“The game,” says Tony Kubek, “lends itself to sitting around.” Kubek played near the end of the railroad era, when the Yankees still took 30-hour train trips from New York to Kansas City. Thirty hours in close confinement with Casey Stengel was a learning experience. So was learning baseball at the side of the likes of Mark Belanger. Belanger’s confidence in his fielding was such that (so says Tony Kubek, a less confident shortstop) he did not wear a protective cup. So the teenaged Ripken was taking tutorials from a master.
Belanger taught him, for example, that on an attempted steal, when you are straddling second base waiting to receive the throw from the catcher, don’t reach out for the ball. Let it come to you because you can’t pull your glove back to you as fast—say, 80 miles per hour—as the thrown ball is moving. Anyway, says Ripken, because Belanger was so quick with the tag, he got a lot of calls from umpires who could not tell on a bang-bang play whether he actually tagged the runner. “When I was 17, Belanger told me some things I was too young to absorb. For example, when you have a lead, and one out is enough, you can play a deeper double-play depth. Perhaps you will miss a double play you might have had playing at the regular depth, but you will get to some balls you might not have reached at regular double-play depth. And you cut the trailing team from nine down to eight outs remaining. Similarly, when you absolutely must have a double play—say, tie game, eighth inning, one out, runners on first and second, fast runner at the plate—there is a shallower-than-usual double-play depth.”
There never has been more of a baseball boyhood than Ripken’s. And there are few, if any, better baseball towns than Baltimore. It is a blue-collar town with a tradition of making steel and sausages and baseball teams from scraps. Good teams, too. Several of them. It is arguable that Baltimore deserves to be thought of as America’s emblematic baseball city. To begin at the beginning, there is a bit of Baltimore (Francis Scott Key’s song) at the beginning of every baseball game. And back at the beginning of big-league baseball, Baltimore was a nursery of greatness.
In the early 1890s the Orioles of John McGraw, Wilbert Robinson and Willie Keeler were one of baseball’s best teams. After the 1902 season, $18,000 was enough to cause the Orioles to move to New York and become the Highlanders. In 1906 the name was changed to the Yankees. But the Yankees did not really become the Yankees, the Yankees as they are remembered, until 1920. Then they acquired Baltimore’s greatest gift to baseball, by far the largest figure in the history of American sport, George Herman Ruth.
He was the product of a Catholic institution for orphans and other needy children (its second most famous alumnus was a Jewish singer, Al Jolson). He was brought into organized baseball by Jack Dunn, owner of the Orioles franchise in the International League, at a time when the difference in the caliber of baseball played in the major leagues and the high minor leagues was not as great as it is today. (Dunn once built a fence for a West Virginia club as payment for the contract of a young pitcher named Lefty Grove.) In Ruth’s first appearance in Baltimore as an Oriole he pitched in an exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. In his first at bat he hit a long fly that was run down by the Dodgers’ right fielder, Casey Stengel. In Ruth’s second at bat Stengel played deeper, and Ruth tripled over his head.
Even after Ruth was sold to the Red Sox, the Orioles won seven consecutive International League pennants, from 1919 through 1925. Nearly thirty years later major league baseball came back to Baltimore with the first move of an American League franchise since 1902. The franchise that moved in 1954 was the one that had moved in 1902. Before that season, after just one season in the league, the Milwaukee franchise moved to St. Louis and became the Browns, baseball’s most consistently awful team.
Through 52 seasons (1902–53) they finished in the second division 40 times. They were more than 1,000 games under .500 (3,416–4,465, .433). They finished second in their first season in St. Louis, and again in 1922. They did not finish that high again until they won their only pennant, in 1944, when most of America’s able-bodied athletes were fighting the Axis. After George Sisler’s 12 seasons hitting .344 for the Browns, their most famous players were a one-armed outfielder, Pete Gray, who hit .218 in 77 games in 1945, and a 3-foot-7, 65-pound midget, Eddie Gaedel, who batted once, in 1951.
In Baltimore the franchise that had been a jalopy became a Rolls-Royce. The Orioles’ record from 1954 through 1988 was 2,972–2,557, .538, with winning records against all but three teams (Red Sox, Indians, Yankees). In their first 35 years at Thirty-third Street, through 1988, the Orioles finished first 8 times and won 6 pennants and 3 World Series. They were runners-up 8 times and finished in the first division 21 times. In their first 32 years in Baltimore, until 1986, the Orioles never finished last. From 1960 through 1985 they had only two losing seasons, and were 625 games over .500, an average of 24 games over .500 for 26 seasons. The Orioles’ 18 consecutive winning seasons from 1968 through 1985 was the second-longest winning streak in history, surpassed only by the Yankees’ 39-year run from 1926 through 1964. (In professional baseball, football and hockey, the franchises with the most consecutive winning seasons are the Yankees, 39 [1926–64]; Canadiens, 32 [1951–83]; Bruins, 22 [1967–89]; Cowboys, 20 [1966–85]; and Orioles, 18 [1968–85].) In the 18 seasons from 1966, when they swept the Dodgers in the World Series, through 1983, when they beat the Phillies in 5 games, the Orioles had a .590 winning percentage and won 6 pennants. It was one of the best long-run performances by any franchise. In the 6 seasons from 1966 through 1971 the Orioles won 4 pennants. In the 9 seasons from 1966 to 1974 they finished first 6 times. In 1969, 1970 and 1971 they became the third major league team in history to win 100 or more games in three consecutive seasons. They won division titles by 19, then 15, then 12 games and swept the first three American League Championship Series (which, at the time, were best-of-5 events) in 3 games each time, twice over the Twins and once over the Athletics.
The Orioles of 1969–71 rank with the best teams in history: with the 1927 Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig; with the 1929–31 Athletics of Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane and Lefty Grove; with the 1976 Reds of Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan; with the 1952 Dodgers of Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese; and the 1961 Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Elston Howard and Tony Kubek. The Orioles had three Hall of Famers, Frank Robinson and Brooks Robinson, and Jim Palmer. Paul Blair was one of the best defensive center fielders since Tris Speaker. The right side of the infield had Boog Powell and Davey Johnson. The Orioles had three 20-game winners (Palmer, Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar). The 1971 team became the second team in history to have four, with Pat Dobson joining the list.
Over a span of 31 seasons, 1957–87, the Orioles had the best record in the major leagues. In the 24 seasons from 1960 (the year Cal Ripken, Jr., was born into the Orioles organization and the year they almost won their first pennant) through 1983 (Ripken’s second season and the year they won their third World Series) the Orioles dominated baseball as it has rarely been dominated. They were 612 games over .500 (2,206–1,594, .581). They had a 99y2-game edge over the second-best team during that span, the Yankees. The Orioles won 100 games in 1980 but finished 3 games behind the Yankees. That year 249,605 attended a 5-game series with the Yankees at Memorial Stadium, the largest attendance for a single series in major league history. (In 1935 the Browns drew 80,922 for the whole season.) Even in the 5 years of decline, 1984–88, the Orioles’ annual attendance averaged 1.93 million. In 1988, in spite of the stumbling start, in spite of the staggering finish, in spite of a season-long trough between those two troughs, in spite of losing 7 home dates to rain, the most in the major leagues, the Orioles drew 1,660,738, more than 7 other major league clubs. It was the fourth-highest attendance for a team losing 100 games, surpassed only by two early seasons of Mets mania (1965 and 1967) and the Toronto Blue Jays in 1977, the first year of that franchise.
In 1992 the Orioles will begin playing in a new bal
lpark in downtown Baltimore, hard by the B&O railroad tracks. (A Hall of Famer who went from Baltimore amateur leagues directly to the Tigers—Al Kaline—developed his strong right fielder’s arm by throwing rocks at the “O” on the passing B&O freight cars.) Center field in the new park will be located approximately where, from 1906 to 1912, there was a saloon operated by George Ruth. He lived there, on the second floor, with his wife, Katherine, and their son, George Herman. The son probably played ball in the street—in what will be center field. That was one of five locations for the senior Ruth’s businesses between 1902 and 1916. After 1912 he ran the Columbia Harness Company at a location where, in 1992, there will be crowds sitting in the new stadium’s seats along the third-base line. Father Ruth’s partner was listed as “Ruth, George Herman, junior, ball player.” That is the first known reference to Babe as a ball player.
Babe Ruth, who was as rambunctious an individualist as ever caroused across America, represented baseball’s individualist side. His speciality was baseball’s supreme act of solitary achievement, the go-it-alone blow, the home run: Do it quickly, with one swing of the bat. Defense is baseball’s collective, team side. The individualism of baseball has been called (by the Chicago American in 1906) the source of American military success. The paper editorialized that base ball (the name was two words until well into this century) “is one of the reasons why American soldiers are the best in the world… capable of going into action without officers.”
It has been said that baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community. Baseball is a team game in which the episodic action begins by repeated confrontations between two individuals standing alone, the pitcher and the batter. The spatial separation of the players—every player’s action is clearly visible to every spectator—underscores the individualism of baseball. The very fact that there is a “lineup” suggests the one-thing-at-a-time aspect of the game. But baseball is really always a one-against-nine game, and if the batter has one or more teammates on base, there are two (or three, or four) against the nine. Batters and base runners affect and help one another. And to understand defensive play is to recognize that there is no simple batter-against-pitcher confrontation. The batter is working against a pitcher who is thinking and acting with eight other players.
Bart Giamatti characterized baseball as “an individual sport that you play as a team member.” It is not a team sport in the sense that football is. In football, 11 men move in an assigned pattern on a prearranged signal. Baseball, however, is most like a team sport on defense, when a full team is on the field. Then it is more of a team sport than most fans realize. If a team on defense is doing its job correctly, all nine men are playing as a team on every pitch. This playing as a team may not involve nine discernible movements. Indeed, it should not. Playing together should not reveal too much. Some, even most, of the playing together can only be inferred. But imagine taut elastic bands connecting every player behind the pitcher. As the pitcher begins his delivery, every player should impart some slight change in the tension of the band, a change that would radiate through the team. Most of the change would be a slight movement, or leaning, denoting the essence of defensive play—anticipation.
There is in baseball an ugly synergism and a lovely synergism and it sometimes seems that there is not much in between. When some aspect of a team’s play goes sour, the sourness is contagious, making other aspects sick. And when something goes well it makes ailing things get well. Bad hitting, for example, makes pitchers press, lose concentration and confidence, aim the ball, bollix up their mechanics. All this happens because they go to the mound gloomily convinced that their team will not score many runs so they must pitch nearly perfectly to win. Bad pitching makes the hitters unable to “stay within themselves.” They go to the plate thinking they must score a lot of runs just to stay close. On the other hand, good pitching makes good defense—and, as we shall shortly see, vice versa. The Orioles of 1988 and 1989 demonstrated, perhaps in each case more dramatically than ever before, both synergisms, the ugly in 1988 and the lovely in 1989.
The 1988 Orioles hit bottom on Opening Day and stayed there all the way. They were in last place every day. In 1989 the Orioles were the only American League East team that was never in last place for even a day. Still, 1989 was a roller-coaster year. Immediately after the All-Star break the Orioles lost eight in a row, one short of the American League record (held by the 1953 Yankees and 1970 Twins) for consecutive losses by a team in first place. That is the way things go when you have gone as far as defense and adrenaline can carry an otherwise marginal team.
When the Orioles management recognized the extent of the 1988 collapse, they decided to rebuild around defense and pitching. They decided to do so because, as Roland Hemond, their general manager, said, “That’s the fastest way to improve.” It is fastest because of the particularly powerful synergism between the two. And of the two, defense is primary.
In 1973 Nolan Ryan pitched 326 innings and piled up 383 strikeouts. That means that Ryan himself retired nearly 40 percent of all the batters who made outs while he pitched. If the likes of Ryan were not so rare, sound defense would not be so important. On April 29, 1986, Roger Clemens struck out 20 Mariners. If every pitcher in every game left just 7 outs to be made by the 7 men who play behind the pitcher, a manager could worry almost entirely about what his players do with wood in their hands. It is a mistake to think that the ideal pitching accomplishment would be an 81-pitch game of 27 three-pitch strikeouts. Rather, the ideal would be a 27-pitch game with 27 first pitches put in the strike zone and put in play for outs by the defenders who are paid to make putouts. In 1944 Red Barrett of the Boston Braves pitched a complete game with just 58 pitches—about 2 per out. The people behind him were kept busy. They are supposed to be busy. Ray Miller’s credo—“throw strikes, change speeds, work fast”—has, in its unabridged version, seven more words: “Throw strikes, change speeds, work fast and let everybody else do the work.”
The pitcher’s primary task is to make batters put the ball in play where fielders can reach it. As John Tudor said after he went on a 20–1 tear in 1985, “If I can’t throw strikes and let Ozzie [Smith] and Willie [McGee] catch ’em, then I’m beating myself.” As Davey Johnson of the Mets says, “We believe totally that you pitch in front. Get the first one over. Statistics show that the guys don’t hit for much of an average if you are pitching in front. I have told pitchers, I don’t care if it is right down the middle. Down the middle for the first two pitches, then move to the corners, and if the count gets even, go back to the middle.” Doesn’t Johnson worry that the other teams will notice that his teams do that? “Doesn’t matter. Your defense is more ready if you’re pitching in front. All good staffs are ’strike one, strike two, then go to work.’ And if they hit the ball early in the count they haven’t had a lot of pitches they could time.” That is why Wade Boggs believes he is a better hitter deep in the count. In 1986 the Indians led the American League in errors, in part, Andy Allanson believes, because the pitchers were running so deep in the count with so many hitters that the infielders were losing the edge that a brisk tempo hones. Furthermore, the errors made the pitchers nervous and drained away their aggressiveness, and they began to pitch too carefully. They were afraid to let the batters hit the ball, so they nibbled around the plate, thereby producing more deep counts.
The late Lefty Gomez was making a serious point when he joked that he owed his success to “clean living and a fast outfield.” Pitchers, like other players, are paid on the basis of the numbers they put up. The number, other than wins and losses, they care most about is earned run average. It supposedly is the number that comes closest to reflecting the pitcher’s pure value—what he does on his own. But a pitcher’s ERA is going to rise if, in first-and-third situations with no outs or one out, he gets batters to hit ground balls but his infielders do not turn the double plays. Although Hershiser showed in
1985 that he had special talent (19–3,2.03 ERA), he was just a .500 pitcher in the two seasons before 1988, splitting 60 decisions (14–14, 3.85 ERA in 1986; and 16–16, 3.06 ERA in 1987). This was in part-in large part—because the Dodger infield was too porous.
In olden times, before the strike zone sagged to the belt, pitchers were praised for being able to throw “the high hard one.” A scout once reported to Branch Rickey on an unpromising rookie, “This boy is wild low. He doesn’t have enough stuff to be wild high.” Today, with the increased emphasis on defense, a sinker-ball pitcher like Hershiser is especially valuable because he pitches down where the strike zone has gone, and in doing so he produces a lot of ground balls. The ideal Hershiser game would closely resemble the 10 major league games in which infielders have made 25 putouts in nine innings. Mike Flanagan, who before going to the Blue Jays pitched for the Orioles when they won two pennants and one World Series, says defense “makes all the difference.” The 1979 American League Cy Young Award winner says, “It’s the difference between hoping and knowing.” When a ball is hit that a good infield would turn into a double play, but the ball gets through for a hit, that “is a momentum-turning play. One or two major plays can make a game. An 11–2 game can come down to one pitch, one play.” Or, as Casey Stengel said, “When a fielder gets the pitcher into trouble, the pitcher has to pitch himself out of a slump he isn’t in.”
Bob Gibson said that the plate’s 17 inches includes two dominions: “The middle 12 belong to the hitter. The inside and outside 2½ are mine. If I pitch to spots properly, there’s no way the batter is going to hit the ball hard consistently.” Listen to Gibson’s language carefully. He spoke about pitching the way he practiced it—with precision. So note the words “hard” and “consistently.” Gibson was saying that no matter how well you pitch to spots, many pitches are going to be hit, some of them hard. Cal Ripken, Sr., remembers the 1971 Orioles’ pitching staff with its four 20-game winners. The pitching was great. The defense was sensational. The four pitchers, Cal, Sr., says, made a lot of mistakes. “If they didn’t make mistakes, how did Brooks Robinson get to make all those great plays at third base? They made mistakes that the defense got them out of.” From 1968 through 1984 Orioles pitchers had twenty-three 20-win seasons and won six Cy Young awards. It is not a coincidence that the Orioles’ pitchers had a lot of Gold Gloves playing behind them. Between 1957, when the Gold Glove awards were begun, and 1988, Orioles won 48, more than any other American League team and second only to the Cardinals’ 48½. (How do you win only half an award? By trading a Gold Glove player—in this case, first baseman Keith Hernandez, to the Mets—in the middle of the season.) Brooks Robinson shares with pitcher Jim Kaat the record for the number of Gold Gloves won: 16. Belanger holds the American League record for the highest career fielding average among shortstops who have played 1,000 or more games (.977). Cal Ripken, Jr., considers the truth self-evident: “Defense and pitching go hand in hand. Good defense helps pitching and good pitching helps defense.”
Men at Work Page 34
