Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (35 page)

We were joined now by Garry Schumacher, the retired press director for the Giants, who was for many years a redoubtable Polo Grounds press-box sage.

“Garry, we’ve been talking about Luque and Sal and some of the other old-timers,” Stoneham said.

“Hey, do you remember how Maglie used to have fun with Roy Campanella?” Schumacher said. “Every now and then, in a game when it didn’t mean anything, he’d plunk Roy right in the belly with one of those curveballs. You know how Roy used to look when he stood up there and crowded the plate.”

Stoneham laughed. “Sure, I remember now,” he said. “Oh, Campy was a good man. He was a friend of ours.”

“Did you get to the time Marichal and Spahn hooked up against each other for sixteen innings?” Schumacher asked.

Stoneham nodded several times, thinking about it, and it suddenly came to me that he and Garry Schumacher and his other friends had probably talked together hundreds of times about each of these famous games and vanished companions. Old afternoons were fresh and past players stayed young, and it was the talking that kept them that way.

Now, however, the Padres had two base runners aboard, and Stoneham leaned forward in his seat. “They’ve been getting some strange-looking hits here,” he said. “It looks like they’re slapping at the ball.” He called to his pitcher. “Bear down, John!”

Montefusco struck out the next batter, and Stoneham said, “Boy, that fastball is the answer.”

“Did you tell about that doubleheader against the Cards in ’33?” Schumacher said. “The one where Hubbell won the first, 1–0, in eighteen, and Parmelee beat Dean, 1–0, in the nightcap, and we held on to first place?”

“That was a day,” Stoneham said. “Hubbell sure won a lot of big ones in his time. You know, he first belonged to the Tiger organization, but he never played in the majors with them, because they thought that screwball of his would only ruin his arm. Then it happened that our scout, Dick Kinsella, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1928, down in Texas, and one day when he was there he went to a game and saw Hubbell, who was pitching for the Beaumont club. He signed him up. He saw what that pitch would do for him.”

Schumacher, who was not wearing a coat, had been blowing on his hands, and now he said goodbye and went inside to warm up.

“In any list of our teams, you’d have to mention the ’54 club,” Stoneham went on. (The Giants met the Cleveland Indians in the World Series of 1954, and beat them in four straight games, although the Indians had been prohibitive favorites. It was the only Stoneham team to win a World Series.) “Willie and Don Mueller and Dusty Rhodes. It’s funny, but the thing I remember about that club is all the double plays they got that year that ended up with a base runner caught out of position—being put out by a throw behind him, or something like that. A great heads-up team. Dusty Rhodes got all the publicity for those pinch-hit homers, but I think Henry Thompson was the key man for us in that Series. Dusty’s first home run was nothing—real Chinese—but the one he hit the next day went nine miles. You know, Dusty Rhodes works on a tugboat in New York Harbor now. He belongs to the seafarers’ union, or whatever they call it. I still hear from him. And Davey Williams is a deputy sheriff down in Dallas. I try to keep in touch. I got a letter from Burgess Whitehead just this week, from—let me see. From Windsor, North Carolina.”

I asked Stoneham when he had first seen Willie Mays.

“Willie Mays first reported to us in New York carrying a toilet kit and three bats,” Stoneham said. His face was lit up. “But the first time I saw him play was way before that. He was with Trenton, in a Class B league, and we’d just played a game in Philadelphia, and some of us rented a car and drove out to watch him play. They had a little press box, just about the size of this box. Bill McKechnie, Jr., was the general manager there, and Chick Genovese was manager, and Bill warned us that Mays might be a little tight because of our being there. Well, Willie got about two hits in the first few innings, and in the seventh he came up and hit a ball into a gas station that was across the street beyond the left-field fence. That’s how tight he was.

“Henry Thompson had seen him play in exhibitions, and he told me how Willie sometimes ran after a ball in the outfield and caught it in his bare hand. I said, ‘Oh, sure.’ You know—I didn’t believe it. And then, of course, he did it lots of times for us. I missed his greatest play, when he made an unbelievable catch like that in Brooklyn, just as he crashed into the outfield wall. And I remember after Willie had been with us a couple of years I was out watching our farm club at St. Cloud, Minnesota, and I saw all the young players—Willie Kirkland and Orlando Cepeda and Andre Rodgers—making those basket catches in the outfield, and I said ‘Hey, who loused up all these kids?’ It was Willie, of course—they’d seen him on the television and they were all trying to imitate him. Nobody else had those reflexes, though, and nobody else could get away with what he did.”

Stoneham left his seat for a few minutes to talk to some visitors who had been brought up to the box to be introduced, and then he made a couple of telephone calls. When he sat down again, we were in the eighth inning and the Giants were ahead by 6–1.

“We were talking about Juan Marichal,” he said. “Well, one of the remarkable things about him was that even when he first came up he knew everything there was to know about the game of baseball. He came from the Dominican Republic, and young General Trujillo—the big man’s son, I mean—he’d put Juan into the Air Force there in order to have him play on his team. There must have been some great coach or manager in that Air Force who taught Juan, because he did everything right from the beginning.

“I think we were the first club that signed players from that whole area. They’d have their winter leagues in the fall, and after the World Series we’d take a couple of scouts and go down and see our friends. I think the first time I ever saw Jose Pagan play—he came in a game to pinch-hit—he was fourteen years old. Our scout down there was Alex Pompez, who was a Cuban. He saw Fidel Castro play ball when Castro was a young fellow, and sent us a report on him. Castro was a right-handed pitcher. When he came up—you know, came into power—we checked back in our files, and it was the same Castro. A good ballplayer. I think if he’d stayed in the game he’d have made it to the majors. You know what a fan he is.”

Bobby Murcer, the Giants’ right fielder, doubled in a run, and a minute or two later Chris Speier drove in another. It was a Giants afternoon.

“I just hope fellows like Chris and Bobby get a break in the All-Star Game balloting,” Stoneham said. “Bobby’s done everything we expected when we got him from the Yankees—everything and more. He’s a fine man. But the fans tend to overlook this year’s play on their ballots, you know. They vote on reputation. Well, I’m not going to the All-Star Game this year anyway. They’re having business meetings all day, before the game. Who wants
that?
That used to be a holiday. You’d go to the game and then you’d see your friends in the evening. It’s the same way at our board meetings. When I first came on our board, all the conversation was about baseball. We’d sit and talk about the game. Now the lawyers outnumber the baseball people. In the old days, it was nothing but baseball people on the ball clubs—it was a personal thing. Even with somebody like Mr. Wrigley, it was him that owned the team, not the company.”

The Padres came up in the ninth, trailing by 8–1, and Stoneham clapped his hands.

“Who would you pick on an All-Time Giants team?” he said. Then he answered his own question. “I’d have Travis Jackson at short,” he said. “Travis never got in the Hall of Fame, but he came up with us and took Dave Bancroft’s job away from him. Terry’s the best first baseman. Can I play Frisch at second
and
at third? Mays and Ott and Ross Youngs in the outfield. But Monte Irvin’s got to be out there somewhere, too. If Monte had come up from the Negro leagues a few years sooner, he’d be known now as one of the great ballplayers of all time. And we can’t leave off Irish Meusel, either. Frank Snyder is catching. But Gus Mancuso was a great defensive catcher, and so was Wes Westrum.”

Montefusco, who looked tired, walked his second Padre batter of the inning, and then threw a pitch past his catcher. “He’s trying to aim the ball,” Stoneham said. He stood up. “Come on, John!” he pleaded. Then he turned and said, “Oh, I almost forgot Willie McCovey. Where do we play him? Or Joe Moore, our best leadoff man. You’d try to bat him third and he’d hit .250. Put him back up top there and he’d hit .330.”

His all-time roster was growing by the minute, but now there was a swift double play on the field, and the game ended. “All
right,”
Stoneham said. The Giants had won.

We went back to Stoneham’s office. I took off the polo coat, and Stoneham hung it up in the closet again. I suddenly wondered how many Giants games it had seen. Stoneham signed a couple of letters that were waiting on his desk, and buzzed his secretary on the intercom. “I’m getting a haircut in the morning,” he told her, “so I’ll be a little late getting in. Good night, Florence.”

We went outside and walked down a ramp in the sunshine. The wind had dropped, and the low hills around the Bay were all alight. It was one of those afternoons when you felt that summer might never end. I started to say something to Stoneham about his parting with the Giants and how I felt about it, but he smiled and cut me off.

“You can’t get discouraged over a few bad breaks,” he said. “In this game, you’re always losing sometimes. You can’t let yourself complain or feel sorry for yourself.”

He walked me to my car in the parking lot, and we shook hands and said goodbye.

*
It was, in fact, a great deal lower, since the Japanese sportsmen never let anyone see the color of their yen, and the deal fell through. For the true further adventures of Mr. Lurie and the elusive San Francisco franchise, see page 336
et seq.

**
The trend continued in 1975, when the A’s drew 1,075,518 for the season, against the Giants’ 522,919.

October 1975

T
ARRY, DELIGHT, SO SELDOM
met.… The games have ended, the heroes are dispersed, and another summer has died late in Boston, but still one yearns for them and wishes them back, so great was their pleasure. The adventures and discoveries and reversals of last month’s World Series, which was ultimately won by the Cincinnati Reds in the final inning of the seventh and final game, were of such brilliance and unlikelihood that, even as they happened, those of us who were there in the stands and those who were there on the field were driven again and again not just to cries of excitement but to exclamations of wonder about what we were watching and sharing. Pete Rose, coming up to bat for the Reds in the tenth inning of the tied and retied sixth game, turned to Carlton Fisk, the Red Sox catcher, and said, “Say, this is some kind of game, isn’t it?” And when that evening ended at last, after further abrupt and remarkable events, everyone—winners and losers and watchers—left the Fens in exaltation and disarray. “I went home,” the Reds’ manager, Sparky Anderson, said later, “and I was stunned.”

The next day, during the last batting practice of the year, there was extended debate among the writers and players on the Fenway sidelines as to whether game six had been the greatest in Series history and whether we were not, in fact, in on the best Series of them all. Grizzled coaches and senior scribes recalled other famous Octobers—1929, when the Athletics, trailing the Cubs by eight runs in the fourth game, scored ten runs in the seventh inning and won; 1947, when Cookie Lavagetto’s double with two out in the ninth ended Yankee pitcher Bill Bevens’ bid for a no-hitter and won the fourth game for the Dodgers; 1960, when Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning homer for the Pirates threw down the lordly Yankees. There is no answer to these barroom syllogisms, of course, but any recapitulation and reexamination of the 1975 Series suggests that at the very least we may conclude that there has never been a better one. Much is expected of the World Series, and in recent years much has been received. In the past decade, we have had the memorable and abrading seven-game struggles between the Red Sox and the Cardinals in 1967, the Cardinals and the Tigers in 1968, and the Orioles and the Pirates in 1971, and the astounding five-game upset of the Orioles by the Mets in 1969. Until this year, my own solid favorite—because of the Pirates’ comeback and the effulgent play of Roberto Clemente—was the 1971 classic, but now I am no longer certain. Comebacks and late rallies are actually extremely scarce in baseball, and an excellent guaranteed cash-producing long-term investment is to wager that the winning team in any game will score more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in nine. In this Series, however, the line scores alone reveal the rarity of what we saw:

In six of the seven games, the winning team came from behind.

In one of the games, the winning team came from behind twice.

In five games, the winning margin was one run.

There were two extra-inning games, and two games were settled in the ninth inning.

Overall, the games were retied or saw the lead reversed thirteen times.

No other Series—not even the celebrated Giants–Red Sox thriller of 1912—can match these figures.

It is best, however, not to press this search for the greatest Series any farther. There is something sterile and diminishing about our need for these superlatives, and the game of baseball, of course, is so rich and various that it cannot begin to be encompassed in any set of seven games. This Series, for example, produced not one low-hit, low-score pitching duel—the classic and agonizing parade of double zeros that strains teams and managers and true fans to their limits as the inevitable crack in the porcelain is searched out and the game at last broken open. This year, too, the Reds batted poorly through most of the early play and offered indifferent front-line pitching, while the Red Sox made too many mistakes on the base paths, were unable to defend against Cincinnati’s team speed, and committed some significant (and in the end fatal) errors in the infield. One of the games was seriously marred by a highly debatable umpire’s decision, which may have altered its outcome. It was not a perfect Series. Let us conclude then—before we take a swift look at the season and the playoffs; before we return to Morgan leading away and stealing, to Yaz catching and whirling and throwing, to Eastwick blazing a fastball and Tiant turning his back and offering up a fluttering outside curve, to Evans’ catch and Lynn’s leap and fall, to Perez’s bombs and Pete Rose’s defiant, exuberant glare—and say only that this year the splendid autumn affair rose to our utmost expectations and then surpassed them, attaining at last such a level of excellence and emotional reward that it seems likely that the participants—the members of the deservedly winning, champion Reds and of the sorely disappointed, almost-champion Red Sox—will in time remember this Series not for its outcome but for the honor of having played in it, for having made it happen.