by Roger Angell
Season Lightly
— July 1973
ONCE A PASTIME, BASEBALL is becoming another national anomaly—an institution that is less and less recognizable as it grows in age and familiarity. The executives of the game, displaying their customary blend of irresolution, impulsiveness, and inflexibility, failed this year even to agree on the basic rules, presenting us with one league of teams playing ten men on a side and another offering the more customary nine. Thus inspired, the leagues have responded with three months of stimulating but inexplicable competition, which has been reflected in team standings of unmatched discombobulation. At times this spring, even the most resilient fan must have felt his grip on things begin to loosen when he opened his morning paper and turned to the good old standings. In mid-May, a full month into the campaign, the six teams in the American League East were separated by the span of a single game. Splendid, total competition, one could conclude, and especially heartening for the supporters of the downtrodden Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers—until one noticed that every one of the six clubs had lost more games than it had won, and that the race in fact constituted nothing more than a flabby bulge below the waistline of .500 ball. A month later, the American League East and West had reached parallel levels of irresolution, having sorted out one clear loser in each division—Cleveland (East) and Texas (West)—and ten other clubs so closely bunched that the standings could be absolutely reversed in the space of a single weekend. Milwaukee, Boston, New York, and Detroit had all taken turns at the top of the East, which most resembled a diorama of heaving stegosauri in a tar pit. Just recently, almost halfway through the long season, the AL East has discovered one club apparently capable of a sustained upright posture—the Yankees, of all people, whose sudden recent successes have brought back unexpected visions of the kind of quiet, well-ordered Yankee summers we all grew up on.
The National League has so far managed a more commonplace arrangement of leaders, contenders, and stragglers, although its certified powers, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, have been out of the sunshine this spring; the Pirates (who were badly shaken by the death of their great star, Roberto Clemente, in a plane crash last winter) appear to have lost the mysterious group energy that vitalizes winning clubs. The true aristocracy of baseball at present is probably represented by the National League West, which is topped by the Dodgers, with their enormous margin (at this writing) of twenty-one games over the .500 level. The most interesting journey to date has to be that of the Cardinals, who fell into a well by losing twenty of their first twenty-five games, and then instantly resurfaced, looking barely damp, after winning sixteen of their next eighteen.
Back in the AL, the world champion Oakland A’s have pushed to the fore after a notoriously languid start; their surprising opposition in the West has come from the Kansas City Royals, a newly muscled entrant that scores runs and gives up runs in thick, juicy clusters. The Royals’ main man, John Mayberry, is an entertaining new slugger whose style at the plate features a forward-spinning airplane-propeller windup with the bat just before the pitch arrives—a perfect replica of Willie Stargell’s countdown procedures. If Mayberry has in fact decided to model himself on Willie Stargell, he has picked a superior model. Stargell, I sometimes think, may be one of the last baseball men in whom we can still glimpse the hero. He not only hits the ball often and for great distances—he is currently leading both leagues in home runs—but comports himself in all days and weathers with immense style. I remember watching Stargell in October of 1971, when he was suffering an epochal slump at the plate, brought on in part by painful injuries to both knees. He went hitless through all four games of the playoffs and did scarcely better in the famous World Series against the Orioles, batting in only one run in the seven games. Stargell had led his league in homers that year and had knocked in 125 runs, and he was accustomed to playing a large, even triumphant, part in Pirate affairs, and yet he endured those repeated humiliations at the plate with total composure, trudging back to the dugout after still another strikeout or pop-up without the smallest gesture of distress or despair. I remember coming up to him in the clubhouse after one of those empty afternoons and asking him how it was possible for a proud, intensely competitive man to put up with that kind of disappointment without giving way to anger or explanation. Stargell’s four-year-old son, Wilver, Jr., was playing on the floor of his cubicle, and Stargell made a gesture toward him and said, “There’s a time in life when a man has to decide if he’s going to be a man.” Later, I realized that this was probably a true Hellenic answer: one couldn’t say whether one most admired the principle or the philosopher’s way of expounding it.
A few traditions, thank heaven, remain fixed in the summer state of things—the June collapse of the Giants, Gaylord Perry throwing (or not throwing) spitballs, Hank Aaron hitting homers, and the commissioner … well, commissioning. The Giants, after leading the National League West from the very beginning of the season, lost fourteen games out of twenty-seven in the month of June—a pattern as predictable as the spring ascension of Ursa Major. Pitching, as usual, was the problem, and the San Francisco manager, Charlie Fox, confessed, “Our earned-run average looks like the national debt.” Gaylord Perry, who formerly did not (or did) throw wet pitches for Charlie Fox, now performs similarly for the Indians, eliciting from American League batters the same howls of outrage that he used to inspire in the National. Bobby Murcer complained so vehemently about the umpires’ failure to prosecute Perry for the illegal pitch that he was called in and fined two hundred and fifty dollars by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Murcer paid up—and struck a game-winning homer off Perry that night, while the sporting press speculated like Peter Wimseys about the nature of Perry’s glop (K-Y Jelly is the leading suspect) and its hiding place (inside the neckband, perhaps) on Perry’s person. Perry has professed innocence, but retains his familiar mannerisms—viz.: right fingers to the bill of the cap, to the side of the cap, to the back of the cap, to the right sideburn, to the hair above the right ear, to the hair behind the right ear, to the neck—before delivering each pitch to each quivering batter. Is Perry throwing the spitter? Did the Commissioner’s fine constitute an unfair incentive to Bobby Murcer—and if so, should not each slugger on every contending team be similarly docked before going out to face the horrid Perry predilection? Does Gaylord Perry have a tiny vial of water from the Dead Sea concealed inside his eustachian tube? The Supreme Court is expected to rule on these burning issues before their summer recess.
Hank Aaron, now thirty-nine years old, is batting only .221 but has perfected an admirable habit of conservation, since almost half of his hits this year have been homers. His total of 23 to date has brought his lifetime to 696, which means that he is within striking distance this season of Babe Ruth’s all-hallowed lifetime mark of 714—a possibility that excites everybody but his fellow townspeople. The Braves’ attendance so far strongly suggests that if Hank should waft the record-breaker during a home game the deed will be witnessed by more mediapersons than Atlantans. National League pitchers have already begun to speculate about which one of them will be the victim of No. 715, and thus be propelled into the history books in the manner of a Balaclava cavalryman or a Joe Louis knockee. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, on hearing of this bullpen chatter, issued a stern warning that he would fine any pitcher guilty of not trying his best to get Aaron out on the historic day. The commissioner has been in splendid moral fettle this year. During spring training, when the news came out that two Yankee pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, were terminating their marriages in order to make new domestic arrangements with each other’s wives, Mr. Kuhn issued an advisory opinion on the matter—not marital counseling, it turned out, but an expression of concern for the image of the game. Fritz Peterson promised the commissioner he would try not to do it again.
The coming eminence of the Yankees was not detectable during my early calls at the Stadium, where I found the customary acres of empty blue grandstand seats and the customary earnes
t but unavailing competence on the field. In four of my first seven Yankee games this year, the Bronxites scored no runs at all. This jinx has nothing to do with the Stadium, because I have also seen the Yanks lose just as convincingly on the road. (Cf. against Mickey Lolich in Detroit, May 24: Tigers 4, Yankees 0.) On my first call at Yankee Stadium, the beneficiaries of my whammy were the White Sox, who bashed out thirteen hits and three homers in the course of demolishing Fritz Peterson, 8–4. The day also provided my first look at the American League’s new designated hitters—the tenth man in the lineup, who bats in place of the pitcher. The incumbents—Mike Andrews for the White Sox and Jim Ray Hart for the Yanks—bopped two doubles, two singles, and some line-drive outs, thus running their early DH averages to .429 and .529, respectively, and blunting my moldy-fig objections to the innovations, at least for a time. The other true first, for me and perhaps for everyone there, was the moment in the eighth inning when Yankee catcher Thurman Munson and third baseman Graig Nettles, converging on a bunt by Jorge Orta, made simultaneous bare-handed grabs at the ball and came up holding hands.
I went back the next afternoon and saw the Yankees shut out again, but I cannot take all the credit for the 3–0 loss, since the White Sox pitcher was Wilbur Wood, the knuckleballer, who had unmanned the Yankees on his five most recent outings against them; he beat them four times last year, allowing just two earned runs in thirty-six innings. At the time of this first 1973 visit to the Bronx, the Sox were batting over .300 as a team, and with Wood flipping up his flighty, sailing, fingertip junk, the eventual 3–0 margin looked like a mismatch. Everything about Wilbur Wood is disarming. On the mound, he displays a comfortable expanse of turn and the stiffish-looking knees of a confirmed indoorsman, and thus resembles a left-handed accountant or pastry chef on a Sunday outing. Even the knuckler—which he throws, sensibly, on nearly every pitch—looks almost modest, for it does not leap and quiver like Hoyt Wilhelm’s old hooked trout. Like all knuckle-bailers, Wood works with little strain, and, at the age of thirty-one, he may be just approaching his best years. He pitched 377 innings last year. The Yankee shutout came after Wood had rested for only two days—a frequent custom of his, inaugurated by the iconoclastic Chicago pitching coach, Johnny Sain. After the game, Wood sat comfortably in the corner of the clubhouse and drank several beers and smoked several cigarettes while he talked cheerfully to the reporters in a mild Bahst’n accent (he is from Cambridge), explaining that the only difficult part of his difficult pitch is learning to throw it softer, rather than harder, when he is in trouble. “He has the perfect disposition for the knuckleball,” Sain said, looking on with evident affection. “He’s always like this. He has as fine a control over himself as any athlete I’ve ever seen.”
A few nights later, the visitors to the Bronx were the Orioles, and the two teams—both participants in the stately quadrille then being enacted by the American League East, in which each dancer ascended by degrees to the head of the room and then gracefully gave way to another—played a nearly noiseless encounter: four hits and three runs for the O’s, to two hits and guess how many runs for the Yankees. Jim Palmer did not allow any pinstripes to reach second base. The winning blow was a shallow fly-ball home run to the right-field unused-furniture display, and was struck by the Baltimore catcher, Elrod Hendricks, who was up to bat for the second time this season. Hendricks got into the game only because the regular Oriole receiver, Earl Williams, got caught in traffic and was late getting to the ball park. Earl Weaver, the Baltimore manager, said, “He moves in mysterious ways”—apparently not a reference to either catcher. The Orioles, at that point batting .174 for their previous eight games, had apparently resumed the near-total batting slump that afflicted them all last season.
Real spring had come when I next dropped in on the Yanks; the visiting team was the Milwaukee Brewers, who, as it happened, were currently enjoying their turn in first place. It was a lovely, mild night, with several kites aloft in the still-bright Bronxian empyrean, and in the third inning I caught sight of a long, wavery pencil-line of migrating Canada geese far overhead. I pointed out this nonurban marvel to my neighbors in the press box, thus causing them to miss another wonder—a successful pick-off throw to third base by Thurman Munson. Luckily, the Yanks had other entertainments in store for us—four hits in the fourth, a nifty hit-and-run shot by Gene Michael that scored a man all the way from first, and a noisy, cheerful six-run outburst in the sixth. When Yankee starter Steve Kline suffered some arm twinges, Sparky Lyle came in and awed the Milwaukee hitters, at one point striking out five of them in succession with his downer. Munson wound up with a single, a double, a homer, and four runs batted in; the Yanks won by 11–4, and the Brewers gently took up a lower place in the dance.
Unburdened of my jinx, I tried manfully to deepen my appreciation of the Yankees, an experienced if less than dazzling team that had enriched its portfolio over the winter with the acquisition of a pair of tested regulars, Matty Alou and Graig Nettles. I wanted to care about the Yanks—I really did. There is more fan than critic in me, and I take far more pleasure in a game where I can yell for the good guys. I am also a confirmed front-runner, whose loyalty is hardly more selective than that of a Bide-a-Wee puppy. Still, I can’t quite attach myself to these Yankees, and to judge by the team’s home attendance this year, a lot of other people have been having the same difficulty. I think the problem is ghosts. As every fan knows, one of the strange particularities of our game is the vivid private image we retain of certain players we have seen, players we have watched with intensity. Hours or days after a game—sometimes years after—we recall a name, and in the same instant we see the man in perfect midafternoon memory. He doesn’t have to be a star or even a regular; all that is required is that we have watched him often enough or with sufficient emotion to make him our own. I can bring back Ed Charles, of the 1969 Mets, as precisely as Ted Williams; I can see Don Mueller or Tommy Byrne as readily as Stan Musial or Warren Spahn. Almost none of the Yankee stalwarts this year (and, to tell the truth, for several years) seem to have this spectral dimension. Bobby Murcer, Roy White, Mel Stottlemyre, Ron Blomberg, Sparky Lyle—I watch them with admiration, but when I come home from the Stadium and go to bed, what I see before sleep is Phil Rizzuto laying down a drag bunt, suddenly dipping the bat down by his belt buckle to tap the ball, and then whirring away down the line; Johnny Mize (a red, melonlike, country-farmer face) hulking over the plate; Yogi Berra lashing a bad outside pitch to the distant left-field corner; Allie Reynolds, in heavy trouble, glaring down at the hitter; or Joe DiMaggio motionless in the sunlight in center field, with his hands on his knees. Among the contemporary Yankees, only Thurman Munson has impinged on my picture show: stubborn, solid, dust-smeared, he straddles the plate, awaiting the arriving peg and an on-rushing enemy base runner, with his meaty arms and fat glove still casually at rest at his side—the catcher in a classic attitude, just before battle. This year’s Yankees have good power (Munson, Nettles, Murcer, Blomberg), fair defense, pretty good starting pitchers (Peterson, Stottlemyre, Doc Medich), firm direction (Ralph Houk), and irresolute competition (Detroit, Milwaukee, et al.); all they need now is an exorcist.
American league attendance is actually up a trifle, which is happy news indeed, and it is almost a certainty that the AL den leaders will claim that the designated-hitter innovation is responsible. I doubt this—partly because the only significant AL gate increases are in Milwaukee, California, Kansas City, and Chicago, where the local teams have only lately sprung into contention, and partly because I cannot imagine many hundreds of new fans suddenly clustering in to watch a .230 or .240 hitter strut his stuff. The truth is that, taken together, the anointed new men in the lineups have not been able to hit the ball any better than the eight other regulars—which is to say not well at all. They have outhit the pitchers-cum-pinch-hitters they replaced by a margin of .237 to .169. The real gain has been in home runs; the designees have hit out 107 so far, as against a full season’s total of 48 by
the 1972 pitchers and pinch-hitters. It is probably useless to complain at length about the league’s shiny new thingummy, which was officially proclaimed a success almost on opening day, but one cannot forget that the game—the game itself, as played out there between the foul lines—has been wrenched out of shape. Gone now—in one league, at least—is that ancient and unique concept of a player’s total individual accountability, the requirement that he engage in and be measured at every aspect of this difficult sport. Vanished, too, is the strategic fulcrum of baseball—the painful decision about pinch-hitting for your pitcher when you are behind in late innings—and gone with it is the fans’ pleasure in vociferously sharing in and second-guessing this managerial bind. Now the game is farther away from us all, less human and less fun, and suddenly made easy. The DH was voted in after a minimal trial in the minors by executives who seem to believe that perpetual action is the name of this game, too, and who wish to make their sport resemble all other sports. Most of all, they are in the grip of what can be called the television state of mind—the conviction that all entertainments are the same and thus in absolute competition with each other, and that anything less than a No. 1 rating is clear warning that you must alter your product radically or prepare to throw it away.
For two decades, the central affliction of big-league baseball has been its sagging batting averages. Last year, the cumulative National League average stood at .248, and the American League at .239. These are figures to be taken seriously by any baseball fan or baseball magnate not just because they indicate that the game is declining in pleasure and energy but because they suggest that today’s big-league stars are less capable than their famous predecessors. It is this unspoken belief that has the most serious effect upon the game’s national popularity, and yet it is probably false. In every sport where comparable performances can be fairly measured—track and swimming come to mind—the modern athlete regularly and overwhelmingly exceeds the best marks recorded twenty or thirty years ago. There is no reason to assume that the strength and capabilities of contemporary baseball players are an exception. The hitting drought, then, is almost certainly due to a number of technical alterations in the game—night baseball, bigger ball parks, bigger infielders’ gloves, the slider, the size and strength of today’s pitchers, and the vastly increased and more effective use of relief pitchers. The redress should be minimal and precise—a further alteration of the strike zone, a livelier baseball, a more visible baseball, a shaving of the dimensions of the plate. By some means, baseball must bring back its long-lost hero, the .350 hitter—who is, in all likelihood, the same deserving young slugger now struggling so earnestly to maintain himself at .275. The designated-hitter ruling simply misses the point: it is the batters who have been killing the game at the plate, not the pitchers. The DH is a hype.
