The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Inside, and almost incidentally, the ball game went on—fortunately, without any especially difficult calls to challenge the bush-league bluecoats. The matchup brought together teams both known for their good hitters and their aching pitchers. Both had compiled a team average of .270; the Reds had led the league in homers, the Pirates in hits; throughout the season, both had been forced to rely heavily on bullpen veterans and newly called-up young fireballers to help out a corps of starting pitchers who sometimes seemed to be made of blown glass. Expecting a bombardment, we were given, of course, a pitching duel—a languid Indian-summer afternoon of pop fouls and infield outs, only occasionally vivified when the starters, Gary Nolan for the Reds and Dock Ellis for the Pirates, worked out of mild jams. I had plenty of time to study the new ballpark, which is situated just across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh’s downtown Golden Triangle, and to wonder how ballplayers nowadays can remember which town they are playing in as they look up at the same tiered, brightly painted circles of seats that, rising above fields of fake grass, identically and anonymously surround them in so many big-league cities. More and more, these stadia remind one of motels or airports in their perfect and dreary usefulness; they are no longer parks but machines for sports. In time, though, I found the difference here—an immense glassed-in dining room and bar called the Allegheny Club, which occupies much of the third and fourth tiers beyond first base at Three Rivers Stadium, permitting affluent locals (who may also lease private boxes, at a price of $38,000 for five years) to take their baseball à la carte. Pittsburgh has six chandeliers in right field. It also, on this particular day, had some twenty thousand bright orange empty seats in upper center field—an embarrassing reminder that these Championship Series, as the postseason playoffs are officially known, have not yet won the fealty of the fans. I was aroused from these reveries by the first loud, sharp noise of the day as Ty Cline, a Cincinnati pinch-hitter, led off the tenth inning with a triple past Clemente in right field; a moment or two later, he trotted in with the first run of the game, and then Lee May drove in two more with a double to left, and the Reds won it, 3–0.

  I got to the stadium early the next day, but not as early as the striking umpires, who had set up their picket line at five in the morning and now had the place buttoned up like Fort Knox. Pittsburgh, of course, is a union town, and the various locals representing the stadium’s ushers, ticket-takers, groundskeepers, electricians, and such enforced a total embargo in honor of the umps’ grievance. It was a chill, blowy day, and we all milled around together cheerfully under the fortress walls—strikers, unioneers, fans, reporters, Baseball Annies, cops, photographers, and excited small boys. Negotiations, we were told, were in progress within. Umpires Doug Harvey and Paul Pryor gave out autographs and TV interviews like a couple of Musials, and once a cigar-smoking shop steward pushed forward through the crowd to rumble loud reminders of solidarity at the driver of an approaching cab, who, it turned out, was merely lost. Then, just an hour before game time, the word came: “It’s over!” National League President Chub Feeney and Jack Reynolds, the lawyer for the Umpires Association, announced together that negotiations would be resumed in good faith; later that week, the two sides settled on umpires’ fees of $4000 per man for the playoffs and $7500 ($8000 after 1972) for the World Series—a fair sum, it might seem, for a handful of games, but one that each umpire will draw, in rotation with his fellows, only every five years or so. The whole impasse, in retrospect, seemed faintly bush, but it had been a very near thing. That morning, one Pirates executive had approached another inside the empty park and said, “Look, if this strike isn’t cleared up, do you think you could ask Clemente and some of the other players if they’d mind helping take up the tarpaulin?”

  “Who,” said his associate, paling, “me?”

  The victorious umpires received a fat round of boos from the fans as they came onto the field, but then lapsed into invisibility when the baseball began. Better baseball, too. Bobby Tolan, the quick young Cincinnati center fielder, gave us an edifying lesson in one o’cat, scoring the Reds’ first run on a single, a stolen base, an error, and a wild pitch; their second run on a prodigious homer to right center; and their third and final run on another single and a dash around the bases on Tony Perez’ double. The home team, having put up fourteen straight goose eggs on the board, scraped together a run in the sixth, but Sparky Anderson, the Reds’ manager, called in a nineteen-year-old left-hander named Don Gullett, who retired Willie Stargell with two men on and blew down the Pirates the rest of the way. Gullett, who was pitching for his high school in Kentucky a year and a half ago, throws hard; afterward, his catcher, Johnny Bench, said, “He can throw the ball through a car wash and not get it wet.”

  The playoffs now moved along to Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, which is another 1970-model four-decker, but with different accessories: no chandeliers, AstroTurf instead of Tartan Turf underfoot, and no dirt on the base paths, which have utterly vanished except for a miniature sandbox around each base. (Ballplayers, it must be said, are almost unanimous in their praise of these new surfaces, which improve their fielding averages by eliminating the bad bounce. A thrown or batted ball jumps off the ungrass with such alacrity that anything hit up the left- or right-field power alley almost invariably streaks through for extra bases, but outfielders who remember to keep their pegs down low—for the bounce—suddenly discover that they all have developed shotgun arms. All this, of course, has changed the game in ways that have yet to be measured—if anyone should ever care to conduct such useless, ex post facto researches.) Now facing deletion in the three-out-of-five series, the Pirates painstakingly worked the Reds’ starter, Tony Cloninger, for a run in the first inning. In the bottom half, however, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench hit two balls over the left-field fence in such quick proximity and succession that the second resembled an instant-replay shot of the first. The Pirates retied in at 2–2 in the fifth, but Anderson brought in another postpubescent from the bullpen, a twenty-year-old right-hander named Milt Wilcox, who quickly restored order. The crowd, larger and much noisier than the Pittsburgh turnouts, now sensed whatever it is that can so often be sensed about the outcome of a tight, important game; they kept up a happy, expectant screeching, even though Bob Moose, the Pittsburgh starter, was now pitching almost indomitably, setting down nineteen of twenty Redleg batters in a row. Sure enough—with two out in the eighth, Moose walked Ty Cline, and then had to face Pete Rose, who is perhaps the world’s most dangerous hitter in such a situation. Rose singled. Thinking hard, Murtaugh now brought in a lefty, Joe Gibbon, to throw to left-handed Bob Tolan, but Tolan took two quick strikes and then poked a wrong-field single to left on the next pitch, bringing in Cline with what turned out to be the deciding run. The Orioles, the scoreboard announced, were champions again, having wiped out the Twins in three straight for the second year in a row. And here, minutes later, Don Gullett was in again to retire the last Pirate batter, and the Reds were champions too. Time for the champagne: champagne over everybody and everything, champagne all over the nice red rug on the clubhouse floor, and also—hoo, hoo! ho, ho!—all over the Reds’ other rug, which is Lee May’s hairpiece.

  All of us, I think, had been waiting through the summer for this Series and for the collision of these two enormous teams. Both had utterly flattened the opposition in their divisions, holding first place unchallenged after April. The Reds’ three sluggers, Perez, Bench, and May, had combined for a hundred and nineteen home runs—a total six entire teams failed to reach this year—and three hundred and seventy-one runs batted in. Bench, the Reds’ leader and, at twenty-two, already one of the finest catchers in baseball history, had led both leagues with forty-five homers and a hundred and forty-eight RBIs. Against this, the Orioles could offer Boog Powell (thirty-five homers), the two famous Robinsons, three twenty-game-winning pitchers—Cuellar (24–8), McNally (24–9), and Palmer (20–10)—and a hovering, almost visible smolder of resentment over the team’s unexpected beatin
g by the Mets last fall.

  The opener, back at Riverfront Stadium, brought the expected early clang of armor—a Lee May homer and three quick Cincinnati runs, which were instantly won back on homers by Powell and Elrod Hendricks, the Baltimore catcher. It was still 3–3 in the bottom of the sixth, when Lee May, leading off, rifled a hard grounder to left; Brooks Robinson, the Orioles’ thirty-three-year-old perennial third baseman, leaped to his right, speared the ball cross-handed just above the base, and, whirling and throwing in the same instant, let go a fallaway peg from foul ground that got to first on the bounce and still nipped the runner. This wonder (not an unexpected wonder for those of us who remembered Robinson’s play in last year’s Series) saved a double, and made possible the famous and disorderly scene that now began after Bernie Carbo walked and was singled to third. Ty Cline, pinch-hitting, chopped at a Jim Palmer pitch and bounced it high in the air, directly in front of the plate. Hendricks stepped forward, waiting for the ball to descend, and Carbo suddenly and foolishly set sail for the plate. Home-plate umpire Ken Burkhart, apparently forgetting all about the base-runner, stepped forward to see if the ball would come down fair or foul, and Jim Palmer, approaching from the mound, had an incomparable view of the ensuing carnage.

  “I knew Carbo was coming,” he said later. “I could hear him—clomp, clomp, clomp—on the AstroTurf, so I yelled to Hendricks, ‘Tag him! Tag him!’” Carbo slid, Hendricks whirled and lunged for him, and Burkhart, now horribly resembling a dog on a highway, was struck simultaneously from two directions. He landed on the seat of his pants, facing the outfield, but bravely raised his fist in the air for the “out” sign. That settled the matter, of course, though dissenting views were delivered by Carbo, Sparky Anderson, and 51,531 other expert witnesses. The Reds lost the game in the next inning, 4–3, when Brooks Robinson lofted a high sailer into the alley behind the left-field fence. Detailed-sequence photographs in the papers the next day reminded one of the fatal business at Sarajevo. They clearly showed that all three participants had failed in their missions: Carbo never touched the plate, Hendricks tagged the runner with his glove but not the ball, and Burkhart, trying to look down the small of his back, did not see the play.

  The Reds briskly disposed of Cuellar in the second game, racking him for three runs in the first inning and a Tolan homer in the third; more damage impended, but Brooks Robinson jumped for a hard shot by Lee May and turned it into a double play, and Boog Powell, for the second day in a row, began the Orioles’ catch-up with a fourth-inning homer. They did more than just catch up this time; in the fifth, five singles drove out the Reds’ starter, Jim McGlothlin, and then Elrod Hendricks, who bats left-handed, barely clipped a pitch with the very tip of his flailing bat, banking it the wrong way, over third, and driving in the fifth and sixth Baltimore runs—a piece of pure bad baseball luck that cost the Reds the game. Bench hit a subsequent homer that brought it up to 6–5, but the home-towners could do nothing against the Orioles’ relief pitcher, Dick Hall, who set down the last seven batters in order. Dick Hall is a Baltimore institution, like crab cakes. He is six feet six and one-half inches tall and forty years old, and he pitches with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud. He throws a sneaky fast ball and never, or almost never, walks batters; he has given up exactly twenty unintentional bases on balls in the past four hundred and eighteen innings, dating back to 1965. Hall is almost bald; he has ulcers, a degree in economics from Swarthmore, a Mexican wife, four children, and an off-season job as a certified public accountant; and he once startled his bullpen mates by trying to estimate mathematically how many drops of rain were falling on the playing field during a shower. After the game, I saw Dick Hall laughing and talking with teammates and reporters in the clubhouse, with a crust of dried Gelusil on his lower lip; his pitching opponent for the last two innings had been Don Gullett, the nineteen-year-old, and I suddenly wondered which of the two would remember this day longer.

  On to Baltimore, then, to real (if rather scruffy) grass, and, for the next two games, to the awed further inspection of that other local monument, Brooks Robinson. Long ago, his teammates adopted a cool, unsurprised tone, which is part put-on, in discussing Robinson’s feats. “Oh, that’s nothing,” they say to a sportswriter or rival player about some dusty new miracle behind third. “Brooks does that sort of thing all the time.” In the third game—a 9–3 laugher that was settled in the sixth, when Oriole pitcher Dave McNally hit a grand-slam homer—Brooks Robinson hit two doubles and batted in two runs, snuffed out a Cincinnati threat in the first with a nifty double play, robbed Tommy Helms in the second by dashing in for a grab and flip of his slow bouncer, and broke Johnny Bench’s heart in the sixth with a full-length portside dive to snare Bench’s liner in the top of his glove webbing, some four inches above the ground. The Series had given us so many of these Brooksian masterpieces, in fact, that I found myself beginning to collect and compare them in memory, like Vermeers. After the game, Oriole manager Earl Weaver merely smiled and said, “Yes, I’ve enjoyed watching him,” but the unhappy Reds’ pilot, Sparky Anderson, kept shaking his head and muttering, “He’s the whole Series so far.” Pete Rose, glumly pointing a thumb upward, said, “Brooks Robinson belongs in a Higher League.”

  During the fourth game, the following afternoon, Brooks Robinson did nothing much in the field, but he put in a useful day at the plate, rapping a homer and three singles in four trips. It looked to be a quick and nearly monotheistic Series as Baltimore moved smoothly out to a 5–3 lead. Then, in the eighth, with the season running down and the Reds’ power coming to the plate for perhaps the last time this year, Tony Perez worked Jim Palmer for a walk, and Johnny Bench singled solidly to left. Eddie Watt, a right-handed reliever, came in for the Orioles. He warmed, then got his sign, stretched and threw, and Lee May hammered the pitch into the deeper part of the deep-left-field bleachers; none of the Baltimore infielders even turned to watch the flight of the ball. The Reds’ best reliever, Clay Carroll, set down the home side in the eighth and ninth, and the Reds won it, 6–5. It was the Orioles’ first defeat in the past eighteen games, and even a few of the Baltimore rooters must have sensed that the Reds, who had reached the Orioles’ pitchers for twenty-nine hits so far, had deserved at least this one evening of renewed hope and raised voices. Lee May, laughing, said, “I got hold of it! Had to keep it away from that Hoover Robinson, you know. He’s been suckin’ up everything I sent down his way.” Johnny Bench, deadly serious, said, “We’ve really got a shot now. We win it tomorrow and it’s back to our home park, and then let’s see who takes it all.”

  Bench didn’t quite convince me then, but he almost did in the first inning the next afternoon, when he singled and Pete Rose and Lee May and Hal McRae all doubled, to score three lightning-fast runs off Mike Cuellar. Earl Weaver convened a mound conference with his ace and, having seen something that was entirely invisible to everyone else in the park, left Cuellar in the game. This, of course, is what managers are paid for; Cuellar did not give up another hit until the seventh inning, by which time the game and the Series and the season were, in effect, over. The Other Robinson—Frank—had started things off with a two-run homer in the bottom of the first, and then there were two more Oriole runs in the second and still two more in the third, and it became clear that the Reds’ pitching, which had never been in true health, was at last finished. With the Orioles leading by 7–3, Brooks Robinson came up to bat in the eighth, fanned, and returned to the dugout to the accompaniment of what may stand for some time as the longest and loudest standing ovation given to a ballplayer who has just struck out. And then, in the ninth, Brooks returned the compliment prettily—another airborne flight across third base, to grab Bench’s lead-off liner. Afterward, after Baltimore had won the game by 9–3 and the Series by 4–1, Pete Rose sat in the quiet Reds’ clubhouse and said, “That last shot? Oh, that was nothing for Brooks. That’s nothing for him.” Quite right, and so let us conclude by
saying only that there were several of us who, along with Earl Weaver, enjoyed watching the Orioles’ third baseman play baseball this autumn, when he and his teammates entirely destroyed what has sometimes (but never so late) been called the Big Red Machine.