Tilting forward, looking up, Ashe whips his racquet over the ball and aces Graebner with a sharp-angled serve. “I stood as far over as I possibly could and still he aced me,” Graebner mumbles. Ashe misses his next first serve, then follows an American twist recklessly to the net. Graebner chips. Ashe hits the world’s most unorthodox volley, on the dead run, drawing his racquet back all the way and smashing the ball out of the air, out of sight, with a full roundhouse swing. “He just pulls his racquet back and slaps,” Clark’s father comments, but there is only mild disparagement in the remark, for he adds, “That’s what Laver does.” (Before the year is out, Laver and Ashe will be ranked first and second in the world.) Ashe hits another wide serve—unmanageable. Donald Dell says, “Arthur is knocking the hell out of the ball.” Graebner thinks, “He’s smashing every God-damned first serve, and they’re all going in.” Ashe leads four games to one, fourth set. His game is so big now that it is beyond containment. There is something about it that suggests a very large aircraft beginning its descent for Kennedy. In Graebner remain sporadic aces.
Twenty-six hours hence, beside the Marquee, Dell, Pasarell, and Graebner will meet spontaneously, from separate parts of the stadium, and go to press-section seats, close to one end of the court. Their teammate will be in the fifth set of the finals, against the Dutch player Tom Okker, and they will help draw him through it—“Move your feet, Arthur.”…“Bend your knees.”…“Spin it.”…“Chip the returns, Arthur.”…“Get your first serve in.” Graebner, Pasarell, and Dell will shout these things in moments when the crowd is clapping, because coaching from the grandstand is not strictly approved. When Ashe breaks through Okker’s serve, in the fifth game, he will look up at the Davis Cup group and close his fist, and when the match is over he will turn, point up to them with the handle of his racquet, and bow to them, giving them something of his moment as the winner of the first United States Open Championship. “Subdued disbelief,” in his words, is what he will feel, but he will speak with nonchalant clarity into microphones and he will put an arm around his weeping father. When he returns to the United States Military Academy, he will have dinner with the cadet corps, and all the cadets will stand up and cheer for him for three and a half minutes while he pushes his glasses into place and affectionately looks them over.
Meanwhile, he aces Graebner for the last time. Graebner looks at the ball as it goes by, watches it hit the stadium wall, shakes his head, then looks again at the empty air beside him where the ball was and thinks, “I can’t believe he can hit it that hard. I didn’t even see the ball. Arthur is just playing too well. He’s forcing me into errors.” Games are five–two, fourth set.
Graebner serves to Ashe’s forehand. Ashe drives the ball up the middle. Graebner hits hard for Ashe’s backhand corner, and misses. Love-fifteen.
Ashe chips a return into the net. Fifteen-all.
Ashe blocks another return into Graebner’s forehand service court, and Graebner, rushing in, tries a drop half volley, the extraordinarily difficult shot that has almost been Ashe’s signature in this match—that Ashe has scored with time after time. Graebner fails to make it good. He whips himself. “An unbelievable shot for me to try—difficult in the first place, and under this pressure ridiculous. Stupid.” Fifteen-thirty.
Graebner now sends his farewell ace past Ashe. Crunch. Right down the middle. Thirty-all.
Graebner rocks, swings, hits. Fault. He lifts the ball again. Double fault. Thirty-forty.
“Match point,” Ashe tells himself. “Now I’ll definitely play it safe.” But Graebner hits the big serve into the net, then hits his second serve to Ashe’s backhand. The ball and the match are spinning into perfect range. Ashe’s racquet is back. The temptation is just too great, and caution fades. He hits for it all. Game, set, match to Lieutenant Ashe. When the stroke is finished, he is standing on his toes, his arms flung open, wide, and high.
Roger Angell
NOVEMBER 1, 1969 (WORLD SERIES 1969)
THE SERIES AND the season are over—four days done at this writing—and the Mets are still Champions of the World. Below midtown office windows, scraps and streamers of torn paper still litter the surrounding rooftops, sometimes rising and rearranging themselves in an autumn breeze. I just looked out, and they’re still there. It’s still true. The Mets won the National League’s Eastern divisional title, and won it easily; they won the playoffs, beating the Atlanta Braves in three straight; they took the World Series—one of the finest Series of all time—beating the Orioles in five games. The Mets. The New York Mets?…This kind of disbelief, this surrendering to the idea of a plain miracle, is tempting but derogatory. If in the end we remember only a marvellous, game-saving outfield catch, a key hit dropped in, an enemy batter fanned in the clutch, and then the ridiculous, exalting joy of it all—the smoke bombs going off in the infield, the paper storm coming down and the turf coming up, and the clubhouse baptisms—we will have belittled the makers of this astonishment. To understand the achievement of these Mets, it is necessary to mount an expedition that will push beyond the games themselves, beyond the skill and the luck. The journey will end in failure, for no victorious team is entirely understandable, even to itself, but the attempt must always be made, for winning is the ultimate mystery that gives all sport its meaning. On the night of September 24th, when the Mets clinched their divisional title, Manager Gil Hodges sat in his clubhouse office after the game and tried to explain the season. He mentioned good pitching, fine defense, self-reliance, momentum, and a sense of team confidence. The reporters around his desk nodded and made notes, but they all waited for something more. From the locker room next door came a sharp, heady whiff of sloshed champagne and the cries of exultant young athletes. Then someone said, “Gil, how did it all happen? Tell us what it all proves.”
Hodges leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and then spread his large hands wide. “Can’t be done,” he said, and he laughed.
Disbelief persists, then, and one can see now that disbelief itself was one of the Mets’ most powerful assets all through the season. Again and again this summer, fans or friends sitting next to me in the stands at Shea Stadium would fill out their scorecards just before game time and then turn and shake their heads and say, “There is no way—just no way—the Mets can take this team tonight.” I would compare the two lineups and agree. And then, later in the evening or at breakfast the next morning, I would think back on the game—another game won by the Mets, and perhaps another series swept—and find it hard to recall just how they had won it, for there was still no way, no way, it could have happened. Finally, it began to occur to me that if my friends and I, partisans all, felt like this, then how much more profoundly those other National League teams, deeper in talent and power and reputation than the Mets, must have felt it. For these were still the Mets—the famous and comical losers, ninth-place finishers last year, a team that had built a fortune and a following out of defeat and perversity, a team that had lost seven hundred and thirty-seven games in seven years and had finished a total of two hundred and eighty-eight and a half games away from first place. No way, and yet it happened and went on happening….
· · ·
The playoffs—the television-enriching new autumn adjunct known officially as the Championship Series—matched up the Orioles and the Minnesota Twins, and the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, who had barely escaped the horrid possibility of three-way or four-way pre-playoff playoffs with the Dodgers, Giants, and Cincinnati Reds in the National League West. Atlanta filled its handsome white stadium to capacity for its two weekend games against New York, but to judge from the local headlines, the transistor-holders in the stands, the television interviews with Georgia coaches, and the high-school band and majorettes that performed each morning in the lobby of the Regency Hyatt House hotel, autumn baseball was merely a side attraction to another good old Deep South football weekend. Georgia beat South Carolina, 41–16; Clemson beat Georgia Tech, 21–10; the Colts beat the Falcons,
21–14; and the Mets beat the Braves, 9–5 and 11–6. The cover of the official program for the baseball games displayed a photograph of the uniformed leg of an Atlanta Brave descending from an LM onto a home plate resting on the moon, with the legend “One Step for the Braves, One Giant Leap for the Southeast,” but Manager Hodges saw to it that the astronaut never got his other foot off the ladder. Not wanting to lose his ace in the significant first game, he kept Tom Seaver on the mound for seven innings, while Seaver absorbed an uncharacteristic eight-hit, five-run pounding. Tom plugged away, giving up homers and doubles, and resolutely insisting in the dugout that the Mets were going to win it. The lead changed hands three times before this finally happened, in the eighth, when the Mets scored five times off Phil Niekro on three successive hits, a gift stolen base, a fearful throwing error by Orlando Cepeda, and a three-run pinch single by J. C. Martin. The next day’s match was just as sloppy. The Braves scored five runs with two out in the fifth, all off Koosman and all too late, since the Mets had already run up a 9–1 lead. Hank Aaron hit his second homer in two days, Agee and Jones and Boswell hit homers for the Mets, and the Braves left for Shea Stadium with the almost occult accomplishment of having scored eleven runs off Seaver and Koosman without winning either game.
Hodges, having demonstrated slow managing in the first game, showed how to manage fast in the last one. His starter, Gary Gentry, who had given up a two-run homer to the unquenchable Aaron in the first inning, surrendered a single and a double (this also by Aaron) in the third, and then threw a pitch to Rico Carty that the Atlanta outfielder bombed off the left-field wall on a line but about two feet foul. Hodges, instantly taking the new ball away from Gentry, gave it to Nolan Ryan, in from the bullpen, who thereupon struck out Carty with one pitch, walked Cepeda intentionally, fanned Clete Boyer, and retired Bob Didier on a fly. Agee responded in obligatory fashion, smashing the first pitch to him in the same inning for a homer, and Ken Boswell came through with a two-run job in the fourth, to give the Mets the lead. Cepeda, who so far had spent the series lunging slowly and unhappily at Met singles and doubles buzzing past him at first, then hit a home run well beyond the temporary stands behind the left-center-field fence, making it 4–3, Braves. Even he must have sensed by then what would happen next: Ryan, a .103 hitter, singled to lead off the home half; Garrett, who had hit but one home run all year, hit another into the right-field loges, for two runs; Jones and Boswell and Grote and Harrelson and Agee combined to fashion two insurance runs; Ryan fanned seven Braves in all, and won by 7–4. Just about everybody got into the act in the end—the turf-moles onto the field again, Nolan Ryan and Garrett under the kliegs, and Mayor Lindsay under the champagne. Forehandedly, he had worn a drip-dry.
· · ·
After a season of such length and so many surprises, reason suggested that we would now be given a flat and perhaps one-sided World Series, won by the Orioles, who had swept their three playoff games with the Minnesota Twins, and whom reporters were calling the finest club of the decade. There would be honor enough for the Mets if they managed only to keep it close. None of this happened, of course, and the best news—the one true miracle—was not the Mets’ victory but the quality of those five games. They added up to a baseball drama I have not seen surpassed in thirty-seven years of watching—an assemblage of brilliant parables illustrating every varied aspect of the beautiful game.
The Baltimore fans expected neither of these possibilities, for there were still plenty of tickets on sale before the opener at Memorial Stadium, and the first two Series games were played to less than capacity crowds. This is explicable only when one recalls that two other league champions from Baltimore—the football Colts and the basketball Bullets—had been humiliated by New York teams in post-season championships this year. Baltimore, in fact, is a city that no longer expects any good news. In the press box, however, the announcement of the opening lineups was received in predictable fashion (“Just no way…”), and I could only agree. The Orioles, who had won a hundred and nine games in the regular season, finishing nineteen games ahead of the next team and clinching their divisional title on September 13th, were a poised and powerful veteran team that topped the Mets in every statistic and, man for man, at almost every position. Their three sluggers—Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, and Paul Blair—had hit a total of ninety-five homers, as against the Mets’ team total of a hundred and nine. Their pitching staff owned a lower earned-run average than the Mets’ sterling corps. Their ace, screwballer Mike Cuellar, had won twenty-three games and led the staff in strikeouts; their second starter, Dave McNally, had won fifteen games in a row this year; the third man, Jim Palmer, had a record of 16–4, including a no-hitter. Since Cuellar and McNally are left-handers, Hodges was forced to start his righty specialists (Clendenon, Charles, Swoboda, and Weis) and bench the hot left-handed hitters (Kranepool, Garrett, Shamsky, and Boswell) who had so badly damaged the Braves. Just no way.
Confirmation seemed instantaneous when Don Buford, the miniature Baltimore left fielder, hit Seaver’s second pitch of the game over the right-field fence, just above Swoboda’s leap. (Swoboda said later that his glove just ticked the ball “at my apogee.”) For a while after that, Seaver did better—pitched much more strongly than he had in Atlanta, in fact—but with two out in the Baltimore fourth the steam suddenly went out of his fastball, and the Orioles racked up three more runs. The game, however, belonged not to Buford, or to the other Oriole hitters, or to Cuellar, but to Brooks Robinson, the perennial All-Star Baltimore third baseman, who was giving us all a continuous lesson in how the position can be played. Almost from the beginning, I became aware of the pressure he puts on a right-handed batter with his aggressive stance (the hands are cocked up almost under his chin), his closeness to the plate, his eager appetite for the ball. His almost supernaturally quick reactions are helped by the fact that he is ambidextrous; he bats and throws right-handed, but eats, writes, plays ping-pong, and fields blue darters with his left. In the fifth, he retired Al Weis on a tough, deep chance that leaped up and into his ribs. In the seventh, after the Mets had scored once on a pair of singles and a fly, he crushed the rally when he sprinted in toward Rod Gaspar’s topped roller, snatched it up barehanded, and got off the throw, overhand, that retired Gaspar by yards. The Orioles won, 4–1, and Brooks had made it look easy for them.
The Mets were grim the next day (Frank Robinson had baited them after their loss, commenting on the silence in their dugout), and they played a grim, taut, riveting game. Brooks Robinson went on making fine plays, but he had plenty of company—an extraordinary catch and falling throw to second by Baltimore shortstop Mark Belanger, a base-robbing grab by gaunt little Bud Harrelson. (The tensions of the season had burned Harrelson down from a hundred and sixty-eight to a hundred and forty-five pounds.) The Mets led, 1–0, on Donn Clendenon’s wrong-field homer off McNally in the fourth, and Baltimore had no hits at all off Koosman until the bottom of the seventh, when Paul Blair led off with a single. Two outs later, Blair stole second on a change-up curve, and Brooks Robinson scored him with a single up the middle. The tie seemed only to make the crowd more apprehensive, and the Baltimore partisans seemed unamused when a large “LET’S GO, METS!” banner appeared in the aisle behind home plate; it was carried by four Met wives—Mesdames Pfeil, Dyer, Ryan, and Seaver, smashers all, who had made it the night before out of a Sheraton bed-sheet. There were two out in the top of the ninth before the Mets could act on this R.S.V.P., winning the game on successive singles by Charles and Grote, and a first-pitch hit to left by the .215 terror, Al Weis. Koosman, throwing mostly curves in the late going, walked two Orioles in the bottom half, but Ron Taylor came in to get the last out and save Jerry’s two-hit, 2–1, essential victory. It was a game that would have delighted John McGraw.
Back at Shea Stadium, before an uncharacteristically elegant but absolutely jam-packed audience, Tommie Agee rocked Jim Palmer with a lead-off first-inning homer—Agee’s fifth such discouragement this year. Gary G
entry, who had taken such a pounding from the Braves, was in fine form this time, challenging the big Baltimore sluggers with his hummer and comforted by a 3–0 lead after the second inning. He was further comforted in the fourth, when Tommie Agee, with two Orioles aboard, ran for several minutes toward deep left and finally, cross-handed, pulled down Elrod Hendricks’ drive just before colliding with the fence. Agee held on to the ball, though, and carried it all the way back to the infield like a trophy, still stuck in the topmost webbing of his glove. It was 4–0 for the home side by the seventh, when Gentry walked the bases full with two out and was succeeded by Nolan Ryan. Paul Blair hit his 0–2 pitch on a line to distant right. Three Orioles took wing for the plate, but Agee, running to his left this time, made a skidding dive just at the warning track and again came up with the ball. The entire crowd—all 56,335 of us—jumped to its feet in astonished, shouting tribute as he trotted off the field. The final score was 5–0, or, more accurately, 5–5—five runs for the Mets, five runs saved by Tommie Agee. Almost incidentally, it seemed, the Orioles were suddenly in deep trouble in the Series.
The 60s Page 59
