The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  I cite this vivid communication to make a point not about inflationary economics but about inflationary baseball. This year, the league championship series were expanded to a best-of-seven-games format (they had been operating on a best-of-five system since their inception, in 1969), in the interests of augmented television revenues. The Cardinals, as we know, eliminated the Dodgers in the National League playoffs in six games, while the Royals went the full seven in knocking off the Blue Jays. Seven World Series games were then required to establish the Royals as champions: in sum, twenty postseason games. More people watched more October baseball than ever before, which may or may not be a good thing, but I think we can take it as a certainty that in the year 2057 there will not be a single surviving fan who remembers even one of these games with anything like the clarity and pleasure that Mr. Ryan so well conveys. Already, mere weeks after the games, I sense an inner blur and an accompanying incapacity to bring back more than a handful of postseason plays and innings.

  Each of the playoffs opened in perfect misdirection, with the eventual losers winning the first and second games. The Dodgers, starting at home, put down Tudor at last, with the help of some slovenly Cardinal work afield, and then administered a gruesome 8–2 whacking to Joaquin Andujar, the combustible Dominican right-hander, who, when in difficulties, persistently damaged himself with angry down-the-middle fastballs; he also bunted into a double play which he proudly did not deign to run out. I joined the action at Busch Stadium, where the Redbirds, playing before the home folks (53,708 loyalists, in 53,708 Cardinal-red ensembles), gave a marvellously quick and instructive lesson in their special style of speedball. The front three Cardinal batters—Coleman, McGee, and Herr—got to bat against Dodger starter Bob Welch in both the first and the second inning and reached base all six times, fashioning four runs out of four hits (one of them a homer), two walks, two stolen bases, and two jittery pickoff-play throwing errors. The Cards won by 4–2, and drew even in the series the following night, when they sent fourteen batters to the plate in the second inning, in a 12–2 walkover—“one of those games,” in Ballspeak. The more significant news of the day was the grotesque workplace accident suffered before the game by young Vince Coleman, the Cardinal baserunning flash, who was knocked down and nearly devoured by an oncreeping automatic infield tarpaulin; he suffered a chipped bone in his left leg and did not reappear in further postseason action—a most damaging turn of events for the Cardinals, it turned out.

  Game Five was the one that mattered: a fairish pitching duel between Fernando Valenzuela (who somehow gave up eight bases on balls) and the St. Louis bullpen committee (Dayley, Worrell, Lahti), which took over in the fourth and shut down the visitors until Ozzie Smith delivered a sudden little ninth-inning homer, for a 3–2 victory—an amazement, inasmuch as it was his first left-handed home run (he switch-hits and had turned around to face the right-handed Dodger reliever, Tom Niedenfuer) in 4,277 professional at-bats. Dodger manager Tom Lasorda was understandably testy in the postgame interview (“What do I think about what?” he barked at a reporter. “I’m not too happy—all right!”), but this Q. and A. was a mere plate-warming compared to the rotisserie broiling that Lasorda endured immediately after Game Six, in Los Angeles. The matter at issue here may be remembered for a while, at least around the Casa Lasorda: the decision of the ever-popular Dodger manager—ahead by 5–4 in the ninth inning—to allow his hurler (the selfsame Niedenfuer) to pitch to Jack Clark, the muscular Cardinal cleanup batter, with first base open and Cardinal base runners at second and third, instead of giving him a prudent base on balls. Clark hit the first pitch four hundred and fifty feet in to the bleachers, for the pennant. Manager Tom, in his defense, had several left-hand-vs.-right-hand, pinch-hitter-vs.-new-pitcher scripts in mind before he made his difficult decision, but I think he must be viewed as a victim of overthink. Back in St. Louis, talking to some reporters in the home clubhouse after the third game, Jack Clark had said, “Both of these teams have decided that there are certain guys they’re not going to let beat them, which is why batting in that fourth spot is so hard.” Lasorda forgot.

  I had lunch with Alison Gordon in Toronto before the first American League playoff game. “I’m feeling better,” she told me. “I’m all right, for now.” I didn’t see her after that, and I was secretly relieved, for her Blue Jays won the first two playoff games there—a fine 6–1 outing by Dave Stieb and then a surprise tenth-inning comeback victory over the Royals’ stellar submariner, Dan Quisenberry—and I was certain that she had begun to think, Well, maybe!…Out at Kansas City, the Jays put together an early five-run inning, but Doyle Alexander couldn’t hold it—George Brett went four-for-four (single, double, two home runs) on the day—and the Royals prevailed. Toronto next pulled out an unexpected 3–1 win with a startling three-run rally against Charlie Leibrandt in the ninth inning of Game Four, topped off by Al Oliver’s pinch-hit double against Quisenberry, but signs of fatal turnaround were becoming evident, for the Jays had stopped hitting. They were shut out the next day by the young K.C. left-hander Danny Jackson, and then Mark Gubicza, Bud Black, and the Quis together worked out a 5–3 Kansas City win that brought the teams even at last. Bret Saberhagen had to leave the deciding game (we were back in Toronto by now) when he took a sharp bouncer on the palm of his pitching hand, but Leibrandt (and Quisenberry again, at the end) held off the Blue Jays without difficulty, and took the gonfalon with a 6–2 victory. The Royals’ pitching was both wide and deep, it turned out, and the resultant strain on the other side brought out some weaknesses—a classic turn of events. The mid-game Kansas City left-handers in the last two games (Black and Leibrandt) forced the Toronto skipper, Bobby Cox, to wheel in his right-handed platoons, who men proved helpless against Quisenberry. The Jays had far less pitching, especially out of their bullpen, and as the vise tightened, the lightly experienced Blue Jay lineup became cautious on the bases and began to overswing fiercely when up at bat; twenty-six Toronto batters were stranded in the last three games. In the end, everything seemed to turn against the Blue Jays—some terrible umpiring (it was just as bad for the other side, but the Toronto players brooded about it), the luck of the games, the weather, and even the dimensions of their park. Doyle Alexander, furious over a ball-four call, gave up a game-clinching double to the next and bottommost Royals hitter, Buddy Biancalana, in Game Six. Dave Stieb, left out there far too long in Game Seven, watched a windblown pop fly by Jim Sundberg barely reach the top of the fence out in the too-short right-field corner of Exhibition Stadium, where it caromed away for a three-run triple, putting Toronto behind for the winter. I had pulled for both of these teams throughout the season, so I felt mixed emotions at the end. I should have looked up Alison Gordon, but I didn’t, and after a couple of days she called me in New York. “I’m all right, but let’s not talk about it,” she said. “I just thought I’d tell you a subhead in the Globe & Mail here on the day after the Cardinals and Royals won, damn it. It says, ‘Missouri loves company.’”

  The Missouri ballparks, east and west, presented the usual festival buntings, identical grassless lawns, and some slummocky game accompaniments by the organists. The musical commentary at Royals Stadium, though less oppressive than the Yankee Stadium stuff, is of a repellent cuteness, while the resident Schweitzer at Busch Stadium spurs on the crowds with little more than ceaseless repetitions of a Budweiser jingle. The Cardinals fans appear to enjoy this custom, I must admit, happily patting their paws together in time to the commercial Braulied, but this response is as nothing compared with their enravishments during the pre-game show at Busch, when a gate in the outfield swings open to admit the famous Clydesdales, who perform several galumphing circuits of the field, pulling behind them an ancient, shining beer wagon stacked high with cartons of Bud, with a waggy Dalmation perched on top. The swaying wagon seat, aloft and forward, is occupied by a busy teamster, his fists full of reins, and by August A. Busch, Jr., the diminutive eighty-six-year-old millionaire owner-brewer, bravely w
aving his plumed, Cardinal-red chapeau as he hangs on for dear life. I had some initial critical doubts about this spectacle, wondering whether the precedent might not encourage Mr. Steinbrenner to cruise the Yankee Stadium outfield in a replica tanker some day, but in time I began to look on the ceremonial more tolerantly, comparing it, rather, to a colorful but puzzling indigenous religious rite, like fire-walking or rajah-weighing or a blockful of beefy, sweating Sicilians groaning under their tottering ninety-foot saint’s tower on some downtown feast day—a spectacle, that is, better entrusted to a National Geographic photo crew than to an out-of-town baseball writer.

  The Series games, seen in brief retrospect, invite further attention to the commanding nature of stout pitching and the diffident pleasures of come-from-behind baseball. Tudor, it will be recalled, won the opener of the classic, out at Royals Stadium, though in less than imperious fashion, barely outpitching Jackson for a 3–1 decision. Charlie Leibrandt, the strong, thoughtful Royals left-hander, threw a near-masterpiece the next evening (his patterns are much like Tudor’s, in fact, although his off-speed pitch moves the other way: in on a left-handed batter), surrendering a bare two singles through the first eight innings, but suffered an appalling progressive accident in the ninth, when the Cardinals put together a single and three doubles (none of them exactly smoked) and pulled off a sudden 4–2 win. Manager Dick Howser’s decision not to bring in Quisenberry in the midst of these adventures—Quis had been knocked about in uncharacteristic fashion in his last few outings—will not be taken up here, lest the sound of New Year’s revels intrude on the consequent lengthy argumentation.

  Game Three belonged to Bret Saberhagen, who absolutely awed the Cards with his 6–1 economy cruise at Busch Stadium, as the Royals briskly did away with Andujar (his season had come apart, for he finished and won only one game after August 23rd, when he stood at 20–7 in the campaign), and George Brett reached base in all five turns at bat. It was in this game, I imagine, that the millions watching at home began to notice Saberhagen—his perky little half smile on the mound, his beginner’s mustache, the wonderful rush of mid-game strikes and outs that he can impose on the batters, and the odd darting of his tongue at the outset of his windup—a mannerism that has given turn his clubhouse nickname, the Lizard. The other pitcher held our attention the next evening: John Tudor back in more characteristic style—a five-hit, 3–0 shutout, in which only two Kansas City base runners set foot on third. Tudor twice fanned Brett with off-speed, slicing sliders, embarrassing him in the process. The Cards were ahead by three games to one, in what some press-box watchers were calling a dull, one-sided Series.

  Tudor had struggled unhappily through the early going this season, and his record stood at 1–7 in late May, when he received a telephone call from Dave Bettencourt, his erstwhile batterymate on the Peabody (Mass.) high-school baseball team, who, while watching the Cards on television, had spotted a minor flaw in his old friend’s delivery. Tudor made an adjustment and went 20–1 for the rest of the summer—an astounding turn of events for a pitcher who in almost five full years’ work, for the Pirates and Red Sox, had never won more than thirteen games in a season. I went to Bill Campbell for enlightenment—the tall, knob-shouldered Cardinals reliever, who had also worked out of the Boston bullpen when Tudor was there.

  “There’s no secret to it,” Campbell said in the St. Louis clubhouse. “He’s learned how to pitch. He didn’t do all that bad with the Red Sox or the Pirates, but you’re not going to come out looking very good with teams like that, because you can only do so much. Here we’ve got these rabbits in the outfield, a great big ballpark, and some guys who are going to turn the D.P. It’s amazing what that double play will do for a pitcher. When he doesn’t get it, he knows he should be out of the inning but he’s not, and when that happens over and over again it adds up—it’s another sort of year. The big difference might be that John changes speeds more than he used to—that’s maturity in a pitcher. He’s got a good enough fastball, with a tail on it, and he doesn’t mind coming inside—any left-hander who’s pitched at Fenway has to be willing to throw inside—but when you can move the ball around the way John does, the changeup becomes a big pitch for you. His change looks like a fastball, but it moves away, and you can see what that does to the hitters. They’re leaning, they’re a mile out in front. You saw what happened to Brett today, and Brett is a great, great hitter. You have to remember that big-league batters hate to have the fastball thrown past them. Here’s John, who’s already shown them that change-up and then the fastball, so what are they going to do? They know the change is coming—it’s in the back of their minds—but what they’re ready for, every time, is the fastball. And then…” He shrugged. “Then they get the change and they’re out of there.”

  Dick Howser, the midsize, sociable Royals manager, loves to talk about his young pitchers—Bret Saberhagen most of all. “Here’s a guy who looks like Mel Stottlemyre and throws like Catfish Hunter,” he told me out in Kansas City. “I’ve been saying he doesn’t throw the ball past anybody, but after that game he pitched against the Angels”—a 3–1 complete-game victory that brought the Royals even with California at the beginning of their critical late-season series—“I’m not so sure. His last pitch, to Reggie Jackson, was a ninety-five-mile-an-hour strike, and Reggie didn’t move. The best pitch in the game was that last one. But it’s his control that amazes you. Last year, when he was just starting, he beat the Angels a game and only threw ninety-one pitches. Like Guidry and Stottlemyre and those others, he fields his position and he holds the runners close. He doesn’t get beat in those little ways. He’s got a great pickoff move, and that’s something you don’t see much with young pitchers, because the good ones have been striking everybody out when they’re down in the minors. I kept watching this kid’s figures as he came up through our system. There’d be nine innings, with six strikeouts and no bases on balls—that kind of thing. And they held up all the way for him, at every level. You notice him.” He shook his head a little. “Even his pitchouts are good,” he went on. “The ball is up here to the catcher—not down there somewhere.”

  Pitching coach Gary Blaylock told me that Saberhagen could throw the running fastball, could ride it up and in, and could swing it down and away from the batter. “And that’s all you can do with a fastball, you know,” he said. But in the end he, too, came back to Saberhagen’s control. “I was the Royals’ minor-league pitching coach up to last year, so I saw this kid when he first came to work for us, in the Instructional League,” he said. “He walked one man in his first twenty-three professional innings. He didn’t have a breaking ball when we signed him, but he did have that control right from the beginning, which is hard to believe. He’s a quick kid, and he can do it all now, and the hitters know it. He gets on a roll in the middle innings, and the batter is up there looking to hit that first pitch, because he knows he’s never going to find himself in that good two-oh, three-one spot. Before you know it, the kid is getting ten or twelve or fourteen outs in a row. I’ve never seen a pitcher to compare him with.”

  Saberhagen did not emerge as the best of the young K.C. Dingers until the middle of this past summer, and Howser told me that he was still not sure which of them would be the top man in the long run. A year ago, he reminded me, Bud Black’s 17–12 record had been the best among the young starters. The beginning of the Royals’ championship, in his view, was the spring-training season of 1984, at a very low ebb in the club’s history. Four of its best-known players—Willie Wilson, Vida Blue, Willie Aikens, and Jerry Martin—had been convicted on cocaine charges at the end of 1983, and had served terms in jail; only Wilson came back to the Royals afterward. Three established Kansas City starters—Dennis Leonard, Paul Splittorff, and Larry Gura—were approaching the end of illustrious careers (although Leonard has undergone extensive rehabilitation for a serious knee injury and is still hoping for a return to full form), and no one in the dugout or in the front office expected much good news in the seaso
ns just ahead. Howser, with no other course really open to him, determined to see how far he could go with Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, and Danny Jackson, who between them had nineteen innings of major-league experience. (Bud Black, a year ahead of this freshman class, was already in the rotation.) Saberhagen and Gubicza began the season as rookie starters, and Jackson moved in from the bullpen late in the summer. Leibrandt, who is in his upper twenties (he had four earlier, fair-to-poor years with the Cincinnati Reds), began that 1984 season in the minors. “We plain didn’t have room for him,” Howser said. “He only got in three innings’ work all spring. But then he pitched his way onto our club from Omaha. He just kind of happened on us. You know the rest.”

  The rest he meant is that the Royals, in sixth place in mid-July of ’84, went 44–27 for the rest of the year—the best record over that distance in their league—on the strength of their pitching, and won their division before being eliminated in the Championship Series by the Tigers. The same pattern showed itself this year, when the Royals, seven and a half games back after the All-Star break, put the Angels away in the last week, but this time they seemed to know all along that they would win. As a team, they finished next to the top in pitching (second to the Blue Jays), next to the bottom in batting (the Angels were lower), and somewhere up out of sight in confidence. The Royals’ absolute zest for come-from-behind baseball was not made out of mere cheerfulness or some mad belief in baseball luck but came from a perfect knowledge of their own capabilities. A splendid old adage tells us that great pitching will always beat great hitting and vice versa, but I suspect, in fact, that great pitching builds character. The 1985 Cardinals were a better offensive and defensive ball team than the Royals by almost every measurement, but a persistent edge in pitching can give a young, mild club the carefree look of champions; what their players envisage at the beginning of every game is another string of scoreless or low-scoring innings for the other side—a guarantee that they themselves, the good guys, can always play on even terms with any team in the land. What the Royals showed us repeatedly this fall, on the field and in their clubhouse, was class. You could see it in sudden headline performances like Brett’s outbursts at the plate or in successive marvellous outings by Leibrandt, Jackson, Saberhagen, and the rest, but you expect that sort of thing from one source or another during championship play. In these games, though, one also began to notice and appreciate lesser inferences, like Steve Balboni’s dogged persistence at the plate, in spite of his repeated strikeouts and pop-ups (he hit thirty-six homers this year, but none at all in postseason play), which ultimately brought him eight Series singles and a .320 Series average; Jim Sundberg’s baserunning (of all things) and those two identical super-duper slides into home; Buddy Biancalana’s exuberance and pleasure in the game, which showed itself in his errorless and sometimes breathtaking play at shortstop (he was considered something of a joke at the outset of the autumn games, having accounted for more errors than runs batted in during his brief tenure this season); Dan Quisenberry’s elegant refusal to complain about his bad luck and unaccustomed embarrassments in several games (“I try never to be the manager,” he said after being passed over by Howser in that second-game crisis. “I want to be a tool for him, and not guess whether he should use me now, or not now, or not until the fifteenth inning. He’s better at that than I am”); and Dick Howser’s open and unpatronizing admiration for the play of his professionals, and his joy at their joy at the end. Sooner or later, he seemed to know, young talent will catch up.