The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (56 page)

Something better began almost at once—some rabbit-quick infield plays by Bud Harrelson; some darting, quite uncharacteristic fastballs by Jerry Koosman, who said later that the dry, cold air made it impossible for him to grip the ball properly for his meal-ticket pitch, the curve. Jerry also solved the Campaneris problem, with a terrific double-leaning, Warren Spahn pick-off move in the third inning which caught Dagoberto a full eight feet off the bag. Meanwhile, Cleon Jones, who eats up Vida Blue pitches like M & Ms, had whanged a double to the left-field fence and scored on a little eye-hit by John Milner. Blizzards of torn-up paper took wing, rising to vast heights in the windy dark, to the accompaniment of deep, mittened sounds of joy. The chilly air and the pleasure and closeness of the game kept us shivering in our serapes and ski masks and steamer rugs and quilts, and in time there were bits of paper in everybody’s hair, on everybody’s shoulders. The wind rushed up out of the entrance tunnels, lifting the plastic bunting and making the homemade fan banners on the railings flap like laundry, and sometimes, when the cheering faded for a moment, you could hear the stadium itself groaning and creaking like a great ship in the night.

Koosman threw a shutout, it turned out, winning by a bare 2–0, and there were swift plays afield to keep us shouting and pointing—Felix Millan running at full speed away from the plate and pulling down a shallow fly at the last instant between two inrushing outfielders; a heart-stopping leap and catch by Joe Rudi as he crashed into the left-field barrier; Bud Harrelson making wonderful stops and throws all over his spacious rangeland. Once, he robbed Reggie Jackson with an effortless scoop and force-play toss from directly behind second base; Reggie stopped dead in the base path and stared at him incredulously: What are you doing over
there,
man? Then McGraw came in and twice put on the tying runs with walks, and twice survived rifled line-drive outs (Jesus Alou, disgusted, sent his green batting helmet spinning into the air), and the upper decks cried “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” and Tug pitched out, and in the ninth, all together for the last time this year, we sang “Good-byyye, Char-lee, we hate to see you go-oh-oh!” in a deafening chorus, and the Mets were ahead in the World Series.

I did not go back to Oakland. After the winter party in the stands, and after seeing the exuberant cheerfulness in the Mets’ clubhouse that night, which almost suggested a Series victory celebration, I decided that Finleyland could not contain deeper rewards. What I secretly feared, of course, was almost exactly what came to pass. In game six, Tom Seaver, with very little left but guile (it seemed to me, watching via television), gave up run-scoring doubles to Reggie Jackson in the first inning and again in the third (with an Oakland runner scoring all the way from first because Rusty Staub still could not throw), and a third A’s run came across on still another Met error, by Don Hahn this time. Somehow, the Mets kept it close, but Darold Knowles (in relief of Hunter) came in and fanned Rusty, with two runners aboard, on three fiery fastballs, to nail down the game, 3–1, and tie the Series for the last time. The next day, the A’s won the big game, 5–2, as Jon Matlack’s almost unparalleled streak of sustained great pitching came to an end. In collecting his first six outs of the day, he completed forty-two innings in which he had surrendered exactly one earned run. Now, in the third, in the space of a bare minute or two, Holtzman doubled and Campaneris homered on the very next pitch; Rudi singled and, after an out, Reggie Jackson homered to deepest right-center field—four hits, four runs, one World Championship. The moment Jackson hit his shot, he dropped his bat at his feet and stood stock-still at the plate, watching the ball go, more or less in the style of Sir Kenneth Clark regarding a Rembrandt. I thought he could be forgiven this gesture; he was, after all, the big gun of the A’s, and he had shot us down in the end.

Everyone could be forgiven, it seemed. The Mets’ super pitching had finally been worn away (Matlack’s last two starts had been on three days’ rest), and Oakland had won with its power, its depth, and its own fine pitching (their two top relievers, Rollie Fingers and Darold Knowles, had a combined earned-run average of 0.45 over twenty innings). The Oakland victory represented the first back-to-back championship by any team since the 1961–62 Yankees, and I could not think of any pennant winner in the interim that deserved the title more. If the renewed championship seemed an undue reward for the likes of Mr. Finley, it was the only conceivably sufficient compensation for his mistreated schoolboys. As for the Mets—ah, the Mets! What can one feel for them but gratitude for such a season of prizes, for a summer that lasted, in the end, just two afternoons too long?

—
July 1974

I
T’S QUIZ TIME, MR.
and Mrs. John Q. Fan, and here we go with a brainteasing assortment of baseball stumpers! Are you a
real
baseball fan? Do you enjoy matching wits with the savants of the press box, with the Figger Filberts who keep watch over the precious “stats” of the game, and with the hoary historians of the onetime National Pastime? No? Oh, come on—say yes. Good for you! Now get out your pencils and scratch pads, and away we go! Just one little thing before you step up to the plate.… This time, in order to squeeze a little more fun out of our quiz, we’re going to bring you the answers first, instead of the questions. Got that? Play ball!

A: Hank Aaron.

Q
(no peeking!)
: Who is the current major-league leader in lifetime home runs, and also the lifetime leader in total bases and extra-base hits, and the holder of the second-highest lifetime marks for runs batted in and times at bat, and of the third-highest lifetime marks for hits, runs, and games played (with a good chance to move up a notch or two in some of these categories before the end of this season), and the man who with the first swing of his bat in the 1974 campaign tied the previous lifetime-home-run record (the hallowed 714 hung up forty years earlier by the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth) and then surpassed that record, and so attained something close to the ultimate sports transfiguration (plus uncounted hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of publicity and commercial sponsorships), by striking his seven-hundred-and-
fifteenth
round-tripper in Atlanta at 9:07
P.M.
on April 8, 1974, in his second time at bat in his team’s hometown opener, thus transporting 53,775 Atlanta Braves fans (on hand in prayerful hope of witnessing the historic four-ply blow live and in person), as well as several hundred national- and local-media persons, and the gratified Atlanta Braves’ owners and front-office nabobs (who had earlier suffered over the horrid possibility that the billion-dollar poke might come to pass, like its immediate predecessor, in some ball park other than the all too rarely occupied confines of Atlanta Stadium), and simultaneously pleasing several million fans and (to be sure) idly curious nonfans watching by national television, who then saw the game stopped in its tracks for almost a quarter of an hour of handshakes, hugs, encomiums, plaque presentations, photos, and assorted ceremonials (and had the opportunity, a few minutes later, to see the whole business, from pitcher’s fateful windup to politician’s fervent speechifying, repeated on a taped replay, under the auspices of an entirely different and extremely forehanded commercial sponsor), and who eventually (in much diminished numbers) resumed watching the game at hand—the Braves, by the way, vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers—perhaps then noticing that a large part of the outfield in Atlanta had been painted (in the style of a pro-football field) to represent a map of the United States, executed in red and white stripes, and also noticing that the stands in Atlanta were almost vacant within an inning or two after the awaited event, and then possibly sighed a deep sigh occasioned by a private and quite uncharacteristic feeling of anticlimax and ennui, and hoped (against hope) that at last the real business of baseball (which is the playing of games, rather than the celebration of history) and the rest of the season might now be allowed to proceed—as, indeed, thank goodness, it has?

Did you get all that right, quiz players? Way to
go!
More coming up in a minute.

It has been a strange season so far, beginning with such a sudden shout, and in retrospect it appears that Hank Aaron’s finest feat this year was the swiftness with which he accomplished his necessary business, thus saving himself and the rest of us from the embarrassment of waiting for an inevitability. That seven-hundred-and-fifteenth homer was a fixed target, of course, and its attainment is more a landmark than a true event. There is something warming and elegant about Hank Aaron’s long conservation of his powers, but lifetime records lack urgency. This was not a sudden prodigy, like batting over .400 or hitting sixty home runs in a single season. Babe Ruth was prodigious; Bad Henry is—well, historic. Most of us sensed some of this, and these differences should not be lost in the current rush of Aaron fame and money and publicity. It was understandable that the baseball establishment should look on Hank’s feat as a fabulous PR opportunity, since the new record so clearly suggests that modern baseball, despite all secret fears to the contrary, is at least as good as, and maybe even better than, baseball in the Babe’s day. This is not provable, and it is not the point. Hank Aaron has not really defeated Babe Ruth, but he has accomplished something far more difficult and significant. He has defeated the averages.

The statistics of baseball form the critical dimensions of the game. Invisible but ineluctable, they swarm and hover above the head of every pitcher, every fielder, every batter, every team, recording every play with an accompanying silent shift of digits. The true, grinding difficulty of this sport is to be found in its unwinking figures, and ballplayers on the field are in competition not just with the pitchers and sluggers of the opposing team but with every pitcher or batter who ever played the game, including their past selves. Some aspects of fielding are not perfectly measurable, and good or bad managerial thinking is similarly obscure, but each pitcher and hitter is absolutely without illusion about the current level of his professional competence and the likely curve of its continuation. The red-hot spring hitter
knows
he will not stay up there at .472; the averages will get him. The veteran knows he will break out of his 0-for-22 slump—but when,
when?
At night, in his hotel room on the road, the manager rereads the day’s new cumulative team stats and thinks about his not so dazzling rookie outfielder: the figures spell Tulsa. In the next room, a thirty-two-year-old pitcher slowly rubs his aching shoulder and silently reruns his numbers (ERA 3.81; W
5
–L 8; HR 12; CG 0), which are beginning to say something to him about his next year’s salary and his chances of a ten-year-man’s pension. Only the superstar, with his years of averages and numbers safely banked in the record books, has longer thoughts—perhaps about his precise eventual place in the history of this game, and about the players (some of them now old, some of them now dead) who at this moment bracket his name in the all-time totals. His figures may have begun to spell another destination: Cooperstown. None of this is secret; none of it is hard to understand. The averages are there for us all to read and to ponder, and they admit us to the innermost company of baseball. On that same evening, the true fan, comfortably at home with his newspapers and
The Sporting News
and his “Official Baseball Guide”s and his various record books and histories, notes the day’s and the week’s new figures, and draws his conclusions, and then plunges onward, deeper into the puzzles and pleasures of his game.

A: Jim and Gaylord Perry.

Q: Which pair of brothers have together pitched the most winning games in the major leagues?

Ah, friends, this one hurts. The answer here is a brand-new one—a mark hung up on April 23 of this year, when Gaylord Perry, on his way to a dazzlingly successful early season, won his second game of the year for the Cleveland Indians. Gaylord, now thirty-five, has subsequently run his record to 14–1, and tops all pitchers in both leagues with an earned-run average of 1.27. His achievement so far is curious as well as astounding, since he seems to have abandoned the infamous spitball with which he used to fan so many batters, enrage so many managers, and mystify so many umpires. Faced with a new ad-hoc (and
con
-Gaylord) ruling this year which permits an umpire to call an automatic ball on any pitch that appears even faintly perspiring in its flight, and to eject a hurler for a second offense, Perry (or so he claims) has gone to a fork ball that behaves very much like its damp cousin as it crosses the plate—that is, like a diving pelican. Wet or dry, Gaylord Perry deserves homage, but one cannot entirely help wishing that he had stayed down on the family farm in Williamston, North Carolina, this summer. The new brother-pitcher record—composed of Gaylord’s pre-1974 lifetime mark of 177 wins, plus his first two this year, and Jim Perry’s 194, plus his first this year (also for the Indians)—erased an ancient mark much beloved of press-box historians and other baseball loonies: the 373 victories scored by Christy and Henry Mathewson. The latter sibling was not quite as effective as his celebrated bro, having appeared in a total of three games for the Giants during the seasons of 1906 and 1907, during which he ripped off a lifetime mark of zero wins and one defeat. That sum, carefully added to Christy’s 373, had topped all comers until now. There was a brief further flurry this spring when some statistical mole discovered that
three
brothers—Dad and John and Walter Clarkson—pitching in baseball’s Pleistocene era, had put together a lifetime conglomerate of 386 wins. But the Perrys have now topped that, too, and the last word on the foolish matter may have been said by a visiting baseball writer at Shea Stadium last month who murmured, “Cy Young and his sister have still got them all beat.”

A: Al Benton and Bobo Newsom and (in a way) Satchel Paige.

Q: Name two (or three) pitchers who pitched to both Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle.