by Roger Angell
I feel bad about the Angels, who were a team made up of some distinguished, or very well-known, older players—Don Sutton, Reggie Jackson, Doug DeCinces, Bob Boone, Brian Downing, George Hendrick, Rick Burleson, and Bobby Grich (Sutton and Jackson are in their forties, and the others in their upper thirties)—who fitted well with younger stars like Dick Schofield, Gary Pettis, Mike Witt, Kirk McCaskill, and the splendid rookie first baseman Wally Joyner. (He missed all but the first game of the playoffs with a leg infection.) I see that I have just referred to the Angels in the past tense, which is understandable, for this particular Angels team has ceased to exist. Grich has already retired, Jackson is a free agent—with no assurance that anyone will pick him up for next season—and so are Downing, Boone, and DeCinces, and management has been extremely quiet about which of the other expensive old-timers we will see in Anaheim next summer. I feel sorry for Gene Autry, the seventy-nine-year-old president and chairman of the board, who is revered in the game (he is known as the Cowboy) and has owned the still pennantless team ever since its inception, as an expansion club, in 1961.
I even feel bad about the Angels fans. There is a popular dumb theory here in the East that there is no such thing as a California Angels fan, and that those two-and-a-half-million-attendance totals at Anaheim Stadium, year after year, are made up of moonlighting sunbathers and foot-weary families resting up from Disneyland. This is parochial nonsense, of course, and it’s about time we old-franchise inheritors admitted the Angelvolk to the ranks of the true sufferers—the flagellants, the hay-in-the-hair believers, the sungazers, the Indians-worshippers, the Cubs coo-coos, the Twins-keepers, the Red Sox Calvinists: the fans. I have heard from a few of them by mail. One pen pal, a professor of Byzantine history from Canoga Park, California, sent me a five-page single-spaced typed letter delineating his pains and his heroes down the years, starting in 1961, when the Angels played at the Pacific Coast League Wrigley Field, in Los Angeles, and won seventy games in their very first season. “Now we know that rooting for the Angels is just like rooting for the Red Sox,” he wrote. “One does it guardedly, always looking over one’s shoulder.” Another Angels correspondent, a medical-journal editor who lives in San Francisco, sent along his scorecards for the A.L. playoff games this fall—beautifully detailed, meticulously executed, pitch-by-pitch delineations of the seven games, which concluded with a gigantic, smudgy execration of Gene Mauch scrawled across the bottom of the seventh-game score-card: the last Angels loss of the year. My correspondent apologized for this in a covering note: “I’m sorry—I was very upset. I still am.”
I feel bad about Gene Mauch, too—everybody feels bad about Mauch by now—who has managed in the majors for twenty-five years without ever setting foot in the World Series, although he had come excruciatingly close before this. In 1964, his Phillies led the National League (this was before divisional play) by six and a half games with two weeks to go, and then lost ten of their last twelve games and, on the last day, the pennant. Four years ago, his Angels led the Milwaukee Brewers in the five-game American League playoffs by two games to one but lost—an outcome so painful that Mauch moved up to the front office for a couple of seasons, and took up the managerial burdens again only last year. He is a dour, unapologetic baseball chancellor (a former colleague of his told me that he’d never heard Mauch ask an opinion or invite a discussion about any move he had made, on or off the field), who has acquired a sharply divided body of passionate loyalists and dedicated doubters in the press boxes and front offices of the game. He has also been second-guessed as much as anyone in his hard profession, but this, I have come to believe, is due not so much to his hard-shell exterior or to his reputation for over-managing as to a deep wish, however unconscious, among other managers and players and watchers of the game to prove that baseball really is more tractable, more manageable in its results, more amenable to tactics and patience and clear thinking, than it seems to have been for him. All of us—even us fans—want the game to be kinder to us than it has been to Gene Mauch, and we are terribly anxious to find how that could be made to happen. No group of games in recent memory had produced anything like the second-guessing of managers that one heard at these two championships, but this is explained, to my way of thinking, by the fact that five of the thirteen games were settled in the ninth inning or later—in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and sixteenth, to be precise—and that prolonging reties were also produced, twice in a ninth inning and once in a fourteenth.
Mauch’s moves during Boston’s ninth inning of that fifth game, when the three-run Angels lead was converted to a one-run deficit, will be a Gettysburg for tactical thinkers for years to come. An old friend of mine who has managed extensively in both leagues was in Anaheim that afternoon, and later on I asked him what it was like when it all began to come apart for the Angels out there, and what he would have done in the same circumstances.
“When Baylor hit his home run, the game still didn’t have that feeling of doom,” he said. “You thought, All right, you don’t win 5–2, you win 5–4. There were so many different directions Gene could have gone—he just chose the one that didn’t work. Gedman looked like the problem, because he’d gone three for three against Witt. But for me, the one to worry about, the key batter, is the next guy, the right-handed hitter Henderson, and I’m not too worried about him, because my very best right-handed pitcher—my best pitcher of all—is still in the game. Mike Witt, I mean. He’s just struck out Rice and popped up Evans, so he can’t be all that tired. If he loses Gedman somehow, he just needs to get Henderson out, and if he can’t do that, then we don’t deserve the pennant. And Henderson would have a whole lot more trouble against him than against a Donnie Moore.
“We know that Gene went to Lucas, and Lucas came in and hit Gedman. Gene’s move could have worked, but I think the wrong man hit Gedman. If Witt hits him, it’s a very different story. With Witt on the mound and Gedman coming up to bat and all eager for that next rip at my pitcher, I would have walked out to Witt and said, “Look, the next batter is the one you want. Don’t worry about Mr. Gedman. Hit him on the hip with your first pitch, and if you miss go back and hit him with the next one. Then go after Henderson and we’re out of this and into the World Series.’
“You know, when Donnie Moore came in after Lucas, I had the same little feeling I’d had back in Milwaukee when Gene’s Angels got so close in ’82: Now, wait a minute: this is ours, but it isn’t quite ours yet—let’s not gather the bats. And then it all happened again. The fans took it hard, but I think they felt, Well, OK, we still just need one of the two games back in Boston. But you only had to look at the players’ faces to know that it had gotten away from them and it might never come back. Once that phoenix gets out of the ashes, he wants to fly.”
My friend the manager told me that he felt terrible about Gene Mauch. “He’s been in this place for so long, and he won’t give in to it and he won’t walk away from it. This one’s going to be very tough for him. He gets within one pitch and one run of the Series, but all those ‘one’s are still there for him. I know Gene, and I know all the cigarettes that have been smoked and the drinks that have been drunk and the miles that have been paced over this kind of thing, down the years. He’ll pay that price to get there, but now I don’t know if it will ever happen for him. How do you go on?”
*Baylor’s home ran, which I watched again and again in taped replay during the winter, ranks as Feat of the Month in this feat-filled October. Witt’s pitch broke sharply away over the farthermost part of the strike zone, and Baylor not only got his bat on it but somehow muscled the ball over the opposite-side fence.
Game Six, National League Championship Series
I wasn’t there, and had to pick up most of its extended, convoluted, and startling events in bits and pieces—by television and cab radio and word of mouth and television again—and then put them together in my head at last with the help of another tape made for me by the Mets screamers at my house. I was in Boston
for the American League finale, and the Mets and Astros, as we know, had moved back to the Astrodome. The day before, I had seen the Mets go one up in their playoffs, in a makeup afternoon game at Shea (the thing had been rained out the night before), in which Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden pitched each other to a 1–1 standstill over the regulation distance. Ryan, who is thirty-nine years old, fanned twelve Mets and threw a two-hitter, but one of the two was a home run by Strawberry. Ryan left after nine innings and Gooden after ten, and the Mets won in the twelfth, when Gary Carter rapped a run-scoring single past Kerfeld’s rump, which Charlie this time did not grab behind his back, although he tried. The Astros were sore about an umpire’s out call at first base, which had cost them a run back in the second inning, but nothing could be done about it, of course.
I took in most of Game Six the next afternoon by television in my Boston hotel room—not much sport, to tell the truth, for the Mets instantly fell behind by three runs in the first inning, and could do nothing at all against Bob Knepper over their initial eight. It’s embarrassing to curse and groan and shout “C’mon!” twenty or thirty times in an empty hotel room, but yelling and jumping up and down on the bed—which is what I did during Dykstra’s pinch-hit triple, Mookie’s single, Keith’s double, and Ray Knight’s game-tying sac, all in the Mets ninth—is perfectly all right, of course. And here, perhaps, we should pause for statistical confirmation of the kind of baseball week that it had turned out to be. Somebody along about here had noticed or discovered that in the six hundred and forty-two postseason games played prior to 1986 no team had ever made up a deficit of more than two runs in its final chance at bat. Now it had happened three times in five days.*
Darkness had fallen on the Public Garden by the time the Mets got all even, and I was overdue at Fenway Park. Four or five times, I turned off the set, grabbed my game gear, and headed for the door, only to come back and click on again for another out or two. (I didn’t know it at the time, but millions of Mets fans in New York were in the same pickle; baseball had burst its seams and was wild in the streets.) The Mets scratched out a run at last in the fourteenth, against Aurelio Lopez (possibly a leftover character actor from a Cisco Kid movie), and that was good enough for me: the Mets had it in hand for sure. I doused the game and headed out to keep my other date, and so missed Billy Hatcher’s gargantuan solo home run into the left-field foul-pole screen, which retied things in the bottom half. The sixteenth did wrap it up at very long last, but my patchwork impressions of its events (snatches over somebody’s radio just ahead of me on the outside staircase at Fenway Park, and then glimpses on a TV monitor at the back of the overstuffed rooftop pressroom while several scribe friends tried to catch me up, viva voce, at the same time) have required subsequent firming up by tape. The Mets’ three runs in the top half of the sixteenth and the Astros’ gallant but insufficient answering pair in the bottom are still thrilling, of course, but the fatigue and bad nerves of the principals make you jittery, even in replay. Strawberry’s mighty-swing semi-bloop fly became a double when the Houston center fielder, Hatcher, got a very late start in for the ball, and a throwing error by right fielder Kevin Bass and two wild pitches helped the Mets almost as much as Knight’s single and then Dykstra’s. Jesse Orosco (who won three games in the playoffs) was so arm-weary by the uttermost end that fastballs became an impossibility for him; one last, expiring sinker fanned Bass, with the tying run at second, and that was the pennant. A moment or two earlier, Davey Johnson (he told some of us about this back in New York), with the enormous, domed-in roarings of the Houston multitudes cascading and reverberating around him, noticed that his nearest companion in the Mets’ dugout, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, looked a tad nervous. Davey leaned closer and said, “Come on, Mel, you knew this had to come down to one run in the end. It’s that kind of game.”
What I missed by not being in Houston that day may have been less than what I missed by not being in New York. The pennant-clinching celebrations in Boston were happy indeed (about a four on the Roger Scale), but the excruciating prolongation and eventual exultation of the Mets’ Game Six were something altogether different—a great public event, on the order of a blackout or an armistice. The game began at 3:06, New York time, and ended at 7:48, and in that stretch millions of Mets fans in and around New York, caught between their day-watch of the game and some other place they had to be, found themselves suspended in baseball’s clockless limbo, in a vast, mobile party of anxious watching and listening and sudden release. Sports can bring no greater reward than this, I think. In time, I—like many others, I imagine—began to collect Game Six stories: where folks had been that night, and what they had seen and heard and done during the long game’s journey into night. There was no rush hour in New York that evening, I kept hearing: so many office workers stayed in their offices to follow the game that the buses and avenues in midtown looked half empty. Subway riders on the IRT platform at Grand Central heard the score and the inning over the train announcer’s loudspeaker. A man I know who was in bed with the flu or something said that he rose to a sitting position during the Mets’ rally in the ninth, and then left his bed and paced the floor; when it was all over, he got up and got dressed and was cured. Another man, a film editor—not at all a fan—was running around the Central Park Reservoir when a strange, all-surrounding noise stopped him in his tracks. It came from everywhere around the Park, he said, and it wasn’t a shout or a roar but something closer to a sudden great murmuring of the city: the Mets had won.
Men and women on commuter trains followed the news by Panasonic or Sony, clustering around each radio set for the count and the pitch, and calling the outs and the base runners to the others in their car. At the Hartsdale platform, in Westchester, a woman with a Walkman, having said goodbye to other alighting commuters as they hurried off to their car radios, started up a stairway and then stopped and cried “Oh!” Her companions from the train stared up at her, stricken, and she said, “Gary got thrown out, stealing.” There were portables and radios at Lincoln Center, too, where the ticket holders at the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of “The Marriage of Figaro” reluctantly gave the game up at seven-thirty and went in and took their seats for the overture. After a moment or two, a man in the orchestra section sprang up and disappeared through a side exit; he slipped back in a few minutes later (he’d found someone in the cloakroom with a radio, he subsequently explained) and, resuming his seat at the beginning of Figaro and Susanna’s opening duet, turned and signalled, “Seven-four in the sixteenth!” on his fingers to the rows around him, and then did a thumbs-up to show he meant the Mets. A newspaperman heading back home to New York stopped off in an airport bar at Boston’s Logan Airport, where the game was on, and fell into Mets conversation there with a woman who turned out to be a Merrill Lynch investment broker; they missed the three-o’clock, the four-o’clock, and the five-o’clock Eastern shuttles, somehow tore themselves away for the six-o’clock—and discovered that the game was still on when they deplaned at La Guardia. A colleague of mine who lives in New Jersey said that while going home he’d followed the game by stages over a spontaneous electronic relay network that had sprung up along the way—a TV set in the fire station on Forty-third Street, a wino’s radio in Grace Plaza, a big TV in the window of a video store on Sixth Avenue, some kids with a boom box in the doorway of a Spanish deli, and then a crowd-encircled gray stretch limo parked in Herald Square, with its doors open and the windows rolled down and, within, a flickering tiny television set turned to the game. Radios on his PATH train went blank during the journey under the Hudson but they came back to life in the Hoboken station, where he changed to a New Jersey Transit train, and where the Astros retied the game in the fourteenth. A frightful communications disaster—the long tunnel just before the Meadowlands—was averted when his train, a rolling grandstand, unexpectedly ground to a halt (“Signal difficulties,” a conductor announced), and stood right there through the top of the sixteenth, when the Mets scored three and s
ervice resumed.
Writer friends wrote me about the game, too. A woman’s letter began, “My friend Sandy came over to my place for the game with a quart of beer and some snacks—he doesn’t have a color TV set. Sandy and I had been to a couple of games at Shea together, and I assumed it would be just about the same, but this was more like the time we’d been to see the movie ‘Dawn of the Dead’—he kept turning his face away from the screen in dread. I kept up a casual, chatty, reassuring act, saying comforting things like ‘It’s all right now. Ojeda is totally in command,’ but then there was this one terrifying closeup of Knepper out on the mound—eyes burning and steam coming out of his ears. A real image from a horror movie. As the game went on, I realized that I was living it through the Mets pitchers, maybe because the pitcher’s motions can give you that trancelike feeling of security. Just about all I was aware of late in the game was McDowell’s right leg coming down and that little bow-legged hop he takes after every pitch, over and over. As long as I kept seeing that, I knew we’d be all right.”
An art critic who lives in the East Village wrote, “At our apartment during the late innings of Game Six were my wife Brooke, our daughter Ada, myself, two dinner guests, and two people who had dropped in on short notice and then stayed around. One of the guests was Nell, a film director we like a lot, even though she’s one of those people who can’t believe that anyone of your intelligence actually cares about baseball. One of the drop-ins, an Australian poet named John, knew nothing—nothing!—about baseball but took a benign attitude, asking polite, wonderfully dumb questions about the game. The other drop-in was Aldo, our neighborhood cop on the beat, a Mets fan and a friend. Aldo was in full cop gear, and voices crackled from his walkie-talkie: cops out there talking about the game.
