by Roger Angell
Another tip-off to a truly fine club is that a fan constantly finds himself discovering fresh stars in the lineup. Most of us know all about Pete Rose and Joe Morgan and Tony Perez and Johnny Bench by now. The other four Cincinnati regulars are Dave Concepcion, who is the best defensive shortstop in the National League; Ken Griffey, whose speed and .336 batting have been mentioned here; George Foster, who hit twenty-nine home runs this year and batted .306; and Cesar Geronimo, who has the best center-field arm in the business, and who, hitting in the seventh and eighth positions this year, batted .307. All are between twenty-six and twenty-eight years old, which means that they are just arriving at their peak seasons. For me, the discovery of the Series was Concepcion, who seemed to be forever coming up with the essential play at some vital turn of events. During a Yankee uprising in the fourth inning of the first game, he stopped a wild throw behind second base—stopped it by sticking out his leg—and then made a heartbreaking, inning-ending grab and throw of an apparent hit by Willie Randolph: two runs saved. In the first inning of the last game, he went yards behind second base to seize a shot by Carlos May and throw him out, again snuffing out what looked like a big inning. Concepcion also batted .357 in the Series—but this, it must be said, was not exactly a feat. The Yankee pitching corps contained the first two men in the Reds’ batting order—Rose and Griffey—holding them to .188 and .059, respectively, but was a little less fortunate after that. The next seven Cincinnati regulars batted .333, .313, .357, .429, .533 (Bench, who was voted the best player of the Series), .308, and .357 (Concepcion). Further comment, I somehow sense, is superfluous.
These feats and colors are dimmed by the fact that the championship games and the World Series were played this year—as they will almost surely be played for years to come—in the wrong season and at the wrong time of day, with twisted rules and abnormal playing conditions, and, for the most part, in frightful weather. The players and the customers suffered doubly—from the discomfort and the loss of pleasure of having the chief festival of their sport held in depressing and inappropriate circumstances, and from the unmeasurable but inexorable loss in the quality of the baseball. I heard players in both dugouts cursing the cold. Billy Martin said, “When are we going to stop letting TV tell us when we are going to play? This is asinine, playing night games in October. It’s damn near freezing out there.” Before the Sunday-night game, in Cincinnati, Bob Howsam, the Reds’ president, said, “The football people must be laughing at us”—a reference to the fact that NBC, for the price of seven hundred thousand dollars, bought the right to move the Sunday game to prime evening time and was thus able also to present its pro football games in the afternoon.
All this happened with the enthusiastic approval of the Baseball Commissioner. Responding to heavy criticism in the sporting press, Bowie Kuhn said that baseball had made these scheduling decisions independently of the networks, and then pointed to the game’s need for increased revenues and to the much larger television audiences for the World Series produced by night games. But no one had suggested that the Commissioner had been bought off by television interests. That was never necessary, for Mr. Kuhn has shown that he shares the television producers’ sense of priorities and state of mind. His prime concern is for audiences and profits, and he has proved willing to go along with almost any alteration of the game that will enhance or protect “the numbers.” In addition to Arctic night ball, this has so far resulted in the designated hitter (a barbarism that was first conceived of to stimulate slumping attendance in the American League, and that found its way into the World Series this year), artificial turf (far cheaper for owners to maintain, of course, than real grass), and the extension of the already swollen season to make room for the playoffs (an instant television special that has automatically pushed the World Series ten days closer to winter).
The fans’ deepening feeling of cynicism and hopelessness about the plight of baseball comes, I think, from their slow realization that apparently nothing can be done to alter this state of things. The profits of the game have become the preeminent consideration, and no one in the inner councils of the game seems much concerned about the quality of the product—the needs of the players, the claims of lifelong fans, the depth of attachment of the paying customer, in contrast to that of the television watcher, and so forth. The issue of artificial turf is a case in point. Almost without exception, the players detest the chemical carpet, which causes unusual injuries and imposes such wear and tear on their legs that it may prove to shorten outfielders’ careers by as much as two years, and which is, in addition, miserably hot to play on in sunny weather. Now some of the fake surfaces are beginning to wear out (the infield at Veterans Stadium, in Philadelphia, for instance, is almost rocklike, because of the decay of the protective cushion beneath the green coverlet), but no owner (except Bill Veeck, a known maverick) has admitted that a mistake was made or has offered to give up the cheaper spread. Any change would go against the numbers, so nothing can be done.
An even darker view of baseball must now be set forth. It is my own pure, horrified guess that if the complaints about the weather and about the playing conditions of the autumn games persist or grow wider, the Commissioner and the owners will present us with a plan that will seem to solve everything: Mr. Kuhn will propose that the site of the World Series be moved permanently to some friendly metropolis in the Sunbelt, perhaps one that has a large, domed enclosure waiting to be filled—New Orleans, say, or Houston—or rotated each year, in the style of the Super Bowl, among two or three such cities. The World Series will thus be instantly transformed into Superweek—the Super Bowl multiplied by seven, the ultimate Sportsfest USA. It will become an obligatory status trip and expense-account holiday for business executives, prime corporate accounts, network people, politicians, and show-business celebrities. It will also be an unbeatable television property—the first all-American sports show truly worthy of a Howard Cosell. A few objections may be expected, of course, including some carping from hometown baseball fans, who will suddenly realize that, with the exception of a wealthy few among them, they have been done out of the chance ever to cheer for their team at a World Series game. But this will seem a trifling consideration when it is understood that, in addition to solving the weather difficulty, the plan will do away with the present expense and annoyance to the clubs involved in printing tickets and preparing concessions and finding hotel space for a World Series that often ends up at the last instant in another city. And, perhaps best of all, the unruly and passionate hooligan fans that make up part of some big-city sports crowds can at last be kept away from the game.
Superweek will be an enormous initial success. It will instantly surpass the Super Bowl, and its immense profits will lead to further promotion of the event and ever-increasing television revenues. And if it should happen (it will happen, of course) that at some future point there come two or three World Series in succession that are as one-sided and dull as the one we have just seen, and if the public, as a result, begins to sense that the sport has not measured up to the Event—that the games have been hyped out of all meaning, and that the World Series has become just another inflated and vulgarized TV show, another stop on the “Wide World of Sports”—well, then, the game of baseball can be changed, of course, like anything else on television: changed in some terrific new way that will take care of the numbers.
This nightmare vision will not affect or deter Mr. Kuhn or his employers. Their attitude toward those of us who share such fears is perhaps epitomized by the Commissioner’s patronizing gesture during the three icy night games of the Series, which he attended wearing a business suit and no topcoat: You’re wrong, folks—it isn’t cold here. It has not occurred to these men (nor would it matter to them if it did) that we are entirely in earnest, that we are trying to conserve something that seems as intricate and lovely to us as any river valley. A thousand small relationships, patterns, histories, attachments, pleasures, and moments are what we draw from this game, and
that is why we truly worry about it, grieve for it now, and are filled with apprehension and despair at the thought of its transformation into another bland and deathlike pause on the evening ribbon of dog food and gunfights and deodorants and crashing cars. Not everyone feels this way, of course, but who among us feels none of this?
But it is wrong to leave baseball in such a dark corner for the winter, for the game rewards and surprises us still, and may outlast even its proprietors. (It never has belonged to the “owners,” of course.) While I was watching batting practice at Yankee Stadium just before the third game of the World Series, I noticed that the thin, long-faced man standing directly to my right, wearing a tan raincoat, was Lefty Gomez, a great pitching star for the Yankees in the nineteen-thirties. I got up my nerve and introduced myself to him, and we shook hands.
“I saw you pitch your very first game in Yankee Stadium,” I told him at once. “I still remember it. I was about nine years old.”
Old ballplayers hear this sort of thing every day, of course, but Gomez was gracious about it. “Is that right?” he said. “I remember it, too. It was in May of 1930, against the White Sox. I beat Red Faber, 4–1.” He pointed up at the great triple-decked stands and said, “I remember walking out here just before that game and looking around, and there were so many people in the stands that—well, there weren’t just more people here than in my home town but in my home county!”
We laughed, and then Gomez looked down at the ground and shook his head a little. “Nineteen thirty,” he said. “My God, do you realize that’s forty-six years ago? I can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I,” I said.
I think we both sensed the same thing. Time had destroyed the once-immeasurable difference between us, between a small boy and a hero. Now we were the same—two gents in winter raincoats watching the young men getting ready to play another game.
That Series game, it turned out, wasn’t much. It wasn’t nearly as interesting, for instance, as a Mets-Cubs game I went to on a Sunday back in the middle of September, with my wife and my son John Henry. It was the boy’s first big-league game—he is six years old—so I had arranged to get good seats at Shea Stadium, right behind home plate. The only trouble was that it came up rain that morning. John Henry kept watch at the windows, however, and about one o’clock in the afternoon he discovered an almost invisible lightening in the clouds, and we decided to give it a try. By the time we arrived at Shea, it was raining again, but I parked the car, and we ran through the downpour and went into the park. There was a surprising crowd there, milling about in the dank passageways under the stands, and we all looked at each other in a self-congratulatory way. The Mets against the Cubs, in the rain? We were crazy, but we were fans, all right. John Henry announced that the three of us should sit down in our seats and get ready for the game to start, and we did. We found our places—an island of three people in the surrounding sea of slatted yellow seats—and huddled there cheerfully enough in our foul-weather gear, unsuccessfully trying to share a single umbrella. I watched my son as he inspected the lights and the scoreboard and the empty stands around and above us and the soaking tarpaulins and—now and then, glimpsed in the dugout—a player.
“Where’s home plate?” he asked.
“Out there someplace,” I said, gesturing.
Then, unexpectedly and after several false alarms, it stopped raining. The grounds crew came out and rolled up the tarps and put down the white bases, and the waiting crowds filled up a few hundred of the wet seats. The pitchers warmed, and the umps and players came out on the field, and we stood for the anthem, and sat down and clapped. Rick Monday came up to lead it off for the Cubs, and Jerry Koosman struck him out, swinging, and we yelled—and then it really began to rain.
We stuck it out there for another forty minutes or so, observing the unrolling of tarps and studying rain patterns and watching the out-of-town scores beginning to go up on the scoreboard. John Henry kept occupied somehow (1 Coke, 1/3 box popcorn, 1 ice cream, 1 Mets cap), and I kept looking up at the sky, hoping against hope. But at last we said the hell with it and went home, and by the time we got back to our part of the city the rain had stopped, of course, and the streets were almost dry. When we got home, I flipped on the TV set, and, sure enough, there were the Mets and the Cubs.
“I’m sorry, John Henry,” I said. “I didn’t think they were going to play today.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said at once. “I liked it there. That was cool.”
So it was all right, after all, and maybe one batter is plenty to see, the first time. It was a beginning.
Season Ticket
Roger Angell
“Don’t you know how hard this all is?”
TED WILLIAMS, on batting in particular and baseball in general
Contents
Preface
La Vida
In The Fire
The Baltimore Fancy
Easy Lessons
Being Green
Tiger, Tiger
Taking Infield
Summery
Quis
To Missouri
The Cheers For Keith
Fortuity
Not So, Boston
The Arms Talks
Up At The Hall
Preface
IT IS MY HOPE in this book a rough replica of their own actual or imaginary explorations of the game over the past five years—a journey through the seasons, with stopovers at the spring camps; notes and exclamations about the midsummer campaigns; conversations with vivid players or movers of the pastime; excursions and distractions (including a consideration of the most distracting issue of drugs); and the intensive pursuit of the late pennant races, the championship playoffs, and the World Series. As before, I have covered this beat in haphazard fashion, following my own inclinations and interests. Friends and critics have sometimes called me a historian of the game or a baseball essayist or even a baseball poet, but I decline the honors. It seems to me that what I have been putting down for a quarter century now is autobiography: the story of myself as a fan. I have tried to do this seriously, because fans matter, but with a light hand, for baseball has brought me much pleasure.
This is my fourth baseball book, and if there has been a shift of gaze, it is because I have at last sensed that there is more losing than winning in our sport, and that a fan’s best defense against inexorable heartbreak is probably to learn more about how the game is really played. I care a lot about the games and the moments and the men on the field—the 1986 Mets–Red Sox World Series still seems a cruelly unfair test of my deepest loyalties—but in recent years I have become engrossed in the craft and techniques of the game: not just how the runs were scored but why. I have talked for hours on end with catchers and pitchers (famous starters and young blazers, and an exceptional relief artist), and infielders, hitters, coaches, managers, scouts, executives, and owners, and most of the time I started with the same question: “How do you do what you do?” They responded with floods of information and instruction, example and anecdote, all put forth with an intensity that confirmed my belief that this placid, easy game is in fact a thing of such difficulty that it easily holds off our wish to master it and bend it to our desires. No team in this decade has established itself as a dynastic power—it is quite the contrary, in fact—despite the best corporate and strategic efforts of twenty-six major-league duchies to achieve that end: a macrocosm of the resistance presented by every game, almost every inning, on the long summer schedule. Since I am a fan, I will always be an amateur of baseball, but I no longer feel like an outsider; none of the old pros I talked to on the field or in the dugout or up in the stands gave me the impression that he had subdued the game, either. We are baffled but still learning, and we keep coming back for more.
-R.A.
TWO CHAPTERS HAVE BEEN shuffled out of calendar order in the book, in the interest of better flow. In the interest of sanity, I have omitted mention (for the most part) of the trades o
r other shifts of affiliation that have moved some players and managers along to other teams since their appearance in these pages.
La Vida
— Summer 1987
BASEBALL OPENS YOUR EYES. Each new season, it takes me four or five games before I begin to see what’s really happening on the field—how the pitcher is working to this particular batter, the little shifts in the infield defense, with men on base, as the count progresses; how bold or how cautious this manager will be with his fresh assemblage of hitters and base runners. Over the winter I also seem to forget another part of baseball—the stuff away from, or off to one side of, the teams and the standings and the vivid events on the diamond, which can reward the experienced and reawakened fan. But that, too, comes back in time. At Tiger Stadium, early in June–June, 1984: the Year of the Tiger, it turned out—I watched the Toronto Blue Jays valiantly trying to chip away at Detroit’s mountainous early-season lead in the American League East in a contest that the visitors eventually won, 6–3, thus narrowing the Detroit margin to three and a half games. (The Jays never came as close again.) There was a big, apprehensive crowd and plenty of action—back-to-back doubles by the Jays’ Dave Collins and Lloyd Moseby and an inside-the-park homer by George Bell—but between all the action and the cheering and the rest of it my attention was taken by a spider I happened to notice up in one corner of the frame of the open press-box window before me. It was a very small spider—a dot, really—but a busy one. It was working on a web. Inning by inning, the creature persisted, laying out struts and cables, catwalks and connectors, and the stadium floodlights illuminating the green field below us also lit up the little construction project as it grew in size and beautiful design. The white light struck each fresh thread with silver as it appeared, magically, where there had been none before, and was stretched to its planned and perfect mooring. I pointed out the web to my seatmate in the press box, and he studied it, too, and in time I noticed that each of us was following the game in the same way—watching the pitch or the play below and sometimes making an entry in his scorecard, but then returning at once to the smaller event above us in the window. I ran into that writer, an old friend, in October at the World Series in Detroit, and after we’d exchanged some remarks about the players and the pitching and the coming game he said, “Say, do you remember that night back here in the summer, with that little spider? Wasn’t that something? You know, I woke up the other night and I was thinking that again. Funny…”
