by Roger Angell
Fortuity
— Midsummer 1986
THE PRESS BOX AT Wrigley Field, in Chicago, is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park’s second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion, and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate. Seen from this vantage point, the preoccupied fans below sometimes suggest a huddled, uncomplaining horde of immigrants stuffed into steerage on some endless voyage toward better luck—not an inappropriate image if we remind ourselves that this famous rustbucket, the good ship Cubbie, last dropped anchor in the shining harbor of the World Series in 1945. The outward view from the catwalk is felicitous and hopeful: the converging faraway left-field and left-bleacher sections complete the lines of the ancient vessel that plows forever dead ahead into Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, while the bleachers in center rise bravely toward the prow of the great green scoreboard, topped by a single lofty mast, its rigging aflutter with signal pennants (the current standings, top to bottom, of the teams in the two National League divisions), which customarily tell of happier news in other places. I visited the Friendly Confines on a Friday afternoon last July, just three days after the All-Star Game, which traditionally marks the equator of the baseball season; I was there not just to take in some daytime ball (there are no lights at the park) or to watch the Cubs engage the visiting San Francisco Giants over a midsummer weekend but also in search of a better understanding of some central processes of the game: luck or momentum or confidence, and their opposites—whatever it is that can unexpectedly make winning a habit for one club and losing such a curse for the other. I had chosen these two teams with care, as will shortly be seen, but the park was a break for me, too, because Wrigley Field always offers a fresh perspective on baseball: it is the specialite de la maison.
I had skipped the All-Star Game itself (it was played at the Houston Astrodome this year, and won by the American League by a score of 3–2), but I did not grieve over my loss any more than I would have fretted about not getting a seat at the Emmy Awards or missing a Jerry Lewis telethon, which are also television promotions rather than sporting events. Like many other fans, I imagine, I employed the three-day All-Star break in the schedules to study the 1986 standings to date and to wonder about their strange configurations. In the National League East, the New York Mets, established before the season as solid favorites to win their division, had surpassed all expectations, bowling over their opponents in runaway-train fashion, and dominating both the standings and the National League team statistics. As a team, they led all comers in runs, home runs, runs batted in, and batting average, and had yet to be shut out in any game. This was a team effort, for once, since none of their players stood at the top of the list in any batting category, and their best-known sluggers—Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, and Darryl Strawberry—were, in fact, experiencing slightly sub-par years. The Mets also had the best pitching in the league, with a team earned-run average of 3.06; their four prime starters—Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and Bob Ojeda (a left-hander picked up in a trade with the Red Sox over the winter)—had a combined record of 41–10, with twenty-one complete games. The Mets led the Montreal Expos, their nearest opponent in the National League East, by thirteen games; within a couple of weeks, they would widen the margin to sixteen games—a bigger lead than any of the three other first-place teams had established over the last-place clubs in their divisions. In the National League West, the Houston Astros (good pitching and good defense; feeble batting and few fans) had been taking turns at the top with the surprising Giants, last-place finishers a year ago, while the Dodgers, sorely afflicted with injuries, floundered along in the cellar, eight games back. The American League West, habitually a rest home for most of the league’s losing teams, showed the California Angels holding a slim game-and-a-half lead over the young Texas Rangers, with none of the five other teams so far able to get its chin over the .500 bar. The real news was the Red Sox, who were leading the second-place Yankees in the mighty A.L. East by seven full games, mostly on the strength of their pitching: a startling turn of events for a club that has always specialized in winning by cannonade—the four-hour, four-homer, 10–7 Fenway Park Special, with both starting pitchers back in their street clothes by the middle of the fifth. Roger Clemens, a powerful twenty-three-year-old righthander who sat out most of the 1985 season after a shoulder operation, had accounted for this turnabout almost on his own, winning his first fourteen decisions without a defeat; here at the All-Star break, he stood at 15–2, with a league’s-best ERA of 2.48 and a hundred and forty-six strikeouts in his hundred and forty-five innings pitched. On April 29th, he had fanned twenty Seattle batters in a single game—the highest one-game total in the history of the major leagues.
There were other happy surprises tucked in among the midterm postings (including the wholly unexpected prosperity of the Cleveland Indians, who were more than holding their own in the savage campaigning in the American League East), but the bad news seemed far more absorbing. Just recently, the World Champion Kansas City Royals had somehow lost eleven games in a row, with their vastly admired corps of starting pitchers compiling an earned-run average of 7.32 during that spell. Bret Saberhagen, the Cy Young Award winner in his circuit last summer, had a 4–10 and 4.39 record, and was pitching so poorly that there was talk of sending him to the bullpen for rest and cogitation.
If the Royals looked bad (fourth place and eight games below .500), their World Series opponents, the Cardinals, were abysmal. Their 36–50 at the All-Star break had them a half game out of the cellar and twenty-four games behind the Mets, and they were batting .228 as a team. No one could explain what had happened to the spirited and combative club that came so close to winning the classic last fall, but their manager, Whitey Herzog, was blunt about their season to date. “We’re just a bad club,” he said late in May. “We’re not deep in any department. We’re supposed to have a great defense, and we haven’t played worth a damn.” Asked if there was some remedy for his club’s dismal showing, he said, “Better players.” When the schedule at last brought the Cards a day off at a point when they had lost eleven out of their last fourteen games, Herzog said the occasion called for a victory party.
The downside news was up in other places as well. Toronto’s ace starter, Dave Stieb, was at 2–9 and 5.80 so far, and forty-one-year-old Steve Carlton, a lifetime three-hundred-and-eighteen-game winner, was given his unconditional release by the Phillies after surrendering twenty-five runs in twenty innings. (He was picked up by the Giants a few days later.) The Yankees lost a record ten straight games at Yankee Stadium, and the Oakland A’s, who were believed to have a fair shot at a pennant this year in the American League West, set a team mark with fifteen consecutive losses on the road. Both Chicago managers lost their jobs, as did the Oakland and Seattle skippers; the deposed White Sox manager, Tony LaRussa, was instantly hired to manage the A’s.
Midseason performances don’t mean much by September, to be sure, but all this instability at the center of the sport was something to think about. The Mets are a pretty fair team on all counts, but the pace of their success so far seemed almost out of control: they weren’t just good, they were imperious. What had happened to so many competent teams this year, I wondered, to make them go so flat? I recalled the pride and self-assurance and sense of accomplishment that only last October permeated the clubhouses of the Cards and the Royals and was equally apparent in the demeanor and conversation of their front-office people. Their teams had attained the heights on merit, these men seemed to be saying, and proved the corporate wisdom and foresight of the organizations that had produced them; success so plainly established almost looked like a guarantee of further success, even in the chancy world of competitive sports. The fatuity of such hopes, in the light of the 1
986 season to date, suggested the anxiety and puzzlement and sense of quaky footing that must now infect every team in baseball.
Sports teams live on confidence; it is the air they must breathe if they are to survive at all. Each of the twenty-six major-league clubs spends millions of dollars every year on player development and on the signing of young talent; sizable further funds and thousands of hours of hard work go into scouting and planning trades and into long-range projections, all with the aim of putting a team on the field that will prove resolute in the face of adversity and opportunistic and aggressive when the chance to win presents itself. Quality, however, cannot be guaranteed, which is why the threats and petulant outbursts that George Steinbrenner directs at his Yankee players in times of trouble are so disliked by executives with a better sense of the game. “Maybe we’ll surprise some folks” and “At least we’ll be respectable” are what you hear from managers of potential fifth-place clubs, but when the season begins it always becomes plain that no one is ever quite ready for the heaven-sent pink glow of success that can suddenly envelop any team when everything—the starting pitching, the bullpen, timely hitting, sound defense, freedom from injury, and the breaks—is going your way, or contrariwise, ready for how bad a club, even a strong or famous one, can turn in the space of ten days. And no team, it seems, can even be sure of its own respectability when it is faced with more than its share of the vicissitudes of baseball: injuries, bad hops, bad calls, suddenly vapid pitching or hitting, trembly defense, and the unexpected and then unstoppable cascade of lost ballgames. Sandy Alderson, the able general manager of the Oakland A’s, recently said to me, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this game, it’s that you can very seldom afford to smile. That’s a sad statement, but the truth is that you never know which game may be your last win in a long while, or which day may turn out to be the high point of your season. If you’ve been going bad, you don’t know if the game you’ve just lost is not yet your nadir or if it’s going to be the last loss in a week. That old baseball saying about never letting yourself get too high or too low is a matter of self-preservation. You just never know.”
I had never thought much about winning and losing as freestanding and presumably discussable elements of baseball, but now the idea came to me to travel about the leagues a little, here at mid-season, and talk to some players and managers and front-office people about good baseball luck and bad, watching some teams that had enjoyed the best of things in recent weeks take on opponents who had met with very little luck so far this year, and trying to learn from both sides how it felt to be hot or not, how much difference the manager makes, and how different crowds and owners and writers seemed to respond to hard times and high times. In the end, I might even have a better sense of what proportion of the game actually rests in the hands of the men who play it.
Luck always matters in baseball, and here I at once found some luck of my own in the schedules—the upcoming games at Wrigley Field, where the ebullient and onrushing Giants (they had just climbed into first place in the West again, and their nine-game margin over the .500 level represented their best grades in almost four years) would meet the better-established Cubs, who had been winners of the National League East a bare two years ago but were not skating in stately circles in the lower reaches of their division. Injuries did in the entire Cubs pitching rotation last year, but this year the Chicago pitching was the worst in the league. “Last year was an excuse year,” a grizzled Cubs writer said to me later in the week. “This year—” He shrugged. “Well, Chicago is a Cubs town.” A new manager, Gene Michael, had replaced Jim Frey in June, and Dallas Green, the Cubs’ president and general manager, blamed his players for the ritual execution. “I’m not very happy about it,” he told a reporter. “I told them in no uncertain terms that they had contributed in great part to it.”
Directly after my weekend at Wrigley Field, I also discovered, I could repair to California in time to see the brilliant Red Sox, now at 56–31 for the year and seven games ahead of the pack, do battle with the miserable, last-place Oakland A’s, whose season had gone down the drain during a stretch in which most of their pitchers were on the disabled list and they had dropped twenty-five out of thirty-one games; the club had likewise dispensed with a manager, the agreeable Jackie Moore, and had lately replaced him with the aforementioned Tony LaRussa. Looking at my plans, I felt a twinge of compassion for the battered losers of my planned mismatches, but baseball, I reminded myself, is not for the fainthearted.
Wrigley Field lay becalmed in furnace-like doldrums as the Giants and the Cubs took the field on Friday, but the natives, I noticed, were unaffected. With the temperature in the mid-nineties, the customary thirty thousand-plus Cubs fans threw themselves into the ancient environs for our uncrucial tilt, and the massed descamisados in the bleachers further tanned their pelts toward the prized North Side Gurkhatones of August. Drops of sweat from my brow formed paisley patterns on my scorecard, and between innings home-plate ump Jerry Crawford tottered back to a minuscule strip of shadow next to the backstop, where a ball girl tended him with elixirs and cold cloths. Perhaps sensing our need for a swift distraction from the weather, the Chicago starting pitcher, the tall right-hander Scott Sanderson, absolutely subdued the visitors in the course of his seven innings, striking out nine of the San Franciscos and giving up one hit, a double by Jeff Leonard, and a lone unearned run; his successor, the enormous flamethrower Lee Smith, was perfect, fanning three more Giants and preserving the 2–1 beauty. Sanderson’s breaking ball, which an inordinate number of Giants took for called third strikes, bowing politely at the waist as it dipped across the corners, was the talk of both clubhouses. There wasn’t much else to say, for great pitching is a silencer. The Giants, like all losing players in such circs, summed things up with a shrug and a wan smile: What are you going to do?
I had seen the Giants suffer an infinitely more painful loss earlier in the season, I now recalled. Back on May 30th, at Shea Stadium, the club had stood on the verge of a hard-earned one-run victory over the Mets in the bottom of the tenth inning. Then, with two out and two Mets aboard, Giants shortstop Jose Uribe and second baseman Rob Thompson somehow collided under a harmless infield fly; the ball popped loose and the winning run came in. A killing defeat, one felt, since it dropped the Giants three games behind the Astros and suddenly ran their string of losses to four straight, all on the road; last year, the Giants lost fifty-seven on the road, on the way to their last-place, worst-ever 62–100 finish. “Same old Giants,” a San Francisco writer muttered as we waited for the Shea press-box elevator down to the clubhouses.
Only they weren’t. That night, the Giants manager, Roger Craig, closed his clubhouse to exhort his young troops. That game was gone, he told them, and mourning or anger wouldn’t bring it back or turn the score around. The team’s young second-base combination had already won at least six games for the team with their gloves, so what had just happened only meant that they were 6–1 for the year. Tomorrow’s game was the one that mattered now. And so forth. It worked—something worked. The Giants won the next day, knocking off Bob Ojeda; Rob Thompson was involved in four double plays for the afternoon and singled three times, and Uribe came through with a two-run double. The Giants won again the day after that, handing Ron Darling his first defeat of the year. The team then moved along to Montreal, swept two games there, and headed home with a suddenly satisfying 4–4 record for the road swing.
In Chicago, I talked to Giants catcher Bob Brenly about the turnaround. “That game in New York was the one that did it,” he said. “You know, for any team there can come a day when you decide that this is going to be just another year, just like it was before. Losing can happen so fast. You lose a game, and you think, OK, we’re stuck all right. You lose the next day, and you think, Well, that was a tough one—no way we could have gone against the breaks there. Then you get blown out, say, and the day after that maybe you get beat 2–1, and before you know it it’s five or six in a row a
nd you’ve slid down a couple of places in the standings. But Roger prepared us for that sort of thing this year. We know we’re a better team. We know we have that resiliency. Roger has done it—give him the credit. He’s got guys bunting, doing the hit-and-run, guys hitting the ball to the right side of the infield who never bothered to learn that kind of ball. He’s got me running, and I’m a catcher. Nobody’s exempt, nobody’s ahead on the ball club, and it’s all from Roger. Call him a guru, call him a positive guy, call him a man—a grown-up human being. You know, almost every professional athlete has had one great coach in high school or college that he remembers and thinks of most highly. I had a high-school basketball coach back at Coshocton High named Bill Bowman, who always seemed like he could pull about ten percent more out of you than you thought you had. Well, that’s the way Roger is for everybody in this room. We’ve talked about it. He reminds you of somebody important in your life. He makes you think winning is something you can be personally responsible for. The biggest difference is we’re having fun. You can hear it in the air around here. I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and come to the ballpark. Last year was mostly just a personal thing, and I think that down feeling, that first bad day, came almost on Opening Day. Baseball is a team game, and once you lose that you’ve lost all concept. Some of our guys had a pretty good year in 1985, but I don’t think they were enjoying it any. It all got washed away by the team. Roger wants it the other way now. I’ve never learned so much from one person.”
