The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  For a time today, it seemed that all the recent doubts and discomforts suffered by Dodger fans were finally to be rewarded, for their team, after handing the Giants two runs on three errors in the third inning, came back and took apparent command of the game, and in the happiest fashion imaginable. Duke Snider, the old demigod, led off the fourth with a double, and Tommy Davis, the young demigod and new National League batting champion, moved him to third with a single, from where he scored during an abortive double play. Then, in the sixth, Duke singled, and Davis, a batter who studies each pitch with the eye of a jewelry appraiser, hit a homer for the tying and the go-ahead runs. Duke jumped on home plate with both feet as he came across. It was then appropriate for Maury Wills, the new base-stealing champion and the ranking deity in Los Angeles this year, to score the insurance run. He managed this because the Giants forgot their newly discovered stratagem for getting Wills out; in yesterday’s game, Wills stole second, and the Giants’ catcher, in attempting to cut him down, relayed the ball to center field and to the possessor of the best arm on the club, Willie Mays, who then cut down Wills at third. In the seventh inning today, Wills singled and stole second, but the ball didn’t get out to Mays. Wills then stole third, and Bailey, the Giants’ catcher, angry at having flubbed baseball’s newest trick play, threw the ball into left field, allowing Wills to score.

  This was a movie ending, pat but satisfying. Unfortunately, the game had two more innings to go. Matty Alou led off the Giant ninth with a pinch single but was erased at second on Kuenn’s grounder. Ed Roebuck then walked the next batters, and Alston and Durocher, sensing the onset of another ice age, suddenly foresaw that the season might be too short after all. The clatter of typewriters died away in the press box. Many of the sportswriters had already departed for the victory celebration in the Dodger clubhouse; those who remained fell silent, half hoping for more drama, half praying that they would not have to rewrite their leads so late in the day. The preposterous end came quickly. Willie Mays nearly tore Roebuck’s glove arm off with a line single that scored one run. Stan Williams came in to pitch, and Cepeda delivered the tying run with a fly. With runners on second and third, Williams walked one batter intentionally and another unintentionally, and the game was untied. The final run scored on an error, and the press-box loudspeaker announced that United Airlines would have a special flight leaving at seven o’clock for San Francisco and the World Series. Billy Pierce came in to pitch for the Giants and set the Dodgers down in order, and the visitors went into the ritual autumnal dance of victory in front of their dugout, leaping into the air like Watusi.

  When I returned to my hotel, the Statler Hilton, I noticed for the first time that there was an art exhibit in one corner of the lobby. Ranged in a great semicircle were a dozen or so life-size pastel portraits of Dodger players, elegantly framed and each bearing a gold identifying plate. The exhibit was encircled by a velvet rope, like the one that protects the new Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum, and there was a uniformed Pinkerton on guard. No one was looking at the pictures.

  San Francisco, October 5

  On the evening of the day the Giants won the pennant, the circulation manager of the San Francisco Chronicle approached the news editor and said, “What’s the headline?”

  “It’s ‘WE WIN!’—white on black,” the news editor said.

  “How big?”

  “Same size as ‘FIDEL DEAD!’”

  That evening, twenty-five thousand or perhaps five thousand celebrants tore down police barriers at the San Francisco airport and swarmed out onto the runways and taxiways, forcing several flights to delay their arrival or departure, and causing the team that they had come to greet to land at a distant maintenance runway. I arrived in San Francisco after eleven o’clock, but the jubilee was still in full swing. The gutters were awash with torn-up newspapers and office calendars, and Market Street, Geary Street, and Kearny Street were solid with automobiles crawling bumper to bumper, horns blasting. The faces inside all had the shiny-eyed, stunned, exhausted expression of a bride at her wedding reception. The police, who had planted red flares at intersections to guide the processions, were treating it all like cops in a college town after a big football victory—a little bored, a little amused, a little irritated. The San Francisco newspapers cannot get enough of the Giants. The team and the World Series cover the front pages, the sports pages (green and pink here), and most of the pages in between. There are human-interest stories about little boys who have run away from home with their piggy-bank savings in order to buy a Series ticket. In the papers, the name of the team is usually prefixed with the possessive pronoun—“our Giants.”

  The total identification of this attractive city with a baseball team is a sado-masochistic tangle. The gala this week has offended a good many proud old-time locals, who think the city should be less naïve. “Good God!” one of these said to me. “People will think we’re like Milwaukee, or something!” One local sports columnist, Charles McCabe, of the Chronicle, has tried to stand against the river of heroic newspaper prose; he has characterized the Giants’ style of play as “lovable incompetence” and has told San Franciscans that victory may be less cozy to live with than years of defeat. His warning will be considered, for this is a town fond of self-examination and afflicted with self-doubt. “We’ve had a lot of trouble in the past few years,” a woman told me at a cocktail party, and for a moment I thought she was talking about some scandal or sickness in her family. She meant the Giants, who have frequently been favored to win the pennant in their five-year residence here but have staged a series of exaggerated pratfalls, sometimes in the final week of the season. As an old Giant fan, I was tempted to tell the woman that persistent ill luck and heroic failure, interspersed with an occasional triumph, had been characteristic of her team ever since Merkle’s Boner in 1908. I thought of the Snodgrass muff in 1912; of the 1917 Series that was lost when Heinie Zimmerman chased Eddie Collins across the plate with the winning run; of the Series of 1924, when Hank Gowdy stumbled over his catcher’s mask and a grounder bounced over Freddy Lindstrom’s head and allowed Washington to win the last game; and of the last two games of the 1934 season, when the Dodgers dropped the Giants out of first place after Bill Terry had asked if they were still in the league. But I said nothing, for I realized that her affair with the Giants was a true love match and that she had adopted her mate’s flaws as her own. The Giants and San Francisco are a marriage made in Heaven.

  Candlestick Park is no supermarket; with its raw concrete ramps and walkways and its high, curving grandstand barrier, it looks from the outside like an outbuilding of Alcatraz. But it was a festive prison yard during the first two Series games here. In order to beat the midafternoon Candlestick wind, which can blow pop fouls into triples and cause flags on adjacent outfield poles to flutter briskly in opposite directions, the games started at noon, and the fans arrived bearing picnic hampers and gin-and-tonic fixings. The crowd here is polite, cheerful, and gaily dressed; it has the look of a country horse-show audience. Some of the home-town exuberance wore off quickly yesterday afternoon, when the fans came in and found the Yankees waiting—Mantle and Berra, Ford and Howard and Maris, all instantly identifiable and suddenly menacing—on the field below. A few of the spectators gave up then and there. A man next to me in the lower stands watched Mickey Mantle hit four balls over the fence in batting practice, applauded politely, and then turned to his wife and said, “Well, at least we won the pennant.” The Yankees started off just as he had feared they would, scoring two runs in the top of the first on three solid hits. The big crowd was restless and nervous until Mays came up to bat against Ford in the second. Willie Mays against Whitey Ford—this was worth the five-year wait! Willie singled, and came around to score the Giants’ first run. An inning later, he drove in the tying run with another hit, and the San Franciscans whooped and screamed with elation and relief; every one of them, I was convinced, had harbored the secret fear that his heroes would perform like Little L
eaguers against the all-conquerors. The Giants kept reaching Ford—nine hits in the first six innings—but they couldn’t ruffle him or quite put him away. Ford stands on the mound like a Fifth Avenue bank president. Tight-lipped, absolutely still between pitches, all business and concentration, he personifies the big-city, emotionless perfection of his team. This was his seventeenth World Series game, and he was giving the young Giants a lesson in metropolitan deportment. O’Dell, the Giants’ pitcher, was pitching better than Ford, but showing the strain. He was working too fast, striking out too many men, giving up walks, and running up high counts. Apprehension muffled the audience, and in the seventh Clete Boyer totally silenced the park with a home run over the left-center-field fence. It was all downhill from there. The champions got two more in the eighth and another in the ninth. With victory in his pocket, Ford retired the Giants on a handful of pitches and left the mound as if on his way to board the four-thirty to Larchmont.

  The apparently inevitable outcome of yesterday’s game seemed to afflict the home team and its fans deeply this afternoon. A man seated just in front of me was suffering from a severe case of the uh-ohs. “Uh-oh,” he would murmur to his companion, “here comes Yogi Berra.” … “Uh-oh, Mantle comes up this inning.” Meanwhile, the Giants were clustering under pop flies like firemen bracing to catch a baby dropped from a burning building (they muffed one baby, right behind the mound), and wasting their substance in overexuberant base-running. In the seventh and eighth innings, they combined a home run by Willie McCovey, three singles, a walk, two successful sacrifices, and a Yankee error for the grand total of one run, which may be another Series record. Fortunately for everyone, Jack Sanford, a tough, hard-working right-hander, kept his courage and his presence of mind, and pitched a lovely, near-perfect game, shutting the Yankees out, 2–0, with three hits. After the last out, the massed San Franciscans expelled their breath in a shout, and then trooped out into the afternoon wind with the same relieved, “Still alive!” expression on their faces that they had been wearing all summer.

  New York, October 10

  This jet Subway Series moved three thousand miles east last Saturday, but in watching the reactions of the local crowds to the first of the three marvelous games in Yankee Stadium this week I had the recurrent impression that the teams’ planes had overshot their mark, and that the Series was being continued before a polite, uncomprehending audience of Lebanese or Yemenis. New York is full of cool, knowing baseball fans—a cabdriver the other day gave me an explicit, dispassionate account of the reasons for the Milwaukee Braves’ collapse this year—but not many of them got their hands on Series tickets. Before the first game here, on Sunday, the northbound D trains were full of women weighted down with expensive coiffures and mink stoles, not one of whom, by the look of them, had ever ridden a subway as far as the Bronx before. There was no noise in the stands during batting practice, and the pregame excitement seemed to arise from the crowd’s admiration for itself and its size (a sellout 71,431), rather than for the contest to come; ritual and occasion had displaced baseball. The only certifiable fans near me were among the standees packed three-deep behind the lower-grandstand seats. When Roger Maris came up to bat in the second, the box-holders gave him a dutiful spatter of applause, but the voice of the demanding, unforgiving Yankee fan came from behind me—a deep, rich “Boo!” and the cry, “C’mon, bum!” During the long, austere pitchers’ duel between Bill Stafford and Billy Pierce, which the Yankees finally pulled out, 3–2, the spectators near me who had radios were giving most of their attention to the football game between the New York Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. (There are no low-scoring pitchers’ duels in pro football.) By the sixth inning, when the game was still scoreless, spectators had begun walking out in twos and threes, surrendering their ticket stubs to the persevering verticals; the departees had accomplished their purpose, which was to be able to tell their friends they had been to a Series game.

  Ignorance and moneyed apathy became less evident during the second and third games at the Stadium. I suspect that a considerable number of corporation seat-holders went home to Dallas and St. Paul after the weekend, in order to begin earning the money to buy next year’s trip to the Series, and thus freed their tickets for resale to more knowledgeable resident fans. At the same time, the gallant, inflammatory, instructive baseball being played by both teams began to make believers and partisans among those who had come only for the show. To judge by my private decibel meter, most of the neutrals became Giant rooters. The San Francisco équipe is a genetically pure descendant of its dichotomous, death-loving, strong-jawed forebears. It is capable of appalling human fallibility, which it attempts to counteract with insane pluck. When one sees troops with such qualities brought into battle against the massed fieldpieces of the Yankees, one is filled with the same pride, foreboding, and strong desire to avert one’s eyes that was felt by the late General Pickett. In yesterday’s game, the Giants’ pitcher, Juan Marichal, flattened a finger on his pitching hand while bunting in the fifth. Alvin Dark then called on Bob Bolin, an inexperienced twenty-three-year-old fast-baller, to hold the Giants’ two-run lead. Bolin instantly pitched himself into and out of an appalling jam; apparently enjoying the tension, he tried the same thing in the sixth, walking Mantle and Maris in succession, but this time the bomb went off and the Yankees tied the game. Enemy scores are a tot of rum to this Giants team, however; in the past two weeks, they have usually responded to them with an instant retaliatory base hit. This time, Matty Alou hit a pinch double between two walks in the seventh, and the bases were loaded with two out when Chuck Hiller, the frail San Francisco second baseman, came up. Hiller had struck out in a similar situation in the fifth, but Dark merely told him to try harder this time, and Hiller hit a grand slam into the right-field stands for the ball game.

  In today’s encounter, the last Stadium game of the year, the same melodrama of error, reprisal, and retaliation was played, but with a different curtain. Jack Sanford, pitching powerfully again, held the Yankees to three hits through the seventh inning, but the score, instead of being 2–0 for the Giants, was 2–2, one Yankee run having scored on a wild pitch and the other on a passed ball. It is a poor idea to give the unsentimental Yankees a helping hand up, to dust their jackets and to set their caps straight after they have fallen into a ditch. In the eighth, Kubek and Richardson singled, and Tom Tresh, the Yankees’ elegant switch-hitting rookie, hit a three-run homer. Willie McCovey started the reflexive Giant rally in the ninth with a single and came around on Haller’s double, but Ed Bailey, pinch-hitting, missed his bid for the tying two-run homer by about fifteen feet, and the two teams trooped off toward the more impressionable audiences of the opposite coast.

  What these ballplayers left behind, with at least one spectator, was not just an appreciation of their individual skills, courage, and opportunism but a refreshed admiration for the sport they pursue. Unlike the playoffs, each of the five World Series games to date has been taut, wholly professional, wholly absorbing. Each has been won by the team that deserved to win. Each, in fact, has revealed in early-inning whispers—a key strike delivered, a double play just missed—which team was a fraction sharper or luckier that day and would eventually win. This year, baseball’s two best teams rose to the beloved, foolish, exciting autumn occasion, and did honor to their great game.

  New York, October 14

  The violent West Coast storm that has postponed the completion of the Series has bred in me the odd conviction that this championship can have no satisfactory conclusion. A victory by the Yankees will merely encourage smugness among their adherents, whose mouths are already perpetually stuffed with feathers, and will reinforce the San Francisco fans’ conviction of their own fundamental insufficiency. (I can hear my friend from the cocktail party triumphantly crying, “I told you we always have trouble here!”) A seven-game comeback win for the Giants, on the other hand, will lead to another horn-blowing and paper-throwing orgy out there, to the pain of the resi
dent non-rubes. It will also cause San Francisco to discover for themselves the gloomy truth in Charles McCabe’s warning; total triumph is unsettling, for introverts can taste in it the thrilling, debilitating, and ultimately fatal virus of future defeat. Giant fans, like all neurotics, are unappeasable. I can see it now—the Dodgers should have won the playoff.*

  *This account ended here, amputated by rain and deadline. As some dodderers may remember, the Series eventually resumed and went the full seven, the Giants winning the penultimate game, 5–2, after knocking out Whitey Ford, and losing the finale, 1–0, in a game whose gruesome denouement could have been foretold by every lifetime Giant fan. In the bottom of the ninth, Yankee pitcher Ralph Terry gave up a bunt single to Matty Alou and, with two out, a double to Mays; McCovey then struck a low screamer toward right—a sure championship blow but for the fact that the ball flew directly into the glove of Bobby Richardson, at second. The ensuing speculation eventually hardened into the legend, “a foot either way, and the Giants win it,” but I have recently re-examined the game film, which shows that “six feet either way” would be more like it; Richardson made the play without exertion. A.J. Liebling, who detested baseball, was in San Francisco at the time, waiting to see a prizefight that had been postponed in turn by the postponed Series, and he confessed himself dangerously bored by the endless public dissections of the play. “It may be noted,” he wrote later, “that the Yankees are the least popular of all baseball clubs, because they win, which leaves nothing to ‘if’ about.”