The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (132 page)

We
Metsvolk
regathered at Shea on the last Saturday of the season for a farewell afternoon of scoreboard-watching. The magic number was down to one, and there was a small yell when the Cubs, who were playing the Cardinals out in St. Louis, put a “1” on the board in the fourth, to tie up that game for the moment, but the news before us on the field was all too clear from the beginning. The visiting Expos were cuffing Ron Darling—a homer by Dawson, a homer by Hubie Brooks in the early going—and it was plain that there would be nothing much to shout about today. (I was wrong about
that,
it turned out.) On the board, there were other pennant-settling engagements to think about—the Yankees losing at Toronto (beaten there by Doyle Alexander, a Yankee castoff), the Angels beating Texas (but the Royals, who would play that night, won their game, it turned out, and got to open the champagne). Hopes leaked slowly away at Shea, but no one around us in the mezzanine looked desolate or upset. It was a blowy afternoon, and dozens, then hundreds of paper airplanes took to the air, to the accompaniment of cheers. The Mets had handed out orange-and-blue scarves to the ticket holders (it was Fan Appreciation Day), and suddenly—I don’t know what set it off—all forty or fifty thousand of us there began waving our scarves in the air, a festival of butterflies, and then we laughed and applauded and cheered for
that.
Through most of this, two women seated just behind me kept up a sociable running commentary about the day and the team and the season. They were side by side: comfortable-looking, Mets-blazoned ladies in their upper thirties—old friends, by the sound of them. Their husbands were over in the adjoining seats.

“They tried, you know,” said one of the women, sounding not unlike a Little League mom. “They didn’t have it easy, with all those guys out.”

“Yes, what was it with Strawberry—seven weeks, with the thumb?”

“Yeah, and Gary’s knees, and then Mookie, you know. Imagine if we’d’ve had Strawberry all the time, it might be different. But that’s the way baseball
is.”

The Mets had been giving away prizes and promotional gifts through the afternoon, and when the loudspeaker now announced a trip to St. Pete for two and listed the seat numbers of the winners, one of my Euripidean chorus girls said, “Why don’t they give like a trip to the dugout?,” and they giggled together.

On the board, the Cards went ahead by 5–1, and then 7–1, and somebody near me said, “Good. I hope they win by five hundred to one.” A few folks began to head home. One man looked back up the aisle just as he turned into the exit tunnel and spotted a friend up behind me somewhere, and he tipped his head back and made a little throat-cutting gesture. He was smiling.

At last, the red light went out next to the Cubs-Cards game on the scoreboard—the Cardinals had won their pennant—and then everyone in the ballpark came to his feet to applaud the Mets. Gary Carter was up at bat just them, and when he grounded out, we called him back—“
GAR-EE!” “GAR-EE!” “GAR-EE!”—
and he came out and waved his helmet and gave us his engaging grin. Strawberry stepped in, to more yells and cheers, and hit a homer over the right-center-field fence—the first home run of next year, so to speak—and then he got more yells and came out again and waved his hat. It went on a longish while—the Expos batted around in the ninth, and won the game by 8–3, it turned out—but we stayed to the end, almost all of us, and cheered some more for our team, and for ourselves. The lights on the scoreboard gleamed in the late-afternoon shadow, and the clock there said “4:52” at the end. I went down to the clubhouse to shake hands with a few friends and wish them a good winter. The Mets looked tired and almost relieved. There was a joke floating around (nobody could remember who in the clubhouse said it first): “If only Doc hadn’t lost those four games, we’d have had ’em then!”—but the players kept coming back to the cheers and the ovations on the field at the end there. They couldn’t get over the fans.

Back in June, I received a stimulating letter from a ninety-two-year-old baseball tan named Joe Ryan, of Yountville, California, who wrote to tell me about a trip he made to New York in October 1913, to take in the opening game of the World Series between the Giants and the Philadelphia Athletics. He was twenty years old that fall and was working for an insurance company in Hartford, at a salary of fifteen dollars per week, but he and a colleague named Dave were Giants fanatics and impulsively determined to attend the classic. Mr. Ryan’s letter is wonderfully precise, conveying not only news of the sport (“It was a good game, but apprehension turned to despair when Home Run Baker put one of Marquard’s best into the right-field stands…”) but a careful accounting of every penny disbursed during the long-ago two-day outing.
Viz:
Railroad fares for two, round trip: $4.40. Room at Mills Hotel: 800 (two nights at 400 per night). Restaurants: $2.50 (Childs Restaurant breakfast, 250 per person; Childs Restaurant fried-oyster dinner, $1 per person). Hotdog lunches: 400. Transportation: 200 (nickel rides uptown and back via Ninth Ave. elevated). Tickets: $2. Lagniappe: 500 (tip to a wino who directed the out-of-towners to a gate at the park where same-day tickets were still available). Theatre tickets: $2 (balcony seats, at $1 each, to see Jane Cowl in “Within the Law”). This last was consolation for the Giants’ 6–4 loss to the A’s in the opener. “Just to look at Jane helped a lot,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “We thought she was the most beautiful creature who had been allowed to live.” The total budget came to $12.80, plus a possible 250 (Mr. Ryan isn’t sure about this) for three Blackstone cigars.

I cite this vivid communication to make a point not about inflationary economics but about inflationary baseball. This year, the league championship series were expanded to a best-of-seven-games format (they had been operating on a best-of-five system since their inception, in 1969), in the interests of augmented television revenues. The Cardinals, as we know, eliminated the Dodgers in the National League playoffs in six games, while the Royals went the full seven in knocking off the Blue Jays. Seven World Series games were then required to establish the Royals as champions: in sum, twenty postseason games. More people watched more October baseball than ever before, which may or may not be a good thing, but I think we can take it as a certainty that in the year 2057 there will not be a single surviving fan who remembers even one of these games with anything like the clarity and pleasure that Mr. Ryan so well conveys. Already, mere weeks after the games, I sense an inner blur and an accompanying incapacity to bring back more than a handful of postseason plays and innings.

Each of the playoffs opened in perfect misdirection, with the eventual losers winning the first and second games. The Dodgers, starting at home, put down Tudor at last, with the help of some slovenly Cardinal work afield, and then administered a gruesome 8–2 whacking to Joaquin Andujar, the combustible Dominican right-hander, who, when in difficulties, persistently damaged himself with angry down-the-middle fastballs; he also bunted into a double play which he proudly did not deign to run out. I joined the action at Busch Stadium, where the Redbirds, playing before the home folks (53,708 loyalists, in 53,708 Cardinal-red ensembles), gave a marvellously quick and instructive lesson in their special style of speedball. The front three Cardinal batters—Coleman, McGee, and Herr—got to bat against Dodger starter Bob Welch in both the first and the second inning and reached base all six times, fashioning four runs out of four hits (one of them a homer), two walks, two stolen bases, and two jittery pickoff-play throwing errors. The Cards won by 4–2, and drew even in the series the following night, when they sent fourteen batters to the plate in the second inning, in a 12–2 walkover—“one of those games,” in Ballspeak. The more significant news of the day was the grotesque workplace accident suffered before the game by young Vince Coleman, the Cardinal baserunning flash, who was knocked down and nearly devoured by an oncreeping automatic infield tarpaulin; he suffered a chipped bone in his left leg and did not reappear in further postseason action—a most damaging turn of events for the Cardinals, it turned out.

Game Five was the one that mattered: a fairish pitching duel between Fernando Valenzuela (who somehow gave up eight bases on balls) and the St. Louis bullpen committee (Dayley, Worrell, Lahti), which took over in the fourth and shut down the visitors until Ozzie Smith delivered a sudden little ninth-inning homer, for a 3–2 victory—an amazement, inasmuch as it was his first left-handed home run (he switch-hits and had turned around to face the right-handed Dodger reliever, Tom Niedenfuer) in 4,277 professional at-bats. Dodger manager Tom Lasorda was understandably testy in the postgame interview (“What do I think about
what?”
he barked at a reporter. “I’m not too happy—all
right!”
), but this Q. and A. was a mere plate-warming compared to the rotisserie broiling that Lasorda endured immediately after Game Six, in Los Angeles. The matter at issue here may be remembered for a while, at least around the Casa Lasorda: the decision of the ever-popular Dodger manager—ahead by 5–4 in the ninth inning—to allow his hurler (the selfsame Niedenfuer) to pitch to Jack Clark, the muscular Cardinal cleanup batter, with first base open and Cardinal base runners at second and third, instead of giving him a prudent base on balls. Clark hit the first pitch four hundred and fifty feet in to the bleachers, for the pennant. Manager Tom, in his defense, had several left-hand-vs.-right-hand, pinch-hitter-vs.-new-pitcher scripts in mind before he made his difficult decision, but I think he must be viewed as a victim of overthink. Back in St. Louis, talking to some reporters in the home clubhouse after the third game, Jack Clark had said, “Both of these teams have decided that there are certain guys they’re not going to let beat them, which is why batting in that fourth spot is so hard.” Lasorda forgot.

I had lunch with Alison Gordon in Toronto before the first American League playoff game. “I’m feeling better,” she told me. “I’m all right,
for now.”
I didn’t see her after that, and I was secretly relieved, for her Blue Jays won the first two playoff games there—a fine 6–1 outing by Dave Stieb and then a surprise tenth-inning comeback victory over the Royals’ stellar submariner, Dan Quisenberry—and I was certain that she had begun to think, Well,
maybe!…
Out at Kansas City, the Jays put together an early five-run inning, but Doyle Alexander couldn’t hold it—George Brett went four-for-four (single, double, two home runs) on the day—and the Royals prevailed. Toronto next pulled out an unexpected 3–1 win with a startling three-run rally against Charlie Leibrandt in the ninth inning of Game Four, topped off by Al Oliver’s pinch-hit double against Quisenberry, but signs of fatal turnaround were becoming evident, for the Jays had stopped hitting. They were shut out the next day by the young K.C. left-hander Danny Jackson, and then Mark Gubicza, Bud Black, and the Quis together worked out a 5–3 Kansas City win that brought the teams even at last. Bret Saberhagen had to leave the deciding game (we were back in Toronto by now) when he took a sharp bouncer on the palm of his pitching hand, but Leibrandt (and Quisenberry again, at the end) held off the Blue Jays without difficulty, and took the gonfalon with a 6–2 victory. The Royals’ pitching was both wide and deep, it turned out, and the resultant strain on the other side brought out some weaknesses—a classic turn of events. The mid-game Kansas City left-handers in the last two games (Black and Leibrandt) forced the Toronto skipper, Bobby Cox, to wheel in his right-handed platoons, who men proved helpless against Quisenberry. The Jays had far less pitching, especially out of their bullpen, and as the vise tightened, the lightly experienced Blue Jay lineup became cautious on the bases and began to overswing fiercely when up at bat; twenty-six Toronto batters were stranded in the last three games. In the end, everything seemed to turn against the Blue Jays—some terrible umpiring (it was just as bad for the other side, but the Toronto players brooded about it), the luck of the games, the weather, and even the dimensions of their park. Doyle Alexander, furious over a ball-four call, gave up a game-clinching double to the next and bottommost Royals hitter, Buddy Biancalana, in Game Six. Dave Stieb, left out there far too long in Game Seven, watched a windblown pop fly by Jim Sundberg barely reach the top of the fence out in the too-short right-field corner of Exhibition Stadium, where it caromed away for a three-run triple, putting Toronto behind for the winter. I had pulled for both of these teams throughout the season, so I felt mixed emotions at the end. I should have looked up Alison Gordon, but I didn’t, and after a couple of days she called me in New York. “I’m all right, but let’s not talk about it,” she said. “I just thought I’d tell you a subhead in the
Globe & Mail
here on the day after the Cardinals and Royals won, damn it. It says, ‘Missouri loves company.’”

The Missouri ballparks, east and west, presented the usual festival buntings, identical grassless lawns, and some slummocky game accompaniments by the organists. The musical commentary at Royals Stadium, though less oppressive than the Yankee Stadium stuff, is of a repellent cuteness, while the resident Schweitzer at Busch Stadium spurs on the crowds with little more than ceaseless repetitions of a Budweiser jingle. The Cardinals fans appear to enjoy this custom, I must admit, happily patting their paws together in time to the commercial
Braulied,
but this response is as nothing compared with their enravishments during the pre-game show at Busch, when a gate in the outfield swings open to admit the famous Clydesdales, who perform several galumphing circuits of the field, pulling behind them an ancient, shining beer wagon stacked high with cartons of Bud, with a waggy Dalmation perched on top. The swaying wagon seat, aloft and forward, is occupied by a busy teamster, his fists full of reins, and by August A. Busch, Jr., the diminutive eighty-six-year-old millionaire owner-brewer, bravely waving his plumed, Cardinal-red chapeau as he hangs on for dear life. I had some initial critical doubts about this spectacle, wondering whether the precedent might not encourage Mr. Steinbrenner to cruise the Yankee Stadium outfield in a replica tanker some day, but in time I began to look on the ceremonial more tolerantly, comparing it, rather, to a colorful but puzzling indigenous religious rite, like fire-walking or rajah-weighing or a blockful of beefy, sweating Sicilians groaning under their tottering ninety-foot saint’s tower on some downtown feast day—a spectacle, that is, better entrusted to a
National Geographic
photo crew than to an out-of-town baseball writer.