenal,
both
leaped into the batter’s box. Crawford signaled “No pitch” and turned to adjudicate matters, at which point the Cardinal catcher, Ted Simmons, punched Madlock in the face. Chaos. Asked later what Madlock had said that had proved insupportable to him, Simmons replied, “He didn’t say anything. I didn’t like the way he was
looking
at me.”

LONGIES:
On September 11, the Mets and the Cardinals played a seven-hour-and-four-minute game at Shea Stadium, which the Cardinals won, 4–3, at 3:12
A.M.
, in twenty-five innings. The home-plate ump was Ed Sudol, who also called balls and strikes during a twenty-three-inning Mets game in 1964 and a twenty-four-inning Mets game in 1968. There is no time and a half, by the way, for umpires.

On September 21, the Red Sox defeated the Orioles, 6–5, in ten innings, in a game that consumed six hours and twenty-seven minutes because of rain delays. The winning pitcher, Bill Lee, went the full distance. The loss dropped the Orioles out of first place.

On September 25, the Cardinals beat the Pirates, 13–12, in eleven innings. The Pirates scored three runs in the top of the eleventh; the Cardinals scored four runs in the bottom half. The victory moved the Cardinals into first place and dropped the Pirates to second.

On September 27, the Orioles defeated the Brewers, 1–0, in seventeen innings, in a game that lasted four hours and twenty-eight minutes. The winning run scored on a bunt. The victory moved the Orioles into a one-game lead in their division.

As it happened, all these deformed contests were important games—evidence of the grudging competition in the pennant races that were fought down through the final weeks and days and hours of the season in the two Eastern divisions. During the final month, the Cards and the Pirates exchanged the lead in the National League East four times and tied at the top four times; the Pirates’ final one-and-a-half-game margin was achieved by means of four wins over the Cardinals out of six harsh head-to-head September games—that, plus a passionate kiss of fortune bestowed on them in the last of the ninth inning of their very last game of the season: with two out and the Cubs leading by 4–3, Pirate pinch-hitter Bob Robertson struck out, swinging, but Cub catcher Steve Swisher failed to hold the ball. He then hit Robertson on the back with his peg toward first, allowing the tying run to score from third. The Pirates won it in the tenth.

September in the AL East began with the Red Sox still in their summerhouse at the top of the division but already in the grip of a frightful batting catatonia that eventually resulted in ten defeats in twelve games (including seven shutouts) and, on September 5, the end of their lead. The startled inheritors of first place were the Yankees, who had been doing some streaking of their own—twelve wins out of fourteen games, including six in a row. A clear marvel, but not the only one, as it happened, for here came the Orioles, suddenly the winners of ten straight, including an astounding five successive shutouts, four of them thrown by the celebrated ancients of their pitching corps.

Any appreciation of the Yankees must be clouded by our knowledge that their adventurous summer voyage fell just short of its goal. The headshakings and forebodings of the nonbelievers and Yankee-haters proved to be correct—not quite enough pitching, not enough speed, not quite enough talent around second base, not enough power (for most of the season the club was last in the league in both home runs and stolen bases), not quite enough
anything
to win, even in an admittedly weak division. Yes, but who cared about any of that back when it all seemed to be happening? Wasn’t that the whole point, the real joy of it? These Yankees were a cobbled-up team of retreads, trade bait, and disappointed regulars. The new manager, Bill Virdon, was hired only when the original appointee, Dick Williams, became legally estopped from the job. But never mind; it all came together somehow, at least for a few days. The crowds and the screaming and the banners (
“YES, WE CAN!”
) burst forth in Shea Stadium once again, this time for the new tenants, and some optimist discovered that the club did lead the league in at least one category—sacrifice flies. In the second week of September, the team took to the road and won successive series in Boston, Baltimore, and Detroit. In the eleventh inning of the second game in Boston, Sandy Alomar saved everything with an astounding dive, stop, and throw from short right field that thwarted the winning Red Sox run; Alex Johnson, a brand-new Yankee, then won the game with a homer in the twelfth. In Baltimore, young Mike Wallace made his first American League start and shut out the Orioles and Jim Palmer, 3–0. In Detroit, the Yankees wrapped up the trip by scoring ten runs against the Tigers in each of the last two games, and came home two and a half games in front of the pack. Yes, it seemed, they could!

No, they couldn’t. The home stand opened against the Orioles, and the trio of veteran Baltimore pitchers, perfectly accustomed to taking difficult matters in hand in late summer, now utterly suppressed the arrivistes with three beautifully pitched complete-game victories—4–0 for Palmer, 10–4 for Mike Cuellar, 7–0 for Dave McNally—and Baltimore took over the lead by a half game. The visitors offered instructive lessons in power, in defense (notably some wizard catches in center by Paul Blair, of the kind he has been making for a decade now), and—well, in baseball itself. In the second game, Bobby Grich led off the fourth inning with a walk and then was sent along to third on a hit-and-run single by designated hitter Tommy Davis, who stroked the ball precisely behind Sandy Alomar as the second baseman dashed over to cover second; Grich scored a moment later. In the sixth, Grich again led off with a walk, and this time Davis improved on his microsurgery, rapping the hit-and-run, two-and-two pitch a bare yard behind Alomar’s heels, as Sandy once again jammed on the brakes and attempted a backward dive at the ball. Nothing in baseball is prettier than this, and no one does it better than Davis. Seven runs now swiftly ensued—and so did my absolute conviction that the Yankees could not win this pennant. The Orioles’ clubhouse was a merry place on these evenings, for the team had revived its Kangaroo Court—a traditional buffoonery staged after each Baltimore victory. The judgeship this year went to catcher Elrod Hendricks (Frank Robinson was the Mr. Justice Marshall of his time), who presided with perfect unfairness and the assistance of a sawed-off, magenta-colored bat stub. “Cases” were loudly brought against various players—Mark Belanger for being overambitious on the base paths, Brooks Robinson for an error, Coach Billy Hunter for some invented malfeasance—and suitable booby prizes (an ancient, silver-painted spike shoe, a broken-down glove) were awarded and one-dollar fines assessed. “Vote!” the entire team would shout. “Vote! Vote!” and Hendricks, brandishing his bat, would roar out the guilty verdict: “One! Two! Three! Whop!” The Orioles were loose.