Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  Today, of course, the gulf between the players and the everyday fan is almost immeasurable, especially at the Series, and most of the middle ground seems to be filled with distracters and explainers—play-by-play announcers, beer and razor-blade commercials, stop-action TV shots, and battalions of sportswriters. Baseball is perhaps the most perfectly visible sport ever devised, almost never requiring us to turn to a neighbor and ask “What happened?” And yet our joy is no longer instantaneous. Scoreboards tell us when to cheer, and the incredible catch, the famous pinch-hit double are not entirely real to us until we have seen them confirmed on the late news show and in the morning columns. Years from now, we may find it difficult to remember whether we were really there at all. Inevitably, the fame and richness of the Series make it more and more difficult for most of us to make the scene, since large areas of the two autumn ballparks are occupied by moneyed boxholders, the press, and the immense bureaucracy of baseball. The Times estimated that thirty-two thousand Series seats at Dodger Stadium this year had been sold to season-ticket holders, and that twelve thousand more were reserved for baseball executives and their employees and friends. There were a thousand accredited reporters, cameramen, and radio and TV personnel in Los Angeles. The postgame crush in the clubhouses has lately grown so dense that most Series teams, including both the Dodgers and Orioles, now stage formal postgame press conferences in chair-lined rooms, where I have seen a slugger approach the microphones like an Under-Secretary of State, clear his throat, and murmur, “Well, in answer to that, I’d say it was a fast ball, high and inside.” In the evenings during the Series week, the reporters and numerous, various-sized baseball wheels assemble at large cocktail-and-dinner gatherings thrown by the home club. These are loud, cheerful enough affairs, full of gossip and anecdote, old friends, and free provender, and yet I have never come away from one without a feeling of glumness. It is not just the annual presence there of so many down-on-their luck baseball men—fired managers, superfluous coaches, and deterritorialized scouts—all looking for the fortuitous handshake, the whisky-warmed happenstance that will readmit them, however distantly, to the sunshine game. Concealed in the hoarse rumors, recollected heroics, and comical dugout yarns of the baseball writers there is also a simultaneous adulation and bitter patronizing of the young and lucky that reveals how out of it all we reporters are, how second-hand. We, too, are hangers-on of baseball.

  The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it. Sandy Koufax, although making his third start in eight days, including the pennant-nailer on Sunday, looked quick enough to lengthen his string of scoreless World Series innings indefinitely, and it seemed only a matter of time before his teammates would mark up some runs against the unpuzzling fast balls thrown by his opponent, the twenty-year-old right-hander Jim Palmer. For half the game, the only sign of twitchy nerves came from the Orioles. In the second, Frank Robinson stumbled as he fielded Lou Johnson’s hit to right field, and Johnson whizzed along to second; in the fourth, Robinson overran second on an error by Jim Gilliam and was thrown out easily. In the next inning, reality and the scoreless game came unstuck together. With Boog Powell on first and one out, Paul Blair lifted a high fly to center field, where Willie Davis, squinting up into the fierce, smog-glazed sun, allowed the ball to drop behind his left knee, and Powell and Blair each took two bases. The Dodgers thought so little of Andy Etchebarren, the next batter, that they decided to pitch to him, instead of putting him on and aiming for a double play. Their logic was perfect, but Etchebarren’s short fly subjected Davis to further corona observation, and he dropped it. Still shuddering under the weight of so many footcandles, Davis now pounced on the ball and made his first really unforgivable play—an angry Little League, heave into the Dodger dugout that scored the second run. Koufax, perhaps grieving for this teammate’s sudden arrival in the record books, gave up another run on a double by Aparicio, and disbelief was further stretched in the next inning, when Davis and Ron Fairly allowed Frank Robinson’s long drive to fall between them for three bases, and Powell scored him with a single. Struck dumb, the Dodgers stopped getting on base, and the game eventually ended with the score at 6–6—runs for Baltimore, errors for Los Angeles. It should be noted that the Dodger fans did not remain silent this time; full of spunk, they cheered bitterly every time Willie Davis caught the ball in the between-inning warmups. The day’s only display of gallantry came in the clubhouses after the game, where Willie Davis responded with grace to a reportorial cross-examination that would have done credit to Eichmann’s prosecutors. Only ballplayers understand how hard their game really is; over in the Oriole dressing room, Hank Bauer closed the accident report on Davis when he said, “If the Dodgers don’t want him, I’ll take him.”

  I could have provided further comfort for Willie Davis, had he needed it, from the lively memoirs contained in The Glory of Their Times, which I continued to read on the plane back to Baltimore. The book is packed with disasters. I learned that Roger Peckinpaugh, the Most Valuable Player in the American League in 1925, committed eight errors for the Senators in the World Series that year. I read several descriptions of the infamous “$100,000 Muff” by Fred Snodgrass that cost the Giants the 1912 Series with the Red Sox, and then Snodgrass’s own assessment: “For over half a century I’ve had to live with the fact that I dropped a ball in the World Series—‘Oh, you’re the guy that dropped that fly ball, aren’t you?’—and for years and years, whenever I’d be introduced to somebody, they’d start to say something and then stop, you know, afraid of hurting my feelings. But nevertheless, those were wonderful years, and if I had the chance I’d gladly do it all over again, every bit of it.” Snodgrass is stoutly defended by other witnesses, who point out that he also saved the game with a magnificent running catch on the next play and that the championship was actually lost when the Giant infield then misplayed a foul pop, thus permitting Tris Speaker to stay alive and drive in the winning run. Later, thinking back to Sandy Koufax and recalling the anxiety that stabs one when watching him pitch his flaring fast balls with an arthritic arm that may end his baseball days at any instant, I read Smoky Joe Wood’s lacerating account of the sore arm that finished him as a pitcher after he had won thirty-four games for the Red Sox in 1912, and of his long struggle back to the majors and to the World Series as an outfielder with the Cleveland Indians. Half asleep during the soft, deadening trip from one unlovely city to another, I read about the dusty American small towns where so many of these past heroes had begun their baseball—Wahoo and Freemont, Nebraska; Princeton, Indiana; and Ness City, Ellis, Bazine, and WaKeeny, Kansas. Sam Crawford, the old Tiger immortal, can remember when baseball was still a game for country boys:

  Every town had its own town team in those days. I remember when I made my first baseball trip. A bunch of us from around Wahoo, all between sixteen and eighteen years old, made a trip overland in a wagon drawn by a team of horses. One of the boys got his father to let us take the wagon. It was a lumber wagon, with four wheels, the kind they used to haul the grain to the elevator, and was pulled by a team of two horses. It had room to seat all of us—I think there were eleven or twelve of us—and we just started out and went from town to town, playing their teams.… We were gone three or four weeks. Lived on bread and beefsteak the whole time. We’d take up a collection at the games—pass the hat, you know—and that paid our expenses. Or some of them, anyway. One of the boys was the cook, but all he could cook was round steak. We’d get twelve pounds for a dollar and have a feast. We’d drive along the country roads, and if we came to a stream we’d go swimming; if we came to an apple orchard, we’d fill up on apples. We’d sleep anywhere. Sometimes in a tent, lots of times on the ground, out in the open. If we were near some fairgrounds, we’d slip in there. If we were near a barn, well …

 
Two unexpected wins had Baltimore jumping. Airport redcaps, cabdrivers, waitresses, storefronts, bank windows, and even a church or two were decked out in buttons or banners exhorting “Bomb ’em Birds!” and indoor strippers and outdoor revivalists in the downtown honky-tonk area known as The Block staged extra shows Friday night for the visiting sports. Most of the crowd turned up early at Memorial Stadium the next morning, in plenty of time to watch batting practice, and the tootling of extemporaneous bands in the parking lots, the hawkers selling chrysanthemums and orange-and-black pennants, and the excited faces of young boys hurrying their fathers along to their seats made me think for a minute that I was walking into Palmer Stadium. Out on the field, it was the other side that was now trying to smother its nerves. “I don’t think any team can be really down for a Series,” Ron Fairly said to me, but he seemed uncertain about it, and then Maury Wills lost his famous cool for a moment and threw angry imprecations at a sportswriter for an unfavorable phrase in a column. The Robinson team, by contrast, posed arm in arm for the photographers, laughing and hamming it up, and when it was over, Frank Robinson, who is, of course, black, said to Brooks, who was born in Arkansas, “If they print that down home, man, you’ll never get back.” Noisy, elated fans streamed into the stands wearing Oriole boaters and sunshades boosting a gubernatorial candidate named Agnew, and outside the park, beyond the center-field scoreboard and the jammed parking lot, a scattering of ticketless partisans had taken over a grassy knoll, from which they might get a glimpse of an occasional fly ball and hear the deep cries of the crowd.

  It was a brisk game, marvelously enjoyable, and the innings flew by to the accompaniment of hopeful toots on a hundred horns in the stands and a flurry of witticisms in the press rows about Willie Davis’s attack of stone hands in Los Angeles. The game was half gone after an hour, and there was nothing to choose between the teams—no runs, two hits apiece, and identical football blocks thrown at second base by the Dodgers’ Lou Johnson and the Orioles’ Luis Aparicio, which both spoiled double plays. If anything, I thought that the Dodger pitcher, Claude Osteen, was throwing harder and lower than the Orioles’ Wally Bunker, and I went on thinking so even after Paul Blair, the part-time Oriole center fielder, hammered a ball deep into the left-field stands in the fifth. It was a good pitch, down and away—the kind that any pitcher will occasionally see pickled even on his best days. Any pitcher, that is, but an Oriole in October. The Dodgers made agonized efforts to move their base-runners along, but they now seemed to be guessing at the plate. Their last flutter came in the eighth, with Tommy Davis on second, when a committee of Orioles gathered under Parker’s fly in left field and almost tabled it. Aparicio made the grab, and minutes later the Dodgers clumped wearily back to their clubhouse, their eyes still all goose eggs.

  The fourth game, before a cheerful, faintly incredulous shirtsleeved crowd, rematched Drysdale and McNally, but in tone and flavor it much more resembled the previous day’s game than the slack opener—the same good pitching, the same fast, scoreless early innings, the same slick infield play. It was as if the two teams had only knocked off for a tea interval before continuing the same encounter. Drysdale, although his fast ball was not tailing off like a cast fishing plug, the way it does when he is at his sharpest, was pitching with immense determination, and McNally, on his home mound, had his control back and now could share his fellow Orioles’ mad conviction that the Dodgers might not score another run until, say, late July in 1967. That remains a possibility to this day, of course, but this knowledge should not keep anyone from remembering how close the Series still looked early on that final afternoon. If Drysdale could win, if the Dodgers could stop drowning in two feet of water, Koufax would pitch that next game, and only members of the Flat Earth Society are prepared to bet that Koufax can lose two Series games in a row. Then the Series would move back to Los Angeles, surely at no worse than even odds. This quick, close, yet one-sided Series was so mystifying that in the early innings on Sunday the representatives of the magazine Sport, which awards a sports car each year to the outstanding player in the Series, were helplessly asking for nominees in the press rows. The most sensible suggestion, assuming a Baltimore victory that day, was to permit each of the Orioles to drive it for a week and to donate the safety belt to Willie Davis.

  The resolver—of the game, the Series, and the Sport editors’ dilemma—was Frank Robinson, who hit a Drysdale fast ball four hundred and ten feet into the left-field stands in the fourth inning. Robinson, a tall, solidly built right-handed slugger with long legs and gigantic forearms, stands in the batter’s box with his left foot almost touching the back corner of the plate; his quick forward stride throws all his weight into the pitch, and he swings with such violence that his third-base coach, Billy Hunter, has learned to bail out rapidly on the frequent occasions when Robinson’s bat comes whirring through his place of business. Robinson’s plate-crowding invites pitchers to throw at his left ear—a game that Drysdale enjoys—but this was no occasion for games. Drysdale’s pitch was a good, live fast ball, but right over the middle, and after the explosive whock! of Robinson’s bat Drysdale didn’t bother to turn and follow the ball; instead, he kicked the mound violently, exactly the way he did in the first inning of the first game. Robinson sailed around the infield, touching bases and counting his self-made blessings—Series hero; league-leading batting mark of .316; forty-nine homers, and a hundred and twenty-two runs batted in; certain attainment of the Most Valuable Player award; and, perhaps most comforting of all, the knowledge that the Cincinnati Reds, who sold him to the Orioles last winter after he had terrorized National League pitchers for a decade, had been stuck with the most foolish baseball trade in memory.

  The game went on, instantly growing in omens and tension. With two out in the same inning, Boog Powell, the immense doorstop who plays first base for the Orioles, powered a drive to deep straightaway center. I watched Willie Davis lope back until he bumped into the wire fence at the 410-foot sign, and when he dropped his arms I thought he had given up. He was merely coiling himself, however, and at the last moment he sailed straight up, hung in midair for an instant like a drip-dry shirt on a line, and came down with the ball in his glove.

  This kind of third-out catch is the classic baseball signal for a turnabout, and the Dodgers reacted with alacrity. Lefebvre singled, and then Wes Parker hit a hard, high-bouncing hopper that seemed headed through the infield between third and short. It didn’t get through. Brooks Robinson charged the ball and fielded it, half staggering, just above his shoe tops, and then whipped it over to second to start the double play. It was the second-best fielding play of the Series (Davis made the best, and the worst), and the Dodgers died right there. Drysdale pitched grimly, Lefebvre almost came up with a tying homer in the eighth, and the Dodgers put two runners on base in the ninth, but they went down in the end, sinking under a prodigal weight of zeros.

  The Dodger collapse at the plate should not invite any corollary murmuring to the effect that the Orioles do not deserve their new status as champions. Although their own team batting average of .200 is a new low for a Series winner, they played perfect, errorless ball, which is also a new team Series record. They had excellent pitching, and the two Robinsons did what so few team leaders accomplish in October: they led. Best of all, the Orioles’ victory restores prestige and interest to the recently flabby American League, and may help destroy the current misconception that only National League teams are worth the price of a ticket. At the same time, I doubt whether even the most Birds-mad Baltimore twelve-year-old would claim that the Oriole pitching was quite that good. The four pitchers who won three shutouts and ran up thirty-three consecutive scoreless innings in the Series managed only one shutout all season and pitched fewer complete games than Sandy Koufax alone. The only answer to that question “What happened?” is that the Dodgers stopped hitting, and the only explanation must be that baseball is still the most difficult, and thus the most unpredictable and interesting, of all professional s
ports. For all its statistics, the game does not yield itself readily to the form player or the expert; only two out of two hundred members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America correctly picked both pennant winners this year. There are so many surprises in baseball and so many precedents for this unexpected Series result that one must conclude that the only reliable precedent in baseball is surprise itself.

  Old ballplayers know the game best, and the most appropriate autumn garland for the 1966 World Series comes from The Glory of Their Times.

  Heinie Groh, of McGraw’s Giants: “So much of baseball is mental, you know, up there in the old head. You always have to be careful not to let it get you. Do you know that I was scared to death every time I went into a World Series? Every single one, after I’d been in so many. It’s a terrific strain.”

  Rube Bressler, of Connie Mack’s early Athletics: “Baseball … is not a game of inches, like you hear people say. It’s a game of hundredths of inches. Any time you have a bat only that big around, and a ball that small, traveling at such tremendous rates of speed, an inch is way too large a margin for error.” And “[The Athletics] won four pennants in five years, and three World Championships.… The only one they lost was that 1914 one—to George Stallings’ ‘miracle’ Boston Braves, of all teams. The weakest of them all. And we lost it in four straight games too.”

  Sam Jones, of the Yankees, on the 1923 World Series: “Art Nehf and I both pitched shutouts through six innings, but then in the seventh Casey Stengel hit one of my fast balls into the right-field stands. That was the only run of the game, and Nehf beat me, 1–0. Oh, that really hurt!”

  Paul Waner, of the Pirates, on losing the 1927 Series to the Yankees in four straight: “Out in right field I was stunned. And that instant, as the run that beat us crossed the plate, it struck me that I’d actually played in a World Series. It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? I didn’t think, ‘It’s all over and we lost.’ What I thought was, ‘Gee, I’ve just played in a World Series.’”