The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (27 page)

The rest of those games—Tom Seaver’s beautiful near-no-hitter suddenly snipped off by that Qualls single in the ninth, the Cubs’ two successive wins, those raucous and admirable banner-wavers in the Wrigley field bleachers, Tommie Agee crashing so many first pitches, and Al Weis’s unexpected homers in the last two Mets victories—were equally notable for the sight of so many men on the streets here making their afternoon rounds with transistor radios against their ears. No one had seen that kind of midsummer fever in the city since the old Giants-Dodgers bloodlettings, fifteen or twenty years back. One of those afternoons, hurrying back to my office TV set, I suddenly wondered what Mr. Harris’s poll-takers were doing just then.

I got away for two more grandmothers’ funerals—the first at Fenway Park, the Taj Mahal of New England, to watch the Red Sox and the Tigers. The Sox this year have been bashing a lot of homers, but they have also had injury trouble, pitching trouble, catching trouble, fielding trouble, and Baltimore trouble. They stayed close to the Orioles until the weekend of June 13, when the Athletics destroyed them, racking up thirty-eight runs and forty-eight hits in three games, during which Reggie Jackson hit four homers and batted in fifteen runs. Despite all, the Beantown fans are flocking into the little green ballyard at a rate that may equal last year’s record Boston attendance of 1,940,788. My visit was on a weekday afternoon, but even standing room was sold out half an hour before game time. On this day, the park most resembled a huge pet shop—a place of endless squeakings, flutterings, yelpings, hoppings, feedings, and scatterings as hundreds upon hundreds of kids shrieked and piped during their long afternoon sociable. The average age of the fans looked to be about twelve, and the Red Sox and the Tigers, successive pennant-winners the past two years, responded by playing a hilariously bad game that looked like a matchup between two day-camp nines. There were five throwing errors, two of them by Boston center fielder Reggie Smith, whose arm is as powerful and just about as random as a MIRV missile. Eventually, the Tigers took it, 6–5, and both teams trooped embarrassedly into the clubhouses for late classes with their managers.

Baltimore, my last stop, has the opposite kind of trouble—a ball team that can do no wrong this year, and a shortage of ticket-buyers. Attendance at Memorial Stadium is running at about the same pace as last year, when the club wound up with a $186,460 deficit; the park has a capacity of fifty-two thousand, but it has never once been filled in a regular-season game. Baltimoreans do care about the Orioles, but their curious affair is mostly conducted at long distance, by radio and television; whenever Manager Earl Weaver yanks a pitcher or decides to rest Frank Robinson for a day, the stadium switchboard is flooded with inquiries, complaints, and counter-advice. I heard a lot of baseball talk downtown, but most of it was centered on the autumn playoffs, which everyone thinks the Orioles will lose. Two other local champs, the football Colts and the basketball Bullets, fell on their faces in postseason tournaments this year, and the Orioles’ success fills their townsmen’s hearts with despair.

The Orioles have it all—the two Robinsons, Paul Blair, Boog Powell, a solid infield, and a pitching staff good enough to hold the fort until the artillery is unlimbered; Dave McNally’s pitching record is now 15–0, but he has been taken off the hook seven times by late rallies. Powell, Blair, and Frank Robinson have seventy-three homers to date. I turned up to watch this formidable equipage in a twi-night doubleheader against the Red Sox, then trailing by thirteen and a half games. The promised mismatch turned out just the other way around, as so often happens in this most unpredictable of all sports; the Bosox swept the bill, 7–4 and 12–3, banging out a record (against Baltimore pitching) twenty-two hits in the nightcap. Yastrzemski, who is swinging only for the fences this year, had a pair of homers; Mike Andrews, the dandy Boston second baseman, had five hits and a walk in the second game; and Reggie Smith, enjoying the longest hot streak of any American League batter this year, managed two walks, four singles, two doubles, and one home run in eleven trips to the plate. Sitting there in the stands, a happy neutralist surrounded by unhappy locals, I tried to decide which kind of baseball I like best—the anxious involvement of those taut miracles at Shea Stadium; the gentle, comical back-country beginnings in Montreal; or this long banging of bats and the satisfying humiliation of a better team. Then I remembered that I didn’t have to choose, for all these are parts of the feast that the old game can still bring us. I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ball game: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.

*
Quite a wait. Matlack and Bibby have yet to attain the majors.

—
October 1969

T
HE SERIES AND THE
season are over—four days done at this writing—and the Mets are still Champions of the World. Below midtown office windows, scraps and streamers of torn paper still litter the surrounding rooftops, sometimes rising and rearranging themselves in an autumn breeze. I just looked out, and they’re still there. It’s still true. The Mets won the National League’s Eastern divisional title, and won it easily; they won the playoffs, beating the Atlanta Braves in three straight; they took the World Series—one of the finest Series of all time—beating the Orioles in five games. The Mets. The New York
Mets?
… This kind of disbelief, this surrendering to the idea of a plain miracle, is tempting but derogatory. If in the end we remember only a marvelous, game-saving outfield catch, a key hit dropped in, an enemy batter fanned in the clutch, and then the ridiculous, exalting joy of it all—the smoke bombs going off in the infield, the paper storm coming down and the turf coming up, and the clubhouse baptisms—we will have belittled the makers of this astonishment. To understand the achievement of these Mets, it is necessary to mount an expedition that will push beyond the games themselves, beyond the skill and the luck. The journey will end in failure, for no victorious team is entirely understandable, even to itself, but the attempt must always be made, for winning is the ultimate mystery that gives all sport its meaning. On the night of September 24, when the Mets clinched their divisional title, Manager Gil Hodges sat in his clubhouse office after the game and tried to explain the season. He mentioned good pitching, fine defense, self-reliance, momentum, and a sense of team confidence. The reporters around his desk nodded and made notes, but they all waited for something more. From the locker room next door came a sharp, heady whiff of sloshed champagne and the cries of exultant young athletes. Then someone said, “Gil, how did it all happen? Tell us what it all
proves
.”

Hodges leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and then spread his large hands wide. “Can’t be done,” he said, and he laughed.

Disbelief persists, then, and one can see now that disbelief itself was one of the Mets’ most powerful assets all through the season. Again and again this summer, fans or friends, sitting next to me in the stands at Shea Stadium would fill out their scorecards just before game time, and then turn and shake their heads and say, “There is no way—just
no
way—the Mets can take this team tonight.” I would compare the two lineups and agree. And then, later in the evening or at breakfast the next morning, I would think back on the game—another game won by the Mets, and perhaps another series swept—and find it hard to recall just how they
had
won it, for there was still no way,
no
way, it could have happened. Finally, it began to occur to me that if my friends and I, partisans all, felt like this, then how much more profoundly those other National League teams, deeper in talent and power and reputation than the Mets, must have felt it. For these were still the Mets—the famous and comical losers, ninth-place finishers last year, a team that had built a fortune and a following out of defeat and perversity, a team that had lost seven hundred and thirty-seven games in seven years and had finished a total of two hundred and eighty-eight and a half games away from first place. No way, and yet it happened and went on happening, and the only team, interestingly, that did not disbelieve in the Mets this summer was the Houston Astros, a club born in the same year as the Mets and the owners of a record almost as dismal; the Astros, who also came to competence and pride this summer, won ten out of twelve games from the Mets and were the only rivals to take a season series from them.

The Amazin’s amazed us so often that almost every one of the 2,175,373 fans who saw them at home this year (an attendance record that topped all clubs in both leagues) must be convinced that he was there on that one special afternoon or crucial evening when the Mets won
the
big game that fused them as contenders and future champions. Many claim it was that afternoon of July 8, when the Mets, five games behind the Cubs in the standings and two runs behind the Cubs in the game, came up with ninth-inning pinch doubles by Ken Boswell and Donn Clendenon that were both misplayed by a rookie Chicago center fielder; a tying double by Cleon Jones; and a bloop two-out single by Ed Kranepool that won it. Some think it was the next day, when the Mets’ shining leader, Tom Seaver, came within two outs of a perfect game, shutting out the Cubs, 4–0, and cutting their lead to three. Some hold out for the televised game at Wrigley Field the following week when Al Weis, the weak-hitting spare infielder, bashed his first homer of the year to drive in three runs in a 5–4 victory. Or the next game there, when Weis hit
another
homer and Tommie Agee delivered a lead-off double and a lead-off homer in the first two innings, as the Mets won again. Others remember the doubleheader against San Diego at Shea on August 16 (four-hit shutout by Seaver in the first; winning pinch single by Grote in the nightcap) that started the Mets back from their midsummer nadir, nine and a half games behind. After that day, the team won twelve of its next fourteen games, all against Western teams, and Seaver and Koosman embarked on a joint record of sixteen wins in their last seventeen decisions. My own choice of
the
game is a much earlier wonder—a fifteen-inning, 1–0 bleeder against the Dodgers on the night of June 4. In the top of the fifteenth, with a Dodger on third, Al Weis, playing second base, darted to his left for a hard grounder that was deflected in midflight by pitcher Ron Taylor’s glove; Weis had to leap the other way, to his right, for the carom, but came up with the ball and an instant off-balance throw that nailed the runner at the plate and saved the tie. Moments later, Tommie Agee scored the winning run all the way from first on an error. The victory sustained what came to be an eleven-game winning streak and completed successive series sweeps against the Dodgers and the Giants. Manager Hodges said later that Weis’s double reverse and peg was one of the greatest single infield plays he had ever seen.

What matters here is not the selection of one winning game (there were many others as close and perhaps as important) but the perception of a pattern in them all. Ten separate players, many of them part-timers or pinch-hitters, figure significantly in these brief accounts of seven key games. This happened all year, and in time the Mets began to recognize the pattern as their main source of strength. This is a phenomenon unique in baseball. The Mets were the first team in the history of the game to enter a World Series with only two players (Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee) who had over four hundred official at-bats in the course of the regular season. From the beginning, successful big-league clubs have won with set lineups, which has usually meant sending at least five or six hitters to the plate four or five hundred times a year. The 1967 Cardinals had eight players with more than four hundred ABs; the 1964 Yankees had six with more than
five
hundred. Even Casey Stengel’s famous Yankee platoons of the nineteen-fifties, even those constantly reshuffled castoffs who played for the Mets in their first season presented more stable lineups than the new champions. Hodges’ Irregulars, to be sure, were a creation of pure necessity. Cold bats, injuries, and call-ups to Army Reserve duty required improvisation all through the season, but every substitution seemed to work. Young Wayne Garrett niftily spelled old Ed Charles at third; rookie Bobby Pfeil and backup glove Al Weis filled in for Bud Harrelson and Ken Boswell; Ed Kranepool and Donn Clendenon (who was acquired from Montreal just before the trading deadline in June) together added up to a switch-hitting first baseman who delivered twenty-three home runs; Art Shamsky and Ron Swoboda became a switch-hitting right fielder who hit twenty-three more homers; Rod Gaspar, mostly played as a pair of fast wheels in late innings, led the outfielders in assists, which means enemy runners cut down in key situations. No professional ballplayer likes to sit out even one game, but in time all the Mets, sensing that no one on the bench had actually lost his job, were infected with a guerrilla spirit. Ed Charles, who has played pro ball for eighteen years, talked about it one day near the end of the season. “I’ve never seen it or heard of it before,” Charles said. “Every one of us knew when it was time to pick the other guy up. The bottom of the order, a pinch-hitter, a man who’d just fanned three times—everybody figured, ‘What the hell, what am I waiting for? Do it now, baby, because there’s no big man going to do it for you.’ Give No. 14 a lot of credit.” No. 14 is Gil Hodges.

Other components of the new-Metsian physiology are more traditional. They include:

PITCHING—Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, who appeared and flowered in succession in the past two seasons, are now the best one-two starting pair on any team in the majors. This year’s freshman was Gary Gentry, up from Arizona State (the Notre Dame of college baseball) and only two years in the minors, who won thirteen games and invariably proved obdurate in the tough, close ones. A veteran, Don Cardwell, and two more youngsters, Nolan Ryan and Jim McAndrew, together provided the fourth and fifth starters, and Ron Taylor and Tug McGraw were the stoppers from the bullpen. Ryan throws pure smoke (in the minors he once fanned eighteen batters in seven innings), but there are those who think that McAndrew may be an even better pitcher in the end. Young hurlers’ arms are as delicate as African violets, and Hodges and the Mets’ pitching coach, Rube Walker, stuck to a five-day rotation through the most crowded weekends of the schedule, arriving at September with a pitching staff that was in splendid fettle. Rube has been known to glare at a pitcher whom he finds playing catch on the sidelines without his permission.