The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Darling, who went the full nine, repeatedly ran up high counts (or “deep” counts, in the current cant) on the batters, but I noticed that he was often able to deliver his breaking pitches for strikes in such straits, and that he threw first-pitch strikes when defending a lead in the late innings—certifying marks of the arrived, professional moundsman. Now in his second full season as a starter, Darling has put aside some of the reflective self-doubt that he sometimes displayed on the mound when things weren’t quite going his way (the rap against him, which I used to hear even in his own clubhouse, was always that he might be “too smart” to be an effective big-league pitcher), and his post-game interviews are less winsome as well. “In the past, I’ve let walks bother me, but I’m a better pitcher now,” he said. “It’s a natural evolution—I’d worry about myself if I wasn’t.”

  In the next game, Ed Lynch, a bean-pole right-hander, gave up a run to the Cubs, in the very first stanza and then shut them down with six lonely singles for the rest of the evening, as the Mets took it by 5–1. It was Gooden-time the next night—a 1–0, nine-strikeout gem, which ran his record to 10–3—and no lessons to be learned, for once, except the unanswerable logic of overpowering stuff. I missed the game, being caught up in the social ramble (in Satchel Paige’s phrase), but found time now and then to tiptoe away to a television set in the next room and there await the next Gooden high heater or glimpse another leaning, distraught batter punched out with the unfair curveball. In some ways, I have decided, it’s almost better to catch Gooden on the tube, where the slow-motion replay can show us the real dimensions of these chronic mismatches. Something was clearly wrong with the Cubbies (the Gooden whitewashing was their eighth loss in a row), and I even felt a few unfamiliar pangs of compassion the next afternoon as I sat in the sunshine, in company with my teen-age son, and we joined thirty-seven thousand Mets-roarers in their noncompassionate bayings (“Sweep! Sweeeep!”) as the good guys won again, 5–3, and the series concluded with the Mets suddenly a bare half game behind the Expos at the upper end of the standings. The Mets pitcher this time was Sid Fernandez, a thick-bodied left-hander who hides the ball behind his shoulder and then delivers it with an awkward-looking sudden lurch and arm-snap. He reminds you of somebody jumping out of a closet. The mannerism is effective but tiring, and I was in perfect agreement with Davey Johnson when he brought on Roger McDowell in relief after six innings, by which time Fernandez had already set down ten batters on strikes. The crowd was almost as much of a story as the game—the attendance total of 172,292, achieved without benefit of a promotion or weekend date, was the largest four-game turnout in club history—and we in the stands comported ourselves with exuberant and proprietary disbelief. With the Mets behind by 1–0 in the third inning, George Foster came up to bat with two out and the bases loaded, and was greeted with considerable un-optimism by the experienced fans in my sector of the mezzanine. “You’re a thief, George!” a man just off to my left announced. “You’re stealing the money! Sit down, George—you’re gonna strike out again!” I disapprove of financial references in these public debates (Foster is paid about two million dollars per year by the Mets), but I have so often seen Foster wave harmlessly at strike three or rap a mighty four-bounce grounder to the shortstop under these circumstances that I recognized these sounds as the cries of a true Metsevik. This time, Foster took a strike and hit a low, hard line drive that ate its way hurriedly through the mild summer air and disappeared behind the right-center-field fence, for a grand slam. The ensuing noise and emotion were predictable, but loudest, I think, there in the forward rows of Section 501, where we had all turned to scream happily at Foster’s recent tormentor—who was on his feet like the rest of us, with an enormous, unrepentant grin on his face. He’d got what he wanted.

  I haven’t seen Pete Rose in a game yet this year, but I will, I will. As most residents of our nebula must know by now, Pete is very near to Ty Cobb’s once unapproachable lifetime mark of 4,191 base hits. At this writing, he is thirty hits short of that famous goal and closing fast, but, strangely enough, the daily “Rose Watch” box, which has been a sports-page sniffer for more than a year now, has almost obscured the sort of season Pete has been having. Playing first base for the Cincinnati Reds and benching himself every fourth or fifth game, usually when there is a left-handed pitcher going for the other side (he is the Reds manager, too, of course), he has kept his average close to .280 for most of the year; in spite of a recent and perhaps predictable slump, he is tied for third in the National League in on-base percentage. He is officially forty-four (but possibly forty-six) years old, and plans to go right on playing and batting once the Cobb plateau is reached—perhaps for another two years, perhaps more. His interviews are all line drives; they take your breath away. Explaining to one reporter (Mike Sheridan, of Baseball Bulletin) why the new record would not tempt him to ease up, he said, “Say you get to interview the one person you’ve always wanted to interview. Does that mean you stop writing?” He concluded a talk with Peter Gammons in the Boston Globe (one of the most entertaining lectures on hitting I’ve come across) this way: “Sure [Cobb’s record] is great. It won’t make me the greatest hitter who ever lived: it will make me the man who had the most hits. But the statistic I’m most proud of is that I’ve played in more winning games than any man on earth.”

  There will be an enormous dissection of the Cobb-Rose numbers when Pete Day arrives—perhaps early in September—but the only way I can make such figures come alive in my imagination is by comparing them with the lifetime statistic put together by some other distinguished and durable batsmen. Thinking about this the other day, I went to the record books and looked up the first two famous hitters who came to mind—Charlie Gehringer and Rod Carew. Gehringer, a Hall of Famer, played second base for the Tigers from 1924 to 1942, for sixteen of those nineteen years as a full-season regular, and batted a lifetime .320. He had seven two-hundred-hit seasons, and finished up with 2,839 hits, which still leaves him 1,352 short of the Cobb total. If we employ in the equation his average number of at-bats per year over those sixteen best seasons and assume that he continued to hit at that same robust .320 clip, we find that he would have had to continue to play for just a bit less than eight additional years in order to catch up. Rod Carew, who will be forty this year, is in his nineteenth season and holds a lifetime .330 batting mark—the best of our time. If we overlook his 1985 work to date (he is batting a sub-par .262 for the Angels) and permit him to begin the year over again, he would do so with 1,262 fewer hits than Cobb, which means that he would have to sustain that same splendid .330 average into September of 1992 in order to draw even. There is just no comparison—except with Pete.

  Cobb compiled his total over a span of twenty-four years, from 1905 to 1928 (he played for the Athletics in his final two seasons, and for the Tigers, of course, before that), but in fewer games; for one thing, seasons were a bit shorter then. For another, Cobb’s lifetime batting average of .367 stands at the top of all the lists—he was the best batter the game has ever seen—while Rose came into this season, his twenty-third, with a lifetime .305. He has had to work a lot harder to get where he is today, then—he has twenty-two hundred more at-bats so far than Cobb—but hard work has been what he is all about. One can only begin to guess how many parents and music teachers and camp counselors must be using his name these days, in repellent, exhortatory fashion, to languid feeders, reluctant scales-players, or wimpy canoeists: “C’mon! Let’s see some Pete Rose, there, fella!” He is in the language now.

  Players and managers think about Rose just as much as the fans and the writers do. One day in June, Cub manager Jim Frey told a few of us about the awe with which Pete’s teammates look upon his energy and furious dedication. Frey, who was once a coach with the Orioles, recalled a story that Terry Crowley told about Rose when Crowley (an outfielder, and prime left-handed pinch-hitter and designated hitter) returned to Baltimore in the mid-seventies, after a brief stint with the Reds, where Rose wa
s already an established star. The Reds, in Crowley’s account, were flying home to Cincinnati one night after an extended and exhausting road trip; it was after one o’clock in the morning, and the players who weren’t asleep in their seats were dozily thinking about their coming day off—the first break in the Cincinnati schedule in weeks. Just before the plane landed, Rose came up the aisle and woke up Terry Crowley and his seatmate, Merve Rettenmund (likewise a good-hitting ex-Oriole outfielder, albeit a righty.) “Listen,” Rose said urgently. “How would you each like to earn an extra hundred bucks? I need a couple of guys to throw about a half hour each of batting practice to me tomorrow morning. Can you be at the park by ten o’clock?”

  Frey pointed out that Rose, who is a switch hitter, wanted to bat against both a left- and a right-hander. “Probably it was more than half an hour for them, the way Petey goes,” he said, shaking his head. “Crowley couldn’t get over it. The man is slightly amazing.”

  I had planned to take in Cubs-Mets Part II, scheduled to open at Wrigley Field the following week, but a sudden, Bambi-sweet inner wish not to observe the further sufferings of the Cubs prompted me to cancel—a mistake, of course. The Cubs, after experiencing another painful house call from Doctor K in the opener (Gooden’s eleventh win of the year, and the Cubs’ thirteenth straight loss), turned on their oppressors and won the two remaining games in more characteristic fashion, rapping five home runs along the way. I went instead to Toronto, where the first-place Blue Jays and the visiting third-place Red Sox staged a running three-day burleycue that alternately bemused, dismayed, piqued, bored, drenched, inflamed, entertained, and (now and then, a little) rewarded the frazzled onlookers. The night before my arrival, the Bosox had blown a four-run lead in the process of losing to the Jays by 6–5, to drop four and a half games back (the Tigers were in second), and after observing but a few innings’ worth of my old favorites’ current style of play I knew for a certainty that this would be another dry summer in New England. The Bosox starter, the left-hander Bruce Hurst, and his mates gave us a thoughtfully illustrated progressive demonstration of the many ways in which a ballgame may be lost; here a misplayed outfield fly, there a hit batsman, now a gift stolen base for the opposing team, now (heigh-ho!) another, now a baserunning botchup for us, then a delightfully amateurish sandlot peg from the outfield, and—oh, yes—here’s a wild pitch! and soon thereafter (note the difference, please) a passed ball, and so on, ad infinitum, or, rather ad 7–2 Toronto, which seemed very much the same. During the evening, I came to know and perfectly understand some previously challenging and difficult-looking baseball data; how Mr. Hurst could have won but four of his last twenty-six outings (a bare month later, however, he had amazingly reversed his form and fortunes, running off five consecutive victories as a Bosox starter); how Hurst’s successor on the mound, Mr. Mark Clear, could have recently permitted fifty-three consecutive stolen bases by enemy base runners (including two by the now retired tank car Greg Luzinski); and who will lead the league once Bill James, the Pythagoras of baseball theoreticians, devises a best-hitter/worst-base-runner formula: Bill Buckner, by a mile. All this, of course, is most unfair to the home-team Blue Jays, who took these many gifts with modest good grace and sometimes show us the brighter aspect of the pastime as well. Jimmy Key—a brisk, poised young left-hander—threw a tidy five-hitter; first baseman Willie Upshaw hit a homer; and centre (in the local style-book) fielder Lloyd Moseby whacked three singles and stole second and third on successive pitches (cf. Clear, supra).

  The Blue Jays, runners-up to the World Champion Tigers in their division last year, have the second-best won-lost record in all baseball over the past two and a half seasons (behind the Tigers and a hair better than the Yankees), but have somehow remained invisible in the process. “Nobody knows us,” the veteran third baseman Garth Iorg told me cheerfully. “We go on the road, and you hear the fans saying ‘Who’s that shortstop?’ and ‘Who’s their first baseman?’ NBC passed up a chance to put us on their ‘Game of the Week’ the other day, against the Tigers, and the guys in the clubhouse were saying, ‘What’s the matter with those people? We’re the best two teams in the league!’ I told them maybe it was to our advantage—it takes the pressure off a little—but it does seem funny, doesn’t it?” Catcher Ernie Whitt said, “We were on one ‘Monday Night Baseball’ network thing this year, and I hear the ratings went down. It’s been that way around here since Day One. I figure people will wake up and discover us in the playoffs in October.”

  A Globe & Mail sportswriter characterized the Jays for me as “decent but unexciting,” and a Toronto friend of mine named Alison Gordon, who used to cover the Blue Jays for the Star, seemed to be lumping the players and the fans together when she said, “We’re not a very colorful lot.”

  Some firmer causes for this epidemic anonymity also suggest themselves. The Blue Jays came into being as an expansion team in 1977 and stayed wholly out of harm’s way for their first five years, hidden away in Canada and seventh place. Manager Bobby Cox came aboard in 1982, and the club climbed to fourth the next year and into contention thereafter, but the talented present roster was built up patiently and economically, without recourse to the kind of blockbuster trade or multimillion-dollar free-agent signing that wins sudden attention and expectation in the sports media. Whitt and Iorg (along with pitcher Jim Clancy) are surviving members of the club’s original expansion draft, and starting outfielders Jesse Barfield and Lloyd Moseby and pitchers Jimmy Key and Dave Stieb—the latter now perhaps the most formidable starter in the American League—were selected in the annual rookie drafts, while outfielder George Bell, pitcher Jim Acker, first baseman Willie Upshaw—locally the best-known, best-loved Blue Jay since the retirement of John Mayberry—were found at bargain rates in the little-used minorleague draft; Damaso Garcia, a fixture at second base since his arrival, in 1980, was picked up in a six-player trade with the Yankees; and the veteran hurler Doyle Alexander, who went 17–6 for the Jays last year, was signed after the Yankees gave up on him and handed him his outright release in 1983. The quick mind and cool eye most responsible for this un-Steinbrennerish merchantry belong to Pat Gillick, the club’s executive vice-president for baseball operations, who is much admired (and perhaps unpleasantly denigrated) in the inner circles of baseball for his discovery and signing of so many brilliant young Latin-American players, most of whom were first spotted as schoolboys by a legendary regional scouting director, Epy Guerrero. Three of the present Blue Jays—George Bell, infielder Manny Lee, and the ravishingly talented young shortstop Tony Fernandez—hail from Guerrero’s home town, San Pedro de Macon’s, in the Dominican Republic, as did Alfredo Griffin, Fernandez’ predecessor at short, who went over to the Oakland A’s last winter as part of a trade for a much-needed bullpen stopper, Bill Caudill. There is no draft system for young ballplayers who live outside the United States, and the Blue Jays’ diligent, old-fashioned scouting in the islands and elsewhere to the south makes them, to my way of thinking, the modern equivalent of Branch Rickey’s old Cardinals. It also further explains the semi-anonymity of the 1985 Blue Jays, if one believes, as I do, that all Latin-American stars, from Roberto Clemento to Joaquin Andujar, have been habitually overlooked or slighted in our baseball consideration. A Latino playing in Canada is doubly ignored, although in some sense he has become the most American player of all.

  Dave Stieb, Toronto’s king of the hill, was scheduled to start the next Red Sox game, a Saturday-afternoon affair, but manager Cox, having got word from the weatherman of the imminent arrival of heavy rainstorms, held back his ace at the last moment and sent out a young right-hander, Ron Musselman, to essay his very first major-league start. Cox, of course, did not want to waste an outing by Stieb—a hard-luck pitcher (and legendary moaner), whose record at the moment stood a bare 6–5, despite an earned-run average of 2.16—in a possible rainout, and he very nearly got away with his gamble. Musselman confined the scary Boston sluggers to a couple of runs during his stint; Tony Ferna
ndez delivered the catch-up and go-ahead runs for the home side with a two-run round-tripper, to make for a 3–2 Blue Jay lead in the bottom of the fourth; and the spattering rains held off just long enough to force the dawdling, languishing, heavenward-hoping Bostons to make their third out in the top of the fifth before the players were forced to take shelter—a legal victory, of course, if play were to stop there for the day. Then it rained—downward and side-blown sheets and skeins of water that streamed down the glass fronting of the press box, puddled and then ponded on the lumpy, too green AstroTurf playing field before us, and emptied the roofless grandstand around the diamond. Glum descendant clouds swept in, accompanied by a panoply of Lake Ontario ring-billed gulls (a celebrated and accursed local phenomenon), who took up late-comer places upon the long rows of backless aluminum benches in outer right field and then settled themselves thickly across the outfield swamplands as well, where they all stood facing to windward, ready for a fly ball, or perhaps for a visiting impressionist French film director (“Quai des Jays,” “Toronto Mon Amour”) to start shooting. Rain delays are hard on writers, who cannot just go home—as most of the intelligent Toronto fans were now deciding to do—and are enjoined from visiting the clubhouses or asking the umpire in charge (it was Joe Brinkman) why he won’t reconsult his bunions and call the damned thing once and for all. I had plenty of time (three hours and sixteen minutes, as it turned out) to work up my notes; to share in the tepid, on running press-box jokes (there had been a guest party of Ojibway Indians at the game, it was discovered, and we worked over the rain-dance variations at excruciating length); to catch up on local baseball history (Babe Ruth hit his very first home run as a professional into the waters of Lake Ontario in 1914, while playing for the visiting minor-league Providence Grays against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the long-defunct park at Hanlan’s Point); and to memorize the unlikely configurations of the Blue Jays’ Exhibition Stadium. The place is the home field of the Toronto Argonauts, of the Canadian Football League, and the baseball diamond has been tucked off into one corner of the rectangle, with an added-on, boomerang-shaped grandstand section adjacent to the diamond and a temporary curving outfield wall that cuts oddly across the long gridiron, forestalling rolling eight-hundred-foot home runs but imparting an unhappy, overnight-tent-show look to the place. General-admission seats are in the roofed football grandstand, which begins out by the left-field foul pole but then, since it adjoins the football sidelines, departs from the baseball premises at an ever-widening-and-disimproving angle. Fans do sit there, however, even in its farthest reaches—there were some there now, patiently waiting out the deluge under cover. I asked a resident writer how far it was from home plate to the top row of the outmost grandstand sector, and he said, “That’s Section 51. I don’t think anybody’s ever paced it off, but I tried using a little trigonometry once and I made it out to be around a thousand feet. The folks in the lower rows out there are even worse off, because they can’t see over the outfield fence, but you see them down there, too, sometimes. I think they bring radios.”