by Roger Angell
As drama, the 1963 World Series was wanting in structure and development. This lack of catharsis was sensed, I am sure, even by Dodger supporters. This disappointment, the small, persistent resentment, about the outcome of the Series which is felt (or so I believe) by Yankee fans is at least partly a result of the fact that they had to wait through a long summer of vapid American League baseball, in which the Yankees walked over such feeble and acquiescent challengers as the Chicago White Sox, the Minnesota Twins, and the Baltimore Orioles. The only crucial series for the Yanks in 1963 was the last one, and they muffed it shockingly.
Those millions of us who saw the Series on television were left with the emptiest balloon of all. There is a small paradox here, because these were pitchers’ games, and the television camera, hovering over the home-plate empire’s shoulder and peering down the back of the pitcher’s neck, gives a far better view of each ball and strike than any spectator can get from the stands. But baseball is not just pitching. A low-scoring series of games is stirring only if one can sense the almost unbearable pressure it puts on base-running and defense, and this cannot be conveyed even by highly skilled cameramen. This World Series was lost by a handful of Yankee mistakes, most of which were either not visible or not really understandable to television-watchers. The cameras were on the hitter when Maris fell in the second game. The grounder that bounced off Richardson in the third game and Pepitone’s astonishing fluff in the final game caused everyone near me to ask “What happened?” On the same two-dimensional screen, it looked as if the throw to Pepitone had hit the dirt, instead of skidding off his wrist, as it did. It is the lack of the third dimension on TV that makes baseball seem less than half the game it is, that actually deprives it of its essential beauty, clarity, and excitement.
Yankee fans grew increasingly invisible as the Series progressed, and now they must nurse their winter puzzlement and disappointment with whatever grudging grace they can muster; to do otherwise would seem ungrateful in the face of their team’s nine world championships and thirteen American League pennants in the past fifteen years. But it must be clear to them now that this Yankee team is not the brilliant, almost incomparable squad that many baseball writers claimed it was. No team can be judged entirely on one series, and the Yankees were not disgraced, for all the games were close; this was nothing like the dreary one-sided pasting that the Yankees gave the Cincinnati Reds in five games in 1961. And the Dodgers’ pitching, opportunism, and nerve were magnificent. But fine pitching inevitably means bad batting; the terms are synonymous. Hard luck and injuries notwithstanding, the Yankees’ best and most publicized athletes have not been of much help to them in recent Octobers. Mickey Mantle has batted .167, .120, and .133 in his last three Series; Roger Maris has hit .105, .174, and .000 in the same span. Whitey Ford has failed to win one of the last four Series games he has pitched. There is something wrong here—too little day-to-day opposition, perhaps a tiny lack of pride, perhaps a trace of moneyed smugness. Whatever it is, it probably explains this year’s collapse and makes it certain that this Yankee team cannot be compared to the Ruffing-Gehrig-Dickey teams of the nineteen-thirties or the DiMaggio-Henrich-Rizzuto Yanks of the nineteen-forties and fifties. What made those Yankee teams so fearsome, so admirable, so hated was typified by the death-ray scowl that Allie Reynolds, their ace right-handed pitcher a decade ago, used to aim at an enemy slugger stepping into the box in a crucial game. I can think of no member of the current team capable of such emotion, such combative pride. I suspect that local Yankee fans sensed the absence of this ingredient almost unconsciously, even before the Series began. That would explain, most of all, why the deepest passions and noisiest pleasures of baseball were so conspicuously absent in the bars and streets and offices of the city this autumn.
TWO STRIKES ON THE IMAGE
— October 1964
AS WE ALL KNOW, when the typical American business executive turns out his bedside light he devotes his next-to-last thought of the day to his corporate image—that elusive and essential ideal vision of his company which shimmers, or should shimmer, in the minds of consumers. Do they like us, he wonders. Do we look respectable? Honest? Lovable? Hmm. He sighs, stretches out, and tries to find sleep by once again striking out the entire batting order of the New York Yankees. As he works the count to three and two on Tom Tresh, it may suddenly occur to this well-paid insomniac that baseball itself has the most enviable corporate image in the world. Its evocations, overtones, and loyalties, firmly planted in the mind of every American male during childhood and nurtured thereafter by millions of words of free newspaper publicity, appear to be unassailable. It is the national pastime. It is youth, springtime, a trip to the country, part of our past. It is the roaring excitement of huge urban crowds and the sleepy green afternoon silences of midsummer. Without effort, it engenders and thrives on heroes, legends, self-identification, and home-town pride. For six months of the year, it intrudes cheerfully into every American home, then frequently rises to a point of nearly insupportable tension and absorption, and concludes in the happy explosion of the country’s favorite sporting spectacle, the World Series. Given these ancient and self-sustaining attributes, it would seem impossible that the executives of such a business could injure it to any profound degree through their own carelessness and greed, yet this is exactly what has happened to baseball in the past ten years. The season that just ended in two improbably close pennant races and in the victory of the Cardinals over the Yankees in a memorable seven-game World Series was also the most shameful and destructive year the game has experienced since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
The fervent loyalties of baseball are almost, but not quite, indestructible. I know a New York lady, now in her seventies, whose heart slowly bleeds through the summer over the misadventures of the Boston Red Sox, a team representing the home town she left in 1915. With immense difficulty, I have sustained something of that affection for the San Francisco Giants, once my New York team, but I know that my attachment will not survive the eventual departure of Willie Mays. Since 1953, six teams have changed their names and four entirely new teams have been born, so exactly half of the twenty major-league teams must count on a loyalty that is less than a dozen years old. Further expansion of both leagues is already being discussed, and at this writing it seems entirely possible that faltering attendance will cause three more franchises—Cleveland, Kansas City, and Milwaukee—to shift to new cities within the next two seasons. Another team, the Angels, will conclude its brief tenancy in Los Angeles at the end of next year; starting in 1966, it will represent Anaheim, California, which is the home of Disneyland.
The irritation and dismay that I share with most baseball fans over this queasy state of affairs is not caused entirely by the appearance in our ballparks of so many semi-anonymous ballplayers with unfamiliar insignia on their shirtfronts, or by the inept play of so many of the new teams, or even by the ridiculously expanded new schedules, which now require the majors to play 1620 games, as against the old 1232, before they can determine two winners. Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark. He was followed at once by Horace Stoneham, who took his Giants to San Francisco while piously denying that he had any understanding with O’Malley, although every schoolboy knew that National League schedules required the presence of two teams on the West Coast. Within a few days, the largest and most vociferously involved baseball audience in the country was deprived of its two oldest franchises and left with the new knowledge that baseball’s executives cared only for the profits inherent in novelty and new audiences, and sensed no obligation whatever—not even the obligation of candor—to the fans who had buil
t their business.
The subsequent operations of Mr. O’Malley, the other owners of big-league teams, the league presidents, and Commissioner Ford Frick have been watched by fans with growing cynicism. In 1961, O’Malley, supported by Frick, permitted the establishment of a rival team in Los Angeles only after imposing such punitive conditions and rental fees that the Angels could not possibly succeed. The result, of course, is Anaheim. In the 1962 draft creating two new teams, the National League owners, ignoring the much fairer system inaugurated by the American League the previous year, protected their player investment so carefully that the squads were manned entirely by a miserable collection of culls and aging castoffs, and the two teams—the Houston Colt .45s and the Mets—have been a disgrace to baseball. The perverse loyalty of the Met fans—the New Breed—is at least partly engendered by a hatred for the kind of cold-blooded success typified by Mr. O’Malley and by the owners of the New York Yankees.
In the past few years, baseball has staged such unedifying spectacles as the loud public wrangle carried on by Charles O. Finley, the owner of the Athletics, in his attempt to secure more favorable stadium-rental terms from the municipal government of Kansas City. At various times, since he purchased the club in 1960, Mr. Finley has threatened to move to Oakland, to Atlanta, or to almost any other city or hamlet that promised him a ballfield and the kind of profits he considers his due. Last winter, his negotiations with Louisville reached the point where the American League had to threaten him with expulsion before he accepted terms and signed a new lease for the Kansas City park. Mr. Finley, it should be added, is the man who had to be restrained by the baseball Rules Committee from enlivening the national pastime with orange baseballs and green-and-gold bats. His notion that baseball owes him a free, or almost free, municipal ballpark and the right to move wherever and whenever he chooses is neither eccentric nor atypical. Consider, for example, the fact that the Braves, who have been established in Milwaukee only since 1953, are now casting hungry eyes on Atlanta. This team—pennant winners in 1957 and 1958, and formidable contenders from 1952 through 1960—enjoyed four consecutive years in which their attendance topped two million, and in 1957 they established a league gate record of 2,215,404, so there can be no doubt about Milwaukee’s enthusiasm for the sport. But now that the team is old and attendance is down, the chance to move on to new audiences, in the pattern established by O’Malley, may prove to be more tempting than the hard work involved in staying put and rebuilding the club. There is a powerful rumor that Milwaukee will move to Atlanta next year,* and other shifts, involving cities such as Cleveland, Kansas City,† Seattle,‡ Oakland,** and Dallas,†† are in the wind. If these shuttlings ever do take place, several million more fans will understand at last that baseball’s executives view them as dimwitted louts who will automatically attach their attention and loyalty to the most recent second-rate team that happens to wear the home uniform.
The most significant event of the 1964 baseball season was the news on August 13 that the Columbia Broadcasting Company had bought control (80 percent) of the New York Yankees for the sum of $11,200,000. The shabby and by now typical manner of the maneuver was as dismaying as its import. Charles Finley, of Kansas City, and Arthur Allyn, president of the Chicago White Sox, were both informed of the deal in telephone calls from the American League president, Joe Cronin, who in one breath told them that league rules required them to vote on the transaction and in the next that their votes were meaningless, since he already had the three-quarters majority necessary for it to pass. This call came only two days after the annual major-league executive meetings in Chicago, during which the deal was never mentioned to Finley, Allyn, or the public. Finley’s and Allyn’s subsequent shouts of rage and the astonished editorial protests of the press were so piercing that Cronin convened a league meeting in Boston to consider the possible antitrust violations implicit in the sale. The meeting turned into a whitewash, in which various proposals for reconsideration were ruled out of order or brushed aside and a tentative change of heart by the Baltimore owners (which could have killed the sale) was ruthlessly muscled down. A few facts about the inner councils of baseball may explain how this was possible. Dan Topping and Del Webb, the former owners and continuing managing executives of the Yankees, are as powerful in their league as Walter O’Malley is in his. Topping and O’Malley are both members of the majors’ Executive Council, along with the two league presidents and Commissioner Frick. American League President Cronin is a brother-in-law of Calvin R. Griffith, the president of the Minnesota Twins. The Cleveland Indians are anxious to move their franchise, and would need the approval of the Yankees and other clubs in order to make the shift. Lee MacPhail, the president of the Baltimore Orioles, is the brother of Bill MacPhail, director of sports for CBS. Several American League executives own blocks of CBS stock; the owners of the Los Angeles Angels, who also needed league approval for their franchise move, operate CBS affiliates in California, and John Fetzer, president of the Detroit Tigers, operates CBS-affiliated stations in the Middle West.
Television now exerts the most intense pressure on all aspects of baseball. Since the war, its total exposure of major-league games has destroyed most of the minor leagues. The widely varying amounts of TV revenue enjoyed by the big-league clubs have made the rich teams richer and do much to explain why so many poorer clubs want to shift franchises. The potentialities of pay television, first attempted in California this year, are as yet unknown, but this new device may vastly increase the revenue of baseball, while causing further financial disruption in less-populated baseball territories. The Yankees, of course, already derive considerable money from their own telecasts and broadcasts—$1,200,000 from local stations, plus an additional $600,000 from CBS itself for their part in the nationwide Game of the Week telecasts. To drop CBS into the middle of this rich, untidy gumbo as the owner of baseball’s No. 1 attraction may look like an engraved invitation for Congressional antitrust investigations, but it is an entirely appropriate symbol of television’s enormous interest in the game.
The sports television business has never been happy with baseball, which so far includes only two big-revenue packages—the All Star Games and Series—each year.** Moreover, the old pastime does not produce tidy two-hour segments of marketable time; a nationally televised Saturday game may creep along into the early evening, and it cannot be puffed by much advance billing, since the meaning of its outcome may not be known until late September. This is almost intolerable to the young men in blazers who run sports TV; their dream is fifty weekends of world championships—in football, in baseball, in surfing, in Senior Women’s Marbles—that are not to be missed by the weekend watcher. Yet these sportsmen cannot be dismissed so easily, for they command an audience of millions and revenues that are almost immeasurable. It must be assumed that baseball executives will do almost anything to climb aboard this gaudy bandwagon, and that the ultimate shape of baseball in the next ten years or so—its size, its franchise locations, and even its rules—will be largely determined not by tradition or regard for the fans or regard for the delicate balances of the game, but by the demands of the little box.
These objections, I am certain, will cut no ice with most baseball magnates, whose instant response to criticism of this nature is to smile and say, “Well, I’m in this for the money, of course.” Of course. Baseball is a commercial venture, but it is one of such perfect equipoise that millions of us every year can still unembarrassedly surrender ourselves to its unique and absorbing joys. The ability to find beauty and involvement in artificial commercial constructions is essential to most of us in the modern world; it is the life-giving naïveté. But naïveté is not gullibility, and those who persistently alter baseball for their quick and selfish purposes will find, I believe, that they are the owners of teams without a following and of a sport devoid of passion.
It is a breath of fresh air to emerge from those noisome back rooms and to report, if far too briefly, on the World Series just past
. That Series and the two or three weeks of the season that preceded it constituted the happiest kind of surprise, for they demonstrated the vitality, unpredictability, and accomplishments of the game itself. This was the year in which a few dozen baseball players barely retrieved their sport from the indoor thinkers. As everyone but the most obdurate recluse must know by now, the Yankees, after stumbling futilely for most of the season, came on to win thirty out of their last forty games, making up a six-and-a-half-game deficit and climbing past the White Sox and the Orioles to win the American League pennant on the next-to-the-last day of the season. (This race, breathtaking as it was, would have been even more dramatic if the league had not drawn up a ridiculous schedule that left no games whatever between the Yankees and the two other contenders after the middle of August.) Meanwhile, in the other league, the Phillies, a young, underprivileged team of have-nots, had painstakingly compiled a six-and-a-half-game lead of their own that looked absolutely unassailable with two weeks of the season remaining. They then fell apart like a dropped tray of dishes, losing ten straight, and first the Cincinnati Reds and then the St. Louis Cardinals drew even, with the Giants hanging on by their fingernails just behind. On the last Saturday of the season, the first four-way tie in the history of baseball was entirely possible. That afternoon, though, the Giants lost and dropped out of it, leaving the Phillies-Reds and Cardinals-Mets games to settle matters on the last day. The Phils, loose and angry now, took the Reds apart, 10–0, leaving it all for the Cards, who had only to beat the most popular losers in history. For a few innings, a magnificent comic-opera ending seemed possible, for the Mets, who had won the two previous games from the Cards by scores of 1–0 and 15–5, were leading, 3–2, as late as the fifth inning, thus sustaining baseball’s tradition of autumn embarrassments inflicted by last-place clubs upon their betters. Class finally told, however, when three three-run outbursts won the game, 11–5, and brought the Cards their first pennant since 1946. The deep “Whew!” emitted by the nation’s fans sounded familiar; since 1946 the National League has staged four pennant races that ended in a dead tie, four that were determined on the final day, and six more that were settled only in the final week of the season.
