The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (116 page)

Clete Boyer (coach, Oakland A’s; former third baseman, Athletics, Yankees, Braves): “First basemen have a lot more to think about than third basemen. The shortstop—I don’t know what’s the hardest play for him. They’re
all
hard, I guess. There’s not much of a problem for him on the double play, because the whole situation’s right in front of him, but the second baseman—he knows he’s got to turn that thing, and the guy’s breathing down his neck. You can get your legs torn up. More often than not, you see the second baseman turn it when he didn’t have a chance, really. The judgment of infielders is something.”

Keith Hernandez (first baseman, New York Mets): “There’s a small percentage of left-handed batters today who are real pull hitters. There’s an even smaller number of right-handed hitters who can hit the ball away and up the line. I play away from the bag, and that lets our second baseman play more up the middle man what’s done on most clubs. I’ve got enough range so that I can be very aggressive about going for anything in the hole.”

Dave Conception (shortstop, Cincinnati Reds): “I think being able to play the infield, especially playing shortstop, is something you’re born with. You can’t learn it—you have to have that ability from the beginning.”

No, we fans will never quite learn this game, but there are rewards in trying. We can’t step up to bat or take infield or get to play, ever, but we can look and listen and, most of all, try to make ourselves notice what we’ve been watching all along. Spring is the best time for this, before we get involved in scores and standings, or are distracted by hope. Players and coaches and managers are more willing to reflect on their profession when you approach them in the preseason: bring a notebook and a good No. 10 sunscreen—mornings and afternoons were a white blaze in Florida and Arizona this year—and, with luck, you can improve yourself in the happiest fashion, which is to learn something you thought you already knew. This March, as the names of the deponents above suggest, I tried to sharpen up my infielding, and within days I felt more alert to all the different ways the ball is picked up and got rid of in the quicker instants of the pastime. Once again, I discovered how much more difficult baseball is than I had imagined. Although these seminars seemed less exacting than those I encountered in a recent survey course in catching, I soon understood that this was because infielding is a fine art, not a science—an aesthetic to be thrillingly glimpsed but, as Dave Concepcion suggested, never quite understood. The conventional wisdom about spring training is that it doesn’t mean anything (it is never mentioned in the sporting press after the bell rings), but its languid, noncombative pace suits me very well, I find, not only for the pursuit of some special baseball discipline but because it provides me and the other early fans with a procession of trifling moments and glimpses and connections that feed our intuition about players and teams and skills, and so keep us in the game.

I began my infield tutorials on the very first day of my trip, and I tried to keep at them every day, waylaying practitioners or infield coaches or managers who came my way, and asking them what was hard or easy or unappreciated about their work in the field. I happily took whoever came along—some veterans, some journeymen, a few famous performers, some newcomers. All of them were established professionals. They didn’t always agree with one another, of course, and I quickly realized that I lacked the expertise to weigh or evaluate their responses, even if I had wanted to. There is no right way to pick up a one-bounce rocket at third base, or to charge a soft hopper at second and make a whirling flip to the shortstop as he crosses the bag off to your right, and many of the men I talked to said that they themselves weren’t always quite clear how they made the hard plays. The personalities of the different infielders—thoughtful, impatient, ironic, exuberant—seemed a very important part of their style of play, as they described it, and the number and variety of the answers I gathered left me with a flickering, videolike impression of the ways infielders do their work, rather than with any freeze-frame rules or certitudes. “How do you do what you do out there?” I kept asking, and the answer was mostly, “Any way I can.”

Jerry Remy, who has put in ten years at second base with the Angels and the Red Sox, told me that positioning himself in the field before every pitch required him to pick up the catcher’s signal to the pitcher about the forthcoming delivery, to which he added his accumulated knowledge and hunches about the abilities and habits of the batter, and of the base runner (if any). Most of all, though, he had to know his pitcher. “With Bob Stanley pitching, I wouldn’t play a dead-pull left-handed hitter the way I would if it was Roger Clemens pitching, let’s say, because nobody pulls Stanley. Stanley is easy. He doesn’t walk anybody, and you get almost all ground balls, because of that sinker. I played behind Nolan Ryan a couple of years, and you could throw all that stuff out the window, because the batters were just trying to make contact. There were high counts and fouls and walks and—well, it wore you out. Then, if you’ve got a real quick base runner on first—a Rickey Henderson, say—it makes a tremendous difference in the way the whole infield plays. On bunt situations then, I’ve got to be cheating toward second base all the time. If the runner fakes a steal and you make one little move toward second to cover, you can be dead: the ball’s hit by you. If he’s on second, you got to be keeping him close, and that means you might miss anything hit off on the first-base side. A runner doesn’t even need a whole lot of speed to make that work. A team like the Tigers doesn’t have all that much speed, but they think aggressively on the bases, and that changes the way you have to play them.”

Remy, who is thirty-two, has a narrow face, a small mustache, and a contained, street-smart way of talking. I was surprised and then touched by his willingness to talk about his work at all, for it had been announced only the day before that he was probably finished as a second baseman. Once a wonderfully quick and spirited infielder, he has played with increasing difficulty over the past six seasons, as a result of an accident in July 1979, when he caught his spikes while sliding into home plate at Yankee Stadium. Five operations on his left knee have failed to relieve the intense pain he feels whenever he attempts the twisting pivot at second base in the middle of a double play, and now he was trying to hang on with the club as a pinch-hitter. I suggested to Jerry that he might not want to talk to me just then, in view of the news, but he smiled and made a dismissing gesture. “It doesn’t hurt to talk,” he said. (Just before the season opened, the Red Sox, trimming their roster to the obligatory twenty-five players, placed him on the twenty-one-day disabled list—a message that the club had decided that it couldn’t afford to keep him on only as a pinch-hitter. He took the news in good part—there were no hard feelings, he told me by telephone—and he and Dr. Arthur Pappas, the Red Sox physician, have just decided that one more arthroscopic procedure, the sixth and final surgical tinkering, might possibly relieve his pain. No major surgery would be attempted. “I want this because it will settle things once and for all,” Remy said. “I didn’t like the idea of just being a pinch-hitter—not playing the infield at all. This way, I can get better and be a real player again, or else that’s it—it’s over and I’ll know it, and I’ll go on to the next thing. So it’s all right.”)

Remy said that the most difficult play for him at second base had always been the one on a ball hit off to his left, with a base runner on first, which meant that he had to turn completely around, spinning three hundred degrees or so and making the throw back to second with the same motion. We were sitting side by side on a railroad-tie embankment next to the Red Sox batting cages, and as Remy described this he made a little half-turn in illustration, with his arms reaching to his left for the invisible ball; the gesture of his upper body was like a snapshot, and I had a sudden flash of Remy in the field again, making the play.

“If that ball’s hit at all soft, you’re probably not going to make the play,” he went on. “But even if you think you’ve got a chance, you’ll tend to rush your throw, and the ball can fly all over the place. You want to try to take the extra second to make that throw. Turning the double play can be real tough, of course. I always try to hit the bag with my left foot when I’m taking the throw. Then I can either back off or go across or go behind the bag, depending on the situation. The hardest D.P. is probably going to come on the throw over to you from third base, because the runner’s going to be a little closer. You end up making all different kinds of pivots and throws, depending on who’s giving you the ball. When Carney Lansford played here, his ball from third was always the same, and you could count on getting off your own same throw across to first. A guy like Wade Boggs, now, his throw tends to sink. If the man at third doesn’t have such good control, or if it’s a tough play of some kind for him, I’ll try to straddle the bag, if I can get there in time, so’s to be more ready. Then when I do go to first—well, I guess I’ve made every kind of throw there is.”

I asked where such things could be learned and perfected, and Remy said that most of his habits afield had been instilled years ago, when he was a young infielder coming up in the Angels system and had worked with a coach named Bob Clear. “I’ve used the same moves ever since, I guess,” he said. “Things like going over to the bag a little bit bent, so you can handle the ball better and get it off quicker. And if you’re there a little early, even staying
behind
the base, so if there’s a wild throw you’re not stretched out by being up on top of the bag. Adjust to the ball, adjust to the base runner. If you ask me after the game how I made the play, I probably can’t tell you. If I’ve got Don Baylor comin’ in on me, I’m sure not thinking about how it’s done. But at least in certain situations—say, first and third, with less than two outs—you know they’ll be coming after you. A select few will take a crack at you every time. Baylor’s probably the best at it—or he was when he could run better. Hal McRae, of course. George Brett. Hrbek does it well. Winfield, because he’s so damn big—he can slide five feet out of the baseline and still take you down. Big guys with speed are what you watch for. With all that going on, I don’t think there’s anybody playing second base who can say he’s real technical about it. There’s no time for that—you just get it done. You do it in infield practice and then in games, but you don’t work on it, if you see what I mean. You take extra batting practice all the time, but in my whole career I never practiced taking extra double plays.”

Marty Barrett, who replaced Remy at second for the Red Sox last year (and batted .303 in the process), mentioned most of the same runaway-truck base runners that Remy had listed for me, and threw in Reggie Jackson and Chet Lemon for good measure. “You have to have an idea about these guys and how they come at you,” he told me. “But knowing the batters—knowing where to play them all, and being with the pitcher—is the main thing. You pick that up quicker than you’d think. I won’t have to make as many tough plays this year, because I’ll be positioning myself better. Of course, I was up with the Sox for most of ’83, even though I didn’t get in a lot of games, and I really paid attention to where Jerry played everybody. Position, and all that—the pitchers, the batters—means everything for me, because I don’t have that much range. You look at a Frank White or a Lou Whitaker”—the Gold Glove second baseman with the World Champion Tigers—“and they basically stay within a three- or four-foot spot on the field. I really believe they can play a whole game just from there—they’re that quick—while I’ll be starting from over in the hole to way up the middle. I’m twenty to thirty feet different, depending on the batter.”

Frank White, it turned out, had just about the same ideas as Barrett about positioning. “I think as you learn the players more, over the years, the great plays are going to come easier, because you’re in the right place and ready for the ball,” he said to me. “When I first came up, I was making these super plays all over the place—
wow! hey!—
because I didn’t know where I was supposed to be. When I knew the hitters and knew the pitchers, that kind of slowed down. I’d learned where to play, I’m saying. Maybe I’m playing better now but getting noticed less.” He laughed.

White is an engaging fellow—an intelligent, invariably cheerful star player, with a dazzling smile. He is thirty-four and has played second base for the Royals for more than eleven seasons, winning six consecutive Gold Gloves through the 1982 campaign; the honor (it is voted by each team’s players, coaches, and manager) went to Whitaker the last two years, but you can still get an argument in clubhouses around the league about which of the two is the better second baseman. White told me that there was less sudden body contact around his base now than when he came up. “The runners aren’t so bad now that they make them slide a little sooner,” he said. “Before they changed the ruling, everything was a cross-body block. When we played the Yankees in the 1977 playoffs, Hal McRae took out Willie Randolph with a shot way over beyond the bag at second—you remember that [I did indeed]—and it was legal, because at that time base runners didn’t have to slide at all. They could just run right over you. The rules were changed after that, so at least they have to slide first now. Most of the times now when a guy gets taken out it’s on the first-and-second situation or a bases-loaded situation, where the man on first isn’t being held close, so he gets down at you in a hurry on an average-hit ball. I’ve only been hit bad twice, and it was in a bases-loaded situation both times. Once was by Doug DeCinces, back in ’78, and I twisted my knee. And then I got hit by Dwight Evans once and landed on my shoulder and missed a couple of weeks.”

Two damaging collisions in fifteen hundred-odd games: I expressed amazement.

“I’m
awake
out there,” White said. “By the time I get to the base, I know if I’m going to get one or try for two. I never bail out. You only have to bail out if you haven’t made up your mind.” He told me that a second baseman’s throw to first under these circumstances is often less than picture-perfect. Like all fielders, he tries to take the ball with his fingers across the seams when getting off a throw, because the ensuing spin makes the peg much more accurate. “You try to grab seams, but you don’t always have time for it,” he said. “In most cases, your hand sort of goes there automatically. But on the D.P. sometimes I’m throwing over with three fingers, or even with the ball in the palm of my hand. The general idea is any way you can, and as quick as you can. That’s why you appreciate having a real big first baseman over there to throw to—a guy like Steve Balboni, here. It’s a comfort to your mind.”