Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (38 page)

The curious thing about the whole dismal tort is that there is no dispute whatever about the events (the play was perfectly visible, and was confirmed by a thousand subsequent replayings on television), just as there is no doubt but that the umpires, in disallowing an interference call, cited apparently nonexistent or inapplicable rules. Barnett said, “It was simply a collision,” and he and Stello both ruled that only an intentional attempt by Armbrister to obstruct Fisk could have been called interference. There is no rule in baseball that exempts simple collisions, and no one on either team ever claimed that Armbrister’s awkward brush-block on Fisk was anything but accidental. This leaves the rules, notably Rule 2.00 (a): “Offensive interference is an act … which interferes with, obstructs, impedes, hinders, or confuses any fielder attempting to make a play.” Rule 6.06 (c) says much the same thing (the baseball rule book is almost as thick as Blackstone), and so does 7.09: “It is interference by a batter or a runner when (1) He fails to avoid a fielder who is attempting to field a batted ball.…” Armbrister failed to avoid. Fisk, it is true, did not make either of the crucial plays then open to him—the tag and the peg—although he seemed to have plenty of time and room for both, but this does not in any way alter the fact of the previous interference. Armbrister should have been called out, and Geronimo returned to first base—or, if a double play had in fact been turned,
both
runners could have been called out by the umps, according to a subclause of 6.06.
*

There were curses and hot looks in the Red Sox clubhouse that night, along with an undercurrent of feeling that Manager Johnson had not complained with much vigor. “If it had been me out there,” Bill Lee said, “I’d have bitten Barnett’s ear off. I’d have van Goghed him!”

Untidiness continued the next night, in game four, but in more likely places. The Reds did themselves out of a run with some overambitious base running, and handed over a run to the Sox on an error by Tony Perez; Sparky Anderson was fatally slow in calling on his great relief corps in the midst of a five-run Red Sox rally; the Boston outfield allowed a short fly ball to drop untouched, and two Cincinnati runs instantly followed. The Sox led, 5–4, after four innings, and they won it, 5–4, after some excruciating adventures and anxieties. Tiant was again at center stage, but on this night, working on short rest, he did not have full command of his breaking stuff and was forced to underplay. The Reds’ pitcher over the last three innings was Rawlins J. Eastwick III, the tall, pale, and utterly expressionless rookie fireballer, who was blowing down the Red Sox hitters and seemed perfectly likely to pick up his third straight win in relief. Tiant worked slowly and painfully, running up long counts, giving up line-drive outs, surrendering bases on balls and singles, but somehow struggling free. He was still in there by the ninth, hanging on by his toenails, but he now gave up a leadoff single to Geronimo. Armbrister sacrificed (this time without litigation), and Pete Rose, who had previously hit two ropes for unlucky outs, walked. Johnson came to the mound and, to my surprise, left Tiant in. Ken Griffey ran the count to three and one, fouled off the next pitch, and bombed an enormous drive to the wall in deepest center field, four hundred feet away, where Fred Lynn pulled it down after a long run. Two outs. Joe Morgan, perhaps the most dangerous hitter in baseball in such circumstances, took a ball (I was holding my breath; everyone in the vast stadium was holding his breath) and then popped straight up to Yastrzemski, to end it. Geronimo had broken for third base on the pitch, undoubtedly distracting Morgan for a fraction of a second—an infinitesimal and perhaps telling mistake by the Reds.

Tiant, it turned out, had thrown a total of 163 pitches, and Sparky Anderson selected Pitch No. 160 as the key to the game. This was not the delivery that Griffey whacked and Lynn caught but its immediate predecessor—the three-and-one pitch that Griffey had fouled off. Tiant had thrown a curve there—“turned it over,” in baseball talk—which required the kind of courage that baseball men most respect. “Never mind his age,” Joe Morgan said. “Being smart, having an idea—that’s what makes a pitcher.”

Morgan himself has the conviction that he should affect the outcome of every game he plays in every time he comes up to bat and every time he gets on base. (He was bitterly self-critical for that game-ending out.) Like several of the other Cincinnati stars, he talks about his own capabilities with a dispassionate confidence that sounds immodest and almost arrogant—until one studies him in action and understands that this is only another form of the cold concentration he applies to ball games. This year, he batted .327, led the National League in bases on balls, and fielded his position in the manner that has won him a Gold Glove award in each of the past two years. In more than half of his trips to the plate, he ended up on first base, and once there he stole sixty-seven bases in seventy-seven attempts. A short (five foot seven), precise man, with strikingly carved features, he talks in quick, short bursts of words. “I think I can steal off any pitcher,” he said to me. “A good base stealer should make the whole infield jumpy. Whether you steal or not, you’re changing the rhythm of the game. If the pitcher is concerned about you, he isn’t concentrating enough on the batter. You’re doing something without doing anything. You’re out there to make a difference.”

With the Reds leading, 2–1, in the sixth inning of the fifth game, Morgan led off and drew a walk. (He had singled in the first inning and instantly stolen second.) The Boston pitcher, Reggie Cleveland, now threw over to first base seven times before delivering his first pitch to the next Cincinnati hitter, Johnny Bench—a strike. Apparently determining to fight it out along these lines if it took all winter, Cleveland went to first four more times, pitched a foul, threw to first five more times, and delivered a ball. Only one of the throws came close to picking off Morgan, who got up each time and quickly resumed his lead about eleven feet down the line. Each time Cleveland made a pitch, Morgan made a flurrying little bluff toward second. Now Cleveland pitched again and Bench hit a grounder to right—a single, it turned out, because second baseman Denny Doyle was in motion toward the base and the ball skipped through, untouched, behind him. Morgan flew around to third, and an instant later Tony Perez hit a three-run homer—his second homer of the day—and the game was gone, 6–2. Doyle said later that he had somehow lost sight of Bench’s hit for an instant, and the box score said later that Perez had won the game with his hitting and that Don Gullett, who allowed only two Boston batters to reach first base between the first and the ninth innings, had won it with his pitching, but I think we all knew better. Morgan had made the difference.

Game Six, Game Six … what can we say of it without seeming to diminish it by recapitulation or dull it with detail? Those of us who were there will remember it, surely, as long as we have any baseball memory, and those who wanted to be there and were not will be sorry always. Crispin Crispian: for Red Sox fans, this was Agincourt. The game also went out to sixty-two million television viewers, a good many millions of whom missed their bedtime. Three days of heavy rains had postponed things; the outfield grass was a lush, Amazon green, but there was a clear sky at last and a welcoming moon—a giant autumn squash that rose above the right-field Fenway bleachers during batting practice.

In silhouette, the game suggests a well-packed but dangerously overloaded canoe—with the high bulge of the Red Sox’ three first-inning runs in the bow, then the much bulkier hump of six Cincinnati runs amidships, then the counterbalancing three Boston runs astern, and then,
way
aft, one more shape. But this picture needs colors: Fred Lynn clapping his hands once, quickly and happily, as his three-run opening shot flies over the Boston bullpen and into the bleachers … Luis Tiant fanning Perez with a curve and the Low-Flying Plane, then dispatching Foster with a Fall Off the Fence. Luis does not have his fastball, however.…

Pete Rose singles in the third. Perez singles in the fourth—his first real contact off Tiant in three games. Rose, up again in the fifth, with a man on base, fights off Tiant for seven pitches, then singles hard to center. Ken Griffey triples off the wall, exactly at the seam of the left-field and center-field angles; Fred Lynn, leaping up for the ball and missing it, falls backward into the wall and comes down heavily. He lies there, inert, in a terrible, awkwardly twisted position, and for an instant all of us think that he has been killed. He is up at last, though, and even stays in the lineup, but the noise and joy are gone out of the crowd, and the game is turned around. Tiant, tired and old and, in the end, bereft even of mannerisms, is rocked again and again—eight hits in three innings—and Johnson removes him, far too late, after Geronimo’s first-pitch home run in the eighth has run the score to 6–3 for the visitors.

By now, I had begun to think sadly of distant friends of mine—faithful lifelong Red Sox fans all over New England, all over the East, whom I could almost see sitting silently at home and slowly shaking their heads as winter began to fall on them out of their sets. I scarcely noticed when Lynn led off the eighth with a single and Petrocelli walked. Sparky Anderson, flicking levers like a master back-hoe operator, now called in Eastwick, his sixth pitcher of the night, who fanned Evans and retired Burleson on a fly. Bernie Carbo, pinch-hitting, looked wholly overmatched against Eastwick, flailing at one inside fastball like someone fighting off a wasp with a croquet mallet. One more fastball arrived, high and over the middle of the plate, and Carbo smashed it in a gigantic, flattened parabola into the center-field bleachers, tying the game. Everyone out there—and everyone in the stands, too, I suppose—leaped to his feet and waved both arms exultantly, and the bleachers looked like the dark surface of a lake lashed with a sudden night squall.

The Sox, it will be recalled, nearly won it right away, when they loaded the bases in the ninth with none out, but an ill-advised dash home by Denny Doyle after a fly, and a cool, perfect peg to the plate by George Foster, snipped the chance. The balance of the game now swung back, as it so often does when opportunities are wasted. Drago pitched out of a jam in the tenth, but he flicked Pete Rose’s uniform with a pitch to start the eleventh. Griffey bunted, and Fisk snatched up the ball and, risking all, fired to second for the force on Rose. Morgan was next, and I had very little hope left. He struck a drive on a quick, deadly rising line—you could still hear the loud
whock!
in the stands as the white blur went out over the infield—and for a moment I thought the ball would land ten or fifteen rows back in the right-field bleachers. But it wasn’t hit quite that hard—it was traveling too fast, and there was no sail to it—and Dwight Evans, sprinting backward and watching the flight of it over his shoulder, made a last-second, half-staggering turn to his left, almost facing away from the plate at the end, and pulled the ball in over his head at the fence. The great catch made for two outs in the end, for Griffey had never stopped running and was easily doubled off first.

And so the swing of things was won back again. Carlton Fisk, leading off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy, the eighth Reds pitcher of the night—it was well into morning now, in fact—socked the second pitch up and out, farther and farther into the darkness above the lights, and when it came down at last, reilluminated, it struck the topmost, innermost edge of the screen inside the yellow left-field foul pole and glanced sharply down and bounced on the grass: a fair ball, fair all the way. I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw—Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair,
forced
it fair with his entire body. He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,”
fortissimo,
and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them—in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all five Manchesters; and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was
born),
and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway—jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy—alight with it.

It should be added, of course, that very much the same sort of celebration probably took place the following night in the midlands towns and vicinities of the Reds’ supporters—in Otterbein and Scioto; in Frankfort, Sardinia, and Summer Shade; in Zanesville and Louisville and Akron and French Lick and Loveland. I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox fan is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really
caring
—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.