by Roger Angell
The Padres’ comeback win in Game Two was made possible by some startling relief pitching by a young right-hander, Andy Hawkins, and a young left-hander (and terrific screwballer), Craig Lefferts, who between them muffled the Tiger offense over the last eight and one-third innings. The winning runs came in on a three-run homer by their raffish and exuberant veteran designated hitter, Kurt Bevacqua, who did pirouettes and threw kisses to the crowd as he rounded the bases. All this was vastly appreciated by the cacophonous, Wave-running local multitudes—far and away the loudest baseball audience I have ever encountered. Some aspects of the San Diego persona elude me—I am thinking of the persistent, semi-weepy references to the team’s late owner, Ray Kroc, the millionaire McDonald’s-hamburger man, in the local journals and news shows, where he was depicted as being almost visibly in attendance at the revels—but I took pleasure in the game and its result. Most of all, I admired the top two men in the Padre order, second baseman Alan Wiggins and right fielder Tony Gwynn, who for a time almost rivalled the Whitaker-Trammell wizardry at the plate. Wiggins, who is a switch hitter, is skinny and quick, and a master of the push bunt—the exquisite little offensive tap that must be rolled just to the pitcher’s left and past him, so that the play (no play at all, usually) can be made only by the inrushing first baseman. He is a useful foil for Gwynn, who sees an inordinate number of fastballs from pitchers who don’t want Wiggins to steal second, and thrives on them; his .351 led the National League this year, but it was .413 when Wiggins was on base. Gwynn is chunky and aggressive, and mobile in the batting box: a left-handed Bill Madlock up there—a pistol.
We repaired to Tiger Stadium for Game Three, the unenthralling contest in which the Padres’ pitchers almost walked the ball boys along with everyone else; no explanation for it, nothing to be said. It was 5–2, in the end, with twenty-four base runners left aboard by the two clubs. Game Four, on Saturday, was pretty well over by the third inning, by which time Alan Trammell had hit two home runs into the left-field stands against Eric Show—one downstairs, one upstairs—each of them with Whitaker aboard. The Detroit starter was Morris (back from his victory in the opener), who threw first-class fastballs and down-breaking split-fingered semi-fastballs, almost all of them strikes; somebody keeping count declared in the eighth that he had delivered one ball in his previous twenty-one pitches. He won 4–2, cruising.
Morris, who has won a hundred and three games for the Tigers over the past six summers (only the Phillies’ Steve Carlton, with a hundred and six, has more), is an exceptional athlete and a violent competitor who would succeed, no doubt, with any club, but Roger Craig has had a part in his making. Craig, the Detroit pitching coach, is the Leonardo da Vinci of the split-fingered fastball, which he claims to have invented at his own California baseball school a few years back, when he was instructing teen-agers and was looking for a variant pitch that would not damage their arms. The pitch is not the old forkball, which is held more deeply between forefinger and middle finger, and which, being spinless, behaves a good deal like the knuckler; this delivery arrives more quickly, looking very much like a fastball until its late little pause and duck, which result in handfuls of lovely four-hop ground balls. Craig has taught the pitch to anyone on the Tiger club who was interested, including the catcher-third baseman Marty Castillo, who had such success with it on the sidelines that he had sudden wild hopes of becoming a pitcher as well. Craig’s prime pupil is probably Milt Wilcox, a veteran righty starter with fourteen years in the bigs; on Craig’s advice, he substituted the s.-f.fb. for his rather shopworn slider this year and, despite some chronic long-term aches and frays in his arm and shoulder, came up with a 17–8 summer—by far the best of his career. Craig, by the way, calls the Tiger pitchers’ pitchouts and pickoff moves from the bench—not always on pure hunch. Late in the final game, when the Padres had a pinch-runner, Luis Salazar, on first, Craig, who had been eying the Padre dugout from across the field, suddenly announced, “Salazar is going and we’ve got his ass.” So he was and so they did: he was picked off on the next pitch.
Like most coaches, Roger Craig has been around. He coached for the Padres, and moved up to be their manager in 1978 and ’79; before that, he had managed and coached in the minors. Early Mets masochists will remember him as a tall, extremely patient mound stalwart who lost twenty-two games for the good guys in 1963—an improvement over 1962, when he lost twenty-four. Before that, to be sure, he was a successful starter with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He is an engaging, lanky North Carolinian, with a sizable nose and a pleasing resemblance to the late Slim Summerville. Before one of the games, he was telling some of us about his first look at the major leagues, back in July 1955, when he and another rookie pitcher, Don Bessent, were suddenly called up to join the Dodgers. “I was with our Montreal club on a road trip down in Havana, where I was supposed to pitch on a Sunday against the Havana Sugar Kings,” he said, “but my manager, Greg Mulleavy, called me in and said no, I was pitching against the Reds on Sunday, in Ebbets Field. I called my wife collect, and she asked what the hell was I doing calling long-distance all that way, and I said, ‘I’m goin’ to the big leagues.’ Well, Bessent won his game and I won mine—I pitched a three-hitter, and it was the first major-league game I’d ever seen—and when it was over Walter Alston told me I’d better fly back to Montreal and get my wife, since I was a major-league pitcher now. I didn’t have but a dollar on me, and I had to borrow the money. Jackie Robinson, he drove me to the airport. I’ll never forget that.”
Tiger Stadium, as the end drew near, was roiling and pleasure-mad. It didn’t quite come up to San Diego for pure noise, but Detroit fans certainly know how to express themselves. Over the summer, the turned-on Tiger-made throngs evolved simultaneous clockwise and counter-clockwise Waves in the upper and lower decks, which then somehow reversed themselves. Sometimes there came a funny, slow-motion Wave in the center-field bleachers (always a place of humor and invention this summer), which would be succeeded by a right-to-left sprint Wave that could circle the stadium (I clocked it) in twenty-seven seconds flat. There was also the foolish, comical business of the two bleacher sectors’ yelling a beer commercial back and forth (“tastes great!” from one side, and then “less filling!” from the other) while brandishing ringers and programs at each other. Other worked-up routines involved rotating hands and jingling car keys—God knows how they started, or why—and, of course, banner variations on this summer’s inescapable “bless you boys” campaign slogan, which, I believe, was born on WDIV, the local TV channel, no comma and all. Tiger Stadium is a steep-sided, squared-off city enclosure, whose boxy dimensions, like those of many ballparks back then, were dictated by the cross streets and avenues that hem it in. Downtown stadiums like this (Comiskey Park, in Chicago, is the other surviving relic) seem to hold and intensify the sounds and hopes and intimate oneness of their crowds, and when you’re inside, watching your team (in its old brilliant home whites, with the same famous, old-timey gothic initial) violently at play, it’s possible to wonder for a moment which decade you are in and which wonderful, hero-strewn lineup is on view down there, in the instant of its passing from action to history. Just above my vertiginous press-row perch, high in the park, I could see the backward “MUIDATS REGIT” sign on the roof, with each of its tall letters illuminated in blue neon, and for another odd instant I felt as if I were in one of those rooftop “LETOH” chase scenes in a black-and-white gangster movie, with the watching crowds breathless below.
All through the playoffs and all through the Series so far, Sparky Anderson had kept telling us that we hadn’t really seen the Tigers yet—the Tigers doing it all: the hitting and the power and speed all together in one game, the Tigers at their best—but in Game Five that happened at last. The obligatory first-inning explosion (against Mark Thurmond this time) was for three runs, with the first two sailing home, on surges of noise, on Kirk Gibson’s first-pitch homer into the second deck. The third was scored because Parrish, up next, singled and then sto
le second, and came in on a single. A bit later, there was a double steal. The Padres, it will be recalled, obdurately tied things up again in the fourth, but Gibson, back on first base after a single in the fifth, tagged up and thundered down to second after a deep fly to left field—a play one sees very rarely indeed—and when he scored, a moment or two later, on a very short sacrifice fly, the Tigers went ahead for the winter.
The rest of it probably didn’t matter, but it was nearly pure pleasure. Aurelio Lopez, the other famous and stubborn Detroit reliever, worked some quick innings, sometimes seeming to dismiss a San Diego batter with a blur of slicing strokes, like a Japanese sushi chef (when he and the Padres’ Craig Lefferts were in the game over the same stretch, we had a marvellous assortment of tough, hard pitching stuff on display); and Garvey and Templeton pulled off a dazzling three-six double play for the other guys, with Tempy making the tag on Marty Castillo’s fingertips down at second. Lance Parrish came up in the seventh, and in came Goose Gossage for the Padres (the loudspeakers played the “Ghostbusters” theme full blast, with the fifty-one-thousand-voice home-town choir roaring out “GOOSE-BUSTERS!” in the right places), and Lance busted the Goose, smacking a line drive into the lower left-field pavilion on the second pitch, for a two-run lead, and I think it was about then that I spotted a little parade of stadium venders, in their red-striped jackets, snake-dancing down an upper-deck aisle with their boxes held up over their heads.
The party still wasn’t over, though, for the Tigers put runners on second and third in the eighth, with the discouraged Padres’ mistakes helping a bit now, and there was a mound conference about the open base, at which Gossage somehow persuaded Dick Williams to let him pitch to the waiting and wildly hopeful Gibson. I couldn’t believe it, and neither could Sparky Anderson, in the dugout, who flashed a little one-hand-up five-dollar bet to Gibson, in the on-deck circle, that Gossage would never pitch to him—to which Gibson responded with all ten fingers: Ten bucks he will, and I’m going to hit it out. And so he did, on the second pitch—a heater down the middle and then, very quickly, up into the middle rows of Topside Section 436. Gibson circled the bases, rejoicing as he went, and came home with some very nice totals for the day: two homers, three runs, five runs batted in, ten bucks, and one World Championship. The score at the end was 8–4.
Kirk Gibson was an All-American flanker back at Michigan State, and he chose a career in baseball, as against one with the National Football League, almost at the last moment. Baseball hasn’t been easy tor him. He played in the minors for two years and then put in the better part of three seasons with the Tigers before he became a regular; a year ago, he went through a tortured .227 season, in which he raged at his coaches and his manager and the local writers and (most of all, of course) at himself. This year, he got it together, and then some; there are many baseball people who think he could be the next Mickey Mantle. He is twenty-seven years old, with a thick neck and enormous shoulders, but when you see him up close—in the middle of a boisterous clubhouse party, say, with his blond hair soaked with champagne, and his pale, darting eyes alight with triumph—your first, startled thought is: Look how young he is! Why, he’s just a kid—it’s all just beginning for him. Quite a few of the Detroit players look like Gibson; tall and aggressively athletic, with little gunslinger mustaches and an air of great, insouciant confidence. The Tigers are of different ages and temperaments and degrees of experience, but there is a sense about them—I felt it all summer—that they are just beginning. Next year will be different—it always is—and, as Sparky Anderson has said, it will be much, much harder, but still…If baseball wants a dynasty, why not start here?**
*I almost walked out there to pay my respects to Veeck, a favorite old friend of mine, but then I decided that I didn’t want to add to the distracting crush of admirers around him. So many reporters wanted to interview him during the playoffs that he was forced to set up a schedule of incoming telephone interviews at his house; one writer told me he had got his story at seven-twenty in the morning. Bill Veeck died fifteen months later, but I treasure this distant last glimpse of him at home in his favorite old ballpark and relishing a game. Baseball, he always said, should be savored.
**Why not, indeed? But the Tigers finished third in the American League East in 1985 and again in 1986, fifteen and eight and a half games out; in 1987, they won their division on the very last day of the regular season but then suffered an unexpected elimination in the championship playoffs at the hands of the Minnesota Twins, who went on to beat the Cardinals in the World Series as well. Sparky’s Muhammad Ali, an imperial baseball power for our times, has yet to step forward, and each autumn we writers and experts fall victim to the wishful delusion that the skills and vivid demeanor of this year’s World Series winner will prevail in the coming season, when in truth the fixed factor in our game just now is that champions do not repeat.
Taking Infield
— Spring 1985
BILL RIGNEY (FORMER INFIELDER, New York Giants; former manager, Giants, Angels, Twins): “Sometimes you should remind yourself that of all the things we have in this game—hits and runs and stolen bases and home runs—the thing we have the most of is outs. So it’s important to be able to catch the ball out there and then to know what to do with it. You can’t give a major-league team four outs in an inning and expect to win.”
Frank White (second baseman, Kansas City Royals): “I don’t notice that anybody thinks about defense a lot—not the fans, not all the managers, not even the front office. If they find some infielder who can hit, they’re more likely to go with that kind of player than stay with one who can field and not hit much. The theory is that you can always shake another defensive infielder out of the trees when you want one. I don’t believe it. Baseball is offense-minded because the fans like that. Defense isn’t discussed unless your club is going good and it’s close to World Series time.”
Clete Boyer (coach, Oakland A’s; former third baseman, Athletics, Yankees, Braves): “First basemen have a lot more to think about than third basemen. The shortstop—I don’t know what’s the hardest play for him. They’re all hard, I guess. There’s not much of a problem for him on the double play, because the whole situation’s right in front of him, but the second baseman—he knows he’s got to turn that thing, and the guy’s breathing down his neck. You can get your legs torn up. More often than not, you see the second baseman turn it when he didn’t have a chance, really. The judgment of infielders is something.”
Keith Hernandez (first baseman, New York Mets): “There’s a small percentage of left-handed batters today who are real pull hitters. There’s an even smaller number of right-handed hitters who can hit the ball away and up the line. I play away from the bag, and that lets our second baseman play more up the middle man what’s done on most clubs. I’ve got enough range so that I can be very aggressive about going for anything in the hole.”
Dave Conception (shortstop, Cincinnati Reds): “I think being able to play the infield, especially playing shortstop, is something you’re born with. You can’t learn it—you have to have that ability from the beginning.”
No, we fans will never quite learn this game, but there are rewards in trying. We can’t step up to bat or take infield or get to play, ever, but we can look and listen and, most of all, try to make ourselves notice what we’ve been watching all along. Spring is the best time for this, before we get involved in scores and standings, or are distracted by hope. Players and coaches and managers are more willing to reflect on their profession when you approach them in the preseason: bring a notebook and a good No. 10 sunscreen—mornings and afternoons were a white blaze in Florida and Arizona this year—and, with luck, you can improve yourself in the happiest fashion, which is to learn something you thought you already knew. This March, as the names of the deponents above suggest, I tried to sharpen up my infielding, and within days I felt more alert to all the different ways the ball is picked up and got rid of in the quicker instants of the past
ime. Once again, I discovered how much more difficult baseball is than I had imagined. Although these seminars seemed less exacting than those I encountered in a recent survey course in catching, I soon understood that this was because infielding is a fine art, not a science—an aesthetic to be thrillingly glimpsed but, as Dave Concepcion suggested, never quite understood. The conventional wisdom about spring training is that it doesn’t mean anything (it is never mentioned in the sporting press after the bell rings), but its languid, noncombative pace suits me very well, I find, not only for the pursuit of some special baseball discipline but because it provides me and the other early fans with a procession of trifling moments and glimpses and connections that feed our intuition about players and teams and skills, and so keep us in the game.
