The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  No doubt there were some residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul in early October who were untouched by the impending clash of these oddly matched, oddly similar rivals, but I met none. On the eve of the opening game, the infection seemed absolute—perhaps not the loudest case of baseball fever I have observed but one of the happiest. Bunting and triple-life-size portraits of the Twins filled the windows of banks and department stores along Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, and homing automobiles bore exhortatory bumper stickers reading “Sam Mele for President” and “Twins A-Go-Go-Go!” At dusk, I saw cars with Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, and Manitoba license plates debouching fans at hotels and restaurants—country loyalists wearing platter-size Twins buttons, and straw boaters emblazoned with Twins heraldry. The local papers had made a brave try for balance, but they could not control their advertisers (“Homer after homer, Harmon Killebrew enjoys the Major League Benefit Plan underwritten by Equitable”), or even their headline writers (“Series Lures Recluse from Kentucky Cabin”). That evening, badge-wearing delegates to a recreation-industries convention wandered about in the lobby of the Leamington Hotel, nudging each other whenever they recognized a face—Red Schoendienst, Bobby Bragan, Eddie Lopat, Bill Veeck—among the cheerful, noisy knots of baseball people. Down at the Pick-Nicollet Hotel, a handful of students from the University of Minnesota danced in the Pic-Nic Locker Room, an impromptu cabaret that had been set up that afternoon right in the lobby and decorated in a hopeful attempt to resemble the Twins’ clubhouse. The Fruggers were studied glumly by a cluster of tall teen-age boys in green blazers—members of the Charlotte Hornets’ Nest Post No. 9 baseball team, from Charlotte, North Carolina, which had won the national American Legion baseball title in early September and thereby, a free trip to the Series. Late that night, I watched a taped TV show over WCCO—Channel 4 in which an announcer interviewed an almost interminable number of employees at the Twins’ ballpark. “Tell me,” he said to the groundskeeper. “Are you responsible for putting down these nice straight lines?”

  By midmorning the next day—a cool, burnished fall day—Minnesota had given up almost all pretense of civic equilibrium. In the State Supreme Court, in St. Paul, an attorney cut short his argument with “There are more important matters before us today!” He received grateful applause from both sides, court adjourned, and various jurists departed for their grandmothers’ funerals. On Summit Avenue, also in St. Paul, a meeting of a ladies’ study group was ruined when five members put down their copies of Troilus and Cressida and tiptoed out, off to meet their husbands at the ballpark. At about the same time, three suspected members of the Kansas City Cosa Nostra under surveillance by the Minneapolis Morals and Narcotics Squad aroused the darkest suspicions among their tailing detectives by not heading for the game. And on Minnehaha Drive the cabdriver who was taking me out to the game turned in his seat and said, “You know, five years ago we had nothing here but the Lakers, and they were bush. Now we got the Vikings, we got the Twins, we got the pennant, and Hubert is Vice-President!”

  Hubert Humphrey—a Twins fan, of course—was there to throw out the first ball at Metropolitan Stadium, an airy cyclotron standing amid cornfields in Bloomington, precisely equidistant from Minneapolis and St. Paul. The most notable absentee that afternoon was Sandy Koufax, who was observing Yom Kippur. (Women’s-page feature writers invariably refer to Koufax as “the world’s most eligible Jewish bachelor.”) The fans around me behind first base celebrated this bit of calendarial good fortune with hopeful yawps and bayings, even though Koufax’s stand-in was Drysdale, a twenty-three-game winner and the world’s most formidable No. 2 pitcher. Their cries died abruptly when Ron Fairly led off the Dodger second with a homer into the right-field bleachers (at least two spectators within my hearing muttered, “The Dodgers aren’t supposed to hit homers!”), but the Twins’ first baseman, Don Mincher, balanced matters with an almost identical poke a few minutes later. Then, in the bottom of the third, Swedish-American credulity and tonsils were imperiled by a swift succession of astonishments. Frank Quilici, the Twins’ rookie second baseman, doubled just inside the left-field foul line. Pitcher Jim Grant bunted, Drysdale fell while fielding the ball, and both runners were safe. Versalles hit a three-run homer into the lower left-field deck. Two outs and two hits later, Drysdale walked Mincher, loading the bases, and Earl Battey, the Twins’ catcher, popped a little Texas leaguer to right for his second hit of the inning, and Drysdale departed. When the side was out at last, the scoreboard operator had to try three times before he managed to put up the correct, incredible number of runs for the half-inning: six. That, of course, was the ball game, though the crowd sat tight through the rest of the affair, smiling in the afternoon sunshine. Versalles drove in another run and stole a base in the seventh, and Jim Grant, working quickly and perhaps a bit carelessly, permitted the visitors nine more scattered hits and one more run. The smiles remained as everyone trooped out to the parking lots. It was like a family wedding.

  The following afternoon, a considerable number of those Twin-boosting straw boaters showed bitten-off brims—evidence of late celebrations of the famous victory. But it was a drizzly, sobering sort of day. Two roaring helicopters hovered just above the outfield grass, trying to dry out the surface, and when the game finally did start, amid light showers, there was Koufax. There, too, was the Twins’ own ace left-hander, Jim Kaat, and for five full innings there was no way to choose between them—three hits for the Twins, two for the Dodgers, no runs at all. Tension and damp feet kept the crowd quiet until the Dodger fifth, when Bob Allison, in left field for the Twins, saved at least one run with a mad spring to the foul line and a diving, cross-handed grab of Lefebvre’s long drive. He slid a good fifteen feet into foul territory, and when he came up still holding the ball, I was suddenly persuaded that this, too, would be the Twins’ day—a conviction that seemed to strike everyone else, even Koufax, at the same time. Versalles, leading off the sixth, slashed a grounder off third baseman Gilliam’s glove for a two-base error. Nossek neatly sacrificed him to third, and Tony Oliva brought him home with a shot to left that he somehow stretched into a double. Killebrew scored Oliva with a single. Koufax steadied and pitched out of it, having actually given up only one earned run, but it was too late; he vanished, necessarily but uselessly, for a pinch-hitter in the seventh, when the Dodgers scored once on three singles. Versalles, who was now clearly running for governor, bashed a triple off Ron Perranoski in the same inning, and then scored, all unaided, when he feinted down the line so convincingly that Perranoski bounced a pitch past his catcher. The Twins, having devoured Drysdale and Koufax on successive afternoons, now disposed of Perranoski, the Dodgers’ brilliant relief man; Kaat delivered the final two runs with a bases-loaded single in the eighth. The fans around me were laughing and hooting by now, and one next to me kept repeating, “It’s all over now! It’s all over now!” I hope he meant the game, and not the entire Series. After I had visited the clubhouse and heard Sandy Koufax’s precise, unapologetic, and totally unruffled analysis of the game, I came away with the curious impression that the Twins, after two straight victories, were only slightly behind in the World Series.

  Rival baseball executives sometimes talk about Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, with less than total admiration, but always with undisguised envy. For one thing, his Dodger Stadium, at Chavez Ravine, is the finest plant in baseball—a model of efficiency and attractiveness which is brightening the design of new ballparks across the country. For another, he has found in Los Angeles the perfect baseball audience. Dodger fans are numerous (attendance has averaged over two and a half million in the new park, by far the best in the majors), steadfast, and suffused with love. They need the Dodgers fully as much as the Dodgers need them, for the team seems to serve as a civic center or model home—a hearth to pull up to in a land of dusty patios. Caring about the Dodgers in Los Angeles is a form of mother love, and there were times during the three Series games in the Taj O’Malley when I had t
he feeling that I had wandered into a radio breakfast show for moms. It wasn’t just the mass sing-alongs, encouraged by the electric signboard in left field—“Happy Birthday to You!” warbled, cum Wurlitzer, to a Dodger bat boy or a pitcher’s father—but my growing conviction that the men and women around me, in their green stretch pants and russet golf cardigans, had, in some mild, innocent fashion, lost their marbles. They accepted the Dodgers’ three one-sided and fundamentally unexciting victories at home as a source of continuous and uncritical self-congratulation, maintaining a nonstop high-decibel babble of joy (“Marvelous! Oh, marvie, marvie, marvie!” one woman cried after each Dodger base hit) during a span of twenty-seven innings in which the Dodgers outscored the Twins 18–2. It was a phenomenon; love of team had utterly eclipsed love of sport.

  In the first Los Angeles game, Claude Osteen gave the National Leaguers the best pitching they had yet enjoyed in the Series, allowing five lonely hits and keeping the ball so consistently low that the Twins managed only three flies to the outfield all afternoon. The Dodgers displayed some nifty base-stealing and sacrifices, but almost to no purpose, since they were hitting Camilo Pascual so energetically. Every home-team starter came up with at least one hit (there were ten hits in all), and the final score was 4–0. This outcome only nourished in me the belief that the next game, the fourth, would be the key to the Series; with a three-one lead, the Twins would be almost impossible to beat, but a two-two tie would require the Twins to beat Koufax once again—perhaps twice again. Both the Dodgers and the Twins played that fourth game as if they too had come to this conclusion—and the Twins, for all practical purposes, utterly blew the Series in six innings.

  Wills, the very first Dodger batter, was knocked sprawling when various Twin infielders converging on first base failed to handle his infield bouncer. He got up and stole second, proceeded to third when Jim Grant forgot to cover first on a grounder by Willie Davis, and scored when Versalles messed up a double play. In the next inning, a second run scored on a bunt by the Dodgers’ Wes Parker, another steal of second, another gift of third (on a wild pitch), and an infield error by Quilici. The Dodgers were playing their favorite kind of baseball on their favorite grounds (the infield grass there resembles shrunken worsted, and a chopped grounder sometimes bounces thirty feet in the air, like a golf ball landing on a highway), and the Twins grew badly rattled. They almost stayed in the game until the sixth, but then two high, useless throws by Minnesota outfielders allowed a Dodger runner an extra base, and the last vestiges of the Twins’ poise vanished. Their subsequent butcheries are best forgotten; the game wound up 7–2, Los Angeles, and the Series was even.

  It was unevened after the first two Dodgers had batted the next afternoon, when Wills doubled and steamed home on Gilliam’s single. There were twelve more Dodger hits and six more runs, but that first score, as it turned out, would have been enough, for Koufax was back on the mound, and this time the W.M.E.J.B. was performing very close to his peak. By the end of seven innings, he had faced only one more than the absolute minimum number of batters, and he wound up with a four-hit shutout and ten strikeouts. It was the twenty-second time this year that he had struck out ten or more batters in a single game. There were other things to admire that afternoon (Willie Davis’s three stolen bases, for instance, and the Twins’ not falling apart again), but I concentrated on watching Koufax at work. This is not as easy as it sounds, for there is the temptation simply to discredit what one sees. His fast ball, for example, flares upward at the last instant, so that batters swinging at it often look as if they had lashed out at a bad high pitch. Koufax’s best curve, by contrast, shoots down, often barely pinching a corner of the plate, inside or out, just above the knees. A typical Koufax victim—even if he is an excellent hitter—having looked bad by swinging on the first pitch and worse in letting the second go by, will often simply stand there, hit bat nailed to his shoulder, for the next two or three pitches, until the umpire’s right hand goes up and he is out. Or if he swings again it is with an awkward last-minute dip of the bat that is a caricature of his normal riffle. It is almost painful to watch, for Koufax, instead of merely overpowering hitters, as some fast-ball throwers do, appears to dismantle them, taking away first one and then another of their carefully developed offensive weapons and judgments, and leaving them only with the conviction that they are the victims of a total mismatch. Maybe they are right, at that; the records of this, Koufax’s greatest year, suggest as much. In the regular season, he won twenty-six games, struck out three hundred and eighty-two batters (an all-time record), and pitched his fourth no-hit game—a perfect game, by the way—in as many years, which is also a new record. In the Series, he won two shutouts pitched within three days of each other, and gave up exactly one earned run in twenty-four innings. He was the difference between the two clubs; he won the Series.

  I watched the last two games at home, on television, because I did not want to see or share the pain that I felt certain was waiting for the Minnesota fans. Besides, it had become clear that this was not to be a Series that would go echoing down the corridors of time. A curious, dissatisfying pattern to the games had emerged, for neither team had displayed the smallest ability to come from behind. In the first five games (in all seven games, it developed), the winning pitcher lasted the full nine innings, and no resolute power hitter stepped up to the plate to challenge him—to reverse matters with an explosion at a crucial moment. That pin-striped ghost remained; what I wanted—what we all wanted—was a moment of Yankee baseball. Still, my decision to stay away from Metropolitan Stadium was probably a mistake, because I missed some innings of rare tension and some sudden rewards for two or three ballplayers who deserved them wonderfully. There was, for instance, Jim Grant’s slick, courageous 5–1 victory in the sixth game, in which he outpitched Claude Osteen, kept those Dodger sprinters off the bases, drove in three runs with his own sixth-inning homer, and generally restored the Twins to joy and self-esteem. Mudcat Grant himself is a singularly joyful and estimable young man, who has emerged this year as a pitcher of the first magnitude. He is a tall, self-possessed Negro who is also pursuing a second, cold-weather career as a singer and entertainer; he will make a nightclub tour this winter with a turn called “Mudcat and the Three Kittens.” Even without those two big wins for the Twins, he would be notable for the most startling ballplayer’s quotations to come out of this year’s Series: “I was a member of the NAACP before it became Camp.”

  There were two more homers to remember with gratitude. Bob Allison’s, in the sixth game, must have been at least a momentary salve for the unimaginable tortures he had suffered at the plate this year in his endless batting slump. And then, on the final afternoon, there was Lou Johnson’s homer—a looping, dying blow to left that actually caromed off the foul pole. It came in the fourth inning, with no score and the bases empty, but it demolished Jim Kaat and the Twins, for Koufax had already struck out six batters and again appeared untouchable. Ron Fairly doubled on the next pitch, and Parker singled him home, but Johnson had really done the job. Lou Johnson is a somewhat shopworn Negro outfielder (he even looks a little tattered, because of an automobile accident years ago that cost him the top of his right ear) who has spent most of the past twelve years in the minors; he took over left field when Tommy Davis was injured, and hung on with the Dodgers as a regular by playing the best ball of his career. The sound, the weight, the feel and flight of that home run will stay with Johnson, I would bet, for at least twelve years to come.