The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (17 page)

Studying millionaires in Houston’s favorite year-round entertainment, and Judge Roy Hofheinz, the Kublai Khan of the Domed Stadium, is the most entertaining millionaire in town. He has been, variously, a campaign manager for Lyndon Johnson, a boy-wonder jurist, mayor of Houston, a real-estate developer, and a promoter and owner of radio and television stations. Hofheinz is not one of the big rich, like John W. Mecom, who seems to have succeeded the late Jesse Jones as Houston’s financial vizier, but he talks more and gets into more fights than any other moneyman in sight. Hofheinz’s fallings-out are epochal. Among others, he has squabbled with Jesse Jones; with K.S. (Bud) Adams, Jr., the owner of the American Football League’s Houston Oilers (the Oilers do not play their home games in the Astrodome); and with R.E. (Bob) Smith, his former senior partner in Houston Sports Association, Inc., the company that owns the Astros and rents the stadium from Harris County for an annual payment of three-quarters of a million dollars. This last blowup, a year ago, ended with the Judge buying up most of Smith’s interest, and he now owns 86 per cent of the Astros. Hofheinz’s experience in baseball is minimal, and most of the club’s field operations rested in the hands of general manager Paul Richards, a former manager of the Orioles and a widely admired baseball thinker. Experienced Hofheinz-watchers predicted that there would be amity in the organization until the day Hofheinz decided he had surpassed Richards in baseball wisdom—a day that apparently arrived last December, when Hofheinz abruptly fired Richards (whose contract had five years to run), along with farm director Eddie Robinson and manager Luman Harris. The new team manager is Grady Hatton, and the Astros are now a pure Hofheinz fief.

Houston looks on Hofheinz with a mixture of awe, amusement, and anxiety. There is the undeniable fact that the prodigious idea of a domed year-round stadium was entirely the Judge’s, and without his plans for the new miracle park Houston almost certainly would not have been granted a franchise in the league expansion of 1962. It was also Hofheinz’s energy and promotional optimism that got the necessary bond issues approved and launched, and his hand is recognizable in every corridor and catwalk of the finished marvel. Any remaining Houston doubts about the Judge’s genius are now centered on the awesome financial weight that is being balanced on top of the dome, and on the recent population implosion of top executives at the Houston Sports Association. The precise break-even point of Astroperations has not been made public, but the stadium’s financial overhead is known to be Texas-sized. The electric bill alone, covering lights and air-conditioning, comes to thirty thousand dollars a month. The best estimates of the amount of business required to keep the Domed Stadium afloat come down to about a hundred and twenty-five days of active operation at an average attendance of twenty thousand. This means that the Astros must continue to draw handsomely during their eighty dates at home, and that numerous additional attractions will have to be encouraged. No one in Houston doubts the Judge’s energy and imagination, but Harris County voted in an investment of some thirty-one million dollars toward the success of the Astrodome—a sum that adds a certain sense of zesty involvement to each taxpayer’s daily Hofheinz-watch.

I visited the Judge one afternoon in his famous Astrodome office—a two-story business pad of such comically voluptuous decor and sybaritic furnishings that I was half convinced it had been designed by, say, John Lennon. My awed gaze took in hanging Moorish lamps and back-lit onyx wall panels in His Honor’s sanctum, a pair of giant Oriental lions guarding the black marble and rosewood judicatorial desk, a golden telephone awaiting the Hofheinzian ear, and, at the far end of the boardroom, a suspended baldachin above the elevated red-and-gilt magisterial throne. It would have been irreverent to talk baseball in these surroundings, but luckily the Judge received me in his box on an upper floor, which offered an expansive vista of the lofty, gently breathing dome and a distant view of some Astros working out in the batting cage. Hofheinz is a tall, thick-waisted man with lank hair, heavy black-rimmed spectacles, and small hands, in which he constantly rotates a giant cigar. We sat in gold plush swivel chairs overlooking the field and drank coffee out of gold cups, while the Judge talked about the long, tedious process of building a pennant contender from scratch. I asked about the Houston audience’s devotion to baseball, observing that I had seen very few local patrons keeping score during the game, and Hofheinz said, “This park keeps ’em interested enough so they don’t
have
to keep busy with a pencil and scorecard. Why, in most other parks you got nothing to do but watch the game, keep score, and sit on a hard wooden seat. This place was built to keep the fans happy. They’ve got our good seats, fine restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don’t have to make a personal sacrifice to like baseball.” He tapped the ash from his heater into a gold ashtray shaped like a fielder’s glove, and went on. “We have removed baseball from the rough-and-tumble era, I don’t believe in the old red-necked sports concept, and we are disproving it here. We’re in the business of sports entertainment. Baseball isn’t a game to which your individuals come alone just to watch the game. They come for social enjoyment. They like to entertain and
be
entertained at the ballpark. Our fans are more like the ones they have out in California. We don’t have any of those rowdies or semi-delinquents who follow the Mets.”

I started to put in a small word for rowdies, but Hofheinz continued. “We have by far a higher percentage of fans in the upper economic brackets than you’ll find in any other park,” he said, “but we
also
have the best seats and service at the dollar-fifty level. You’re competing for attention in sports entertainment, and you’ve got to create new kinds of fans. We make a big effort to bring out the ladies. There are plenty of mothers and grandmothers who have just learned about the double play from some Little Leaguer, and now for the first time here’s a ballpark where you would
want
to bring them and let them develop into real fans. And once they’ve seen what it’s like here, they won’t feel so bad about letting their husbands and boys go off to the ball game any old time they want.”

For the remainder of my stay, I tried to concentrate on Houston baseball, instead of its setting, and I saw the Astros split a pair of lively games with the Dodgers. The first was one of those baseball rarities, a complete turnabout, in which the Astros, after giving up ten hits and five runs in the first four innings, suddenly bounced back with batches of runs of their own while entirely bottling up their tormentors, and won going away, 8–5. John Bateman’s fourth-inning homer set off the scoreboard’s steers and rockets for their first sanctioned gala of the year, and in the fifth the home side, assisted by some absent-minded Dodger fielding, batted around and drove Don Drysdale from the mound. This was perhaps less of a feat than it sounds, for Drysdale was far from sharp after his long, much-publicized dual holdout with Sandy Koufax, but it was popular; there is nothing like the public shaming of a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man to tone up a crowd. The Astros got some first-class pitching from a tough workmanlike reliever named Mike Cuellar, who struck out nine Dodgers with his down-breaking screwball. The next night, the Astros almost pulled out another, but they were up against Claude Osteen, the least publicized and perhaps the best No. 3 pitcher in the league, who fanned Jim Gentile with the tying run aboard in the ninth, and they lost a 3–2 squeaker.

The Astros are a curiosity, for they are a team without a star, present or past, unless one counts such mini-celebrities as Jimmy Wynn or Larry Dierker. Invented, along with the Mets, in the league expansion of 1962, they have consistently displayed a shabby competence that has kept them above New York in the standings every year, and has probably cost them much of the rich affection and attention generated by the Mets’ anti-heroes.

There is no real doubt, however, that the Astros are on the way and will someday break into the tough, embattled territory of the National League’s first division, but a healthy franchise, particularly in new baseball territory, also requires the building of a sizable body of young, resilient, and truly knowledgeable fans. No one knows much about the loyalties and passions of the Houston baseball audience, in spite of those enormous attendance figures of last season, for it is impossible to guess how many of the two million ticket-buyers came to see the Astros and how many to see the Astrodome. During the Dodger games, I kept moving about in the stands and changing neighbors, but I could not penetrate the placid bonhomie of those small, citified, early-season crowds or convince myself that we were watching a sporting event. There was applause at the appropriate moments, but not much tonsil-straining, and the scattered booing was mostly directed at the ball and strike calls of the home-plate umpire, which is bush. No one booed an Astro player. No one got into a fight; a fight at the Astrodome would be as shocking as fisticuffs in the College of Cardinals. And always, as before, the applause and attention of the fans around me would be interrupted, redirected, and eventually muffled by the giant scoreboard and its central screen. It commanded “
CHARGE
” and “
GO-GO
” for every Astro base-runner, it saluted a homer by the Dodgers’ Wes Parker with the word “
TILT
,” and when it broke in on a lively dispute at third base, the spectators forgot about the real thing and sat back in their armchairs to watch a cartoon umpire argue with a cartoon manager.

Toward the end of the last game, my irritation took me out to the pavilion seats in center field (Astropatrons, untouched by the sun, do not sit in bleachers), and here I found the first unscattered group of recognizable fans in Houston. It was a shirt-sleeved, short-sleeved crowd, Negro and white, full of young people. There were some big families, complete with sleeping babies, and a blond teen-age girl next to me wore a patch on the arm of her sweater that said “Future Homemaker of America.” Some of the men wore straw cowboy hats, some were in city coconut straws. Shortly after I arrived, Dave Nicholson led off the Astro sixth with a triple off Osteen that almost landed in our laps, and at once the entire pavilion crowd was on its feet, shouting and cheering. The scoreboard, I remembered later, was behind us, but we didn’t seem to need it. And then in the top of the seventh, when Houston pitcher Bob Bruce was in heavy trouble, first baseman Chuck Harrison speared a hopper by Maury Wills and then hesitated a moment over his play. I jumped up and yelled, “Home! Throw home!,” and it came to me suddenly that I had company: a hundred fans near me were screaming the same advice. Harrison got our message and threw to Bateman, who tagged out Nate Oliver at the plate, and we all sat down, grinning at one another.

Baseball is an extraordinarily subtle and complex game, and the greatest subtlety of all may well be the nature of its appeal to the man in the stands. The expensive Houston experiment does not truly affect the players or much alter the sport played down on the field, but I think it does violence to baseball—and, incidentally, threatens it own success—through a total misunderstanding of the game’s old mystery. I do not agree with Judge Hofheinz that a ballpark is a notable center for socializing or propriety, or that many spectators will continue to find refreshment in returning to a giant living room—complete with manmade weather, wall-to-wall carpeting, clean floors, and unrelenting TV show—that so totally, so drearily, resembles the one he has just left. But these complaints are incidental. What matters, what appalls, in Houston is the attempt being made there to alter the quality of baseball’s time. Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own. Any persistent effort to destroy this unique phenomenon, to “use up” baseball’s time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and stylized curiosity.

It seems to me that the Houston impresarios are trying to build a following by the distraction and entire control of their audience’s attention—aiming at a sort of wraparound, programmed environment, of the kind currently under excited discussion by new thinkers of the electronic age. I do not wish them luck with this vulgar venture, and I hope that in the end they may remember that baseball has always had a capacity to create its own life-long friends—sometimes even outdoors. One Houston lady told me that she had been a fan for more than thirty years, beginning when she was a schoolgirl and the Houston Buffs were a Cardinal farm. “I remember a lot of players from back then,” she said. “I saw them all before they went up to the majors and became famous. Howie Pollett and Danny Murtaugh were my
gods
. And I remember something else. Buff Stadium back in the old days used to be right next to a bakery—Fehr’s Bakery, that’s what it was called! I’ll never forget sitting in the stands in the afternoon and watching the games, and the sweet smell of fresh bread in the air all around.”
*

*
Now, six years later, the Astrodome remains our only domed ballpark, but newer and larger bubbles are on the way. The Astros’ home attendance has leveled off in the neighborhood of 1,350,000—an extremely attractive neighborhood for a perennially noncontending club—so the park and its peculiar attributes are almost universally considered a success. Only the enormously increased costs of construction have delayed the erection of similar sports-tanks in other localities, but New Orleans has now sunk pilings for the 80,000-seat Louisiana Superdome, thus proving the American axiom that it is perfectly O.K. to go ape at the bank as long as you are drawing out the money for nuclear weapons or sports. Official estimates place the cost of the bayou balloon at one hundred and forty million dollars, but some irate taxpayers are suggesting final figures closer to three hundred million. This dome is promised for 1974, and will house the New Orleans Saints, of the National Football League; it is also expected that it will constitute an irresistible lure for some poor, heavily rained-upon baseball club, such as the Cleveland Indians.