The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  TAVERNS IN THE TOWN

  — October 1963

  ALREADY, TWO WEEKS AFTER the event, it is difficult to remember that there was a World Series played this year. It is like trying to recall an economy display of back-yard fireworks. Four small, perfect showers of light in the sky, accompanied by faint plops, and it was over. The spectators, who had happily expected a protracted patriotic bombardment culminating in a grand crescendo of salutes, fireballs, flowerpots, and stomach-jarring explosions, stood almost silent, cricking their necks and staring into the night sky with the image of the last brief rocket burst still pressed on their eyes, and then, realizing at last that there was to be no more, went slowly home, hushing the children who asked, “Is that all?” The feeling of letdown, of puzzled astonishment, persists, particularly in this neighborhood, where we have come to expect a more lavish and satisfactory autumnal show from our hosts, the Yankees, the rich family up on the hill. There has been a good deal of unpleasant chatter (“I always knew they were really cheap,” “What else can you expect from such stuckups?”) about the affair ever since, thus proving again that prolonged success does not beget loyalty.

  By choice, I witnessed the Los Angeles Dodgers’ four-game sweep at a remove—over the television in four different bars here in the city. This notion came to me last year, during the Series games played in Yankee Stadium against the San Francisco Giants, when it became evident to me that my neighbors in the lower grandstand were not, for the most part, the same noisy, casually dressed, partisan, and knowing baseball fans who come to the park during the regular season. As I subsequently reported, a large proportion of the ticket-holders appeared to be well-to-do out-of-towners who came to the games only because they could afford the tickets, who seemed to have only a slipshod knowledge of baseball, and who frequently departed around the sixth or seventh inning, although all of last year’s games were close and immensely exciting. This year, then, I decided to seek out the true Yankee fan in his October retreat—what the baseball beer commercials refer to as “your neighborhood tavern.” I was especially happy about this plan after the Dodgers clinched the National League pennant, for I well remembered the exciting autumns here in the late forties and the mid-fifties, when the Dodgers and the Yanks, both home-town teams then, met in six different Series in what seemed to be a brilliant and unending war, and the sounds of baseball fell from every window and doorway in town. Those Series were a fever in the city. Secretaries typed only between innings, with their ears cocked to the office radio down the hall, and if business drew you reluctantly into the street (fingering your pool slip, designating your half-inning, in your pocket), you followed the ribbon of news via elevator men’s rumors, snatches of broadcasts from passing taxi radios, and the portable clutched to a delivery boy’s ear, until a sudden burst of shouting and laughter sucked you into a bar you were passing, where you learned that Campy or Duke had parked one, or that Vic Raschi had struck out Furillo with two on.

  Even before Stan Musial had thrown out the honorary first ball to open the first game this year, I discovered that there would be no such attendant melodrama in the city. Just before game time, I walked west in the mid-Forties and turned up Eighth Avenue, searching for the properly athletic saloon in which I could, in Jimmy Durante’s words, “mix wit’ de hoi pollew” who had not felt inclined to plunk down thirty-two dollars for a block of four home-game tickets at the Stadium. I stuck my nose in three or four likely-looking bars, only to find no more than a handful of fans who had staked out bar stools and were watching Whitey Ford and Sandy Koufax complete their warmups. Finally, exactly at game time, I walked into O’Leary’s Bar, on the northwest corner of Fifty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, and found an audience of sufficient size and expectancy to convince me that it was not about to watch an afternoon quiz program. There wasn’t a woman in the place, and the bar stools and nearly all the standing slots along the bar were taken. It was mostly a young crowd—men in their twenties, in sports shirts and with carefully combed hair. There were some off-duty postmen in uniform up front, with their empty canvas mailbags under their feet. I ordered a beer and took up a stand beside the shuffle alley, near the front door, from where I could see the television screen just above the head of the bar. It was a color set, and I was appalled to discover that Whitey Ford had turned blue since I last saw him; he and all the other ballplayers were haloed in rabbit’s-eye pink, like deities in early Biblical color films. There was a black-and-white set at the back of the bar, and from time to time during the afternoon I turned around and watched that, just to reassure myself that Victor Mature was not kneeling in the on-deck circle.

  It was a Yankee crowd at O’Leary’s. There were winks and happy nudges when Whitey struck out Maury Wills, the lead-off man, and silence when Koufax fanned the side in the first. Frank Howard’s double off the center-field screen in the next inning won an astonished “Oooh!” and a moment later, when Skowron and then Tracewski singled, a man to my left shook his head and said, “Whitey ain’t got it today.” I wasn’t sure yet, but I had to agree when Roseboro homered into the right-field stands, to make the score 4–0; left-handed hitters do not hit homers off Ford when he is pitching low and to the corners. Koufax stepped up to the plate, and several watchers suggested to Ford that he would do well to hit him in the pitching arm.

  It was sound advice, though ignored. For a time, Koufax simply got better and better. He struck out Mantle and Maris in the second, and Pepitone in the third. With his long legs, his loose hips, his ropelike motion, and his lean, intelligent face, he looked his part elegantly—a magnificent young pitcher at an early and absolute peak of confidence, knowledge, and ability. In the fourth, facing the top of the order again, he struck out Kubek swinging, with a dipping curve that seemed to bounce on the ground in front of Roseboro, and got Richardson out on another big changeup curve; when he fanned Tresh, also for the second time, for his ninth strikeout, the men around me cried “Wow!” in unison. They had been converted; now they were pulling for Koufax. They knew their baseball—in the third, there had been expert admiring comment on a throw of Maris’s that almost nailed Willie Davis at third base—and they knew they were watching something remarkable. What they had in mind, of course, was Carl Erskine’s Series strikeout record of fourteen batters, which had been set exactly ten years before. Koufax, straining a bit now, struck out Mantle in the fifth, and then yielded three singles in a row before fanning Lopez, a pinch-hitter, for No. 11. In the sixth, he temporarily lost his poise; in spite of his 5–0 lead, he seemed edgy, and his motion had grown stiff and elbowish. He walked Richardson and Tresh in succession. There was a stirring under the TV set, a brief resurgence of Yankee hopes, but Koufax took a few deep breaths on the mound, went back to his fast ball, and got Mantle and Maris to pop up, ending the inning.

  Two innings later, the strikeouts stood at thirteen, and there was much less interest in Kubek’s single and Tresh’s two-run homer than in Richardson’s strikeout, which tied the old record. O’Leary’s was jammed now; no one had left, and those who had wandered in stayed to watch Koufax. A middle-aged man came in and asked one of the men near the bar to order him a Fleischmann’s whisky and a beer chaser. “I won’t get in your way,” he said apologetically. “I’m gonna drink it and then go right out.” But he stayed, too.

  Elston Howard led off the bottom of the ninth with a liner to Tracewski. Pepitone singled, and Boyer flied out to Willie Davis. Koufax’s last chance—a pinch-hitter named Harry Bright—came up to the plate. The count went to two and two, and there was a mass expulsion of held breath when Bright hit a bouncer that went foul. Then Koufax stretched and threw, Bright swung and missed, and the young men in O’Leary’s burst into sustained applause, like an audience at Lincoln Center. Up on the pink-and-blue stage, Koufax was being mobbed by his accompanists. The sporting crowd left O’Leary’s, blinking in the pale, unreal late-afternoon sunshine on Eighth Avenue and chattering about what it had seen. Not one of them, I was certain, was wo
rried about what had happened to his team.

  Oblivion descended on the Yankees after ten minutes of the second game. Maury Wills, leading off, singled, and was instantly trapped off first by Al Downing, the Yankees’ young left-hander. But Pepitone’s throw to second was a hair wide, and Wills skidded safely in on his belly. Gilliam singled to right, Willie Davis lined to right, and Roger Maris fell while going for the ball (or so Vin Scully, the announcer, told us—the camera missed the play), and the Yankees were down, 2–0. These rapid events were received with overpowering ennui in my second observation post, a spacious restaurant-bar called the Charles Café, just west of Vanderbilt Avenue on Forty-third Street. I had chosen the spot as a likely sporting headquarters because of the dozens of jumbo-size baseball and boxing photographs that hang above the mirrors on its walls, but the customers had nothing in common with the decor. These were youngish men too, but they were wearing dark suits and subdued neckties, and most of them were giving more attention to their hot-pastrami sandwiches and their business gossip than they were to the events on the television screens at either end of the long, shiny bar. One junior executive next to me at the bar ordered a Beefeater dry martini on the rocks—a drink that has perhaps never been served in O’Leary’s. The only certifiable Yankee fan near me was a man who banged his palm on the bar when Maris tapped to the box in the second. His fealty was financially oriented. “Oh, God,” he said. “For that they pay him seventy thousand a year.” Subsequently, another railbird was unable to detect the considerable difference in appearance and batting style between two Yankee veterans. “Here’s the man who took the catching job away from Yogi Berra,” he said to me when Hector Lopez, an outfielder, came up in the fourth.

  By the middle innings, shortly after two o’clock, these zealots were all back at their desks, the Yankees were down, 3–0, and I was lonely as a cloud in the Charles. Johnny Podres, the veteran Dodger lefty, was, unbelievably, pitching even better than Koufax had. He was less flashy but more efficient, working on the premise that it takes five or six pitches to strike a batter out but only two or three to get him to pop up or ground one to an infielder. This had become a nice, dull pitchers’ Series. The TV announcers, Scully and then Mel Allen, tried to disguise the fact that the fall classic was laying an egg by supplying me with a steady stream of boiler-plate news. A dandruff of exclamation points fell on my shoulders as I learned that Dick Tracewski and an umpire named Joe Paparella came from the same home town, that Tommy Davis was the youngest batter to win the National League batting championship two years running, that Al Downing had been twelve years old when Jim Gilliam played in his first World Series, and that the Dodgers’ Ron Perranoski and the Red Sox’ Dick Radatz had both attended Michigan State! There was still another non-news flash from Mel Allen, but his peroration—“something that means nothing but is nonetheless interesting”—was so arrestingly metaphysical that I didn’t catch the rest of the message.

  Languishing, I studied the pictures on the wall—shots of Ketchel fighting Billy Papke, Dempsey knocking out Jess Willard—and wished I were at ringside. Then I found a framed motto and studied that:

  Life is like a journey taken on a train

  With a pair of travelers at each window pane.

  I may sit beside you all the journey through,

  Or I may sit elsewhere never knowing you.

  But if fate should mark me to sit by your side

  Let’s be pleasant travelers, it’s so short a ride.

  —A Thought

  I straightened my tie and looked about for someone to be pleasant to, but the nearest fellow-traveler was fourteen feet down the bar and totally occupied in making rings on the mahogany with his beer glass. I had to finish this particular part of life’s journey, a longish one, alone with Mel Allen. Eventually, Podres (“The Witherbee, New York, Wonder!”) won, 4–1, with a little help in the ninth from Perranoski, and the Series (“America’s greatest sporting spectacle!”) removed itself to California.

  I was understandably anxious for company during the next game, and I found it at the Cameo, a Yorkville snuggery at Eighty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue. The U-shaped bar, which enclosed two bartenders, two islands of bottles, and the TV set, was almost full when I came in, and everyone there seemed to know everyone else. It was a good big-city gumbo—men and women, Irishmen and Negroes and Jews and Germans, most of them older than the spectators I had encountered downtown. This was a Saturday afternoon, and the game, being played in Los Angeles, began at four o’clock, which is drinking time on Yorkville weekends. Boilermakers were the favorite, but there were interesting deviations, including one belt I had never seen before—a shot glass of gin with lemon juice squeezed into it. Everybody kept his drinking money out on the bar in front of him. With their club down two games, Yankee fans had grown reticent, but there was one brave holdout, a woman in her late forties named Millie, who was relying on voodoo. She had fashioned a tiny Dodger image out of rolled and folded paper napkins held together with elastic bands, and throughout the game she kept jabbing it viciously and hopefully with toothpicks. When Jim Gilliam came up in the bottom of the first, she stuck a toothpick in each of the doll’s arms. “He’s a switch-hitter,” she explained, “so I gotta get him both ways.”

  The arrows failed to reach Los Angeles in time, though. Gilliam walked and then took second when Jim Bouton, the Yankees’ sophomore fast-baller, threw a bullet all the way to the foul screen behind home plate. Tommy Davis hit a ball that bounced off the pitcher’s mound and then off Bobby Richardson’s shin, and Gilliam scored. The Yankees were again behind in the very first inning (as it turned out, they never led in a single game of the Series), and the Dodger glee club in the Cameo was in full voice. “None of that sweet sugar for the Yanks this year!” one man exclaimed.

  In the next few innings, I evolved the theory that the Dodger pitching staff had made a large pre-Series bet on their comparative abilities, because Don Drysdale, the handsome home-team pitcher, was easily surpassing both Koufax and Podres. His fast ball and his astonishing curves, pitched three-quarters overhand from the apparent vicinity of third base, had the Yankee batters bobbing and swaying like Little Leaguers. Even so, it was an exciting, lively afternoon, because Bouton, although in a lather of nerves, kept pitching his way out of one jam after another, and the game, if not the entire Series, now almost surely hung on that one run. In the seventh, the Dodgers seemed certain to widen the gap when they put Roseboro on third and Tracewski on second, with none out. The combination of tension and boilermakers proved too much for one fan at this juncture. “This Roseboro’s gonna blast one,” he announced loudly. “Just watch and see.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” his companion said, embarrassed. “Roseboro’s standing on third. What are you—bagged or something?”

  “That’s what I said,” the other insisted. “He’s gonna hit a homer. Roseboro’s gonna hit a homer.”

  What did happen was almost as unlikely. Drysdale hit a sharp grounder between second and first, which Richardson ran down with his back to the plate and pegged to Pepitone for the out at first. Pepitone then jogged happily across the infield, having found both Roseboro and Tracewski hopefully toeing third base. Roseboro had held up, Tracewski had run, and it was a double play. The man on the bar stool just to my right, who had told me that he once played semi-pro ball, was disgusted. “What’s the matter with that Roseboro?” he said in disbelief. “No outs and the ball’s hit hard to right, you got to run. You don’t even look—you just go! That’s baseball. Everybody knows that.”

  As it turned out, the insurance run was unnecessary. With two out in the top of the ninth, Pepitone hit a high smash that seemed to be headed for the bleachers. The Cameo’s Yankee fans gave their only yell of the afternoon, but Ron Fairly, with his back almost against the right-field wall, put up his hands and made the catch that ended the game. Millie shook her head slowly and then crumpled her doll into a wet ball on the bar.

  The next aft
ernoon, I witnessed the obsequies in the bar of the Croydon, a genteel residential hotel on Eighty-sixth Street just off Madison Avenue. Surrounded almost entirely by women, but joined from time to time by bellboys and doormen and waiters who dropped into the bar to catch the action, I saw Frank Howard, the Dodger monster, apparently swing with one hand as he hit a hyperbolic home run into the second tier in left field—a blow that Mickey Mantle almost matched with his tying poke in the seventh. Whitey Ford pitched perhaps the best of all his twenty-one World Series games, giving the Dodgers only two hits, but he was up against Koufax again, and the Yankee hitters remained hopelessly polite. In the seventh, Clete Boyer’s throw to Pepitone went through the Yankee first baseman as if he had been made of ectoplasm, and Gilliam steamed all the way around to third on the error, immediately scoring on Willie Davis’s fly. At this juncture, the talk in the bar, which had been pro-Dodger (when it was not concerned with haute couture, Madame Nhu, Elizabeth Taylor, and lower-abdominal surgery), took a sharp, shocked swerve toward disbelief and sadness. Even a lifelong Dodger fan who had come with me to the Croydon was affected. “I never thought the Yankees would go out like this, without winning one damned game,” he said, shaking his head. He sounded like a tormented foretopman who had just learned that Captain Bligh was dying of seasickness. The demise came quickly. Richardson singled, but Tresh and then Mantle took third strikes with their bats resting comfortably on their shoulders. There was an error by Tracewski, but Lopez dribbled to Wills for the last out, and the Dodger squad galloped out and tried to tear souvenir chunks off their baby, Koufax.