The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  With the Reds leading, 2–1, in the sixth inning of the fifth game, Morgan led off and drew a walk. (He had singled in the first inning and instantly stolen second.) The Boston pitcher, Reggie Cleveland, now threw over to first base seven times before delivering his first pitch to the next Cincinnati hitter, Johnny Bench—a strike. Apparently determining to fight it out along these lines if it took all winter, Cleveland went to first four more times, pitched a foul, threw to first five more times, and delivered a ball. Only one of the throws came close to picking off Morgan, who got up each time and quickly resumed his lead about eleven feet down the line. Each time Cleveland made a pitch, Morgan made a flurrying little bluff toward second. Now Cleveland pitched again and Bench hit a grounder to right—a single, it turned out, because second baseman Denny Doyle was in motion toward the base and the ball skipped through, untouched, behind him. Morgan flew around to third, and an instant later Tony Perez hit a three-run homer—his second homer of the day—and the game was gone, 6–2. Doyle said later that he had somehow lost sight of Bench’s hit for an instant, and the box score said later that Perez had won the game with his hitting and that Don Gullett, who allowed only two Boston batters to reach first base between the first and the ninth innings, had won it with his pitching, but I think we all knew better. Morgan had made the difference.

  Game Six, Game Six … what can we say of it without seeming to diminish it by recapitulation or dull it with detail? Those of us who were there will remember it, surely, as long as we have any baseball memory, and those who wanted to be there and were not will be sorry always. Crispin Crispian: for Red Sox fans, this was Agincourt. The game also went out to sixty-two million television viewers, a good many millions of whom missed their bedtime. Three days of heavy rains had postponed things; the outfield grass was a lush, Amazon green, but there was a clear sky at last and a welcoming moon—a giant autumn squash that rose above the right-field Fenway bleachers during batting practice.

  In silhouette, the game suggests a well-packed but dangerously overloaded canoe—with the high bulge of the Red Sox’ three first-inning runs in the bow, then the much bulkier hump of six Cincinnati runs amidships, then the counterbalancing three Boston runs astern, and then, way aft, one more shape. But this picture needs colors: Fred Lynn clapping his hands once, quickly and happily, as his three-run opening shot flies over the Boston bullpen and into the bleachers … Luis Tiant fanning Perez with a curve and the Low-Flying Plane, then dispatching Foster with a Fall Off the Fence. Luis does not have his fastball, however.…

  Pete Rose singles in the third. Perez singles in the fourth—his first real contact off Tiant in three games. Rose, up again in the fifth, with a man on base, fights off Tiant for seven pitches, then singles hard to center. Ken Griffey triples off the wall, exactly at the seam of the left-field and center-field angles; Fred Lynn, leaping up for the ball and missing it, falls backward into the wall and comes down heavily. He lies there, inert, in a terrible, awkwardly twisted position, and for an instant all of us think that he has been killed. He is up at last, though, and even stays in the lineup, but the noise and joy are gone out of the crowd, and the game is turned around. Tiant, tired and old and, in the end, bereft even of mannerisms, is rocked again and again—eight hits in three innings—and Johnson removes him, far too late, after Geronimo’s first-pitch home run in the eighth has run the score to 6–3 for the visitors.

  By now, I had begun to think sadly of distant friends of mine—faithful lifelong Red Sox fans all over New England, all over the East, whom I could almost see sitting silently at home and slowly shaking their heads as winter began to fall on them out of their sets. I scarcely noticed when Lynn led off the eighth with a single and Petrocelli walked. Sparky Anderson, flicking levers like a master back-hoe operator, now called in Eastwick, his sixth pitcher of the night, who fanned Evans and retired Burleson on a fly. Bernie Carbo, pinch-hitting, looked wholly overmatched against Eastwick, flailing at one inside fastball like someone fighting off a wasp with a croquet mallet. One more fastball arrived, high and over the middle of the plate, and Carbo smashed it in a gigantic, flattened parabola into the center-field bleachers, tying the game. Everyone out there—and everyone in the stands, too, I suppose—leaped to his feet and waved both arms exultantly, and the bleachers looked like the dark surface of a lake lashed with a sudden night squall.

  The Sox, it will be recalled, nearly won it right away, when they loaded the bases in the ninth with none out, but an ill-advised dash home by Denny Doyle after a fly, and a cool, perfect peg to the plate by George Foster, snipped the chance. The balance of the game now swung back, as it so often does when opportunities are wasted. Drago pitched out of a jam in the tenth, but he flicked Pete Rose’s uniform with a pitch to start the eleventh. Griffey bunted, and Fisk snatched up the ball and, risking all, fired to second for the force on Rose. Morgan was next, and I had very little hope left. He struck a drive on a quick, deadly rising line—you could still hear the loud whock! in the stands as the white blur went out over the infield—and for a moment I thought the ball would land ten or fifteen rows back in the right-field bleachers. But it wasn’t hit quite that hard—it was traveling too fast, and there was no sail to it—and Dwight Evans, sprinting backward and watching the flight of it over his shoulder, made a last-second, half-staggering turn to his left, almost facing away from the plate at the end, and pulled the ball in over his head at the fence. The great catch made for two outs in the end, for Griffey had never stopped running and was easily doubled off first.

  And so the swing of things was won back again. Carlton Fisk, leading off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy, the eighth Reds pitcher of the night—it was well into morning now, in fact—socked the second pitch up and out, farther and farther into the darkness above the lights, and when it came down at last, reilluminated, it struck the topmost, innermost edge of the screen inside the yellow left-field foul pole and glanced sharply down and bounced on the grass: a fair ball, fair all the way. I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw—Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair, forced it fair with his entire body. He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them—in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all five Manchesters; and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway—jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy—alight with it.

  It should be added, of course, that very much the same sort of celebration probably took place the following night in the midlands towns and vicinities of the Reds’ supporters—in Otterbein and Scioto; in Frankfort, Sardinia, and Summer Shade; in Zanesville and Louisville and Akron and French Lick and Loveland. I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox fan is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do
know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

  The seventh game, which settled the championship in the very last inning and was watched by a television audience of seventy-five million people, probably would have been a famous thriller in some other Series, but in 1975 it was outclassed. It was a good play that opened on the night after the opening night of King Lear. The Red Sox sprang away to an easy 3–0 lead in the third inning—easy because Don Gullett was overthrowing and walked in two runs in the course of striking out the side. By the fifth inning, the Sox had also left nine runners aboard, and a gnawing conviction settled on me that this was not going to be their day after all. It occurred to me simultaneously that this lack of confidence probably meant that I had finally qualified as a Red Sox fan, a lifelong doubter (I am sort of a Red Sox fan, which barely counts at all in the great company of afflicted true believers), but subsequent study of the pattern of this Series shows that my doubts were perfectly realistic. The Red Sox had led in all seven games, but in every game after the opener the Reds either tied or reversed the lead by the ninth inning or (once) put the tying and winning runs aboard in the ninth. This is called pressure baseball, and it is the absolute distinguishing mark of a championship team.

  Here, working against Bill Lee, the Reds nudged and shouldered at the lead, putting their first batter aboard in the third, fourth, and fifth innings but never quite bringing him around. Rose led off with a single in the sixth. (He got on base eleven times in his last fifteen appearances in the Series.) With one out, Bench hit a sure double-play ball to Burleson, but Rose, barreling down toward second, slid high and hard into Doyle just as he was firing on to first, and the ball went wildly into the Boston dugout. Lee, now facing Perez, essayed a looping, quarter-speed, spinning curve, and Perez, timing his full swing exactly, hit the ball over the wall and over the screen and perhaps over the Massachusetts Turnpike. The Reds then tied the game in the seventh (when Lee was permitted to start his winter vacation), with Rose driving in the run.

  The Cincinnati bullpen had matters in their charge by now, and almost the only sounds still to be heard were the continuous cries and clappings and shouts of hope from the Reds’ dugout. Fenway Park was like a waiting accident ward early on a Saturday night. Ken Griffey led off the ninth and walked, and was sacrificed to second. Willoughby, who had pitched well in relief, had been lost for a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the eighth, and the new Boston pitcher was a thin, tall left-handed rookie named Jim Burton, who now retired a pinch-hitter, Dan Driessen, and then (showing superb intelligence, I thought) walked Pete Rose. Joe Morgan was the next batter, and Burton—staring in intently for his sign, checking the runners, burning with concentration—gave it his best. He ran the count to one and two and then threw an excellent pitch—a slider down and away, off the outer sliver of the plate. Morgan, almost beaten by it, caught it with the outer nub of his bat and lofted a little lob out to very short center field that rose slightly and then lost its hold, dropping in well in front of the onrushing, despairing Lynn, as the last runner of the year came across the plate. That was all; Boston went down in order.

  I left soon, walking through the trash and old beer cans and torn-up newspapers on Jersey Street in company with hundreds of murmuring and tired Boston fans. They did not look bitter, and perhaps they felt, as I did, that no team in our time had more distinguished itself in the World Series than the Red Sox—no team, that is, but the Cincinnati Reds.

  This Series, of course, was replayed everywhere in memory and conversation through the ensuing winter, and even now its colors still light up the sky. In the middle of November that fall, a Boston friend of mine dropped into a tavern in Cambridge—in the workingman’s, or non-Harvard, end of Cambridge—and found a place at the bar. “It was a Monday night,” he told me later, “and everybody was watching the NFL game on the TV set up at the other end of the bar. There wasn’t a sound in the place, and after I’d been there about ten minutes the old guy next to me put down his beer glass and sort of shook his head and whispered to himself, ‘We never should have taken out Willoughby.’”

  * I have truncated this mind-calcifying detour into legal semantics, because time proved it to be both incomplete and misleading. Shortly after the publication of this account, the news filtered out of the league offices that the Series umpires had been operating under a prior “supplemental instruction” to the interference rules, which stated: “When a catcher and a batter-runner going to first have contact when the catcher is fielding the ball, there is generally no violation and nothing should be called.” This clearly exonerates Larry Barnett and explains his mystifying “It was simply a collision.” What has never been explained is why the existence of this codicil was not immediately divulged to the fans and to the writers covering the Series, thus relieving the umpires of a barrage of undeserved obloquy. We should also ask whether the blanket exculpation of the supplemental instructions really does fit the crucial details of Armbrister v. Fisk. Subsequent pondering of the landmark case and several viewings of the Series film have led me to conclude that fairness and good sense would have been best served if Armbrister had been called out and the base runner, Geronimo, returned to first. It is still plain, however, that Carlton Fisk had the best and quickest opportunity to clarify this passionate affair, with a good, everyday sort of peg down to second; irreversibly, he blew it.

  In the Counting House

  — April 1976

  SPRING AFTERNOONS ARE WARMING, daylight lingers, and the news of baseball flowers about us once again. The news, that is, of games and scores and standings, of late rallies and shutout pitching, of rejuvenated veterans and startling young rookies—the good old summertime news, and not the news of the other side of the sport, the economics of baseball, which so confused and wearied us during the off-season. The same chilling blight has recently overtaken most major professional team sports; this year’s eruption of labor troubles and money squabbles represented only the newest stage in a long national struggle between athletes and entrepreneurs for the upper hand (or perhaps only an equal hand) in the regulation of their sports and the apportionment of profits. In baseball, however, the collisions of this past winter and early spring were notable for their bitterness and naked hostility, which suggests that a time of decision in these matters may be close at hand. The players’ strike of 1972, which erased the first few days of that season, was an unpleasant but relatively insignificant affair, caused by the owners’ refusal to arbitrate a minor pension issue—which was in fact eventually negotiated and quickly resolved. This year’s difficulties were altogether serious—something close to open warfare. The preseason camps in Florida, Arizona, and California were shut down for seventeen days—almost half the normal spring term—by a lockout called and enforced by the club owners. This year, the disagreement reached such a level of acrimony that for a time the regular season itself seemed threatened: baseball might stop altogether.

  The center of it all was a decision handed down last December by a three-man arbitration panel, which ruled that two players, Andy Messersmith and
Dave McNally, were released from affiliation with their clubs—Messersmith from the Dodgers, McNally from the Montreal Expos—as a result of their having played out their existing contracts plus an additional year, and were now free agents, entitled to sign up with whatever club they wished, at any pay they could command. This affirmation of a seemingly minimal right was in fact a ruling of revolutionary significance—an athletes’ Miranda decision—for it marked the long-expected end of the ancient “reserve clause,” which had bound every player irrevocably to the club holding his contract, thus fixing his place of employment and insuring that his salary was always ultimately determined by the pleasure of the owner. The decision in the Messersmith case (Dave McNally, a pitcher, had actually retired from baseball, because of a sore arm, by the time the case was settled) may have appeared historically inevitable, but it unleashed a storm of passions and legal complexities. Through the cold-weather months, the baseball hot-stove news mostly concerned the owners’ trips to court to have the arbitrators’ decisions overturned (the pleas were denied); ill-tempered, staccato haggling over the free-agent issue; onerously complex proposals and counteroffers put forward by rival professional negotiators speaking for the owners’ Player Relations Committee and for the Executive Board of the Players Association; lengthy statements of position that only confirmed the deepening division and stalemate; and, finally, the lockout. A fan searching the back pages for some word of Nolan Ryan’s elbow or Billy Martin’s pitching rotation could be forgiven if he sometimes threw down his newspaper in despair.