by Roger Angell
The particular problem for the Phillies—or a symbol of the problem, at least—was Pete Rose, who got into the game as a pinch-hitter in the ninth after spending most of it sombrely watching the proceedings from the top step of the dugout, with his white-gloved fists tensely clenching and unclenching. He had been benched by Philadelphia manager Paul Owens, who put Tony Perez on first in hopes of getting a little sock into the lineup—not an inconceivable turn of events, since Pete had had one single to his credit so far—but Rose was at no great pains to conceal his distress and irritation over the demotion. The press hordes made much of the little scandal, of course, and Joe Morgan uncharacteristically lost his temper in the postgame clubhouse when the reporters, after Rose’s swift departure, turned their questions toward the gentle Perez. Morgan’s sense of propriety was offended; he felt that professionals (including Rose, although he did not say so) should have handled all this more calmly. Rose, in fact, had previously embarrassed the club by not admitting a fielding lapse in Game Two, when he left first base uncovered in a bunt situation that specifically called for him to stay in place: no play was made, the bunt helped win the game, and the fans mistakenly blamed Morgan for the uncovered base.
These trifling contretemps are set forth here because they tell us about a much deeper problem that afflicted the Phillies all year. Paul Owens became the Philadelphia manager in the middle of July, replacing Pat Corrales at a moment when the club was in first place in the flaccid N.L. East but scraping along just one game above the .500 level. Owens, the incumbent general manager, took on the field directorship because the Philadelphia front office foresaw that only a man with his authority and reputation would be able to enforce some difficult alterations in the Phillie lineup of famous and very well-paid older stars, who by now had made it plain that they weren’t good enough to win. Owens installed a platoon system of his own, resting Pete Rose and veteran outfielders Gary Matthews and Garry Maddox whenever it seemed advantageous to do so, and reshuffling his batting order. Everyone in the lineup but catcher Bo Diaz, third baseman Mike Schmidt, and shortstop Ivan DeJesus became a replaceable part, in fact, and Owens made frequent use of the lesser-known outfielder Joe Lefebvre and, later on, of a rookie first baseman, Len Matuszek, and outfielder Sixto Lezcano. None of this was easy (Rose’s first benching ended a seven-hundred-and-forty-five-consecutive-game streak for him), and no one on the club took it with particular grace. In September, Mike Schmidt indulged himself in a public outburst of criticism of Owens’ managing (it came at the moment when the club was embarking on its eleven-game winning streak), and even during the Series, after it had become plain to everyone that the changes had worked and that the team had outdone itself at the end, there were mumbles and grousings from some of the famous principals. Owens himself—he is a tall, stooped, gentle-spoken man, with odd white eyelashes, who carries a packet of Gelusil in his uniform pocket—summed up his club during the playoffs with a musing little aside: “We have an old team and a middle-aged team and a young team.” Three teams from which to make one—to make a Baltimore, say.
Pete Rose and Joe Morgan were given their release by the Phillies in the week after the Series ended, and it is expected that Joe Morgan will soon decide whether to retire or to join the Oakland A’s for a final season as a designated hitter. It is painful for us to see old players go, and infinitely harder when they prolong the inevitable process. Morgan went into September at the bottom of the National League batting averages, but then took fire, at one point running off thirteen hits in eighteen at-bats, and on his fortieth birthday enjoying a four-for-five game with two homers—a beautiful goodbye, if he can but see it that way. Pete Rose, who has slowed down perceptibly in the field, batted .245 this year—sixty-three points below his lifetime average. He will be forty-three next spring, by which time he will have signed on with some club or other, for he is in obdurate pursuit of Ty Cobb’s 4,191 lifetime hits. He needs eleven more hits to pass the four-thousand mark, where only Cobb has gone before him, and two hundred and two more to set the new mark. I hope he can do it in one great last rush—an eleventh two-hundred-hit season, with great festivals at its close—but I suspect it may be a much longer journey for him, and for the rest of us as well.
Rose, in any case, was back in the lineup for Game Four, and had two hits and scored a run and batted in another—not quite enough to win it. You could say that the Orioles’ pitching (Storm Davis, plus Sammy Stewart and Tippy Martinez) won again, or else that it was Orioles second baseman Rich Dauer who did it, with his three hits and three runs batted in and a neatly turned double play to stop a big Philadelphia inning. It was a taut, hard game, in any case, with the Orioles pulling it out by 5–4, and if I believed that managers ever actually win ballgames I would say that Baltimore manager Joe Altobelli won this one, because of what he and his accomplished bench (the “role-players,” as they like to call themselves) pulled off in the sixth inning. Trailing John Denny (a right-hander, remember) by 3–2, with Oriole base runners at second and third, he unexpectedly wheeled in the left-side-swinger Joe Nolan as a pinch-hitter; when Nolan was intentionally walked, Altobelli produced Ken Singleton, who switch-hits and was thus proof against any Philadelphia countermove to a lefty pitcher. Singleton walked, driving in a run and tying the game (Sakata came in to run for him), and when Hernandez, a left-hander, did at last come in to pitch, the batter awaiting him was John Shelby, who also switches, and who now, batting right-handed, hit a sacrifice fly that drove in the lead run. Baltimore’s fourth successive pinch-hitter, Dan Ford, fanned for the last out, but the marionette show was not quite done, since Altobelli, by moving one incumbent fielder, Dauer, from second base to third base, found room in his defensive deployment for two of the pinch-hitters and for Sakata, too (but none at the same position as the man he had replaced), in the bottom half of the inning. I apologize for this digression, which perhaps needs an accompanying flow chart, but for those of us who were keeping score Altobelli’s moves suddenly looked like the moment onstage when the shining red balls vanish from the cup and reappear—count them!—in the magician’s fingers, and there was a further glow of pleasure when we suddenly realized that Altobelli somehow still had his three best right-handed backup hitters—Roenicke, Ayala, and Landrum—available on the bench for later use, if needed. Managers try this sort of stuff all the time, but rarely does it work out as elegantly and inexorably as it did here. To be sure, there is always some luck involved in such maneuvers (think of Altobelli’s embarrassment in that August game against the Blue Jays, when he ran out of catchers and had to play Sakata behind the plate), but when things come out right you see behind them a kind of nerve and a games intelligence that freshen our appreciation of the sport. Chess is harder, but anyone who thinks these managerial moves are a snap should think back to 1981—another year when the American League had to make do without a designated hitter in the Series—and how Yankee manager Bob Lemon and his staff, in losing to the Dodgers, repeatedly found themselves flustered and outmaneuvered in these old games of pinch and switch.
Joe Altobelli, who put in fourteen years as a minor-league player, coach, and manager in the Baltimore system (he later managed the Giants for three years and then coached at third base for the Yanks, before taking up his post last winter), has a strong instinct for the Baltimore outlook on baseball. “My moves weren’t that hard to make,” he said mildly. “It wasn’t the result of meditation, or anything. I had the players available, and that’s the big thing. And how hard is it to send Singleton up to pinch-hit, when he’s had five hundred at-bats, or Shelby, who’s been in there all year for us?”
Most of the Orioles regulars are long-termers with the club (which in recent years has lost to free-agency only one player it hoped to keep, pitcher Don Stanhouse), and most of them talk about Baltimore style with the same tempered earnestness, but in each case, I felt, their views seemed to represent a private set of convictions or discoveries, with none of the numbing, faked-up “positive values” t
hat the boyish Los Angeles varsity exudes when it expounds upon Dodger Blue. Ken Singleton, now in his ninth year with the club, who was converted from designated hitter to a pinch-hitter for this series, talked to the reporters about how much more difficult it was to get up on short notice and make a single crucial appearance at the plate, and expressed his awe of people like Dwyer and Ayala, who do it all the time. “There’s a certain atmosphere here that’s conducive to winning,” he said. “On other teams, guys get upset with their roles if they’re not playing all the time. Not here.” Dauer, who batted .235 this summer but maintained that he’d had a good year, said, “If we’re here, we must all be playing well. When you come up in an organization that’s had a Brooks Robinson and a Mark Belanger, the defensive part is instilled in you. You know that’s part of why you win.” And Jim Palmer: “We don’t have any ups and downs. We come out here and hope we’ll win. It’s a calm feeling. Earl Weaver had a lot to do with it. He never overreacted early in the season, so by September we’d be in business again. Joe is the same. We had two seven-game losing streaks this year, but, as he said, nobody pointed the finger at anyone else. Stable organizations don’t overreact. You do your best, send out good pitchers, and hope you can go on doing what you’ve done all year.”
Stable organizations run deep, and the calm Baltimore way of winning that Palmer was talking about seems to have grown out of a pattern of sound management that began with its first general manager, Paul Richards, who was steering things when the club came to Baltimore, in 1954. (It had been the hapless St. Louis Browns franchise.) He was succeeded by a near-Plantagenet line of brilliant executives: Lee MacPhail, Harry Dalton, Frank Cashen, and the incumbent (since 1975) G.M., Hank Peters. (Dalton is now the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, who won the A.L. pennant last year, and Cashen holds the same post with the up-and-coming Mets.) Above them, in the owner’s office, were Jerold C. Hoffberger and then (since 1979) Edward Bennett Williams—each an exception to the twin mold of drearily conservative or flamboyantly egocentric owners—and around them, so to speak, in various farm and coaching and scouting posts, was a passel of sound, much-admired field men: Jim McLaughlin, Lou Gorman, George Bamberger, Ray Poitevint, Ray Scarborough, and the present-day super-scout, Jim Russo. Some of these worthies have retired or moved along to higher posts with other clubs (Ray Scarborough died last year), but each of them, I think, must have felt a proprietary glow over the Orioles’ home-grown grand success this autumn.
In the Series, Eddie Murray and Mike Schmidt each ran into oppressive difficulties in trying to do what he had been doing all year, which was to hit the ball to distant parts and win ballgames. Schmidt talked at length with the writers about his failures (he was batting .063 after four games), and said that the Orioles pitchers were making him chase a lot of pitches that were up and out of the strike zone, and that he was making adjustments in his swing; Murray, for his part, said nothing and made no adjustments (he had had two singles so far, for .125), as is his custom, but it seemed certain that he was unhappily thinking back to the World Series of 1979, when he failed repeatedly at the plate while the O’s dropped the last three games in a row and lost to the Pirates. Now he came up in the second inning of the fifth game and whacked a monstrous homer into the upper tiers in right field—“It would have been a homer in Grand Canyon,” Pete Rose said later—and followed up in the fourth with an even longer, two-run job that bounced off the center-field scoreboard, where the ball just missed hitting the “M” of his own name up there at a moment when the message screen was listing the American League RBI leaders. Rick Dempsey hit a home run and also a double, and scored the last run, and the O’s, behind McGregor’s 5–0 shutout, were World Champions. Dempsey was voted the Most Valuable Player—a lovely choice. He is a first-rate catcher, durable and energetic, with a powerful arm and great agility behind the plate, but with few of the offensive abilities that usually go with the job. This summer, he batted .231, with four home runs—about average for him. Dempsey’s attitude toward the game has always been summed up for me by the way he wears his cap in the field—turned backward, because of the mask, but with the brim bent up in a cocky little flourish. Like most of his teammates, he seems to have an unquenchably high regard for himself. “I’ve got a lot of good hits for this club down the years,” he remarked early in the Series. “I get pinch-hit for a lot late in the game, so I’ve gone plenty of weeks when I was oh-for-two and then came out of the game. I figure if I’m hitting .250 here it’s the same as .280 someplace else. We just have a different way of doing things here.”
*Righetti was moved to the bullpen the following year, where, as expected, he became the Yanks’ prime late-innings stopper.
Easy Lessons
— Spring 1984
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE AN all-expense-paid late-winter vacation under the palms and within sight and sound of batted baseballs to give a sensitive man a deeper appreciation of the nature of guilt. Each year in March, I journey to Arizona and then to Florida, or vice versa, to watch a sampling of the current and future major-league ballplayers do their morning stretching exercises on dew-dappled outfield lawns (lately these workouts are being done to bouncy aerobic-rock sounds and are led by a young woman in shorts and leg-warmers who is clearly in better shape than anyone else on the field) and then test and disport themselves in batting cages and on practice mounds-engaging in B.P. and Infield and Shagging and Flip—and eventually play a few innings of morning B-Squad ball or an afternoon exhibition game, and each year this excursion brings me such freshets of pleasure that I must find new excuses within myself to justify such dulcet bystanding. Duty, for instance. I am there at the camps as a reporter, to be sure, having been dispatched sunward to search out the news and the special sense of the coming season, and there is no sterner or more assiduous newshawk to be found on the demanding Scottsdale-to-Sarasota beat than yours truly. Even the most casual morning invitation to take a dip in my motel pool or to make a fourth at middle-aged doubles finds me puritanically glum. “Not a chance!” I cry. “I’m working today.” And work I do, carefully noting in my notebook the uniform number and the unremarkable batting mannerisms of some hulking young stranger now taking his hacks in the cage, and checking his thin line of stats (.266 and eight home runs in Danville in 1981) in my team press guide, and then eliciting clubhouse quotes from a grizzled bullpen millionaire about the current state of his damaged wing (“Hurts like a bastard….”), and, later in the day, raising my mid-game gaze from the diamond to observe the gauzy look of departing rain clouds lifting from the jagged rim of some distant desert peak, and then entering that in my notebook (with the pen slipping a little in my fingers, because of the dab of Sea & Ski I have just rubbed on my nose, now that the sun is out again and cooking us gently in the steep little grandstand behind third base). I watch and listen and write, filling up almost as much space in my copybooks as I do in October at the World Series, and entering on my score-card the names of third-string non-roster substitutes who filter into the game so late in the day that even the geezer fans and their geezerettes have begun to gather up their backrests and seat cushions and head off home for beer and naps. Guilt, as I have said, is the spur, for it is my secret Calvinist fear that baseball will run out on me someday and I will find nothing fresh at the morning camps, despite my notes and numberings, or go news-less on some sun-filled afternoon, and so at last lose this sweet franchise. Baseball saves me every time—not the news of it, perhaps, so much as its elegant and arduous complexity, its layered substrata of nuance and lesson and accumulated experience, which are the true substance of these sleepy, overfamiliar practice rituals, and which, if we know how and where to look for them, can later be seen to tip the scales of the closest, most wanted games of the summer. Almost everything in baseball looks easy and evident, but really learning the game, it turns out, can take a lifetime, even if you keep notes.
Let’s face it: spring training is a misnomer. Thanks to aerobics, racquetball, high-tec
h physical-fitness centers, California-chic wives, and a sensible wish to extend their very high salaries through as many years as possible, most major-league ballplayers stay in terrific shape all year round now. Back in the straw-suitcase days, it took a month to six weeks to work off winter beer bellies and firm up poolroom-pale bodies, but contemporary players have told me that a single week of batting practice and rundown drills would make them absolutely ready for Opening Day. What with performance records, autumn visits to the Instructional Leagues, and almost daily reports from the winter-ball leagues in Latin America, most managers have a pretty good notion of the capabilities of the rising minor leaguers in their organizations, and are not likely to be badly startled (or much convinced) by a .485 spring average put together by some anonymous rookie outfielder during the exhibitions. The pitchers, to be sure, do require all of March and a little bit more in order to get their arms in shape, and the process—early stretching and tossing, the first three-innings stints, then harder stuff and longer outings—cannot be hurried or shortened, since there must be days of recuperation after each game or batting-practice workout. Spring training is really for the pitchers, then—and for the writers, who need this slow, sleepy time in which to sweeten their characters and enlarge their perceptions of what truly matters in our old game. I offer as example an apothegm uttered by a friend from the Chronicle, a budding Solomon whose views have already been heard in these pages. It was in a week of dazzling weather in Arizona, and this time we were sitting side by side in the narrow press box of Scottsdale Stadium, watching the Giants vs. (I think) the Brewers. Late in the sixth inning, he looked irritably at his watch and said, “Damn. Yesterday’s game was already over by this time.”
