The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (30 page)

Commissioner Kuhn, it can be seen, had a difficult second year in office, and should probably be listed as another victim of the legendary sophomore jinx. Some achievements and standoffs must be granted him. A players’ strike was averted through the negotiation of a wide-ranging new three-year contract with the Players Association; the agreement raises minimum salaries and playoff and World Series bonuses, protects players cut during spring training, and establishes new grievance procedures that considerably limit the powers of the Commissioner’s office. Still in abeyance, however, is the biggest issue of all—the reserve clause, which was challenged head-on this year by Curt Flood’s refusal to report to the Phillies after being traded away by the Cardinals, and his subsequent suit against organized baseball. The case was heard in Federal District Court by Judge Irving Ben Cooper, who listened to fifteen sessions of testimony from owners, executives, and players, and eventually found in favor of the defendants; it was agreed by both sides, however, that the real test of baseball’s right to its ancient and unique exemption from the antitrust laws will come during the pending appeal to the Supreme Court. Flood, who is thirty-two, missed a full year at his trade because of his belief that he and his fellow professionals should not be sold and shipped from city to city like crates of oranges, but his sacrifice is still not understood by many of the same megatheriums who were so scandalized by
Ball Four
. When asked about Flood, they shake their heads incredulously and mutter, “How do you
like
that for ingratitude? He was earning ninety thousand a year!”

Outdoors, the news was brighter. Rico Carty, the Braves’ ebullient left fielder, won the National League batting title with a mark of .366—the highest average since Ted Williams’ .388 thirteen years ago. In all, thirty-one hitters finished the year at .300 or better, which suggests that the recent advantage that pitchers have enjoyed over batters has been almost rebalanced. The Yankees came up with an excellent young catcher named Thurman Munson, who hit .302 in his first year, and a new twenty-game winning pitcher in Fritz Peterson. Willie Mays, who will be forty next spring (Willie Mays
forty?
), had a splendid season, batting .291 and hitting twenty-eight homers for the Giants, thus running his lifetime total to 628. Hank Aaron, who will be thirty-seven this winter, batted .298 and hit thirty-eight homers for the Braves, running
his
lifetime total to 592. And Hank Morgenweck, who is thirty-eight, worked behind second base during the National League playoff game in Pittsburgh on October 3, thus running his lifetime total of major-league games umpired to one; this record, of course, is shared by George Grygiel, Fred Blandford, and John Grimsley.

Before we move on to those playoffs and the pleasures of the quick, loud World Series just concluded by the Reds and the Orioles, attention must be paid to the painful collapse of the World Champion Mets. It
was
a collapse, although it didn’t look that way, because the defenders remained in contention with the Pirates and the Cubs until the very last weekend of the season. From June to October, these three clubs gasped and spluttered and thrashed together at or just below the surface of first place in the National League East; whenever one of them managed two or three strokes in succession and seemed on the point of drawing clear, a clutching hand would reach out and pull it down again. Mostly, it was the Pirates who stayed on top, but the ineptitude of all three teams permitted the Cubs to survive one submersion of twelve straight losses without undue damage, and sustained late pennant hopes that were, in every case, richly undeserved. The Pirates’ final 89–73 record was the lowest winning average in the history of the big leagues.

Why the Mets failed to survive even this flabby test, falling seventeen games below their record of last year, is easy to explain but hard to understand. The 1970 Mets encountered many of the accidents and disappointments that befall almost every team in the course of the long season, and their failure to survive them must remind us that last year’s Amazin’s were largely free of injuries and sore arms. They were also a team of extremely limited power and reserves, which kept winning because every man on the squad seemed to come through with a key hit or clutch pitching performance at the precise instant it was needed. This year, one kept seeing the opposite. Cleon Jones, who led the team with a .340 average last year, fell into an epochal early slump that kept him close to the .200 mark until past midseason; no one appeared, from the bench or the farms, to take up this slack. The bullpen, so obdurate last year, was unreliable until mid-September, when it was too late. Jerry Koosman hurt his arm and broke his jaw, and still wound up with a 12–7 record—an admirable performance but less good than last year’s 17–9, when he also missed a month of the action. Gary Gentry and Nolan Ryan were consistently inconsistent. Explanations, excuses … What remains invisible is the weight of success that these young, all-conquering Mets brought with them into this season. So little was expected of these players last year that they could plunge headlong into every key game and series, knowing that they would not be blamed if they fell on their faces. This year, the opposite was true. I doubt whether the Mets were surprised or troubled to find every other club taking dead aim at them in every game, but what must have been much more difficult was the discovery that a second success requires different private resources and reserves from the first. (This is a hard lesson that New York people understand well; it was what made the Mets’ exuberant, astonishing victory last autumn seem somehow heartbreaking, too.) This summer, the Mets suffered so many difficult, late defeats in close games that no one on the team, surely, could have escaped the chilling interior doubt—the doubt that kills—whispering that their courage and brilliance last summer had been an illusion all the time, had been nothing but luck.

Of all the defeats this summer, none was quite so shocking as the loss the team suffered to the Braves in Atlanta on the night of August 15. With Tom Seaver in excellent form on the mound, the Mets led, 2–1, when the Braves, thanks largely to a lucky infield hit by Carty, loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the ninth. With the count one and two on Bob Tillman, Seaver wound and threw a called strike three, but the pitch was a fast ball instead of the curve that Jerry Grote had signaled for, and it sailed right by the catcher and back to the screen. The runner scored from third, and when Grote pegged wildly past Seaver, covering at the plate, the runner from second also came in, and the game was suddenly and horribly gone. That one seemed to go on hurting. It dropped the Mets four games behind the Pirates and made Seaver’s record 17–7; he was to win only one more game the rest of the year, finishing up at 18–12. Of all the Mets’ mysteries, this is the most mysterious. Seaver was not injured or suffering from arm exhaustion, although he did pitch with insufficient rest in the late stages of the race. Throughout September, he made no excuses, except to say that the problem was technical—his left leg was getting too far ahead of his body in his delivery, subtly altering his timing. Yet he looked worse and worse as the season ran out, being hit by humpty-dumpty batters who had never touched him before, and even fielding his position poorly. Tom Seaver is a complicated young man who has enjoyed extraordinary success at his profession, and any tentative explanation of his sudden downfall must also be complicated, beginning with the instant reminder that it was a “downfall” only in comparison with his own past record; his 18–12 mark was below last year’s 25–7, but he still led the league this year with an earned-run average of 2.81 and two hundred and eighty-three strikeouts. And here, perhaps, is a clue. Last year, Seaver came within two outs of pitching a perfect game, that finest of all baseball feats, and during the early part of this season it sometimes looked as if his personal goal, in a career that had quickly brought him almost every other achievement, was to win that game back—to attain, if only once, perfection on the mound. Several times this spring, he came unscathed to the middle innings, only to see a scratchy infield hit trickle through or a bloop fly drop in against him and ruin things. He was visibly angry at such times, kicking the mound and glaring at the base-runner; later, he was curt and haughty with reporters. At about the same time, Seaver began striking out more hitters than ever before. He tied a record by fanning nineteen batters in a game against the Padres, during which he set another all-time mark by striking out ten batters in a row. This is impressive but just possibly fatal. As real fans know, a pitcher who strikes out a great many men in a game is often working at less than his best level; a blend of whiffs, grounders, and flies is more effective, and much easier on the arm. What suggests itself, then, is that, subtly and perhaps unconsciously, Seaver began relying too often on his hummer, his strikeout pitch, to get him out of difficulties in a hard season. This is what happened in Atlanta that night, and it may have gone on happening, even to the point where he imperceptibly altered the natural and beautiful rhythm that had made him almost indomitable. In trying for perfection, he may have suffered the first true defeat of his life.

And yet, and yet … Even down to late September, a reprieve, a tarnished but acceptable second miracle, seemed quite possible for the Mets. The last fourteen days of the schedule offered seven games with Pittsburgh and four with Chicago. The Mets lost the first two games to the Pirates at Shea on September 18 and 19, each by an excruciating one-run margin, and slid into third place, two games behind the Cubs and three and a half back of the leaders. Then, on the twentieth, the largest home crowd of the year—54,806—turned out for the Sunday doubleheader. Long before game time, there were turned-away fans standing three-deep on the roofs of some parked buses behind the visiting-team bullpen in left field; they stood there, craning and hoping, all through the warm late-summer afternoon. They were rewarded with a superb performance by Jerry Koosman in the opener. Tendonitis has robbed Koosman of his old, sweeping fast ball, but he is perhaps more of a pitcher now than ever before. Working resolutely, always around the corners, he served up an assortment of down-breaking curves and changes that set down the first fifteen Pirate batters in order. José Pagan hit a home run to lead off the sixth, but by that time the home side had compiled a modest three runs, and Jerry gave the Pirates only one other hit, winning 4–1. Now! A sweep would put us back in the thick of things. Seaver was opposed by a young pitcher named Fred Cambria, who was in only his second year of organized ball, yet it was Seaver who was instantly in difficulties, giving up singles and loud outs in profusion. Some good luck and a costly Pirate error kept it tied at 2–2 until the sixth, when Tom departed amid a shower of hits and boos—a sound I never expected to hear directed at him—and the score went to 5–2 against the Mets. Stubbornly, almost sullenly, they rallied—a Boswell homer in the sixth, three hits in the seventh—to tie it once more at 5–5, to an enormous storm of shouting, but the effort clearly exhausted them. The visitors’ Willie Stargell hit a homer off McGraw to open the tenth, and a moment or two later Tommy Agee and Rod Gaspar collided in right field, not far from the site of Agee’s second famous catch in the World Series last year, and Gene Alley’s liner rolled all the way to the wall. The Pirates won, 9–5, and the two-year age of wonders came to its end. Official extinction descended a week later, when the Mets dropped three more games in Pittsburgh, all of them by one-run margins. In the seven key games against the Pirates, they had batted into sixteen double plays and stranded no fewer than sixty-six base-runners, which is the mark of an old, old ball team.

The most riveting figures visible on the first day of the National League playoffs between the Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds at Pittsburgh’s new Three Rivers Stadium were neither the home team’s conglomeration of old and young hitters—Roberto Clemente and Manny Sanguillen, Willie Stargell and Rich Hebner, Bill Mazeroski and Bob Robertson—nor even such celebrated Red cannoneers as Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Lee May, and Pete Rose; they were the umpires, the aforementioned Messrs. Morgenweck, Grygiel, Blandford, and Grimsley, who had been hastily summoned up from the minors (and into the Trivia Hall of Fame) to replace the regular six-man National League crew, which had that day (
O tempora!
O Bill Klem!) gone on strike for higher playoff and World Series wages. The American League umps working the Orioles-Twins playoffs in Minnesota were also out. Negotiations between the Umpires Association and the Commissioner’s office had dragged on in a desultory fashion for some weeks, with no more than a couple of thousand dollars separating the two, and it seemed clear that no one had truly expected the issue to be drawn. Thus, it was not until just before game time that the strikers slipped their painted-cardboard sandwich signs (“Major League Umpires on Strike for Wages”) over their uniforms and formed a ragged self-conscious picket line outside the stadium. One of them, Harry Wendelstedt, kept explaining to entering fans that he felt embarrassed about the whole thing. “I’m a professional man,” he said. “I belong out on that ballfield, not here looking like a clown.” Whatever irresolution might have been indicated by this remark was probably dispersed when Warren Giles, the former president of the National League, shook hands with Wendelstedt on entering the park and then turned to a nearby special cop and said, “Move ’em away from here—about a mile and a half away.” The umps stood fast, and during the afternoon their number increased as more of their colleagues arrived from around the country and joined the line.

Inside, and almost incidentally, the ball game went on—fortunately, without any especially difficult calls to challenge the bush-league bluecoats. The matchup brought together teams both known for their good hitters and their aching pitchers. Both had compiled a team average of .270; the Reds had led the league in homers, the Pirates in hits; throughout the season, both had been forced to rely heavily on bullpen veterans and newly called-up young fireballers to help out a corps of starting pitchers who sometimes seemed to be made of blown glass. Expecting a bombardment, we were given, of course, a pitching duel—a languid Indian-summer afternoon of pop fouls and infield outs, only occasionally vivified when the starters, Gary Nolan for the Reds and Dock Ellis for the Pirates, worked out of mild jams. I had plenty of time to study the new ballpark, which is situated just across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh’s downtown Golden Triangle, and to wonder how ballplayers nowadays can remember which town they are playing in as they look up at the same tiered, brightly painted circles of seats that, rising above fields of fake grass, identically and anonymously surround them in so many big-league cities. More and more, these stadia remind one of motels or airports in their perfect and dreary usefulness; they are no longer parks but machines for sports. In time, though, I found the difference here—an immense glassed-in dining room and bar called the Allegheny Club, which occupies much of the third and fourth tiers beyond first base at Three Rivers Stadium, permitting affluent locals (who may also lease private boxes, at a price of $38,000 for five years) to take their baseball à la carte. Pittsburgh has six chandeliers in right field. It also, on this particular day, had some twenty thousand bright orange empty seats in upper center field—an embarrassing reminder that these Championship Series, as the postseason playoffs are officially known, have not yet won the fealty of the fans. I was aroused from these reveries by the first loud, sharp noise of the day as Ty Cline, a Cincinnati pinch-hitter, led off the tenth inning with a triple past Clemente in right field; a moment or two later, he trotted in with the first run of the game, and then Lee May drove in two more with a double to left, and the Reds won it, 3–0.