Catcher Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra
First base Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell
Second base Rod Carew, Joe Morgan
Third base Mike Schmidt, Brooks Robinson
Shortstop Ernie Banks, Ozzie Smith
Outfield Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Frank
Robinson, Roberto demente, Carl Yastrzemski
Left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax
Right-handed pitcher Bob Gibson
Furthermore, although the first black players did not make it to the major leagues until 1947 and baseball was not really fully open to blacks until the mid-1950s, it is possible to select an all-black team that could hold its own with a team drawn from all the other players during the first nine decades of this century.
Catcher Roy Campanella
First base Willie McCovey
Second base Rod Carew
Third base Jackie Robinson (he played 256 games at third)
Shortstop Ernie Banks
Outfield Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson
Pitcher Bob Gibson
Tony Gwynn hit “only” .332 in the 1980s because average play has improved so much that there are fewer opportunities for geniuses like Gwynn to exploit (in Gould’s phrase) “suboptimality in others.” The “play” in playing professional baseball is, Gould says, gone. Baseball has become a science in the sense that it emphasizes repetitious precision in the execution of its component actions. That is why variation decreases at both ends, with the highest and lowest averages edging toward the league average. Standard deviations (take a deep breath: the square root of the sum of the squares of all individual averages minus the major league average divided by the total number of players) are narrowed by progress. The extinction of the .400 hitter, like the rareness of the dynastic team, is evidence of progress, not regression.
It is inconceivable that a protean figure like Babe Ruth could burst upon baseball today. Remember how disproportionate his achievements were to those of his contemporaries. In 1919 the Yankees led the major leagues in home runs with 45. But up in Boston, Ruth hit 29. And in 1920, as a Yankee, he hit 54. The American League’s second-best slugger in 1920 was George Sisler. He hit only 19. The National League champion had 15. Only one American League team other than the Yankees had more than 44. Ruth’s biographer, Robert W. Creamer, notes that when Ruth was sold to the Yankees after the 1919 season he was already recognized as the greatest home-run hitter in baseball history—and he had hit just 49 (the number Mark McGwire hit in his 1987 rookie season). The career leader at the time was Roger Connor with 136. Ruth became baseball’s career home-run hitter in 1921, which was just his third season as a full-time (nonpitching) player. He proceeded to break his own record 577 times. When in 1934 he hit his 700th home run, only two other players had more than 300. When he retired his total of 714 was nearly twice the total of the man in second place (Gehrig, then at 378). Over a 6-season span (1926–31) Ruth averaged 50 home runs, 154 RBIs, 147 runs and a .354 average.
Suppose Ruth had more frequently gone to bed early and with Mrs. Ruth. Suppose he had not downed a couple of hot dogs (and a glass of bicarbonate soda) before most games. Suppose he had not had the habits that caused him to balloon one winter to a gargantuan 49%-inch waist—larger than his chest. (Perhaps the Yankees would not be wearing pinstripes today, an innovation ordered by their owner, the elegant Jacob Ruppert, who hoped the stripes would make Ruth look less obese.) If Ruth had lived sensibly and trained as we now know how to train, he would loom even larger over his era, like an Everest in Kansas.
But he could not so loom today. Once when Mickey Mantle was weary of hearing the batting achievements of his era dismissively discussed as mere products of a livelier ball, he said, “Maybe the players are livelier now.” Certainly they are generally bigger and stronger and faster, and they know more about a game that rewards knowing. Baseball is an intensely emulative industry. What works gets noticed almost immediately and is communicated quickly among baseball people, who are great talkers. As the Elias people write, “There are no copyrights on strategy.” That is why baseball is a game of watchfulness. Success goes to those who are paying attention, day by day, from April to October.
A baseball season is a surefire quality detector. By late October one team is certified the best. Five months later 26 teams start all over again. And nowadays, more often than not, the team that proved itself to be the best the previous year goes on to be proven, over the next six months, to be no longer the best. Competition has intensified, not just because talent has been emancipated and become mobile, but also, and even more, because of the progressive nature of the game. Knowledge matters, knowledge is cumulative, knowledge travels. The margin between baseball success and failure has been shrinking. It never has been large.
A team that plays only .500 ball is considered barely respectable. But a team that wins 11 of every 20 games wins 89 games and probably is a pennant contender. The best five-year team record is that of the 1906–10 Cubs: .693. So baseball’s best sustained performance still did not quite amount to winning seven out of ten, consistently. In recent decades it has become increasingly rare for a team (the 1961 Yankees, 1969–70 Orioles, 1975 Reds, 1986 Mets) to win twice as many games as it loses. Since divisional play began in 1969, 60 percent of the titles have been won by six or fewer games, 50 percent by five or fewer. More than a fifth (22.5 percent) have been won by two or fewer games. Many games turn on a single play, a single pitch, so championships can be—and frequently are—decided by a half dozen plays or pitches.
“Don’t you know how hard this all is?” said Ted Williams, talking about baseball. Actually, very few people, even among the most attentive fans, know. But Henry Heitmann knew. The Baseball Encyclopedia contains this entry, surely one of the most melancholy career totals:
On July 27, 1918, the Dodgers gave the ball to pitcher Heitmann and sent him out to cope with the Cardinals. This he did not do. He gave up four hits and four runs. He got one Cardinal out. That was the beginning of his major league career, and the end of it. (Hence his career ERA of 108.) His career is a complete contrast with that of Warren Spahn. Spahn was not only the winningest left-hander, he also came within six losses of being the losingest. That is what longevity means in baseball: a lot of both winning and losing. Spahn won more games after turning 35 than Sandy Koufax won in his career, which ended when Koufax was 30. Careers in sports have different spans and paces, but they all have one thing in common. They end, going downhill. The photographer Margaret Bourke-White once described her work as “a trusted friend, who never deserts you.” Every baseball player is deserted. The natural attrition of skills spares no one. So there is an inevitable poignancy inherent in the careers of even the best professional athletes. They compress the natural trajectory of human experience—striving, attaining, declining—into such a short span. Their hopes for fulfillment are hostage to their bodies, to attributes that are short-lived and subject to decay. The decay occurs in public, in front of large audiences. The decay is chronicled and monitored by millions of people who study the unsparing statistics that are the mathematics of baseball accomplishment. But poignancy is not the same thing as sadness. Baseball is a remarkably cheerful business.
Baseball is, of course, hardly immune to the ills of the society of which it is an expression. Thus, being a fan is not unalloyed fun. For one famous fan, baseball was heartbreaking. One of the costs of the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal was that baseball lost one of its best writers, Ring Lardner, whose disillusionment drove him away from the game. Shortly after Lardner died in 1933, his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a summation of Lardner’s life. It was affectionate and generally approving, but it contained Fitzgerald’s conclusion that Lardner had invested too much of his talent in writing about something that Fitzgerald considered unworthy of such attention: baseball. “A boy’s game,” wrote Fitzgerald, “with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bounded by walls which kept out
novelty or danger, change or adventure. This material, the observation of it under such circumstances, was the text of Ring’s schooling, during the most formative period of the mind…. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had the diameter of Frank Chance’s diamond.” Actually, the diamond of the mind can be larger than Fitzgerald thought.
There is, of course, a sense in which sport is the toy department of life. But professional sport, and especially baseball, has serious resonances in society. A nation’s preferred forms of recreation are not of trivial importance. They are tone-setting facets of the nation’s life. Scores of millions of Americans spend billions of hours a year watching baseball, listening to broadcasts of it, talking and reading and thinking about it. This pleasurable preoccupation is, at its best, an appreciation of grace, self-control and the steady application of an elegant craft.
“Knowin’ all about baseball,” said humorist Kin Hubbard, “is just about as profitable as bein’ a good whittler.” Wrong. Knowing a lot (no one knows all) about baseball confers not only the profit of an elevating pleasure, but also that of instruction. It teaches a general truth about excellence. However, if we must talk about profits, permit me this concluding unscientific postscript.
I am a layman who has spent some time trespassing—respectfully—on the turf of specialists, the men and women who write about baseball full time. I am by vocation a commentator on social events, trends and problems. People who do what I do in periodic journalism often seem to be professional scolds. My interest in writing this book has been to have fun exploring the spirit and practice and ethic of something fun, a sport. But I can not forbear from drawing a lesson.
The national pastime is better than ever in almost every way and is getting even better every year. The same can not be said about the nation. America consumes too much and saves too little. Indeed the nation’s savings rate, the worst among industrial nations, is a scandal because it is a choice: Public policies contribute to it. Small savings and huge government deficits cause underinvestment, which causes slow growth of productivity, which produces economic anemia and uncompetitiveness. Increasingly we are being outperformed by—and even owned by—our competitors. We should be chagrined, but not surprised. They are studying harder and longer, and working harder and longer and better than we are. From a population approximately one-half the size of ours, Japan is producing an equal number of engineers. In 1985,55 percent of U.S. doctoral degrees in engineering were awarded to foreign nationals, many of whom went home. In the late 1980s about half the Ph.D.s being hired in the high-tech electronics industry were foreign born. We produce 35,000 lawyers a year. Japan muddles through with only a fraction of that depressing total. American children spend 180 days in school, Japanese children spend 240 days and the school days are longer. Japanese students outperform American students in math, science and engineering. American children outperform Japanese in English. For now.
Such facts have given rise to a spate of analyses, the theme of which is that America’s problems are the result of “imperial overstretch,” a national impulse to try to do too much abroad. I believe America’s real problem is individual understretch, a tendency of Americans to demand too little of themselves, at their lathes, their desks, their computer terminals. The baseball men I have spent time with while preparing this book demonstrate an admirable seriousness about their capabilities. They also demonstrate the compatibility of seriousness and fun. In fact, what makes baseball especially fun is seeing the way its best players apply their seriousness.
A generation ago a wit said that Americans most wanted to read books about animals or the Civil War, so the ideal book would be / Was Lincoln’s Vet. Nowadays it sometimes seems that Americans are most interested in “how-to” books, especially those that teach one how to attain thin thighs quickly or sexual ecstasy slowly. Today the shelves in bookstores groan beneath the weight of books purporting to explain how to attain excellence in business, and especially how to beat the Japanese in commercial competition. I will not belabor the point but I do assert it: If Americans made goods and services the way Ripken makes double plays, Gwynn makes hits, Hershiser makes pitches and La Russa makes decisions, you would hear no more about the nation’s trajectory having passed its apogee.
America, the first modern nation, has led the world in what historian Daniel Boorstin calls “mass producing the moment.” We do this with photographs, movies, tapes, records, compact disks and copying machines. Modern manufacturing is the mass production of identical products. In merchandising, the development of franchising (McDonald’s, Holiday Inns) has made it possible to go from coast to coast having identical experiences eating and sleeping. You can go all the way on the interstate highway system and never really see the particularities of a town. A sport like baseball, although a small universe of rule-regulated behavior, is actually a refreshing realm of diversity. The games are like snowflakes. They are perishable and no one is exactly like any other. But to see the diversities of snowflakes you must look closely and carefully. Baseball, more than any other sport, is enjoyed by the knowledgeable. The pleasures it gives to fans are proportional to the fans’ sense of history. Its beauties are visible to the trained eye, which is the result of a long apprenticeship in appreciation. The more such apprenticeships we have, the more we will be able to drive away one of the retrograde features of today’s baseball experience, the multiplication of irrelevant sights and sounds in ballparks.
When Roger Angell of The New Yorker first decorously expressed his disapproval of Houston’s Astrodome, he said that the most common complaint about the place is valid but incidental. The most common complaint is that going to a game there amounts to exchanging your living room for a larger one. But what matters most, Angell said, is the violence done by the entire ambiance of the Astrodome. It is violence done to “the quality of baseball time.” A person absorbed in a baseball game should be “in a green place of removal” where tension is intensified slowly, pitch by pitch. The contest has its own continuum and that continuum is degraded by attempts to “use up” time with planned distractions such as entertaining scoreboards, dancing ball girls, costumed mascots and the like. The attempt to attract fans by planned distractions is worse than gilding the lily. It attacks the lily by disregarding its virtue. Baseball’s foremost virtue as a spectator sport is that, as Angell says, it “is perhaps the most perfectly visible sport ever devised.” That is why it is the sport that most rewards the fan’s attention to details and nuances. Nuances should matter to the observer because they matter so much to the participants—managers and players—who determine who wins.
Bart Giamatti, speaking with Roger Angell, deplored “the NFLIZATION of baseball.” He meant the infestation of ballparks by clownish mascots (the bastard children of the San Diego Chicken) and the pollution of the parks’ atmospheres by “dot races,” rock music trivia quizzes and other distractions. Some franchises, said Giamatti, “are like theatrical companies who only want to do Shakespeare in motorcycle boots and leather jackets. They’ve given up on the beautiful language.” The language should suffice. Perhaps NFLization is a concession to the “television babies,” those Americans under 40 who find rock videos pleasurable and even, in some sense, intelligible. Baseball is a sport for the literate, and not merely in the sense that it involves, for the aficionado, a lot of reading and has frequently been the subject of literature. It is also a mode of expression more suited to a literary than a pictorial culture. A baseball game is an orderly experience—perhaps too orderly for the episodic mentalities of television babies. A baseball game is, like a sentence, a linear sequence; like a paragraph, it proceeds sequentially. But to enjoy it you have to be able to read it. Baseball requires baseball literacy.
“This ain’t a football game,” said Orioles manager Earl Weaver. “We do this every day.” That is why baseball is a game you can not play with your teeth clenched. But neither can you play it with your mind idling in neutral. Baseball is a game where you have to do mo
re than one thing very well, but one thing at a time. The best baseball people are (although you do not hear this description bandied about in dugouts) Cartesians. That is, they apply Descartes’s methods to their craft, breaking it down into bite-size components, mastering them and then building the craft up, bit by bit. Descartes, whose vocation was to think about thinking, said (I am paraphrasing somewhat): The problem is that we make mistakes. The solution is to strip our thought processes down to basics and begin with a rock-solid foundation, some certainty from which we can reason carefully to other certainties. His bedrock certainty was Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” His theory was that by assembling small certainties, one could build an unassailable edifice of truths. As any infielder could have told Descartes, errors will happen, no matter how careful you are. But Descartes’s method is not a bad model of how best to get on with things in life: Master enough little problems and you will have few big problems.
Dizzy Dean once said after a 1–0 game, “The game was closer than the score indicated.” In a sense it may well have been. Games are often decided by marginal moves and episodes less stark and noticeable than a run. They are won, and championship seasons are achieved, by the attention to small matters, and the law of cumulation. In the 1952 musical Pajama Game there is a song about a wage increase:
Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a hell of a lot,
Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing,
But give it to me every hour, forty hours every week,
And that’s enough for me to be living like a king,
I figured it out.
Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, figured it out. Sell enough 15-cent hamburgers (which is what they cost in the 1950s) and you are a billionaire. Do enough 15-cent things right in baseball—“It breaks down to its smallest parts,” Rick Dempsey said—and you may win. Let those parts slide and try to rely on $100 achievements—spectacular events—and you will lose. The best players pay the most attention to baseball’s parts. Frank Crosetti, a Yankee coach, saw every game DiMaggio played and never saw him thrown out going from first to third. When DiMaggio was asked why he placed such a high value on excellence he said, “There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time. I owe him my best.”
Men at Work Page 44
