Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (47 page)

I said that this sounded like more patience and optimism than most men could be expected to bring to their work, and Ray nodded. We were sitting behind home plate at Veterans Stadium, and he looked slowly around at the glittering, brightly lit field and the noisy throng filling every seat in the circular, triple-decked park. “I think it has to be a private thing,” he said at last. “You don’t go around saying it, but I’m
devoted
to the club I work for. It was downright satisfying being connected with that winning Baltimore outfit, and I do like working for a man like Harry Dalton. I’m interested in being with him and Walter Shannon and the rest, trying to make California the same kind of organization. But first of all it’s the baseball. Those airports and motels and cars are pretty taxing on a man, and I keep thinking I’m going to ease off one of these years, but I never quite do it. It’s love of the game of baseball that keeps me at it. I still feel there’s no greater reward a young man can achieve than attaining the major leagues as a player. I truly mean that. I don’t care what the price is, I think it’s worth it. Nothing can beat it.”

The Philadelphia fans had turned out in cheerful expectation of another slugging spree by their powerful young team, which had already opened up a nine-game lead in the National League East, but as happens so often in baseball, things turned out quite the other way, with the Dodgers moving off smartly to a three-run lead and the Phillies going down in rather helpless fashion before the pitching of the Dodger starter, Burt Hooton. Ray occasionally made a brief note on his program, but I had the impression that he was watching the proceedings with less intensity than he had displayed at the earlier games I shared with him. He told me that he would stay with the Phillies for four or five games—until he had seen their full pitching rotation and, with any luck, most of their bench as well. He said that in professional scouting he operated on the premise that any player, including a team’s top stars, might become available for a trade but that in practice, of course, the second-liners or players having a bad year were the ones he paid the most attention to.

“Evaluating the physical attributes of a major-leaguer isn’t very hard,” he said. “It’s when he begins to change that you have a tougher time of it. Is he washed up? Is he not on good terms with the manager? Is he getting a divorce? Does he have an injury we don’t know about? You stay until you find out, and in that time you may hardly ever see him in a game. A man who’s showing a big change for the better is sometimes just as mysterious. Can you tell me why this Bob Boone is having such a great year with the Phillies? He’s batting thirty or forty points over his best, and he’s doing everything right. Maybe it’s their other catcher, Johnny Oates, coming on the club last year and playing so well—maybe Boone needed that push. Maybe it’s just being on a winning club, or maybe he’s suddenly grown up, found himself. Now, over on the Dodgers you see this catcher Yeager, who’s never been much of a hitter. The club has just traded away Joe Ferguson, who did a lot of the catching, and you wonder what kind of effect it will have on Yeager. Will he begin to hit better? Will he pick up because he feels less threatened? All the time, you keep thinking, ‘What about this man? Can this man help the Angels? Does he fit our plans?’ I’m here to improve the club I’m working for. Right now, our prime needs are catching, a topnotch center fielder, and a home-run-hitting first baseman. I may not find anybody in those positions who’s available for a trade, but you don’t always have to have a perfect fit. Sometimes one trade can set up another. You keep watching and listening.”

In the third inning, Ray made admiring noises about a fine play and peg to first by Mike Schmidt, the Phillies’ third baseman. “In Elizabethtown, Kentucky, that would have been a double,” he said. “You have to remember, baseball in the big leagues always looks a lot easier.” A few minutes later, Greg Luzinski, the big Philadelphia left fielder, was a bit sluggish going after a drive to left by Reggie Smith, and because the center fielder, Garry Maddox, failed to back up the play, Smith wound up with a triple. “There’s no excuse in the world for that,” Ray said.

The Phillies’ starter, the veteran Jim Lonborg, appeared to be struggling. “His arm looks a little slow tonight,” Ray said. “He’s not using his fastball at all—just sliders and that fork-ball, or whatever it is. That’s what you have to do, but it’s awful hard to win with just two pitches.”

The game wore on, and the great crowd, with nothing at all to cheer about, fell into an irritable silence. Bobby Tolan, the Philadelphia right fielder, grounded weakly out to first, and Ray said, “He didn’t have a chance on that pitch, up on his hands like that. He’s got a big hitch in his swing, and you’ve got to be awful strong to come back up again with the bat and hit the ball with any kind of power. Reggie Jackson can do it, or maybe Lee May, but it certainly isn’t advisable. But that was some kind of pitch Hooton made.”

Hooton, in fact, threw a two-hit shutout, winning by 6–0, and Ray Scarborough was overcome with admiration for what we had seen. “That’s as good a night’s work as you ever want to see in the major leagues,” he said later that evening. “Hooton was throwing more overhand than I’d ever seen him. Maybe you saw sometimes he even had to lean his head over to the side to make room for his arm comin’ over. He had more stuff, velocity-wise, than I’d ever seen, and he used that overhand curve just enough to make the fastball work. He was just eatin’ up that outside corner. He sold that pitch to the ump”—it was Bruce Froemming—“in the very first inning. He showed him right then that he could hit that front corner. That
alerts
the umpire—puts him on his toes—and if he sees you can do it he’ll give it to you all night long. If you’re sort of wild—throwing up here, then down there, then way inside or someplace—he’ll sort of lose interest, and he won’t give you that little corner even if you do hit it. Control is
so
important. It makes the catchers look better, as well as the umpire, and the infielders do a lot better, too. They will anticipate the play. Hell, even the fans are better!”

I pointed out to Ray that he and I had seen several remarkable pitching exhibitions.

“Well, there’s no doubt that pitching is much better now than it was when I was playing,” he said. “There aren’t any better arms, but pitchers are much better coached, and they have amazing poise, even when they’re just breaking in. The biggest difference now is the slider, which was just coming in when I was pitching. A few pitchers had it naturally back then—Bob Muncrief, he was one of them. We called it the short curve. I was a curveball pitcher, but mine was a real old-fashioned curve, and that took a lot more effort to throw.”

He groaned and rolled his eyes comically. “When I first came up to the Senators, I was one of the wildest goats in the AL,” he said. “I used to throw that big four-foot curve, and if they didn’t swing at it it was a ball. I pitched a long time in the majors when every game was a struggle, and I guess it was five years before I got control and knew how to
pitch
—knew how to get a man out. I finally learned that with a good hitter you never threw him the same pitch twice. Never put it in the same place or at the same speed. That’s how I got them to hit my pitch—the one I wanted them to swing at, whatever it was. I never threw a change of pace in my life that I didn’t want the batter to swing at.

“I always had a lot of luck against Ted Williams, because I knew he was a great one for timing a pitch. He was always thinking, and I could think along with him. But Hank Majeski, who wasn’t a great batter—he could always hit anything I threw. A lot of baseball is just confidence, of course. I finally got to feeling that if I threw a pitch behind Hank Majeski, he’d hit it somehow. I think he sometimes froze in the batter’s box on a curveball, and that always made me afraid I’d hurt him someday. George Kell was the same way.”

I asked if he’d been known as a knockdown pitcher.

“Well, we didn’t have the slider then, but what we did have was that good, hard inside pitch.” He said this with considerable relish. “The umpires have taken that away now, but I always felt I deserved to have that pitch. I needed to keep that batter honest—let him know that I was out there earning my living against him. What I used to hate to see was a batter stepping in and holding up his hand for time while he scratched around in the back of that batter’s box with his spikes and dug himself a toehold for his back foot. I remember a game once when Luke Appling came up against me and started that. He kicked and dug and scraped around in the box and finally got all set, and I walked halfway in and said, ‘You sure you got that all fixed up just the way you like it, Luke?’ He looked at me sort of puzzled, and I could see Cal Hubbard, the plate umpire, beginning to shake his shoulders laughing. Luke said, ‘Sure, Horn. It’s fine.’ I said, ‘You don’t think you ought to improve that some and dig it a lot deeper back there, Luke?’ He said, ‘What for?’ And I said, ‘’Cause I’m going to
bury
you!’ Well, sir, I popped him on that first pitch as pretty as you please! Got him right on the hip. He went down like a sack, but he jumped up and went on down to first, and then he called over, ‘Say, you really meant that, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘Don’t you
ever
dig in against me.’”

I had already looked up Ray Scarborough’s pitching record, which came out to eighty wins and eighty-five defeats in ten years of campaigning, mostly with terrible teams. (He missed the seasons of 1944 and 1945, when he served in the Navy.) Later, I went back and checked his fifth year in the majors, 1948—the year when he had finally learned how to pitch. That summer, he had an earned-run average of 2.82 and won fifteen games and lost eight for the Senators, a seventh-place club that hit thirty-one home runs for the season and finished forty games out of first.

Ray and I went to one more game together—the meeting between the Phillies and the Dodgers on the following night, which the Dodgers took by 5–1, scoring all their runs in the third inning. There was a much smaller crowd. Doug Rau pitched well for the visitors, though not as spectacularly as Hooton. Ray Scarborough took only a few notes. He told me that he had had a call that afternoon from Harry Dalton, who had asked him to curtail his report on the Phillies for the moment and come out and help the Angels with a full-scale evaluation of their own minor-league players—a preparation for the coming American League expansion in the fall, when all the AL clubs will have to contribute some of their players to an expansion draft to man the new teams in Seattle and Toronto. Ray was leaving the next day, and would go first to El Paso, to look over the Diablos, the Angels’ team in the Class AA Texas League, and then move along to Salt Lake City to study the Gulls, their Class AAA team in the Pacific Coast League.

Scarborough looked a bit worn, and he told me he had already spent a lot of time scouting that day—scouting by telephone. He had been talking about various players on the Philadelphia club with local baseball people—people he declined to name. “This is confidential information,” he said. “It’s absolutely essential, and it comes from your friendships and contacts all around the league. You have to have facts about a player that you can’t pick up just by watching him play or seeing him throw in infield practice. What is his club not telling you about this man? Does he have a physical drawback they’re keeping quiet? How good a man is he in the clubhouse? How much does he care? Will he fight for his team, or is he a troublemaker, a complainer? Does he drink? Does he use drugs? I could tell you the names of some bad customers in the major leagues who have absolutely torn some clubs apart. If we’re going to spend half a million dollars on an article, we have to know what we’re getting. His club isn’t going to tell you, but there are ways of finding out. You have to be careful and avoid a suggestion of tampering, so you learn how to listen and how to get the facts in an informal way. Everybody does this. It’s what a lot of the friendships in baseball are for. I’m loyal to the Angels, but I wouldn’t hesitate to tell a good friend of mine about one of our players who was less than he seemed.”

Ray looked unhappy as he said this, and I wondered if it was because he disliked this aspect of his job. “We have something in baseball that we call ‘the lower half,’” he went on. “It means the personal makeup of the individual player—what he’s like inside, how he lives, what he believes in. I think finding that out is the biggest thing in scouting today. Individuals are changing, and I don’t just know how to evaluate the changes. I don’t know for sure how many of the kids today have the dedication you need in order to play this game. All these players who haven’t signed their contracts, because they want to move along to some other club for a lot of easy money—I never dreamed we’d see something like that. Why, I know some young players who are just starting out their careers—barely been up a whole season in the majors yet—and
they’re
playing out their options. They’ve got some agent who’s telling them to hold back and get on one of those expansion teams for a lot of money. I just—I don’t know how to comprehend that.”

He shook his big head two or three times and stared out at the field. His face had become clouded and heavy. A few minutes later, he gestured with his scorecard at the Phillies’ first baseman, out on the field. “Now, there’s a man, Dick Allen, who once walked out on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contract in the middle of September,” he said. “Just walked away. Now his bat looks as if it’s begun to slow down a lot, and I wonder if he isn’t kicking his tail for the time he’s missed. We never had anybody in our day who would have done anything like that.”

I tried to think of something to say. Ray and I had talked several times about the Messersmith decision, which last year suddenly ended baseball’s reserve clause, and about the turbulent labor relations and enormously inflated contracts and million-dollar deals that had marked this baseball summer, and I had found him profoundly unsympathetic to the Players Association and to the players’ side of things. This should not have surprised me; I had deliberately sought out Scarborough, after all, because he represented a part of baseball that seemed fixed and unalterable. Now I had run headlong into a paradox: I badly wanted Ray to feel better about the real shift in style that has recently come to the sport—a shift which may be the result of the new beliefs that many young players and black players hold about personal independence and corporate loyalty and other considerable issues. I hoped that Ray might become less unhappy about this change than he seemed to be, because I liked him so much and so admired his spirited and generous nature. On the other hand, I also wanted him obdurate and preserved, because I had begun to sense that he still embodied the classic attitudes of baseball—the sunlit verities of the game that had first moved and attracted so many of us when we were young. At times, he almost seemed to encompass the entire history of the sport. His own country beginnings in the game sounded exactly like the boyhood memoirs of famous early-twentieth-century baseball stars that I had read in Lawrence S. Ritter’s splendid book
The Glory of Their Times,
and yet Ray had survived in baseball into the superjet age—into a time when his own hard-won professional judgments were in competition with computerized data, and his long hours and months of work could be nullified in an instant by the cold economics and deadly luck of the business draw. If this game, in achieving its inevitable contemporary alterations of form and attitude, could not continue to reward a man like Ray Scarborough, it would have lost something precious and probably irretrievable.