Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  It was not just the prospect of witnessing weatherless baseball played on Chemstrand grass under an acrylic-painted Lucite sky that induced me to travel to Houston last month to see the Astros open their first 1966 home stand. There was also the fact that the Astros’ first indoor season had been a rousing success, in spite of their customary ninth-place finish. Houston jumped from a 1964 home attendance of 725,773, smallest in the National League, to a gate of 2,151,470, barely second to that of the World Champion Dodgers, and more than six hundred thousand higher than the best American League home draw. Since half of the majors’ twenty teams have been born or have moved to new cities in the past twelve years, all in panting search of new audiences, these figures were of remarkable interest; Houston seemed on its way to becoming the capital of Baseball’s Age of Alteration.

  So it was that I found myself, early in the evening of April 18, sitting in a cushioned deep-purple loge seat in left field of the Harris County Domed Stadium (as the Astrodome is formally named) and listening to the Jeff Davis High School band’s pre-game rendition of “The Good Old Summertime.” The only good and old object in view at the time was Robin Roberts, the erstwhile ace of the Phillies and Orioles and now the Astros’ senior mound statesman, who was warming up near the right-field stands preparatory to taking on the Dodgers. He toiled earnestly, though surrounded by distractions. A group of female scholars from Tyler Junior College assembled along the foul lines and did some high kicks in unison, wearing cowboy hats and peach satin body stockings. The groundkeepers smoothing the base paths were dressed in fake bright orange space suits and fake white plastic space helmets. Each level of the stands was painted a different color—royal blue, gold, purple, black, tangerine, and crimson—and I had the momentary sensation that I was sinking slowly through the blackberry-brandy layer of a pousse-café. The AstroTurf infield was green, but more the shade of a billiard table than a lawn. Only the outfield grass (which will be replaced with AstroTurf later this year) was reassuring; it looked like any Westchester back yard after a five-year drought. The lacy overhead pattern of beams and cloudy panes arching up from the brilliant circle of field lights made a soft and surprising sky above me. Leaning back in my theater seat, I measured its height by eye and saw that it was far above the reach of any fly ball, and then I wondered why someone hadn’t placed an altitude mark at the apex of the roof, to match the “340,” “390,” and “406” signs along the outfield wall and thus supply us with baseball’s latest statistic.

  The elegant stands slowly filled, the ceremonials slipped by (the National League president with a plaque, Dinah Shore with the anthem, a county judge with the first ball), and baseball was allowed to begin. It turned out to be the same old game, the same game as ever. I could tell, because there was Robin Roberts out on the mound fiddling with his right pants leg between pitches. There, too, were the Dodgers, the champions, instantly ripping off singles, bunting, scurrying for the extra base, taking charge of the game from the very beginning, just as they did in the World Series last fall. Only the fact that Maury Wills was thrown out stealing second kept them down on two runs in the first inning and sustained the hopes of the locals. I presumed that the Houston fans were hopeful, but it was hard to be certain. It was a thinnish turnout for an opening game—just over twenty-five thousands—and the spectators near me, who were remarkably well dressed, also appeared to be unaccustomed to indoor shouting. It developed, however, that they were merely waiting for directions. With two out in the home half of the first, Jimmy Wynn drew a base on balls, and the center screen of the Astrodome’s huge, three-panel electronic scoreboard above the outfield pavilion seats burst forth with a noisy, animated depiction of a bugle bugling, followed by the lettered command “CHARGE!” “Charge!” responded the crowd with one voice. The fans near me were still laughing over this display of a capella ferocity when Joe Morgan flied out and the tiny rally came to a close.

  Several scoreboards in big-league parks are now wired for bugle calls and CHARGE! injunctions (the device was born, I believe, in Los Angeles), but comic cavalry attacks are only the beginning of the Houston scoreboard’s repertoire. The thing is four hundred and seventy-four feet long and cost two million dollars, and there is room on its various partitions for simultaneous presentation of the game’s lineups and scoring, out-of-town baseball results, messages of welcome to fan groups, plugs for Astro souvenirs, and gigantic animated commercials. These last flash on between innings—routine cartoon plugs for potato chips, gasoline, an airline, and so forth, accompanied by sound effects but without a spoken message. This is the only mercy, for the giant set is impossible not to look at, and there is no “off” switch. Actually, there was plenty to watch and enjoy on the field in that first game, in which Roberts, in search of his two-hundred-and-eighty-second major-league win, was throwing a potpourri of soft junk and being outpitched by a twenty-one-year-old Dodger rookie named Don Sutton, who has been in organized baseball for exactly one year, but the scoreboard and its busy screen seemed anxious to improve on the baseball. In the second inning, second baseman Morgan and third baseman Bob Aspromonte came up with successive brilliant stops for the Astros, to rob Jim Lefebvre and Lou Johnson of base hits; there were shouts and applause in the stands, but the scoreboard commanded “OLÉ!” and was obeyed. By the middle innings, I found that I was giving the game only half my attention; along with everyone else, I kept lifting my eyes to that immense, waiting presence above the players. In the eighth, with the Astros behind, 5–1, Sonny Jackson led off the home half with a nifty bunt, and when Morgan singled him along, some fans began a hopeful, rhythmic clapping, instantly surpassed by the appearance on the screen of a giant female silhouette dancing the Frug, and then the words “GO-GO.” The Astros went-went for two runs, but the Dodgers added another of their own and won the game, 6–3. As I walked down the broad ramps of the Astrodome and, oddly, stepped outdoors, I heard a good many Texans around me still talking about something that had taken place way back in the second inning, when Chuck Harrison had doubled off the left-field wall, for the Astros’ first hit. The man in charge of the scoreboard evidently thought the ball had gone into the stands, for he pressed the button touching off the board’s home-run celebration display—an immense, multicolor, forty-five-second extravaganza depicting an exploding ballpark, shooting cowboys, ricocheting bullets, a snorting steer with flags on his horns, a mounted cowboy with lariat, and a fusillade of skyrockets. This time, when it was all over Harrison was still standing on second, and the screen boffed the crowd with its next message, “OPPS.” A minute or two later, catcher John Bateman also doubled, and the home team scored, but no one in the postgame crowd seemed to remember that. The board had been the big hit of the evening.

  Baseball, of course, is not the only main event at the Domed Stadium. In the past year, it has put on such disparate attractions as Judy Garland, the Ringling Brothers circus, a rodeo, a boat show, a polo match, the home football games of the University of Houston, a bloodless bullfight, and a Billy Graham crusade. Some of these bombed and some did excellent business, but what emerged most startlingly was the fact that the Astrodome itself is its own best attraction. In the first year, close to four hundred and ninety thousand visitors paid a dollar apiece just to walk around inside the place. Most of these were out-of-towners, but in Houston itself the Astrodome seems to rank second only to the nearby Manned Spacecraft Center as a source of self-congratulation. Certainly there is far more conversational enthusiasm about the building than about the sport it was built to house; a local sportswriter told me he had never heard anyone say, “I’m an Astro fan.” During my stay, I found that when I forced myself to look at the Astrodome as a work of art, my admiration for the improbable cool bubble grew with each visit. The exterior is especially pleasing—a broad, white-screened shell of such excellent proportions that you doubt its true dimensions until you stand at its base. The Astrodome is the world’s biggest indoor arena, but its ramps are gentle, its portals and aisles bril
liantly marked, and its various levels so stacked and tilted that immensity is reduced and made undiscouraging. There are almost no bad seats in the house, and the floors are so antiseptically clean that one hesitates before parting with a peanut shell or a cigarette butt.

  Ballplayers like the Astrodome, too. Descending to the playing field during batting practices (I tried to pull up a blade of AstroTurf to chew on while standing behind the batting cage, but the stuff is pluckproof), I talked to various Dodgers and Astros and found them unanimous in the view that the lighting is now excellent, the prefab infield very fast but perhaps not as fast as Dodger Stadium’s brickyard, but the chilled, windless air profoundly unconducive to the long ball. Last year, only fifty-seven homers were struck in Houston, which is only a third of the total in most parks. Wes Parker, the young Dodger first baseman, said, “It’s a park for singles-hitters. Hit the ball on the ground, ffft, and it’ll likely go through. Good for our kind of team. I’ll tell you, though, I just discovered something funny about this fake grass. Watch bunts on it. Watch what happens to them.” I studied the next dozen-odd bunts laid down in practice, and each time, the spinning ball, catching the nap of the AstroTurf, suddenly veered off toward first base, like a marble dropped on the floor in a housing development. Later, after practice, I went out and walked around on the new surface, which has the consistency of an immense doormat. I dug down with my fingers and found the spine of one of the hidden foul-line-to-foul-line zippers that hold the new infield together; I had the sudden feeling that if I unzipped it, I might uncover the world’s first plastic worm.

  The worst seats for baseball in the Astrodome are the most expensive—the narrow topmost ring of “Sky Boxes,” which are sold on a season-long basis in blocks of twenty-four or thirty seats. Such an investment in the national pastime costs a minimum of $14,784 per season, and entitles the boxholder to approximately the same view of the ballplayers as he might have of a herd of prize cattle seen from a private plane. There are other perquisites, though, including membership in the Skydome Club, a private snuggery in the Astrodome that offers Lucite womb chairs, a picture-window view of downtown Houston, and an Oriental restaurant equipped with kimono-clad Japanese waitresses and electric hibachi stoves. (Buyers of single season tickets have to make do with membership at the Astrodome Club, a capacious Turkey-red lounge and restaurant, with beaded curtains, swinging saloon doors, and the longest bar in Texas.) Each Sky Box is connected to an individual small apartment containing a living room, bathroom, refrigerator, and closed-circuit TV set. These roomettes are heavily decorated in Texas provincial, motel Tudor, and other “themes,” and I can only say I found them immensely glum—sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen. The institution is popular, however; women who are invited to a Sky Box dinner party and game can sometimes find their names in the society columns the next day, and a Texas businessman standing behind the Sky Box seats, with his foot on a railing, a glass of bourbon in his hand, and a ball game in progress far below, is sometimes in the mood for a little wheeling and dealing with the other good old boys he finds up there at the top level of the biggest new arena in the world.

  Studying millionaires in Houston’s favorite year-round entertainment, and Judge Roy Hofheinz, the Kublai Khan of the Domed Stadium, is the most entertaining millionaire in town. He has been, variously, a campaign manager for Lyndon Johnson, a boy-wonder jurist, mayor of Houston, a real-estate developer, and a promoter and owner of radio and television stations. Hofheinz is not one of the big rich, like John W. Mecom, who seems to have succeeded the late Jesse Jones as Houston’s financial vizier, but he talks more and gets into more fights than any other moneyman in sight. Hofheinz’s fallings-out are epochal. Among others, he has squabbled with Jesse Jones; with K.S. (Bud) Adams, Jr., the owner of the American Football League’s Houston Oilers (the Oilers do not play their home games in the Astrodome); and with R.E. (Bob) Smith, his former senior partner in Houston Sports Association, Inc., the company that owns the Astros and rents the stadium from Harris County for an annual payment of three-quarters of a million dollars. This last blowup, a year ago, ended with the Judge buying up most of Smith’s interest, and he now owns 86 per cent of the Astros. Hofheinz’s experience in baseball is minimal, and most of the club’s field operations rested in the hands of general manager Paul Richards, a former manager of the Orioles and a widely admired baseball thinker. Experienced Hofheinz-watchers predicted that there would be amity in the organization until the day Hofheinz decided he had surpassed Richards in baseball wisdom—a day that apparently arrived last December, when Hofheinz abruptly fired Richards (whose contract had five years to run), along with farm director Eddie Robinson and manager Luman Harris. The new team manager is Grady Hatton, and the Astros are now a pure Hofheinz fief.

  Houston looks on Hofheinz with a mixture of awe, amusement, and anxiety. There is the undeniable fact that the prodigious idea of a domed year-round stadium was entirely the Judge’s, and without his plans for the new miracle park Houston almost certainly would not have been granted a franchise in the league expansion of 1962. It was also Hofheinz’s energy and promotional optimism that got the necessary bond issues approved and launched, and his hand is recognizable in every corridor and catwalk of the finished marvel. Any remaining Houston doubts about the Judge’s genius are now centered on the awesome financial weight that is being balanced on top of the dome, and on the recent population implosion of top executives at the Houston Sports Association. The precise break-even point of Astroperations has not been made public, but the stadium’s financial overhead is known to be Texas-sized. The electric bill alone, covering lights and air-conditioning, comes to thirty thousand dollars a month. The best estimates of the amount of business required to keep the Domed Stadium afloat come down to about a hundred and twenty-five days of active operation at an average attendance of twenty thousand. This means that the Astros must continue to draw handsomely during their eighty dates at home, and that numerous additional attractions will have to be encouraged. No one in Houston doubts the Judge’s energy and imagination, but Harris County voted in an investment of some thirty-one million dollars toward the success of the Astrodome—a sum that adds a certain sense of zesty involvement to each taxpayer’s daily Hofheinz-watch.

  I visited the Judge one afternoon in his famous Astrodome office—a two-story business pad of such comically voluptuous decor and sybaritic furnishings that I was half convinced it had been designed by, say, John Lennon. My awed gaze took in hanging Moorish lamps and back-lit onyx wall panels in His Honor’s sanctum, a pair of giant Oriental lions guarding the black marble and rosewood judicatorial desk, a golden telephone awaiting the Hofheinzian ear, and, at the far end of the boardroom, a suspended baldachin above the elevated red-and-gilt magisterial throne. It would have been irreverent to talk baseball in these surroundings, but luckily the Judge received me in his box on an upper floor, which offered an expansive vista of the lofty, gently breathing dome and a distant view of some Astros working out in the batting cage. Hofheinz is a tall, thick-waisted man with lank hair, heavy black-rimmed spectacles, and small hands, in which he constantly rotates a giant cigar. We sat in gold plush swivel chairs overlooking the field and drank coffee out of gold cups, while the Judge talked about the long, tedious process of building a pennant contender from scratch. I asked about the Houston audience’s devotion to baseball, observing that I had seen very few local patrons keeping score during the game, and Hofheinz said, “This park keeps ’em interested enough so they don’t have to keep busy with a pencil and scorecard. Why, in most other parks you got nothing to do but watch the game, keep score, and sit on a hard wooden seat. This place was built to keep the fans happy. They’ve got our good seats, fine restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don’t have to make a personal sacrifice to like baseball.” He tapped the ash from his heater into a gold ashtray shaped like a fielder’s glove, and went on. “We have removed baseball from the rough-and-tumble era, I don’t believe in th
e old red-necked sports concept, and we are disproving it here. We’re in the business of sports entertainment. Baseball isn’t a game to which your individuals come alone just to watch the game. They come for social enjoyment. They like to entertain and be entertained at the ballpark. Our fans are more like the ones they have out in California. We don’t have any of those rowdies or semi-delinquents who follow the Mets.”

  I started to put in a small word for rowdies, but Hofheinz continued. “We have by far a higher percentage of fans in the upper economic brackets than you’ll find in any other park,” he said, “but we also have the best seats and service at the dollar-fifty level. You’re competing for attention in sports entertainment, and you’ve got to create new kinds of fans. We make a big effort to bring out the ladies. There are plenty of mothers and grandmothers who have just learned about the double play from some Little Leaguer, and now for the first time here’s a ballpark where you would want to bring them and let them develop into real fans. And once they’ve seen what it’s like here, they won’t feel so bad about letting their husbands and boys go off to the ball game any old time they want.”

  For the remainder of my stay, I tried to concentrate on Houston baseball, instead of its setting, and I saw the Astros split a pair of lively games with the Dodgers. The first was one of those baseball rarities, a complete turnabout, in which the Astros, after giving up ten hits and five runs in the first four innings, suddenly bounced back with batches of runs of their own while entirely bottling up their tormentors, and won going away, 8–5. John Bateman’s fourth-inning homer set off the scoreboard’s steers and rockets for their first sanctioned gala of the year, and in the fifth the home side, assisted by some absent-minded Dodger fielding, batted around and drove Don Drysdale from the mound. This was perhaps less of a feat than it sounds, for Drysdale was far from sharp after his long, much-publicized dual holdout with Sandy Koufax, but it was popular; there is nothing like the public shaming of a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man to tone up a crowd. The Astros got some first-class pitching from a tough workmanlike reliever named Mike Cuellar, who struck out nine Dodgers with his down-breaking screwball. The next night, the Astros almost pulled out another, but they were up against Claude Osteen, the least publicized and perhaps the best No. 3 pitcher in the league, who fanned Jim Gentile with the tying run aboard in the ninth, and they lost a 3–2 squeaker.