by Roger Angell
The next day, the third man in the crew (replacing Bob Uecker) was Keith Jackson, a football specialist, whose excited, rapid-fire delivery makes a routine double play sound like a goal-line stand. Three-man broadcasting crews, by the way, probably make sense covering football, where a great many things happen at the same time, but baseball has no such problem, and three hyperglottal observers usually succeed only in shattering the process of waiting that is such a crucial part of the game. People who don’t know or don’t like baseball make poor announcers, for they are too impatient to sense the special pace of each game, and thus habitually overdramatize. Since they suggest that almost every play we see is memorable, we become distracted and then dulled, so that we are unlikely to remember the actual incidents in a game—sometimes very small ones indeed—on which the outcome truly depended. In the third inning of the second game, the Yankees scored two runs, to take a 3–2 lead, and had Chris Chambliss on first base, with one out. The next batter, Carlos May, hit a bounder to the right side that took a high hop off the artificial carpet and over first baseman Mayberry’s head. It went for a single, but Chambliss progressed only as far as second base, thanks to a bit of mime by the Royals’ shortstop, Fred Patek, who put out his glove for the imaginary incoming peg with such verisimilitude that Chambliss actually slid into the bag. The fake deprived the Yankees of a run when the next batter flied out; it may even have cost them the game. Yet the telecast buried this pivotal moment in its customary over-reporting, and it was soon forgotten. Network television makes every baseball game sound just about like every other. But this is perhaps an inescapable handicap of an instantaneous and unreflective medium. What I cannot forgive is the networks’ implacable habit—and NBC, which handles the World Series, is almost as much at fault here as the ABC people—of dismantling the game of baseball and putting it back together on our screens in a form that they find more manageable. That form, of course, is “entertainment,” and thus centers on personalities rather than events. Reggie Jackson is a perceptive young man, and by the middle of the second game from Kansas City it had become plain that he was no longer just describing a ball game; he was engaged in an open duel with his more-celebrated colleague for dominance in the proceedings. He had already come to understand a first principle of television—that while we at home may think we are simply watching a game, what we are in fact attending is Howard Cosell.
This playoff now moved east, permitting me to take in the action at Yankee Stadium, unfiltered. In Game No. 3, it will be recalled, the Yankee starter, Dock Ellis, was on the verge of extinction in the first inning, when he gave up three runs, but then got his down-breaking stuff together and shut out the visitors the rest of the way, allowing only three fly balls during his eight-inning stint. The Yankees started back with a two-run homer by Chris Chambliss and then batted around in the sixth against five K.C. pitchers, to win by 5–3. The next afternoon—a startling time of day by now for postseason baseball, which permitted the action to be peculiarly illuminated by a single large overhead light—the visitors treated Catfish Hunter with extreme disrespect and went on to an easy 7–4 win, rapping out an awesome assortment of triples and tweener doubles to the distant reaches of the Stadium lawns.
I had by this time developed a considerable attachment to the spirited visiting nine, in their powder-blue double-knits, who had now twice come back to tie up this interesting series. Their veteran shortstop, Patek—who, at five feet four inches, is the smallest man in the major leagues—was having a splendid time of it afield and at the plate, and the whole lineup, although clearly short on power (their main muscle man, Amos Otis, had been lost with an injury in the first inning of the first game), seemed to be crowded with youngsters who attacked the ball with great confidence and relish. Foremost among these, of course, was George Brett, who had begun to look like the hardest out I had seen since my first glimpse of Al Kaline. (Brett batted .444 for the playoffs.) He is a lefty swinger who stands deep in the box and begins his action with a sweeping forward stride, his bat flattening and his hands held well back. He goes with the pitch, hitting the ball to all fields but most often to center or left—a classic inside-out, high-average swing. I had heard that Brett and a number of his young teammates, including Hal McRae and Tom Poquette, were pupils and fervent admirers of the Royals’ batting coach, Charley Lau, who had profoundly altered their physical and mental approach to batting. Lau avoids interviews (and is known, of course, as the Mysterious Dr. Lau), but George Brett is not at all reticent about Lau’s influence and teaching powers. “He’s made hitting seem like the easiest thing in the world,” he told me. “I used to be embarrassed against some pitchers. I was getting jammed a lot and sort of stepping out even before I’d take a swing. No more. I can hardly wait to get up there, even when I’m in a slump. He changed my whole style, and I went from being a Carl Yastrzemski hitter to a Joe Rudi hitter almost overnight.” Brett said that he first asked Lau for tutelage about midway through the 1974 season, when he was batting in the neighborhood of .225. Lau told him that he could have the option of being a .330 hitter with about ten home runs per season or a .280 hitter with twenty homers. Brett, who did not take either prediction seriously, chose the former. He finished that season at .282, batted .308 last year, and wound up, as we all know, at .333 this summer.
I also asked Hal McRae what Charley Lau meant to a hitter.
“Charley Lau means one hundred grand,” he said.
The fifth game, a night affair played before 56,821 frigid, roaring watchers, was a marvel. It began with a double flurry of hits and runs in the first inning—a two-run homer by John Mayberry; a countering triple by Mickey Rivers, followed by two singles and a sac., to tie it. The Yankees relentlessly chewed away at the Kansas City pitching, getting rid of Leonard, Splittorf, and Pattin within four innings, and led after six innings by 6–3, with Ed Figueroa comfortably in charge of things. The top four hitters in the Yankee lineup—Rivers, White, Munson, and the red-hot Chambliss—had truly outdone themselves in their first four times around: sixteen trips to the plate, good for six runs, ten hits, two walks, two sacrifices, two stolen bases, and a bare two outs. Figueroa gave up a leadoff single to Cowens in the eighth and was taken out, to a screeching ovation (“Ed-die! Ed-die! Ed-die!”). Jim Wohlford singled off Grant Jackson; and George Brett, on the count of 0–1, socked a middling-deep, medium-high fly ball that landed just within the second or third row of the short-right-field seats, for a tying three-run homer. The silence of the Stadium was so sudden and startling that one had the impression that somebody had kicked a plug out of a wall socket. Brett had confirmed himself as a great hitter, for if ever a home run was intentional it was this one. It was the first pitch I had ever seen him try to pull.
The ending was a sudden multiple tableau—almost a series of movie stop-frames—now fixed in the New York sporting memory. Frame 1: Chris Chambliss has just swung at Mark Littell’s very first pitch of the ninth inning, a fastball. He has swung from the heels, and the ball is now suspended somewhere out in the darkness above the right-center-field fence. Chambliss stands motionless at the plate, with his feet together and the bat still in his right hand and his head tipped back as he watches the ball—watching not in admiration (as Reggie Jackson has been known to do) but in true astonishment and anxiety. Frame 2: Al Cowens and Hal McRae, the Kansas City center fielder and right fielder, stand together at the base of the wall, waiting and looking straight up in the air, like a pair of bird-watchers anxious to confirm a rare species. Frame 3: McRae leaps, twisting his whole body into a single upward plane, with the left arm extended and the open, straining glove at its apex. Frame 4: McRae descends empty-handed, and falls back against the fence in despair, slumping there like a discarded marionette. A whole season is gone. Frame 5: Now it is Chambliss’s turn to leap—a great bound of joy, with both hands raised high in triumph. He begins his ritual tour of the bases, running slowly at first and then (Frame 6, Frame 7) with increasing attention and urgency, as he sees
surging, converging waves of out-scattering, frantically leaping spectators pouring onto the field from the left-field and right-field grandstands. These people sprint through descending streamers of toilet paper and torn-up newspaper and other debris, and through the reverberating, doubly and triply reëchoed explosions of shouting. They all meet near second base—Chambliss, the thickening and tumbling crowds, the waves of noise, and the waves of people (multiple frames here, faster and faster, all blurring together)—and now it is plain that he is almost running for his life. He is knocked down between second and third, and springs up again, holding on to his batting helmet and running now like a fullback, twisting and dodging through the appalling scene. It is a new game—one for which we have no name yet, and no rules. Chambliss makes it at last to the dugout, without touching third or home (third base has disappeared), and vanishes under the lip of the dugout, with his uniform shirt half torn away and the look on his face now is not one of joy or fear or relief but just the closed, expressionless, neutral subway look that we all see and all wear when abroad in the enormous and inexplicable city. Later, Chris Chambliss comes back onto the ripped-up, debris-strewn field with two cops, and after a few minutes’ search they find home plate and he steps on it.
The World Series, as we know, brought us no such games or passions, and can thus be dealt with here in brief summary. The Yankees, undoubtedly flat after their long and late playoff exertions, played languidly in the opener at Riverfront Stadium, losing, 5–1, to Don Gullett before a full house of confident and captivated hometown rooters, who—to judge by a good many smug comments I overheard—were fully as proud of their litter-free, un-Bronxlike playing field as they were of their team’s brisk performance. A pattern of these games began to suggest itself in the sixth inning, when the Yanks messed up an attempted sacrifice bunt and also had their whippet, Mickey Rivers, cut down while stealing; the Reds, given about the same chances, broke up an attempted double play, pulled off a steal, and scored a run. Joe Morgan had hit a homer earlier, and Tony Perez wound up with three hits off the Yankee starter, Doyle Alexander. Game No. 2 was the only absorbing or truly close contest of the four—thanks not at all to the Baseball Commissioner or to the National Broadcasting Company, who, having together scheduled the thing for eight-thirty on a Sunday night in the middle of October, were then together forced to pretend that the evening’s miserable, bone-chilling weather was a trifling surprise, hardly worth anyone’s notice. In the game, Catfish Hunter threw high and wild during most of the second inning (he was having trouble with his footing on the mound), and was lucky to escape with no more damage than three runs. He loaded the bases again in the third but wriggled free, and then, almost startlingly, became very nearly untouchable. No other pitcher in baseball settles into stride with quite this sort of nearly audible click, or, once there, throws such elegant, thoughtful, and flowing patterns—up and out, up and in, down on the hands, out and away, with each part and pitch connected, in psychology and tactics, to its predecessor and its quickly following next variant. The Yankees now caught up, with a run in the fourth and two more in the seventh, and the game stuck there, frozen fast at 3–3. The wretched, blanket-wrapped, huddled masses in the stands flumped their mittened paws together in feeble supplication, pleading now for almost any result that would send them home. Hunter sailed through the first two outs of the ninth, and then threw a slider that Ken Griffey bounced weakly to the middle of the infield. Yankee shortstop Fred Stanley galloped in, taking the ball on the dead run and coming down on his right foot—the wrong foot, that is, for a proper throw. He had to fling the ball to first off-balance and across his body, and threw it instead into the Reds’ dugout. Griffey, who is the fastest of all the Cincinnati fliers—he had thirty-eight infield hits this year—had very nearly beaten the play in any case, but the error automatically moved him along to second, from where he scored, after an intentional pass to Morgan, on Tony Perez’s first-pitch single. Speed kills. Now a World Series came back to Yankee Stadium for the first time in twelve years, and even the wrong weather and the wrong time of day (it was another shivery, after-dark affair) and the altered details and colors of the park could not dim for me its evocative visions—the unique, flattened declination and cavelike depths of the sweeping, entirely filled lower stands, and the steep, tilted topmost deck stuffed with spectators to its highest, farthest reaches: a great beach of faces, a surf of sounds. Only the baseball failed us. Again the Reds ran away with the game, notching three quick runs off Dock Ellis in the second inning, on four hits and a pair of stolen bases—all helped no end by some sudden uncertainty in the Yankee infield. Matters stood at 4–1 in the fifth inning—still anybody’s game, really—when Mickey Rivers led off with a single, and Roy White walked. Munson, who was having a terrific Series, whacked a bulletlike drive to the right side but almost directly at first baseman Tony Perez, who jumped and gloved the ball, pivoted, and threw instantly to Concepcion, covering second, to double Rivers off the bag. It was a moment when one suddenly sensed how the game of baseball should be played. The other base runner, White, had been only a couple of yards in front of Perez when he caught the liner, and four out of five—or perhaps nineteen out of twenty—first basemen would have made a dive at him, or tried to beat him back to that base. But Perez, without an instant’s pause, knew the right play, the deadly play, and made it. Rivers, it must be added, did not. Any low line drive is a red light for a well-trained base runner—a signal for a sudden full stop until the ball has gone through. Mickey was caught in flagrante delicto. The two parts of the play, commission and omission, summed up these two teams like an epigram. The Reds went on to win, 6–2.
The final game, which was played after a rainout, was closer for most of its distance, and was not actually resolved until the second of Johnny Bench’s two home runs put the issue beyond reach in the ninth inning. The Yankees, although behind by only 3–2 up to that point, had struggled glumly from the beginning against the impossible burden of the Reds’ three-game lead. They scored first, but the visitors’ catchup began when Ed Figueroa, the Yankee pitcher, allowed Morgan such an enormous jump off first base that he stole second without drawing a peg. Thurman Munson had four straight singles, but the Yankees stranded nine base runners. Billy Martin, unstrung by despair, was ejected from the game in the ninth. The Reds won, 7–2, and the arctic night and the premises were no longer embarrassed by these leftover summer doings.
It would be an injustice if this one-sided and undramatic World Series should somehow cause us to overlook the breadth and versatility and effulgent skills of the Cincinnati Reds. The first evidence is the simple fact that they have now won the world championship two years running—a feat too difficult for any other National League team since 1921. Another indication of their quality—a double hallmark—is the manner in which they seemed to strip bare their opponents, leaving the Yankees almost without hope or resource (and, incidentally, exposing serious deficiencies in their outfield defense and their right-handed hitting), while they themselves did not even have to call on some of their own best abilities. They did not, for instance, often show us their marvelous and habitually impeccable ways of getting a base runner from first to third or from second to third by having the batter hit the ball to the proper side of the infield—“give himself up,” in the parlance. All the Reds, it seems, know how to use the bat both ways—with power, and with punch and intent. This is the very stuff of inside, winning baseball, and it is far more exciting, when it is understood, than any mere slugging. It seems to me that not enough of us have recognized the fact that this is probably the first great team that has been specifically designed to take advantage of AstroTurf, which puts such a premium on team quickness and superior throwing, and that it is thus as much of a revolutionary innovation as the Yankees’ first “Murderers’ Row” club, in the mid-twenties, which was built around Babe Ruth, the home run, and the jackrabbit ball. The Reds’ team speed puts enormous psychological pressure on every part of their opponen
ts’ defenses, but on Astro-Turf it also forces the opposing shortstop and second baseman to “cheat”—to play much closer to second base, that is, in order to be able to make the force play—which, in turn, opens the field for more base hits. There is almost no way to win against this parlay.
