by Roger Angell
“I’ll make more plays than some, because I’m willing to go so far in the hole” is the way Hernandez explained it. “The hard play for me is when I have to throw overhand from the hole back to a pitcher who’s breaking for the bag. It’s like being a quarterback throwing to an end on a look-in pattern in football. I want to try to get the ball to him before he gets to the bag—about two steps before, if I can—so he can catch it and then look for the bag. The 3-6-3”—this is the pleasing play when the first baseman takes a grounder, wheels to the shortstop to retire a base runner going down to second, and gets back to his base in time to take the return throw to beat the batter—“used to be tough for me, but it’s not so bad now. About six years into my career, I suddenly realized—it just came to me—that there was no point in my waiting around to see if I’d made a good throw in that situation. If I’ve thrown it away, I’ve thrown it away. Now I throw the ball and then turn my back and run straight to the bag. You want to be there to take that throw back, because it’s the hardest thing in the world for the pitcher to get all the way over and make that catch.”
I asked if any other first basemen made the 3-6-3 that way.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” he said.
What I understood in time—it just came to me—is that there is nothing defensive about Keith Hernandez’ thinking about defense. “How many right-handed hitters can hit the ball up the line to right?” he asked me at one point, and then answered his question at once. “A few. Sandberg does it very well. Moreland does it. Maybe a couple of others. It’s funny, but almost nobody who bats left-handed in my league can really pull the ball down the line. If that’s true, there’s just no point in playing the line so close. In the late innings, you’re supposed to stay up next to the line if you’re defending a one-run lead, so you won’t let a ball get by you for extra bases. Everybody knows that—it’s almost a rule—so you see them all playing three feet from the line. But I’ll be six feet or more away from it, depending on the batter and the pitch, and that’s fine with Davey Johnson—we agree. If you ask most players and managers about it, they’ll say yes, of course, you get beat more on balls hit into the hole—it’s nine times out of ten, I think—but they don’t play it that way. It’s ridiculous.”
Playing the infield requires a perpetually honed anticipation, and if you make yourself watch for them you can almost always notice the little quirks and twitches that each player at an infield position uses to bring himself onto his toes at the instant the pitch is delivered, with his body poised in preparation for a ball suddenly smashed in his direction. (Frank White believes that this constantly repeated preliminary little hop, made thousands of times over a season, wears down infielders’ knees and quadriceps muscles over the years, and may be even more damaging in the long run than playing on AstroTurf.) What you can’t pick up, for the most part, is the accompanying small dialogue of signals that constantly flies about this four-man perimeter a moment or two before that—the language of defense. As I have indicated, both the shortstop and the second baseman peer in at the catcher to pick up his sign to the pitcher about the next pitch—a sign that cannot be seen by the first or third baseman, of course. They—the middle pair, I mean—will lead or edge a bit to one side or the other in response, and if the pitch is to be a breaking ball, one or the other will also relay the message to the infielder at his corner—to the first baseman if there’s a left-handed hitter up, or to the third sacker if it’s a right-handed hitter. A word will do it: if Leon Durham, a left-handed swinger with the Cubs, is to see a breaking ball from Ron Darling on the next pitch, let’s say, Keith Hernandez will hear his second baseman, Wally Backman, say “Keith!” at the instant that Darling is at the top of his windup. It’s a trifle—perhaps only a mental knock-on-wood—and probably doesn’t help much, but it’s there if the first baseman or third baseman wants it. Some don’t want to know. Jerry Remy said that one of his Boston first sackers, George Scott, never wanted the signal; another, Carl Yastrzemski (he often played first in the latter stages of his career), did want it. There are other messages as well—notably the hand signal or glove flick or special glance between the shortstop and the second baseman with a base runner on first, which determines who is to cover second on the coming play. This, too, is a response to the catcher’s sign to the pitcher, for the man who covers will be the one less likely to have the next pitch hit to his side. A common semaphore here is a quick grimace flashed by one man or the other to his partner behind his raised glove—a closed-mouth mime for “Me” or an open mouth for “You.” It’s nothing much—kids might make up a code like this—but it can be needed thirty or forty times in a game, and it’s always done. The keystone pair must also understand which of them is to make the first try at a ball that is chopped over the pitcher’s head and short of second—a very hard chance that is usually taken by the shortstop, since his momentum is toward first base. But they must know. Frank White said that all this comes as second nature to him by now, but that sometimes the burden of so many repeated and altered fragments of intelligence—letting the shortstop know, letting the first baseman know, and sometimes relaying signals from the bench to the Royals outfielders about which direction to shade in a tough situation—can suddenly be too much. “I get a mental blowout now and then,” he said. “I can’t handle it, and then I tell my coaches I’m going to beg off from that for a couple of days and let the shortstop be the main man. The mental strain is unbelievable sometimes.”
Buddy Bell, the Texas Rangers’ third baseman, doesn’t want to know the next pitch to the batter. “I gave up looking for signs on breaking balls, because I found I was cheating too much,” he told me. “I was counting on it, and I’d begun putting myself out of position. I’d rather just go on the situation and what I know about the batter.” Then he added, “Besides, we’ve had a big turnover of pitchers on this club in the past few years.” This took me a minute: Bell was saying that there weren’t many Ranger pitchers just now whom he trusted to put the ball where it was meant to go on the next pitch—to throw what the catcher had asked for.
Bill Rigney had already mentioned the same thing. Rig (he is sixty-six years old, but still has the eager gaze and lanky quickness of gesture of the born infielder) said that he had noticed a recent decline in strategic conversations between infielders and pitchers in hard situations—the moment when a shortstop or third baseman might step over to the mound in a jam and murmur, “Where do you want me? How are we going to come at this guy?” Rigney said, “I can remember times on the Giants when there were men on base and all, and I’d go in and ask Sal Maglie or Larry Jansen, and they’d say, ‘With this guy, play him in the hole, because the way I pitch him, that’s where he’s going to hit it.’ But I noticed with some other pitchers we had, they’d always say, ‘Play him straight away.’ That was because they didn’t know what the batter was going to do, or where the pitch would be. They had no idea.”
Buddy Bell is the nonpareil third baseman in his league—perhaps in both leagues. He looks all wrong for an infielder—he’s six feet two, with powerful shoulders and a long upper body; with his blond hair and mild blue eyes, he reminds you of a Southern Cal football player. Actually, he grew up in Cincinnati, and is the son of the Reds’ (and dawn-Mets’) outfielder-slugger Gus Bell. Buddy Bell played third for seven years with the Indians and is now starting his seventh season with the Rangers at the same position. He’s thirty-three years old, and last year batted .315 and picked up his sixth consecutive Gold Glove. He has an outstanding arm, he is durable (he plays about a hundred and fifty games, year after year), and his manner is efficient, pleasantly brusque, and (you learn in conversation with him) ironic—essential attributes for a third baseman, it seems, if you stop and think about the position a little: they must deal with those bazooka shots that are lined past them or at them, and must also cope with the sneaky, skulking bunt down the line, baseball’s shiv in the ribs. When they fail, as they often must, they look terrible—flat on their bel
lies in the dirt behind the bag, or foolishly grabbing at the bunted ball in the grass…and missing it altogether.
“I play a deeper third than most,” Bell said to me, “and that kind of takes the do-or-die away from the play on that hard-hit ball down the line. You can cover more ground if you’re back a little deeper and can still make the throw. Third basemen need a rock-hard body—I hope we’re getting away from the rock-hard hands a little. No, you really need some kind of hands to play the position now. The infields aren’t as good as they used to be, and with the artificial turf now…” He winced and shook his head. “Defense is the most important part of the game. If you don’t believe that when you start out, you learn it pretty soon playing third. You let a ball go through, and it’s probably the ballgame. I’d say that ninety-five percent of the pitchers have serious trouble in a game if there’s been an error at third and a ball’s gone through that shouldn’t have. Most of ’em sort of blow up after that. So you’re out there not only protecting yourself and your team but knowing that the pitcher is relying on you to do well. Dimensional ballplayers”—he meant the ones who can play all aspects of the game—“are easy to find, because there aren’t all that many of them.”
I asked how he tried to defend against the obligatory-bunt situation—the strategic late-inning tangle that begins with base runners on first and second, no outs, and an unthreatening, bottom-of-the-order batter up at the plate.
“On that play—well, first, it depends on who the runner is coming down to third, and who the pitcher is,” he said. “Then, if the ball’s bunted down toward me I try to draw an imaginary line up the infield between the pitcher’s mound and the third-base line, and anything that’s hit to the right of it should be mine. Either way, I’ve got to call it—yell to the pitcher which one of us is going to make the play, or try to. But that’s a tough, tough chance. You have to make the decision, and if you don’t make it right you may not get the runner you want—you may not get anybody. I don’t mind the swinging bunt”—the sudden surprise tap, for a base hit—“so much, because it’s just a yes-or-no thing: you make the play or you don’t. There’s no think in it.”
Rigney had said that there was more of an effort being made these days to defend against that late-inning must-bunt situation than there had been in his time, and he cited the Chinese-fire-drill set plays that send the first and third basemen charging in on the squared-around bunter, with the second baseman dashing to cover first and the shortstop whirling over to race the front base runner down to third base.
Clete Boyer agreed. “Baseball is a lot of little things,” he said. “You keep learning them and trying them out. There’s always something new.”
Clete is forty-eight now and looks a little heavier than he was when he was playing third base for the Yankees and the Braves, back in the sixties—he put in sixteen years at the hot corner, in all—but it’s hard to think of him in anything but a baseball uniform. He and his brothers, Ken and Cloyd, make up one of baseball’s first families. (Ken, who died a couple of years ago, also played third base, of course, mostly for the Cardinals, and later managed the Cards, too; Cloyd, a pitcher, is now a coach with the Syracuse Chiefs.) Clete talks baseball almost stolidly, with a little Ozark legato in his husky voice—the family comes from western Missouri—but his face lights up wonderfully once he gets into it a little.
“There are those bunt situations you plan about, and all,” he said to me one morning in Phoenix, “but I still think the hardest play at third is when you’ve got a man on second who can steal a base and a left-handed batter up at the plate who can bunt. You’ve got to play up front on the grass and you know what they’re thinkin’. My great example for that kind of trouble is Aparicio and Nellie Fox”—Luis Aparicio, the Hall of Fame shortstop with the White Sox and the Orioles in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and his stellar Chicago second-base teammate, Nelson Fox. “They could work that just perfect. If there’s none out or one out, I’ve got to guess on each pitch if Luis is going to steal or if Nellie’s up there to bunt. If I think Luis is stealing and he breaks, I got to get back and cover third, and then if Fox bunts the ball it’s a base hit. If I break in two steps instead of one toward the plate, I can’t get back—it’s all over. Fans look at you playing back on the grass and grabbing that big line drive, but that play’s routine, really. The other part is where the game is played.”
We went back to the must-bunt a bit, and after a while I suddenly realized that Clete had changed sides in the midst of the conversation. He was like a chess Grand Master expounding upon the Nimzowitsch Defense who had shifted over to the white pieces. “You can’t always protect against that bunt in the same way, you know,” he said. “You can’t always charge, or stuff like that, because I can kill you once I see that. I think you might have your third baseman charge that bunt two or three times in a season, but not more, and that would depend on who you had running at second base. We”—he meant the Oakland A’s—“beat Cleveland three times in the last two years because they always charged their third baseman and first baseman. When that happens, I tell the batter either to take the pitch or else hit away. Forget the bunt, and if you swing don’t give me a little half-assed effort up there. Don’t fall into their trap. Mike Heath hit a ball that went three inches past Toby Harrah’s head one day, and we win the game. Last year, Tony Phillips hit a little plinker up the middle for us, but their second baseman was goin’ over to first to cover, and the shortstop is way down here by third, and nobody can get near the ball. We got five runs in the inning.”
The school term is over, but I think we should call back our distinguished infield faculty for a few more pointers. I did not talk to these players and coaches in a group, of course, but the same subjects kept coming up. There was a great deal of talk about infield surfaces, for instance—grass versus artificial turf. (Six parks in the National League now have the chemical carpet, while six have grass; in the American League, there are four synthetic-turf diamonds and ten natural.) “If you got a turf field, you have to have middle infielders who can move—people who can cover a degree of ground very quickly,” Frank White said. “I’ve played on turf all my career. It’s a cleaner game—no bad hops, no dust blowin’ in your face, or stuff like that. Turf shows all your natural ability—your quickness, your leg strength, your range. Most of all, it tests your durability, because it does wear you down. You also find out that when you’re planting your foot to make the throw over to first you almost have to take an extra little jab-step on turf. It grabs your leg so quick you’ll lose your balance without that, and that’s hard on your legs, too. My biggest complaint about turf is the pounding you take.”
Jerry Remy likes the better bounce on the carpet, too, but almost nothing else. Ground balls hit right at him are less of a strain on turf, he said (everyone said this), but the ball seems to pick up speed after the bounce. “I hold my glove a little looser playing on turf, because the ball can spin right out,” he said. “I play back, of course—sometimes I’m so deep I wonder if I can ever get the ball over to first in time. But even then somebody will hit a little bouncer up the middle that goes right by you, and you think, My God, how did that go through? I like to hit on artificial grass, but I don’t like to field on it.”
Bill Rigney told me that, as a group, the athletes playing the middle infield now were undoubtedly better than the ones who had played in his time, and that this was due in great part to the demands of artificial turf. “A few years back, a lot of clubs were just making do at short and second, but that’s impossible nowadays,” he said. “If you think about it, you begin to notice that the teams who get to play in the Rose Bowl every year”—this is Rigneyese for playing in the World Series—“are the ones who can put an Ozzie Smith or a Cal Ripken out there. Yount and Frank White and Trammell and Sandberg and that little Whitaker—there’s a whole gang of them. I admire them—even though Mr. Ozzie has made so many kids coming up try to play one-handed, the way he does. But, you know, there’
s been a price. That pretty play by a shortstop or a second baseman on a ball hit over second is just about gone. That was one of the nicest things in the game—you enjoyed it—but now almost anything that’s through the box is gone. It’s a base hit.”
Steve Garvey, whom I saw for a few minutes before a Padres-Giants game in Arizona, told me that it was the shifting back and forth from one surface to another that took it out of your legs in time. “I’m fortunate that I’ve always played on grass at home, but you go out on the road and onto AstroTurf, and your legs suddenly get that pounding,” he said. “Then you come back to grass again and your legs stretch out more, and on the second day you’ll have a lot of soreness, no matter how good condition you’re in. It’s like running on pavement and then on the beach.” Wet AstroTurf is more slippery than grass, he added—or, rather, is slippery in a special way. Relays from the outfield that strike wet tuff become hockey pucks that can shoot right past the cutoff man.
White said that it seemed to take him three or four days of playing on a different surface, either grass or fake grass, before he was quite comfortable again. “What I hate,” he said, “is being at home for a couple of weeks and then arriving at a grass-field park on the road, and there’s been rain there, or else there’s a ceremony before the game or something, so you don’t get any infield practice. I just wonder what I’m going to be able to do out there. It shakes you up.”
Infields have a barbered look, and infielders compare notes about the “cut” of the various parks—the dimensions of the circular pattern of infield dirt, that is. Municipal Stadium, in Cleveland, recently enlarged its cut; before that, Remy said, it was ridiculously small—almost like a Little League field. “Nobody wants to be back on the grass, so that cut really limited your play,” he said. “Anaheim has a big cut, which gives you much better range. I like that, but it’s kind of strange there, because everybody looks farther apart. It’s like you’re playing a different game.”
