The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  The sun’s brightest rays this spring have shone around the middle of the infield. Ron Hunt, a skinny twenty-two-year-old second baseman up from the Texas League, and Al Moran, a rookie shortstop snatched away from the Red Sox farm system, are the most impressive inner defense perimeter in the team’s young history. Hunt has quick hands, excellent range to his left, and a terrierlike eagerness for a moving ball. Moran has made some dazzling stops at short, and his arm is so strong that he can almost afford his cocky habit of holding the ball until the last moment before getting off his peg. Together, they have pulled some flashy double plays and messed up some easy ones; more familiarity with each other’s style is all that seems needed. The pair may not last long enough to acquire this polish, however, because Moran has not yet shown that he can hit big-league pitching. Hunt, by contrast, has kept his average close to .300. He reminds me of Pee Wee Reese at the plate—an unassuming, intelligent swinger who chokes up on the bat and slaps singles to all fields.

  The remaining Met assets are harder to define. The disparity between bright-eyed youth and leathery age among the team’s regulars seems, for reasons I cannot entirely fathom, a source of interest this season, where it was only grotesque in 1962. The contrast can be startling, though. In a game at Cincinnati in April, Duke Snider banged his two-thousandth major-league hit in the first inning; when he came up again in the fourth, looking for No. 2001, Ron Hunt was standing on first base, having just rapped his first major-league hit. And the big right fielder/first baseman who frequently bats right after Snider in the Met lineup is Ed Kranepool, who is eighteen years old and was playing baseball for James Monroe High School at this time last year. Collectively, the Mets are still both too young and too old to afford any but the most modest ambitions, but I think the time has arrived when they can look at each other with something other than pure embarrassment. They can at least admire their own hardiness, for they have survived. No fewer than thirty-two other Mets have vanished from the team in the past year—a legion of ghosts, celebrated and obscure: Richie Ashburn and Solly Drake, Gene Woodling and Herb Moford, Marv Throneberry and Rick Herrscher, R. L. Miller and R. G. Miller. That time of hopeless experiment and attrition is, in all likelihood, finished, and the Mets of the future—the squad that eventually erases the memory of these famous losers—will almost surely include some of the twenty-five men who now wear the uniform.* That is progress.

  I am so aware of the attractiveness of this year’s Met team, and I share so much of the raucous, unquenchable happiness of its fans, that I cannot achieve an outsider’s understanding of this much-publicized love affair. I made a try at it during the long Sunday doubleheader against the Giants, when the biggest crowd of the baseball year imperiled its arteries with more than six hours of nonstop roaring, sat through a small rainstorm, threw enough paper and debris to make the outfield look like the floor of the Stock Exchange after a panic, and went home, at last, absolutely delighted with a split of the two games. Met fans now come to the park equipped with hortatory placards as well as trumpets and bass drums, and during the afternoon one group unfurled a homemade banner that read:

  M is for Mighty

  E is for Exciting

  T is for Terrific

  S is for So Lovable

  Reason told me that the first three adjectives had been chosen only for their opening letters; it was the Giants who looked mightily, excitingly terrific. The day before, they had ripped off six homers, a triple, and eight singles, good for seventeen runs, and now Willie Mays settled the outcome of the Sunday opener in the very first inning, when he hit a three-run homer that disappeared over the roof of the Polo Grounds in deep left center—approximately the distance of six normal Met base hits laid end to end. The Mets’ boosters were unsilenced by this poke, or by Jack Sanford’s almost total mastery of the locals. In the fourth inning, when Choo Choo Coleman struck out with the bases empty, amid deafening pleas of “Let’s go, Mets!” I suddenly understood why Met fans have fallen into the habit of permanent shouting. It was simple, really: Supporters of a team that is batting .215 have no heroes, no mighty sluggers, to save their hopes for. The Mets’ rallies fall from heaven, often upon the bottom of the batting order, and must be prayed for at all times.

  Another revelation came to me by degrees, from various Giant fans who were sitting near me in the upper deck. Their team had just gone into first place in the standings; on this day, with Mays, McCovey, Felipe Alou, and Cepeda ripping off extra-base hits in all directions, it seemed capable of winning the pennant by the middle of August. Yet the Giant loyalists were burdened and irritable. “Look at that McCovey,” one of them said bitterly, as Stretch fielded a Met single in left. “He just won’t run. He’s no goddam outfielder. I tell you, Dark oughtta nail him onna goddam bench, save him for pinch-hitting.” He was not watching the game before us; his mind was weeks and months away, groping through the mists of September, and he saw his team losing. The Giants’ pennant of last year, the Giants’ power of today had made a miser of him, and he was afraid. I had nothing to lose, though; I clapped my hands and shouted, “Let’s go, Mets!”

  Most of the identifiable Giant fans left before the end of the nightcap. They just couldn’t take it. The Mets had stumbled into a first-inning lead on a pop-fly, wrong-field home run by Cliff Cook, good for two runs, and Carlton Willey was pitching carefully and intelligently, keeping the ball low and scattering the Giant hits. The absentees missed a Giant defeat, which might have done them in, and they also missed the last, tastiest bit of Met quirkiness. With two out in the top of the ninth, the bases empty, and the Mets leading 4–1, José Pagan hit a deep grounder to Al Moran, who heaved the ball away, past Harkness at first. Tom Haller then pinch-hit and scored Pagan with a monstrous triple. Willey sighed and went to work on Davenport, who now represented the tying run. Davenport hit another grounder to short. Moran cranked up and made good with his second chance, and the lovable Mets sprinted off to the clubhouse through snowbanks of trash and salvos of exploding cherry bombs.

  The noisy, debris-throwing, excitable Met fans have inspired a good deal of heavyweight editorial theorizing this year. Sportswriters have named them “The New Breed.” Psychologists, anthropologists, and Max Lerner have told us that the fans’ euphoria is the result of a direct identification with the have-not Mets, and is anti-authoritarian, anti-Yankee, id-satisfying, and deeply hostile. Well, yes—perhaps. But the pagan après-midi d’un Met fan, it seems to me, also involves a simpler kind of happiness. The Mets are refreshing to every New York urbanite if only because they are unfinished. The ultimate shape, essence, and reputation of this team are as yet invisible, and they will not be determined by an architect, a developer, a parks commissioner, a planning board, or the City Council. Unlike many of us in the city, the Mets have their future entirely in their own hands. They will create it, and in the meantime the Met fans, we happy many, can witness and share this youthful adventure.

  The dirt, the noise, the chatter, the bursting life of the Met grandstands are as rich and deplorable and heartwarming as Rivington Street. The Polo Grounds, which is in the last few months of its disreputable life, is a vast assemblage of front stoops and rusty fire escapes. On a hot summer evening, everyone here is touching someone else; there are no strangers, no one is private. The air is alive with shouts, gossip, flying rubbish. Old-timers know and love every corner of the crazy, crowded, proud old neighborhood: the last-row walkup flats in the outermost lower grandstands, where one must peer through girders and pigeon nests for a glimpse of green; the little protruding step at the foot of each aisle in the upper deck that trips up the unwary beer-balancer on his way back to his seat; the outfield bullpens, each with its slanting shanty roof, beneath which the relief pitchers sit motionless, with their arms folded and their legs extended; and the good box seats just on the curve of the upper deck in short right and short left—front windows on the street, where one can watch the arching fall of a weak fly ball and know in advance, like one who s
ees a street accident in the making, that it will collide with that ridiculous, dangerous upper tier for another home run.

  Next year, or perhaps late this summer, all this will vanish. The Mets are moving up in the world, heading toward the suburbs. Their new home, Shea Stadium, in Flushing Meadow Park, will be cleaner and airier—a better place for the children. Most of the people there will travel by car rather than by subway; the commute will be long, but the residents will be more respectable. There will be broad ramps, no crowding, more privacy. All the accommodations will be desirable—close to the shopping centers, and set in perfect, identical curves, with equally good views of the neat lawns. Indeed, a man who leaves his place will have to make an effort to remember exactly where it is, so he won’t get mixed up on his way back and forget where he lives. It will be several years, probably, before the members of the family, older and heavier and at last sure of their place in the world, indulge themselves in some moments of foolish reminiscence: “Funny, I was thinking of the old place today. Remember how jammed we used to be back there? Remember how hot and noisy it was? I wouldn’t move back there for anything, and anyway it’s all torn down now, but, you know, we sure were happy in those days.”

  *Only one of the twenty-five survived until the Mets’ championship of 1969, thus sustaining this brash prediction: Eddie Kranepool.

  FAREWELL

  — April 1964

  THE POLO GROUNDS WENT under last week, and I had no wish to journey up and watch the first fierce blows of ball and hammer. The newspaper and television obituaries were properly melancholy but almost entirely journalistic, being devoted to the celebrated names and happenings attached to the old ballfield: John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott; Carl Hubbell’s five strikeouts, Bobby Thomson’s homer, Willie Mays’ catch, Casey Stengel’s sad torment. Curiously, these historic recollections played little part in my own feeling of sadness and loss, for they had to do with events, and events on a sporting field are so brief that they belong almost instantly to the past. Today’s fielding gem, last week’s shutout, last season’s winning streak have their true existence in record books and in memory, and even the youngest and brightest rookie of the new season is hurrying at almost inconceivable speed toward his plaque at Cooperstown and his faded, dated photograph behind a hundred bars. Mel Ott’s cow-tailed swing, Sal Maglie’s scowl, Leo Durocher’s pacings in the third-base coach’s box are portraits that have long been fixed in my own interior permanent collection, and the fall of the Polo Grounds will barely joggle them. What does depress me about the decease of the bony, misshapen old playground is the attendant irrevocable deprivation of habit—the amputation of so many private, repeated, and easily renewable small familiarities. The things I liked best about the Polo Grounds were sights and emotions so inconsequential that they will surely slide out of my recollection. A flight of pigeons flashing out of the barn-shadow of the upper stands, wheeling past the right-field foul pole, and disappearing above the inert, heat-heavy flags on the roof. The steepness of the ramp descending from the Speedway toward the upper-stand gates, which pushed your toes into your shoe tips as you approached the park, tasting sweet anticipation and getting out your change to buy a program. The unmistakable, final “Plock!” of a line drive hitting the green wooden barrier above the stands in deep left field. The gentle, rockerlike swing of the loop of rusty chain you rested your arm upon in a box seat, and the heat of the sun-warmed iron coming through your shirtsleeve under your elbow. At a night game, the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balloon and then whitening over the waves of noise and the slow, shifting clouds of floodlit cigarette smoke. All these I mourn, for their loss constitutes the death of still another neighborhood—a small landscape of distinctive and reassuring familiarity. Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved.

  A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED CELLAR

  — May 1964

  AS THE WRITER OF two excessively vernal and optimistic previous dissertations on the New York Mets, I resolved this year to keep my distance after the home opener and not file a report until midsummer. This admirable plan lasted for three weeks, during which time the Mets lost sixteen of their first twenty games—exactly the same mark they achieved early in 1962 while rushing toward an all-time record, generally considered secure for the ages, of a hundred and twenty losses in a season. At this point, I reconsidered and hurried to the scene, and I am glad I did. After watching a dozen-odd home games and an equal number of televised road encounters, I can report, almost without crossing my fingers, that the Mets are better than they were in 1962, and probably not worse than they were last year, when they lost a hundred and eleven games. There will be greater joy in Endsville this summer.

  Much of the local interest in the Mets this year will be architectural rather than athletic or psychopathologic, for on April 17 the club finally moved into its long-promised new home, William A. Shea Stadium, which was built by the city (which owns it) at a cost of $25,500,000, seats 55,300 baseball fans, and is situated in Flushing, just across the elevated IRT tracks from the World’s Fair. Indeed, on my first visit the new ballyard, with its cyclotron profile, its orange and blue exterior spangles, and its jelly-bean interior yellows, browns, blues, and greens, looked to me remarkably like an extension of the Fair—an exhibit named “Baseball Land,” or perhaps “Stengel-O-Rama.” To one nurtured in the gray fortress of Yankee Stadium and the green barn of the Polo Grounds (O lost!), the place came as a shock; luckily, the Mets supplied a reassuring sense of continuity by giving up sixteen hits to the Pirates and losing, 4–3. On subsequent visits, my feelings of outraged classicism grudgingly abated and I was able to judge the park more coolly. Some complaints remain. The acres of box seats—21,795 of them—in two ellipsoid scoops on the field level, the entire loge circle, and much of the mezzanine and upper stand are probably a valid tribute to our affluent times, but I wish that unmoneyed fans, who usually make up a team’s true loyalists, didn’t have to climb to the top ten rows of the upper level to find an unreserved seat. Those same top-rail-birds must also be irritated to discover that the two bullpens are out beyond the outfield fence in right and left field, thus making it impossible for a spectator to identify and speculate about the relief pitchers who are warming up. This could be remedied, no doubt, if the gargantuan scoreboard in right center field provided such useful information in lighted letters on its huge central message center, but so far that bulletin board has been largely employed to boost souvenir and ticket sales and (very unsuccessfully) song lyrics for between-innings sing-alongs. The bright colors of the different stands are cheerful, I guess, but women in the field boxes are not going to be pleased with their complexions during night games, when the floodlights bouncing off those yellow seats make the section look like a hepatitis ward. The lights, the most powerful in any ballpark, are bright enough to pick up gleams from the shine on an outfielder’s spikes, and most of them have been set lower than usual, just above the upper tier of seats, in order to make it easier for outfielders to follow fly balls. Shea Stadium is built of reinforced concrete, and its banked seats, set almost entirely within the foul lines, sweep around in a lovely circle, offering everyone a splendid and unobstructed view of the action. Unobstructed and, I should add, too distant. Only in the field-level seats—those two scooped sections that roughly parallel the infield foul lines—does one feel close to the action; the loge, mezzanine, and upper levels are all circular, and this imposed geometry keeps the elevated fan forever distant from the doings within the contained square of the infield. All this is because Shea Stadium (and all future big-city stadia) must also be suitable for professional football. The changeover will be achieved, come autumn, by sliding the two massive suspended field-level sections apart on their tracks and around the circle, until the
y face each other on opposite sides of the gridiron. This is an impressive solution to an old problem, but it has been achieved at the expense of the baseball fan, for the best ballparks—Ebbets Field, say, or Comiskey Park—have all been boxes. Many of the games I saw this spring were thickly attended, but again and again I had the impression that I had lost company with the audience. In the broad, sky-filled circle of the new stadium, the shouts, the clapping, the trumpet blasts, and the brave old cries of “Let’s go, Mets!” climbed thinly into the air and vanished; the place seemed without echoes, angles, and reassurance. No longer snug in a shoebox, my companions and I were ants perched on the sloping lip of a vast, shiny soup plate, and we were lonelier than we liked.