Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (9 page)

Meantime, in another part of the forest—back at home plate—Ump Delmore, frazzled by the importunings of Taylor and Scheffing, suddenly and inexplicably extracted a fresh ball—hereinafter to be known as Ball No. 2—and plopped it into Taylor’s glove. Taylor, spotting Musial on the base path, threw the new pill down to second, a bare instant after Alvin Dark had made the same peg, from well behind him, with Ball No. 1. Musial, sliding into second, saw an unmistakable baseball (it was No. 2) sail untouched past his ear and on into center field. He scrambled up and turned happily toward third, only to be tagged after two or three steps by Ernie Banks, the shortstop, with Ball No. 1. Ball No. 2 was chased down in the outfield by the Cubs’ Bobby Thomson, who now threw it wildly past
third
base. But here, at last, both baseballs may be allowed to make their exit, for at this juncture the chief umpire, Al Barlick, who had been working at second base, mercifully threw up his hands, calling time. The ensuing confabulations and plea-bargainings need not be explicated. Barlick’s next ruling, which caused the game to be played under official protest by the Cardinals, was that Musial was out at second, because he, Barlick, had seen the tag made there with the ball—or with
a
ball. The game went back a step, then resumed, eventually being won by the Cards, and the sport, once again, survived.

For continuous baseball melodrama, there probably never was a better theater than the Phillies’ shabby little park, Baker Bowl, which was finally abandoned in 1938. The field was better suited for a smaller, narrower game—croquet, perhaps—and its very short right-field wall, a bare 270 feet from home, was detested by every pitcher and outfielder in the league. One afternoon in 1934, the starting hurler for the visiting Brooklyn Dodgers was Walter (Boom-Boom) Beck—the nickname was onomatopoetic—and the dangerous starboard garden was being defended by Hack Wilson. Always a robust slugger, Wilson unfortunately got to spend far less time at the plate than he had to put in afield, where he was, to put the matter kindly, less than adequate. Hack was also known to spend an occasional evening at his local tavern, pondering this injustice. On this day, he had experienced a particularly trying afternoon in pursuit of assorted line drives and scorching grounders rifled in his direction off Boom-Boom’s deliveries—often getting extra practice as he spun around and tried to field the caroms and ricochets, off that extremely adjacent wall, of the same hits he had missed outward-bound.

The Dodger manager, Casey Stengel, even then accustomed to severe adversity, watched several innings of this before he called time and made his familiar journey to the mound, where he suggested to Beck that he take the rest of the afternoon off. Beck’s performance had been perfectly within his genre, but for some reason he was enraged at this derricking, and instead of handing the ball over to Stengel he suddenly turned and heaved it away in a passion. Fate, of course, sent the ball arching out into right field, where Hack Wilson, with his head down and his hands on his knees, was quietly reflecting on last night’s excesses and this day’s indignities. Boom-Boom’s throw struck the turf a few feet away from Wilson, who, although badly startled, whirled and chased manfully after the ball, fielded the carom off the wall, and got off a terrific, knee-high peg to second base—his best fielding play, Casey always said, of the entire summer.

A more recent epochal disorder came in a game played in the Florida Instructional League last year. This time, things began with an outfielder’s peg to a rookie catcher (all the players in the Instructional League are rookies), who grabbed the ball and made a swipe at an inrushing, sliding base runner at the plate. As sometimes happens, the catcher missed the tag and the base runner missed the plate. The runner jumped up, dusted himself off, and trotted to his dugout, convinced that he had scored. The umpire made no call either way, which is the prescribed response, and after a moment or two the pitcher and the infielders, analyzing the situation, hurried in and implored the catcher to make the tag.

“What?” said the catcher. “Tag who?”

“The runner, the runner!” they cried, severally. “You missed him. He didn’t score. Go tag him!”

“Ah,” said the young receiver, the light bulb over his head at last clicking on. Still holding the ball, he ran eagerly toward the enemy dugout, with the umpire close behind. When the catcher got there, however, he gazed up and down the line of seated fresh-faced rookies without recognizing anyone who looked like a recent passerby. He frowned, then went to one end of the bench and tagged the first two or three men sitting in line. He looked around at the umpire, who was watching with folded arms. The umpire made no sign. The catcher tagged four more players. The ump shook his head almost imperceptibly: nothing doing. Now the erstwhile base runner, seeing the catcher inexorably working up the line toward him, suddenly leaped onto the field and made a dash for the plate. The pitcher, who had been standing bemused near home, screamed for the ball, and he and catcher executed a rundown, more or less in the style of stadium attendants collecting a loose dog on the field, and tagged the man out in the on-deck circle.

I have dismissed the Mets too quickly—the progenitors of so many legendary baseball disasters. Some of the legends were true. During the early stages of their terrible first summer, in 1962, their center fielder, Richie Ashburn, suffered a series of frightful surprises while going after short fly balls, because he was repeatedly run over by the shortstop, the enthusiastic but modestly talented Elio Chacon. After several of these encounters, Ashburn took Chacon aside and carefully explained that, by ancient custom, center fielders were allowed full freedom to catch all flies they could get to and signal for. The collisions and near-collisions and dropped fly balls continued exactly as before, and Ashburn eventually concluded that Chacon, who spoke very little English, simply didn’t understand what it meant when he saw his center fielder waving his arms and yelling “Mine! Mine! I got it!” Richie thought this over and then went to Joe Christopher, a bilingual teammate on the Mets, and asked for help.

“All you have to do is say it in Spanish,” Christopher said. “Yell out
‘Yo la tengo!’
and Elio will pull up. I’ll explain it to him, too—OK? You won’t have any more trouble out there.”

“Yo la tengo?”
Ashburn said.

“That’s it,” Christopher said.

Before the next game, Ashburn saw Chacon in the clubhouse.
“Yo la tengo?”
Richie said tentatively.

“Sí, sí! Yo la tengo! Yo la tengo!”
Chacon said, smiling and nodding his head.

“Yo la tengo!”
Ashburn said. They shook hands.

In the second or third inning that night, an enemy batter lifted a short fly to center. Ashburn sprinted in for the ball. Chacon thundered out after it.
“Yo la tengo! Yo la tengo!”
Richie shouted.

Chacon jammed on the brakes and stopped, happily gesturing for Ashburn to help himself. Richie reached up to make the easy catch—and was knocked flat by Frank Thomas, the Mets’ left fielder.

Interesting baseball happenings sometimes take place away from the field. Consider, for example, the memorable and uplifting public-relations outing made in the mid-sixties by Cy Tatum (this is not his real name). Cy was a remarkable hitter, and he had the good fortune to play for a big-league team in a city close to the town where he had grown up. Like some other players in the majors, he had run into trouble with the law when young, and he had served a few semesters at a state trade school for wayward boys. He mended his ways, went into baseball, and became a great local favorite. One summer when his team was in the process of winning a pennant, its first in many years, somebody in the front office realized what a dynamite PR event it would be if Cy were invited to come back to the trade school and address the boys there. The date was quickly arranged, and Tatum turned up at the appointed time and was introduced by the principal of the school to the full, enraptured student body. Cy spoke eloquently, praising the virtues of the straight-and-narrow path and a level swing at the ball, and sat down, to wild applause.

“Thank you, Cy!” said the principal, coming to the center of the stage. “That was splendid. Now, I know the boys want to ask you a lot of questions, and I wonder if you could give us a few more minutes out of your busy day?”

Cy nodded graciously.

“Fine, fine,” said the principal. “Perhaps I could just start things off with a question of my own. I think the boys would be really interested to know what you took when you were at school here. Can you recall, Cy?”

Tatum looked faintly surprised, but he recovered himself quickly. “Mostly,” he said, “it was overcoats.”

Tom LaSorda’s story also begins in boyhood. LaSorda, of course, is the long-term third-base coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers who recently was named the successor to Walter Alston as the Dodger manager, after Alston’s twenty-third season on the job. LaSorda, it can be proved, is a patient sort of man. He grew up in Morristown, Pennsylvania, and became a serious baseball fan at an early age. When he was twelve or thirteen, he volunteered for duty as a crossing guard at his parochial school because he knew that the reward for this service was a free trip to a big-league ball game—an event he had yet to witness. The great day came at last, the sun shone, and the party of nuns and junior fuzz repaired to Shibe Park, where the Phillies were playing the Giants. Young Tom LaSorda had a wonderful afternoon, and just before the game ended he and some of his colleagues forehandedly stationed themselves beside a runway under the stands, where they could collect autographs from the players coming off the field. The game ended, the Giants came clattering by, and Tom extended his scorecard to the first hulking, bespiked hero to come in out of the sunshine.

“C’n I have your autograph, please, mister?” he said.

“Outta my way, kid,” the Giant said, brushing past the boy.

When Tom LaSorda tells the story now, the shock of this moment is still visible on his face. “I couldn’t
believe
it,” he says. “Here was the first big-league player I’d ever seen up close—the first one I ever dared speak to—and what he did was shove me up against the wall. I think tears came to my eyes. I watched the guy as he went away toward the clubhouse and I noticed the number on his back—you know, like taking the license of a hit-and-run car. Later on, I looked at my program and got his name. It was Buster Maynard, who was an outfielder with the Giants then. I never forgot it.”

Seven or eight years went swiftly by (as they do in instructive, moral tales), during which time Tom LaSorda grew up to become a promising young pitcher in the Dodger organization. In the spring of 1949, he was a star with the Dodger farm team in Greenville, North Carolina, in the Sally League, and took the mound for the opening game of the season at Augusta, Georgia, facing the Augusta Yankees. Tom retired the first two batters, and then studied the third, a beefy right-handed veteran, as he stepped up to the box.

The park loudspeaker made the introduction: “Now coming up to bat for the Yankees, Buster May-narrd, right field!”

LaSorda was transfixed. “I looked in,” he says, “and
it was the same man!”

The first pitch to Maynard nearly removed the button from the top of his cap. The second, behind his knees, inspired a beautiful sudden
entrechat.
The third, under his Adam’s apple, confirmed the message, and Maynard threw away his bat and charged the mound like a fighting bull entering the plaza in Seville. The squads spilled out onto the field and separated the two men, and only after a lengthy and disorderly interval was baseball resumed.

After the game, LaSorda was dressing in the visitors’ locker room when he was told that he had a caller at the door. It was Buster Maynard, who wore a peaceable but puzzled expression. “Listen, kid,” he said to LaSorda, “did I ever meet you before?”

“Not exactly,” Tom said.

“Did I bat against you someplace, maybe?”

“Nope.”

“Well, why were you tryin’ to take my head off out there?”

LaSorda spread his hands wide. “You didn’t give me your autograph,” he said.

Tom LaSorda tells this story each spring to the new young players who make the Dodger club.
“Always
give an autograph when somebody asks you,” he says gravely. “You never can tell. In baseball, anything can happen.”

July 1973

O
NCE A PASTIME, BASEBALL
is becoming another national anomaly—an institution that is less and less recognizable as it grows in age and familiarity. The executives of the game, displaying their customary blend of irresolution, impulsiveness, and inflexibility, failed this year even to agree on the basic rules, presenting us with one league of teams playing ten men on a side and another offering the more customary nine. Thus inspired, the leagues have responded with three months of stimulating but inexplicable competition, which has been reflected in team standings of unmatched discombobulation. At times this spring, even the most resilient fan must have felt his grip on things begin to loosen when he opened his morning paper and turned to the good old standings. In mid-May, a full month into the campaign, the six teams in the American League East were separated by the span of a single game. Splendid, total competition, one could conclude, and especially heartening for the supporters of the downtrodden Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers—until one noticed that every one of the six clubs had lost more games than it had won, and that the race in fact constituted nothing more than a flabby bulge below the waistline of .500 ball. A month later, the American League East
and
West had reached parallel levels of irresolution, having sorted out one clear loser in each division—Cleveland (East) and Texas (West)—and ten other clubs so closely bunched that the standings could be absolutely reversed in the space of a single weekend. Milwaukee, Boston, New York, and Detroit had all taken turns at the top of the East, which most resembled a diorama of heaving stegosauri in a tar pit. Just recently, almost halfway through the long season, the AL East has discovered one club apparently capable of a sustained upright posture—the Yankees, of all people, whose sudden recent successes have brought back unexpected visions of the kind of quiet, well-ordered Yankee summers we all grew up on.