Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (26 page)

Del Unser was inside the batting nets, out in left-field foul territory. He stood about ten feet in front of the plate, making things harder for himself, and swung left-handed against the characterless offerings of the pitching machine. Phil Cavarretta, the Mets’ batting coach, stood behind him, with his arms folded. Cavarretta has a deeply tanned face and white hair. The machine stopped, and Unser and Cavarretta began collecting the dozens of balls scattered about the rope enclosure; they looked like park attendants picking up after a holiday. They reloaded the machine and then dusted it with a rosin bag. “I turned this wrist just a little and opened up on it,” Unser said, picking up his bat again. Cavarretta nodded. “If I keep my hands back, I can bail on a pitch and still hit the ball,” Unser said.

“You’re damn right you can,” Cavarretta said.

Randy Tate began throwing again, and I walked back and stood beside Rube Walker, behind the backstop. Rube watched a few more pitches. “He ain’t doin’ a damn thing different,” he murmured to himself. “How am I going to get
through
to him?”

In time, batting practice began, with coach Joe Pignatano throwing from behind a low screen on the mound. Jay Kleven, a young nonroster catcher, hit two pop flies to center, and coach Eddie Yost said, “Try to loosen up that top hand, Jay. Just throw the bat at the ball.”

Kleven hit a liner over second base.

“That’s it,” Yost said. “Good!”

The next pitch broke down sharply over the plate, and everyone cried, “Spitter! Hey, a spitter!”

“Aw, it just got a little wet on the grass,” Piggy said, laughing.

I drove downtown to Al Lang Field, the ancient, iron-beamed park where the Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals play their home games in the spring. The White Sox, who had come up from Sarasota to play the Mets that day, were taking batting practice, observed from behind the batting cage by their manager, Chuck Tanner, and by Harry Walker, a special-assignment scout for the Cardinals. The Cards were off in Lakeland for a game against the Tigers, but Walker was here. He was wearing a faded Cardinal road uniform, and he was talking earnestly to Tanner. From time to time, he pointed to a batter in the cage and then touched Tanner’s arm or pointed to his knees. He held up an imaginary bat and cocked his hands and hips and swung the bat forward in different planes, talking all the while. Tanner watched his batters, but he nodded as Walker went on talking. A number of players and writers looked at this tableau in delight.

Harry Walker is a tall, deep-bellied man who has at various times managed the Cardinals, the Pirates, and, most recently, the Houston Astros. As a player, three decades ago, he was known as Harry the Hat; he won the National League batting title in 1947, with an average of .363. He is Dixie Walker’s brother. Harry Walker is reputed to be one of the finest theoreticians of hitting in baseball, and several players who have come under his tutelage have given him credit for an increase of twenty or thirty points in their batting averages—astounding figures, for batting is considered the most difficult of all athletic techniques to learn or to teach. Some other players, however, have admitted that they found it impossible to take advantage of Walker’s wisdom, simply because they could not force themselves to stay within earshot of him—to go on listening to the hundreds of thousands of words that pour from Harry Walker every day. Harry Walker talks like a river. He is easily capable of as many words per hour as Hubert Humphrey or Buckminster Fuller—which is to say that he is in the Talkers’ Hall of Fame. A few summers back, one of the Houston infielders is reported to have said to a teammate, “I’m worried about Harry. He’s a natural .400 talker, and these last few days he ain’t talked more than about .280.”

Three years ago, before an Astros-Dodgers game in Los Angeles, I casually asked Harry Walker why his young pitchers and catchers seemed to be giving up so many stolen bases to enemy runners. Harry Walker has no casual answers, and his reply, which took the better part of twenty minutes, encompassed the American public-school system, permissiveness in the American home, Dr. Spock, our policies in Vietnam, great pick-off deliveries of various right-thinking pitchers of the past, the high rate of divorce in America, umpiring then and now, the inflated American economy, the exorbitant current bonuses paid to young baseball prospects, taxation, growing up in the Great Depression, how to protect home plate with your bat during the run-and-hit, and various other topics. At one point I recall his crying, “Whah, hell-fahr, when Ah was goin’ after mah battin’ title in ’47 and Ah got the sign to lay down the bunt ’cause we was down a run late in the game and needed to move that runner up, Ah didn’t come stormin’ and hollerin’ back to the dugout to tell the old man how much Ah wanted mah at-bats in order to qualify for that title and whah Ah’d ruther have hit away, and Ah didn’t slam mah battin’ helmet down on the ground like those kids do here today. No, sir! Whah, God damn it, we din’ even
have
any battin’ helmets back then!”

Here, in time, the Mets and the umpires and the fans appeared, and the batting cage and Harry Walker were taken off the field, and the game began, and the visitors demolished the Mets, in a somnolent, sun-filled time-killer, by 10–4. Jerry Koosman pitched three good innings, and Randy Tate pitched, too, and gave up five runs and six hits; I am not a camera, but it seemed to me that Tate was still not driving off the rubber. Between these two hurlers, there was an appearance by a good-looking Mets sprout named Jeff Grose, who is only two years out of high school. Grose, a southpaw, showed us a live fastball and a smooth, high-kicking motion, and he hid the ball behind his hip while on the mound, like Sandy Koufax. He seemed poised, but he was working a little too quickly, and he gave up three hits and a run in his first inning of work. In the next inning, his fastball began missing the corners. He kept falling behind the hitters, and then forcing things and overthrowing to make up for it. He gave it a battle, though. With two out and a run in, he went to three and two, saw the next pitch barely tipped foul, then threw the fourth ball way inside, to load the bases, then swiftly walked in another run and gave up a single, and was lucky when Rusty Staub threw out a base runner at the plate. It was painful to add up his totals: four runs, six hits, and four walks in two innings. Spring training is good young pitchers falling behind on the count and then disappearing until next year.

POSTCARDS

Saw the Phillies beat the Cards at Al Lang Field by 1–0, in a game illuminated by wind, sun, and young baseball stars. The newcomers include twenty-three-year-old Alan Bannister, a swift Phillie outfielder, and twenty-one-year-old Keith Hernandez, the new Cardinal first baseman, who batted .351 last year in the American Association. Before the game, I saw the Cards’ Reggie Smith and the Phillies’ Dave Cash in earnest conversation near the batting cage. As I walked by, Reggie was saying, “And the rest I got in tax-exempts.”

Al Lang Field is to be demolished next fall, and a more modern ball park will be built on the same site. It seems a pity, since the stands, which look like a leftover segment of Ebbets Field, perfectly match the style and antiquity of the fans. And what will happen to the ushers? When an Al Lang usher escorts an elderly female fan to her seat, it is impossible to tell who is holding up whom.

“Pick it” is this year’s “in” baseball phrase. It means playing the infield well. Ken Reitz, the Cardinal third baseman, can really pick it.

Talked to John Curtis, the tall, intelligent left-handed pitcher who came over to the Cardinals from the Red Sox two years ago. I told him I had a vivid recollection of a night game at Yankee Stadium two years ago, in July, in which he had shut out the Yankees by 1–0, and had retired the last batter on a pop-up with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. He remembered it, too, of course. “That one-and-two change-up I threw to Felipe Alou in that spot was the best pitch of my life,” he said.

Curtis had an off year last season, and this campaign will be an important one for him. I have heard it said that he may be too gentle a man to become a big winner in the majors.

VETERAN

The speaker is Ray Sadecki, thirty-four, who is beginning his fifteenth year as a major-league pitcher. His lifetime totals are 129 victories and 127 losses, and an earned-run average of 3.77. His best year was 1964, when he won twenty games for the Cardinals and also won a World Series start. The next year, he slipped to six and fifteen. He has also pitched for the Giants and, in the last five years, for the Mets. He was sent back to the Cards last winter, as part of the Joe Torre trade. He sat in the dugout at Al Lang Field one afternoon, wearing a bright-red warm-up jacket, and talked about baseball. He has a quizzical, amused expression and an easy manner. He is left-handed.

“It seems to take me every single day of the spring season to get ready now,” he said. “I make all the same moves, but I come up a little short. Then, of course, when the season starts, a man like me who isn’t a front-line pitcher anymore has to do all his training all over again, throwing on the sidelines. You get caught in those rainouts and before you know it you’ve only pitched two or three innings in three weeks. The most starts I had with the Mets was twenty, and the least was two. You get to know all the conditions, all the possibilities. You know about that year when I lost fifteen games, right after my best year? Well, a man has to be pitching pretty well to get the
chance
to lose fifteen.

“Every time I’m traded, I figure the other club wants me. I went once for a pretty fair player named Orlando Cepeda. This trade from the Mets—you know they had to make it. Getting a chance at Torre doesn’t mean they dumped me. The thing about trades is it’s an opportunity for most players. An awful lot of trades end up helping the people involved. Look at Nolan Ryan. Look at Dave Cash. Torre came over to this club from Atlanta and won an MVP. Too many people get it wrong and think, ‘Boy, what a rotten thing to do.’ Fans don’t understand trades.

“The only tough part about being traded—the worst part—is when it happens during the season. Seventy-two hours to report. Your family is all upset, your wife has to do all the moving. You walk into your new dugout and they’re playing the anthem. Hell, when I went over to the Giants I walked out onto the mound, and Tom Haller and I had to get together on our
signs.
A pitcher and a catcher need a lot of time to get used to each other.

“I’m a completely different kind of pitcher than I was when I was with this club the last time. But I don’t figure I’m down here to let them see what I can do. They’re looking at the young pitchers. I got together with Red [Schoendienst, the Cardinal manager] and Barney [Schultz, the pitching coach], and said I’ll get ready in my own time. I pitched two and two-thirds yesterday. They weren’t the best ever, but they were just right for me. I’m just where I want to be. That’s what spring training is for. Anyway, we all know about a pitcher who gets hammered all spring and then walks out there on opening day and nobody can touch him. Another one has it the other way around—once the bell rings, he can’t get anybody out. It’s awful hard to make a decision about people in the spring. I’ve been out there at times in March and couldn’t do
anything.
I embarrassed myself. But you can’t start throwing harder and mess yourself up. That’s what a kid will do. It’s the last week or so of training that counts. That’s when you’ll see a pitcher try things he hasn’t done all spring. He’s getting ready for that first start. You can’t pay much attention to what happens down here. Putting on these games has always seemed to me sort of a distraction. I think that most of the players are less cooperative with the press in spring training because of this—because you can’t go telling the writers, ‘Look, don’t pay any attention to what I did.’

“It’s the young players I’m sorry for. It’s awful hard for a rookie to make a ball club in the spring. If you’re a pitcher, you’ve pretty well got to throw all scoreless innings. If you’re a batter, you’ve got to hit about .400. Even so, they’ll all say, ‘Hell, it’s only spring training.’ Spring is hard on people.”

The Cactus League consists of four small ball parks attached to a ribbon of motels, moccasin shops, trailer sales lots, and Big-Boy burger stands in and around Phoenix, Arizona—plus outlying baseball stockades in Tucson, Yuma, and Palm Springs, California. (The air service to Palm Springs, where the Angels train, is sketchy, and when one of the Phoenix-area clubs—the Cubs, say—plays there, the visitors can count on a good twelve hours, round-trip, in which to study the desert from the windows of their bus.) The motels are functional to the spring baseball scene. Generally, they feature an enclosed central swimming pool and lawn and patio, plus restaurant and bar and dance floor and shuffle courts and lobby and coin-operated electronic Ping-Pong games, all of them variously patronized by players, managers, league executives, front-office people, writers, scouts, and fans, and attendant wives, children, babies, parents, in-laws, girl friends, hookers, and Baseball Annies. (Lounging at poolside one morning, I noticed a nearby gathering of cheerfully forward, heavily tanned ladies, of indeterminate age and affiliation. I asked a fellow writer about them. “Groupies,” he said. “They’ve been coming here for years and years. They used to hang out with the players, then with the coaches. Now I think they’re umpire groupies.”)

The Giants’ park, Phoenix Municipal Stadium, is an agreeable, half-sunken field, with a concrete grandstand offering a prospect of distant mountains, a nearby highway, and, in between, several weirdly twisted, buttelike rock formations suggesting dinosaurs or Boschian damned souls or Horace Stoneham’s baseball hopes. The Giants, by general consensus, in recent years have led their league in finding and developing the greatest talent and then employing it to the smallest possible ends. This year, they have come up with another one of their nearly irresistible Spring Specials—a new (almost) manager, a lineup stripped of last year’s disappointing stars, and a stimulating catalogue of young arms and great wheels. Gone is the charming, moody skipper, Charlie Fox, who plainly lost control of things last summer and was replaced in midcampaign by the calm and approachable Wes Westrum. Gone are the high-strung, well-paid Bobby Bonds and Dave Kingman. A veteran hot-dog second baseman, Tito Fuentes, was sent to the Padres in return for a new hot dog, Derrel Thomas. The pitching staff is young and strong but without a true stopper—with the possible exception of a second-year fireballer named John D’Acquisto. The holdover regulars afield, including Chris Speier and Garry Maddox and Gary Matthews, have dash but not much power, and there is a terrific catching prospect named Marc Hill.