The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  The matter is usually less grave on the field, as the great Atlanta brawl of August 12th seems to illustrate. This Thermopylae began briskly when the Braves’ Pascual Perez drilled the visiting Padres’ leadoff hitter, Alan Wiggins, with the very first pitch of the game, and it extended itself lengthily, with many skirmishings and rasslings along the way—mostly because it took three San Diego pitchers four Perez at-bats to nail him in return, in the eighth. Then there was a counter-counter essay of honor in the ninth, when a Braves reliever, Donnie Moore, nicked the Padre third baseman, Graig Nettles, which again emptied the dugouts. By the time the firefight was over, sixteen members, including both managers, had been officially excused for the day, and league president Chub Feeney eventually parcelled out eighteen fines and suspensions, including a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a ten-day suspension for Padre manager Dick Williams.

  Stern stuff, but once again I sense a decline in the quality of hostilities in comparison with some earlier eras of the game—at the very least, a decline in the language of hard feelings. After the Atlanta fracas, Atlanta manager Joe Torre said that Dick Williams was “Hitler-like,” and Williams, in riposte, referred to Torre as “Benito.” A couple of weeks later, during an A’s-White Sox game at Oakland, Dave Kingman was nailed by a pitch, with a brief ensuing flareup, apparently because somebody in the home dugout had called the White Sox pitcher a “jerk,” and Chicago manager Tony LaRussa, swinging from the heels, retaliated by describing the A’s as “pimps.” Or consider the horrid outbreak of rudeness between the Minnesota Twins and the California Angels, in which there were taunting references made to Angel catcher Bob Boone’s celebrated wine collection, and Twins manager Billy Gardner stated flatly that there was enough cork in the bat of Angel third baseman Doug DeCinces to make a fishing bob. It’s enough to make one long for the bad old days. The late Ray Scarborough, a redoubtable right-handed pitcher with the Senators and several other A.L. clubs in the nineteen-forties and fifties, once told me that when he was toiling for the Tigers against the Red Sox one afternoon his manager, Fred Hutchinson, was baited from the field by the flamboyant and somewhat unreliable Jimmy Piersall, then a Bosox outfielder. As it happened, Piersall was due to lead off the next half inning at bat, and when the sides changed and Scarborough started out of the dugout to take the field, he muttered, “I know, I know,” to his skipper. Hutchinson, a famously dour and direct competitor, beckoned him back. “What you don’t know,” he said, “is that it will cost you a hundred if you don’t hit him.” This was a first, as far as Scarborough knew, but he went manfully at the job, only to find himself quickly behind in the count, by 3–0, when Piersall proved wonderfully lithe and rabbitlike under fire. “I sure couldn’t afford to walk him,” Ray said to me, “so I bore down on the next two pitches, which were called strikes. Then I threw the next pitch behind his back, and Jimmy guessed wrong.” He held up two fingers. “Two broken ribs,” he announced.

  Some surprising names made their way onto the dean’s list at the end of the term this year, including Tony Gwynn, of the Padres, and Don Mattingly, of the Yankees, who won the league batting tides with averages of .351 and .343, respectively. Mattingly, it will be recalled, pulled it off by rapping out four hits in the Yankees’ very last game of the season, thereby nudging his way past his teammate Dave Winfield, who had begun the day two points ahead. There is no right way to hit, of course, and the two Yankees’ month-long day-by-day pursuit of the title offered a wonderful contrast in styles—Mattingly always taking a level, thoughtful cut at the ball, with his arms beautifully extended at the point of contact (he bats from the left side, with his head tilted back oddly as he stares out at the pitcher), while Winfield, as always, looked lunging and prodigal up there, with the various parts of his gigantic six-foot-six frame seeming to depart the launching pad separately, starting with the shoulders, but then all somehow coming together again in the midst of his scary swing (sometimes when he misses a pitch he has to take a twisting leap in the air to keep his balance and comes down yards in front of the plate, like a broad jumper landing). To put it another way, I am always as surprised when Winfield bangs out a base hit as I am when Mattingly doesn’t.

  Tony Armas, of the Red Sox, led the American League with forty-three home runs, while Mike Schmidt, of the Phillies, and Dale Murphy, of the Braves, wound up together at the top of the N.L., with thirty-six homers apiece. (Murphy is in a rut; this was his third straight thirty-six-homer season.) The American League appears to be working up a monopoly in power hitters, with ten of its sluggers driving in a hundred runs or more during the summer, as against three in the National League; eight A.L. hitters weighed in with more than thirty homers, while only Schmidt and Murphy made the grade in the other league. Boston outfielders Armas, Jim Rice, and Dwight Evans each finished with more than a hundred runs batted in—the first time any outfield picket line had turned that trick since the Cubs’ Hack Wilson, Kiki Cuyler, and Riggs Stephenson did it in 1929.

  A new American League bopper was Dave Kingman, who joined the Oakland A’s this spring after the Mets had given up on him because of his sulks and strikeouts (he batted .198 last year, with thirteen homers) and released him. Freed from New York and the New York writers, which he claimed to despise equally, Kingman came through with a ravishing year as a designated hitter: thirty-five home runs and a hundred and eighteen runs batted in. (He was also quite a bargain for the A’s, who paid him only the major-league minimum salary of forty thousand dollars, while the Mets continued to mail him the installments due on the rest of his six-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar unexpired annual contract.) Sky King has always been a famously (or infamously) streaky hitter, but his performance during a nine-game road trip in April must have been his best—a three-homer night in Seattle, two subsequent two-homer games, and eight home runs and nineteen runs batted in, over all. Some of the travelling A’s on that trip—second baseman Joe Morgan and coaches Clete Boyer and Billy Williams—have watched a fair assortment of the game’s best in action over the past twenty or thirty years, and all three said they’d never seen a hot spell to match it. Most of us probably remember Kingman for some enormous downtowner we once saw, but I think we don’t yet realize how many of these there have been over the years and how fast they have come. He has hit three hundred and seventy-seven homers in fourteen seasons—one for each 14.65 times at bat. This is the fourth-best ratio in the history of the game, putting him behind only Babe Ruth, Ralph Kiner, and Harmon Killebrew. He has some firsts as well. In May, he hit a stratospheric, straight-up fly ball that disappeared through a ventilating aperture in the tentlike roof of the Metro-dome, in Minneapolis, and never came down: a sky-rule double.

  Joaquin Andujar, of the Cardinals, and Mike Boddicker, of the Orioles, were the only official twenty-game winners among all the pitchers (Boddicker was 20–11, and Andujar went 20–14, after a 6–16 season a year ago), but Rick Sutcliffe, it should be noted, did even better in his split season (which doesn’t count in the record books): 4–5 with the Indians and 16–1 with the Cubs. One might even claim that Bert Blyleven had the best totals of all—a 19–7 and 2.87 year, compiled while pitching, from start to finish, for the lowly Indians. Mike Witt, of the Angels, belongs on this honor roll as well, for the perfect game—no hits, nobody on base at all—that he threw against the Rangers on the very last day of the season. Dan Quisenberry had forty-four saves for the Royals, and Bruce Sutter forty-five (a new National League record) for the Cards: no surprise there, at least. The Pirates led the National League in team pitching and somehow also finished last in their division, while the Manager’s Averted Eyes Award (given here for the very first time) went to Juan Samuel, the rookie second baseman with the Phillies, who had fifteen homers, nineteen triples, and seventy-two stolen bases (a major-league rookie record), but also struck out a hundred and sixty-eight times and committed thirty-three errors.

  There has rarely been a better vintage of rookies and baseball Yuppies, with a minimal rundown r
equiring mention of the Mariners’ Alan Davis (twenty-seven homers, a hundred and sixteen RBIs); center fielder Kirby Puckett, of the Twins; second baseman Marty Barrett (also of the Bosox); and outfielders Dan Gladden (Giants) and Jeff Stone (Phillies), who batted .351 and .362, respectively, in less than full seasons. The new pitchers were almost better: the aforementioned Messrs. Gooden and Darling, of the Mets; Mark Langston, of the Mariners (17–10, with two hundred and four strikeouts); Roger Clemens, of the Red Sox; Orel Hershiser, of the Dodgers; and Bret Saberhagen and Mark Gubicza, of the Royals. (The funny-name team title went to the Cincinnati Reds, by the way, in a landslide: a roster that included the possible law firm of Knicely, Krenchicki, Bilardello, Esasky & Redus. A trade might even land them Doug Gwosdz—pronounced “Goosh”—of the Padres, who is known to his teammates as Eye-Chart.) And let us conclude our rosters by not naming the eleven managers who were released, or allowed to depart, during the season or just after it—a casualty (or scapegoat) list that inspired the ineffable George Steinbrenner (who has canned ten managers—but not ten different managers—in his twelve years with the Yankees) to remark, “It’s getting so you can’t make news anymore when you make a change. The lack of stability is alarming.” Steinbrenner then gave his incumbent, Yogi Berra, a vote of confidence that reminded me of the three-finger handshake that W. C. Fields received from his boss in “The Bank Dick”: “Yogi did a very creditable job.”

  Reggie Jackson, now almost exclusively employed as a designated hitter by the Angels, struck his five hundredth lifetime home run—a vast relief to everyone who knows what pride he takes in such matters. I am not very fond of these Landmarks Commission records, which so often seem to burn out or put down an aging player as he struggles toward some arbitrary plateau. I well remember the repeated mound embarrassments that Lefty Grove experienced when he was straining to notch his three-hundredth victory, and, twenty years later, the sadness and disconcertion we felt as we watched Early Wynn go through the same process; each of them made the grade at last, and instantly retired, diminished by his triumph. Reggie has persisted, however, and has surprised us once again. He knocked No. 500 (his twenty-second of the year, on September 17, against the Royals, out of an eventual twenty-five), thereby joining a most exclusive gents’ club; eleven of its twelve previous members are in the Hall of Fame. Reggie, now thirty-eight and with no more real challenges in sight, will be back for at least one more season—clear sailing at last, with a few splendid targets (Mel Ott, with 511 lifetime homers; Ernie Banks and Eddie Mathews, each with 512; and Ted Williams and Willie McCovey, with 521 apiece) in plain view.

  A few sweepings remain here on the floor of the Archive Room. Here is the box-score pitching line left by George Frazier, a Cubs long reliever, after a painful outing against the Mets in September:

  IP H R ER BB SO

  0 3 4 4 0 1

  Box scores never lie, and the apparent typo in Frazier’s little row of embarrassments—a strikeout but no outs (the out would show as “1/3” under the innings-pitched symbol)—is absolutely correct: Darryl Strawberry struck out on a Frazier wild pitch that bounced away from the catcher, and made it easily to first. Another genuine curio is not in the record books but deserves enshrinement somewhere—the umpire’s ruling that enjoined Indians outfielder Mel Hall from coming up to the plate with three batting gloves dangling from each hip pocket; an errant pitch might flick one of the gloves, the arbiter decided, and unfairly allow Hall a free pass to first base. This was a sad loss to the game, for Mel Hall does not actually wear a batting glove when at the plate. The six white mitts, dangling prettily on his haunches and all aflutter whenever he ran the bases, were purely decorative: the beautiful badge of a hotdog. And, finally, we should probably not forget the midsummer news that three members of the Padres’ pitching staff—Eric Show, Mark Thurmond, and Dave Dravecky—were found to be full-fledged, signed-up members of the John Birch Society. Much was made of this in the press, and the hurlers defended their politics stoutly, but I couldn’t fit it in anywhere. Everything in baseball means something, but this one eluded me. Two of the pitchers were starters, one was a reliever….Two were left-handed but one of these, Dravecky, was a left-hander who bats right-handed….Something is afoot here, clearly, but what? I leave the matter to Bill James, the demon Sabermetrician, who must now devise the first Birchfactor formula and thereby return our game to the pure world of numbers, where it belongs.

  Early on the day of the first Cubs-Padres playoff game, Jim Frey went to his bedroom window to check the wind—too early, it turned out, for it was four-thirty in the morning and still pitch-black out there. He went back to bed. He got what he wanted, though, for there was a lovely Cubs wind at Wrigley Field by game time that afternoon—blowing straight out, that is, at a good twenty miles an hour—and throughout the day you could hear the shuffle and pop of the flags snapping in the breeze. The scoops of bunting set around the gray-blue facing of the steep upper deck were also astir, and, farther out, the tall center-field flagpole above the great gray-green scoreboard and the rising pyramid of bleachers flew a double row of pennants (team flags, in the order of finish, top to bottom of the National League divisions), which kept up a gala, regattalike flutter all through the shining afternoon. The famous ivy, thickly overgrowing the outfield walls from pole to pole, showed October tints, and the graceful old brickwork of the inner-field facade suggested football weather as well. There were treetops swaying out along Waveland Avenue, beyond left field, and Sheffield Avenue, beyond right, and other flags were aloft on the rooftops of the low neighborhood houses there, with a fine range of colors and loyalties to choose among: Old Glory, Israel, Ireland, Puerto Rico, and, of course, the Cubs. In among the flags, a couple of big tethered balloons shifted and shouldered in the moving air, and the parapets and extemporaneous stands on the roofs were jammed with unticketed, opportunistic fans, who counted themselves lucky to be close enough to pick up glimpses of the game along with the sounds and sense of it. The angling, early-autumn sunlight illuminated white-and-blue Cubs pennants in the stands around the park and silhouetted a long, sweeping line of heads and shoulders of the spectators in the topmost row of the lower deck, and when the Cubs’ center fielder, Bob Dernier, sprinted to his left and abruptly bent low to pull in a line drive, early on, there was a sudden gleam, a dart of light, from his dark glasses as he made the grab. Even the noises of the day—the deep, happy roaring of the fans; the ancient, carny-show strains of the Wrigley Field organ (sometimes playing upbeat old airs like Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On”)—seemed to reach us with washed and wonderful clarity, and in my seat in the airy, down-sloping lower left-field stands (an overflow press sector), I kept tight hold on my rustling scorecard and stat sheets, and felt at one with the weather and the world. It was as if the entire baseball season—all those hundreds of games and thousands of innings—had happened, just this one time, in order to bring this afternoon to pass; a championship game and the Cubs, for once, in it. Only one possibility could spoil things on a day like this—and I could almost see the same thought on the faces of the holiday throngs pushing along under the stands before game time: the unexpected, awful shadow of a doubt—and even that was taken care of in the quickest possible way. Dernier, leading off against the Padres’ Eric Show in the bottom of the first, rocketed the second pitch to him into the screen above the left-field bleachers, and a bare moment or two later Gary Matthews got another shot up into the wind, which landed above and beyond the ivy in left center, a good four hundred feet away. Rick Sutcliffe came up to bat in the third, and his homer—a low, hurrying, near line drive over the right-side bleachers: a shot—didn’t need the wind at all, and it told us, if any doubt remained, what kind of day this was meant to be. Chicago won, 13–0.

  Before we say goodbye to the Cubs, who are about to make their sudden departure from this season and this account (they won again the next afternoon, this time playing shortball—speed and defense and the extra base—for a neat 4–2 de
cision), another lingering look at the Friendly Confines and its team may be forgiven. The Cubs’ great success in 1984 and their abrupt termination in the championships can best be appreciated if we remind ourselves about the team’s unique place in the sport. The Cubs are the Smithsonian of baseball, a caucus of institutions, many of which were on view during the playoff festivities. “Mr. Cub,” Ernie Banks, who put in nineteen years’ distinguished service at shortstop and first base, reappeared in uniform as an honorary member of the 1984 team and threw out the first ball (a trick flip from behind his back on the mound) before the first game. The next day, the ritual was performed by Jack Brickhouse, who had broadcast thirty-four years of Cub games before his retirement, in 1982; his successor in the booth, the incumbent Harry Caray, is a transferred institution, who had previously put in eleven years’ work with the White Sox. Bill Veeck, who sat in the center-field bleachers through the season and the playoffs (I spotted him there through my binoculars, with a Vincent van Gogh straw hat on his bean, a beer in his hand, and his pegleg comfortably out in the aisle, while a stream of friends and writers and well-wishers came by to shake his hand and spoil his view),* was most recently in baseball as the owner and chief executive of the White Sox, but his father, William Veeck, Sr., was president of the Cubs from 1919 to 1933, and Veeck the Younger grew up in Wrigley Field and had his first job in the business with the team thereafter. It was Bill Veeck, in fact, who persuaded the Wrigleys to plant ivy out along the outfield walls, in 1938. Steve Trout, the southpaw who pitched and won the second playoff game against the Padres, is a son of Dizzy Trout, who pitched and won a game against the Cubs in their last previous postseason adventure, the 1945 World Series, against Detroit. And so on. The best-known Cub fixture, of course—almost an honored institution—is defeat. No other club has had a manager who described his team’s home fans as unemployables, as did a recent incumbent named Lee Elia, and no other franchise has taken so mild a view of its own fortunes as to allow its team to amble along with no manager at all, as the Cubs did from 1961 to 1965, when the day-to-day direction was handled by a rotating board of coaches. Leo Durocher took over after that and whipped the team up into second place a couple of times, but the last pennant, in ’45, is still so vivid in the memory of the fans that this year in Chicago I kept hearing references to Hank Borowy, the pitcher who won the first and sixth games of that World Series, and lost the fifth and seventh.