by Roger Angell
A few owners have opposed expansion for precisely these reasons, but the majority are executives caught up in the old business fiction that says bigger is better. Their usual defense against charges of greed and shortsightedness is a dictum first propounded by Branch Rickey in the nineteen-fifties, which postulated that the increase in national population guaranteed an increase in the number of first-class ballplayers, thus justifying expansion. This year’s batting averages do not support the theory, for reasons I have suggested, and neither do the sharply declining attendance figures in the parks of some famous old teams that have not been in recent pennant contention. The new expansion, in the owners’ dreams, will remedy the attendance anemia, particularly in September, by doubling the number of pennant races and adding two new playoff extravaganzas before the Series itself. The scheduling of these playoffs means that baseball will now be extended into mid-October, and that there will be three full weekends of national television coverage right in the heart of the professional-football season. Clearly, the conservative owners—the non-expansionists—never had a chance. It is expected that baseball fans will somehow not notice that the new playoffs will make most of the long baseball season meaningless, and that the fans will accept at once a system that, had it been in effect this year, would have required the Detroit Tigers to qualify for the Series by winning a playoff against the sixth-place Oakland Athletics, who finished twenty-one games behind them in the standings.
The World Series just past carried an extraordinary burden of hopes. It was counted on to make up for everything—not only the deadly zeros of the Year of the Pitcher but the bad luck of two one-sided pennant races, whose winners were virtually decided by mid-July. This last pre-inflationary, pre-playoff Series meant the end of something, and there was pleasure in the knowledge that both champions represented ancient baseball capitals that had flown a total of eighteen previous pennants. Many of us could remember the last Tiger-Cardinal Series, in 1934, which went seven memorable games and concluded in a riot of acrimony and garbage. Each of the current rivals presented deep, experienced, and exciting teams, whose individual attributes were admirably designed for the dimensions of their home parks—the Cardinals, the defending world champions, quick on the bases, brilliant in defense, knowing in the subtleties of cutoff, sacrifice, and hit-and-run; the Tigers a band of free-swingers who had bashed a hundred and eighty-one homers and could eschew the delicate touch in the knowledge that their runs would come, probably late and in clusters. At almost every position, there were dead-even matchups of ability and reputation. Curt Flood and Mickey Stanley were the best center fielders in their leagues, and Tim McCarver and Bill Freehan the best catchers; Roger Maris, retiring this winter, would play opposite Al Kaline, now in his sixteenth year with the Tigers, who had finally been rewarded for his refusal ever to attend a Series except as a participant; at first base, Orlando Cepeda and Norm Cash presented faded but still formidable reputations as game-busting clean-up hitters. Best of all, the opening game (and probably the key fourth and seventh games) would offer what few sportswriters could resist calling a “meaningful confrontation” between Bob Gibson, the best pitcher in baseball, and Denny McLain, who had won more games in a season than anyone since Lefty Grove. With squads like these, neither Manager Red Schoendienst nor Manager Mayo Smith had been called on through the season to attempt more than minimal prestidigitation. Then, on the eve of the Series, Smith announced that he was moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop, a position he had played in only eight games in the majors. Some sort of shuffle like this was inescapable, because room had to be found in the outfield for Kaline, who had been injured too often of late to hold down a regular spot, but Mayo’s switch offered the heady possibility of disaster every time a ball was hit to the left side of the Tiger infield.
A sellout crowd of 54,692 turned out at St. Louis’s Busch Stadium for the meaningful confrontation. The meanings were there, if hard to decipher immediately. Gibson fanned two batters in the first, but he threw a lot of pitches and looked less imperious than he had against the Red Sox last fall. In the second, though, he settled into his astonishing, flailing delivery, which he finishes with a running lunge toward the first-base line, and struck out the side on eleven pitches. After four innings, he had eight strikeouts—halfway toward a new Series record. McLain, who stands hunchily on the mound, like an Irish middleweight in his ring corner, was mostly high and wild. He gave up an enormous triple to Tim McCarver in the second, but Mike Shannon and Julian Javier were too eager to nail his chin-level fast balls and went down swinging. McLain escaped again in the next inning, when Lou Brock was stranded at third after stealing second and sailing along to third when catcher Bill Freehan’s abysmal throw bounced behind the pitcher and on into center field. Freehan was known to have an ailing arm, but this frail peg promised something like a free visa to all bases for the Cards’ winged messengers. In the fourth, Maris and McCarver both walked on four pitches, and this time Shannon and Javier waited for pitches in the strike zone and then hit singles, good enough for three runs, because Willy Horton misplayed Shannon’s hit in left, moving up the runners. They were also good enough for the ball game. McLain vanished after the fifth, Brock hit a loud but superfluous homer in the seventh, and then there was nothing to watch but Gibson setting the new Series record of seventeen strikeouts.
It made memorable watching—not just the three last batters whiffed in the ninth but a whole lineup of fine hitters utterly dominated and destroyed by the man on the mound. Gibson worked so fast that I was constantly falling behind the actual ball-and-strike count. His concentration was total. Not once, it seemed, did he look at his outfielders, tug at his cap, twitch his sleeve; he didn’t even rub up the new ball after a foul. The instant he got his sign, he rocked, flailed, threw, staggered, put up his glove for the catcher’s throw back, and was ready again. He threw more curves than expected—good, sharp-breaking, down stuff—and though he always seemed to be working at a peak of energy, he had reserves when needed. In the sixth, after Dick McAuliffe singled with one out, he fanned Stanley on three pitches, and when Kaline then doubled down the left-field line he fanned Cash on five. He was tired by the ninth, and he had to throw twenty-eight pitches to four batters (Stanley singled, leading off), yet the count never went above two balls on any of them. Kaline went down swinging at a fast ball, which tied Sandy Koufax’s old Series record of fifteen strikeouts, and then, after many fouls, Gibson got Cash on a beautiful half-speed curve that may have been the best pitch of the game, and Horton on a called third strike that just nicked the back inside corner. Afterward, in the clubhouse, the Tigers sounded like survivors of the Mount Pelée disaster. “I was awed,” said McLain. “I was awed.” McAuliffe, asked to compare Gibson with some pitcher in his league, said, “There is no comparison. He doesn’t remind me of anybody. He’s all by himself.” Gibson proved just as difficult for the reporters as he had for the batters. He is a proud, edgy, intelligent, and sensitive man, very aware of his blackness and all its contemporary meanings. He could stand in front of a circle of fifty reporters and say something impossible, like “I’m never surprised at anything I do,” without making it seem anything less or more than truth. He smiled briefly when someone asked him if he had always been deeply competitive. “I guess you could say so,” he said. “I’ve played a couple of hundred games of ticktacktoe with my little daughter, and she hasn’t beaten me yet. I’ve always had to win. I’ve got to win.”
The next day’s baseball was of more human proportions. Detroit’s starter, Mickey Lolich, is a swaybacked, thick-waisted left-hander whose sinker ball becomes more difficult to hit as he grows tired in late innings. This curious propensity may account for his near invulnerability in late-season ball; by midsummer this year he was reduced to bullpen work, but his record after August 6 was ten wins and two losses. Here, he fell into difficulties in the first, and was saved from immediate extinction only by Al Kaline’s long gallop to right, where he grabbed Cepeda’s foul dri
ve just before crashing into and disappearing through an unlocked field gate. The Tiger batters, perhaps relieved at being able to see what they were swinging at, were doing a lot of first-ball hitting, and, in the second, Willy Horton sailed Nelson Briles’s first delivery deep into the left-field seats, to the accompaniment of a long, low moan of pain from the local partisans. The only sounds that greeted Lolich’s modest round-tripper in the third were hilarious cries from the Detroit bench, for it was his first home run in ten years of professional ball. In the sixth, Norm Cash made it three homers, three runs, and then the Tigers added a pair more modestly, on two singles, a walk, and Dick McAuliffe’s low drive to center that skidded off Curt Flood’s glove. Lou Brock twice stole second, but Lolich’s only anxieties were suddenly eased when, with one run in and two men on base in the sixth, Mickey Stanley flew to his right to seize Shannon’s grounder and begin a nifty double play. Mayo Smith’s alchemy had produced gold. The Tigers won, 8–1, and the teams moved on to Detroit even up.
After twenty-three years without a pennant, and perhaps a decade without any good news of any description, Detroit could almost be forgiven for its susceptibility to the worst kind of baseball fever—the fence ripped down at the airport by the mob welcoming the team home; the billboards crying “Tigertown, U.S.A.”; the tiger-striping on dresses, hats, suits, menus, and street crossings; the prefixative “our” before every mention of the team in the papers; and the “Sock It to ’Em, Tigers!” motto, with excruciating variations (“Soc et Tuum, Tigres!” “Duro con Ellos, Tigres!”), in every bar and department-store window. The fever reached a critical point in the third inning of the home opener, when Kaline lined a two-run homer into the top left-field deck of the boxy old canoe-green stadium, and then it plummeted rapidly as the weather and the ball game turned icy cold. Curiously, though the Tigers led for almost half of the going, only the Cardinals looked dangerous, and no one was much surprised when they went ahead at last and won it, 7–3. Brock had stolen second in the top of the first, but was nailed at third as Maris fanned. He came up again in the third, singled, stole again, and was stranded. A Cardinal double steal went awry in the fourth, when McCarver was thrown out at third on a close call, but the angry shouting from the Cardinal bench suggested that this kind of teetery, edge-of-the-cliff shutout could not be sustained for long. Brock singled to lead off the fifth and again helped himself to second; it was his fifth straight time on base in two games, and his fifth straight steal of second. Earl Wilson, the Detroit starter, was by now in an understandably poor state of nerves, and after he gave up a run-scoring double to Flood and a walk to Maris he was excused for the afternoon. A moment or two later, McCarver hit a three-run homer off Pat Dobson, to put the Cards ahead for good. Ray Washburn, the Cardinal pitcher, also departed, after a homer to McAuliffe in the fifth and two walks in the sixth, but the reliever, Joe Hoerner, stopped the Tigers, and then Cepeda, emerging from an autumn hibernation that had stretched back through three World Series, hit a low liner in the seventh that just reached the left-field seats, to score the last three runs and conclude the arctic maneuvers.
Sunday’s game, played in a light-to-heavy Grand Banks rainstorm and won by the Cardinals, 10–1, offered several lessons, all of them unappreciated by the Tigertowners. (1) Lou Brock does not always steal second. He led off the game with a homer, tripled and scored in the fourth, grounded out in the sixth, and then doubled and stole third in the eighth. It was his seventh stolen base of the Series, tying the record he set last year against Boston. He was at this point batting .500 in the Series and .387 for eighteen Series games, going back to 1964. (2) Some meaningful confrontations are meaningless. McLain met Gibson again, and was gone after two and two-thirds innings, having surrendered four runs and six hits. He turned out to have a sore shoulder, and might not be seen again in the Series. Gibson stayed for his customary nine (he was not knocked out of the box once this season), gave up a home run to Jim Northrup, hit a home run himself, and struck out ten batters without the benefit this day of a reliable curve ball. (3) There are several ways to try to delay a ball game, and just as many to try to speed it up. When rain interrupted matters for an hour and a quarter in the third, with the Cardinals ahead, 4–0, the bleacherites set up a chant of “Rain! Rain! Rain!” hoping for a postponement. This didn’t work, so in the fourth and fifth, with the score now 6–1, the Tigers tried their own methods—long pauses for spike-digging and hand-blowing by the batters, managerial conferences, and inexplicable trips to the dugout, all conducted while they glanced upward for signs of the final and reprieving deluge. Willy Horton even feigned an error, dropping a fly by Shannon that he had already caught, but the umpire would have none of it. Meanwhile, the Cardinals, fully as anxious to reach the legal limit of five innings as the Tigers were to avoid it, gave their special and highly secret steal-but-steal-slow sign to Cepeda and Javier in successive innings; both runners, looking like Marcel Marceau’s mime of a man running while standing still, were thrown out, and the game eventually went into the books. (4) Some baseball games that should not be played because of terrible weather are played anyway, especially if they happen to be Series games televised by NBC on prime Sunday-afternoon time.
At this point, with four one-sided games gone and the Tigers facing imminent deletion, the strongest memories this Series had brought forth were of last year’s long rouser between the Cards and the Red Sox. The Sock It to ’Ems filing into their seats for the fifth game looked distraught, for the papers that morning had informed them that only two clubs had ever recovered from a one-three Series deficit. Surprisingly, the Tigers themselves, gathered around the cage during batting practice, seemed in remarkable fettle for a group apparently awaiting only the executioner’s blindfold. Norm Cash was telling George Kell, a retired Tiger demigod, that he had just figured out how to hit Gibson. “It’s like duck-shooting,” he said. “You gotta lead the goddam bird. When he’s up here [he imitated Gibson at the top of his windup], you gotta start swinging. Pow!” Northrup, in the cage, laced a long fly to right, and several Tigers, watching the ball, cried, “Get out of here!” Northrup then broke two bats on two swings and was urged to open a lumberyard. There was some giggling over Vice-President Humphrey’s visit to the Tiger clubhouse after the previous game. “He kept congratulating everybody,” Dick Tracewski said. “‘Congratulations! We’re proud of you.’ I mean, didn’t he see the game? Didn’t he see us get pasted?” “Maybe he thought he was in the other clubhouse,” someone suggested.
I concluded that these high spirits among the losers were induced only by anticipation of their coming winter holiday, a hunch that appeared swiftly verified when the Cards teed off on Lolich in the top of the first—a double by Brock, a single by Flood, and a homer by Cepeda. The stands fell into a marmoreal hush, and the cheering in the third when Freehan, on a pitchout, finally threw out Brock stealing had a bitter edge to it. But then, in the Tiger fourth, Mickey Stanley’s lead-off drive to right landed a quarter-inch fair, and he would up on third. Kaline was decked by Nelson Briles’s inside pitch, but the ball trickled off his bat and he was out at first. Cash scored Stanley on a fly, and then Willy Horton bashed a triple to deepest right center field. Northrup’s hard grounder right at Javier struck a pebble on the last hop and sailed over the second baseman’s head, and suddenly the breaks of the inning were even and the Tigers only one run down. From then on, it was a game to treasure—the kind of baseball in which each pitch, each catch, each call becomes an omen.
Brock doubled again in the fifth, going with an outside pitch and flicking the ball to left, exactly as he had in the first. Javier singled to left, and when Brock, in full stride, was within six feet of the plate it looked as if he had Willy Horton’s throw beaten by yards. He must have thought so, too, for he failed to slide. The ball came in on the fly, chest-high to Freehan, he and Brock collided, and umpire Doug Harvey’s fist came around in a right hook: Out! Brock, storming, thought Harvey had missed the call, and so, I must confess, d
id I. Later, photographs proved us wrong (though nothing would have been altered, of course, if they’d proved us right). The pictures show Brock’s left heel planted and his toes descending on the plate; an instant later he has hit Freehan’s right arm and left leg, and his foot, banged away, twists and descends on dirt instead of rubber.
The game rushed along, still 3–2 Cardinals, and when the Tigers loaded the bases in the sixth and Freehan, now zero for fourteen in the Series, came up to the plate, I thought Mayo Smith would call on a pinch-hitter. He let Freehan bat, and Freehan bounced into an inning-ending force. With one away in the seventh, and the Tigers only seven outs away from extinction, Smith also permitted Lolich to bat for himself, and, extraordinarily, his short fly fell safe in right. Hoerner came in to pitch, and McAuliffe singled just past Cepeda. Stanley walked, loading the bases, and Kaline came up to the plate. Now I understood. Clearly, Mayo had planned it all: the famous old hitter up to save the day and the game and the Series in a typical Tiger seventh, and the stands going mad. Kaline swung and missed, took a ball, and then lined the next one to right center for the tying and go-ahead runs. Cash singled another in. Moments later, it seemed, we were in the ninth, and the Cards had the tying runs aboard. Lolich, however, took a deep breath and fanned Maris, pinch-hitting. He then pounced on Brock’s weak tap, ran a few steps toward first, and lobbed the ball to Cash, and the great game was over.
