The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (6 page)

I cannot understand how Orlando Cepeda, the Giants’ slugger, ever hits a pitch. At the plate, he stands with his hands and the bat twisted back almost behind his right shoulder blade, and his vast riffles look wild and looping. Only remarkable strength can control such a swing. In one game, he hit a line drive that was caught in front of the center-field screen, 425 feet away; in another, he took a checked half-swing at an outside pitch and lined it into the upper right-field stands. Harvey Kuenn, by contrast, has the level, controlled, intelligent swing of the self-made hitter. He is all concentration, right down to the clamped wad of tobacco in his left cheek; he runs with heavy, pounding determination, his big head jouncing with every step. Mays, it is a pleasure to say, is just the same—the best ballplayer anywhere. He hit a homer each day at the Polo Grounds, made a simple, hilarious error on a ground single to center, and caught flies in front of his belt buckle like a grocer catching a box of breakfast food pulled from a shelf. All in all, I most enjoy watching him run bases. He runs low to the ground, his shoulders swinging to his huge strides, his spikes digging up great chunks of infield dirt; the cap flies off at second, he cuts the base like a racing car, looking back over his shoulder at the ball, and lopes grandly into third, and everyone who has watched him finds himself laughing with excitement and shared delight.

The Mets’ “Go!” shouters enjoyed their finest hour on Friday night, after the Giants had hit four homers and moved inexorably to a seventh-inning lead of 9–1. At this point, when most sensible baseball fans would be edging toward the exits, a man sitting in Section 14, behind first base, produced a long, battered foghorn and blew mournful, encouraging blasts into the hot night air. Within minutes, the Mets fans were shouting in counterpoint—
Tooot!
“Go!”
Tooot!
“Go!”
Toooooot!
“GO!”—and the team, defeated and relaxed, came up with five hits and five runs that sent Billy Pierce to the showers. It was too late again, even though in the ninth the Mets put two base-runners on and had the tying run at the plate. During this exciting foolishness, I scrutinized the screamers around me and tried to puzzle out the cause of their unique affliction. It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers—leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines—who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause. Nor was it conceivable that they were all ex-Dodgers or ex-Giant rooters who had been embittered by the callous snatching away of their old teams; no one can stay
that
bitter for five years. And they were not all home-town sentimentalists, for this is a city known for its cool and its successful teams.

The answer, or part of the answer, came to me in the lull during the eighth inning, while the Giants were bringing in a relief pitcher. Two men just to my right were talking about the Mets.

“I tell you, there isn’t one of ’em—not one—that could make the Yankee club,” one of them said. “I never saw such a collection of dogs.”

“Well, what about Frank Thomas?” said the other. “What about him? What’s he batting now? .315? .320? He’s got thirteen homers, don’t he?”

“Yeah, and who’s he going to push out of the Yankee outfield? Mantle? Maris? Blanchard? You can’t call these characters
ball
players. They all belong back in the minors—the
low
minors.”

I recognized the tone. It was knowing, cold, full of the contempt that the calculator feels for those who don’t play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan. The Yankees have won the American League pennant twenty times in the past thirty years; they have been the world’s champions sixteen times in that period. Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with the stolidity, the smugness, and the arrogance of holders of large blocks of blue-chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. They coolly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homer, as only their due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests. During a slump or a losing streak, these capitalists are quick and shrill with their complaints: “They ought to damn well do better than
this
, considering what they’re being paid!”

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try—antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

The Mets saved their best effort for the final game of the two series. They led the Giants 1–0 for five innings, gave up the tying run in the sixth, and then fell apart in the seventh and lost 6–1. The crowd, which had been beery and raucous toward the end of Saturday’s doubleheader, was smaller and more subdued—a polite Sunday audience, full of children, enjoying a warm, lovely spring day and too absorbed in the game to indulge in much yelling. The Mets scored their run in the first, on a single, an infield out, and a nubbed, wrong-field looper by Frank Thomas that just eluded Cepeda’s glove. After that, the Mets played good ball—for a while—and everyone settled down to watch the first real pitchers’ duel of the week. Young Bob Miller, who hadn’t won a game this year, was matching the Giants’ ace, Juan Marichal, pitch for pitch, and looked almost quicker; he struck out eight Giants in the first six innings. The contrast in their styles was pleasing. Marichal has the exaggerated windup, the deep body-bend, the mighty leg-kick of a scatter-armed twelve-year-old fast-baller; he reminded me of Joe E. Brown’s old pantomime of a cocky bush-league pitcher. Miller’s motion is economical. His pitches are more sidearm than Marichal’s, and his deceptive speed comes from a big twist of the torso toward left field just before he delivers the pitch. He was keeping the ball low, which is something the Mets’ pitchers haven’t been able to do often this spring, and the Giants were swinging late and hitting a lot of soft hoppers to the infield. In this brief interval, it was possible to look at the Mets as a ball team, rather than as a flock of sacrificial lambs, and to speculate about the causes of the chilly summer they face. Their regular lineup, which Casey Stengel has been tinkering with every day—an Edison working with rusty parts—contains three unexciting pros: Felix Mantilla, Charlie Neal, and Frank Thomas. Of these, only Thomas hits with power; he was purchased from the Braves because he pulls the ball consistently and the left-field upper deck of the Polo Grounds is only 279 feet away from home plate. So far, he has delivered handsomely, but his record in the majors does not suggest that he can keep up his current averages. Richie Ashburn and Gil Hodges are receding stars, only occasionally capable of the bursts of light that made them shine so brightly a few years ago. Ashburn, who has slowed down shockingly, has been used mostly as a pinch-hitter this year, and Hodges’ legs apparently aren’t up to the demands of daily play.

Two attractive youngsters have emerged from the Mets’ kiddie corps. (The Mets, like France in the nineteen-twenties, have a missing generation between the too old and the too young.) Rod Kanehl, a lanky all-purpose infielder-outfielder, has been hitting and running bases with an opportunism and an energy that are conspicuous on this team, and the shortstop, Elio Chacon, although he cannot always make the double play, has the knack of getting on base with bunts, scratchy singles, and frequent walks. He is an eager, hilarious base-runner, for he runs almost exactly the way Casey Stengel walks—in a fast, bowlegged hobble, head twitching, elbows rotating.

In the six innings that the Mets were in the ball game on Sunday, I savored the tautness, the cleanness, the absorption in every detail of play that had been so glaringly absent before. Good pitching in a close game is the cement that makes baseball the marvelous, complicated structure that it is. It raises players to keenness and courage; it forces managers to think about strategy rather than raw power; it nails the fan’s attention, so that he remembers every pitch, every throw, every span of inches that separates hits from outs. And in the end, of course, it implacably reveals the true talents of the teams on the field.

In the sixth, Miller, who had fanned Mays in his two previous trips to the plate, tried to blow another fast ball past him on the first pitch. It was his first mistake. Willie hit the ball against the upper façade of the top deck in deep left center, and the game was tied. A little disconsolate, Miller started the seventh by giving up a single and hitting the next batter. Chacon then hesitated a fraction of a second on Pagan’s grounder and was too late with his throw, and the bases were loaded. Miller walked in one run, Kuenn singled in two, and after McCovey’s out the infield botched a double play, and the Mets were finished. They had wasted the rarest of their meager assets—a good pitching performance.

Abysmal pitching, in the end, is what keeps the Mets on their knees. The Polo Grounds has become Coogansbad this year—the spa where ailing National League hitters come to get well—and there is no present hope that its doors can be closed. Even when one of the team’s better pitchers—Jay Hook, Al Jackson, Craig Anderson, or the Mets’ own Cyrano, Roger Craig—achieves a few innings of competence or even brief brilliance, he is almost surely betrayed by egregious fielding or flabby hitting, and thus leaves the field with a fresh loss against his record and the deepened conviction that he is being punished for some unforgivable misdeed in his past.

But for me, so far, the terrible performance of the Mets matters much less than the simple joy of their presence. When my daughter and I left the park on Memorial Day, with the second game of the doubleheader still in progress, we found a taxi on the Harlem Speedway. The cab swung west on 155th Street, and I glanced to my right, along Edgecombe Avenue, and saw a little crowd gathered on a path that runs through a scrap of park and down Coogan’s Bluff toward the Polo Grounds. There were perhaps thirty or forty men and women there. Most were Negroes; many were carrying portable radios. Below them, the great bank of lights above the roofed horseshoe illuminated the bones of the absurd, doomed old stadium. The ticketless spectators stood immobile, staring down through the early dusk, although they could see no more of the field than the big scoreboard above the bleachers and a slice of emerald grass in deep center field. It seemed likely that some of them had been there all afternoon, listening to the roars from below, smiling and nudging one another at each momentary bit of good news over their radio—a small standing committee gathered to welcome the new team and the old league to our city.
*

*
The boyish optimism of this dawn report on the Mets can be explained partly because it was written too early in the year (the Mets didn’t hit their real stride until July, when they won six games and lost twenty-three), and partly because, as a sometime, nonprofessional Mets-watcher, I often missed their most memorable performances. I missed the game of June 17, for example, against the Cubs, when Marv Throneberry, the new first baseman, began working on his own legend. Early in the game, the Mets caught a Chicago base-runner in a rundown between first and second, and Throneberry managed to collide with him while not having the ball in his possession; reprieved by the interference call, the Cubs scored four times. In the bottom half, Marv attempted to make amends. With two mates aboard, he hit a drive to the right-field bullpen and chuffed happily into third, only to be called out because he had failed to touch first base. Ordinarily, there is hot protest over this kind of appeal play, but the Met bench did not exactly erupt, since it was perfectly plain that Throneberry had also failed to touch second. The Mets lost the game by one run.

—
May 1963

T
HE FIRST MAN TO
bat at the Polo Grounds in 1963 was a right-handed outfielder named Curt Flood, who plays for the St. Louis Cardinals. As he stepped up to the plate shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of April 9, he was studied by me and the 25,848 other spectators at the park with an almost palpable apprehension. Flood represented the first hazard of the new season to the New York Mets, who had begun the previous season, the first of their existence, by losing the opening game to the Cardinals; had then tied a National League record by losing eight more games in succession; and had gone on to establish an all-time record by losing a hundred and twenty of the hundred and sixty games they played. During the endless, turbulent summer of 1962, Met fans and Met players developed a needlelike sensitivity to omens and portents, a superstitious belief in historical inevitability, and a fondness for disaster that were positively Sicilian, and here, on opening day, we gave Curt Flood the same apprehensive, defiant glare that a farmer on the slopes of Mount Etna might cast toward the smoke plume on the summit just before he began his spring lava-plowing. Flood took his stance at the plate, looked over a couple of pitches from Roger Craig, the Mets’ starter, and then swung at a curve. The pitch fooled him, and he barely managed to top the ball, which rolled slowly down toward third. Charlie Neal, the Met third baseman, dashed in, but Flood, who is fast, was only a step or two away from first when Neal snatched up the ball. At this instant, several appalling intuitions struck me simultaneously. Flood would beat out the hit, which was unfortunate but not especially serious. However, I also
knew
that Neal would make a useless, off-balance throw toward first, and then the ball would end up in right field, Flood would move to second, the Cardinals would score in this first inning, and the Mets would lose this first game. They might even be worse than last year; they might end up losing a hundred and fifty games. All these conclusions came to me—and, I’m sure, to most experienced Met students in the park—before Flood’s foot came down on first base. Corroboration followed quickly. Neal’s wild throw sailed into right field, and Flood proceeded to second. The Cardinals then added three singles, the Mets came up with another error, and two runs scored. The Cards won the game, 7–0. The Mets lost again the next day, and then left town and lost six more games in succession.