by Roger Angell
The work of translating the memorandum of agreement into the full language of a formal Basic Agreement is not yet near completion, mostly because of the owners’ attempts to redraft it or alter it unilaterally, but the memorandum itself was signed, and is thus a binding document. Since it came as the result of extensive bargaining, it is expected to be a strong instrument that will withstand any future court tests. It is true that Mr. Gaherin (along with Mr. Fitzgerald) was the planner and promulgator of the player lockout last spring, but it is also true that he and Marvin Miller, who somehow kept his youthful, scattered six-hundred-man union informed and unified through two years of unrelenting hostility and pressure from their employers, came out at the end with an agreement that looks like a Gibraltar in the churning seas of big-time American sport.
A somewhat more lighthearted view may be taken of the summer’s other great off-diamond dustup, which was Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s abrupt action in June to stop a multimillion-dollar sale of three of Charles O. Finley’s celebrated chattels. The deal, it will be recalled, would have delivered Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Boston Red Sox for one million dollars each, and sent Vida Blue to the Yankees for one and a half million. After a meeting with Mr. Finley, Commissioner Kuhn announced that he was ordering the players back to the Oakland roster under powers entitling him to “preserve the honor of the game,” and said that “public confidence in the integrity of club operations and in baseball would be gravely undermined should such assignments not be restrained.” Mr. Finley stated that “Kuhn sounds like the village idiot,” and filed a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against him for restraint of trade. He also refused to allow the returned merchandise to go on playing for his team—a ban that lasted for two weeks and was lifted by him only in the face of a strike by the other members of the A’s.
Two interpretations of Mr. Kuhn’s motives may be postulated:
(1) He was truly concerned about maintaining the competitive balance of the leagues, and felt that the sale of such famous stars to well-heeled contending clubs would breed cynicism and despair in the heart of American fandom. (Footnote: The chart of Mr. Kuhn’s concern may be plotted with some precision, since he had offered no let or hindrance to a just previous deal involving the sale of Minnesota pitcher Bert Blyleven to the Texas Rangers for three hundred thousand dollars.)
(2) He and his employers, the owners, were truly concerned about a sale that would establish such a high price tag for free agents on the open market—a market in which most of the clubs would have to deal at the end of the season. (Footnote: The major-league clubs, by a vote of twenty-two to two, pledged to make good any financial buffeting the Commissioner’s office may undergo as the result of a judgment in the Finley suit. The nay votes were Baltimore and, of course, Oakland.)
The Red Sox never thrived after the opening of their season, but the vivid symbol of their fall from grace this year came in the bottom of the sixth inning in a game at Yankee Stadium on May 20, when Boston catcher Carlton Fisk took a marvelous peg from right fielder Dwight Evans and tagged out the Yankees’ Lou Piniella at the plate. Piniella arrived at full speed and banged into Fisk’s chest with his upraised knees in an effort to jar the ball loose; Fisk held on, but the crash—the most violent plate collision I have ever seen—knocked both players sprawling, and instantly set off a prolonged and extremely ugly fight on the field, from which Bill Lee, Boston’s only left-handed starting pitcher, emerged with a severe injury to his pitching shoulder. The Red Sox responded at once in the game, burying the Yankees with eight runs in the next three innings, including two home runs by Carl Yastrzemski, but the loss of Lee for many weeks was irreparable. The Sox—the mettlesome and exciting runners-up of last year’s bright October—fell into torpor and dissension, and eventually even into disfavor at home, finishing third in their division and never mounting even a minimal run at the dominant Yankees. The team lost its manager, Darrell Johnson, who was fired in mid-season, and its modest and much admired longtime owner, Tom Yawkey, who died in July. Many of the Fenway Park fans blamed the club’s apparent loss of pride on the fact that three of the Sox stars—Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Rick Burleson—did not sign contracts until late in the summer and were obviously prepared to become free agents if their demands were not satisfied. More dispassionate watchers, however, came to the conclusion that the Bosox were beaten by weak pitching and by the whetted competitiveness that rival clubs bring to bear against a defending pennant winner. The Sox played all summer as if they expected at any moment to regain their edge and brilliance of 1975, but that never happened. Doing it over again is the hardest task in professional sport. What was most missed at Fenway Park this year was the deep, startled pleasure of the Red Sox’ winning campaign and that extraordinary Series. Even the Cincinnati Reds mourned it. After the Reds had swept the Yankees last month, Joe Morgan said, “I’m glad we won, but last year was a lot more fun.”
Similar joys came this summer to the refurbished blue-and-white expanses of Yankee Stadium, where, right from the first week of the campaign, fans could collect the images and patterns of a team coming together, doing all the small things right, no longer being surprised by its own abilities, expecting always to win. My own summer album is full of these pictures: Mickey Rivers approaching the plate like an old man—like Walter Brennan limping up to a horse stall. Rivers batting, shifting his feet and tilting back his head and twitching his bat, and then tapping a little bunt down toward third and flying up the line—not just beating the throw but making a throw useless.… Graig Nettles taking a pitch in an odd, slightly bowlegged stance, with his hands low and back. Nettles waiting unhappily but silently through his implacable early-season slump, and then, in July at last and in August, beginning to crash the ball. Nettles expunging a bases-loaded rally in a September game against the Red Sox by scooping up a hard grounder behind third and racing to the bag and then throwing ahead, past the runner’s ear, to engineer a startling double play at the plate.… Willie Randolph, the very image of an infielder, restoring a sense of confidence and youthful expectation to the right side of the Yankee infield which had not been there since the departure of Bobby Richardson. Randolph diving over second base to snaffle a low drive by the Indians’ Larvell Blanks, and then diving the other way to tag the bag and double up the base runner.… Thurman Munson hitting all summer long. Munson driving in five runs against the A’s one night, with a homer and three singles. Munson talking in a clubhouse near the end of his great season, permitting himself to smile a little, and perhaps at last overcoming part of his chronic self-doubt.… And Billy Martin, the manager, standing in the front of the dugout with his hands in his jacket pockets and staring out from under his long-billed cap with a cold and ferrety edginess—a glare of suspicion and barely contained hostility directed at umpires and enemy batters and pitchers, and at all the hovering, invisible accidents and waiting disasters of the game that stand in the way of each day’s essential win.
These men and many others—Ed Figueroa, Fred Stanley, Dick Tidrow, Chris Chambliss, Catfish Hunter, Dock Ellis, and the rest—made it a cheerful and noisy summer up in the Bronx, but perhaps the one irreplaceable Yankee was the man who invented this team, who saw it in his mind’s eye before it ever existed on the field—the club’s president, Gabe Paul. A plump, energetic man of sixty-six, Paul came to the Yankees in 1973 and immediately undertook a series of purchases and deep-level trades that entirely altered the club. Only two members of this year’s squad—Roy White and Thurman Munson—came up from the Yankee’s minor-league system. Paul’s best-known transaction was the acquisition of Catfish Hunter, in 1975, in a bidding war against several other clubs after Hunter had been declared a free agent. Accusations began to be heard then that the Yankees intended to dominate their league with cash, but this easy bad-mouthing does not alter the fact that most championship clubs now are built on trades and purchases, and that “buying a pennant” is far more difficult than it sounds. Gabe Paul, to be sure, enjoys a marvelous working
relationship with the seemingly bottomless wallet of his general partner, George M. Steinbrenner III, but his success has been much more due to imagination and trading courage and a profound judgment of baseball talent. Two deals that he made last winter started the club toward its pennant. In 1974, he had given up a longtime Yankee favorite, Bobby Murcer, in order to acquire Bobby Bonds, a potential superstar outfielder, from the Giants, but when the chance came, a year later, he did not hesitate to give up Bonds to the California Angels in return for the little-known Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa. This summer, Bonds was injured and played very little; Rivers led off for the Yankees all year, batted .312, and stole forty-three bases, and Figueroa won nineteen games. In the other trade, he sent Doc Medich, an established Yankee pitcher (and a medical student), to the Pirates for Dock Ellis, Willie Randolph, and Ken Brett, a subsequently retraded pitcher. Randolph, a brilliant prospect, had had virtually no major-league testing, while Ellis, a talented but moody pitcher, had fallen out with his manager and had enjoyed little success in the past three seasons. It was known, however, that Ellis’s best pitch, a sinkerball, was ill-suited to the Pirates’ artificial home turf, and word had also come that Ellis was anxious to play for a manager like Billy Martin. This summer, Dock Ellis, relishing the innumerable enemy outs attributable to grounders hammered along the slower Stadium grass, finished with seventeen wins and eight losses, while Randolph established himself as one of the premier infielders in the league. Doc Medich did not fare quite as well, winding up with an 8–11 record for the Pirates. My favorite comment about Gabe Paul’s trading abilities was made one night this summer in the press box at Shea Stadium, when a veteran Pittsburgh baseball writer who had watched Medich struggle on the mound for several unimpressive innings finally tossed his pencil in the air and cried, “Ellis is a better doctor than this guy!”
Famished for a pennant race, I packed a bag on the last Monday of the regular season and impulsively flew to Oakland, where the young Kansas City Royals were opening a three-game set against the veteran, campaign-hardened A’s, who now suddenly trailed them by only four and a half games. The Royals, who had fallen into an epochal batting slump, had scored a total of five runs in their last five games. My trip almost made up for the whole bland summer. In the first game, a rain-delayed affair played before an enormous and cacophonous Family Night (i.e., half-price) audience, the A’s had to abandon their customary go-go, base-stealing offense because of the slow track, but by the fourth inning they had begun to whack some long line shots off the Royals’ starter, Dennis Leonard, including a homer by a newly acquired late-season helper, Ron Fairly. The Royals evened things up at 3–3, with pokes off Vida Blue by their marvelous hitting duo of George Brett and Hal McRae, but Fairly, in his next at-bat, in the fifth, hit a double off the wall, eventually coming around to score, and Sal Bando led off the sixth with another screamer, which disappeared over the center-field fence. This was clearly more than enough for Leonard, whose next pitch, by no mischance, caught Don Baylor on the right shoulder, thus emptying both benches and bullpens. The lengthy ensuing scrimmage around the mound was eventually dispersed, but it resumed almost immediately, with different topography and tactics, out at the visitors’ bullpen in short right field, where some hometown fans had been showering the K.C. pitchers with beer—not a trifling insult, since some of the Oakland Coliseum beer containers are half-gallon jobs. Six of the malt-dampened relief men eventually got into the game, to little avail, as the A’s won by 8–3.
The next evening, after another rainstorm, we were given a perfect counterpiece to these rowdy doings—a thrilling pitching duel between Oakland’s Mike Torrez and the Royals’ Marty Pattin, who is a slider specialist. Pattin limited the on-rushing A’s to four hits, but lost, 1–0, to Torrez’s two-hitter. The game distilled itself into two splendid moments. In the third, with Fred Patek on second base for the visitors, Tom Poquette smashed a Torrez fastball on a lofty arc toward the left-center-field wall; Joe Rudi, running at full tilt from the moment the ball was struck, slithered and splashed through the mud of the warning track and made a sailing, last-second grab at the base of the wall, saving a sure triple and a run, and then easily doubled up Patek, who was well around third by the time the great catch was made. Then Sal Bando, leading off in the seventh, duelled with Pattin for several minutes, fouling off pitches repeatedly until he found the one he wanted, a fastball, and drove it into the left-field seats for the only run of the day.
This was my farewell taste of such famous Oakland specialties. I could not stay for the next game, in which the Royals’ Larry Gura at last closed the door on the Oakland hopes, winning by 4–0; the A’s were eliminated two nights later, when they lost to the Angels in twelve innings. I also missed the champagne party in the A’s clubhouse after the last game of the season, when six of the newborn Oakland free agents—Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Campy Campaneris, and Don Baylor—celebrated a moment more exquisite than a mere championship: liberation from Charles O. Finley.
Any observations here about the Phillies, whom I watched in their home park as they dropped their first two playoff games to the Cincinnati Reds, will strike Philadelphia fans as being typically insufficient and unfair. (Lifelong Phillies fans closely resemble the victims of a chronic sinus condition; they sometimes feel better, but never for long.) Their team, of course, will now be remembered mostly for having almost collapsed in the later stages of the pennant race and then playing miserably in the championship playoffs, but such is the heartless way of the world. The Phillies did in fact finish strongly, winning thirteen of their last sixteen after their late-summer catalepsy, and ended with 101 victories in the regular season. Their lineup offered three .300 hitters (Jay Johnstone, Garry Maddox, and Greg Luzinski), three genuine slugging threats (Luzinski, Mike Schmidt—who led the majors with thirty-eight homers—and Dick Allen); a splendid double-play combination in shortstop Larry Bowa and second baseman Dave Cash; and three tough, experienced front-line pitchers (Steve Carlton, Jim Lonborg, and Jim Kaat). On paper, the club looked almost a match for the Reds. Those first games, however, were played on the faded green Tartan Turf carpet of Veterans Stadium—where the Phillies, strangely enough, seemed not at all at home. They lost the opener by 6–3, largely because of some frightful defense—right fielder Ollie Brown played two singles into triples, and Larry Bowa allowed two routine grounders to skid under his glove untouched—and because the home-team pitchers, Carlton and Tug McGraw, permitted the speedy Cincinnati base runners to take enormous leads off first base, thus encouraging four stolen bases and the infliction of a debilitating nervousness on the Philadelphia defense. Anxiety, of course, is the Reds’ prime weapon; their speed and power and opportunism and experience breed the conviction in the opposing team that it must play an almost superhuman level of baseball to have any kind of a chance. This is the same brain fever that used to afflict opponents of the old, all-conquering Yankees. The state of mind became perfectly visible the next afternoon, when the Phillies started off in much better fashion, and actually led by 2–0 after five innings. Jim Lonborg had not permitted any Cincinnati hits at all in this span, but he began the sixth by walking Dave Concepcion—an apparently insignificant lapse that seemed utterly to destroy his concentration and control. His elbow began to drop down and his pitches came up; singles by Pete Rose and Ken Griffey swiftly produced a run, center fielder Garry Maddox threw to a wrong base, and within a bare few minutes Lonborg and the Phillies’ lead were gone together, and the Reds won again, this time by 6–2.
It is not suggested here that this Reds Fever is purely psychosomatic or easily resistible. The next—and, this time, fatal—onset of the disease came in the bottom of the ninth inning of the third game, which was played in Cincinnati and watched by me on television. The Reds at this point were behind in the game by 4–6—a deficit and a setting that suddenly caused me to recall a leadoff home run under almost identical circumstances, hit by Johnny Bench against the Pirates in 1972
, and two catch-up homers, by Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, that ruined Tom Seaver and the Mets in a 1973 playoff game. The same frightful visions undoubtedly came shimmering into the mind of Ron Reed, the Phillies’ pitcher, who worked too carefully on the Reds’ leadoff hitter, George Foster, ran up a 1–2 count, and came in, unnecessarily, with a fastball, which Foster hit for a homer. Reed repeated the process exactly with the next batter, Bench, with exactly the same inexorable, incredible result. The game was tied, and Reed’s jittery, doom-stricken successors then swiftly gave up the single (by Concepcion), walk, sacrifice, intentional walk, and infield chopper (by Griffey) that meant the game and the pennant.
I also tried to take in the first two games of the Royals-Yankees playoffs, in Kansas City, by television, but the medium just about wiped out the message. In the first game, the Yankees left the post swiftly, scoring two runs in the very first inning on a pair of singles and a pair of throwing errors by the Royals’ third baseman, George Brett—a winning margin right there, since Catfish Hunter, who started for the visitors, was in impeccable form, giving up five hits (three of them by Brett) and a lone run, for a 4–1 win. In the second game, played on Sunday evening, the Yanks rapped out twelve hits but played egregiously afield, committing five errors, while losing, 7–3; Paul Splittorf, coming on for K.C. in relief in the third inning, was the winning pitcher. These minimal messages would seem well within the capabilities of a major television network, but ABC almost buried them under a mind-bending barrage of statistics, color, bad jokes, personality struggles, distracting intercut interviews with players and other people (this often while the game was actually in progress), useless information, misinformation—and rivers, estuaries, tidal basins, oceans of talk. (I will not bother to complain about the commercials, except to mention a series of repellent house ads touting baseball as an institution or a way of life, and a super-schlock promotion, evidently approved by the Commissioner, in which a man from the Rolaids company was permitted to give an award to somebody as the Relief Pitcher of the Year.) ABC took up baseball for the first time this summer, and, by general critical consensus, had formidable difficulties with the old pastime. The telecasting team that the network dispatched to Kansas City did not, for some reason, include either of its two best baseball reporters—Al Michaels (who was doing the Phillies-Reds games) and Bob Gibson. This three-man crew was captained by Howard Cosell, and included Bob Uecker and a visiting celebrity-expert, Reggie Jackson. Mr. Cosell has been a long-term disparager of baseball, which he considers to be old-fashioned and draggy, but it became clear within the first inning or two of the first game that his handicap was not prejudice but lack of knowledge. In the second inning, John Mayberry, a left-handed Royals slugger, flied out to the left fielder, causing Cosell to state that he had been attempting to hit the ball to left field. Mayberry, in truth, suffered acutely last summer from the fact that he could not, or would not, hit the ball to the opposite field—a widely known weakness that was mostly responsible for his miserable .232 average and mere thirteen homers this year—and it had also been clear on my screen that Hunter had simply jammed him for the out. Reggie Jackson corrected Howard Cosell gently, but Cosell does not take contradiction lightly, and he now evidently set out to prove that he knew more baseball than Reggie Jackson. Through the last few innings, he predicted insistently that Catfish Hunter was tiring, or was about to tire and be driven to cover, when it was plain that the Cat, who had to face only thirty batters over the full nine innings, was breezing. Again Jackson tried to enlighten him: when Catfish Hunter gets knocked out, it usually happens in the early innings.
