by Roger Angell
But I did remember. I still do—me, at ten or eleven, with my ear next to the illuminated, innerly-warmed gold celluloid dial of the chunky, polished-wood family radio, from which there emerges, after an anxious silence, the rickety, train-depot sounds of a telegraph instrument suddenly bursting with news. Then a quick, closer tock!—the announcer or some studio hand rapping on the mike with a pencil, I suppose—and the re-creator, perched in his imaginary press box, says, “Uh-oh….Hafey really got hold of that delivery from Fat Freddie. The ball is rolling all the way to the wall in left, and here come two more Cardinal runs across the plate….” The front door slams—my father home from work, with the New York Sun under his arm (and the early-inning zeros of that same Giants road game on the front page, with the little white boxes for the rest of the line score still blank), and I get up to meet him with the bad news.
Spring training is the life. One march day in Phoenix Municipal Stadium, I strolled slowly away from the batting cage in the dazzling desert sunlight and climbed the shallow grandstand steps behind the Oakland home dugout, on my way to grab a pre-game hamburger and a cold Coors at the little free-load picnic grounds for the media out by left field. The fans were coming in—old folks carrying seat cushions and score-cards, college kids in T-shirts and cutoff jeans, young women in sandals with serious tans and white “A’s”-emblazoned painter’s caps, kids balancing mammoth cups of popcorn—and unhurriedly scouting around for good seats in the unreserved rows. A last fly ball rose and dropped untouched behind second, where an Oakland coach and a batboy were picking up the batting-practice balls and dropping them into a green plastic laundry basket. The first visiting ballplayers, fresh off their bus, were playing catch over in front of their dugout; it was the Giants this time, and I was looking forward to seeing Al Oliver again and to watching this kid pitcher Garrelts (if he did work on this day, as promised) and a couple of others, but there was no hurry about the game’s starting, of course, and nothing to worry about even if I did miss a few pitches and plays while I lingered over my lunch. A friend of mine, a beat man with the San Francisco Chronicle, came along and fell into step beside me. Smiling a little behind his shades, he nodded toward the field and the players and the filling-up stands and murmured, “You know, it’s a shame to have to mess all this up with the regular season.” Teams in Arizona and Florida play with identical rules and before the same sort of audiences, but the two spring flavors are quite different. I don’t understand it. Florida ball seems more citified, hurried, and temporary; no matter how rustic the setting, I always have the sense that the regular season impends, and that these humid, sunny afternoons are just postcards, to be glanced at later on and then thrown away. Arizona baseball is slower, sweeter, and somehow better fixed in memory. For one thing, there seem to be more young children in attendance at the western parks; the stands are stuffed with babies and toddlers—or else I just notice them more. In Phoenix one afternoon, a small barefoot creature came slowly and gravely up the aisle behind the home dugout wearing nothing but a Pamper. Six- or seven-year-old home-team batboys are already veterans of two or three Arizona seasons. In one game at Scottsdale, matters were suspended briefly when a very young rookie bat-person in pigtails went out on the field after a base on balls, picked up the bat (they were both the same length: the thirty-three-inch model), and paused, staring slowly back and fourth, until she remembered which dugout she had come from, and then returned there, smiling in triumph. The home-plate umpire, I noticed, made a good call, holding up one hand and watching over his shoulder until we were ready for baseball once again. It wouldn’t have happened in Florida.
For me, Arizona baseball is personified by a young woman vender at Phoenix Stadium I came to recognize, after several springs, by her call. She would slowly make her way down an aisle carrying her basket and then sing out a gentle, musical “Hot dog!…Hot dog!”—a half note and then down four steps to a whole note. She’d go away, and later you heard the same pausing, repeated cry at a different distance, like the cry of a single bird working the edge of a meadow on a warm summer afternoon. “Hot dog!”
Old fans and senior scribes want the spring camps to remain exactly the same; they should be like our vacation cottages at the lake or the shore—a fusty and familiar vicinity in which we discover, every year, the sparkle and renewing freshness of another summer. The wish is doomed, of course. Each succeeding March, the small ballparks are visibly more crowded and the audiences younger and more upscale, with affluent, Hertz-borne suburban families on the kids’ spring break lately beginning to outnumber the cushion-carrying retirees in the stands. Authors and television crews cram the sidelines at the morning workouts, and by game time the venders at the souvenir stands look like Bloomingdale’s salesgirls during Christmas week. Spring training is “in,” worse luck, and even the most remote baseball bivouacs are incipient Nantuckets. Out in Mesa, descending hordes of Cubs fans absolutely swamp little HoHoKam Park every game day, lining up at breakfast time to buy up the twenty-three hundred unreserved seats that go on sale at ten o’clock; the park put in new bleacher seats in 1985, enlarging its capacity to eight thousand, but this was insufficient to handle the numbers of the new faithful. A friend of mine—a retired Chicago baseball writer who lives in Arizona now—told me that he drove over to the Cubs training complex on the very first day of spring training that same year, when only the pitchers and catchers had reported, and counted license plates from twenty-six states in the parking lot. “There were maybe a thousand fans at the workout,” he said. “A thousand, easy, just watching the pitchers doing sit-ups.”
Chain O’Lakes Park, the Red Sox training site in Winter Haven, is less frantic, but it has changed, too. It was an inning or two into my first game there in 1985 when I saw the difference: the old, fragrant orange grove out beyond the right-field and center-field fences was gone, replaced by a cluster of low, not quite finished white buildings, with a drooping banner out front that said “LAKEFRONT CONDOMINIUMS.” I gestured miserably at this phenomenon, and my seatmate, a Boston writer, said, “Yes, I know. Remember when we used to write ‘and Yaz hit it into the orchard’? Now what do we say?”
Trying to perk me up, he pointed out that the two nesting ospreys I had seen here on prior spring trips were still in residence in their big, slovenly nest on top of the light pole in short right-field foul ground; just the day before, he said, a batter with the visiting Reds had skied a foul ball that had landed in the nest—landed and stayed there, that is—but the birds did not seem discomposed. I kept an eye out, and over the next few innings I saw one or perhaps both of them depart and return to their perch, coming in with a last flutter of their great wings and then settling down on whatever they were keeping there above the field. Someday soon, I decided, we would hear about the first confirmed sighting of a young red-stitched osprey (Pandion ueberrothiensis) here, hard by the banks of Lake Lulu. I cheered up. A little later in that game, we had a brief shower—the first rain in weeks, I was told—and some of the older fans got up from their unprotected seats along the left- and right-field lines and came and stood in the aisles of the roofed grandstand, out of the wet. The game went on, with the sitting and standing fans quietly taking it in, and I had a sudden, oddly familiar impression (this has hit me before, in this park at this time of year) that I had found my way into a large henhouse somewhere and was surrounded by elderly farmyard fowls. We perched there together, smelling the aroma of mixed dust and rain, and waited for the sun to come out again.
The life—baseball as a side order, so to speak—is not necessarily slow or reflective. What I remember about an October now seven years gone isn’t an unmemorable World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees (the Dodgers won it) but the crowds at the Stade Olympique, up in Montreal, during the stirring Dodgers-Expos playoff games there. All that is still clean the middle innings of Game Three, say (the clubs had come back from Los Angeles with the series tied), with the Dodgers’ Jerry Reuss and the Expos’ Steve Rogers locked i
n hard combat, and the Dodgers up a run—the only run of the game so far—and the encircling, in-leaning rows upon rows of avid, baseball-mad Canadians, seeming to sway and shudder and groan and cry in the chilly northern night air with every pitch and movement of the fray. And to sing. When I wrote about this, several days later, I still half heard in the dusty back chambers of my head the vapid, endlessly repeated chorus of that damnable Expo marching song—“Val-de-ri! Val-de-rah!”—that the locals bellowed together, in enormous and echoing cacophony, at every imaginable stitch and wrinkle of the games’ fabric. The song is not some famous indigenous voyageurs’ chantey, as one might suppose, but only the old, implacably jolly “Happy Wanderer” hiking ditty that generations of sub-adolescents across the continent have had to warble through (“Val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) during mosquitoey marshmallow roasts at Camp Pineaway. But the Montrealers sang it with a will—sang it because they wanted to, of all things—and they won my heart. I didn’t even mind the weather, which was unsuitable, if never quite unbearable, or the appalling ballpark. The round, thick-lipped, inward-tilted concrete upper wall of the Stade Olympique appears to hang over the stands and the glum, Astro-Turfed field in a glowering, almost threatening way, shutting out the sky, and fastballs and hard-hit grounders are so hard to see from above, for some reason, that the accompanying noise from the crowd is always an instant or two out of sync. This time I didn’t care, because the teams and the players and the quality of play were all so good that every part of the games mattered and made you glad you were there and no place else in the world just then.
In the sixth inning of that third game, the Expos tied things up with a single and a walk and a little roller by Larry Parrish, just through between Cey and Russell at third and short. Reuss, perhaps ever so slightly distracted by the blizzards of torn-up journeaux, and the layered explosions of noise, and the illuminated “PLUS FORT!” up on the scoreboard, and the back-and- forth billowings of an enormous white Québecois flag, and the hundredth or perhaps thousandth bellowed cascade of “Val-de-ri!’s” and “Val-de-rah!’s”—now got a fastball a millimeter or two higher than he wanted to against the next batter, outfielder Jerry White, who socked the ball up and out into the left-field stands for a homer and three more runs and, it turned out, the game.
I imagine everyone who thinks of himself or herself as an Expo fan still clings to that moment, for the team lost the next two games—lost them late, under grindingly painful circumstances—to miss out on the World Series, and sank into a long baseball torpor. Sometimes it’s wiser to remember the byplay of big games—the songs and the rest of it—instead of their outcome, because losing hurts so much. Players understand this all too well. A day or two before the end, Steve Rogers, talking about all the singing and happiness in the Montreal stands, shook his head a little and said, “Yes, it’s beautiful, but—well, euphoria is not always the name of the game.”
People who don’t follow baseball very closely assume that fans care only about their own club. I don’t agree. Whenever I happen upon a Little League game or a high-school game or a Sunday game in Central Park between a couple of East Harlem amateur nines, it only takes me an inning or so before I find myself privately rooting for one of the teams out there. I have no idea how this choice is arrived at, but the process is more fun if the two sides offer a visible, almost moral, clash of styles and purpose, and—even better—if each seems to be personified by one of its players. At that 1982 Cardinals-Brewers World Series, York and Lancaster were brilliantly depicted by the rival center fielders; the frail, popeyed, apologetic-looking Cardinal rookie, Willie McGee; and the hulking, raggedy-ass veteran Brewer slugger, Gorman Thomas. McGee had a great series, it turned out, both at the plate and in the field; in the third game, which the Cardinals won, 6–2, he smacked home runs in two successive at-bats, and in the ninth he pulled down a mighty poke by Gorman Thomas (of course) after running at full tilt from mid-center field into deep left center and then to the top of the wall there all in one flowing, waterlike motion—a cat up a tree—with no pause or accelerations near the end to adjust for the catch; at the top of his leap, with his back to the field, he put his glove up and bit to his left, and the ball, in the same instant, arrived. The play almost broke my heart, for I had already somehow chosen the Brewers and Gorman Thomas as my own. Thomas, as it happened, did nothing much in the Series-three little singles, and this after a summer in which he had hit a league-leading thirty-nine home runs—so I certainly wasn’t front-running. The frowsy Thomas was a walking strip mine; he had worn the same pair of uniform stockings, now as threadbare as the Shroud of Turin, since opening day of 1978. I recall a moment in the Brewer clubhouse during the Series when a group of us were chatting with Thomas’s father—he was the retired postmaster of Charleston, South Carolina—and some genius reporter asked what Gorman’s room had looked like back when he was a teen-ager. “Tumble!” Thomas pére said, wincing at the thought. “Why, I could hahdly make myself look in theah!”
Events on the field qualify in the life, as well; they only have to be a little special. In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 6–6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 3–2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly’s accountbook for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driven in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, “This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone.” I wasn’t at Candlestick that day, but I don’t care; I have this one by heart.
Or consider an earlier concatenation that began when Phil Garner, a stalwart Pirate outfielder, struck a grand slam home run against the Cardinals at Three Rivers Stadium one evening in 1978. Every professional player can recall each grand slam in his career, but this one was a blue-plate special, because Garner, who is not overmuscled, had never hit a bases-loaded home run before—not in Little League play; not in Legion or high-school ball; not in four years with the University of Tennessee nine; not in five years in the minors; not in six hundred and fifty-one prior major-league games, over two leagues and five summers. Never.
We must now try to envisage—perhaps in playlet form—the events at the Garner place when Phil came home that evening:
P.G. (enters left, with a certain swing in his step): Hi, honey.
Mrs. P.G.—or C.G. (her name is Carol): Hi. How’d it go?
P.G.: O.K. (pause) Well?
C.G.: Well, what?
P.G.: What! You mean…
C.G.: (alarmed): What what? What’s going on?
P.G.: I can’t believe it. You missed it….
Yes, she had missed it, although Carol was and is a baseball fan and a fan of Phil’s, as well as his wife, and was in the custom of attending most of the Pirates’ home games and following the others by radio or television. When he told her the news, she was delighted but appalled.
C.G.: I can’t get over not seeing it. You can’t imagine how bad I feel.
P.G.: (grandly): Oh, that’s O.K., honey. I’ll hit another one for you tomorrow.
And so he did.
Attention must be paid. In March, 1984, I watched a talented left-handed Blue Jay rookie pitcher named John Cerutti work three middle innings against the Red Sox at Winter Haven; at one
point he struck out Jim Rice with a dandy little slider in under his fists. I talked to Cerutti after the game and learned that he was four credits away from his B.A. degree in economics at Amherst (he has since graduated) and that his senior thesis had to do with the role of agents in major-league player salaries. I also discovered that he had a baseball hero: Ron Guidry.
“I don’t have many fond memories of baseball until I was about eighteen and pitching for the Christian Brothers Academy, in Albany,” he said. “Then I got the notion that I might make it in the game someday. I had a real good year that year—it was 1978—and, of course, that was the same time that Guidry had his great year. I was a Yankee fan—always had been—so naturally I followed him and pulled for him, and that spring I began to notice that something weird was happening to us. I mean, I won seven games in a row, and he won his first seven. Then I was 9–0 when he was exactly the same—we were winning together, me and Ron Guidry! School ended and I graduated, but I went on pitching in American Legion ball. I was 13–0 when I lost my first game, and I thought, Uh-oh, that’s the end of it, but that very same night Guidry lost, too, for the first time—I was watching on TV—so we were still the same. Well, I guess you know he finished up the year with a 25–3 record, and was the Cy Young winner and all, and I ended at 25–2. So you could say we both had pretty good years. That affinity began.”
Cerutti said all this a little offhandedly—with a trace of college-cool irony, perhaps—but his face was alight with humor and good cheer.
“So do you want to know my dream now?” he went on. “My dream is that first I make this club some day, and then I end up pitching a game against Ron Guidry. It’s a big, big game—a Saturday afternoon at the Stadium, one of those big crowds, with a lot riding on it—and I beat him, 1–0. It could just happen.”
