The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  “Nell is one of those people who don’t know any policemen and who can’t believe that you do. She looked at Aldo for a while and then said, ‘Excuse me, but what are you doing here?’ I had to explain that it was all right, he was here for the game.

  “I don’t remember it all, but of course I do remember the growing delirium—like trying to explain to John what a foul ball was and how to throw a slider, and Nell becoming more and more agitated, and Brooke assuming her old rally posture in a particular doorway we have, and then, at the very end, all the whooping and hollering and inaccurate high-fiving, and some wild hugging. Nell was leaning out the window shrieking with joy.”

  *Bobby Thomson’s miracle ninth-inning, three-run homer in 1951, which put down the Dodgers and won the pennant for the Giants, has not been overlooked here. The two clubs had finished their seasons in a tie, and the homer came in the final game of a two-out-of-three playoff. This was an extension of the season, in short, and batting and pitching records in the games were included in the 1951 league statistics.

  Game Five, World Series

  This was less than a classic, perhaps, but there was spirit and pleasure in it. The home-team Red Sox ravished their Fenway supporters with a 4–2 win, behind their mettlesome left-hander Bruce Hurst, and defeated Dwight Gooden for the second time in the process. This was the Sox’ high-water mark (it turned out later), putting them ahead by three games to two, but it also felt like the first game in which the Series competition was fully joined. The Bostons, it will be recalled, had won the Series opener down at Shea, with a splendid 1–0 effort by Hurst against Ron Darling, in which the only run had come in on an error by Mets second baseman Tim Teufel. A promised Gooden-Clemens thriller the next day came to nothing when the Sox won by 9–3, doing away with Dwight almost without effort; Clemens, for his part, was wild, and was gone in the fifth inning. This was Dwight Evans’ great game: a mighty two-run homer that caromed off a tent marquee out beyond left-center field, and then a lovely sliding, twisting catch against Dykstra in right. Up in Boston, the Mets, now in a jam, rebounded strongly, with four first-inning runs against Oil Can Boyd in Game Three; Dykstra’s leadoff home run set the tone, all right, but the central figure of the evening may have been the Mets’ lithe left-hander Bobby Ojeda, a member of the Red Sox pitching corps last year, who nibbled the corners authoritatively (“You don’t live in one place in this ballpark,” he said later) in the course of his 7–1 outing, and became the first left-hander to win a postseason game at Fenway Park since Hippo Vaughn turned the trick for the Cubs in 1918. Those two quick losses to the Red Sox in the early games meant that Davey Johnson would be overdrawn at the pitching bank in the ensuing games, but he got even at last in Game Four, when Ron Darling shut down the Sox for seven innings (he gave up no earned runs at all in his first two outings), and the Mets roughed up Al Nipper et al. with twelve hits, including two homers by Gary Carter. (A missing figure in the Red Sox pitching rotation was Tom Seaver, who suffered a knee-cartilage tear in September and was forced to sit out all the postseason games: hard news for Sox fans—and for Mets fans, too, I believe.)

  Hurst’s work here in Game Five was the kind of pitcher’s outing that I have most come to admire over the years—a masterful ten-hitter, if that is possible. This was his fourth start in postseason play, and although he was not nearly as strong as he had looked during his gemlike shutout at Shea, he used what he had and kept matters in check, scattering small hits through the innings and down the lineup, and racking up ground-ball outs in discouraging (to the Mets) clusters with his forkball. (“IT HURSTS SO GOOD,” one Fenway fan banner said.) The pitch, which disconcertingly breaks down and away from right-handed batters, sets up the rest of his repertoire—a curve and a sneaky-quick fastball—and although Hurst resolutely refers to it as a forkball, it is in fact the ever-popular new split-fingered fastball (sort of a forkball), which Hurst learned in 1984. He didn’t actually have enough confidence to use the pitch in a game until late June last year, at a time when he had been exiled to the Red Sox bullpen, but it revived his career wonderfully, transforming him from a journeyman 33–40 lifetime pitcher (in five and a half seasons) to a 22–14 winner in the subsequent going. Hurst missed seven weeks this summer with a groin injury, but he de-convalesced rapidly, wrapping up his season’s work by going 5–0 and 1.07 in his last five starts, which won him a league accolade as Pitcher of the Month in September. Despite all this, I think we should be wary about making too much of one particular delivery, for pitching is harder than that. Hurst, it should be noticed, belongs to the exclusive Fenway Lefties Finishing School, which numbers two other polished and extremely successful southpaw practitioners among its graduates: Bob Ojeda and John Tudor, who pitched the Cardinals to a pennant last year with a tremendous 21–8, 1.93 summer and then won three games in postseason play. Ojeda, for his part, had an 18–5 record with the Mets this year, which was the best won-lost percentage compiled by any of the Mets’ celebrated starters; it was the best in the league, in fact. Previously, Ojeda had toiled for six summers in Fenway Park, and Tudor for five. The uniting characteristics of the three Wallmasters are control, extreme confidence, and a willingness to come inside. At Fenway Park, the inside pitch to a right-handed hitter is what it’s all about, for it discourages him from leaning out over the plate in the hope of something he can rap onto or over the Green Monster, and requires him, in fact, to compete with the man on the mound for his—the pitcher’s—part of the plate and for his sector of the ballpark, which is to say outside, and to right or right-center: a mismatch. The inside pitch, it should be added, is mostly thrown in the early innings, to plant the idea of it in the batter’s head, but is then eschewed in the late going, when weariness is more likely to result in a tiny, fatal mistake. Actually, it doesn’t have to be thrown for a strike in order to have its effect, and unless you are a Clemens or someone of that order, it’s probably a much better pitch, all in all, if it’s a ball. “What Ojeda does, over and over, is one of the beauties of the game,” Keith Hernandez said at one point in the Series. “When you miss, you’ve got to miss where it doesn’t hurt you. That’s what pitching is all about.” For his part, Hurst, who throws over the top and finishes his delivery with a stylish little uptailed kick of his back leg, works with great cheerfulness and energy, and here in Game Five he finished his evening’s work with a flourish, fanning Dykstra for the last out of the game, with Mets runners on first and third. “BRUCE!” the fans yowled, “BRUUUUCE!”

  It was a great night at the Fens. A gusty wind blew across the old premises (left to right, for the most part), and a couple of advertising balloons out beyond the wall bucked and dived in the breeze, tearing at their tethers. The long cries from the outermost fan sectors (the oddly slanting aisles out there looked like ski trails dividing the bleacher escarpments) came in windblown gusts, suddenly louder or fainter. The wind got into the game, too, knocking down one long drive by Henderson in the second (it was poorly played by Strawberry) and another by Jim Rice in the fifth, which sailed away from Dykstra and caromed off the top railing of the Sox’ bullpen—triples, both of them, and runs thereafter. It was the kind of game in which each player on the home team (in that beautiful whiter-than-white home uniform, with navy sweatshirt sleeves, red stirrups, the curved, classical block-letter “RED SOX” across the chest, and a narrow piping of red around the neck and down the shirtfront) seems to impress his own special mode or mannerism on your memory: Rich Gedman’s lariatlike swirl of the bat over his head as he swings through a pitch; Rice’s double cut with the bat when he misses—swish-swish—with the backward retrieving swing suggesting a man trying to kill a snake; Boggs’ way of dropping his head almost onto the bat as he stays down in midswing; Buckner (with that faro-dealer’s mustache and piratical daubings of anti-glare black on his cheeks) holding the bat in his extended right hand and, it seems, aiming it at the pitcher’s eyes as he stands into the box for an at-bat. And so on. Almost everyone out there, it seemed�
�every one of the good guys, that is—had his moment in the game to celebrate and be put aside in recollection by the fans: Hendu’s triple and double, Marty Barrett’s walk and single and double (he batted .433 for the Series), a beautiful play by Boggs on Kevin Mitchell’s tough grounder in the second, and, best of all, Billy Buck’s painful and comical hobbling gallop around third and in to the plate in the third inning to bring home the second run of the game on a single by Evans. Buckner can barely run (can barely play) at all, because of his sore back and his injury-raddled ankles; it takes him two hours to ice and wrap his legs before he can take the field. He had torn an Achilles tendon in the September 29th game and was playing in this one only on courage and painkillers and with the help of protective high-top boots. No one wanted to laugh at his journey home after Evans bounced the ball up the middle, but you couldn’t help yourself. He looked like Walter Brennan coming home—all elbows and splayed-out, achy feet, with his mouth gaping open with the effort, and his head thrown back in pain and hope and ridiculous deceleration. When he got there, beating the throw after all, he flumped belly-first onto the plate and lay there for a second, panting in triumph, and, piece by piece, got up a hero.

  This was the last home game of the year for the Red Sox, and when it was over the fans stayed in the stands for a time (John Kiley gave them “McNamara’s Band” on the organ again and again), clustering thickly around the home dugout and calling out for Hurst and Billy Buckner and the others, and shouting “We’re Number One!” and waving their white Red Sox painters’ caps in exuberance. There had been great anxiety about this game, because of the Mets’ sudden revival in Games Three and Four, but now the Sox were moving down to New York for one more win, with a rested Clemens going on Saturday and with Hurst ready again, if needed, on Sunday, and I don’t think anyone there at the end that night really thought it might not happen. There is great sadness in this, in retrospect, since the team’s eventual loss (and the horrendous way of it, on each of the last two days) has brought back the old miasmal Boston baseball doubt and despair—the Bermuda low that has hung over this park and this team perhaps since the day in 1920 when owner Harry Frazee sold a good young outfielder named Babe Ruth to the Yankees, two seasons after Ruth, then a pitcher, had helped bring the Sox their last (to this day) World Championship. Once again, New England’s fans have been sent into the winter with the dour nourishment of second-best to sustain them: Indian pudding. If they wish, they may once again ponder the wisdom of George Bernard Shaw’s opinion that there are two tragedies in this world: one is never getting what you want, and the other is getting it—a dictum they would love to put to the test someday. But enough of this. Glooming in print about the dire fate of the Sox and their oppressed devotees has become such a popular art form that it verges on a new Hellenistic age of mannered excess. Everyone east of the Hudson with a Selectric or a word processor has had his or her say, it seems (the Globe actually published a special twenty-four-page section entitled “Literati on the Red Sox” before the Series, with essays by George Will, John Updike, Bart Giamatti—the new National League president, but for all that a Boston fan through and through—Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and other worthies), and one begins to see at last that the true function of the Red Sox may be not to win but to provide New England authors with a theme, now that guilt and whaling have gone out of style. I would put forward a different theory about this year’s loss and how it may be taken by the fans. As one may surmise from the Globe’s special section, the Red Sox have become chic: Pulitzer Prize winners and readers of the New York Review of Books hold season tickets behind first base, and the dropped “Geddy” and “Dewey” and “Roger” and “the Can” clang along with the sounds of cutlery and grants chat at the Harvard Faculty Club. The other, and perhaps older, fan constituency at Fenway Park has not always been as happy and philosophical about the Sox. The failures of the seventies and early eighties were taken hard by the Boston sports crowd (the men and women who care as much about the Celtics and the Patriots and the Bruins as they do about the Sox), and the departure of Carlton Fisk, Rick Burleson, Freddy Lynn, and Luis Tiant, and the retirement (at long last) of Yastrzemski, left a very bitter taste, and so did the team’s persistent, almost stubborn unsuccess in this decade. (It finished fifth, fourth, and sixth in the American League East in the three years before this one, an average nineteen games behind the leader.) The ugly “Choke Sox” label was much heard, and the team’s ancient, stubbornly held style of play, characterized by insufficient pitching, insufficient or nonexistent speed, a million ground-ball double plays (by the Sox, I mean), and an almost religious belief in the long ball, had become a byword in the game, a “pahk your cah” joke around the league. Nothing could change this, it seemed. But this year it changed: a baseball miracle. This year, the Red Sox not only won their division and the American League playoffs and, very nearly, the World Series, but became a different sort of team, to themselves above all. Nineteen-eighty-six turned around for the Red Sox because of Roger Clemens (and perhaps because of Schiraldi’s sudden mid-season arrival as a bullpen stopper), but a more significant alteration was one of attitude—a turnabout that began when Don Baylor came over from the Yankees and almost immediately became the team leader, something the Sox had been lacking for as long as anyone could remember. He told the young pitchers that they had to pitch inside if the team was to win; he persuaded the batters to take the extra base, to look for ways to get on base in the late innings (like getting hit with pitches, for instance: a Baylor specialty), to find that little edge—the one play or moment or lucky hop—that turns games around. Tom Seaver came aboard in June, and deepened this same aura with his maturity, his ease, and his sense of humor and proportion. The Sox grew up this summer: you could see it on the field—in Jim Rice choking up on the bat by an inch or so when he got to two strikes (this for the first time ever) and stroking the ball to right-center now and then, so that though his homers went down by seven (to twenty), his batting average improved by thirty-three points and his hits by forty-one—and in the results. The players spoke of it themselves. “We have more character,” they said, and “We’re going to win”—words unheard by this writer from any Boston club of the past.

  What fans think about their team is subtle and hard to pin down, but I am convinced that everything was changed this year by one game—by that stubborn and lucky and altogether astounding Red Sox return from near-defeat in the fifth game out at Anaheim, when they came back from extinction and a three-run deficit in the ninth inning and won by 7–6. It almost carried the month, and it is startling to notice, in retrospect, that the Red Sox actually won five games in a row right in the middle of the postseason—the last three of their championship playoffs and the first two of the World Series. There is no prize for this, of course, but no other team in October played quite so well for quite so long. In its killing last-minute details, their loss to the Mets in Game Six (they fell after holding a two-run lead in the tenth inning, with no one on base for the Mets) was so close to what the Angels had experienced that their fans—even the most deep-dark and uncompromising among the bleacher-ites, I think—must have seen the connection, and at last sensed the difficulties of this game and how much luck and character and resolve it takes to be a winner in the end. History and the ghost of Sox teams past had nothing to do with it. The Choke Sox died in Anaheim, and this losing Red Sox team will be regarded in quite a different way in New England this winter. It will be loved.

  Game Six, World Series

  The Mets are not loved—not away from New York, that is. When the teams moved up to the Hub, with the Mets behind by two games to none, there was a happy little rush of historical revisionism as sportswriters and baseball thinkers hurried forward to kick the New York nine. Tim Horgan, a columnist with the Boston Herald, wrote, “Personally, I don’t think anything west of Dedham can be as marvelous as the Mets are supposed to be. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the Mets are what’s known as a media myth, if
only because New York City is the world capital of media myths.” Bryant Gumbel, on NBC’s “Today” show, called the Mets arrogant, and ran a tape of Keith Hernandez’ bad throw on a bunt play in Game Two, calling it “a hotdog play.” Sparky Anderson, the Tigers manager, declared over the radio that the Indians, the traditional doormats of his American League division, put a better nine on the field than the Mets, and a newspaper clip from the heartland (if San Diego is in the heart of America) that subsequently came my way contained references to “this swaggering band of mercenaries” and “a swaying forest of high fives and taunting braggadocio.” Much of this subsided when the Mets quickly drew even in the games, and much of it has nothing to do with baseball, of course; what one tends to forget is that there is nothing that unites America more swiftly or happily than bad news in Gotham or a losing New York team. Some of these reflections warmed me, inwardly and arrogantly, as Game Six began, for I was perched in a splendid upper-deck-grandstand seat directly above home plate, where, in company with my small family and the Mets’ mighty fan family, I gazed about at the dazzlement of the ballpark floodlights, the electric-green field below, and the encircling golden twinkle of beautiful (by night) Queens, and heard and felt, deep in my belly, the pistol-shot sounds of clapping, the cresting waves of “LETSGOMETS! LETSGOMETS! LETSGOMETS!,” and long, taunting calls—“Dew-eee! dew-eeee!” and “Rog-errr! rog-errrr!”—directed at some of the Bosox below: payback for what the Fenway fans had given Darryl Strawberry in the last game in Boston. And then a parachutist came sailing down out of the outer darkness and into the bowl of light and noise—a descending roar, of all things—of Shea, “GO METS,” his banner said as he lightly came to rest a few steps away from Bob Ojeda in mid-infield and, encumbered with minions, went cheerfully off to jail and notoriety. We laughed and forgot him. I was home.