The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  That last afternoon, I discovered that I was being torn in three. Part of me wanted the Phillies to win, because of their long, teeth-gritting stand against superior forces. Part of me was pulling for the Reds, if only because their admirable manager, Freddie Hutchinson, is suffering from lung cancer and deserved the present of another pennant. In the end, however, I was delighted about the Cardinals, because St. Louis is perhaps the most dedicated baseball town in the country, and eighteen years is too long for such worthy fans to wait for their reward. I must confess, too, to another, less noble feeling of joy: the Cardinals’ pennant—and now their championship—is solid puck in the eye for contemporary baseball ownership and management. Over the years, the Cardinal organization has been a model of modest, intelligent planning and direction. Before the league expansion, theirs was the westernmost and southernmost franchise, and they drew swarms of players and fans from the vast stretches of baseball’s heartland. Even in lean summers, their home attendance rarely fell below the million mark, although their park seats only thirty-odd thousand. Three or four years ago, Vaughn P. (Bing) Devine, the club’s vice-president and general manager, began the moves that resulted in this year’s flag. He installed Johnny Keane, a veteran member of the Cardinal chain, as manager; he put in Eddie Stanky as director of player development; and he negotiated a number of trades of such astuteness that he was named 1963’s Major League Executive of the Year. Meanwhile, however, August A. Busch, Jr., the St. Louis brewer who purchased the Cards in 1953, was growing impatient. Two years ago, irritated by the club’s sixth-place finish, Busch hired Branch Rickey, the octogenarian Grand Panjandrum of baseball, as “special consultant” to the club—a famously disruptive title in any business organization. Rickey arrived, heavily retinued, and began rumbling forebodings. He opposed Devine’s pending Gotay-for-Groat trade with Pittsburgh—a deal, ultimately clinched, that nailed the Cardinals’ infield together once and for all. The Mahatma was unappeased. As one Cardinal later said, “He sat in that damned box watching us and never smiled once. He didn’t even smile when we won.”

  Last August, some weeks after Devine traded off an eighteen-game-winning pitcher, Ernie Broglio, for a .251-hitting Cub outfielder, Lou Brock, he was summarily fired by Busch and Rickey, neither of whom noticed that the trade had transformed the Cardinals into the hottest team in the league. Eddie Stanky then resigned, and both Devine and Stanky were instantly hired by the New York Mets, who are unaccustomed to such strokes of fortune. It was also leaked to the press that Manager Keane, who had been a member of the Cardinal organization for thirty-five years, would be dropped at the end of the season and replaced by Leo Durocher. Thanks to his team’s rush toward the pennant, Mr. Keane, a reflective, gentle-voiced Texan, received a public handclasp from Branch Rickey just before the end of the season, and the offer of a new one-year contract from August Busch. Keane looked Busch straight in the eye and said he’d think about it after the season was over—an act of character that may have taught Mr. Busch more about baseball than all of Branch Rickey’s counselings.***

  On the first two days of the Series, Busch Stadium—a seamed, rustly, steep-sided box that will be replaced within two years by a new ballpark on St. Louis’s riverfront—reminded me of an old down-on-her-luck dowager who has been given a surprise party by the local settlement house; she was startled by the occasion but still able to accept it as no less than her due. The Cardinal fans around me were plainly and noisily delighted, but I detected none of the unbelieving hysteria with which San Francisco greeted its first pennant, in 1962. These were veteran city and country loyalists. The parked cars around the stadium bore license plates from Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and their occupants, approaching the gates, had to wade through a moat of trash, broken glass, and old beer cans left by the urbanites who had camped outside the park for two cold nights while waiting for the bleachers to open. Inside, I noticed many spectators (and two young ushers) keeping score in their programs. Clearly, that new pennant would be at home here.

  The Cardinals, it will be recalled, won the first game, 9–5, putting away Whitey Ford in the sixth inning and taking advantage of a startling number of Yankee errors and oversights. The Cards happily jumped on the Yanks’ relief pitching, scoring seven runs in the last three innings—a procedure that the visitors reversed the next afternoon, when their seven hits and six runs in the last three innings broke up what had been a pitchers’ game and brought them an 8–3 victory. What struck me during those two windy, cool, exuberant afternoons was not just the similarity of the games but the almost mirrorlike resemblance between the teams themselves. I cannot remember two Series opponents that were more closely matched in strength, weaknesses, and combative optimism.

  To begin with, of course, there were the Boyer brothers, Ken and Clete, at third base. Then, both clubs had to play a substitute infielder—Phil Linz for the Yankees’ Tony Kubek, and Dal Maxvill for the Cards’ Julian Javier—through the entire Series. While the Cards’ infield was far more threatening at the plate than that of the Yankees (361 runs batted in during the season, as against 263), the balance was redressed by the Yankee outfield power (289 RBIs, as against 200). The Yankees counted on the home run; the Cards were faster on the bases. Both clubs, it turned out, had no consistent relief pitching; by the end of the Series, the arrival of a fireman on the mound caused enemy partisans to grin with expectant relish. And, most remarkable of all, each team had won its pennant because of the performance of a pitcher straight out of the legends of baseball. Barney Schultz, a heavy-bodied thirty-eight-year-old veteran who had spent twenty years in the bushy environs of Terre Haute, Wilmington, Macon, Hagerstown, and Schenectady, joined the Cardinals at the beginning of August and then saved eleven games for the team with his knuckleball. At approximately the same time, Mel Stottlemyre, a cool, skinny-necked rookie pitcher with remarkable control, was called up from Richmond; he won nine key games for the Yankees in their stretch drive. Both of them, being creations of Ring Lardner, were a trifle unreal.

  As it turned out, Schultz’s only happy moments in the Series came in the first game, when he held the Yanks to four hits and a single run and saved the win for Ray Sadecki. Stottlemyre was the Yanks’ starter in the second game, and he gave Bob Gibson, the Cardinals’ ace, a rare lesson in pitching. Gibson started out like a Redstone missile, striking out eight men in four innings, and then ran out of fuel and was aborted. Stottlemyre, content merely to get men out on grounders, kept the ball low and concentrated on the tough hitters; he gave up exactly one hit to the top five men in the Cards’ order and easily pitched his way out of three or four nasty jams while waiting for his team to put him ahead for good. He will be at home in New York for years—perhaps decades—to come.

  The third game, at Yankee Stadium, was the only classic. For eight innings, Curt Simmons and Jim Bouton pitched marvelously—Simmons, the veteran, with a selection of soft, in-and-out sliders, curves, and other junk, and Bouton with a rearing fast ball delivered with such energy that his cap flew off on every second or third pitch. Yankee errors kept Bouton in trouble and cost him a run, but it was still 1–1 at the top of the eighth, when Simmons departed for a pinch-hitter. Barney Schultz walked in from the bullpen in the ninth and threw one pitch, which Mickey Mantle hit into the top right-field deck, instantaneously reconverting to Yankeedom several thousand of the 67,101 spectators, who had been rooting almost equally for the two teams.

  What pleased me most at the three Stadium games was the fact that the fans in attendance, whatever their loyalties, were fans. During that lovely three-day holiday weekend, there were, for some reason, conspicuously fewer of the overdressed, uncomprehending autumn arrivistes who usually make up the World Series audience in New York; in their place were hundreds of children—boys with their fathers, teenagers in windbreakers—who screamed over every pitch, every foul. On Sunday, one of these, a youngster named Adam, made so much noise right behind me that his father tried to restrain him in the second i
nning. “Take it easy, Adam,” he said. “You’ll never make it through the game.”

  “I can’t help it,” Adam said proudly. “I’m tense. Listen to me—I’m hoarse already.”

  All his shouts couldn’t help the Yankees, who started off in the first inning with five straight hits and three runs and then were able to manage only one more hit for the rest of the afternoon. They pitched Al Downing in place of Whitey Ford, whose sore arm had finished him for the Series. The Cards won it in the sixth, on Ken Boyer’s grand slam, which had been set up by Bobby Richardson’s error. Roger Craig pitched admirably in relief and got the 4–3 win, thereby easing some of the years of torment he had experienced as a blood sacrifice for the Mets.

  Adam was absent the next afternoon—gargling at home, no doubt—which was just as well; I don’t think he could have stood it. Gibson and Stottlemyre had at each other again, and this time Gibson remembered not to throw all strikes. Stottlemyre looked as icily effective as ever, but another error by Richardson led to two Cardinal runs in the fifth, and Stottlemyre was removed for a pinch-hitter in the seventh. In the ninth, a couple of outs away from a shutout, Gibson was nailed on the hip by Pepitone’s line drive; the ball caromed toward third, but Gibson, a former member of the Harlem Globetrotters, leaped after it and made a looping, fallaway jump-shot to first base to nip Pepitone. It saved the game, because Tom Tresh then hit a two-run homer that tied it up. In the tenth, Tim McCarver hit a three-run homer after some further butterfingered work by the Yankee infield, and Gibson, who had struck out thirteen batters, had the victory he deserved.

  The final two games, at Busch Stadium (which I watched on television), scarcely stand rational examination, for the starting pitchers for both clubs were so weary and the relief pitchers so ineffectual that the games were determined by sheer stamina. Simmons tired before Bouton on Wednesday, and Pepitone’s bases-loaded homer scored the runs that reliever Schultz had put on base, the Yankees thereby tying the Series for the last time; the score was 8–3. On the final afternoon, Yogi Berra waited too long to remove the exhausted Stottlemyre, who was finally allowed to sit down after the fourth, when he trailed 3–0. Yogi’s unwillingness to act became understandable at once, for Al Downing, the next Yankee pitcher, was bombed for a homer, a single, and a double on his first four pitches. Manager Keane, who has learned the virtues of patience this year, was thus able to stand with his own panting marathoner, Gibson, even after Mantle hit a three-run homer in the sixth. By the ninth, Gibson was ahead 7–3, but he was so tired that he could only heave his pitches right down the middle. Clete Boyer and Phil Linz each hit one of these into the left-field stands, but they were the last, dying salutes of this season. Bobby Richardson popped up to end it all, and five or ten thousand Cardinal fans tried to throw themselves into the home-team dugout in their ecstasy. I was sorry for the Yankees, pleased for St. Louis, happy for Johnny Keane, and delighted it was over. Another couple of innings of such attrition and somebody would have tried pitching underhand.

  The day after the Series ended, Johnny Keane announced his resignation as manager of the Cards, and Yogi Berra was summarily dismissed as manager of the Yankees.**** Berra, the last of the old Yankee demigods, was cast aside at the end of his first year at the helm for failing, after a hundred and sixty-nine games, by exactly three runs. The supporters of two baseball capitals have been deprived of their much-admired field leaders, and the pleasures of the World Series are already dimmed. The image-smashers are busy again.

  *That was no rumor.

  †‡**††Neither were these.

  **Now three, with the addition of the inflationary autumn playoffs, the so-called Championship Series, which constitute television’s first contribution to the game.

  ***Not, it turned out, an act of pure character; forehandedly, Johnny Keane had made other plans for the coming season.

  ****Keane, of course, was subsequently hired by the Yankees to succeed Berra, and disimproved on Yogi’s managerial record. The Bronxian Dark Ages had begun.

  WEST OF THE BRONX

  — October 1965

  THE POSSIBILITY MUST BE entertained that the American baseball fan has grown insatiable. Consider his swollen expectations, his insane, autumn hubris. Late in September, he confidently expects to find at least one of the two major leagues concluding its immense hundred-and-sixty-two-game season with two or three teams locked in exhausted contention for the pennant right up to the final weekend of play. This year, the National League obliged him again, when the Dodgers clinched on the final Saturday—a slip, nonetheless, from last year, when there were four National League clubs still in the fight on the penultimate day, and the Cardinals won the flag only on the last afternoon. Unappeased by the persistent recurrence of this statistical miracle (there have been thirteen final-weekend finishes in the majors since 1946), the fan then confidently looks forward to a long, bitterly fought World Series that will somehow produce the most brilliant baseball of the entire season. These expectations, too, are frequently rewarded. Seven of the past ten World Series have gone to the full seven games, and at least five of the past ten turned into classic baseball dramas that will be discussed and remembered decades from now. The World Series of 1965, in which the Dodgers defeated the Minnesota Twins in seven games, was no classic; it was, however, an entertainment of more than sufficient interest, and only the most thrill-surfeited fan could ignore its distinctive omens, curiosities, and pleasures.

  To begin with, this was the first Series played between runaway orphans—the former Brooklyn Dodgers, who went west in 1958, vs. the former Washington Senators, who became the Twins in 1961. Both of them play before home crowds of less than ten years’ loyalty. It should not be forgotten, however, that half the present twenty major-league clubs were born or have pulled up stakes since 1953, and that two of the rovers are changing homes again this year, which means that the Dodgers and the Twins are now among the more typical big-league teams, and that holdfast veterans like the Red Sox, the Cubs, the Pirates, and the Yankees are slipping into the minority. Attendance figures at all parks are memorized and whispered over with an almost rabbinical intensity by contemporary baseball executives, and the complex bond of loyalty, home-town pride, and critical favor that binds, or fails to bind, the man in the stands to the man at the plate has become the game’s leading mystery. Two ghosts haunted the 1965 Series—the Yankees and the Braves. The Braves became the first modern team to move its franchise, when they left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953. In the ensuing five years, they won two pennants, set a major-league single-season gate record, and regularly enjoyed attendance in excess of two million per year. This same Milwaukee team is now defunct; it has just moved to Atlanta, leaving behind a mixed residue of indifference, bitterness, and lawsuits. At the Series this fall, at least a dozen Eastern fans, sportswriters, and baseball men separately described to me an identical experience—a sudden doubt, a momentary shivery silence, that they had felt when their plane paused in Milwaukee before carrying them on to Minneapolis and the noisy, unquenchable joys of another Series. I, too, had been chilled by that same cold breath at the Milwaukee airport: Perhaps baseball was not, after all, immortal.

  The ghost of the Yankees was even more perceptible at the opening games of the Series; you could almost hear the distant rattle of IRT trains above center field. The Yankees are not dead, of course—only their era is dead. The team collapsed and fell to the second division this year, and there is only the smallest reason to believe that it can substantially improve its performance in the seasons immediately ahead. This was only the third time in the past seventeen years that the Yankees had failed to appear in the Series, and the monstrous crash of this Ozymandian figure is still shaking the ground. For a generation, the team was the premier attraction of its league, drawing more fans on the road than at home and sustaining a good many clubs at the box office even while in the act of destroying them on the field. The dilapidation of the Yankees over the past four years can be seen not only
in declining attendance at the Stadium (it has fallen off by 280,000 in that period) but also in the entire league’s loss of fans. American League attendance was down to 8,860,175 in 1965, a drop of over a million in four years; the National League gained more than two million spectators in the same span, and this year’s attendance of 13,576,521 set an all-time record. The disparity can be seen in other, even more painful comparisons. Those late-September dogfights in the National League recur, of course, because there are generally four or five powerful teams in contention; six different teams have won the NL pennant in the past eight years. The National League has won five of the last seven World Series, eight of the last dozen All-Star Games. This could be carried further, into an evaluation of the two leagues’ individual players, but the point is already clear. The incomparable Yankees are gone, and their departure has at last permitted us to see the pitifully undermuscled condition of the other members of their family, whom they bullied over a period of decades into a condition of hostile but abject dependency. The 1965 World Series, even if it lacked the sense of moral drama that made the old autumn Yankee wars so exciting, at least began the essential and hopeful process of rebalancing the leagues.

  The above, I must admit, is a most ungenerous way of introducing the Minnesota Twins, but politeness cannot cover the curious fact that this team, which won the American League pennant by seven games, went through its season without having to survive a single game or set of games that might truly be termed crucial. To put it plainly, no challengers appeared. The Twins had the best batting in the league and the third-best pitching, but neither was overpowering. This was almost exactly the same team that finished in a tie for sixth place in 1964, when it led both leagues in home runs, with two hundred and twenty-one; this year its homer output dropped to a hundred and fifty. The Twins won largely because their manager, Sam Mele, hired a new set of coaches last spring and taught his team a new kind of ball. They eschewed the bomb and studied the hit-and-run, the stolen base, the stretched single. Pitching coach Johnny Sain put Jim Grant and Jim Kaat through a summer-long seminar on spin ballistics, and they won twenty-one and eighteen games, respectively. Third-base coach Billy Martin persuaded the shortstop, a moody Cuban named Zoilo Versalles, that aggressiveness at the plate, quickness on the bases, and a capacity for instantly getting rid of ground balls can make a star out of a small infielder. Finally, no coaches at all were allowed near young Tony Oliva when he approached the plate, and he wound up with his second batting championship in as many years in the majors. Oliva, an outfielder who bats left, has leopardlike reflexes and great speed in the field, and he may become the best American League hitter since Ted Williams. The presence of the Dodgers in this year’s Series was only faintly more explicable, since they too had finished sixth in 1964, and they won this year with a team batting average of .245—the lowest of any championship team since baseball’s dark ages. In May, the Dodgers lost their two-time batting champion, Tommy Davis, who broke an ankle and was finished for the season. Unlike the Twins, they had to battle every day to survive in their junglelike league, and they saw their carefully hoarded little lead wiped out in September by a fourteen-game winning streak of the Giants’. The Dodgers had great pitching and great cool, however, and they responded with a thirteen-game streak of their own, which put them back on top. They clinched their pennant that last Saturday of the season with an almost typical performance—a 3–1 win by Sandy Koufax over the Braves in which the Dodgers collected only two hits. They won this year not just because of Koufax and Drysdale and Maury Wills but because of a combination of speed, pride, and managerial intelligence that enabled them actually to overturn the entire structure of modern offensive baseball, which had been built around the home run. The Dodgers hit only seventy-eight homers all year, but they stole a hundred and seventy-one bases, thereby inventing a brand-new sport—“tap-ball,” perhaps, or “hot wheels”—which was more exciting and certainly more successful than the old game played by the rest of the league this summer.