by Roger Angell
Pete is great, but Cobb was better, having achieved his famous total (in 1928, when he retired) in four hundred and forty-two fewer games and in 2,339 fewer at-bats; Pete is a lifetime .305 batter, but Cobb, at .367, was the best hitter the game has ever seen. I feel like an old crab in pointing out these obvious discrepancies, but they exist, and the obdurate fact of them makes you wonder about our apparent wish for guaranteed present greatness or historic certification, or whatever it is that has driven us to make so much of this particular milestone. Late in the summer, I began to wonder who it was Cobb had supplanted in the lifetime lists, and after spending a happy half hour with my nose in the Baseball Encyclopedia I decided that it must have been Honus Wagner (3,430), whom Cobb motored past in 1923, six years after the Dutchman’s retirement. But what happened on that September day in 1923? How had the local scribes and fans and historians celebrated the end of the “Wagner Watch,” I wondered.* Finding no mention of the moment in several histories of the pastime, I called up Seymour Siwoff, the grand sachem of the Elias Sports Bureau, a Fort Knox of stats, which keeps track of every jot and tittle in the books, not quite including Sunday foul tips in the Federal League.
“Nothing happened!” Siwoff said instantly when I put the question to him. “Just the other day, we tried to come up with some mention of the event. We looked and looked, but there was nothing there. The hype wasn’t in. This Rose thing was a sitting target all the way. There was much more of a challenge for Pete in 1978, when he was going after Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak, winding up in a tie with Willie Keeler at forty-four, which is still the best in the National League. Any single-season record has a finite ending, so it means something.”
Four other life landmarks were celebrated this summer: Nolan Ryan’s four-thousandth strikeout (he is alone at this level); Tom Seaver’s three hundredth winning game and Rod Carew’s three-thousandth hit (these two fell on the same afternoon, August 4th, a great day for newspaper layout men across the land); and then Phil Niekro’s three-hundredth win, on the very last day of the regular season. I was tickled about Seaver’s arrival in the Old Moundsmen’s Sodality (he had an excellent, 16–11 year with the White Sox), and when Niekro made the club, too (they were the seventeenth and eighteenth admittees), I suddenly remembered that he and Seaver had pitched against each other in the very first National League Championship game, way back on October 4, 1969—a terrible game, as I recall—when Tom and the Mets beat Phil and the Braves, 9–5. Nierkro’s No. 300 was a party, for it came in a game at Toronto that meant absolutely nothing (the Blue Jays had eliminated the Yanks the previous afternoon), so everyone there and everyone at home by his set could pull for Phil, who had come up short in four previous attempts. He is forty-six, and although he will enter the free-agent market this winter he must be very near the end of the line. Watching him out on the mound these past few summers, with his preoccupied air and his white locks, bent shoulders, protruding elbows, and oddly rumpless pants, I was sometimes weirdly put in mind of a colonial-planter hurler puttering about in his garden, his brain alight with Rousseau and Locke and the knuckler. In the Blue Jays game, Niekro eschewed his specialty pitch until there were two out in the ninth and his team was leading by 8–0; then, smiling at last, he fanned Jeff Burroughs, an old Braves teammate of his, with a sailing beauty.
What is certain about these plateau observances is that there will be fewer of them in the seasons just ahead. Don Sutton’s fifth victory next year will admit him to the three-hundred-wins circle, but then, since there are no other viable contenders in these categories at present, we can put away the speeches and the cornerstone trowels for a half decade or more, which is OK with me. After Pete Rose’s single bounced in short left field at Riverfront Stadium that day, a Redsperson painted a white circle on the field at the point where it struck, so that it might be AstroMarked for the ages. However, some lunkish football players scrubbed out the spot a day or two later, during a Cincinnati Bengals workout on the field, which means that the place-of-the-hit may be forever lost to the ages. Like the site of Custer’s Last Stand, it will have to live on only in our imagination, which was probably the best place for it all along.
I may be overlooking Preënshrinement—a phenomenon I first encountered in October, when a veteran baseball-writer friend announced to me that Dwight Gooden is the greatest pitcher who ever lived. The Doctor, who turned twenty-one just three weeks ago, had a great year—there is no argument about that. His twenty-four wins (he was 24–4 in all) led both leagues, and so did his two hundred and sixty-eight strikeouts and his earned-run average of 1.53. He pitched sixteen complete games, including eight shutouts, and ran off a stretch of forty-nine consecutive innings—from August 31st to October 2nd, when it mattered most to his team—in which he did not allow an earned run. He was the youngest pitcher ever to win twenty games in the majors, and the youngest to win the Cy Young Award, which he can put up on his mantel next to last year’s Rookie of the Year plaque. Gooden at work is pleasing as well as thrilling. I have come to expect that midgame inning or two when he turns up the meters and becomes even more dominating out there, closing down the other side at the moment when lesser pitchers, even the best of them, so often look vulnerable and anxious. Like other fans, I’m sure, I also appreciate the inner calm and the businesslike unmannered mien with which he gets his work done, game after game—an austerity of style that is so prettily replicated by the clean, ledgerlike columns of one’s scoreboard at the end of one of his outings. I look forward to these and further wonders from Dwight next summer and, barring injury or some unforeseen decline in his fortunes, for many summers to come, and the only way to diminish such a prospect, I believe, would be to turn him into a statue, as my friend has proposed. To watch him that way—to enter a mental checkmark beside each strikeout or shutout from now on, simply to confirm our grandiose evaluation of his ultimate place in the history of the sport—is to lose the pleasure and dangers of the day and our joy in his youth: exactly what we came to the game for in the first place.
It is tempting for us fans to assume that baseball is falling to pieces, like so many other parts of our lives, and that therefore we must prop it up with honorifics and superlatives. Perhaps we should just try to keep our eyes open. What is more pleasurable in the game, I wonder, than to watch Willie McGee, whose .353 batting average, quickness on the bases—he had eighteen triples and fifty-six stolen bases—and scintillating work in center field brought him the Most Valuable Player award in his league? I felt the same sort of satisfaction this summer in watching Don Mattingly up at bat and reflecting on what he has done in his own behalf in his first two full seasons in the majors. Once known as a good wrong-field hitter, with no power and no position (he was shuttled back and forth between the outfield and first base throughout his minor-league career), he settled into place last year as the day-to-day Yankee first baseman, and led his league in hits, doubles, and batting average (.343). This year, he batted .324, with thirty-five homers (fourth best in the league), and led all comers in doubles, extra-base hits, total bases, and runs batted in. He was recently voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player—an easy choice, to my way of thinking. His total of a hundred and forty-five runs batted in, by the way, has not been topped in the A.L. since 1949. Mattingly is not notably burly or overmuscled (he is five-eleven and weighs a hundred and eighty-five), but, watching him at the plate, you notice that he is a package of triangles—neck, arms, torso, thighs—that together mesh and turn on a pitch like a drill press; his upper body has the thick, down-slanting droop that we once saw in the hockey immortal Gordie Howe—what Howe’s teammates called “goat shoulders.” Up at bat (he is a lefty swinger), Mattingly positions his front foot with balletlike delicacy, its in-turned toe just touching the dirt, and then tilts his upper body back, with his full weight on the back leg and his hands and bat held close to his body. He hits left-handers exceptionally well, often going with the away pitch and cuing the ball off to left,
but he also has enough confidence and power to pull the outside fastball to right field on occasion, to the consternation of the man on the mound. He simply kills anything inside, turning beautifully on the pitch and releasing the bat in an upturned, circular arc—the Stadium Swing, which he has retinkered and polished ceaselessly these past two seasons or more, and which so often cracks or bonks or wafts the ball into the middle-upper deck. In the meaningless last Yankee game of the year—Phil Niekro’s outing against the Blue Jays—Mattingly rapped a homer and three singles in five at-bats, but when he also grounded out he flung down his bat, shaking his head at such ineptitude.
Mattingly would be an easy pick as the man most likely to win the next triple crown of batting (highest batting average, most home runs, and most runs batted in, all in a single season—a trick last turned by Carl Yastrzemski, of the 1967 Red Sox), except that he would somehow have to garner more hits than Wade Boggs in the process. Boggs, the Red Sox third baseman, this season won his second batting title in the past three years, finishing at .368, with two hundred and forty hits—a total not exceeded in his circuit since Heinie Manush whacked two hundred and forty-one for the 1928 Browns, in an era when the ball was made of rabbit toes and bathtub gin. Only Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Ted Williams ever racked up single-season on-base totals (hits plus walks plus hit-by-pitcher) higher than Boggs’ three hundred and forty this year. It might demean Boggs to call him an automaton of hitting, except that he tries to be an automaton. He eats chicken for lunch every day—not always the same chicken dish but the one that comes around on his precise fourteen-day, thirteen-recipe rotation. Before night games, he arrives at Fenway Park at exactly three o’clock; and he runs his wind sprints—the same number of them, and for exactly the same distance—starting at exactly 7:17 P.M. He stands up at the plate always in the same way—his feet comfortably apart, his bat well back (he, too, bats from the left side)—and cuts smoothly at the ball, with his head tucked in and his long arms extended, and raps it on a low, straight line to all fields, but most often to left or left-center. He does this all the time: in six hundred and fifty-three at-bats, he popped out to the infield twice this year. Tik-Tok of Fenway plays similarly afield: whenever he happens to make the last out of an inning by catching a foul fly in front of the visiting-team dugout (on the third-base side, in Boston), he will still turn and circle back clockwise, outside the bases, so that he can return to his dugout by his own special route; if you study the grass between the foul line just beyond first base and the home dugout at Fenway Park, you will see four worn places on the turf—the four steps that Wade Boggs takes on his way back to where he can get ready to start hitting again.
Late in the summer, a coincidence of scheduling offered the riveting possibility that the Mets and the Yankees could both move into first place in their divisions by whomping their main rivals—the Cardinals and the Blue Jays, respectively—in adjacent home-stand series in the second week in September; the engagements even overlapped, with the third and last game of the three-game Cardinals-Mets set at Shea Stadium falling on Thursday afternoon, just before the opener of the four Toronto-Yankee games that night. Entranced by sudden visions of an epochal collision between the two New York clubs in the World Series this year, the Gotham media performed a dogged mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of the moldering Subway Series feature, with many a backward look, via TV or tabloid, at fans in fedoras cheering on Dem Bums or the Jints against Whitey and the Mick, et al. (I enjoyed a Sports Illustrated photograph of the magazine’s intrepid correspondent George Plimpton in the act of descending into the IRT, apparently for the first time in his life.) None of this quite came to pass, of course, but the two teams certainly did their part in preparing us for the festival—the Yankees by mounting an eleven-game winning streak (their best surge in twenty-one years) that brought them to within two and a half games of the Jays on the eve of their meeting (they had trailed Toronto by nine and a half in early August), and the Mets with a succession of improbable melodramas on a West Coast trip (a ninth-inning game-winning pinch-hit homer by Keith Hernandez against the Giants; a five-for-five game for Keith against the Padres the next evening; Gary Carter’s five homers in two days in San Diego; Darryl Strawberry’s thirteenth-inning double against the Dodgers, to settle what had begun as a double-shutdown duel between Gooden and Fernando Valenzuela), which brought them even with the first-place Cardinals as the momentous week began. The ensuing games and discoveries—the best fun of my baseball summer, it turned out—can only be suggested here, perhaps in shorthand:
Tues., Sept. 10: Yucko Shea weather (drizz., tarps, planes roaring, etc.) for Grand Opening, but Metsie fans stay high in fog. Herr homers vs. Ronnie Darling in 1st, but irrit. St. L. twirler Danny Cox loses temper w. dawdling Foster in bottom of stave & plunks Geo., loading hassocks. Mistake? Yep: H. Johnson rockets 2–1 pitch over R-CF fence, for slam. Fans: “HOJO! HOJO!” Whatta team, whatta guy, etc. Metsies lead 5–1, but pesky Redbirds peck at Ronnie, close to 5–4 by 7th. Bad nerves in stands (“C’mon, you guys!”), but kid reliever R. McDowell slams door w. sinker. Mets up by one in NL East. Hard work, whew, etc. F’tnotes: R. Darling 1st NY pitcher to hurl key game on same day his Op-Ed piece (bettering our burg, etc.) runs in Times…Keith, back home from bad-boy drug testimony in Pitts., gets standing O. in 1st frame. Message of some kind: prob. love. Keith wipes tear, bops single.
Wed., Sept. 11: Dwight vs. John Tudor: 9-inn. double-zip standoff before 52,616. Terrif. strain. Doc great, but pickle-puss Tudor no slouch: slider, change, sneaky FB, in-out, up-down. 3-hitter. Best LH in NL. (Typical ex-Red Sock: so-so at Fens, Superman now. Go figure.) Mgr. Davey J. yanks Doc after 9 (young arm, long career ahead, etc.), & Card slugger Cedeno takes Orosco deep in 10th. Winning blow. Cards-Mets tied for No. 1. (Davey after Nobel Peace Prize or whart)
Thurs., Sept. 12, aft.: Visiting scribes scan road maps, subway maps, for unus. postgame exped. to Yankee Stadium, in Bronxian wilds. Game here at Shea starts with Metsies ripping St. L. hotdog starter Andujar. Back-to-back-to-back doubles for Straw., Heep, HoJo. We lead 6–0 after 2. Beaut, afternoon. Pesky Cards batt. back (see lues, script), close to 6–5 after four. (“C’mon, you guys!”) In 9th, McOee (skinny neck, mighty stroke) ties it w. 396-ft. blast to left CF, vs. Jesse again. Silencio. No hope. Home ½ of 9th, Mookie hoofs out hopper to SS, beats peg. Hope. Sac. to 2B by good-old Wally B. Keith up (“keith! keith!”), strokes daisy-cutter thru 3B-SS hole & Mookie hotfoots home. Yay, yippie, etc. Mets No. 1. Nothing to it. Knew it all along.
The visiting writers found their way from Queens to the Bronx through the rush hour that evening (“It was bumper-to-bumper in that subway tunnel under Grand Central,” one of them reported), but the visiting Blue Jays fared less well in the game. Steaming along behind a two-hitter by their ace right-hander, Dave Stieb, they suffered an uncharacteristic spell of nerves in the seventh, when second baseman Damaso Garcia and shortstop Tony Fernandez utterly missed connections on a double play, and Stieb lost his connection with the strike zone; thus encouraged, the Yankees scored six unearned runs—the last three of which came around on an enormous home run into the top deck by catcher Ron Hassey—and went on to win by 7–5. The crowd, which had begun the evening by booing the Canadian national anthem, concluded it by chanting obscenities about the Blue Jays, but I forbore from any easy sociological comparisons between the two leagues and the two audiences, since it seemed certain that great segments of the crowd had attended both games, contributing to both ends of the 98,436 total for the odd doubleheader.
