The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Some of the reasons for this instability are broadly understood, since they arise, in one form or another, from the central alterations to the game brought about by free agency and salary arbitration: enormous payrolls (averaging in the neighborhood of eight million dollars per club) and the consequent shifting, by trades or by loss to the free-agent market, of older, more expensive players from one club to another, with a resultant smudging of team identity from one season to the next. I don’t propose to examine this phenomenon in depth here, since the responses to high salaries and limited-year contracts would require us to explore a very wide range of club philosophies, resources, needs, and plans. To illustrate just a bit, though, a team with a limited audience and small immediate prospects (the Indians, let’s say) will often try to trade off a star player near the end of his contract, since it may be unwilling to offer him big enough fresh sums to keep him out of the free-agent market; in return, it will look for some first-class rookie prospects from the other club involved in the trade, thus saving itself the long-range cost of maintaining a full-scale scouting and farm system. Another team (try the Padres or the Angels) will habitually seek to pick up established older players, at whatever price, to fill precise needs in a roster that seems close to becoming a genuine pennant contender. Elsewhere, a change of ownership can inspire a depressed, fiscally cautious club (yes, the Cubs) to plunge headlong into the trading place with fistfuls of dollars and players, while, for its part, a wealthy, conservative franchise with a high record of success may begin to unload some famous but aging regulars in order to make room for shining rookies whom its field personnel now consider to be ready for daily play: the Phillies and the Dodgers both recently embarked on such a course, with unhappy results so far.

  A glance through the lineups of some of this year’s divisional winners offers useful lessons and variations on these themes. First baseman Steve Garvey, who is thirty-five, joined the Padres two years ago as a free agent at $1.3 million per year, and third baseman Graig Nettles and the famous short reliever Goose Gossage (they are forty and thirty-three years old, respectively) came over in a trade with the Yankees last spring, adding some $2.7 million per year to the San Diego payroll. The 1984 Cubs are virtually a short-order team, grabbed up over the past two years, mostly via the trade route, by their vigorous general manager, Dallas Green, who has put twenty-two new players in place on the club since his arrival in 1981, the year that the team was bought by the Chicago Tribune’s parent corporation. Six of Green’s regulars, including the entire starting outfield, played for him on his former club, the Phillies. Three fixtures in his 1984 lineup—third baseman Ron Cey, shortstop Larry Bowa, and left fielder Gary Matthews—are in their mid-thirties, and achieved their high reputations and high salaries (they all earn a base pay in excess of six hundred thousand dollars per year, with considerable increments in the form of bonuses and deferred payments) while playing for other clubs that have appeared in the fall championships within the last four years—Cey with the Dodgers, Bowa and Matthews on the Phillies. Dallas Green’s most brilliant acquisition for the Cubs has been then-youthful second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, this year’s Most Valuable Player in the National League, who was virtually a throw-in in a trade of shortstops that brought Bowa from Philadelphia in 1982, but the deal that won the division was the Cubs’ acquisition of Rick Sutcliffe, who came over from the Indians on June 13th in a multi-player swap; he won sixteen of seventeen decisions for Chicago over the remainder of the summer, and captured the Cy Young Award as the league’s best pitcher. An established, dominant right-handed starter, Sutcliffe was playing out the final months of a contract that released him as a free agent a couple of weeks ago, and at this writing it is not at all certain that the Cubs will decide to bid against the eight clubs that have obtained negotiating rights to him and are expected to drive his salary up to or over the one-and-a-half-million-dollar level. He may even sign with the Padres. The Cubs’ No. 2 starter, Steve Trout, is also a free agent, and so are Dennis Eckersley and reliever Tim Stoddard—which suggests that the Chicago pitching staff may have a very different look and capability come Opening Day next spring. And so it goes. The newly crowned Tigers are a stable, mostly homegrown team, as such matters are measured nowadays, but their key addition in 1984 was the left-handed short reliever Willie Hernandez, who was successful in thirty-two out of the thirty-three late-inning game-saving situations in which he worked for Detroit, and thereby emerged at the top of the balloting for both the Cy Young and the MVP awards in the American League.

  I should add that there are some front-office people and managers and coaches (and baseball writers, too) who see a different cause for the pattern of vapid play by contemporary pennant-winning clubs in the years just subsequent to their championships. Last year’s World Series contestants—the Orioles and the Phillies—finished nineteen games and fifteen and a half games, respectively, behind their divisional leaders this year; the 1982 pennant winners—the Cardinals and the Brewers—wound up twelve and a half and thirty-six and a half games to the bad this year. The baseball thinkers I have mentioned find all this attributable much less to the shifting of personnel from one club to another than to a smugness and a waning of desire among players who have been very highly rewarded at the pay windows as a result of their October triumphs. The notion has a certain logic, and if I resist it to some degree it is because it is so often put forward by some of the arch-conservatives of the game, including the Tigers’ manager, Sparky Anderson. I will follow Sparky all the way, however, when he says (as he did in the Tiger dugout before the third Series game this year) that what the sport now badly wants is a consistent winner—a dynasty, if you will. “It’s fine for the fans in all those different cities to have a different team in the playoffs each year,” he said, “but you also need one particular team in there that half the people in the country love and half of them hate: the Yankees, the great Oakland club back in the seventies, the Cincinnati team we had”—Anderson managed the Big Red Machine that appeared in five playoffs and four World Series between 1970 and 1976—“which used to break all those attendance records wherever we played. There should be a club like that in the World Series about half the time. What baseball needs right now is a Muhammad Ali.”

  Anderson delivered all this in cheerfully matter-of-fact tones (he also insisted he did not blame the players for taking the loot that has been coming their way), and I wish I could persuade some of my friends who are part-time baseball followers to adopt a similarly calm and unpenitent view of money and trades and baseball as a business. It’s my impression that it is the late-summer soldiers—the fans who don’t pay much attention until the campaigns slip into mid-September, and “magic numbers” and MVP talk begin to turn up in the sports pages—who are most upset by the ironies and realities of contemporary baseball. They are probably the ones who most want an imperial and dynastic old club in the series every October, for that will add a morality-play savor to their tube-watching for a couple of weeks, and will also seem to confirm that nothing much has changed in the old game, which is a lie. For my part, I will happily welcome a defending champion in the October games when one turns up, but I don’t think that a brusque, rather slovenly World Series or three flatfish pennant races are much cause for gloom. One should not go thirsty at dinner for want of a Chateau Margaux, and the happier fans, I think, are the ones who find time actually to go to games every so often throughout the season. This summer, I kept leaving baseball and men coming back to it—dropping in on the game, so to speak—and I had as much fun, from first to last, as I ever did. The sport didn’t seem particularly Homeric this year—no clanging swordplay in the dust under ancient walls—but more resembled a collage, a ragbag, or perhaps a meadow: bits and swatches jumbled together for our pleasure, and color everywhere.

  The closest meadow for me was Shea Stadium, of course, and I dropped in on the Mets again and again—not just for those enormous games with the Cubs in midseason but earlier, when the team’
s repeated successes were still so new and refreshing that a sudden Mets rally to retake the lead or a dandy double play that began with still another elegant move or unlikely stop by Keith Hernandez from deep behind first base would be greeted not only by roars and cheers and applause but by great bursts of delighted laughter all around the stands. Following the Mets back then was like watching a child of yours suddenly being good in a school play or a junior tennis tournament; you didn’t know he had it in him. I was at Shea in the middle of June when the Mets beat the Phillies and slipped past them into first place in the National League East—a ridiculous, obstreperous game in which the Mets led by 6–1, then trailed by 7–6 (the clubs took turns batting around, and there were thirty hits for the afternoon), and finally prevailed by 10–7.1 was back again the next night, when the downy Dwight Gooden struck out eleven Montreal batters but lost by 2–1 to the dewy Bill Gullickson; and I was there (along with fifty-one thousand and nine others) to celebrate the Glorious Fourth with fireworks and maybe first place again, huzzah!—except that the visiting Astros put a damper on the party by bonking out seven hits (bloops and nubbers, for the most part), good for five runs, in the very first inning, and took it by 10–5. A couple of nights later, the Mets swept a double-header from the Reds, with Ron Darling knocking off his seventh straight win with a 1–0 shutout in the opener (he had a most disappointing second half of the season, partly because the club scored so few runs behind him, and wound up at 12–9 for the year), and the next night it was Gooden again and first place regained, in a great gala, as the Mets hitters dealt most severely with the formidable Mario Soto, battering him for eight runs in four innings, with homers by Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry, and with the firecrackers going off in the upper deck again, and the non-stop cheering, and the banner wavers and sign carriers at work, just like the grand old days of 1969 and 1973. In the stands, the new Gooden strikeout tabulators kept busy, hanging up their big red-on-white “K” placards, one after another, on the front-row railing of the top left-field deck, and I noticed that the custom had spread around the park, with folks waving “K”s scrawled on newspapers and paper napkins and scorecards. I spotted a kid, down a couple of rows from me in the stands, who would write a “K” in ballpoint on one of his fingertips whenever Dwight struck out another batter, and then waggle his hands in the air for us to see. Then, out on the right-field side, two men put up a huge black “K” done on cardboard—as big as a garage door by the look of it—and held it swayingly aloft. As it happened, this wasn’t a particularly brilliant outing for Dwight, and he was allowed to sit down after the sixth, by which point he was ahead by 12–2 in the game, with eight “K”s up on the rails. It turned out to be Mookie Wilson’s night—four hits and four RBIs, with that homer and a stolen base thrown in—and he got the best sign, too: a couple of kids strolling the lower-deck main aisle and holding up “PARTY AT MOOKIE’S!”

  The Mets’ season, as we know, did not end quite so happily, but Dwight Gooden never stopped. He wound up the year at 17–9 (third best in the league), with an earned-run average of 2.60 (second best), and two hundred and seventy-six strikeouts—the most in baseball this year and the most by a rookie pitcher ever. He pitched two innings in the All-Star Game (he struck out the side in the first one), and finished his season in awesome fashion, winning eight of his last nine decisions and posting a 1.07 earned-run average for that span, with a one-hitter and two sixteen-strikeout games along the way. The most frequent baseball question I hear is “Is he really that good?” Yes, he is. Most major-league scouts and managers I have consulted state without hesitation that Gooden is the best young pitcher they have ever seen at a comparable stage—better than Tom Seaver, better than Bob Gibson, better than Herb Score, better than Bob Feller. He is the most vivid first-year hurler I can bring to mind since Vida Blue set the American League afire with his twenty-four victories and 1.82 earned-run mark for the Oakland A’s, back in 1971, but Blue was twenty-two years old (and technically past his rookie status) and, as I recall, did not quite have the command of his pitches that Gooden has. The Gooden fastball is the genuine article, regularly up in the 92-to-96-m.p.h. range, and delivered with a tight spin that makes the ball look smaller and quicker as it bites through the strike zone; his curve breaks late and sharply downward; and at times he has a first-class change-up, which he can also deliver for strikes, to the deep discouragement of the hitters. I remember a 2–1 shutout he pitched against the Dodgers in Los Angeles early in May (I was watching on television), which he concluded by fanning the side in the ninth, with a changeup in there that Pedro Guerrero swung at and missed by—Well, he would have missed it with a canoe paddle. Gooden is six feet three and about two hundred pounds, with amazingly long legs, arms, hands, and fingers. His motion begins with an exaggerated leg-lift, which brings his knee up higher than his front-side elbow, but everything about the launching is nonetheless balanced, smooth, unforced, and pleasing. It requires some concentration before you begin to pick up his gargantuan opening strike on the mound and the abrupt downward tilt of the left shoulder which inaugurates the mostly over-the-top (about NNW, I make it) delivery, and also pulls his whole body swoopingly to his left just as the ball is released.

  For all these elegant kinesthetics, I think I most admire Gooden’s thoughtful and untroubled attitude while he is working—the absence of gesture or mannerism on the mound (now and then he flicks the sweat from his face with a downward swipe of his right palm), and his ability to adjust and improve his performance on a given day as the game progresses. Often this past summer, I saw him struggle and sometimes begin to overthrow in the middle innings of a tough game, and I would nod wisely to myself and think, Well, not much longer for you this time, kid—only to watch him recapture his poise and rhythm within a batter or two and resume the little string of “K”s on my score-card. His notable weakness so far is his inability to hold runners on first (forty-seven out of forty-nine would-be base stealers were successful against him), but the Met coaches are convinced that a slight tinkering with his delivery in the Instructional League during the off-season will clear up the problem. Davey Johnson, the Mets manager, spoke often and warmly about the youngster’s maturity and his continuing eagerness to learn as the season went along. Gooden is reserved and quiet in the clubhouse, and a bit shy with reporters and TV crews, and there is no suggestion that further fame and a great deal more money down the line will much alter him. He is in the habit of calling his father, down home in Tampa, after each game he has pitched. He is nineteen years old, and this was his second full season in professional ball. He will be better next year.

  Another manager—Jim Frey, of the Cubs—was being asked about Gooden one July afternoon in the dugout at Shea, after Gooden had shut down his club by 2–1, on four hits, the previous evening. Frey, who was a coach with the Mets last season, was complimentary about the phenom, but when most of the reporters had gone away he sighed and spat and murmured, “If there’s one thing I get tired of, it’s all these questions about Dwight Gooden’s poise. Anybody who can throw the ball across the plate at ninety-five miles an hour up here and then comes back with a breaking ball that drops a foot and still comes over down there for a strike—why, damn, that man doesn’t need poise! But ask me about a pitcher who’s just been taken to the back of the bullpen twice in the same inning, then I’ll show you a man who needs poise!”

  AS IT HAPPENED, I didn’t see a major fight on the field this year, or many brushbacks or knockdown pitches of the kind that eventually empty the benches, but it was a testy, bad-tempered sort of season nevertheless—by mid-September, the National League counted twenty-six official warnings to pitchers and/or brawls, which was up by one-third from the total of the previous summer. News shows and editorials have gravely taken up the “beanball epidemic,” which they seem to view as a true threat to the pastime, but I am less alarmed. For one thing, “beanball” is a misnomer: no, or very few, big-league pitchers aim for a batter’s head (it is too dangerous
to a fellow-professional, or, conversely, the head is too small a target if malice is actually intended). For another, the war between the pitcher and the batter for control of the plate (more precisely, for the outside three or four inches of the plate) is the center of the game, of course, and the pitcher’s best weapon in that unending contest is a whistling fastball up and in, close to the body or under the chin, that will make the batsman give ground—in his mind or in the batter’s box—when the next pitch arrives. “Show me a pitcher who can’t pitch inside and I’ll show you a loser,” the sweet-mannered Sandy Koufax once said. Sometimes, given a certain pitcher and batter at a certain moment in the long, nerve-abrading season, the pitch is to the ribs or the knees, and the batter goes down. Retaliation is then in order, although the rules forbid it and umpires now have the power, as they did not up until seven years ago, to issue warnings to one side or both and to eject a pitcher or a manager for an ensuing provocation. Even this form of peace-keeping is not wholly endorsed by some classicists of the sport, who also dislike the American League’s designated-hitter rule, because it exempts the pitcher from ever coming to bat, and thus makes him unavailable for direct retribution if he has plunked somebody. Don Drysdale, the dominating, Hall of Fame Dodger right-hander, believes that the D.H. and the umpires’ new pitcher-banishment power have actually increased the chances of some batter’s being seriously injured. He points out that more batters are digging in at the plate and that they are much more aggressive in attacking the outer sector of the plate. Because they have forgotten about bailing out, he says, they are forever at risk against an inside fastball that gets away from the pitcher. Someone’s going to get hurt.