Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  Everyone in St. Louis was ready for the third game except the scoreboard-keeper, who initially had the Cardinals playing Detroit. More than fifty-four thousand partisans, the biggest sporting crowd in local history, arrived early at Busch Memorial Stadium, most of them bearing heraldic devices honoring “El Birdos”—a relentlessly publicized neologism supposedly coined by Orlando Cepeda. Home-town pride was also centered on El Ballparko, a steep, elegant gray concrete pile that forms part of the new downtown complex being built around the celebrated Saarinen archway. I admired everything about this open-face mine except its shape, which is circular and thus keeps all upper-deck patrons at a dismaying distance from the infielders within the right angles of the diamond. The game, like its predecessors, went off like a pistol, with Lou Brock tripling on the first pitch of the home half. After two innings, Gary Bell, the Boston starter, was allowed to sit down, having given up five hits and three runs to the first nine Cardinal batters. That was the ball game, it turned out (the Cards won, 5–2), but there were some memorable diversions along the way. Nelson Briles, the Cards’ starter, decked Yastrzemski in the first with a pitch that nailed him on the calf. Lou Brock, having led off the sixth with a single, got himself plunked in the back with a justifiably nervous pick-off throw by pitcher Lee Stange, and chugged along to third, from where he scored on a single by Maris. L’affaire Yaz was the subject of extended seminars with the press after the game. St. Louis Manager Red Schoendienst stated that inside pitches were part of the game but that his little band of clean-living Americans did not know how to hit batters on purpose. Pitcher Briles stated that the sight of Yastrzemski caused him to squeeze the ball too hard and thus lose control of its direction. (He had improved afterward, not walking a man all day.) Manager Williams pointed out that a pitcher wishing to hit a batter, as against merely startling him, will throw not at his head but behind his knees, which was the address on Briles’ special-delivery package. This seemed to close the debate locally, but that night the publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader wrote an editorial demanding that the Cardinals be forced to forfeit the game, “as an indication that the great American sport of baseball will not allow itself to be besmirched by anyone who wants to play dirty ball.”

  The great American sport survived it all, but it almost expired during the next game, a 6–0 laugher played on a windy, gray winter afternoon. The Cardinals had all their runs after the first three innings, and the only man in the park who found a way to keep warm was Brock, who did it by running bases. He beat out a third-base tap in the first and went on to score, and subsequently doubled off the wall and stole another base. Gibson, the winner, was not as fast as he had been in the opener, but his shutout won even more admiration from the Red Sox batters, who had discovered that he was not merely a thrower but a pitcher.

  The Red Sox, now one game away from extinction, looked doomed after that one, but Yastrzemski pointed out to me that most of his teammates, being in their early twenties, had the advantage of not recognizing the current odds against them. “Lonborg goes tomorrow,” he said, “and then it’s back to Boston, back to the lion’s den.” Lonborg went indeed, in a marvelously close and absorbing game, that I watched mostly through Kleenex, having caught a pip of a cold in the winter exercises of the previous day. The Red Sox won, 3–1; two former Yankees settled it. In the Boston ninth, Elston Howard, who can no longer get his bat around on fast balls, looped a dying single to right to score two runs—a heartwarming and, it turned out, essential piece of luck, because Roger Maris hit a homer in the bottom half, to end Lonborg’s string of seventeen scoreless innings. Maris, freed from his recent years of Yankee Stadium opprobrium, was having a brilliant Series.

  Laid low by too much baseball and a National League virus, I was unable to make it back to the lion’s den, and thus missed the noisiest and most exciting game of the Series. I saw it on television, between sneezes and commercials. This was the game, it will be recalled, in which the Red Sox led by 1–0, trailed by 2–1, rallied to 4–2, were tied at 4–4, and won finally, 8–4, burying the Cardinal relief pitchers with six hits and four runs in the seventh. Brock had a single, a stolen base, and a home run. Yastrzemski had two singles and a left-field homer. Reggie Smith hit a homer; Rico Petrocelli hit two homers. This was the first Series game since the Cardinal-Yankee encounters in 1964 in which any team rallied to recapture a lost lead, which may account for the rather stately nature of most of the recent fall classics. My admiration went out not only to the Red Sox, for evening the Series after being two games down, but to Dick Williams, for having the extraordinary foresight to start a young pitcher named Gary Waslewski, who had spent most of the season in the minors, had not started a Boston game since July 29, and had never completed a game in the major leagues. Waslewski didn’t finish this one, either, but he held the Cards off until the sixth, which was enough. Williams’ choice, which would have exposed him to venomous second-guessing if it had backfired, is the kind of courageous, intelligent patchworking that held his young, lightly manned team together over such an immense distance. In the opinion of a good many baseball people, his managerial performance this year is the best since Leo Durocher’s miracles with the Giants in the early nineteen-fifties.

  Nothing could keep me away from the final game of the year, the obligatory scene in which Lonborg, on only two days’ rest, would face Gibson at last. Fenway Park, packed to the rafters, seemed so quiet in the early innings that I at first attributed the silence to my stuffed-up ears. It was real, though—the silence of foreboding that descended on all of us when Lou Brock hit a long drive off Lonborg in the first, which Yastrzemski just managed to chase down. Lonborg, when he is strong and his fast ball is dipping, does not give up high-hit balls to enemy batters in the early going. After that, everyone sat there glumly and watched it happen. Maxvill, the unferocious Cardinal shortstop, banged a triple off the wall in the third and then scored, and another run ensued when Lonborg uncorked a wild pitch. In time, it grew merely sad, and almost the only sounds in the park were the cries and horns from Cardinal owner Gussie Busch’s box, next to the St. Louis dugout. Lonborg, pushing the ball and trying so hard that at times his cap flew off, gave up a homer to Gibson in the fifth, and then Brock singled, stole second, stole third, and came in on a fly by Maris. A fire broke out in a boxcar parked on a railway siding beyond left field, and several dozen sportswriters, looking for their leads, scribbled the note, “… as Boston championship hopes went up in smoke.” Manager Williams, out of pitchers and ideas, stayed too long with his exhausted hero, and Javier hit a three-run homer in the sixth to finish Lonborg and end the long summer’s adventure. The final score was 7–2. Gibson, nearly worn out at the end, held on and finished, winning his fifth successive Series victory (counting two against the Yankees in 1964), and the Cardinals had the championship they deserved. I visited both clubhouses, but I had seen enough champagne and emotion for one year, and I left quickly. Just before I went out to hunt for a cab, though, I ducked up one of the runways for a last look around Fenway Park, and discovered several thousand fans still sitting in the sloping stands around me. They sat there quietly, staring out through the half-darkness at the littered, empty field and the big wall and the bare flagpoles. They were mourning the Red Sox and the end of the great season.

  A LITTLE NOISE AT TWILIGHT

  — October 1968

  SOME YEARS AGO, DURING a spell of hot-stove mooning for summer and baseball, I jotted down on a slip of yellow paper the names and batting averages of the top National League hitters in the year 1930. I have carried the slip in my wallet ever since, and on occasion, when comfortably surrounded with fellow baseball bores, I produce it. While being unmemorable in every other way, 1930 was a hitters’ year. The combined National League batting average was .303, and the top finishers, all full-time regulars, were:

  Bill Terry .401

  Babe Herman .393

  Chuck Klein .386

  Lefty O’Doul .383


  Freddy Lindstrom .379

  Paul Waner .368

  Riggs Stephenson .367

  Lloyd Waner .362

  Kiki Cuyler .355

  During the season just past, which concluded with the Detroit Tigers’ stimulating seven-game, come-from-behind victory over the Cardinals in the World Series, I reread this list often, with a deepening incredulity; once an oddity (attributable in part to the jackrabbit ball), it suddenly had become a document of almost paleographic significance—a record of another sport, now clearly gone forever. The 1968 season has been named the Year of the Pitcher, which is only a kinder way of saying the Year of the Infield Pop-Up. The final records only confirm what so many fans, homeward bound after still another shutout, had already discovered for themselves; almost no one, it seemed, could hit the damn ball any more. The two leagues’ combined batting average of .236 was the lowest ever—four points below even the .240 compiled by the Mets in 1962, their first year of hilarious ineptitude. This year, there were three hundred and forty shutout games, as against a hundred and ninety-nine in 1962, and 1994 home runs, as against 3001. Only five National League batters finished over the .300 mark, and only one batter—Carl Yastrzemski—in the American; his average of .3005 was the lowest ever to win a batting title. Baseball owners and other positive thinkers will find more joy in studying these statistics from the pitcher’s mound, from which direction 1968 becomes a year of triumph. Denny McLain, of the Tigers, won thirty-one games and lost six, thus becoming the first thirty-game winner since 1934. Bob Gibson’s earned-run average of 1.12 was the lowest in the history of the National League. Don Drysdale ran off a record fifty-eight and one-third scoreless innings; a Mets rookie named Jerry Koosman pitched seven shutouts; Gaylord Perry, of the Giants, and Ray Washburn, of the Cardinals, threw no-hitters on consecutive days in the same ballpark; and there was only a minimal stir when a journeyman hurler, Catfish Hunter, of Oakland, achieved the ultimate rarity, a perfect game—no runs, no hits, no one on base, twenty-seven up and twenty-seven out.

  Adding up zeros is not the most riveting of spectator sports and by mid-July this year it was plain to even the most inattentive or optimistic fans that something had gone wrong with their game. Why were the pitchers so good? Where were the .320 hitters? What had happened to the high-scoring slugfest, the late rally, the bases-clearing double? The answers to these questions are difficult and speculative, but some attempt must be made at them before we proceed to the releasing but somewhat irrelevant pleasures of the World Series. To begin with: Yes, the pitchers are better—or, rather, pitching is better. All the technical and strategic innovations of recent years have helped the defenses of baseball; none have favored the batter. Bigger ballparks with bigger outfields, the infielders’ enormous crab-claw gloves, more night games, the mastery of the relatively new slider pitch, the persistence of the relatively illegal spitter, and the instantaneous managerial finger-wag to the bullpen at the first hint of an enemy rally have all tipped the balance of this delicately balanced game. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that that young relief pitcher motoring in from the bullpen in a golf cart is significantly different from the man who walked the same distance twenty or thirty years ago, and so is the pitcher he is replacing on the mound. Like all young athletes, they are an inch or two taller and twenty or thirty pounds heavier than their counterparts of a generation ago, and they throw the ball harder. The batter waiting in the on-deck circle is also enormous, but all that heredity and orange juice are going to be of no help to him if he can’t meet the ball with his bat. And here, precisely, the batter is most disadvantaged, for hitting has nothing much to do with size or strength but is almost wholly a matter of reflexes. A number of thoughtful students of athletics, including Ted Williams, consider hitting a baseball to be the most difficult reflex—the hardest single act—in all sports.

  Almost any strong and passably coordinated young man can learn to pitch, but batting is not generally teachable; even after a lifetime in the game, most pitchers still swing like their old aunties. The solid-gold reflex of the natural hitter is capable of some polishing, but only through many years of practice. There was a time when American boys so endowed spent most of their afternoons playing nothing but baseball, yearned only after a career in baseball, and once signed, spent at least three years in the minors learning their trade—that is, learning to hit. All this is changed. Boys have more afternoon diversions, many of which do not require seventeen companions and an empty sandlot, and baseball must now compete with pro football, basketball, and golf in signing up the best teen-age athletes. Even if the young phenom does choose baseball, he no longer enjoys the same lengthy apprenticeship. Expansion and television have dried up most of the minor leagues, and the baseball draft now makes it impossible for the parent club to train and protect a promising young slugger down in Rochester or El Paso for more than two years. Hurried through the minors, brushed up in the winter instructional leagues, the would-be Gehringer or Musial suddenly finds himself in the batter’s box in a big-league park, where he is expected to begin repaying at once the investment of his owners and the hopes of the fans. Unsurprisingly, he pops up.

  Baseball executives might disagree with some of these observations, or place a different emphasis or interpretation on others, but it is difficult to believe that they are totally unaware of the problem itself. Yet their decisions in this decade not only have ignored the imbalance and the decline in quality of baseball but have directly and profoundly worsened it. The expansion of big-league baseball was inevitable and perhaps defensible, but the addition of two new teams to each eight-team league in 1962 permanently watered the quality of the game; the new teams were not permitted anything like a fair share of the available talent, and none of them have yet risen to full contention in their leagues. Since that time, of course, all twenty teams have had to scout and bid in a player market tightened by 25 per cent more buyers. At this moment, four new teams are being created—Montreal and San Diego in the National League and Kansas City and Seattle in the American—and both leagues next year will be divided into six-team Eastern and Western divisions. Every team will play an unbalanced schedule—eighteen games against each team in its own division and twelve against each team in the other division; the divisional champions in each league will meet in three-out-of-five game autumn playoffs to determine the pennant winners and World Series participants. However neatly or awkwardly this complex plan works in practice, and however rich a revenue the existing clubs will derive at once from the price of the new franchises and the attendance of fans in the new cities, there should be no illusions about the stature of the new teams or the true quality of the leagues. Each existing club lost six players to the new teams in the draft just concluded, but sympathy should be reserved for the fans of the Expos, the Padres, the Royals, and the Pilots, who will have to watch these stitched-together, rivet-necked monsters in action next year. The rosters of the new clubs have been assembled out of culls and spare parts—the sixteenth, twentieth, twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth, thirty-second, and thirty-sixth best ballplayers on each present club. One-third of all the players in the majors next April would have been minor-leaguers in unexpanded baseball.

  A few owners have opposed expansion for precisely these reasons, but the majority are executives caught up in the old business fiction that says bigger is better. Their usual defense against charges of greed and shortsightedness is a dictum first propounded by Branch Rickey in the nineteen-fifties, which postulated that the increase in national population guaranteed an increase in the number of first-class ballplayers, thus justifying expansion. This year’s batting averages do not support the theory, for reasons I have suggested, and neither do the sharply declining attendance figures in the parks of some famous old teams that have not been in recent pennant contention. The new expansion, in the owners’ dreams, will remedy the attendance anemia, particularly in September, by doubling the number of pennant races and adding two new playoff extravaganzas befor
e the Series itself. The scheduling of these playoffs means that baseball will now be extended into mid-October, and that there will be three full weekends of national television coverage right in the heart of the professional-football season. Clearly, the conservative owners—the non-expansionists—never had a chance. It is expected that baseball fans will somehow not notice that the new playoffs will make most of the long baseball season meaningless, and that the fans will accept at once a system that, had it been in effect this year, would have required the Detroit Tigers to qualify for the Series by winning a playoff against the sixth-place Oakland Athletics, who finished twenty-one games behind them in the standings.

  The World Series just past carried an extraordinary burden of hopes. It was counted on to make up for everything—not only the deadly zeros of the Year of the Pitcher but the bad luck of two one-sided pennant races, whose winners were virtually decided by mid-July. This last pre-inflationary, pre-playoff Series meant the end of something, and there was pleasure in the knowledge that both champions represented ancient baseball capitals that had flown a total of eighteen previous pennants. Many of us could remember the last Tiger-Cardinal Series, in 1934, which went seven memorable games and concluded in a riot of acrimony and garbage. Each of the current rivals presented deep, experienced, and exciting teams, whose individual attributes were admirably designed for the dimensions of their home parks—the Cardinals, the defending world champions, quick on the bases, brilliant in defense, knowing in the subtleties of cutoff, sacrifice, and hit-and-run; the Tigers a band of free-swingers who had bashed a hundred and eighty-one homers and could eschew the delicate touch in the knowledge that their runs would come, probably late and in clusters. At almost every position, there were dead-even matchups of ability and reputation. Curt Flood and Mickey Stanley were the best center fielders in their leagues, and Tim McCarver and Bill Freehan the best catchers; Roger Maris, retiring this winter, would play opposite Al Kaline, now in his sixteenth year with the Tigers, who had finally been rewarded for his refusal ever to attend a Series except as a participant; at first base, Orlando Cepeda and Norm Cash presented faded but still formidable reputations as game-busting clean-up hitters. Best of all, the opening game (and probably the key fourth and seventh games) would offer what few sportswriters could resist calling a “meaningful confrontation” between Bob Gibson, the best pitcher in baseball, and Denny McLain, who had won more games in a season than anyone since Lefty Grove. With squads like these, neither Manager Red Schoendienst nor Manager Mayo Smith had been called on through the season to attempt more than minimal prestidigitation. Then, on the eve of the Series, Smith announced that he was moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop, a position he had played in only eight games in the majors. Some sort of shuffle like this was inescapable, because room had to be found in the outfield for Kaline, who had been injured too often of late to hold down a regular spot, but Mayo’s switch offered the heady possibility of disaster every time a ball was hit to the left side of the Tiger infield.