Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (6 page)

Eight days later, the Red Sox were still holding a bare half-game lead as the two teams, now in Detroit, began the final series of the regular season. The old Tigers, it turned out, still had a couple of bites left. They won the essential first game, 4–1, on the pitching of Mickey Lolich and three hits by Al Kaline, and took over first place. There had been a strange moment in the third inning when the Red Sox’ Luis Aparicio stumbled on the way home and then retreated, winding up on third base with another base runner, Carl Yastrzemski, and thus killing a promising inning. The next evening, before a game that the Sox now had to win if they were to avoid extinction, a writer reminded Eddie Kasko that the same embarrassing accident, involving exactly the same base runners, had also happened in Detroit on the very first day of the season, in a game that Lolich also won. Kasko, a quiet and gentle man with a perpetually mournful visage, nodded forlornly and sought comfort in the classics. “I know,” he said. “How does that thing go? Oh, yes—‘If
ifs
and
buts
were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas.’”

Tiant pitched for Boston, and his opposite was Woodie Fryman, another wonderfully revived elder, who had won nine games for the Tigers after coming over from the Phillies early in August. They had at each other in characteristic style—Tiant wheeling almost toward center field with each pitch and bobbing his head, changing speeds and nicking the corners; Fryman firing quickly, throwing sliders and inside fastballs—and for half the game the only rift in the fabric was a little error that allowed a Boston run in the first inning. The Tigers tied it in the sixth, on a walk, a sacrifice, and a single by Northrup, who waved his cap gaily amid a flurry of confetti when he resumed his place in center field. In the seventh, McAuliffe doubled and then scored on a single by Al Kaline—to an enormous noise, a deluge of noise—and the third and last run came in when Yastrzemski failed to hold on to a little infield chopper off Cash’s bat, on which he had a play at the plate. The ball popped loose just in front of the mound, and Yaz, distraught, flung back his head in agony. Another handful of outs, and Detroit had its half-pennant. Yastrzemski wept in the clubhouse, his head hidden in his locker. The loss did seem almost insupportable, for Boston, after this long and exhausting campaign, had achieved very close to nothing—second place in a six-team league. Al Kaline would have wept, too, I believe, if the result had been reversed. He had, in fact, absolutely distinguished himself; the winning blow had been his twenty-second hit in his last forty-four at-bats. During the celebrations in the Detroit clubhouse, somebody mentioned Kaline’s extraordinary eyes, which are protuberant and pale and somehow lynxlike. Manager Billy Martin nodded. “He’s got sniper’s eyes,” he said. “He’s out to
kill
you.”

To a fan who had given most of his recent attention to the American League, the first two games of the National League playoffs suggested that the principals were engaged in a different and rather more dangerous sport. Each of the teams—the Cincinnati Reds and the World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates—had entirely flattened the opposition in its half-league by the end of August, and their similar credentials (power, speed, experience, depth, adequate pitching, and enormous competitive pride) had given birth to a smug cliché that one heard in both dugouts: This, in fact if not in name, was the true World Series, between the two best teams in baseball; the subsequent encounter, involving the American League winner, would be an anticlimactic formality. In the opener, at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, the Reds’ Joe Morgan hit the first pitch to him over the right-field wall. In the bottom of the first, the Pirates banged two singles, a double, and a triple off Red starter Don Gullett, good for three runs. They added two more in the fifth, on a homer by Al Oliver. This was scary baseball. Oliver was one of nine Pirate players to register more than a hundred hits during the regular season; the Mets, by instructive contrast, had had none. The Pirates won the game, 5–1 (a
close
5–1 game, if that is possible), and the Reds lost their manager, Sparky Anderson, after a fourth-inning line drive by Cincinnati’s Cesar Geronimo caromed off the rump of umpire Ken Burkhart, behind first base. Burkhart, even while groveling on the Tartan Turf, called the ball foul, and then quickly added a codicil, expunging Anderson for the energy of his dissent. This drama was positively Sophoclean in its overtones, for Burkhart and Anderson had been among the principals in another autumn catastrophe, during the 1970 World Series, in which Burkhart and a Cincinnati base runner and a Baltimore catcher and a high-chopped ground ball had all mingled in an untidy puree in front of home plate; Anderson lost that appeal, too. After this game, Burkhart, meeting the press in the umpires’ dressing room, delicately lowered his towel and revealed a pink contusion about the size of a tea rose on his left haunch. “This was in fair territory,” he said, pointing, “but my
hip
was in foul territory, so under the rules the ball was foul.”

The following afternoon, the Reds got off the mark even more briskly, as the first five batters smashed out base hits—two singles, three doubles—scoring four runs and eliminating the Pittsburgh starter, Bob Moose, before he could register an out. This not only settled the ball game but offered a useful lesson in the Cincinnati style of winning. It is a system of wonderful simplicity, merely requiring the top three batters to get on base and the next two to drive them home, but rarely has any ball club managed it so effectively over an entire season. The Reds’ top three—Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Bobby Tolan—got on base an average of five times per game throughout the year (not counting force plays) and scored just over two runs per game—statistics to make any self-respecting pitcher retch. This efficiency was thanks in considerable part to the No. 4 hitter, Johnny Bench (40 homers, 125 runs batted in), and the No. 5 man, Tony Perez (21 homers, 90 RBI). The key part in this assembly was probably Joe Morgan, an assertive and powerful little second baseman, who had arrived from Houston during the winter in a major trade that revivified the Big Red Machine. Here, in the eighth inning, Morgan bashed his second homer in two days; the Reds won, 5–3, and the teams moved along to Cincinnati all even.

I moved along home—not out of a wish to watch less baseball, but more. The encounters I had seen, coupled with the news from the West Coast that the A’s had captured the first two games of their playoff with the Tigers in stimulating fashion, suggested to me that we might be in for a rare double festival of baseball, which could best be absorbed on television. The Oakland hostilities had begun with a splendid pitching duel between Mickey Lolich and Catfish Hunter that had gone 1–1 through ten innings; a homer by Al Kaline in the eleventh seemed to settle it, but the A’s responded swiftly, scoring the tying run on a pinch single and the winning run after a throw by Kaline skipped past third base. The next game was an easy 5–0 win for the A’s, but the participants had been electrified when Dagoberto Campaneris, the veteran Oakland shortstop, after repeated dustings at the plate, tried to even matters by sailing his bat at the Detroit pitcher’s skull. He was ruled off the turf for the remainder of the playoffs, amid a fluster of official deplorings that made the moral plain: Plunking an enemy with a thrown ball, rather than a thrown bat, is (a) more efficient and (b) the American Way.

In front of my set, I watched the Pirates take a courageous comeback win from the Reds by 3–2, mostly on some slashing bad-ball hitting by Manny Sanguillen. The next afternoon, the Pirates, now in a position to step into the World Series again, stepped all over their own feet instead, committing three errors and allowing several fly balls to disappear into the sun, all in the course of a dismal 7–1 pasting. Meanwhile, shuffling scorecards and statistics and rosters like a Japanese playground director, I also watched the Tigers (back home after a day off for travel) return to contention with a 3–0, fourteen-strikeout shutout pitched by Joe Coleman.

The next day, Wednesday, we were given an afternoon of baseball unlike any other in the annals of the sport. It was the day on which the playoffs—heretofore only an irritating preamble to the World Series, created to boost baseball’s television ratings—suddenly succeeded beyond all expectations. The two games (the fourth for the American League contenders, who had taken a day off for travel, and the deciding fifth for the Reds and Pirates, who had not) were continuously exciting, and the NBC camerawork was alert, subtle, and up to every sudden occasion, thus making it clear that television, at its best, has almost conquered the built-in obstacles involved in covering a spacious, intensely three-dimensional sport in a two-dimensional medium. Vivid closeups—Charlie Finley, the Oakland owner, glowering and chewing his thumb in his box; a ball boy nearly ill with suppressed excitement; Joe Morgan, waiting at the plate for a pitch, pumping his left elbow like a rooster wing—brought us details perhaps missed by most people in the stands, and multiple cameras, catching the play at different levels and distances, showed us more of the pitchers’ stuff than the batters seemed to be picking up.

In Detroit, Hunter and Lolich hooked up in another excruciating deadlock, which stood at one run apiece after seven innings, on home runs by McAuliffe and Epstein. The rival pilots, unstrung by possibilities, now indulged themselves in some grotesque overmanaging—Oakland’s Dick Williams with a succession of pinch-hitters that effectively stripped his infield of its most capable personnel, and Billy Martin with a wholly uninspired squeeze play that wiped out the potential winning run in the eighth. (Billy Martin loves the squeeze the way a wino loves muscatel.) Oakland brought home two runs in the top of the tenth, but the first two Tiger batters in the inning singled, and then a key force play was missed at second when Gene Tenace dropped the throw; Tenace, a catcher, was playing second because Williams had used up his infielders. Cash walked, to force in the tying run, and Northrup singled in the winner.

Instantly, we were in Cincinnati, in the midst of a taut, quickly played, elegantly pitched game that would decide it all for the National League. The Pirates led from the outset, and in the bottom of the ninth their palm-ball ace, Dave Giusti, came in in relief of Steve Blass, needing only three outs to hold the 3–2 lead. He got none of them. Johnny Bench, leading off, hit the fourth pitch on a frightening parabola into the right-field seats. Tony Perez singled. Denis Menke singled. The expression on Giusti’s face (seen in closeup) was almost too stricken, too private to look at. He departed, and his successor, Bob Moose, came in and painstakingly, with infinite care and anxiety, got two outs on fly balls. Foster, running for Perez, had moved from second to third on the first out, and now, with the hordes of the Cincinnati in full cry from the dugout and from all over the enormous park, Moose threw a strike to Hal McRae and then a ball, and then bounced a wild pitch cleanly away from the plate and past his catcher, and the game and the Series and the season were gone for the Pirates.

The final American League game remained, the next afternoon, and it was scarcely less than what had come before. The Tigers scored in the first on a single, a passed ball, and an infield out. The A’s tied it in the second on dash and daring—a walk, a stolen base, a sacrifice, a hit batsman, a double steal. The run came at a high price, for Reggie Jackson, the Oakland slugger and leader, severely tore the hamstring muscle of his left leg in a collision at the plate and was carried from the field, finished for the year. The lead run (the winning run, it turned out) came in the fourth on an error, a sacrifice, and a single by Gene Tenace. The pitchers took it from there—Fryman for the Tigers, Blue Moon Odom and then Vida Blue for the A’s. In each of the last three innings, the Tigers put the tying run on first base and could not advance him. Their difficulties—the difficulty of all baseball when it is well played—were so evident that announcer Jim Simpson murmured at one point, “This is a game that requires no description.” The Detroit elders, who had come so far on so little, died at last because of their lack of speed. (They had stolen only seventeen bases all year.) They were reduced in the end to playing the game one base at a time, which is the least rewarding way to travel the 360 feet around to home. Their demise (with the Oakland players leaping and hugging all by themselves) was the hardest to watch of this hard baseball year.

The survivors, gathering in Cincinnati for the Series opener, came together in an atmosphere of almost palpable letdown. All the players, it seemed, were less aroused about the games to come than relieved about the ones just past, and as one watched the Reds cheerfully taking their cuts during pregame batting practice it was hard to discount their evident conviction that their most dangerous opponents of the year had already been buried. They looked over at the hairy young A’s, in their outlandish green-and-gold-and-white costumes, with a patronizing curiosity that was perhaps shared by the great majority of baseball fans everywhere. Oakland, to be sure, was the best the AL had, but the National, by every comparable measurement, was by far the stronger of the two leagues. The Oakland pitching was good—perhaps even first-class—but Reggie Jackson, the team’s only certified slugger, was over there uncomfortably balancing on crutches, and, anyway, who had ever
heard
of a major-league team wearing mustaches? (Charlie Finley’s ugly little scheme of paying each of his players to grow a mustache as part of a promotion stunt last June had a cheerful, unexpected result. The players—most of them, at least—liked their new and wildly variegated whiskers and long locks, and remained unshorn through the summer, and in time this eighteen-nineties look became a proud attribute of the squad. During the Series, the young and exuberant and showy A’s sometimes suggested a troupe of actors in a road company of
Cyrano de Bergerac,
laughing backstage in their doublets or swaggering a little on the streets after the show. The Reds, by front-office decree, were as clean and barefaced as Kiwanians.) In spite of the imbalance of styles, and the imbalance of talent in the lineups which seemed so strongly to favor the Reds, both teams were equally avid for the reputation and honors that would accrue to the new champion. Over the past two decades, the fall classic has usually offered a match between a famous champion and a new challenger—the Orioles against the Pirates, Reds, and Mets; the Cardinals against the Tigers and Red Sox; the Yankees against almost everybody. Now, relieved of this allegory, we looked at the two clubs with total surmise, wondering not only which would win but whether one of them might not also represent the game’s next dynasty.