The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  My guess about Dwight is that he slightly altered his pitching motion (his mechanics, in the parlance) this summer in the course of mastering his new off-speed delivery, and then found he couldn’t always get back the stuff and the great control that were there, game after game after game, last year. He said he was squeezing the ball too hard at times, he said he had problems with his location. Whatever it was, he wasn’t all of a piece out there, which is what great pitchers look like and the way they feel themselves to be when things are going right for them. Bob Boone, the Angels catcher, told me that it had probably taken young Mike Witt an extra season or two to get his pitching act together, because Witt is so tall. (He is six-seven.) “His checkpoints are farther apart,” Boone said, with a smile. Gooden’s checkpoints (this foot, that shoulder, the turn on the rubber, the microsecond when the arm starts forward, and so on) may have drifted apart by a fraction or two this summer, because of the very different motion and rhythm involved in throwing an off-speed delivery. Now he will have to get them together again.

  After Gooden’s departure in Game Four, Marty Barrett, the Red Sox second baseman, said, “I feel Dwight’s mechanics are a little off. I went against him in spring training when he had that great year last year, and he was more straight up and over the top then. Now it’s almost like he’s throwing over and moving across his body.” One of the Mets regulars said to me, “If Marty Barrett says anything like that, you can believe it. Anything from Barrett is like a message from Western Union. I think that’s what happened to Doc, and it made it a tough year for him. But we all have tough years. Now he’ll just have to go out there and get it back. Don’t bet against him.”

  *The news about Gooden’s difficulties with cocaine, which came to light in the early spring of 1987, damages this advice, of course, but it is still difficult to say whether Gooden’s addiction (he was a social or occasional user, according to his physicians) affected his work in 1986.

  Game Three, National League Championship Series

  IT CAME ON A chilly gray afternoon at Shea Stadium, and by the end of the second inning the Mets were in heavy weather of their own making, down by 4–0 to the Astro left-handed starter Bob Knepper. These N.L. playoffs, it will be recalled, had opened at the Astrodome with a dominant, almost suffocating 1–0 shutout performance by the Astros’ big, sleepy-faced right-hander Mike Scott, who had struck out fourteen Mets batters with his darting split-fingered fastball and high heater, thus nullifying a strong effort by Dwight Gooden. The visitors had evened matters the next day, when the Mets, blown away by Nolan Ryan in his first trip down their batting order, jumped on him for five quick runs on their second look, to win 5–1, behind their left-handed off-speed precisionist Bob Ojeda. But here at Shea the sudden four-run Houston lead looked serious, for Knepper, a ten-year veteran with exquisite control, had defeated the Mets three times during the regular season, and we knew that Scott, the best pitcher in the National League this year, would be back for the Astros the very next day. Watching these glum proceedings from my press seat in deep left field (the foul pole actually blocked my view of the mound), I was afflicted by grumpiness and self-pity. The night before, at home by my television set, I had watched the Red Sox drop a 5–3 game to the Angels out in Anaheim, to slip behind in their playoffs by two games to one. My dream was already coming apart, and here at my sixth game in five days (two up at Fenway Park and three via television) I felt baseballed out. Ron Darling, the Mets’ starter, had composed himself after two egregious innings (five hits, a base on balls to the No. 8 batter, two stolen bases, a wild pitch, and a two-run homer by second baseman Bill Doran), but the Mets in their dugout—as viewed unsteadily through my binoculars-looked glum and wintry, with their arms crossed and their paws buried in the pockets or the armpits of their shiny blue warmup jackets. In among them I could pick out Wally Backman and Lenny Dykstra, the Mets’ dandy two-cylinder self-starting machine that had figured in so many uprisings this summer, Dykstra bats from the left side and Backman is a switch hitter who does much better against right-handers, and so both were sitting out Knepper. (“I don’t care how fiery you are,” Mets manager Davey Johnson said about Dykstra before the game. “It’s on-base average that counts.”) The Shea multitudes made imploring noises from time to time, but they, too, looked muffled and apprehensive. Nothing doing.

  Kevin Mitchell led off the Mets’ sixth with a single over third, and Keith Hernandez followed with a modest fly ball that dropped into short center field for another hit—nothing much, except that Craig Reynolds, the Astro shortstop, now booted a grounder by Gary Carter (a double-play ball, in fact), sending Mitchell home, and Darryl Strawberry lofted Knepper’s next pitch into the first deck in right field, to tie the game. I revived instantly, but also briefly, for the Mets now handed back the gift run—a walk (Rick Aguilera was pitching for the home side by now), a throwing error by Ray Knight, and an infield out—and very soon thereafter had to deal with Charlie Kerfeld, the Astros’ lumpy, menacing right-handed rookie flamethrower, who blew out the candle in the eighth on a handful of pitches. Kerfeld is a hotdog—all shades, chaw, belly, and heat out there—and when he somehow reached behind his back to spear Carter’s hard one-hop grounder to the mound, he pointed at Gary as he ran up the line, relishing the moment before he threw him out.

  I had improved my seat by a section or two during the afternoon, scrounging the places of no-show reporters closer to the action, but at the end of the eighth I decamped for the interview room, just beyond the Mets clubhouse in the nether corridors of the park—a way to beat the crowds, and a pretty good vantage point from which to watch the last few outs of a game, by means of a giant television monitor. Panting, but certain of my long wisdom in these matters, I attained my goal, to find the room virtually deserted: somebody had forgotten to set up the monitor. And so it happened that I got to see not the longest game-winning home run of my life but certainly the smallest—the sudden two-run, bottom-of-the-ninth smash to right by Lenny Dykstra that I watched, huddling with similarly misplaced media friends, via a palm-size Sony Watchman TV set that one foresighted reporter had brought along to the game. Peering like microbiologists, we watched the mini-replays and filled in the missing details. Backman, pinch-hitting, had dropped a leadoff bunt down the first-base line and made a skidding slide into the bag around an attempted tag by first baseman Glenn Davis; then he had motored along to second on a passed ball. The Houston pitcher was the Astros’ short-relief specialist Dave Smith, who had been wheeled in by manager Hal Lanier to wrap things up, thus expunging Kerfeld. Now a postage-stamp-size Backman, seen in black-and-white slow-motion replay, flung up his arms as he watched Dykstra’s homer sail into the Mets’ bullpen and then began his jumping, backward-running dance toward third, while the rest of the Mets streamed onto the field to celebrate the 6–5 victory and their sudden lead in the playoffs. Dykstra, it should be explained, had come into the game in the seventh, when he fanned against Knepper. Davey Johnson was proud of this maneuver (he likes to have his pair of deuces in there late in a game), and explained that he had guessed—guessed right, it turned out—that Knepper would shortly be done for the day, leaving Dykstra still in there to swing against a right-hander his next licks.

  Dykstra is a pistol. In this, his first full season, he not only had won the job in center field (moving Mookie Wilson to left, on most days, and permitting the club to drop the increasingly ineffective George Foster) but had quickly emplaced his engaging and brattish mannerisms in our mass Shea consciousness—his odd preliminary forward lean in the batter’s box, with bat held upright, as if to conk a burglar; the facial twitches, winces, and squinchings as he prepares for the pitch, and, before that, the peculiar, delicate twiddling of a gloved fingertip along his brow; the joyful little double jump and hand pop as he comes to a dusty stop beyond first with another base hit; and, contrariwise, his disbelieving, Rumpelstiltskin stamp of rage when a pitcher has caught a corner against him for strike three. Here in the interview room,
Lenny was all cool and charisma—a guest on some late-night talk show. He said that the only other time he had hit a winning home run in the bottom of the ninth was in Strat-O-Matic (a board game), against his kid brother, Kevin.

  In the clubhouses, I heard more talk about Strawberry’s home run than about Dykstra’s. Strawberry had suffered through a ghastly midsummer batting slump (he was booed horrendously by the upper-deck critics at Shea, where he went 0 for August), and had looked particularly helpless against left-handed pitching. The three-run homer struck off Knepper meant something, then—something beyond this game. Keith Hernandez said, “Baseball is a constant learning experience. Nothing happens very quickly for most hitters, and you have to remind yourself that Darryl is still only twenty-four years old. He’s played four years in the majors, but he’s still a baby. It isn’t often that a Gehrig or a Mattingly comes along, who can do it all at the plate right away. When I first came up, the Matlacks and Koosmans and Carltons of this league—all those left-handers—gave me fits. Jim Rooker just killed me at the plate. You have to be patient and try to learn to adjust, and Darryl is still learning.”

  What happened on this afternoon (and again in the fifth game of the playoff, when Straw whacked another telling homer against the Astros) did not quite turn Strawberry’s year around, for he batted only .208 in the World Series, with six strikeouts and a lone, superfluous home run and run batted in on his very last at-bat. He is an enigma and a challenge, perhaps to himself as much as to us and to his club, and his style (those thick, long young arms; the looping, easeful swing; the long-loping catch in right-center field that ends with a casual heavenward reach to suck in the ball, with the gesture of somebody taking down a hat from a top shelf) is always so effortless that it looks magical when it succeeds and indolent when it fails. Each year, we wait for the performance that will lift his numbers (.259 this year, with twenty-seven homers and ninety-three runs batted in) to the next level, which is superstardom; each year, that once-certain goal seems a little farmer away.

  Here in the clubhouse, Strawberry said that Knepper had been throwing him breaking balls all afternoon (he’d nubbed one down the third-base line in the fifth, for a thirty-foot single), and he had guessed fastball the next time up—guessed right, that is. The batting and first-base coach Bill Robinson said, “When Darryl got on base after that little hit, I said ‘That’s the way to beat on that ball!’ and he told me maybe that at-bat would make him stay in the next time up. And that’s what he did do—he kept his right side in on that swing and didn’t pull off the ball. I tell them all, ‘Guess fastball.’ You can adjust to a curveball, a knuckleball, a slider, or a change off the fastball, but it’s tough to guess a curveball, a knuckleball, a slider, or a change and men hit the fastball. I believe most pitchers will throw the fastball six out of ten times. So six out of ten times I’m sitting on dead red and knowing I still have a chance on the others. If Knepper throws me a good slider or something outside that’s nasty, I’m not going to hit it anyway. You can count me good breaking-ball hitters in this league on the fingers of one hand—well, the fingers of two hands. We’re all fastball hitters in the end.”

  Game Five, American League Championship Series

  Home in fine fettle after the Mets’ sudden resurrection that Saturday, I had a drink and some dinner, and took my ease in front of the set, where my Red Sox, out in the late sunshine at Anaheim Stadium, played resolute, patient ball in their almost boring Game Four, eventually dispatching the ancient and wily Don Sutton in the seventh inning. (I should explain that the two sets of playoffs never exactly overlapped in their progression, thanks to the vagaries of the network schedulers.) The Sox’ 3–0 lead midway through the ninth looked safe as houses, for their pitcher was Roger Clemens, their soon-to-be winner of both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player awards in his league; he had gone 24–4 for the season, after winning his first fourteen decisions in a row, and had also established a new all-time record by striking out twenty batters in an April game against the Seattle Mariners. So far in this game, Clemens had simply brushed aside the Angels, allowing no one to reach third base; three more outs would bring the teams even in their playoff, at two games apiece. But in fact Clemens was running out of gas, and after a leadoff home run by Doug DeCinces in the ninth and one-out singles by Dick Schofield and Bob Boone he was abruptly gone. His successor, the young fastballer Calvin Schiraldi, suffered a nasty shock when a well-hit but catchable fly by Gary Pettis became a run-scoring double because Jim Rice lost the ball in the lights. With the score now 3–2, and with the bases loaded after an intentional pass, Schiraldi fanned Bobby Grich and went to two strikes and one ball on Brian Downing, but then hit him on the thigh with his overreaching next pitch (“Oh, no!” I cried, badly startling the snoozing terrier at my feet as I sailed up out of my chair, to the invisible balletic accompaniment of three or four million Sox fans to the north and east of me—along with their dogs, I suppose), to force in the tying run. The Angels won it in the eleventh (oh, yes), bringing exquisite joy to their rooters but ruin to my overcrowded baseball day.

  Game Five, played out lengthily at Anaheim the next afternoon, has already taken its place on the little list of Absolute All-Timers, and I must assume that its immoderate events are known by heart by even the most casual followers of the pastime. The Angels pitched their main man, Mike Witt, a spidery righthander with an exceptional curveball, which he throws in two variant modes; he had eaten up the Red Sox batters in the playoff opener, retiring the first seventeen in a row. Now he survived a two-run homer by Rich Gedman in the early going and was still in command as the ninth began, with his club ahead by 5–2, three outs away from a pennant. The last two California runs had come in when Dave Henderson, the second Boston center fielder of the day (he had entered the game after Tony Armas twisted an ankle), made a fine running catch of Grich’s deep drive, only to have the momentum of his effort carry the ball up over the top of the center-field wall and, appallingly, out of his glove for a home run. In the ninth, Witt gave up a single to Bill Buckner, fanned Rice, and then threw a pretty good breaking ball, down and away, to Don Baylor, who reached out and drove it over the left-field fence: a sobering moment there in Southern California.* Dwight Evans popped up for the second out, though, and manager Gene Mauch called in a left-hander, Gary Lucas, to pitch to the left-side batter Gedman, in search of one more out and a championship. The tactic, arguably logical (and arguably the only appropriate occasion for “arguably” ever to see print), since Gedman had ripped Witt for a homer, a double, and a single for the day, didn’t work, because Lucas plunked Gedman on the hand with his first pitch, thereby setting up the next confrontation, between Dave Henderson and the Angels’ less than imperious right-handed relief stopper Donnie Moore, who had thrown well in his most recent appearance. With the crowd putting up an insupportable din, with the ushers arrayed along the baselines and police stuffing the dugouts and bullpens, with the Angels up on their topmost dugout step for the pennant spring and the huggings and the champagne, Henderson worked the count to two and two, fouled off two fastballs, and then hit the next delivery—a forkball, perhaps—into the left-field seats. Silence and disbelief out there. Exultation on the opposite coast. The Angels, it will be recalled, quickly made up the new one-run deficit in their half of the ninth, and even had the next winning run—the pennant-winner once again—poised at third base when DeCinces popped to short right field and Grich lined out softly to the pitcher. These extended melodramatics had settled nothing so far (Al Michaels, the exemplary ABC television play-by-play man, summed things up along about here by saying, “If you’re just tuning in, too bad”), but now it suddenly seemed clear that the Red Sox would win, although that took a couple of innings: a hit batsman (it was Baylor), a single, an unplayable bunt by Gedman, and the winning sacrifice fly to center—by Henderson, of course. Schiraldi came in at the end and got the save. The Angels repacked their gear and de-iced the champagne (I guess) and returned to Boston, where
they lost their last two games of the year, 10–4 and 8–1. “I don’t think we ever should have had to come back here,” Donnie Moore said when it was all over.

  My eagle-eye view of Game Five was not nearly as clear as I have depicted it, since duty forced me to leave my TV set in the middle of the ninth that evening and head back to Shea for the fourth Mets-Astros affray, and I picked up most of the amazing and extended events in Anaheim over my car radio while tooling along op the Grand Central Parkway. Taking pity on his old man, my son taped the action on our VCR, and when I got home very late that night (the Mets had lost again to Mike Scott, just as I had feared) I played the last three innings over for myself, and, sure enough, the Red Sox won, 7–6, in eleven innings. It was the first time all month I didn’t have to keep score.

  I thought back on this game many times after the Red Sox had won their championship and the Angels had packed up and gone home for the winter, but with a good deal less than pure pleasure. These last-moment reprieves and reversals are so anguishing for the losing players and coaches (and the fans, too, to be sure) that one’s thoughts return to them unbidden, long after the winners’ celebrations have been forgotten. Players in the winning clubhouse always look like boys (and not just because they are behaving like infants), while the ones in the other clubhouse resemble veteran combat soldiers who have barely survived some dreadful firefight. They look worse after a playoff defeat than after the World Series, because the losing team in a championship elimination has won nothing at all; it has become a trivia question. Even the Red Sox players, I noticed later on, talked about their narrow escape in Game Five with dire, near-funereal images. “We were on our deathbed,” Roger Clemens said. “The heartbeat meter was on a straight line.” John McNamara, who has a whispery, monsignorlike habit of speech, said to me, “We were dead and buried. When Henderson went to two strikes and the police were all set to go, I looked over and saw Reggie taking off his glasses in their dugout, getting ready for the celebration. That’s how close we were.”