The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (51 page)

It was a fatal move. The exhausted Dazzler [Dizzy Trout] had nothing left—even in the dark shadows of Shibe Park.… Next came the troublesome Estalella, always a thorn in the Tiger paw.… Roberto and Diz battled to a full count and then, swinging late in the murky dusk, the Cuban sliced a sharp line drive to the right-field corner. Cullenbine, shading center field for the righthanded batter, never had a chance as Smith raced around to score the winning run and wrap up the “longest game” in baseball history after forty innings of play.

Two days later, whatever justice there was for the Tigers came when Leslie Mueller defeated the Athletics 1–0 in a five-inning game, while allowing only two hits.

On a Saturday morning late last May, Bert Gordon and Don Shapiro drove to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport to meet Max Lapides, who was returning from Chicago to attend his first Tiger game of the year with his old friends. Max’s wife and their two young daughters were staying in their Detroit home, in the suburban Birmingham section, until the end of the school year, so Max’s exile was still leavened by weekend paroles. On the way to the airport, Bert and Don considered the awful possibility that Max might someday be converted to the White Sox, but the subject died of unlikelihood, and in time the two began comparing some Tiger managers. Red Rolfe (1949–52), it was agreed, had been decent; Fred Hutchinson (1952–54) had been sound but touched with temper; Charlie Dressen (1963–66) had been deep in knowledge but past his prime. Surprisingly, the vote for the best manager since Mickey Cochrane (1934–38) went to the incumbent, Billy Martin, who had taken an aged Tiger team into the playoffs the previous fall, and who had the same seniors currently, if barely, at the top of their division again. “He’s winning ball games,” said Don, “and that’s absolutely all that counts.”

“Plus he’s exciting,” said Bert. “This is the first time since I was eleven years old that you see a Tiger base runner go from second to third on a fly ball.”

Another passenger inquired about Mayo Smith, the pilot who brought the Tigers to within one game of a pennant in 1967, and who won it all the following year. There was a painful pause, and then Don Shapiro, the resident strategist, said, “Listen, there were times when Mayo Smith was managing, and he would call in somebody from the bullpen, and I would know who he had chosen and I knew that he was going to be wrong. I knew the game was down the drain, and so did everybody else in the ball park. Why, that sense of impending disaster was so strong you could almost chart it. It was palpable. And then the disaster would happen. Mayo Smith absolutely lacked that mystical foreknowledge of baseball events, and as a manager you
have
to have that. Oh, this man was a monkey on my back for so long, and the worst part of it was that everybody loved Mayo Smith, because he was such a nice guy and such a charming guy. Mayo the nice poker companion, Mayo the great drinking companion—nobody had anything bad to say about him, and it was all absolutely true except for one thing: the man was overwhelmingly inept. Oh, boy, I hated that man, and I hated myself for hating him. I probably would have
killed
him if I’d run into him in ’67 after he blew the pennant for us.” The Tigers lost a famous three-way race on the last day of the 1967 season, when the Red Sox won the pennant by beating the Minnesota Twins while the Tigers lost the second game of a doubleheader to the California Angels at home. “That last game, he did everything wrong,” Don went on. “He let our pitcher stay in, and I was standing up on my seat screaming, ‘Take him out! Take him out!’ I was blind with rage. I can still see what happened next—that pitch coming in to the Angels’ Fregosi, and Fregosi getting ready to hit it—and I can see the ball going through the hole between short and third, and I can see the man coming around third to put them ahead. And then, like everybody else in this town, I can still see Dick McAuliffe, in the ninth, hitting into only his second double play of the entire season, to end it all. Listen, I’m like a dying man; I can see that whole game flashing before my eyes. It was like a scene out of Fellini, because right in back of me this guy is sitting there and listening to a
football
game—it was a Sunday, and football was on—and his radio is blaring football as the runner is rounding third base, and Mayo Smith is standing there, riveted to that post of his, holding up the dugout.” He shook his head and laughed hollowly. “That was the day I came home and went down in the basement and broke all our flowerpots.”

Bert, from the front seat, said, “Think about something happier. Think about 1968.”

“The trouble with you is you don’t suffer enough,” Don said.

“I don’t
suffer
enough!” said Bert, shouting with laughter. “I’m Jewish, I’m short, I’m fat, I’m poor, I’m ugly—what else do you want me to suffer?”

“That’s all true,” Don said, looking at his friend affectionately. “A man like you probably can’t bear the necessary onus of suffering. After all, this isn’t just a game of ours. It isn’t just a preoccupation. It isn’t an obsession. It’s a—well, it’s a—”

They said it together: “It’s an obsession.”

At the airport, Max was met and hugged, and the car aimed back toward the ball park. Suddenly, it was a party.

“Everything is fine, I guess,” Max said. “Only, I miss my friends, now I’m with them again. I like this so much I may do it every week. But things are not fine back there, really. Listen, the other night when we beat the Yanks I turned on the TV in Chicago and the guy forgot to give the Tigers’ score. He absolutely forgot. I couldn’t get to sleep until four in the morning. Nobody knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, ‘N.Y. at Detroit (n.).’ I mean, doesn’t a man have a Constitutional right to the box scores?” He said that he was sometimes able to pick up Ernie Harwell on his car radio. “It only happens a little bit outside the city, on the north side,” he added. “Sometimes it’s only a snatch of the game broadcast, with a lot of static, but I can always tell from Ernie’s voice how we’re doing. Anyway, that’s how come we bought the new house in Highland Park—so I can get the broadcasts and be closer to drive to all the Tiger games in Milwaukee. Fortunately, my wife likes the area.”

At the ball park, the three friends sat in their accustomed place, in Section 24, between first and home; Tiger Stadium is an ancient, squared-off green pleasance, and the view was splendid. None of the three bought scorecards. (“The thing to do,” Bert said, “is
remember.”
) The World Champion Oakland A’s, who had barely beaten out the Tigers in a violent five-game playoff the previous fall, were the opposition, and a modest but enthusiastic audience was filling up the nearby seats. Don Shapiro has a dark, vivid face—a downturned mustache, some lines of pain, some lines of hope—and he now looked about with satisfaction and clapped his hands. “Well!” he said. “Well, well. What could be nicer than this? I mean that. I really mean it. I’m supremely happy. I like this park even better than my Eames chair.” He caught sight of the Oakland starting pitcher, Ken Holtzman, warming up, and his face fell.
“Uh
-oh,” he said. “A very tough man, and now I’ve got some ethnic problems, too. A Jewish pitcher against our guys.”

The game was a quiet, almost eventless affair for the first few innings, but Don was a restless spectator, twisting and bending in his seat, grimacing, groaning occasionally, leaping up for almost every enemy out. In the fifth, Gene Tenace, the Oakland first baseman, hit a home run into the left-field stands, and Shapiro fell back into his seat. He stared at the concrete floor in silence. “God damn it,” he muttered at last. “This is
serious.”
The A’s added two more runs off the Detroit starter, Woodie Fryman, but in the bottom half the Tigers put together two singles, a walk, and a third single, by Bill Freehan, the Detroit catcher, to tie it up, and the party was delighted.

“That was a good little rally,” Max said. “Just right. Lots of running, and we have a tie.”

“Yes, I don’t like that
one
big blow,” Bert said.

Don, watching the game and his emotions simultaneously, announced, “I’m elated. I’m back to my original state of anxiety. But listen, Max, we’re lucky they decided to pitch to Freehan.”

“Yes,” Max said. “First of all, I would walk him. But then I absolutely don’t throw him any kind of up pitch like that.”

Jim Northrup, the Tiger right fielder, came up to the plate in the sixth, and Bert said, “I still don’t see why this guy doesn’t hit about .380.”

“We’ve been saying that for ten years,” Don said.

Northrup flied out, and Rodriguez stood in. Bert cried, “Au-reeli-
oh!”

“See, here’s another one,” Max said. “This guy hit nineteen homers one year, and everybody called him a home-run hitter. They’ve been waiting ever since.”

“He hit
nineteen?”
said Bert.

“Yes, for the Angels.”

“Not for us, of course.”

“Aurelio has a lazy bat,” Don said. “He doesn’t whip that bat.”

“Frank Boiling had a lazy bat, too,” Max said.

“You can’t remember Milt Boiling?” Bert said.

Rodriguez hit a two-run home run to left, and Max, waving his arms and laughing, cried, “Exactly what I said! He’s a great home-run hitter. I always knew it. Anyway, Williams should have taken out Holtzman. The man was dying out there—anybody could see it.”

In the eighth, however, the Oakland designated hitter, Deron Johnson, jumped on a pitch by a Detroit reliever named Tom Timmerman and drove it high into the left-field seats. The game was tied. There was an enormous silence, and Don Shapiro, holding his head, stood up and turned his back on the field. “I knew it,” he said. “I
knew
it!” He swayed slightly. “Oh, listen to that damned organ, will you? They’re playing funeral selections.” (Another bitter cause: In 1966, Don and Max directed a barrage of letters at the Tigers’ general manager, Jim Campbell, protesting the installation of an organ at the stadium. Max wrote, “Baseball games are baseball games, and vesper services are vesper services.” Don wrote, “Who in hell wants to hear ‘Funiculi Funicula’ in the middle of a Tiger rally?” Max wrote, “The object of a ball game for the fan is not to be entertained. It is to win.” The organ was not removed.)

Rich Reese, leading off the bottom of the eighth, was walked, and hopes revived noisily. Dick Sharon stood in, and Max said, “He should bunt, but we have the worst bunting team in history.”

“It’s an absolute must-bunt situation,” Don agreed. Last year, Don mailed a lengthy letter to Billy Martin outlining a new defense for the must-bunt, which involved sending the second baseman to charge the plate on the right side of the diamond, instead of the traditional move by the first baseman. Don’s plan quoted from his correspondence with the Michigan State baseball coach, Danny Litwhiler, who had devised the new play. No answer came from Martin, but his response, relayed later to Don, was “I don’t go for that funny stuff.”

Here, in any case, Sharon did bunt, and was safe when first baseman Tenace muffed the ball. A moment later, Northrup smacked a triple for the go-ahead runs—good enough, it turned out, for the game. The Tigers won, 8–5, and Don, on his feet and clapping, had brightened perceptibly. “I was never worried for an instant,” he said. A moment later, he added, “Well, that’s a lie. My trouble is I tend to view these games viscerally. Baseball gives me that endogenous epinephrine. I’m hooked on my own adrenaline.”

Detroit in the nineteen-thirties had few visible civic or economic virtues, but it just may have been the best baseball town in the country. The Tigers—a dangerous and contentious team built around the power hitting of the enormous Hank Greenberg, and around Charlie Gehringer and Mickey Cochrane and, later, Rudy York, and around the pitching of Schoolboy Rowe, Tommy Bridges, and, later, Bobo Newsom—did not win nearly as often as the lordly Yankees, but victory, when it came, was treasured. There was a pennant in 1934 (the first since 1909), a championship in 1935 (the first ever for Detroit), and another pennant in 1940. At his home on Tuxedo Avenue, young Don Shapiro, listening to games over Station WWJ in the afternoon, tried to work magic spells to make the Tigers win: twenty-eight baby steps across his bedroom without losing his balance could bring Gehringer a hit (not quite pure magic, since Gehringer’s batting average between 1933 and 1940 was .336). The Ernie Harwell of those Piltdown days was Ty Tyson, for Mobil Oil and “The Sign of the Flying Red … Horse!,” who called Greenberg “Hankus-Pankus” and Schoolboy Rowe “Schoolhouse” or “Schoolie.” (“For a pitcher, Schoolie is sure pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down.”) Whenever they could, Don and Bert and their friends took the Trumbull Avenue streetcar at noontime to the ball park, then called Navin Field, and stood beside an iron gate on the corner of National Street, behind home plate. In time, the gate rolled up, to a great clattering of chains, and a Tigers’ supervisor would conduct a mini-shape-up (“You and you and you and
you
over there”) for the job of assistant ushers. The designees took up their posts in the outer reaches of the upper deck, beyond the uniformed regulars, and returned batting-practice fly balls and dusted seats and, between times, eyed the Olympians on the field: not just Greenberg and Gehringer and Rowe but the others—Marv Owen and Gee Walker and Elon Hogsett and Pete Fox, and batboy Whitey Willis and trainer Denny Carroll and groundskeeper Neil Conway. A lot of the players lived in apartment houses out on Chicago and Dexter Boulevards, or Boston and Dexter, and if you walked out there and waited long enough, you could sometimes pick up an autograph. The game and the players must have seemed very near in those days. Once, in 1936, when Don Shapiro was twelve years old, he played catch with Tiger first baseman Jack Burns, who split Don’s left thumb with a throw; the wonderful stigma—a white cicatrix on the first knuckle—is still visible.

Bert Gordon’s father, a rabbi, was a passionate fan who sometimes got his tickets through the Detroit Council of Churches, which provided free seats for the clergy. “I’d be sitting beside him at the park, and I’d say ‘Father—’ and the whole section would turn around,” Bert said recently. He laughed, and went on, “My father was a city man—like all our fathers, I guess. He never went fishing, or anything. It was baseball that was the bond between us. Baseball was the whole thing. I don’t think anybody can imagine the terrific importance of Hank Greenberg to the whole Jewish community then. He was a god, a true folk hero. That made baseball acceptable to our parents, so for once they didn’t mind if we took a little time off from the big process of getting into college. And then, of course, Hank Greenberg was so big and so handsome—a handsome giant. Plus he didn’t change his name. I can remember Rosh Hashanah, or some day like that, in 1938, when Hank was going after Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in a season. Of course, nobody in the synagogue could go near a radio that day, but somebody came in late from the parking lot with a report about the game, and the news went through the congregation like a
wind.”