The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  By the time July came around, everyone was talking about the Cardinals—about their wonderful combination of fine pitching and good hitting (they have been leading the league both ways); about the rookie flier, Vince Coleman, who plays left field and has been stealing bases at such an amazing clip; about Tommy Herr and about the big cleanup hitter, Jack Clark, who came over from the Giants in a trade during the winter; and—oh, yes—about Willie McGee, in center, who bats second and has thus done a few things that help account for Coleman’s success on the bases, just behind. This is the way ball teams should work, it suddenly seems.

  I kept missing the Cardinals—their baseball schedule always had them going off in the opposite direction from mine. But then I saw my chance and jumped on a plane and went up to see them play the Expos in Montreal in an afternoon game—went up and came home again the same day, just for the game—and caught up on my studies. Vince Coleman, who is muscled like a cheetah, hit a single and stole a base; he is less flashy than Rickey Henderson on the bases, but the man can scamper. Tommy Herr hit a single and got a base three times; Ozzie Smith made a couple of lazily beautiful plays at short, easy as pie; and Willie McGee had a single and a double and a home run and a stolen base—the same silent, scrawny-necked, semi-apologetic Willie McGee who so pleased and surprised us all back in the World Series of 1982, just before we forgot him again. (The last time I looked—as this was written—McGee had passed his teammate Tommy Herr, and was leading the National League in batting, at .339.) The day in Montreal went as promised, I mean, and I even found time to congratulate Whitey Herzog, an old favorite of mine, for the kind of team he had this time, and for the way he had put it together—even trading away an excellent, established left fielder, Lonnie Smith, the moment he was sure about Coleman. “This team is all right, for my park,” Herzog admitted—his park, Busch Stadium, has the artificial carpet—“but if I was playing at Wrigley Field or Fenway I wouldn’t want to go this way. Geography makes all the difference in baseball these days.”

  It was a holiday in Montreal (Dominion Day—or Canada Day, as they now call it), and there was a nice medium-small crowd (everyone else was at the shore, I decided) cheering vociferously down below me in the deep, echoey circular strip mine of Olympic Stadium. A great blazing-white horseshoe of sunlight slid slowly across the billiard-table-green mat below, and I again recalled a remark once made by the long-gone, unforgotten Dick Allen: “If a horse can’t eat it, I don’t want to play on it.”

  There was the game, too, and in time—very quickly, in fact—that took over, and though I was glad to have Herr and Coleman and McGee and others in plain view at last (I almost felt like a scout, because of my trip), I also began to pay attention to the Montreal pitcher, a fledgling righty (he had just turned twenty-one) named Floyd Youmans, who was making his major-league debut. He, too, was there just for the day, having been called up from the club’s Class AA Jacksonville team to make an emergency appearance on the mound when the Expos had found themselves with an inordinate number of pitchers invalided to their liste des blesses, but he had been told before the game that his next stop would be back down at the Indianapolis AAA farm, no matter how well he did here today. Perhaps freed by this news, he resolutely worked his way once and then twice through the tough Cardinal batting order, giving up an occasional base on balls or a longish fly-ball out, and here and there a base hit, but also fanning a Cardinal or two, including Jack Clark, whenever he most needed the out. He had the Cardinals shut out after six innings, by which time the Expos were ahead by 2–0. Then Coleman touched him up in the seventh with a single through the middle—his first time on first base. Vince took an enormous lead, paused, and then flew away on the hit-and-run—an awesome jump, as promised—and Willie McGee socked a high, sailing home run into the Montreal bullpen to tie it. Youmans departed, and the disappointed Expos fans saw him off with a grateful, stand-up round of applause and then sat down quietly and tried to regather hope. I was happy when their team hung in and won the game at last, 3–2, on a single off the third baseman’s glove by the grand old Montreal favorite Andre Dawson, in the bottom of the tenth. It was only the Expos’ fourth hit of the game—four hits amassed against six Cardinal pitchers: I’d never heard of such a thing. Whitey’s bullpen is a Sargasso for National League hitters this summer—no end to it and not much fun.

  On my way home, I kept thinking about the Cards and their new look, and I recalled how Jim Frey, whose Cubs had lately dropped three games to the Cardinals at home, kept returning to the Redbirds in conversation one day. “This Coleman reminds you of a lot of fast young guys in their first year up,” he said. “He plays like Tim Raines did, or like Willie Wilson did in his first two years. You look around and he’s up at bat and the other team has got the third baseman playing in, the second baseman is in by two full strides, and the first baseman’s up on the grass. You got no choice. The way the man’s going, he’s going to steal a hundred and twenty bases in his very first year up. When the season started, everybody was sayin’ they got seven leadoff men and Jack Clark, but you can throw that out the window now, because of Coleman and the way they’re hitting. The whole club is always going from first to third. The one who’s overlooked is McGee. He can run as good as anybody. He can bunt the ball, he can top the ball and get on base, he can hit the ball for distance, and he can run and catch the ball in the outfield. He’s like No. 2 in everything on that club. You look over at Coleman, with McGee at bat, and he’s got that big lead, and you can’t make him back off an inch. He always gets that amazing jump. In a couple of years, they’ll be calling him a great left fielder—you wait and see.”

  Only self-assured veteran managers talk about rival teams and players in this fashion, and when you listen to a Jim Frey or a Whitey Herzog in midseason, you begin to sense that they are perpetually involved in two levels of baseball—the game at hand or just ahead, which they are trying to win, and the deeper difficulties and returns and surprises of the other game; baseball as a discourse or discipline, baseball as a way of thinking. Earl Weaver talks this side of baseball more gracefully than anyone I know; in his postgame chats he compliments the writers by including them in his inner excursions and musings, and by the time he’s done you’re convinced, at least for a glimmering instant or two, that you’ve seen how this game works. The little man was in splendid form up at Yankee Stadium during the Orioles-Yankees game I have mentioned, in spite of his team’s failings. He had only just come back from his two-year self-retirement—brought back, it has been hinted, by a half-million-dollar salary and the offer of another chance to work in the Baltimore organization, where he has passed the better part of his working life. (He said he had turned down several previous bids from other clubs.) His postgame seminars were a treat, as usual. Any day now, I expect to walk into Weaver’s office after a game and find waiting ushers, with programs and flashlights. One night there at the Stadium, he was simultaneously stripping a chicken leg and himself as he fielded our questions, usually cutting them off before they were quite finished—he is quick—and then fitting his answers into the main discourse of the evening. Weaver is the only mid-size, middle-aged executive I know who can sit behind a desk with no clothes on, as naked as a trout, and never lose the thread of his thinking.

  Here he reconsidered a brilliant peg by Dave Winfield that had cut down an Orioles base runner, Ripken, at the plate—the big play of the game, it turned out—and wondered along with his questioner, whether it had been right to send him home. “Yes, it was an outstanding throw,” he said, “but still…” He paused, considering, and then put the matter to rest: “What the hell—if he scores, it’s a great play.” In the eighth inning of the game, with his club well behind, Weaver had unexpectedly employed an Oriole outfielder, John Shelby, at second base, where he filled in for the weak-hitting Dauer, who had departed for a pinch-hitter. (This was a few days before the Orioles signed Alan Wiggins, the talented former Padre second baseman, who had been permitted to leave that club
after revealing his continuing difficulties with cocaine addiction.) Shelby had looked adequate on one chance out there, and more than a bit awkward on another, which went by him, or off him, for a base hit. “On the second ball, he tried to get in front of it, though it’s way off to his right.” Weaver said. “That’s what you’re taught to do in high school, and maybe he’s never had that play since he was in high school. I know about this because I used to manage in Class C ball and D ball, where you have kids who come to you right out of high school. But up here if that ball’s hit over to your right”—he was suddenly on his feet, wearing only his shower clogs—“you just get over this far and backhand the ball, like this. You don’t try to make a great play, or anything, but if you time it right you look real good. If you don’t time it right you look silly. Oh, I love this stuff….”He resumed his seat, for the tactics. “If we’re losing, Shelby at second gives us an extra move, and I’ll go with it. That way, I got his bat in there, and if we tie or go ahead then Lennie Sakata goes out to hold things down. But if I bat for Dauer the old way, then Lennie goes in right away. This is an extra move for me. If you’re losing, go for offense. Look for that move.” His eyes were shining.

  *Fisk set the new record with thirty-seven homers, four of which came while he was in the lineup as a designated hitter—a record, that is, but just barely.

  Quis

  — Late Summer 1985

  TROUBLE IN THE NINTH. The visiting team has just scored, to draw within a run of the home side, and there are base runners at first and third, with one out and the heavy part of the batting order just coming up. Even before the runner crossed the plate, the manager was on his way to the mound, and now he turns toward his bullpen and touched his right arm. The murmurous noises of anxiety in the park give way to applause and the fans’ relishing cries of an outcome now almost foreseen as the bullpen car arrives and yields up its famous passenger, the great reliever. He is whiskered and hulking, and his impatient right-handed warmup pitches—seven seeds and a final down-busting curveball—bring gasps and little bursts of laughter in the stands. The No. 3 batter stands in and takes an instantaneous called strike—a fastball under his fists. He lays off the next pitch—a breaking ball, away—then swings hard at the next fastball and ticks it foul to the screen. Another fastball arrives, and he swings late and raised a feeble little pop foul, which is devoured by the first baseman. Two out now. The cleanup hitter, a large left-handed slugger, digs in and takes a ball, takes a strike. He cuts violently at the next delivery, a letter-high fastball, and misses, swinging cleanly through the pitch and then half-stumbling in the box to keep his balance. The first-base and third-base coaches clap their hands reassuringly—hang in there, big guy—but thirty thousand fans are on their feet now, screaming for the K. A slider here would break this batter in half, but the man on the mound has no such idea. Glowering, he leans in for the sign, stretches and stares, and delivers the inexorable heater—up and out of the strike zone, actually, but the bat has flashed and come around just the same, and the game is over. Ovations and euphoria. Handshakes and high fives in the infield, hugs in the stands. Aw right, we did it again!

  Another ninth, in another city. The Kansas City Royals are leading the visiting Yankees, 5–2, and Royals manager Dick Howser has brought in his prime short reliever, Dan Quisenberry, to finish up. Quisenberry is a slim, angular right-hander, with sharp shoulders and a peaceable, almost apologetic mien. He has pinkish-red hair, a brushy ochre mustache, and round pale-blue eyes. Nothing about his looks is as surprising as his pitching delivery, however. He is a true submariner—a man “from down under,” in baseball parlance—and every pitch of his is performed with a lurching downward thrust of his arm and body, which he must follow with a little bobbing hop off toward third base in order to recover his balance. At perigee, ball and hand descend to within five or six inches of the mound dirt, but then they rise abruptly; the hand—its fingers now spread apart-finished up by his left shoulder, while the ball, plateward-bound at a sensible, safe-driving-award clip, reverses its earlier pattern, rising for about three-quarters of its brief trip and then drooping downward and (much of the time) sidewise as it passes the batter at knee level or below. One way or another, the pitch almost always finds part of the strike zone, but most people in the stands—even the home-town regulars in Royals Stadium—are so caught up in the pitcher’s eccentricities that they don’t always notice this. The oversight is forgivable, since Quisenberry is not a strikeout pitcher. But he doesn’t walk batters, either; in his six hundred and thirty-five major-league innings (going into this season), he had surrendered a total of eighty-four bases on balls—one for each seven and a half innings’ work, which for him comes out at about one walk every fourth game—and had plunked only two batters with pitched balls. Yet Quisenberry when pitching invites more similes than stats. His ball in flight suggests the kiddie-ride concession at a county fairgrounds—all swoops and swerves but nothing there to make a mother nervous; if you’re standing close to it, your first response is a smile. At other times, the trajectory of the pitch looks like an expert trout fisherman’s sidearm cast that is meant to slip the fly just under an overhanging clump of alders. The man himself—Quis in mid-delivery—brings visions of a Sunday-picnic hurler who has somehow stepped on his own shoelace while coming out of his windup, or perhaps an eager news photographer who has suddenly dropped to one knee to snap a celebrity debarking from a limousine.

  In the Yankee game, Quisenberry dismisses his first batter, the towering Dave Winfield, on a harmless bouncer to short. The next hitter, Dan Pasqua, who bats left-handed, numbs a Quisenberry sinker down toward third base, where the spinning ball worms its way out of George Brett’s glove for an infield single. Ron Hassey, another lefty swinger, takes a ball and then jumps on a high delivery—an up pitch: a mistake—and smashes the ball to deep center field, where Willie Wilson pulls it in with his back almost against the fence. Willie Randolph steps up to bat, swings and misses on a sinker, takes two balls, and then whacks a sharp single to center, sending Pasqua scooting around to third. The tying run, in the person of Mike Pagliarulo, comes up to the plate, to the accompaniment of some nervous stirrings in the Kansas City stands. Batting left-handed, he fouls off the first pitch, swings at a sinkerball that slips away from him and off the outer edge of the plate, takes a ball, and then stands immobile while another sinker, again backing at the last instant, catches the inside corner, low, for a called third strike. End of game. The crowd, although happy about the win, does not exactly split the sky in honor of this pitching performance, but in most ways it has been a typical outing for Dan Quisenberry: a couple of hits—one of them a half-hit bouncer to the wrong side of the infield—two solid pokes, one of which went for an out; no walks; no runs (one run would have been almost more like it); and another game safely put away. Quisenberry experienced some uncharacteristic pitching difficulties in the first half of this season—the game just set forth was played on July 23rd—but the official save that went into the record books that evening was his twentieth of the year, which put him ahead of all other American League relief pitchers in that department. It was his third save in four days, in a little string that eventually added up to six saves in six consecutive appearances. Last year, Quisenberry had forty-four saves in all, the most in his league, and figured in sixty percent of the Royals’ winning games; the year before that, he set an all-time record with forty-five saves, although a National League pitcher, Bruce Sutter—then with the Cardinals, now with the Braves—tied that figure in 1984.

  Baseball’s save rule (to get this out of the way, once and for all) has grown in significance in recent seasons, along with the rise of the short-relief specialist—that is, the man who comes in late in the game, sometimes only to nail down the last out or two (or not nail them down, as the case may be)—yet there are very few fans who can say for a certainty what constitutes an official save. The ruling states that the pitcher who is granted an official save when the game is
over—it appears as an “(S)” next to his name in the box score—must be the finishing pitcher but not the official winning pitcher. He must furthermore pass one of three additional qualifications:

  (a)He enters the game with a lead of no more than three runs and pitches at least one inning, or

  (b)he enters the game, regardless of the count on an incumbent batter, with the potential tying run on base or at bat or on deck, or

  (c)he pitches effectively for at least three innings.

  That “effectively” is a judgment call, made by the official scorer, and there is sometimes hot disagreement about it up in the press box. There is also general disagreement about the value of saves as the ultimate yardstick of a relief man’s work. Certain pitchers—Quisenberry is among them—almost never come into a game when their club is trailing, and therefore tend to accumulate more saves by the end of the year than some of their rivals. Some variously weighted combination of saves, earned-run average, and games won probably constitutes the fairest means of measurement, but here, as in other parlous areas of the pastime, the final word must be left to the writers and the fans, and to the thousand late-night logomachies.

  Since Quisenberry adopted his submarine style, at the beginning of the 1980 season, his second in the majors, he has notched a hundred and seventy-five saves—twenty more than Sutter’s total for those five years and forty-five more saves than those accumulated by Goose Gossage, the ex-Yankee and present Padre star, who may be recognized as the model for our classic fireballing bullpen ace in the imaginary inning above. The elegant and obdurate Rollie Fingers, who still performs for the Milwaukee Brewers at the age of thirty-nine, after experiencing some recent serious arm and back difficulties (he sat out the entire season of 1983), he compiled three hundred and twenty-four lifetime saves, the most among all relievers, past or present, but his best five seasons, even when counted non-consecutively, do not bring him within twenty saves of Quisenberry’s work in the nineteen-eighties. No one else comes close. By a different measurement—saves plus wins—Quisenberry, with a total of two hundred and eight in this decade, is also well ahead of the pack. Quisenberry himself, a habitually modest man, would argue with some of these figures—with their significance, above all—but we must embarrass him by suggesting that he may just be on his way to being the most successful practitioner of his odd calling that the game has ever seen.