The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (133 page)

The Series games, seen in brief retrospect, invite further attention to the commanding nature of stout pitching and the diffident pleasures of come-from-behind baseball. Tudor, it will be recalled, won the opener of the classic, out at Royals Stadium, though in less than imperious fashion, barely outpitching Jackson for a 3–1 decision. Charlie Leibrandt, the strong, thoughtful Royals left-hander, threw a near-masterpiece the next evening (his patterns are much like Tudor’s, in fact, although his off-speed pitch moves the other way: in on a left-handed batter), surrendering a bare two singles through the first eight innings, but suffered an appalling progressive accident in the ninth, when the Cardinals put together a single and three doubles (none of them exactly smoked) and pulled off a sudden 4–2 win. Manager Dick Howser’s decision not to bring in Quisenberry in the midst of these adventures—Quis had been knocked about in uncharacteristic fashion in his last few outings—will not be taken up here, lest the sound of New Year’s revels intrude on the consequent lengthy argumentation.

Game Three belonged to Bret Saberhagen, who absolutely awed the Cards with his 6–1 economy cruise at Busch Stadium, as the Royals briskly did away with Andujar (his season had come apart, for he finished and won only one game after August 23rd, when he stood at 20–7 in the campaign), and George Brett reached base in all five turns at bat. It was in this game, I imagine, that the millions watching at home began to
notice
Saberhagen—his perky little half smile on the mound, his beginner’s mustache, the wonderful rush of mid-game strikes and outs that he can impose on the batters, and the odd darting of his tongue at the outset of his windup—a mannerism that has given turn his clubhouse nickname, the Lizard. The
other
pitcher held our attention the next evening: John Tudor back in more characteristic style—a five-hit, 3–0 shutout, in which only two Kansas City base runners set foot on third. Tudor twice fanned Brett with off-speed, slicing sliders, embarrassing him in the process. The Cards were ahead by three games to one, in what some press-box watchers were calling a dull, one-sided Series.

Tudor had struggled unhappily through the early going this season, and his record stood at 1–7 in late May, when he received a telephone call from Dave Bettencourt, his erstwhile batterymate on the Peabody (Mass.) high-school baseball team, who, while watching the Cards on television, had spotted a minor flaw in his old friend’s delivery. Tudor made an adjustment and went 20–1 for the rest of the summer—an astounding turn of events for a pitcher who in almost five full years’ work, for the Pirates and Red Sox, had never won more than thirteen games in a season. I went to Bill Campbell for enlightenment—the tall, knob-shouldered Cardinals reliever, who had also worked out of the Boston bullpen when Tudor was there.

“There’s no secret to it,” Campbell said in the St. Louis clubhouse. “He’s learned how to pitch. He didn’t do all that bad with the Red Sox or the Pirates, but you’re not going to come out looking very good with teams like that, because you can only do so much. Here we’ve got these rabbits in the outfield, a great big ballpark, and some guys who are going to turn the D.P. It’s amazing what that double play will do for a pitcher. When he doesn’t get it, he knows he should be out of the inning but he’s not, and when that happens over and over again it adds up—it’s another sort of year. The big difference might be that John changes speeds more than he used to—that’s maturity in a pitcher. He’s got a good enough fastball, with a tail on it, and he doesn’t mind coming inside—any left-hander who’s pitched at Fenway has to be willing to throw inside—but when you can move the ball around the way John does, the changeup becomes a
big
pitch for you. His change looks like a fastball, but it moves away, and you can see what that does to the hitters. They’re leaning, they’re a mile out in front. You saw what happened to Brett today, and Brett is a great, great hitter. You have to remember that big-league batters hate to have the fastball thrown past them. Here’s John, who’s already shown them that change-up and then the fastball, so what are they going to do? They
know
the change is coming—it’s in the back of their minds—but what they’re ready for, every time, is the fastball. And then…” He shrugged. “Then they get the change and they’re out of there.”

Dick Howser, the midsize, sociable Royals manager, loves to talk about his young pitchers—Bret Saberhagen most of all. “Here’s a guy who looks like Mel Stottlemyre and throws like Catfish Hunter,” he told me out in Kansas City. “I’ve been saying he doesn’t throw the ball past anybody, but after that game he pitched against the Angels”—a 3–1 complete-game victory that brought the Royals even with California at the beginning of their critical late-season series—“I’m not so sure. His last pitch, to Reggie Jackson, was a ninety-five-mile-an-hour strike, and Reggie didn’t
move.
The best pitch in the game was that last one. But it’s his control that amazes you. Last year, when he was just starting, he beat the Angels a game and only threw ninety-one pitches. Like Guidry and Stottlemyre and those others, he fields his position and he holds the runners close. He doesn’t get beat in those little ways. He’s got a great pickoff move, and
that’s
something you don’t see much with young pitchers, because the good ones have been striking everybody out when they’re down in the minors. I kept watching this kid’s figures as he came up through our system. There’d be nine innings, with six strikeouts and no bases on balls—that kind of thing. And they held up all the way for him, at every level. You
notice
him.” He shook his head a little. “Even his pitchouts are good,” he went on. “The ball is up
here
to the catcher—not down there somewhere.”

Pitching coach Gary Blaylock told me that Saberhagen could throw the running fastball, could ride it up and in, and could swing it down and away from the batter. “And that’s all you can
do
with a fastball, you know,” he said. But in the end he, too, came back to Saberhagen’s control. “I was the Royals’ minor-league pitching coach up to last year, so I saw this kid when he first came to work for us, in the Instructional League,” he said. “He walked one man in his first twenty-three professional innings. He didn’t have a breaking ball when we signed him, but he did have that control right from the beginning, which is hard to believe. He’s a quick kid, and he can do it all now, and the hitters know it. He gets on a roll in the middle innings, and the batter is up there looking to hit that first pitch, because he knows he’s never going to find himself in that good two-oh, three-one spot. Before you know it, the kid is getting ten or twelve or fourteen outs in a row. I’ve never seen a pitcher to compare him with.”

Saberhagen did not emerge as the best of the young K.C. Dingers until the middle of this past summer, and Howser told me that he was still not sure which of them would be the top man in the long run. A year ago, he reminded me, Bud Black’s 17–12 record had been the best among the young starters. The beginning of the Royals’ championship, in his view, was the spring-training season of 1984, at a very low ebb in the club’s history. Four of its best-known players—Willie Wilson, Vida Blue, Willie Aikens, and Jerry Martin—had been convicted on cocaine charges at the end of 1983, and had served terms in jail; only Wilson came back to the Royals afterward. Three established Kansas City starters—Dennis Leonard, Paul Splittorff, and Larry Gura—were approaching the end of illustrious careers (although Leonard has undergone extensive rehabilitation for a serious knee injury and is still hoping for a return to full form), and no one in the dugout or in the front office expected much good news in the seasons just ahead. Howser, with no other course really open to him, determined to see how far he could go with Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, and Danny Jackson, who between them had nineteen innings of major-league experience. (Bud Black, a year ahead of this freshman class, was already in the rotation.) Saberhagen and Gubicza began the season as rookie starters, and Jackson moved in from the bullpen late in the summer. Leibrandt, who is in his upper twenties (he had four earlier, fair-to-poor years with the Cincinnati Reds), began that 1984 season in the minors. “We plain didn’t have room for him,” Howser said. “He only got in three innings’ work all spring. But then he pitched his way onto our club from Omaha. He just kind of happened on us. You know the rest.”

The rest he meant is that the Royals, in sixth place in mid-July of ’84, went 44–27 for the rest of the year—the best record over that distance in their league—on the strength of their pitching, and won their division before being eliminated in the Championship Series by the Tigers. The same pattern showed itself this year, when the Royals, seven and a half games back after the All-Star break, put the Angels away in the last week, but this time they seemed to know all along that they would win. As a team, they finished next to the top in pitching (second to the Blue Jays), next to the bottom in batting (the Angels were lower), and somewhere up out of sight in confidence. The Royals’ absolute zest for come-from-behind baseball was not made out of mere cheerfulness or some mad belief in baseball luck but came from a perfect knowledge of their own capabilities. A splendid old adage tells us that great pitching will always beat great hitting and vice versa, but I suspect, in fact, that great pitching builds character. The 1985 Cardinals were a better offensive and defensive ball team than the Royals by almost every measurement, but a persistent edge in pitching can give a young, mild club the carefree look of champions; what their players envisage at the beginning of every game is another string of scoreless or low-scoring innings for the other side—a guarantee that they themselves, the good guys, can always play on even terms with any team in the land. What the Royals showed us repeatedly this fall, on the field and in their clubhouse, was class. You could see it in sudden headline performances like Brett’s outbursts at the plate or in successive marvellous outings by Leibrandt, Jackson, Saberhagen, and the rest, but you expect that sort of thing from one source or another during championship play. In these games, though, one also began to notice and appreciate lesser inferences, like Steve Balboni’s dogged persistence at the plate, in spite of his repeated strikeouts and pop-ups (he hit thirty-six homers this year, but none at all in postseason play), which ultimately brought him eight Series singles and a .320 Series average; Jim Sundberg’s baserunning (of all things) and those two identical super-duper slides into home; Buddy Biancalana’s exuberance and pleasure in the game, which showed itself in his errorless and sometimes breathtaking play at shortstop (he was considered something of a joke at the outset of the autumn games, having accounted for more errors than runs batted in during his brief tenure this season); Dan Quisenberry’s elegant refusal to complain about his bad luck and unaccustomed embarrassments in several games (“I try never to be the manager,” he said after being passed over by Howser in that second-game crisis. “I want to be a tool for him, and not guess whether he should use me now, or not now, or not until the fifteenth inning. He’s better at that than I am”); and Dick Howser’s open and unpatronizing admiration for the play of his professionals, and his joy at their joy at the end. Sooner or later, he seemed to know, young talent will catch up.

The question that remains, before we get back to the last few plays and innings of the year, is why or how it happened that so many extraordinary young pitchers came to the fore so suddenly in 1985—a season in which the ages of the two brand-new Cy Young Award winners, Dwight Gooden and Bret Saberhagen, together, fall four years short of Phil Niekro’s forty-six—a symbol, if I ever saw one. Better training methods, better nutrition, and a generally upward genetic curve come quickly to mind (think of all those young pre-Olympic swimmers breaking world records in every meet, or so it seems), and so does the much more intelligent and intensive present-day coaching of ballplayers at the school and college and minor-league levels. But why has there been no similar flowering of young hitters in the game? We will all be pondering this enigma over the next five years or so—a period in which I believe that pitching will more and more come to dominate the sport—but in the meantime I will relay the words I received from Seymour Siwoff, the Wizard of Elias, when I recently put this question to him.

“It’s television,” he said at once. “It’s gotta be the tube. All these kids have grown up watching baseball on television. They’ve watched all summer long, ever since they were boys, and they’ve learned how this game is played. That doesn’t help much if you’re a batter, because the truth is you’re either born with the ability to hit the ball or else you can’t do it. You can’t
learn
that—it’s not like a book or a theory. But pitching—well, anybody can see how that’s done. Move the ball around, change speeds, get ahead of the batter, throw strikes. There’s no mystery there, and if you’re a great young high-school athlete pretty soon you can just start doing it. The batters are in trouble right now, and it’s going to get worse. Just wait and see.”

The Cardinal fans were ready to celebrate a World Championship when they poured into Busch Stadium for the fifth game (“it’s iced!” said one fan’s placard), but some of the Cardinal players seemed less certain. Although the Redbirds were leading by three games to one, it had not quite escaped notice that the absence of Coleman and the parsimony of the Royals’ pitching had shut off the Cardinals’ free and easy way on the base paths. (By the end, the team had managed only two stolen bases.) “This is by far the best starting rotation we’ve seen all year,” Tom Herr said to me after Game Four. “They’ve taken us out of our game, and that’s the mark of a good club. We’re very tired. I’d sure like to win here tomorrow.”

Tomorrow’s Kansas City starter was Danny Jackson, who further validated Herr’s appraisal by going the full nine, in a 6–1 Kansas City win. Five Cardinal pitchers together struck out fifteen Royals batters—a Ry-Krisp sort of stat under these circumstances. The most discussed (or
only
discussed) play of the game was Sundberg’s dramatic slither past catcher Nieto in the second inning, when he touched the bag with his fingertips and was either: (a) safe, as umpire John Shulock called it, or (b) out, as the more distant, fifty-thousand-voice minority opinion had it. Watching closely from my privileged press perch in the right-field third deck, I abstained.