The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (26 page)

The flowering of Reggie Jackson is an especially happy sign, for baseball is in acute need of new superstars. A decade or two ago, the majors’ lineup included such all-timers as Musial, DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, Mays, Feller, and Koufax, but now, with the retirement of the Mick, the list of one-man gate attractions is reduced to Willie Mays (now thirty-eight), Bob Gibson, and perhaps Carl Yastrzemski. Just behind them, to be sure, is a long list of remarkable ballplayers—Aaron, McCovey, McLain, Banks, Frank Robinson, Marichal, Richie Allen, Killebrew, Frank Howard, etc.—but none of them quite has the flamboyance that makes national household names. For some years now, baseball has not been signing many of the country’s finest young athletes, who have chosen instead to accept the enormous bonuses available in pro football and basketball. But this problem will end shortly, when these rival sports reach the saturation point in salaries and when a new All-American halfback or center will be unable to draw one more ticket-buyer into a sold-out stadium. From then on, there is no reason to suppose baseball will not attract its full share of future Alcindors and O.J. Simpsons. Their presence may offer some solution to the game’s most nagging current affliction—the half-dozen or so tired franchises where shabby, badly situated ballparks or vapid teams mean perpetually low attendance. Baseball’s upward path is not yet assured, and total attendance this season, though currently up by two and a half million, will still require the customary tonic of some September pennant scrambles to show us that the game is truly healthy and still keeping pace with its own expansion. I am optimistic about this, for the reasons stated and also because the rewarding and frequently riveting nature of the baseball games I have seen around the leagues this summer.

Obeying a pre-season resolution to devote more attention to the young Yankees, whose late push had brought them to a surprising fifth-place finish last September, I paid dutiful calls to the Stadium on several chilly spring evenings. The Yankee attack this year consists largely of quickness on the bases and some opportunistic hitting by a youngster named Bobby Murcer. The team is managed by the estimable Ralph Houk, and Mike Burke, the president, is one of the most intelligent young executives now in baseball, but the players on the field often look less palpable than the stalking, pin-striped specters of a hundred departed Bombers. Lately, the management has tried to keep Stadium fans awake by offering to play any patron’s request on the organ. I did see Murcer, then the league’s runs-batted-in leader, win one early game, when manager Bill Rigney of the Angels mysteriously ordered his hurler, Rudy May, to pitch to him in the ninth with two on, two out, and first base open. Murcer obliged with a game-winning double, thus providing one of the few bright spots in a disastrous spring for the Bronx Bunnies. Murcer, though eager and talented, is not a true fence-buster, and the pressure on him to deliver in countless games in which the Yankees have been trailing has steadily pushed his average down—a sight too painful for me to keep watching.

My first visits to Shea Stadium were of the same dispiriting nature—an early, low-hit squeaker against the Reds, when the same old Mets came apart in the ninth (two hits, an error, and a wild pitch) and lost by 3–0, and a mid-May game against Atlanta, when three fast balls aimed by the Mets’ skinny, hardthrowing rookie, Gary Gentry, were redirected by Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Tillman into the distant bullpens, thus providing all the runs necessary for a 4–3 Braves victory. I was not present the following night, when the Mets astonished themselves. Hitless through the sixth against Phil Niekro, they erupted for eight runs in the eighth inning, climaxed by Cleon Jones’s grand-slammer, to win over Atlanta 9–3. I hurried right back the next afternoon, and my subsequent delightful hours with the Mets this year are perhaps best summarized in a game diary I began keeping at that time:

Thursday, May 15:
Beautiful afternoon, beautiful game. Senior Citizens’ Day at Shea, but place jam-packed with kids. Attendance: 32,130. National Pastime looks rosy, but what about schools? Hank Aaron, quickest wrists in West, wafts two (Nos. 516, 517 lifetime), and Metsies dead, down 6–2 in 7th. Metsies
not
dead. Four singles, wild pitch makes it 6–5 in 8th. Optimist fans screeching. Bud Harrelson singles, bottom 9th, Grote plunked by pitch, Agee sacrifices them along. Intentional pass loads hassocks.
Everybody
screeching. Harrelson forced at plate. Cleon Jones up, currently batting .390. (.390? Yep, .390.) Rips one—
pow!
—to right, but triumph denied as Millan, Braves’ 2B, climbs invisible ladder, turns midair, & gloves pill backhand. Sudden silence. Damn!

May 30–June 1:
Mets sweep Giants 3 games while I waste Memorial Day weekend in country. Bad planning.

June 3, night:
Mets’ 6th straight. Pass .500, take 2nd place, as Seaver 3-hits Dodgers, 5–2. First hit for good guys is Kranepool’s homer in 5th; frequent recent habit with Mets. Kranepool
another
HR in 6th. Must revise Kranepool estimate; good old Eddie! Curious impression: Mets resemble vets, while young Dodgers (Sudakis, Sizemore, Grabarkewitz, etc.) are kiddie corps. What’s going on here?

June 4, night:
Exhausted. Mets win, 1–0, in dawn’s early light. 15 innings. Sweep of Giants
and
Dodgers, History made. DiLauro, elderly Met rookie hurler, lucky in early going, then implacable. Mets always look lucky these days; sign of good team. L.A. puts 12 runners on base in extra inns., scores none. Mets unflappable. Save game with incredible play in top of 15th—Al Weis, Mets’ 2B, reverses gears, grabs deflected drive off pitcher’s glove, throws same instant, and nails L.A. base-runner at plate. Still don’t believe it. Mets win on anticlimax: Dodgers’ W. Davis lopes in for Garrett’s easy single, gives it the old hotdog one-hand scoop—and misses. Ball rolls to CF fence & Agee scores easily all way from first. Hoo-haw. Davis looks for place to hide. Kind of game Mets used to lose.

June 15:
Mets away, knocking ’em dead in West. Have just learned why Cleon Jones, Our Boy, throws left but bats right. As lad, played in Mobile sandlot with tiny right field; poke over RF wall counted as out, so Cleon switched to starboard side. Sensible. Cleon played baseball, football with T. Agee, also Our Boy, on same Mobile high-school team. Mobile High first Met farm.

June 22:
Sunday doubleheader. Cards. Sunshine. Mets break own record for largest ’69 crowd: 55,862. (Leagues break own record for largest Sunday crowds ever: 394,008 paid.) Mets look cool, loose, rich—like old Yanks. Manager Hodges a genius. In opener, Gary Gentry shackles Cards as Mets romp, 5–1. (Gentry third straight excellent rookie hurler—Koosman last yr., Seaver yr. before. Wait till NL sees new phenom hurlers. J. Matlack, J. Bibby, now ripening on Met farms! They say Bibby looks exactly like Don Newcombe.)
*
Mets rooters show nouveau-riche side: wildly cheer poor Swoboda, hapless Met flychaser, as he fans 5 times. Second game very tight— Koosman vs. Cards’ Torrez in scoreless duel—but I am distracted by small boy, aged 10 maybe, in next box, who is intent on setting new two-game Eastern Flyweight stuffing record. Order of consumption: 1 pizza, 1 hot dog, 1 container popcorn, 1 Coke, 1/2 bg. peanuts, 1 Coke, 1 ice cream. No more hot dogs, so settles for 2nd pizza. Asks Pop for French fries. Mets’ Boswell doubles in 5th, after 17 straight Met singles today (new record?), but still no score. Boy’s dad, worn out by entreaties, leaves seat in search of French fries, thus misses Harrelson triple, Agee double that win game in 7th. Dad returns with Fr. frs., loses temper. Cries, “I knew it! The only G.-d. Fr. frs. were way the h. over behind third base!” Is placated when Rod Gaspar makes great peg in 8th to nail Brock at plate & save 1–0 nightcap. Brilliant baseball. Day to remember.

That same week, I flew north to visit the Expos, a newborn team that has found a happy home in Montreal and in the cellar of the National League East. (Proper baseball-watching now requires field trips, for the inflated schedule means that almost half the season has gone by before all the teams have paraded into one’s home park.) I arrived at Jarry Park, a handsome little field that much resembles a country fairground, just in time to watch the Cardinals bat around in the fifth, in the first game of a twi-nighter. Bob Gibson was pitching, so I was disheartened for the home crowd, until I noticed that it didn’t seem to mind much. The unroofed stands were packed, and the locals cheered politely for every Expo pop fly and booed every strike called against their team. Though slightly bush, these are real fans, for they have turned out through thick and (mostly) thin, and the whole town is talking baseball. Attendance actually went
up
during a recent twenty-game losing streak, because everybody wanted to be there the day it ended. Montreal is relentlessly bilingual, and as the Cards went on piling up runs that evening I began my first lesson, assisted by the announcer and the scoreboard, in baseball French. A long parade of
lanceurs
trudged to
le monticule
for the Expos before the first game of the doubleheader (
le premier programme double disputé au crepuscule par les Expos
) ended, with the Cards winning 8–1.

The second
partie
started just as dishearteningly, with the visitors scoring three
points
on three
coups sûrs
in the first, but matters improved electrifyingly in the second, when the Expos pulled off a triple play (line drive to Bob Bailey,
au premier but
, who stepped on the bag to double up an occupant Cardinal and then flipped to
l’arrêt-court
, Bobby Wine, who beat the other base-runner to second). It was the first triple play I had ever seen, in any language. The Expos tied it up in the third, on back-to-back (
dos-à-dos?
) homers (
circuits
) by Ron Fairly and Rusty Staub, as the scoreboard put up “
VAS-Y
!” and “
IL NOUS FAUT UNE VICTOIRE!
” Staub (a former Astro) and Mack Jones (a former Brave) are the resident gods in Montreal, the latter because he hit a homer and a triple during the Expos’ victory in their opening home game in April, still a burning date in these fans’ uncrowded memories. The nightcap was still tied in the seventh, and when the Expos put two men on base a tomblike silence descended on the crowd. Puzzled, I asked my neighbor what was going on, and he said, “They know that if we don’t score now, we’ll lose it.” I understood, suddenly remembering what it had been like to be a Mets fan in the lighthearted, hopeless old days at the Polo Grounds. He was right, too; the Expos didn’t score, and the Cards racked up five runs in the last two innings. When the
gérant
, Gene Mauch, came out to relieve his willing but exhausted young starter, Mike Wegener, he got the
framboise
from the fans. Mauch didn’t mind; he used to manage the Phillies, which is the perfect prep school for his current post.

There were fewer fans at Jarry Park the next afternoon, which was too bad, because the absentees missed an Expos win. The Cards scored five early runs, but then fell into the baffling torpor that has gripped them so often this year, and lost it on bad relief pitching. Staub and Ron Fairly, the old Dodger
voltigeur
, had three hits apiece, and reliever Dan McGinn, a
gaucher
, got the 8–6 win with seven innings of peerless sinker-ball (I give up) pitching, and I came away happy.
La victoire
, in Montreal, is rare but sweet.

That home-and-home series waged by the Cubs and Mets last month, and won by the Mets, four games to two, is too recent and vivid in memory to require much recapitulation here, except perhaps to recall the opener at Shea, which was in all respects the first truly crucial game of the Mets’ eight-year history. Five games back of the Cubs (three in the more significant “lost” column), they had to gain some ground while simultaneously answering for themselves the question that their old friends were asking: “Are the Mets for
real?
” If this means “Are the Mets real pennant threats?” the answer is probably still no. With Seaver on tap, there probably will be no long losing streaks, but Koosman, Gentry, and the bullpen were frightfully battered by the Astros in a doubleheader last week. Any further relapse to the Polo Grounds days, in view of the Mets’ continuing lack of true muscle at the plate, may still make the last weeks of their schedule painful. In other respects, this has been a season in which every good hope was realized. Bud Harrelson’s restored knee, Al Weis’s useful glove, rookie Wayne Garrett’s surprising bat have contributed to a respectable infield. The young pitching arms have matured, and Cleon Jones has been up among the league’s batting leaders all year. Best of all, perhaps, has been the dashing performance of Tommie Agee in center and as lead-off man—a renaissance that has finally justified the much criticized trade that brought him here last year. (I’ll bet that a lot of local Little Leaguers have begun imitating Agee’s odd batting mannerism—a tiny kick of the left leg that makes him look like a house guest secretly discouraging the family terrier.) The Mets even have a bench this year, at last permitting Manager Hodges to do some useful platooning. Hodges’ instruction has been subtle and superior; the Mets play fine baseball and are no longer surprised at anything they do.

What they did in that first Cubs game will be remembered for months, and maybe years, by all 55,096 of us who were there that afternoon. Jerry Koosman and Ferguson Jenkins, the towering Cubbie right-hander (and the only pitcher I have ever seen who runs to the mound to start his warmups each inning), had at each other in a flurry of early strikeouts, with the Cubs persistently threatening and just failing to score in the first five innings. The Mets’ first hit was a homer in the fifth—a high fly by Kranepool that barely slipped over the wall in right center. Ernie Banks hit an identical miniblast to the opposite side in the sixth, and the Cubs added one more run in each of the next two innings—the last on a real homer by Jim Hickman, an unsentimental ex-Met. (My own sentiments, hopelessly home-towny, did not entirely keep me from enjoying the Cubs—a vastly more experienced and dangerous-looking team than the Mets. They are worth watching for Ernie Banks alone, the nearly legendary, skinny-necked, and exuberant thirty-eight-year-old first baseman, who is so well loved in Chicago that an alderman there once proposed the erection of a gigantic statue of him to replace the city’s celebrated fifty-foot Picasso creature. If Manager Durocher can growl and connive these Cubs to a pennant, he will reward a mighty army of North Side bleacherites who are at least as vehement and deserving as the Mets’ “Go!” shouters.) So we came down to the bottom of the ninth, with the Mets behind 3–1 and still owning but one hit. No one, absolutely no one, made a move toward the exits. Here, at once, came the necessary piece of luck—a shallow pop by pinch-hitter Ken Boswell that Cub center fielder Don Young lost in the sun for an instant. It dropped in for a double. Agee fouled out, but Donn Clendenon, pinch-hitting, sent Young way back with a long, high drive; Young caught it but slammed into the center-field wall at the same instant, and the ball was banged loose. Cleon up; runners at second and third, and an enormous, pleading din from the stands. He cracked the second pitch to left field, for the third double of the inning, tying up the game. Durocher, thinking hard, ordered the next man walked, and both runners then moved up on an infield out. Reconferring with Jenkins on the mound, Leo ordered outside curves for Kranepool, the next hitter. Eddie took one for a ball, another for a strike, and swung and missed on the next. The last pitch was away, too, but Kranepool, going with it, flicked the ball in a little curving loop that landed it just beyond the shortstop—not much of a hit, but good enough.