The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (25 page)

Gibson stayed in, of course. It was inconceivable that Schoendienst would take him out. He batted for himself in the eighth and fanned, and gave up another run in the ninth, on three singles. His stillness, his concentration, his burning will kept him out there, where he belonged, to the end. Lolich, too, lasted the distance, surviving an error in the seventh, a walk in the eighth, and a final, anticlimactic homer by Shannon in the ninth, which closed matters at 4–1. It was still the Year of the Pitcher, right to the last, but the Tiger hitters had restored the life and noise that seemed to go out of baseball this year.

—
August 1969

I
FIRST HEARD ABOUT
the death of baseball one night last December. A friend of mine, a syndicated sports columnist, called me after eleven o’clock and broke the news. “Hey,” he said, “have you
seen
the crowds at the Jets’ games lately? Unbelievable! It’s exactly like the old days at Ebbets Field. Pro football is the thing, from now on. Baseball is finished in this country. Dead.” He sounded so sure of himself that I almost looked for the obituary in the
Times
the next morning. (“Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness. Remains on view at Cooperstown, N.Y.”) Though somewhat exaggerated, my friend’s prediction proved to be a highly popular one. In the next three or four months, the negative prognosis was confirmed by resident diagnosticians representing most of the daily press, the magazines, and the networks, and even by some foreign specialists from clinics like the
New Republic
and the
Wall Street Journal
. All visited the bedside and came away shaking their heads. Baseball was sinking. Even if the old gent made it through until April and the warmer weather, his expectations were minimal—lonely wheelchair afternoons on the back porch, gruel and antibiotics, and the sad little overexcitement of his one-hundredth birthday in July. I haven’t run into my dour friend at any ball games this summer, but I doubt whether the heavy crowds and noisy excitement of the current season, which is now well into its second half, would change his mind. The
idea
of the imminent demise of baseball has caught on, and those who cling to it (and they are numerous) seem to have their eyes on the runes instead of that leaping corpse. This new folk belief centers on the new folk word “image.” Baseball, the argument goes, has a bad image. The game is too slow and too private, and offers too little action for a society increasingly attached to violence, suddenness, and mass movement. Baseball is cerebral and unemotional; the other, fast-growing professional sports, most notably pro football, are dense, quick, complex, dangerous, and perpetually stimulating. Statistics are then cited, pointing out the two-year decline in baseball attendance, as against the permanent hot-ticket status now enjoyed by football. (Last year, the National Football League played to 87 per cent of capacity in its regular season.) A recent Harris poll is quoted, which showed football supplanting baseball for the first time as the favorite American sport. The poll, which was taken last winter, indicated that football appeals most to high-income groups and to those between thirty-five and forty-nine years old, while baseball still comes first with old people, low-income groups, and Negroes. Bad,
bad
image.

Most of the statisticians and poll-watchers I have talked to have declined my invitation to come along to Shea Stadium to see what’s been happening to the old game this summer, so I must pause here to make my own reading of those same bones and entrails. The decline of baseball at the box office (down from 25,132,209 in 1966 to 23,103,345 last year) has taken place over two seasons that produced only one real pennant race (in the American League in 1967) and that included last summer’s dispiriting Year of the Pitcher—a complicated phenomenon that, for various reasons, seems to have subsided. Baseball has had previous recessions, including a four-year sag from 1950 through 1953, from which it recovered brilliantly. The larger statistics are more to the point. In the nineteen-sixties, the game has been going through the wrenching, loyalty-testing business of expansion—generally with a minimum of tact and common sense—and yet it is clearly holding its own. Average seasonal attendance between 1960 and 1968, during which time the number of games played per season increased 32 per cent, is up exactly 32 per cent over the ten-year average of the nineteen-fifties, and up 55 per cent over the nineteen-forties. As for the poll, it scarcely came as news to me that pro football has a corner on the young, well-heeled, with-it crowd; this is the same audience, to judge by my own eyeball survey, that snaps up all the available tickets to another status event of short duration, the World Series. The old, the poor, and the black might even prefer football, too, if they could afford a pair of season tickets, which is now the only sure way of getting in. It’s hard to see how any of this constitutes a menace to the sunshine game. It’s even more difficult to understand why Mr. Harris asked his questions in the first place. Football’s regular season encompasses fourteen weekends—from mid-September to Christmas—whereas baseball starts in April and winds up, a hundred and sixty-two games later, with the new playoffs and the World Series in October. Being forced to pick between them seems exactly like being forced into a choice between a martini and a steak dinner. Most fans, I suspect, enjoy different sports precisely because they
are
different, and if it’s all right with Mr. Harris I’ll take both—pro football (preferably via television, because of the instant replay) for its violence and marvelously convoluted machinery, and baseball (preferably from a seat behind first base) for its clarity, variety, slowly tightening tension, and acute pressure on the individual athlete.

Those who gave up on baseball last winter may have only been watching the carryings-on of the next of kin outside the sickroom door, who went through a screeching, months-long family wrangle sufficient to do in a less hardy patient. In December, the owners suddenly fired the Baseball Commissioner, General William D. Eckert, in what for them has become typical fashion—forcing him to commit executive hara-kiri at a press conference. General Eckert was hired in 1965, apparently because he knew absolutely nothing about baseball and thus would be certain to keep his hand off the tiller; he was fired for the same reason, when it was noticed that the unskippered vessel had drifted toward a bank of nasty-looking reefs. The closest of these, just off the bow, was a threatened players’ strike over the renewal of their pension fund, centering on the allocation of funds from a new fifty-million-dollar television package. The owners’ first offer was rejected by the Players Association by a vote of 491 to 7, and the subsequent delay of any real negotiations made it clear that some owners and executives were preparing for a test of strength when spring training opened and would risk a full strike, and even a season of baseball played by bush-league replacements, on the chance that they could break the Association and discredit its director, Marvin Miller, a professional labor leader, whose name causes some veteran front-office men to sway and clutch their desks. (This fondness for the Carnegie-Gompers era of labor relations is not unusual in the halls of baseball. Last September, American League President Joe Cronin abruptly fired two veteran umpires—Al Salerno and Bill Valentine—who had been trying to form an umpires’ association; Cronin’s move instantly fused the new union and very nearly precipitated an umpires’ strike at the World Series. Disclaiming union-busting, Cronin explained that Salerno and Valentine were “just bad umpires, that’s all.” This case is now in the courts.) Meanwhile, the owners went through an unedifying two-month squabble over the selection of a new Commissioner, finally settling, out of sheer exhaustion, on a compromise temporary choice, Bowie Kuhn, who had been the National League’s attorney.

Mr. Kuhn, a tall, Princeton-educated Wall Street lawyer who has been a devout fan and student of the game, set to work instantly, advising all parties to cool it and forcing a sensible compromise that was signed just as the spring-training camps were opening. His subsequent operations have shown more sure-handedness, intelligence, and courage than have been customarily visible in the Commissioner’s office in recent decades, and it is expected that he will soon be signed to a full four-year contract. As the season began, he stood up to Judge Roy Hofheinz, the Astros’ panjandrum, over a Houston-Montreal player trade that had gone sour when one of the players, Donn Clendenon, refused to play for Houston. Kuhn not only persuaded Hofheinz to accept an alternative, and inferior, player swap but extracted from him a public apology for a bad-tempered attack he had made on the Commissioner’s office. Some weeks later, Kuhn called in Ken Harrelson, the Red Sox’ outfielder and bead-wearer, who had refused to be traded to the Indians, and taught him to love Cleveland. In both of these curious and difficult negotiations, Kuhn was steering away from a major test of the reserve clause—the system that requires a player to deal for his services only with the club that owns his contract. Owners, players, Congress, and the Supreme Court all know that the reserve clause is probably a violation of the antitrust laws, yet its abolition would so surely destroy team identities and year-to-year play (one can imagine two leagues of pickup teams signed up by entrepreneurs, and a David Merrick-Sol Hurok World Series) that all parties maintain an unspoken pact not to push the matter over the brink. Mr. Kuhn will have to work out an acceptable new plan to ease this persistent anomaly—probably some form of fixed recompense to all traded players. His other large problems include the financial losses suffered by the owners of losing teams and exhausted franchises—losses now far too large to be cured, as in the old days, with one swoop of a millionaire’s check-signing arm. This may even require (oxygen to the directors’ room!) a partial profit-sharing among all clubs. Ahead, too, may be an enforced shortening of the present hundred-and-sixty-two-game season—plus playoffs, plus World Series—which is clearly too much for the pitchers’ arms and the fans’ patience. On his record to date, Mr. Kuhn looks to be the kind of Commissioner who will support baseball’s younger executives and thus at last force the game’s Cro-Magnons into common-sense planning and a grudging contemporaneity.

This is baseball’s hundredth anniversary, a centennial marking the Cincinnati Red Stockings’ first professional season, and no innovation in that century has so severely tested its fans as the majors’ latest expansion to twenty-four teams and four six-team divisions. Many veteran followers of the game have told me that they still have difficulty remembering the names of the new clubs or the composition of the madly named “East” and “West” divisions. (For a start, I recommend throwing away one’s Rand McNally and noting that Chicago is in the West in the American League but is officially East in the National.) What these traditionalists mourn will never come again—the time, a decade ago, when we all knew all sixteen big-league teams as well as we knew the faces and tones of voice of those sitting around the family dinner table at Thanksgiving. That began to go when four new chairs had to be squeezed in, and when several sudden divorces and remarriages added a lot of unfamiliar names to the party. Like everyone else, I was at first unhappy about the new divisional setup, but I must confess now that I have entirely changed my mind. The six-team sub-leagues, whose members play against each other eighteen times and against the teams of the other division twelve times, seem to me a perfect substitute for the departed smaller leagues, and I think that in time most fans will become specialists in the players and the standings within their own chosen division. Already the four families have taken on separate identities and interests. The best of them this year, surely, is the National League West, where four famous old teams—the Braves, the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Reds—are locked in a dusty nonstop scrimmage that will probably go right down to the playoffs. The American League East, which includes the World Champion Tigers, the Red Sox, and the Orioles, promised equally well, but the Orioles, whose pitching and hitting have both come around simultaneously, have played the best ball in either league and now own an apparently insurmountable fourteen-game edge. The National League East, which looked to be a private hunting preserve for the Cardinals, has been saved by the Cards’ early bumbling and by the electrifying apotheosis of the Cubs and the Mets. Only in the American League West, where Oakland and the Minnesota Twins are conducting their rather stately maneuvers, does the luck of the draw run thin, bunching two expansion teams, the Seattle Pilots and the Kansas City Royals, with the White Sox and the Angels in a miserable heap of losers, and reminding us that this year’s shallower cellars can be just as dank and gloomy as the old abolished dungeons of eighth place.

The highest anxiety about this season centered on the hitters, whose combined efforts last year added up to a batting average of .236 (the worst in history), three hundred and forty shutout games, and a winter of rich reminiscences for most pitchers. Early this spring, Jim Maloney, of the Reds, and Don Wilson, of the Astros, pitched back-to-back no-hitters at Crosley Field, thus repeating a similarly comatose miracle of last summer, but this fearful omen vanished in the cannonade of base hits that has lately been audible on all fronts. At this writing, the averages show nineteen National League and ten American League fulltime players batting over .300, led by Rod Carew’s .370. Six of the Cincinnati Reds’ regulars have a combined average of .326. The leagues’ combined batting averages are up to .249, runs per game stand at 8.29 (the highest since 1962), and so many home runs (1.59 per game, or the best since 1960) are flying out of so many parks that any of a dozen sluggers may wind up with at least forty homers this year. First among the bombardiers is Reggie Jackson, a twenty-three-year-old outfielder with the Oakland Athletics. Jackson is the genuine article—a superior natural left-handed hitter with enormously powerful wrists and shoulders. His startling production of downtowners (forty to date) may bring him within range of Roger Maris’s record by mid-September. It is not quite a coincidence that Maris hit his sixty-one homers in another expansion year, 1961; all pitching staffs have been diluted by the draft that manned the four new clubs, and the batters are happily profiting. The sudden jump in averages is equally attributable to an off-season decision to diminish the size of the strike zone and to pare down the pitcher’s mound from fifteen to ten inches. One must also ask, in a whisper, whether the ball has not been discreetly juiced. The hitting boom this season is somewhat synthetic, then, but baseball has often made such adjustments in the past; the new rulings that handicap the pitchers are an answer to previous changes in the game that helped to tip the balance their way—larger ballparks, larger pitchers, larger infielders’ gloves, night ball, and the slider. No one knows yet whether the balance between hitting and pitching has been truly restored, but the joyful sound of bat on ball is once again loud in the land, and only the most obdurate purist will complain.