Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (48 page)

I stole a look at Ray and said, “What will it be like down in El Paso?”

“Hot!” he said instantly. “You watch a game and then you jump back to your motel—back into that air-conditioning. But at least they have grass down there—not this carpet. Baseball is an outdoor game. And we have some good boys down there. Our second baseman, Fred Frazier, is leading the whole league in hitting, and we have a kid at first base named Willie Mays Aikens, who’s already hit about twenty home runs. Willie Mays Aikens! With young players like that, you only want to be sure not to bring them along too fast. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing them.”

October 1976

T
HE LAST OUT OF THE
year was an uninteresting fly ball struck by the Yankees’ Roy White, which ascended briefly through the frigid South Bronx darkness and then fell into the glove of George Foster, the Cincinnati left fielder. Foster and his teammates, who had at this instant captured an utterly one-sided and almost passionless World Series and thus reconfirmed their title to the championship of the world, cavorted briefly in time-honored postures of jubilation and then departed from the arena, leaving behind them a silenced half-frozen audience and the filth-strewn vacant turf of Yankee Stadium—a panorama that inescapably suggested the condition of another, larger game: the state of baseball itself. I visited the clubhouses and entered in my notebook the expected antipodal quotes from variously disappointed, triumphant, heartbroken, generous, bitter, and overmodest athletes and coaches and officials, and then headed for the subway and home, with the old, late-October tang of sprayed champagne on my sleeve and an unfamiliar gloom in my heart. For a while, I ascribed this weight to a childish, partisan disappointment over the double outcome of that last game—Reds 7, Yankees 2; Reds 4 games, Yankees 0 games—but I am not, in truth, much of a Yankee fan, and I have watched enough baseball to know that four-game sweeps are not such a rarity as to strike a grownup aghast. My discontent lay elsewhere, and when it persisted I mentioned it to friends and colleagues and new acquaintances, and found that all of them—every fan among them, that is—was suffering from a similar sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness over this baseball season and its ending. The 1976 World Series, in spite of its brevity and skimped drama, was a significant one. It profoundly enhanced and deepened the reputation of the Cincinnati Reds, who must now be compared seriously with the two or three paramount clubs of the last half-century, and it was equally notable, I think, for the harsh music of complaint that preceded and accompanied and trailed after its brief October passage—sounds of cynicism and anger and sadness from so many people and places that they almost drowned out the thump and tootlings of our favorite old parade.

The causes of this widespread unhappiness are hardly new. They include, in no particular order, night baseball, Sunday-night baseball, the extension of the season far beyond its appropriate weather, the extension and promotion of the controversial designated-hitter device by permitting its introduction into World Series play, artificial turf and its effects on players and strategies, the televising of baseball and television’s enormous influence on scheduling and on almost every other aspect of the game, and, most of all, the irresolute, insensitive, and hypocritical leadership of the executives of the sport, who permitted most of these vulgarities and dumb ideas to creep into their sport in the first place and to flourish until they now almost strangle it. Further uneasy and unresolved elements that afflict the game are the arrival of the free-agent status for players and its accompanying inflation of salaries and trade prices, the violence and anarchy of ballpark crowds, the suspicions and tensions that separate players and owners as a result of the dissolution of the reserve clause, and the utterly unneeded forthcoming expansion of the American League, with the resultant dilution of talent in the league that, as the Reds horribly proved, is already much the inferior one. These grievances, as I have said, are not exactly new—only the scheduling of two important post-season games (one playoff, one Series) in Sunday-night prime time and the entrance of Howard Cosell into the quiet chambers of the game came as true startlers this fall—but the list is so long and depressing that one’s fervent wish is simply to throw it away and to think only about the distractions and pleasures of baseball itself, to watch the games. This has been easy to do in recent years, when several riveting pennant races and a remarkable succession of World Series matchups, culminating in the epochal Reds vs. Red Sox collision last fall, have encouraged this kind of distraction; six of the last ten World Series have gone the full seven games, and only the one-sided five-game victory of the Orioles over the Reds in 1970 ranked close to this year’s affair as unnews. And here, no doubt, is the real reason for my unhappiness. This fall, the baseball games could not distract us from the truth about baseball, which is that it may well be on the point of altering itself, if not out of existence, then out of any special or serious place in the American imagination.

The season’s news was not
all
dismal. The summer provided a basket of surprises, including the discovery that the clubs could prosper without a vestige of a pennant race in any of the divisions. By the first week of June, the four eventual winners—the Reds and Phillies in the National League, and the Yankees and Kansas City Royals in the American—had all moved into first place for good, and by the time of the All-Star Game break in mid-July the nearest second-place team, the Dodgers, was six full games to the rear. The Phillies and Royals, it will be recalled, suffered late-season comas that brought them almost within touching distance of their pursuers, but then steadied at the end. In spite of these torpid campaigns, baseball attendance for 1976 reached an all-time high of 31,320,535—a leap of a million and a half over the previous year. Most of the new or renewed fans turned up in the American League, which improved its gate by 1,470,583, to draw within two million of the perennially more robust NL. The real causes of the surprising turnouts (aside from a numbing surfeit of Bat Days, Helmet Days, Jacket Days, Camera Days, Family Days, Bronzed-Baby-Shoe Days, and other promotions) were probably the memory of that great World Series last fall and the fact that three of the four summer leaders were new to such eminence and thus a reason for local fervor. Among them, the champion Reds and the upstart Yankees, Phillies, and Royals picked up more than two million new fans.

The only races in either league turned out to be for the batting titles, which were settled in both cases by the last couple of swings of a bat. In the National League, the Reds’ Ken Griffey held an average of .337 on the final day of the regular season, and received permission from his manager, Sparky Anderson, to sit out the Reds’ meaningless closing game against the Braves, and thus protect his lead over the Cubs’ Bill Madlock, whose average stood at .333. (An inescapable memory here is the last day of the 1941 season, when Ted Williams was told by his manager, Joe Cronin, of the Red Sox, that it would be perfectly all right if he chose to skip that afternoon’s closing doubleheader in order to protect his batting average, which was tremblingly balanced at .3996—officially .400, that is. Williams chose to play, went six-for-eight for the day, and finished at .406—the only over-.400 average of the past forty-six years.) Halfway through the Reds-Braves game, word came over the sports wire that Madlock was enjoying a terrific afternoon at the plate against the Expos; Griffey hurriedly entered the lineup, but went hitless in two at-bats and lost the title to Madlock, who had gone four-for-four and raised his average to .339. Madlock’s batting title was his second in succession. In the American League, the matter ended even more improbably, in a Twins-Royals game in which
three
participants—Hal McRae (.330784) and George Brett (.330733), of the Royals, and Rod Carew (.329), of the Twins—all began play with a shot at the championship. McRae and Carew each went two-for-four, thus losing to Brett, whose crucial hit, bringing him to three-for-four for the day and .333 for the year, was a short fly that landed in front of the Minnesota left fielder and bounced over his head for an inside-the-park homer. McRae, who is black, later claimed that the outfielder, Steve Brye, who is white, played the ball into a hit intentionally, thus handing the title to Brett, who is also white, and that he did so with the connivance of the Twins’ manager, Gene Mauch. This sad matter will never be entirely resolved, but it must be pointed out that to
plan
such a malfeasance seems utterly unlikely.

Other numbers were less disputable. Hank Aaron retired, after twenty-three years and seven hundred and fifty-five homers. Walter Alston retired, after twenty-three years at the Dodger helm—a technically impeccable but (according to many of his players) distant and impersonal leader; he won seven pennants and four world championships. Lou Brock, now thirty-seven years old, batted .301 and stole fifty-six bases—his twelfth straight summer of more than fifty swipes. Twenty-eight more stolen bases will put him past Ty Cobb’s lifetime mark of eight hundred and ninety-two, a record that has been considered one of the game’s holy minarets. The Oakland A’s, short of power thanks to the trading away of Reggie Jackson, stole three hundred and forty-one bases—only six short of the all-time record set by the 1911 Giants. Nolan Ryan led both leagues in strikeouts (327) and losses (18), thus proving something or other, and failed, for the first time since 1972, to pitch a no-hitter. The Tigers, in a game in May against the Yankees, committed three errors on one play. This horror show began when, with two Yankee runners on base, center fielder Ron LeFlore dropped a fly hit by Roy White, but picked up the ball in time to throw out the second runner at the plate; catcher John Wockenfuss, under the mistaken impression that this was the third out, lightheartedly rolled the ball out toward the mound, where it was seized by pitcher Bill Laxton, who then flung it wildly past third base, allowing White to chug home with the winning run.

The Tigers, a young and improving team, enjoyed some much happier days than this one, and raised their home attendance by more than four hundred thousand fans—a great many of whom came trooping in whenever the phenomenal young Tiger pitcher Mark Fidrych was slated to work. Fidrych finished his first season with a won-lost mark of 19–9 and an earned-run average of 2.34; the latter figure was the best among all starters in the league, which meant that Fidrych had a better summer than Vida Blue, Frank Tanana, Jim Palmer, and Luis Tiant, among others. This is notable work by any standard, but positively electrifying for a twenty-two-year-old rookie who performed for most of last season at the Class-A level of the minors and was not even on the Tigers’ roster in spring training this year. I caught The Bird’s act late in the season, in the first game of a September Sunday double-header at Yankee Stadium, when he gave up nine scattered, harmless hits and defeated the league leaders by 6–0. It was only the second shutout thrown against them by a right-hander all year. On the mound, Fidrych presented the classic profile and demeanor of a very young hurler—long legs and a skinny, pleasing gawkiness (he is six-three); a pre-delivery flurry of overexcited twitches, glances, and arm-loosening wiggles; and a burning anxiety to get rid of the ball, to see what would happen next, to get
on
with this, man! The results were something altogether different. His pitching was wholly cool and intelligent, built around some middling-good fastballs and down-slanting sliders, all delivered with excellent control just above or below the hemline of the strike zone, with an ensuing five strikeouts, one walk, and innumerable harmless fly balls. Fidrych also showed us some of his celebrated eccentricities—sprinting to the mound to start each inning, kneeling to pat down the dirt in front of the mound, applauding plays by his teammates, and shaking hands with some of his infielders after an important out—but his pitching outweighed his oddities. After the game, The Bird performed again with grace and flakiness, this time for the Gotham scribes. One reporter had noticed that he always tossed the ball back to the umpire after an enemy base hit, and asked why. “Well, that ball had a hit in it, so I want it to get back in the ball bag and goof around with the other balls there,” Fidrych said. “Maybe it’ll learn some sense and come out as a pop-up next time.” Another writer, thinking ahead to the enormous salaries and lucrative commercial endorsements that now instantly reward young sporting pheenoms, asked, “What’s come your way so far, Mark?”

Fidrych thought for an instant and then smiled almost shyly. “Happiness,” he said.

Another happy pitcher was the Mets’ Jerry Koosman, who won twenty-one games and lost ten—his first twenty-game season ever. He was 12–4 after the All-Star break, and finished just behind Randy Jones, the Padres’ sinkerball artist, in the Cy Young Award balloting. (Koosman is on everybody’s All-Good-Guy first team.) The only other twenty-game man in the Mets’ annals, Tom Seaver, wound up this time at 14–11, in spite of a league-leading 235 strikeouts and an ERA of 2.59. No runs was the reason. During a typical outing of his in late July, I watched him shut out the Pirates for ten innings, fanning ten and allowing no one to reach third base—all literally for naught, since the Mets went scoreless, too, and eventually lost in the thirteenth. They played so badly in the first two-thirds of the season that their fans fell into the habit of booing them in the middle innings—booing quietly and resignedly, more out of principle than out of passion. But the Mets came on like an express train in the late going, winning twenty-five of their last forty games, taking third place, and playing a small but deadly part in the NL East pennant race. The Phillies, who led their division by fifteen games on August 27, quickly lost eight straight games, and an eventual sixteen of twenty-one, thus permitting Pittsburgh to close to within three games on September 17. The next day, however, the Mets beat the Pirates 6–2 (Seaver pitched); the day after that, they beat the Pirates 7–6 (Dave Kingman hit two home runs); and the day after
that
they beat the Pirates 5–4 (rookie outfielder Lee Mazzilli hit a two-run homer with two out in the ninth). The Pirates never recovered.