by Roger Angell
Morning training sessions at Chain-O’-Lakes Stadium, in Winter Haven, were studied with a mixture of excessive optimism and unjustified despondency by the immense Boston press corps, which has traditionally been made uneasy by success. Soft breezes carried a festive, wedding-cake fragrance across the diamond from an orange grove beyond the outfield, and three large cardboard golden crowns, suspended by wires and marked “BA .326,” “HR 44,” and “RBI 121,” swayed in the bright air above the boxes behind home. Yastrzemski, the inspiration for this impermanent trophy, seemed unconcerned by the almost visible rays of speculation that fell on him wherever he went in the field. Mostly, he was glad that the winter of his celebrity was over. He had been to too many banquets and benefits, once making seventeen appearances in the span of two days, and he told me that he now felt grateful when strangers in a restaurant waited until he had finished eating before coming up to introduce themselves. In Florida, he took long extra turns in the batting cage, sometimes staying for another hour of batting after playing a full game. He was admittedly tired, and he was having trouble with his timing. He knew, of course, that every pitcher in the league would have special plans for him this summer, that he would be the victim of shifts and stratagems and bases on balls, and, most of all, that even another great year at the plate could not bring him the same emotions and rewards. Yet as I watched him set himself again and again in the cage—settling his helmet and tugging at his belt and touching the bat to the ground and leveling his shoulders in exactly the same series of gestures, and then unleashing the flat, late, perfect swing—it came to me that all this was not just preparation for what was to come but that here, strangely, was a place where he could find privacy. Inside the cage, inside the game, he was alone, approachable only by his fellows and subject only to the demands of his hard profession.
Surrounded by more elders (the freshwater, or blue-gilled, geezer is almost indistinguishable from the Gulf variety), I watched the Red Sox split two games in Winter Haven, losing to Detroit by 13–3 and then beating the Phillies the next afternoon, 6–1. In the eighth inning of the game against the Tigers, while the visitors were batting around against a succession of unhappy Boston pitchers, I left the ballpark and walked back to the clubhouse, which lies beyond the stands in deep right field. Here, on a patch of grass in front of the locker rooms, in the midst of a smaller crowd, José Santiago was enjoying a moment of absolute triumph as a pitcher. Dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, his hair combed after his shower, he was tossing underhand to his four-year-old son, Alex, from a range of about ten feet. Alex was wearing a miniature Red Sox uniform, with his father’s number, 30, on the back, and he was swinging a plastic bat. As I counted, Alex took fourteen successive swings at the ball without even managing one foul tip. Watching this game were perhaps a dozen other players—some in uniform, some not, some in stocking feet or with towels draped around their necks—and a good many wives and children and babies. Several of the wives were pregnant, and all of them were very young. They had driven over to the park to pick up the husbands at the end of the day’s work. Now, at last, Alex Santiago hit the ball, and everybody cheered. His father let the ball roll through his legs and across the lawn, and Alex ran excitedly around an imaginary set of base paths, fell down once, and then made it safely home.
PART II
AMAZIN’
THE “GO!” SHOUTERS
— June 1962
THROUGH APRIL AND MAY, I resisted frequent invitations, delivered via radio and television, to come up to the Polo Grounds and see “those amazin’ Mets.” I even resisted a particularly soft blandishment, extended by one of the Mets’ announcers on a Saturday afternoon, to “bring the wife and come on up tomorrow after church and brunch.” My nonattendance was not caused by any unwillingness to attach my loyalty to New York’s new National League team. The only amazement generated by the Mets had been their terrifying departure from the runway in a full nosedive—the team lost the first nine games of its regular season—and I had decided it would be wiser, and perhaps kinder, to postpone my initial visit until the novice crew had grasped the first principles of powered flight. By the middle of May, however, the Mets had developed a pleasing habit of coming from behind in late innings, and when they won both ends of a doubleheader in Milwaukee on May 20, I knew it was time to climb aboard. In the five days from Memorial Day through June 3, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants were scheduled to play seven games at the Polo Grounds, and, impelled by sentiment for the returning exiles, who would be revisiting the city for the first time since 1957, and by guilt over my delayed enthusiasm for the Mets, I impulsively bought seats for all five days. The resulting experience was amazin’, all right, but not quite in the manner expected by the Mets or by me or by any of the other 197,428 fans who saw those games.
I took my fourteen-year-old daughter to the opening doubleheader, against the Dodgers, and even before we arrived at the park it was clear that neither the city subway system nor the Mets themselves had really believed we were coming. By game time, there were standees three-deep behind the lower-deck stands, sitting-standees peering through the rafters from the ramps behind the upper deck, and opportunist-standees perched on telephone booths and lining the runways behind the bleachers. The shouts, the cheers, and the deep, steady roar made by 56,000-odd fans in excited conversation were comical and astonishing, and a cause for self-congratulation; just by coming out in such ridiculous numbers (ours was the biggest baseball crowd of the 1962 season, the biggest Polo Grounds crowd since September 6, 1942), we had heightened our own occasion, building a considerable phenomenon out of the attention and passion each of us had brought along for the games and for the players we were to see.
It must have been no more than an hour later when it first occurred to me that the crowds, rather than the baseball, might be the real news of the two series. The Dodgers ran up twelve runs between the second and the sixth innings. I was keeping score, and after I had jotted down the symbols for their seven singles, two doubles, one triple, three home runs, three bases on balls, and two stolen bases in that span, the Dodgers half of my scorecard looked as if a cloud of gnats had settled on it. I was pained for the Mets, and embarrassed as a fan.
“Baseball isn’t usually like this,” I explained to my daughter.
“Sometimes it is,” she said. “This is like the fifth grade against the sixth grade at school.”
For a time, the long, low “Oooh!” sound and the accompanying thunderclap of applause that greeted the cannon shots by Ron Fairly, Willie Davis, Frank Howard, and the other visitors convinced me that I was in an audience made up mostly of veteran Dodger loyalists. The Mets’ pitchers came and went in silence, and there were derisive cheers when the home team finally got the third out in the top of the fourth and came in to bat trailing 10–0. I didn’t change my mind even when I heard the explosive roar for the pop-fly homer by Gil Hodges that led off the home half; Hodges, after all, is an ex-Dodger and perhaps the most popular ballplayer in the major leagues today. Instantly, however, I learned how wrong I had been. Gil’s homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full, furious, happy shout of “Let’s go, Mets! Let’s go, Mets!” There were wild cries of encouragement before every pitch, boos for every called strike. This was no Dodger crowd, but a huge gathering of sentimental home-towners. Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible. When Hickman and Mantilla hit a double and a single for one run, and Christopher singled for another, the Mets fans screeched, yawped, pounded their palms, leaped up and down, and raised such a din that players in both dugouts ducked forward and peered nervously back over the dugout roofs at the vast assemblage that had suddenly gone daft behind them.
The fans’ hopes, of course, were insane. The Dodgers got two runs back almost instantly in the fifth, and in the top of the ninth their lead was 13–4. Undiscouraged, the spectators staged another screaming fit in the bottom half, and the
Mets responded with four singles, good for two more runs, before Sandy Koufax, the Dodger pitcher, grinning with embarrassment and disbelief, got the last man out. It was the ninth successive victory for the Dodgers, the ninth successive defeat for the Mets, and the Mets had never been in the game, yet Koufax looked a little shaken.
The second game was infinitely better baseball, but the fans, either wearied by their own exercise or made fearful by legitimate tension, were noticeably more repressed. A close, sensible game seemed to make them more aware of reality and more afraid of defeat. The Mets spotted the Dodgers three runs in the first on Ron Fairly’s second homer of the afternoon, and then tied it in the third on homers by Hodges and Hickman. It was nearly seven o’clock and the lights had been turned on when Hodges, who was having a memorable day, put the Mets in the lead with still another home run. Suddenly convinced that this was the only moment in the day (and perhaps in the entire remainder of the season) when the Mets would find themselves ahead, I took my fellow fan reluctantly away to home and supper. This was the right decision in one respect (the game, tied at 4–4 and then at 5–5, was won by the Dodgers when Willie Davis hit a homer in the ninth) but the wrong one in another. A few minutes after we left the park, the Mets pulled off a triple play—something I have never seen in more than thirty years of watching big-league baseball. Sandy Koufax and I had learned the same odd lesson: It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won’t startle you in the process.
In the following four days, the Mets lost five ball games—one more to the Dodgers and all four to the Giants—to run their losing streak to fifteen. Some of the scores were close, some lopsided. In three of the games, the Mets displayed their perverse, enchanting habit of handing over clusters of runs to the enemy and then, always a little too late, clawing and scratching their way back into contention. Between these rallies, during the long, Gobi stretches of home-team fatuity, I gave myself over to admiration of the visiting stars. Both the Dodgers and the Giants, who are currently running away from the rest of the league, are stocked with large numbers of stimulating, astonishingly good ballplayers, and, along with the rest of their old admirers here, I was grateful for the chance to collect and store away a private visual album of the new West Coast sluggers and pitchers. Now I have them all: Frank Howard, the six-foot-seven Dodger monster, striding the outfield like a farmer stepping through a plowed field; Ron Fairly, a chunky, redheaded first baseman, exultantly carrying his hot bat up to the plate and flattening everything thrown at him; Maury Wills, a skinny, lizard-quick base-runner. In the Thursday-night game, Wills stole second base twice in the span of three minutes. He was called back after the first clean steal, because Jim Gilliam, the batter, had interfered with the catcher; two pitches later, he took off again, as everyone knew he would, and beat the throw by yards. Willie Davis, the Dodger center fielder, is the first player I have ever been tempted to compare to Willie Mays. Speed, sureness, a fine arm, power, a picture swing—he lacks nothing, and he shares with Mays the knack of shifting directly from lazy, loose-wristed relaxation into top gear with an instantaneous explosion of energy.
I cannot understand how Orlando Cepeda, the Giants’ slugger, ever hits a pitch. At the plate, he stands with his hands and the bat twisted back almost behind his right shoulder blade, and his vast riffles look wild and looping. Only remarkable strength can control such a swing. In one game, he hit a line drive that was caught in front of the center-field screen, 425 feet away; in another, he took a checked half-swing at an outside pitch and lined it into the upper right-field stands. Harvey Kuenn, by contrast, has the level, controlled, intelligent swing of the self-made hitter. He is all concentration, right down to the clamped wad of tobacco in his left cheek; he runs with heavy, pounding determination, his big head jouncing with every step. Mays, it is a pleasure to say, is just the same—the best ballplayer anywhere. He hit a homer each day at the Polo Grounds, made a simple, hilarious error on a ground single to center, and caught flies in front of his belt buckle like a grocer catching a box of breakfast food pulled from a shelf. All in all, I most enjoy watching him run bases. He runs low to the ground, his shoulders swinging to his huge strides, his spikes digging up great chunks of infield dirt; the cap flies off at second, he cuts the base like a racing car, looking back over his shoulder at the ball, and lopes grandly into third, and everyone who has watched him finds himself laughing with excitement and shared delight.
The Mets’ “Go!” shouters enjoyed their finest hour on Friday night, after the Giants had hit four homers and moved inexorably to a seventh-inning lead of 9–1. At this point, when most sensible baseball fans would be edging toward the exits, a man sitting in Section 14, behind first base, produced a long, battered foghorn and blew mournful, encouraging blasts into the hot night air. Within minutes, the Mets fans were shouting in counterpoint—Tooot! “Go!” Tooot! “Go!” Toooooot! “GO!”—and the team, defeated and relaxed, came up with five hits and five runs that sent Billy Pierce to the showers. It was too late again, even though in the ninth the Mets put two base-runners on and had the tying run at the plate. During this exciting foolishness, I scrutinized the screamers around me and tried to puzzle out the cause of their unique affliction. It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers—leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines—who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause. Nor was it conceivable that they were all ex-Dodgers or ex-Giant rooters who had been embittered by the callous snatching away of their old teams; no one can stay that bitter for five years. And they were not all home-town sentimentalists, for this is a city known for its cool and its successful teams.
The answer, or part of the answer, came to me in the lull during the eighth inning, while the Giants were bringing in a relief pitcher. Two men just to my right were talking about the Mets.
“I tell you, there isn’t one of ’em—not one—that could make the Yankee club,” one of them said. “I never saw such a collection of dogs.”
“Well, what about Frank Thomas?” said the other. “What about him? What’s he batting now? .315? .320? He’s got thirteen homers, don’t he?”
“Yeah, and who’s he going to push out of the Yankee outfield? Mantle? Maris? Blanchard? You can’t call these characters ballplayers. They all belong back in the minors—the low minors.”
I recognized the tone. It was knowing, cold, full of the contempt that the calculator feels for those who don’t play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan. The Yankees have won the American League pennant twenty times in the past thirty years; they have been the world’s champions sixteen times in that period. Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with the stolidity, the smugness, and the arrogance of holders of large blocks of blue-chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. They coolly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homer, as only their due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests. During a slump or a losing streak, these capitalists are quick and shrill with their complaints: “They ought to damn well do better than this, considering what they’re being paid!”
Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try—antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
The Mets saved their best effort for the final game of the two series. They led the G
iants 1–0 for five innings, gave up the tying run in the sixth, and then fell apart in the seventh and lost 6–1. The crowd, which had been beery and raucous toward the end of Saturday’s doubleheader, was smaller and more subdued—a polite Sunday audience, full of children, enjoying a warm, lovely spring day and too absorbed in the game to indulge in much yelling. The Mets scored their run in the first, on a single, an infield out, and a nubbed, wrong-field looper by Frank Thomas that just eluded Cepeda’s glove. After that, the Mets played good ball—for a while—and everyone settled down to watch the first real pitchers’ duel of the week. Young Bob Miller, who hadn’t won a game this year, was matching the Giants’ ace, Juan Marichal, pitch for pitch, and looked almost quicker; he struck out eight Giants in the first six innings. The contrast in their styles was pleasing. Marichal has the exaggerated windup, the deep body-bend, the mighty leg-kick of a scatter-armed twelve-year-old fast-baller; he reminded me of Joe E. Brown’s old pantomime of a cocky bush-league pitcher. Miller’s motion is economical. His pitches are more sidearm than Marichal’s, and his deceptive speed comes from a big twist of the torso toward left field just before he delivers the pitch. He was keeping the ball low, which is something the Mets’ pitchers haven’t been able to do often this spring, and the Giants were swinging late and hitting a lot of soft hoppers to the infield. In this brief interval, it was possible to look at the Mets as a ball team, rather than as a flock of sacrificial lambs, and to speculate about the causes of the chilly summer they face. Their regular lineup, which Casey Stengel has been tinkering with every day—an Edison working with rusty parts—contains three unexciting pros: Felix Mantilla, Charlie Neal, and Frank Thomas. Of these, only Thomas hits with power; he was purchased from the Braves because he pulls the ball consistently and the left-field upper deck of the Polo Grounds is only 279 feet away from home plate. So far, he has delivered handsomely, but his record in the majors does not suggest that he can keep up his current averages. Richie Ashburn and Gil Hodges are receding stars, only occasionally capable of the bursts of light that made them shine so brightly a few years ago. Ashburn, who has slowed down shockingly, has been used mostly as a pinch-hitter this year, and Hodges’ legs apparently aren’t up to the demands of daily play.
