The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  A couple of hours before the beginning of the third game (which became a rainout), Charles O. Finley, resplendent in a Kelly-green double-knit blazer, got aboard a crowded elevator inside the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. When it reached the field level, he stood aside to let the rest of us out, and then turned to the young woman running the elevator. “Listen, dear,” he said urgently. “I want you to stop at two on the way back up and pick up the boys with the coffee urns. You got that?” Charlie Finley is a man who must do everything by himself, even when fifty thousand paying customers are at the gates. He is a self-made millionaire, in the insurance business. He bought his ball club by himself and, almost entirely without advice, developed and traded for the players who brought him the championship. (He is also a jock satrap, owning teams in two other sports—the California Golden Seals, of the National Hockey League, and the Memphis Tams, of the American Basketball Association—which he operates and oversees in the same shouldering style.) He designed the A’s’ uniforms. He designed their style of play. (This year’s policy of pinch-hitting for the second baseman as early as the second inning is a Finley invention, and reflects his conviction that baseball should open itself more to pinch-hitting and pinch-running specialists.) He used up nine baseball managers in ten years, and imposes strategy upon the incumbent, Dick Williams, like a Little League daddy. He is a man who must control every situation in which he finds himself, from arranging the seating at a dinner table to personally dispensing the last five hundred World Series tickets behind the Oakland dugout (an area he refers to as “my box”). He brings his team mascot, an enormous mule named Charlie O, to all the A’s’ public functions, indoors or outdoors. In his relations with his players, he has a fondness for the sudden paternal gesture—an arm around the shoulder and the whispered message that the athlete’s contract has just been upped by a few thousand for some deed well done. Last year, Finley tried to persuade Vida Blue to change his first name to True. Later, he publicly presented him with a new Cadillac, but this spring, when Blue held out for a very sizable increase in salary, Finley fought him with such unbridled vehemence that Blue fell into a state of embittered withdrawal that accounted in great part for his disappointing 6–10 record. Mr. Finley believes he enjoys excellent relations with most of his players, and would probably point to his new championship as the best evidence of their happiness. Yet considerable evidence suggests that the A’s were united and matured most of all by their shared individual resistance to the Finley style and the Finley presence. During the Series, Reggie Jackson talked to me about this. “The man is insulting and meddlesome,” he said. “This team found itself in the summer, but this is not the way to make a team.”

  Finley has already had a notable influence on baseball (scheduling the weekday Series games at night, as was done this year, is an idea he finally sold to his fellow executives), and now, with a hold on the championship, he will wield more power in the councils of the sport. His prime immediate projects for the game are the addition to the lineup of a designated hitter, who would bat for any other player (probably the pitcher) without requiring him to leave the game, and the use of a bright orange baseball in night games. I hate the first idea, and I would leave the second one up to the players to decide, but both deserve serious testing. Charlie Finley, one comes to realize, is impossible to ignore, like a mule in a ballroom.

  The third game, played on a sodden turf and by Pacific Daylight Saving Time, was an austere, nearly eventless affair that finally went to the Reds by a minimal 1–0. The time zone was perhaps the most important element of the game. The action began at five-thirty in the afternoon, which is prime evening tube time in the East and is also the beginning of twilight in California infields in October. The pitchers—Blue Moon Odom for the A’s and Jack Billingham for the Reds—were entranced with this crepuscular setting and struck out batters in helpless clusters. The only run of the evening (and only the second Cincinnati run in the past twenty-one innings) almost didn’t get into the books, for Tony Perez, rounding third in the seventh inning, slipped on the wet turf and went sprawling—a sudden baseball bad dream—but then got up and tottered home.

  The true bad dream for the Reds had been postponed only for a day. In game four, while struggling against the experienced and capable Oakland left-hander Ken Holtzman, they watched incredulously as Gene Tenace deposited another souvenir in the bleachers, in the fifth, to put them down by 1–0. In the top of the eighth, however, Dave Concepcion singled and was sacrificed to second. With two out, Vida Blue came on in relief to face Joe Morgan, and walked him. Bobby Tolan socked Blue’s first pitch, a fastball, on a line for two bases and two runs, and Concepcion and Morgan slapped hands happily at the plate. The win would tie the Series, and everything was about to be all right after all. Later—a day or two later—Sparky Anderson remarked that he never truly expects a pinch-hitter to hit safely, so what happened next will probably remain vividly in his mind for months or years to come—a nightmare to be experienced a thousand times, always with the same far-fetched and loathsome outcome. It is the bottom of the ninth, one out. Gonzalo Marquez, an Oakland pinch-hitter, taps a single over second. With the count two and one on Gene Tenace, Anderson summons in a new pitcher, Clay Carroll, who has set an all-time major-league record for saves during the season. Tenace singles. Oakland has two men on, and Don Mincher, a large veteran left-handed swinger, now comes up to pinch-hit for the A’s—not a true threat, except that Carroll gets his second pitch up a bit and Mincher eagerly whacks it into right field, tying the game and moving Tenace to third. Angel Mangual comes up to pinch-hit. Carroll’s first pitch to him is perfect—a fastball in on the hands. Mangual swings, almost in self-defense, hitting the ball down on the handle and nudging a little bleeder between first and second, which Perez or Morgan cannot quite, either one of them, straining, staggering, get a glove on. The game is gone.

  Q: your team is trailing, three games to one, in the World Series. It is the top of the first inning of game five, and you are the leadoff batter. What is the best thing to do?

  A: Hit the first pitch into the stands for a home run.

  The student who got an A on this quiz was Pete Rose, who had heretofore suffered an uncharacteristic eclipse in the Series. Rose is unmistakable on a ball field. He is ardent, entertaining, and unquenchable. He burns by day and by night. He sprints to first base on walks, dives on his belly on the base paths or chasing line drives in the outfield, and pulls in fly balls in left field with a slicing, downward motion that says “There!” At plate, he is the model leadoff man—a medium-sized switch-hitter who, choking the bat and hunching over the plate, can pull the ball with real power or punch it to the opposite field; he scrutinizes every pitch, not just up to the plate but right back into the catcher’s glove, and then glares into the umpire’s face for the call. He is a great hitter, and only the spring strike this year kept him from his annual quota of more than two hundred hits. (The fans in the left-field bleachers in Oakland, watching Rose in person for the first time, honored him on several occasions with salvos of eggs and vegetables. One of the eggs landed unbroken on the mushy turf, and Rose brought it in as a souvenir to the Cincinnati dugout, where it was eaten by coach Ted Kluszewski.) Tom Seaver says that Pete Rose entirely alters the game when he bats, making it into a deadly personal duel with the man on the mound.

  Rose’s first-pitch homer off Catfish Hunter announced that the alteration of this fifth game had begun, but it was some time before he got it completely under control. It was a crowded, disheveled sort of game, in which each team successfully employed its various specialties. There was another homer by Gene Tenace, good for three runs, in the second inning, and another pinch hit by Marquez—his twelfth in twenty-two such appearances this year. The partisans in Charlie Finley’s private preserve, all green-and-yellow in the caps and banners he had provided them, sustained a continuous jubilee, like bullfrogs in a June shower. The A’s led by 3–1 and 4–2, but Morgan was walked twice, and each ti
me he whistled around the bases in dazzling style to score on a single by Tolan. It was all tied up in the ninth, then, when Geronimo singled, and was neatly sacrificed to second. An infield error now brought up Rose, this time batting left-handed against Rollie Fingers, the Oakland mound incumbent. Fingers (whose mustache aspires toward the Salvador Dali rococo ideal) had won the previous game in relief, but now he sighed disconsolately, fiddled uncharacteristically, and at last offered up the pitch, which Rose redirected smartly into right field to deliver the winning run. Score for the Top Three for the day: three runs, five hits, two walks, three stolen bases, four runs batted in. Oakland, undiscouraged as always, put on its leadoff man in the home half, and Dave Duncan (a catcher with an Oberammergau coiffure and beard) singled the pinch-runner, Odom, along to third. With one out, Campaneris fouled out to Morgan in very short right field, and after the catch Odom impulsively launched himself down the inviting ninety-foot homestretch. He negotiated eighty-nine feet and six inches of the distance before encountering Johnny Bench and the ball, and then most unhappily got up and prepared to join the rest of us on the somewhat longer journey back to Cincinnati.

  The penultimate meeting was played the next afternoon, a Saturday—also prime viewing time, which meant that the teams were not permitted the customary travel holiday. It was probably just as well, however, for in Riverfront Stadium a bone-chilling easterly suggested that this pastime had already overstayed its season. Vida Blue, given his first start of the Series because of the compressed pitching schedule, did not seem to have his hummer and kept falling behind the Red batters. Bench homered in the fourth, and the Reds sent four men to the plate in the fifth, and five men to the plate in the sixth, and (joyfully falling upon Oakland’s second-line pitching) ten men to the plate in the seventh, to wrap up an 8–1 landslide. It was a sad end to Vida’s sad year, but there was some satisfaction in watching the Reds’ sluggers doing their thing at last. The Cincinnati fans were utterly transported, and with reason: this was the first World Series game to be won by the Reds at home since 1940.

  The full seven, then, with a resolution that was still impossible to forecast or guess at. Strangely, no single player had emerged—in the manner of a Clemente, a Brooks Robinson, a Brock—to put his stamp and style on this Series. The closeness of the games and the continuous action on the field almost concealed the fact that the level of play had been less than distinguished. Most of the Cincinnati starting pitchers had been inadequate, both teams had suffered inordinate difficulties in executing the double play, the Oakland pitchers and catcher Gene Tenace had among them surrendered eleven stolen bases, and the teams together were hitting a desultory .203. Still, the original elements of the drama remained, now deepened to a wonderful expectancy—the Oakland pitching and woolly élan against the Reds’ hitting, speed, and pride. Something would give way here today.

  Dick Williams, in an attempt to bolster his hitting and defense simultaneously, moved Tenace to first base, put Duncan behind the plate, and started Angel Mangual in center. (Tenace looked understandably edgy about his new responsibilities. “Tomorrow,” he said during batting practice, “I’ll probably be playing goalie.”) Mangual made a difference in the very first half-inning, when he struck a long drive off Jack Billingham to straightaway center field. Bobby Tolan raced in, absolutely misjudging the play, and then made a leap for the sailing ball, which glanced off his glove and rolled to the fence, with Mangual winding up on third. (Extraordinarily, most of this game seemed to be played at the foot of that center-field fence, 404 feet away.) Gene Tenace, now batting cleanup, pulled a sharp grounder to left that struck the edge of the AstroTurf carpet at the back of the third-base dirt patch and suddenly bounded over Menke’s head; and the Yellowlegs, not exactly on merit, had the first run.

  Blue Moon Odom, the Oakland starter, has a splendid motion to first base (a gift he has evidently never tried to pass along to his co-workers), and he had stated the night before that no Cincinnati runners would steal on him. Now, in the fourth, Pete Rose led off with an enormous smash to center that Mangual one-handed just at the fence. A little startled, Odom walked the swift Morgan, and the crowd began a breathless nonstop shouting: “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Odom would have none of it. Fixing Morgan with a sidewise, over-the-shoulder stare (friends who saw the game on television told me later that the closeups of Odom’s face were remarkable), pausing, waiting almost interminably, he whirled and threw to his first baseman five times in succession, twice nearly erasing Morgan. He delivered a ball to Tolan, then made two more pick-off throws, then threw another pitch—a ball—as Morgan flew away to second, where he was cut down, narrowly but plainly, by Duncan’s peg. The game, I was suddenly certain, had been won right there.

  The Reds were far from done. Tony Perez led off the fifth with a double to the left-field corner, and two successive walks then loaded the bases with only one out. Hal McRae, pinch-hitting, struck the first delivery to him all the way (need it be added?) to the center-field wall, where Mangual made the catch. The score: 1–1. Rose, who had singled in the first, unloaded another rocket to precisely the same spot, and again to no avail. He had now struck two successive clouts, good for a total of more than eight hundred feet, producing two outs. Some baseball games do not yield themselves, even to a Rose.

  Billingham had been given up for the pinch-hitter, and Campaneris greeted his successor, Pedro Borbon, with a single. He was sacrificed to second, and Tenace scored him with a double to deep left—and was taken out of the game, to his surprise, for a pinch-runner. (He had won the sports car, clearly, as the top player of the Series, and also became the recipient of a hug and a retroactive raise from the All-father, Charlie Finley.) The next batter, Sal Bando, hit another enormous shot to the battered center-field salient, and this ball landed untouched when Tolan fell at the warning track. The score was 3–1, and Cincinnati’s luck had run out.

  Pete Rose, leading off for the Reds perhaps for the last time this season, began the eighth with a single off Catfish Hunter, and the despairing Reds rooters hoarsely roused themselves once again. Holtzman, a lefty, came in to pitch to Joe Morgan, a lefty, and the last touch of baseball misfortune now descended on the Reds. Morgan cracked the ball on a low line to right—pulling it so violently, in fact, that Rose had to dodge back to avoid being struck, and then was forced to leap over Mike Hegan, the Oakland first baseman, sprawled in the dirt after his dive for the ball. The ball was in the right-field corner—a sure triple, a certain run, except for that infinitesimal accident at first; Rose came churning around third, with Morgan not far behind, but the ball was on the way in now, and third-base coach Alex Grammas threw up his hands at the last instant, stopping Rose so abruptly that his helmet came flying off. The runners retreated. (Second-guessing, I thought Grammas had made a mistake, but we would never know.) Fingers came in to pitch, and Rose eventually scored on Perez’ fly, to bring it to 3–2, but that was all, and a few minutes later the exhausting, searching season was over.

  One of the wearers of the green-and-gold in the happy Oakland clubhouse was Rick Williams, the fifteen-year-old son of the victorious manager, whom I had last seen five years ago, when his father piloted the Red Sox to their remarkable pennant. Rick looked only a little younger than most of the whooping and grinning new champions, whose hair and mustaches—now streaming with champagne—had somehow always made them look more boyish than any other big-league team I could remember. Reggie Jackson, in civvies, also had a bottle of champagne. He exchanged hugs and hand-slaps with his teammates, but he had not played in this, the only World Series of his life. In time, he limped unnoticed into another room and sat down to watch a football game on television.

  The Reds’ clubhouse was utterly quiet. I heard no complaining about the breaks. (Baseball luck is inescapable, and professionals know that in order to win you must dominate the game to the point where it is no longer a factor.) Bobby Tolan, ignoring the reporters, toured the locker room and apologized to every one of his team
mates. “I’m sorry I let you mothers down,” he murmured. The silence was so profound that three-year-old Pete Rose, Jr., who was carrying a little baseball bat and wearing a miniature version of his father’s uniform, kept staring up at the men’s faces all around him, trying to understand it. In time, he wandered into the deserted equipment room, where he examined a large bin filled with fresh, untouched ice cubes. Then he assumed a left-handed batting stance and swung his small bat again and again and then again, swinging at an invisible ball—perhaps the only person anywhere at that instant who was ready for more baseball.

  Stories for a Rainy Afternoon

  — Summer 1976

  THE TARPAULIN IS DOWN, and a midafternoon rain is falling steadily. Play has been halted. The lights are on, and the wet, pale green tarp throws off wiggly, reptilian gleams. The scoreboard is lit up, too, bringing us fair-weather scores from other cities, and showing us where this game stood a few minutes ago, when the home-plate umpire threw up his hands to call time and everybody on the field ran for cover. Now the players are back in their locker rooms, and both dugouts are empty. A few fans have stayed in their seats, huddling under big, brightly colored golf umbrellas, but almost everybody else has moved back under the shelter of the upper decks, standing there quietly, behind the seats, watching the rain. The press box is deserted except for a couple of writers knocking out sidebars or an early column; a teletype operator is sitting next to his machine and reading a newspaper. The huge park, the countless rows of shiny-blue wet seats, the long emerald outfield lawns, the rain-spattered tarps—all stand silent and waiting. By the look of it, this shower may hold things up for a good half-hour or more. Time for a few baseball stories.