The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (59 page)

Two nights later, back at Shea Stadium, predictability returned when the Mets, crippled and down on their luck, lost to the Dodgers by 3–2. Tommy John gave up six hits and ran his record to 10–1; Jon Matlack gave up six hits and ran his to 5–4. Misery abounding. The winning run, it turned out, was surrendered in the ninth inning by Tug McGraw, just off the disabled list, who thereby kept his earned-run average for the year at an even 9.00. The last out of the night was a strikeout by Mike Marshall, the indefatigable relief man whom the Dodgers picked up from Montreal this year. Marshall (a stocky, heavily sideburned veteran who is a Ph.D. candidate in physiology) toweled his face after the game and said, “Sure, we’ve had a fantastic start, but I’m glad there’s still a long way to go. This is the time of year when baseball is most exciting. I enjoy it. The hitters are ready now, and the pitchers at their best. June, July, and August—this is the best part of the baseball year.”

June, July, August … How to salute this season in its passage, except with a further and final selection from
The Baseball Encyclopedia
—this time not in numbers? Come, let us have a little music, a quiet coda of baseball names upon the summer air. Carden Gillenwater. Alban Glossop. Johnny (Hippity) Hopp. Donie Bush, Guy Bush, Bullet Joe Bush. Alpha Brazle. Jimmy Ring. Dupee Shaw. Buck (Leaky) Fausett. Estel Crabtree. Victory Faust. Chief Yellowhorse. Emil Yde.

Mordecai Peter Centennial (Three-Finger) (Miner) Brown.

Saturnino Orestes Arrieta Armas (Minnie) Minoso.

Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma (Cal) McLish.

Flint Rhem. Bibb Falk. Jewel Ens.

Urban Shocker. Urbane Pickering.

Dummy Deegan, Dummy Murphy, Dummy Hoy, Dummy Taylor, Silent John Titus, and Silent George Twombly.

Sunny Jim Bottomley.

Dutch Ruether, Dutch Leonard, Dutch Leonard, Dutch Hartman, Dutch Wilson, Germany Schaefer, Heinie Manush.

Dusty Miller. Zack Wheat. Hod Lisenbee.

Robert Barton (Dusty) Rhoads. William Clarence (Dusty) Rhodes. James Lamar (Dusty) Rhodes. John Gordon (Dusty) Rhodes. Charlie Rhodes.

Fielder Jones. Orator Shaffer. Socks Seibold. Shoeless Joe Jackson. Tillie Shafer. Dolly Stark. Sadie McMahon.

Kitty Brashear, Kitty Bransfield, Rabbit Maranville, Rabbit Warstler, Pig House, Possum Whitted, Chicken Wolf, Doggie Miller, and Hank (Bow Wow) Arft.

Frank Chance, the Peerless Leader.

Spec Shea, the Naugatuck Nugget.

Roger Bresnahan, the Duke of Tralee.

Vic Raschi, the Springfield Rifle.

Arlie Latham, the Freshest Man on Earth.

Amos Rusie, the Hoosier Thunderbolt.

Welcome Gaston. Eppa Rixey. Garland Buckeye.

Hank Aaron. Babe Ruth.

*
A new, if tainted, addition to the four-decade set is Minnie Minoso, who was coaching for the White Sox last year when he was activated, at the age of fifty-three, into a designated hitter. This was a gate-hype, of course, thought up by Chicago owner Bill Veeck. A self-proclaimed current aspirant to this strange brotherhood is Ron Fairly, the veteran National League outfielder and first baseman, who was purchased from the Cardinals by the Oakland A’s late last summer. Fairly, who came up with the Dodgers in 1958, is in excellent shape; he will only be forty-one years old when the opening day of the 1980 season comes along, which suggests that a little good luck and three comfortable summers in a designated-hitter’s rocking chair should see him home.

**
Further bad-tempered complaints of mine about Mac II have been deleted here, for good reason. In the spring of 1976, Macmillan brought forth a third edition of
The Baseball Encyclopedia,
which restores almost all of the unfortunate omissions and economies of Mac II. The year-by-year team rosters are back, and so are the full records of players with less than twenty-five major-league at-bats (thus preserving for the ages the news that Walter Alston’s lifetime batting record was one at-bat and no hits). Individual World Series batting records have also reappeared, although only in summary form. Furthermore, Mac III contains some brand-new data—a club-by-club all-time roster of players and managers, and a greatly expanded section listing lifetime leaders in most conceivable batting and pitching attainments, which in itself provides fuel for many long nights of hot-stove musings. Here, for instance, one finds the names of all the 139 players with a lifetime batting average of .300 or better (Rod Carew, with .328, is in twenty-eighth place; Pete Rose, at .310, is eightieth); here are the 117 players with more than a thousand runs batted in; here are the leaders in most strikeouts per times at bat, with Reggie Jackson, Bobby Bonds, and Dick Allen in hot competition for the number-one spot. Farther along, we find all 70 pitchers who won more than 200 games (Jim Kaat, with 235 wins, leads the active members); all 96 pitchers (from Walter Johnson on down to Bobo Newsom) who threw 30 shutouts or more; and Nolan Ryan leading all pitchers—all pitchers
ever
—in two separate lifetime categories: most strikeouts per nine innings (9.58), and fewest hits per nine innings (6.25). And so on.

This latest edition of
The Baseball Encyclopedia
has gone up to 2,142 pages, and it is miraculously priced at twenty-five dollars. The principal editor of this restored classic, Mr. Fred Honig, now ranks somewhere near the top on the all-time list of friends of baseball, and seems to be the ideal curator for the essential future editions.

***
Tom Seaver continued to have an unhappy time of it in 1974, finishing with a record of 11–11, but he quickly resumed his pedestal at the top of his league the following year, when he wound up at 23–11 and took home his third Cy Young Award. My anxieties about the Seaver fastball were happily premature, for he struck out over two hundred batters in 1974, ’75, and ’76, thus establishing a significant new record: nine consecutive seasons of two hundred whiffs or more. Pete Rose, a devout student of pitching, is of the opinion that Seaver’s fastball is still the prime article and that Seaver is still the paramount pitcher in the National League. Last summer, one could see that Tom was going to his breaking stuff earlier in a game than he used to, and that he was throwing the hummer less often but perhaps to greater effect than ever.

****
I failed to mention here the only certifiably historic sight of my baseball summer—a steal of second base by Lou Brock, in the eighth inning. The theft, Brock’s fortieth of the year, was a typically efficient piece of Brockery, but it did not alter the score or the game. There was no way for me to know, of course, that Lou was on his way to a new all-time record of 118 stolen bases in one season. Like statesmen or actors, celebrated stats are not easy to recognize in their youth.

—
October 1974

T
HE SUMMER’S IMMENSE BUSINESS
is at last shut down, the Oakland A’s stand bemedaled as the three-time champions of the world and first-time champions of California, and the sound of baseball silence is upon the land. The World Series, in which the familiar green-and-yellow team—Sal and Reggie and Joe, Rollie and Ken and Campy and Cat, and all the other dashing Octobermen—knocked off the young Dodgers in five games, and the preceding league playoffs, which both concluded in four, were mercifully brisk and decisive. They constituted the only visible signs of economy in a season of excess, which must now be sorted out somehow. O for a Muse of fire! Or, rather, O for a competent certified public accountant, who at least might begin to bring order out of the untidy profligacy of baseball news and records and races, baseball achievement and failure and unlikelihood, that made the late summer and early fall of 1974 so crowded and busy and ridiculously entertaining for us all. On the chance of such help, we can at least pick out a few preliminary clips and jottings from this year’s crowded files.

NOTES FOR A STONECUTTER:
Hank Aaron, who started off briskly with those two April home runs that took him past Babe Ruth’s ancient roadmark of 714, concluded his labors for the year with 20 homers, or 733 lifetime. This year, he also took over first place on the all-time roster for games played (3,076) and times at bat (11,628), and added to his first-place figures for lifetime total bases (6,591) and extra-base hits (1,429). Aaron is retiring from the Atlanta Braves, but if he succeeds with his reported plan to sign on with the Milwaukee Brewers as a designated hitter, he will have a clear shot next year at Ruth’s first-place standard of 2,217 runs batted in. Aaron has now passed Ty Cobb as the holder of more lifetime batting records than anyone in baseball history.

LEGS:
Lou Brock, of the Cardinals, stole 118 bases this summer, thus wiping out the old one-season mark of 104 thefts held by Maury Wills. Brock’s pursuit of the new record was a macrocosm of one of his accelerated journeys between first and second base. After a good early-season jump, he stole 18 bases in June, 17 in July, 29 in August, and 24 in September. He was caught stealing 33 times. Brock is thirty-five years old, and he estimates that he is two or three feet slower between bases than he was at his youthful peak, which suggests that the real contest on the base paths is mostly cerebral and strategic—the runner’s experience versus the pitcher’s nerves. The other essential ingredients for the remarkable new record were Brock’s batting average of .306 for the year (he had to get on some base in order to set about stealing the next one) and the batting judgment and protection provided by the next man in the Cardinal lineup, Ted Sizemore. Watching Lou Brock taking a lead off first base is the best fun in baseball.

ARMS:
Mike Marshall, the muscular, muttonchopped relief man for the Los Angeles Dodgers, appeared in 106 games for the year, thus wiping out his own previous one-season mark of 92, which he set last year with the Expos. To judge by his effectiveness (15 wins, 21 saves, an earned-run average of 2.42), his combativeness, and his habit of pitching batting practice for the Dodgers after just one day of idleness, he is perfectly capable of raising this mark by twenty or thirty games, if Walter Alston and the Dodger starters should so require.

Nolan Ryan, the California Angels’ fireballer, pitched his third no-hit game in two years, attaining a lifetime level reached by only five other pitchers. (Sandy Koufax notched four.) Ryan also struck out nineteen batters in a single game, to tie a record previously held by Steve Carlton and Tom Seaver. Ryan, however, did this
three times
this year. He struck out more than three hundred hitters (376) in a single season for the third time. One of his deliveries was timed by an electronic device at 100.8 miles per hour, which exceeded Bob Feller’s old speed mark (recorded on a different machine) of 98.6 mph. Another Ryan pitch struck Red Sox second baseman Doug Griffin above the ear, retiring him from competition for two months; the next game in which Griffin faced Ryan, he hit two singles. No award or trophy for courage was offered to either man.

Ryan was one of nine American League pitchers to achieve twenty wins this year—a new record mostly attributable to the designated-hitter artifice, which allows starting pitchers to stay in a game until their ears are knocked off. In the American League, the traditional level of pitching effectiveness probably should now be raised from twenty to twenty-five games—a more exclusive neighborhood, inhabited this summer only by Ferguson Jenkins and Catfish Hunter.

ARRIVAL:
The day after the regular season ended, Frank Robinson was named manager of the Cleveland Indians. He is the first black manager in the majors, and the belated, much publicized appointment confirms the inflexibility and down-home cronyism that still pervade most of the business side of baseball—a world in which black executives and women executives are equally invisible. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and the two league presidents had pressured the clubs to make such an appointment, and after it happened Kuhn said, “I don’t think that baseball should be exceptionally proud of this day. It’s been long overdue.” Robinson, who will take over a feeble and (to judge by its play in late September) demoralized club, will have his work cut out for him, but he is qualified for the job. He was a true team leader during his six years with the Orioles, where his manager was Earl Weaver, one of the best and most accessible baseball thinkers of our time. Robinson has also managed the Santurce Crabbers in Puerto Rico for five winter seasons, and an observer of his performance there has told me that he was unexcitable, tough, and effective, not hesitating on occasion to take down such superstars as Reggie Jackson (who is black) and such prima donnas as Dave Kingman (who is white). Frank Robinson is probably even qualified to become the first black manager in the majors to be fired.

DEPARTURES:
Dick Allen, the highest-paid player in the game, at $225,000 per year, announced his retirement from the White Sox at the age of thirty-two. He may change his mind and return to baseball; he may not. No one knows what Dick Allen will do next, probably not even Dick Allen. He has been an odd and enigmatic eminence—a great hitter and superior fielder who disdained or ignored every aspect of baseball except occasionally the actual playing of it, the game on the field. He could scarcely bear to give his attention to spring training, to the press, to bus and plane schedules, or, in the end, even to batting practice. Unsurprisingly, he exhausted the patience of several managers and owners, but when at last he was traded to Chicago, in 1972, his new manager, Chuck Tanner, announced that any private drumbeat heard by Dick Allen was perfectly acceptable to him, since Allen was obviously the best player anywhere. Allen responded with one splendid season—a .308 average, 37 homers, and 113 RBIs—which won him his only Most Valuable Player award. The next year, he broke a leg, and since then his other preoccupations—late hours, breeding race horses, silence, indifference—have kept him from the almost limitless baseball heights that could have been his. It is a strange, sad business. Although he quit the sport with two weeks remaining in the season, his thirty-two home runs were tops in his league this year.