The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  The one great coach that Roger Craig reminds me of is himself—a tall, engaging, noble-nosed North Carolinian who when last seen by me was accepting congratulations in the champagne-soaked Detroit Tigers clubhouse for his part in the making of that 1984 World Champion team. As pitching coach, he had brought the Detroit staff along from eleventh-best to best in the league in the space of two years, in considerable part through his teaching of the split-fingered fastball, a deadly little down-diver that he perfected some years ago while running a baseball school for teenagers. Craig retired from baseball after the Tigers’ triumph and went home to his horse ranch and his family in Southern California, but came back to take over as Giants manager in mid-September of last year, as part of a fresh regime headed by an incoming general manager, Al Rosen. Craig also had a previous two-year tenure as manager of the Padres, in 1978 and ’79. This summer, he has been teaching the split-finger to anyone on the Giants staff who is interested—to Roger Mason and Mike Krukow and Mark Davis and Vida Blue (who has had trouble with it, because his fingers aren’t very long), and even to Steve Carlton.

  Whatever ballpark he is in, Craig is implored by the local writers to talk about his defeats as well as his successes—in particular, about the forty-six games he lost in two years while pitching for the newborn and disastrous New York Mets, near the close of his career. “Aw, I don’t want to dwell on that story all the time,” he said in the casbah of the Wrigley Field dugout early one afternoon. But then, because he’s an obliging fellow, he talked about it just the same. He confirmed his most famous statistic, registered in 1963—eighteen consecutive mound losses, which tied an ancient mark. “I think the record still stands,” he said now, “but maybe I’ll pitch tomorrow and break it.” He lost five games by the score of 1–0 in that stretch—also a record. “I kept telling the guys to go out and get me one run and we’d win,” he told us. “Then, one time, I remember, it got to be about the fifth or sixth inning and I said, ‘All right, just get me half a run!’ You know, I always felt I pitched well those years. I got a raise at the end of both years, and I deserved it. I had twenty-seven complete games over those two seasons, and every game I started I expected to win.”

  Craig said he thought the Mets trauma had helped him as a manager. “I know all about the things that can make you lose, and all about the things that can help you win. A lot of my coaching is from that. If a guy gets on a losing streak on the mound or goes oh-for-four up at bat a few days, I can identify with that. He knows I’ve been there before him. But he also knows that I’ve been in five World Series and I got four winning World Series rings to show for it. At first, the guys on this club thought I was crazy when I said I could show them how to win, but now they’ve got the idea. If you’ve got some talent, you can win. Sure, we’ve lost some games, but I’m happier right now than I’ve ever been before in baseball.” He paused, squinting in the sun. “Well, maybe you always say that. The first year I was with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a major-league pitcher, I didn’t feel I could be any happier than that. But as an old man—I’m fifty-six—as an old man, right now I’m very happy. I’ve got outstanding coaches and a fine young ball club, and that’s all you can ask for.”

  This summer in San Francisco, I’ve been told, you can sometimes spot five or six Giants caps at the same time among the noonday crowds waiting for the lights to change on the corner of Kearny and Post Streets. Attendance at Candlestick Park (which will not be torn down or domed over in the near future, as had been much rumored in recent years) is up by a hundred and thirteen percent, and people at cocktail parties in Mill Valley or at dinner downtown at the Washington Square Bar & Grill sometimes refer to the Giants as “the lads” now, just as the sports columns do. Now and then, on the courts at the Berkeley Tennis Club, you can hear somebody out there yell “Humm baby!” when his partner pulls off a winning backhand shot down the alley. The expression comes from Roger Craig, and it means “Great play!” or “Wow!” or perhaps, as a noun, a pretty young woman across the street. Back in June, somebody took down the office-door sign at Candlestick that said “NO. 33-CRAIG.” Now it says “HUMM BABY.”

  The Cubs were less talkative, and no wonder. Dallas Green had recently suggested that he was prepared to dispense with almost anyone on his roster of well-paid underachievers (anyone but all-league second baseman Ryne Sandberg, one must assume, or the brilliant young shortstop Shawon Dunston, or perhaps Lee Smith), although there are cynics who claim he wouldn’t find many takers, because of the lavish contracts that were given to the stars of ’84. In any case, I had very little relish at the prospect of worming out losers’ confessions in the Chicago clubhouse. Ron Cey, who had been riding the bench in recent weeks, probably because of his Rodinesque responses to hard-hit ground balls around third base, was polite but distant. Now thirty-eight years old, he had played nineteen hundred and fifty-three games at third base and hit three hundred and six home runs over ten full seasons with the Dodgers and three-plus with the Cubs, and he was not prepared to be forthcoming about unsuccess. “You’d have to ask players who have been on teams that have been out of it a lot of years,” he said stiffly. “It’s not a situation I’m familiar with—I don’t qualify. I’m used to being up there in the midst of things. When you’re in contention, you contest. It’s what you’re here for—why you exist as a professional. Now—well, not playing much and being with a team that’s out of it, the way we ate, is not an enviable position. I’m in a different place than I’m used to.”*

  Forehandedly, I had arranged for further testimony about the Cubs from the best source possible—a fan. Cubs fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer, and hope, in exquisite proportions. The Cubs sold a million and a half tickets before Opening Day this year, and the sellout Saturday crowd on this second day of my trip would put them over the million mark in admissions on the second-earliest date in their long history. My companion at the game was a baseball pen pal of mine named Tim Shanahan, a young and friendly (it turned out) professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He grew up in Detroit and still sustains an ancient passion for the Tigers (“It’s very, very unlikely that they’ll ever end up playing the Cubs in the World Series,” he said when I asked about his ultimate loyalty), and followed the Phillies closely when attending graduate school in Delaware. His attachment to the Cubs is of only six years’ duration, which barely puts him on the waiting list for admission to the True Cubs Sodality, but he clearly belongs nevertheless. A few weeks earlier, he and his wife and two young daughters had turned up at Wrigley for a Sunday game, to find that the remaining tickets were only for standing room. “My older daughter Erin is six, and she said that was fine with her,” Shanahan said. “She’s been coming to games with us for years. But Meagan is three, and after my wife and I and the girls stood around outside the gate for about an hour we finally decided that it might be a little hard on her to be held in our arms for three hours at her very first game. I wouldn’t have minded, of course, but—” He was still thinking it over.

  Shanahan and I had good seats in the deep stands just behind home, and, with the temperature back in the nineties, I did not respond when he suggested that we probably should have sat in the bleachers if I was in search of some real Cubs fans. We drank some beer, and he brought me up to date on the franchise gossip. The White Sox, who have been traditionally seen as drawing most of their fans from within the city, were probably moving out of Comiskey Park at last, he said; they were negotiating a move to the western suburb of Addison, if the financing could be worked out for a new ballpark there. “The strange thing is that most of the Cubs fans are from the suburbs, even though Wrigley Field is a city ballpark,” he said. “Most of the White Sox fans cheer for the Cubs when the Cubs are in first place, but Cubs fans never, never cheer for the White Sox. They
sort of don’t notice them.”

  Wrigley Field seemed to have survived the great lights crisis, Tim told me. After the winning 1984 season, the club had threatened to move the team elsewhere, so that it could conform with the league’s network-television contracts, which called for night games in post-season play. The city and state ordinances forbidding lights at Wrigley held firm under court testing, but now Dallas Green was talking about adding twenty thousand new seats to the park (which now holds thirty-eight thousand)—a move that seemed certain to destroy its airy vistas and rural ambience. It is reported that Green also wants the club to buy up some of the cozy, tree-shaded blocks of ancient houses that surround the field and convert them into parking lots. Shanahan thought the lights controversy would be settled by compromise: the lights would go in, but would be turned on for only fifteen or twenty games during the regular season. “Nobody likes the idea,” he said, “but it may be the only way to keep Wrigley Field. People care about this place.”

  The game began—the Giants’ veteran ace Mike Krukow taking on the Cubs’ left-handed Steve Trout—and what Shanahan noticed almost instantly was an innocuous fly ball out to left field struck by the second Giant batter of the day, Rob Thompson. “Bad,” he announced. “Anything hit in the air like that against Trout means he’s going to get killed. And look at those flags.” I looked, and saw the pennants on the scoreboard and up on top of the upper deck in right field beginning to stir and lift. They were pointing away from us: local storm warnings for lakeside pitchers. Shanahan was wrong in one way, it turned out: the Giants didn’t exactly kill Trout as much as discourage him to death, finally dispatching him in the third, when he got nobody out while giving up a passel of singles, a walk, and a terminal double by the young power-hitting third baseman, Chris Brown, which ran the score to 5–1, San Francisco. But nothing is forever on windy days at Wrigley, and the Cubs responded at once with four safe knocks, including a home run by Gary Matthews that sailed five or six rows beyond the ivy at left-center. “It’s Sandberg that’s the difference,” Shanahan said, referring to Matthews’ immediate predecessor in the lineup. “They’ve finally got him back where he belongs. He’s got to bat second like this if we’re going to score runs. It’s vital to the whole thing.”

  This, I realized, was the long view—the experienced Cubs-person’s caution—but there was no cynicism or artificiality in it that I could see. Tim nodded happily when Dunston and then Dave Martinez whacked windblown back-to-back homers in the fifth, with the Cubs scoring four more times and going ahead for good in the game, but when we sat down again he said, “I think all these pop-fly home runs in this park hurt the Cubs in the end. It’s the reason we never seem to have any speed on the team, or any real defense. It’s the same kind of team the Red Sox have always been, because of that wall at Fenway. Those big innings distract you from building a real ball team. I think we may have the best defensive stats in the league right now, but that’s only because we’re so slow in the infield that we never even get to the hard chances. It’s an illusion.”

  Sandberg homered in the eighth, and Leon Durham bombed a triple into the ivy a moment or two later, and the Cubs won the thing by 11–6. I was happy for my new friend, but what I had discovered about him was that he was a baseball fan first and a Cubs fan—and a dedicated one—well after that. Maybe that was part of the secret about winning and losing—the fan’s part. “What I love about Roger Craig is the way he’s always in the game,” Tim had said at one point. “He calls all the Giant pitchouts and pick-offs, you know. You remember how he used to do that when he was with the Tigers, I’m sure.” I did remember, because he had reminded me. Then, a little later—an instant later—the Giant pitcher Krukow picked Sandberg off first on a move (I checked it later) signalled by Craig from the dugout. It took the Cubs out of an inning, but I noticed that Shanahan clapped for the slick move just the same. He was in the game, too.

  Now I began to worry about the Giants. Their division lead was gone—Houston had won again—and after the game Craig spoke urgently about the necessity of getting out of town with a split in the series. Matters looked even graver the next afternoon—a beautiful day, a bit cooler, with a noisy family crowd on hand for a Sunday picnic of baseball—when the Cubs went up by 4–1 in the third inning; two pitches by Giants starter Roger Mason bounced by Bob Brenly for passed balls in the three-run second (both split-finger specials, by the look of them), and further damage was avoided only by a nifty pitchout, wigwagged by Craig, which allowed Brenly to cut down a base stealer with two Cubs on and no outs. Craig, in fact, was managing up a storm, at one point sending up a pinch-hitter for a batter in mid at-bat, with the count 3–1 (it didn’t work); the day before, he had relieved one of his relievers in the middle of the count. What did work on this day for the Giants was a brilliant turn at the plate in the fourth by first baseman Harry Spilman, who ran the count to 3–2 against the Cubs’ Dennis Eckersley and then fought off four outstanding sliders for fouls before Eckersley made a mistake, a fastball up, which Spilman hit into the right-field stands for a two-run homer. Spilman, an early-season pickup by the Giants after he was dropped by the Tigers, had been filling in elegantly for the injured and slumping rookie first baseman Will Clark, who had been sent down to Phoenix for rehabilitation. After the game, Spilman said, “That was probably the best at-bat I’ve ever had in the big leagues.”

  The Cubs were still up by a run when another Giants sub, Randy Kutcher, led off the eighth with a rocket to short, which Chicago shortstop Dunston fielded brilliantly and then horribly threw away, to put the tying run aboard. The Cubs infield defended in classic fashion against the inevitable upcoming bunt, but the batter, Robbie Thompson, pushed the ball beautifully to right, fast enough to get it past the pitcher and the onrushing first baseman, Durham, and short enough to allow the covering second baseman, Sandberg, no chance in the world to make a play. The bunt—a pearl of great price—went untouched, and a moment or two farther along Thompson outdid himself, pausing for an instant on the base path in order to hinder Durham’s view of Leonard’s weakly nubbed, lucky wrong-field infield bouncer to right. Durham lunged for the ball and barely missed it as it wobbled off into short right, and the game was tied, with Thompson on third; his run—he scored on a sacrifice fly by Brown, to put the Giants ahead—held up because Scott Garrelts, in from the pen, set down the six remaining Chicago batters in order, on fastballs that all measured in the mid-ninety-m.p.h. range. The Giants wound up with a 5–4 win and the split they had to have.

  How you assessed such a game depended on which clubhouse you visited. Eckersley, who had pitched very well indeed—he struck out nine Giants—was bitter about the fact that manager Gene Michael had allowed him to come up to bat in the seventh, with one out and a teammate on second, instead of wheeling in a pinch-hitter to try to deliver an insurance run. The loss ran Eckersley’s record to 3–6 for the year, and the Cubs’ to 38–50. “It’s just frustrating,” the Eck said. “I know everyone here feels the way I do, so why am I going to sit here and cry about it? It’s just been a terrible year for all of us.”

  In the Giants’ clubhouse, Roger Craig lit up his old-fashioned hook-stem pipe and blew a cloud of sweet smoke at the ceiling. “Humm baby,” he said.

  The teams I found on the grassy field at the Oakland Coliseum at the outset of their three-game series had come through such different terrain in this baseball summer as to make them resemble the principals in some morality play about reward and punishment, good fortune and bad. The Red Sox, here in the midst of their longest road trip of the summer, had just lost three out of four games at the Seattle Kingdome but still held a comfortable six-game lead over the second-place Yankees. At their high-water mark, ten days earlier, the Sox had led the pack by eight games and—to employ the statistic by which most baseball people measure team success or the lack of it—stood twenty-six games above the .500 mark. They had the league’s best pitcher in Clemens (then at 16–2) and the top batter in Wade Boggs (.
365). The A’s, in horrendous contrast, had slipped into the abyssal deep (a level at which the only light is provided by anglerfish and a few weirdly phosphorescent umpires), fifteen and a half games behind the West-leading Angels, but had lately managed a few feeble upward strokes under then-new manager, LaRussa, and now stood thirteen and a half back although still dead last. Their only current celebrity was Jose Canseco, the enormous, thick-armed rookie slugger, who was leading the league with twenty-three homers and seventy-eight runs batted in. June held very different memories for the two teams. The Bosox had begun that month with feelings of great trepidation, having lost their most experienced starting pitcher, Bruce Hurst, who had just gone on the disabled list with a groin injury, at a time when they were already making do without the services of another strong starter, Al Nipper, who was recovering from a severe spike wound suffered in a collision at home plate two weeks before. The Sox came through June with a fairish 15–10 record for the month, but somehow increased then-divisional lead from two and a half to eight games in the process. A five-game losing skid by the Yankees late in the month helped considerably, and so did Roger Clemens’ six consecutive June wins—Nos. 9 through 14. The word “stopper,” which is what Clemens is, doesn’t just mean that the man out there on the mound keeps the other team from scoring; what he really stops is his own club’s two-game and three-game losing streaks, which can suddenly become something much more damaging if not snipped short. The Bosox had swept a three-game series against the Yankees in mid-June and another three-game set against the Orioles at the end of the month, but that swoon by the Yankees was the kind of pure good fortune that all hot teams seem to experience, and even come to count on as being almost then-due. Back in May, the Red Sox had beaten the Indians, 2–0, in a game at Cleveland that was called after six innings—called by fog. Later on, they beat Toronto when a Blue Jay pitcher walked in the winning run in the tenth, and then, in a July game, they completed a four-run twelfth-inning rally against the Angels when the California pitcher was called for a balk that brought in the winning run.