The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  “Right,” said I, arising and gathering up my notebook, media guides, pencils, and scorecard. (My deadline was weeks away.) “And thanks, Dave. See you at the pool.”

  In Winter Haven, on the very first day of this spring jaunt, I found Ted Williams out in right-field foul ground teaching batting to Von Hayes—a curious business, since the Splendid Splinter, of course, is a spring batting instructor for the Red Sox, and Hayes is the incumbent center fielder of the Phillies. Hayes was accompanied by Deron Johnson, the Philadelphia batting coach, and the visit, I decided, was in the nature of medical referral—a courtesy second opinion extended by a great specialist to a colleague from a different hospital (or league). Von Hayes is a stringbean—six feet five, with elongated arms and legs—and his work at the plate this year will be the focus of anxious attention from the defending National League Champion Phillies, who are in the process of turning themselves from an old club into a young one in the shortest possible time. Since last fall, they have parted with (among others) Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, and veteran reliever Ron Reed, and later this spring they traded away Gary Matthews, their established left fielder (Matthews, in fact, was intently listening in on Ted Williams’ talk to his teammate Hayes), to the Cubs. Two years ago, in his first full year in the majors, Von Hayes hit fourteen homers and batted in eighty-two runs for the Cleveland Indians—sufficient promise to encourage the Phillies to give up five of their own players (including the wonderful old Manny Trillo and the wonderful young Julio Franco) for him. Last year, Hayes, troubled with injuries (and perhaps unsettled by the nickname Five-for-One, bestowed on him by Pete Rose), batted a middling-poor .265, with six homers—reason enough for a call to Dr. Ted.

  “Lemme see that,” Ted Williams was saying, and he took Hayes’ bat and then hefted it lightly, like a man testing a new tennis racquet. “Well, all right, if you’re really strong enough,” he said, giving it back. “But you don’t need a great big bat, you know. Stan Musial always used a little bitty drugstore model. So what do you want? You know what Rogers Hornsby told me forty-five years ago? It was the best batting advice I ever got. ‘Get a good ball to hit!’ What does that mean? It means a ball that does not fool you, a ball that is not in a tough spot for you. So then when you are in a tough spot, concede a little to that pitcher when he’s got two strikes on you. Think of trying to hit it back up the middle. Try not to pull it every time. Harry Heilmann told me that he never became a great hitter until he learned to hit inside out. I used to have a lot of trouble in here”—he showed us an awkward inside dip at the ball with his own bat—“until I moved back in the box and got a little more time for myself. Try to get the bat reasonably inside as you swing, because it’s a hell of a lot harder to go from the outside in than it is to go the other way around.”

  Hayes, who looked pale with concentration, essayed a couple of left-handed swings, and Willams said, “Keep a little movement going. Keep your ass loose. Try to keep in a quick position to swing. When your hands get out like that, you’re just making a bigger arc.”

  Hayes swung again—harder this time—and Williams said, “That looks down to me. You’re swingin’ down on the ball.”

  Hayes looked startled. “I thought it was straight up,” he said. He swung again, and then again.

  “Well, it’s still down,” Ted said quietly. “And see where you’re looking when you swing. You’re looking at the ground about out here.” He touched the turf off to Hayes’s left with the tip of his bat. “Look out at that pitcher—don’t take your eyes off him. That and—” Williams cocked his hips and his right knee and swung at a couple of imaginary pitches, with his long, heavy body uncocking suddenly and thrillingly and then rotating with the smooth release of his hips. His hands, I saw now, were inside, close to his body, while Hayes’ hands had started much higher and could not come back for a low, inside pitch with anything like Ted’s ease and elegance. Nothing to it. Hayes, who has a long face, looked sepulchral now, and no wonder, for no major leaguer wants to retinker his swing—not in the springtime, not ever—and Williams, sensing something, changed his tone. “Just keep going,” he said gently to the young man. “Everybody gets better if they keep at it.”

  Hayes kept at it, standing in and looking out at an imaginary pitcher, and then cocking and striding, while Williams stood and watched with Deron Johnson, now and then murmuring something to the other coach and touching his own hip or lifting his chin or cocking his fists by way of illustration—a sixty-five-year-old encyclopedia of hitting, in mint condition: the book.

  When I left, he was in deep converse with Gary Matthews, who had asked about the best response to a pitcher’s backup slider after two fastballs up and in. “Why, take that pitch, then!” led cried. “Just let it go by. Don’t be so critical of yourself. Don’t try to be a .600 hitter all the time. Don’t you know how hard this all is?”

  I accompanied the Red Sox down to Sarasota to watch Tom Seaver work against them the following afternoon—his first American League innings ever. Seaver, as most of the Northern Hemisphere must know by now, was snatched away from the Mets over the winter when that club carelessly failed to place him on its protected twenty-six-man roster prior to a “compensation draft”—a process that permits a team (in this case, the White Sox) that has lost a so-called Type A player to a free agency to select as recompense a player from a pool of players with other teams that have signed up for the plan. This misshapen schema is a monster child spawned by the owners as a part of the settlement of the player strike of 1981, and there is considerable evidence that its headstrong fathers may now wish to disinherit it. Shortly after the Mets’ humiliation, the Yankees experienced a similar shock (the circumstances were a little different) when they lost a freshly signed top pitching prospect, Tim Belcher, to the Oakland A’s in another compensation kidnapping. The Mets, in any case, suffered a horrendous double embarrassment: first, for the forfeit of their old hero figure—an Odin brought back to the fold last year, amid many trumpetings, to finish his days in Shea-Valhalla as the steadfast elder leader of a corps of shining young Baldurflingers—and, second, for the clear evidence that it somehow did not occur to them that the pennant-hungry and publicity-hungry White Sox might find some use for a highly motivated and splendidly conditioned veteran star pitcher (Seaver is thirty-nine) with a lifetime earned-run average of 2.73. The Mets people, to their credit, have rent asunder their blazers and strewn dust upon their razor-cut pates in public penance for their gaffe, and no further criticism of them will be put forward here.

  The first glimpse of Tom in Chisox motley—neon pants-stripes, the famous No. 41 adorning his left groin—was a shock, though, and so was the sight of him in pre-game conversation with his new batterymate, Carlton Fisk. I took a mental snapshot of the two famous Handsome Harrys and affixed to it the caption “Q: What’s wrong with this picture?” (A: Both men are out of uniform.) Then the game started, and Seaver’s pitching put an end to all such distractions. It was a prime early-spring outing—three swift, harm-free innings that included a couple of bases on balls and four strikeouts. There was a good pop to his fastballs, and he wheeled in some thoughtfully located sliders and curveballs as well, and once it was clear that he was going to be all right out there I sat back and took pleasure in all the old looks and ways of him—the thick, strong legs and droopy shoulders, the grave gaze catcherward for the sign, the audible “Hunk!” that sometimes accompanied the in-driving thrust of his big body in mid-delivery (Ted Williams had said that he doesn’t hear enough grunts from the mound nowadays), and then the mitt flipped up vertically to take the catcher’s return peg.

  In the clubhouse after his stint, Seaver declared himself satisfied with his work—perhaps more than satisfied. There had been some small technical problems—his release point was a little flat at times—but that wasn’t surprising, because he’d been nervous about this outing. “I wanted to prove to the guys that I can help this ball club,” he said. “They don’t care who you are. They w
ant to know if you can still pitch—especially at the age of thirty-nine. This is a team that wants to win. They’ve had a taste of it, and they want more. What our game is all about is proving things to your own team.”

  He went over the three innings almost pitch by pitch, making sure that the writers had their stories, and they thanked him and went off. A couple of us stayed on while Tom unwrapped the big icepack from his shoulder and started to take off his uniform. I think we wanted reminiscence or philosophy from him now—something about motivation or the shocks of unexpected trades or the wearing down of an athlete’s will with the years—but what we got was much better: mechanics. He talked about tempos of early throwing in the first few days of spring—a murmured “one, two, three-four…one, two, three-four” beat with the windup as his body relearned rhythm and timing. He went on to the proper breaking point of the hands—where the pitching hand comes out of the glove—which for him is just above and opposite his face. Half undressed, he was on his feet again and pitching for us in slow motion, in front of his locker.

  “What you don’t want is a lateral movement that will bring your elbow down and make your arm drop out, because what happens then is that your hand either goes underneath the ball or out to the side of the ball,” he said. “To throw an effective pitch of any kind, your fingers have to stay on top of the ball. So you go back and make sure that this stays closed and this stays closed”—he touched his left shoulder and his left hip—“and this hand comes up here.” The pitching hand was back and above his head. “It’s so easy to get to here, in the middle of the windup, and then slide off horizontally with your left side. What you’re trying to do instead—what’s right—is to drive this lead shoulder down during the delivery of the ball. That way, the pitching shoulder comes up—it has to go up. You’ve increased the arc, and your fingers are on top of the ball, where they belong.”

  I said I’d heard pitching coaches urging their pupils to drive the lead shoulder toward the catcher during the delivery.

  “Sure, but that’s earlier,” Tom said. He was all concentration, caught up in his craft. “That’s staying closed on your forward motion, before you drive down. No—with almost every pitcher, the fundamentals are the same. Look at Steve Carlton, look at Nolan Ryan, look at me, and you’ll see this closed, this closed, this closed. You’ll see this shoulder drive down and this one come up, and you’ll see the hand on top of the ball. You’ll see some flexibility in the landing leg. There are some individual variables, but almost every pitcher with any longevity has all that—and we’re talking now about pitchers with more than four thousand innings behind them and with virtually no arm troubles along the way.”

  Someone mentioned Jerry Koosman, who had gone along from the White Sox to the Phillies over the winter, and Seaver reminded us that he and Koosman and lug McGraw and Nolan Ryan had been together on the 1969 World Champion Mets and that they were all still pitching in the majors, fifteen years later. “Nolan Ryan’s still pitching and then some,” he said. “We all had good fundamentals, and our pitching coach, Rube Walker, stressed the right things—don’t overthrow, stretch out your work with a five-day rotation, and keep those sound mechanics.”

  There are other ways to pitch and pitch well, to be sure, Seaver said, and he mentioned Don Sutton as an example. “Sutton’s exceptionally stiff-legged,” he said, “but he compensates because he follows through. He doesn’t do this.” He snapped his right arm upward in a whiplike motion after releasing an imaginary ball. “The danger with a stiff front leg is recoiling.”

  He picked up the remaining pieces of his discarded uniform and underwear and tossed them into a canvas hamper. “What is the theory of pitching?” he went on. He sounded like a young college history lecturer reaching his peroration. “All you’re doing is trying to throw a ball from here to here.” He pointed off toward some plate behind us. “There’s no energy in the ball. It’s inert, and you’re supplying every ounce of energy you can to it. But the energy can’t all go there. You can’t do that—that’s physics. Where does the rest of it go? It has to be absorbed back into your body. So you have to decide if you want it absorbed back into the smaller muscles of the arm or into bigger muscles of the lower half of your body. The answer is simple. With a stiff front leg, everything comes back in this way, back up into the arm, unless you follow through and let that hand go on down after the pitch.”

  “But isn’t that leg kick—” I began.

  “The great misnomer in pitching is the ‘leg kick,’” he interrupted. “That’s totally wrong. Any real leg kick is incorrect. Anytime you kick out your leg you’re throwing your shoulders back, and then you’re way behind with everything. You’ve got to stay up on top of this left leg, with your weight right over it. So what is it, really? It isn’t a leg kick, it’s a knee lift! Sure, you should bend your back when you’re going forward, but—” He stopped and half-shrugged, suddenly smiling at himself for so much intensity. “I give up,” he said. “It’s too much for any man to do. It’s too much even to remember.” He laughed—his famous giggle—and went off for his shower.

  I got lucky in Arizona three days later, because here was Don Sutton working five sharp innings for the Brewers against the Giants in Scottsdale, and I could think about mechanics some more. Sutton gave up two singles and a solo home run (to Jeffrey Leonard), and got a passel of ground-ball outs with his down-breaking curve, which he throws, oddly, with his forefinger crooked up on the ball and the fingernail cutting into a seam. For a while there, I thought he was snapping his arm on the recoil—he comes straight over the top, right-handed, bobbing over the front leg and finishing with so little twist or drop to his body that it almost appears to be attached to a vertical wire somewhere—but when I concentrated I thought I could see his pitching arm moving so fast after the release that his hand, a blur, actually did come down past his left knee before it slowed, stopped, and rose again. I wasn’t sure, though, and I checked this with him when we met in the dingy wooden visiting-team clubhouse after his outfield sprints. Sutton has fashionably cut gray curly hair and a lean, humorous face; he looks and sounds like his pitching style—slick, spare, smart. Within a couple of weeks, he would turn forty and begin his nineteenth season as a big-league starter.

  “Yes, my arm comes way down,” he said at once. “I transform the strain. My mechanics are fundamentally sound, because I do what comes naturally to me. We’re all unique. To take a guy like me and turn him into a drop-and-drive pitcher like Tom Seaver would have made for about a one-year career, and to make Tom into an over-the-top curveball pitcher would have done the same to him. Seaver has powerful legs and butt muscles and a strong upper body. All my effort in pitching comes from my upper legs and lower back, and I’ve worked over the years to keep them strong.”

  Sutton’s shirt was off by now, and I could see the lean, tightly drawn shoulder muscles moving beneath his skin. His body looked tailored. He told me that Red Adams, his pitching coach with the Dodgers years ago, had worked with him to establish and refine his pitching form—“He found my slot” was the way he put it—and had given him four checkpoints to watch for during his delivery. Raising his arms, he faced me and went through a slow-motion delivery. “One: Start square,” he said. “Two: Quarter-turn. Three: Pause at the top and tap. Four: Go on through and don’t stop.” He did it all again, even slower this time. “Starting square, looking directly at the plate, and making no more than a quarter turn is important, because if I do this”—he bent his body a little farther away from me on the pivot, going from nine o’clock to about ten-thirty—“if I get that far, I can’t make up for all that body action by the time I turn the ball loose. The quarter turn keeps me together. The tap at the top”—he wiggled the toes of his right foot, the mound foot, while his hands were still together above his head—“allows the upper part of my body to catch up with the bottom half and then throw and follow through. It’s a one-beat pause. If I don’t tap, then I’ll just rush ahead, so I’m twisted way ove
r here, while my arm is still behind. When I do tap, it’s—” And he finished his motion beautifully, with the arm going down and through and then rising again. He had looked almost nothing like Seaver during all this—he was more of a machine, less menacing—but then, near the end of it, I saw the lead shoulder drive down and the back shoulder fly up, bringing the pitching arm up high and through, exactly like Seaver’s. They were the same, after all.

  That was enough mechanics for the moment, and I asked Sutton how he felt about baseball now, in this last, or latter, part of his career.

  “I don’t care any more or any less about the game than when I started,” he said. “I still think it’s a fabulous profession to be in. Sometimes we get a little unrealistic about the role we play in things. Being a professional athlete doesn’t solve world hunger or stop crime. It’s not going to cure cancer or build houses for people. It’s not as important as we think it is. What I do for a living isn’t that big a deal to me, then, but the fact that I can do it is a real big deal, because it was the goal I set for myself. I love the competition. It’s as simple as that.”

  I found Reggie Jackson playing in a B-game between the Angels and the A’s the next morning. He’d been waiting out a pulled leg muscle, and these were his first at-bats of the spring. He rapped a little single to right, struck out, and stroked a double against Ray Burris which the center fielder, out by the 410-foot mark on the wall, gloved but could not hold: a real Reggie-blow. He was D.H.-ing for the Angels—it’s his regular position now—and between his turns on deck and at bat he came out and stood in the sun with some of the writers along the low right-field fence and took care of the day’s ink. Reggie loves to talk—we all love what we’re good at—but now, for the first time, he was talking about the end of his playing days, or the chance of that. He had an abysmal season in 1983—a .194 average, with fourteen home runs, the last of which came in July. In the campaign just previous, he had tied for the league lead with thirty-nine downtowners. He has four hundred and seventy-eight lifetime home runs, and Angel-watchers last summer had the impression that he was so eager to reach the five-hundred plateau (he would be the thirteenth player there, ever) that his big stroke came apart under the strain. He will be thirty-eight later this spring, and there can’t be many seasons ahead. He looked the same as ever—large and friendly and anxious to please, and in great shape—and it was hard to ask him how he felt about closing down his career.