by Roger Angell
Nobody knows why northern California has taken so gingerly to big-league baseball. The population of the immediate area—perhaps three and a half million, if Sacramento is thrown in—is probably too meager to sustain two baseball teams, but this has not proved to be a difficulty for the two pro football teams, the two major college football teams, and the professional basketball team that also sell tickets in the region. The subject is endlessly speculated upon in local bars and pressrooms, and the only sensible theory I have heard put forward suggests that there are a good many other things to do outdoors in the summer in the environs of San Mateo and Marin and Contra Costa Counties. The owner of the A’s, Charles O. Finley, has attacked the problem in characteristic style, with a numbing flood of promotions, but it is still possible that his talented and exciting ball team, with its incomparable new hero, Vida Blue, may eventually succeed in attracting more people into the Coliseum than have yet turned out for Hot Pants Day, cow-milking contests, or a gate prize of two free season tickets to the home games of Charles O. Finley’s hockey team, the Golden Seals.
The game that first night went to the Finleyites, 7–5, in thirteen gelid innings; the next evening the Angels reversed matters by the same score in twelve. The two games, in fact, had a creepy, mirrorlike similarity. On Tuesday, the Angels jumped away to a 3–0 and then a 4–1 lead on home runs by Ken McMullen and Roger Repoz, but the bottom of the Oakland batting order kept bashing the ball, too—a homer by catcher Dave Duncan, a three-run job by second baseman Dick Green. Duncan, a tall young receiver with a pleasingly mobile style behind the plate, hit a double in the seventh, but when he came up to bat with two out in the ninth, the A’s were still one run shy. He ran the count to three and two and then lined another homer to left. I was startled. More accustomed to the sight of looped two-hundred-foot bingles in Shea Stadium, I had forgotten about this style of baseball. Bob Locker, a veteran relief man for the A’s, now entirely muffled the visitors with his sinker ball, and in the thirteenth Dagoberto Campaneris, the Oakland shortstop, got on via an error and then stole second—quite unnecessarily, it turned out, because his teammate Reggie Jackson hit one out into an uninhabited and perhaps unexplored section of the bleachers, to end matters. It was the fifteenth home run for the A’s in seven games—fifteen homers hit by nine different players.
The next evening (before an enormously increased audience of 4354), the Oakland starter, Catfish Hunter, in search of his ninth win in a row, was staked to an early five-run lead, which he slowly but obdurately threw away, surrendering twelve hits to the visitors, including, of course, a tying ninth-inning homer, by Jim Spencer. The winning round-tripper (the tenth of the two-game series) was struck in the twelfth by pinch-hitter Jim Fregosi, the Angels’ All Star shortstop, who has been absent most of this season with an ailing foot. The visitors’ lineup also included a stranger named Alex Johnson, who had been sprung that afternoon by manager Lefty Phillips from the most recent of his many suspensions for languid play; almost languidly, Johnson lined out three singles.
The Athletics (to give them their honored ancient name, which the front office is, for some reason, phasing out) are a poised, eager, and extremely dangerous équipage. Their speed and power (an unusual combination that also distinguishes the Giants) are personified in Bert Campaneris, who has won the AL title for stolen bases in five out of the past six years, and Reggie Jackson, who hit forty-seven homers in 1969. Jackson had a miserable season last year, full of sulks and strikeouts, but he seems to have flowered under this year’s manager, Dick Williams (who might even be next year’s manager, too). Among the other regulars is Sal Bando, an experienced and hard-bitten third baseman. Only the pitching, surprisingly, may be a trifle below championship caliber; the bullpen, for instance, is mostly untested, having rusticated through a span of weeks this spring when two starters, Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter, ran off a string of eighteen wins without defeat.
Vida Blue. The name (it is pronounced “Vye-da”) could have been invented by Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon—Lardner or Runyon on a good day. It can be sung with feeling (I have heard it) to the tune of “Lida Rose,” the quartet from The Music Man. It suggests other baseball monickers—summertime names, now all but lost to memory: June Green, Jimmy Lavender, Lu Blue (a switch-hitting first baseman with the Tigers, long ago). It also suggests, to current American League batters, a quick and unrewarding day’s work. Blue, still only twenty-one years old and playing his first full season in the majors, has struck out about three times as many batters as he has walked, which is phenomenal control for a young fireballer; his 13-and-2 record (at this writing) includes five shutouts. Last year, up from the minors for six late appearances, he threw a no-hitter and a one-hitter. I did not see Blue pitch in Oakland (I had a better plan), but I had no difficulty in picking him out in the clubhouse, or even on the field during batting practice, for he went everywhere with a small attendant cloud of out-of-town and local sportswriters. Their task was unenviable. Every one of them was there to ask what is, in effect the sportswriter’s only question—the question that remains unanswerable, because it scratches at the mystery that will always separate the spectator from the athlete: “How does it feel to be you?” Vida, to give him credit, did his best. One day, pushed for the hundredth time to explain what he, a young black ballplayer from a small town in Louisiana (Mansfield, thirty-five miles south of Shreveport), thought when he heard himself favorably compared to Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and Bob Feller, Blue said, “I find it quite astounding.”
Vida Blue, by the way, is not the most publicized member of the Oakland A’s. That honor goes, by a wide margin, to Charles O. Finley, who must be the only baseball executive whose biography takes up more pages in the team’s souvenir yearbook than the space given to any of his stars or to his manager. He is the sole owner of the A’s and, in effect, their stage manager. He designed the team’s horrendous uniforms (“Kelly Green, Wedding Gown White, and California Gold”) and put his ballplayers into white spikes, a combination that makes them look like members of a tavern-league bowling team. At each home game, his signature, spelled out in lighted script on the scoreboard, begins the announcement “Charles O. Finley presents his Million Dollar Baby.… I hope you find her very entertaining.” He has pushed hard for multicolored bases and for the awarding of first base on three balls instead of four. He is, in short, an embarrassment to baseball and an infuriating goad. Only one thing can be said in his defense: The Oakland A’s are his ball team. Through player development, through trades, through drafts, through planning and hiring and spending and firing—all with the absolute minimum of outside advice or delegated authority—he alone has fashioned the personnel and character of this excellent club. He is a baseball man.
My better plan about Vida Blue was to see him pitch in the proper surroundings—in front of a crowd. That happened just two nights later, on Friday, at baseball’s prettiest diamond, the Bijou of the East, Fenway Park. The game promised wonders. It simultaneously matched up the league’s two division-leading teams and two best pitchers. Blue was coming into the game after those ten straight wins, having lost only on the opening day of the season; five of his victories had been shutouts, and he had not permitted an earned run in his previous twenty innings. His opponent, the Red Sox’ Sonny Siebert, stood at 8 and 0 for the year, and, going back to the middle of the 1970 season, had won seventeen of his last twenty decisions; he had surrendered a total of four runs in his last four games, and not a single home run this year. Vida, a southpaw, would be pitching for the first time in Fenway Park, whose hovering, over-adjacent green left-field wall is known as a ravenous devourer of lefties. There were other vibes: Dick Williams, the Oakland manager, was returning to the park in which, from the opposite dugout, he had led the Red Sox to their extraordinary pennant in 1967. He was fired two years later, when the Red Sox slid to third place. That 1969 season ended for the Red Sox, in effect, during a disastrous June series at Fenway Park in which the visiting Oakland A’s�
�Kismet!—scored thirty-eight runs in three games; in one of those games Reggie Jackson bombed Dick Williams’ pitchers for ten runs batted in.
None of this was lost on the Boston fans. An hour before game time, there were standees stacked three-deep behind the seats back of home, and a swarm of young human flies had alighted on the rooftop billboard behind left field. The paying crowd—35,714—was the biggest at Fenway Park in more than three years. What we saw fulfilled every wish—a dashing and memorable party that was over almost before we knew it. Reggie Jackson, third up for the A’s in the first inning, banged a Sonny Siebert pitch into the right-field bleachers; Reggie Smith singled off Vida Blue in the bottom half, and Rico Petrocelli, batting clean-up, bombed a Blue darter ten or twelve rows up into the triangular fold of bleachers above the wall in exact center field. Enormous noises rose into the spring air.
The two pitchers, thus quickly relieved of several of their statistical burdens, now settled into stride. Vida Blue, I discovered, is a pitcher in a hurry. Each inning, he ran to the pitcher’s mound to begin his work and ran back to the dugout when it was done. (He also ran to the batter’s box to take his licks—and ran back, three times, after striking out.) In the field, he worked with immense dispatch, barely pausing to get his catcher’s sign before firing; this habit, which he shares with Bob Gibson and a few others, adds a pleasing momentum to the game. His motion looked to be without effort or mannerism: a quick, lithe body-twist toward first base, a high lift and crook of the right leg, a swift forward stride—almost a leap—and the ball, delivered about three-quarters over the top, abruptly arrived, a flick of white at the plate. His pitches, mostly fast balls and always in or very close to the strike zone, did not look especially dangerous, but the quick, late cuts that most of the Red Sox batters were offering suggested what they were up against. Siebert, for his part, was retiring batters just as easily, but with a greater variety of stuff; he fanned Dave Duncan once on three pitches delivered with a sensitive yet thoughtful selection of tempi—presto, largo, and allegro, ma non troppo.
Now, in the bottom of the sixth, Vida made his first mistakes. (The Petrocelli homer had been struck off an excellent fast ball.) Yastrzemski lashed violently at a high first-pitch delivery and, catching it just a fraction too low, flied out to Rick Monday in deep center. Petrocelli then swung quickly and economically at the very next pitch and stroked the ball into the screen above the left-field wall. 3–1. All at once, the game had altered; it no longer belonged to the pitchers. Moments later, in the Oakland seventh, Dave Duncan sailed a Siebert delivery even higher into the screen, to bring things back to 3–2, and in the bottom of the same inning Siebert himself drove Reggie Jackson all the way to the bullpen to collar his line drive. Jackson was similarly disappointed in the top of the eighth, when Billy Conigliaro, with his back flattened against the fence, pulled down his shot to center. In the home half, Smith singled, and Dick Williams came out to the mound, patted his pitcher on the rump, and excused him for the rest of the evening. The happy cries of the Boston fans turned to prolonged waves of applause as Vida left the field. George Scott then brought Smith home with a little roller, hit off Bob Locker, that just got through between Bando and Campaneris.
Almost over now. Everyone was standing, clapping, laughing. Oops!—there went another Oakland home run into the screen, this one by Bando, to make it only 4–3. With two out, the count on Dave Duncan ran to three balls and one strike, the last two pitches floating up to the plate with so little zing that it was suddenly plain that Siebert had used up his arm. He departed, amid plaudits, and Bob Bolin took his place on the mound. Warmed up, he stretched and threw, and Duncan rocketed the pitch to left, up and out and—a long pause—foul! The consensus was four inches. Bolin threw, and Duncan whacked another foul into the upper darkness—four feet, maybe five. Bolin threw again, Duncan swung and just ticked the ball, and catcher Duane Josephson held it and jumped straight up into the air, with ball and glove held high.
The season hastens toward its summer discoveries. Vida Blue, drawing enormous audiences on the road, has launched a new winning streak, now three games long. The Red Sox, after beating Vida that Friday, lost five games in a row and eventually surrendered first place to the Orioles, perhaps forever. The Giants’ June swoon—at one point, eight losses in nine games—is in full flower. One of their few recent successes was a victory over the Mets that was achieved almost entirely by their first baseman, who tied the game with a home run in the eighth inning, saved it three times in the next two innings with spectacular infield plays, and then scored the winning run in the eleventh. The first baseman, filling in for McCovey, was Willie Mays. Six days later, Mays beat the Phillies with a home run in the bottom of the twelfth inning. The leader is still leading.
SOME PIRATES AND LESSER MEN
— October 1971
BASEBALL HAS CONCLUDED ITS annual exercises in the obligatory fashion—with another World Series and another franchise shift. A riot followed the wrong event. A long evening of window-breaking, car-burning, and assorted carnage in downtown Pittsburgh was touched off by a marvel of good news—the Pirates’ stimulating victory over the Orioles in a turnabout seven-game Series—while the atrocious circumstances surrounding the Washington Senators’ sudden removal from the capital to a roadside stand west of Dallas were greeted not with the torch but a shrug. The latter happening, to be sure, was followed by some legislative rumblings and an editorial outcry that was nearly unanimous outside Texas, but most fans or ex-fans I have talked to about the matter can summon up only a cynical and helpless grimace over this latest and apparently most arrogant corporate flourish by the owners of the old game. Since 1953, baseball loyalists in nine other cities, from Boston to Seattle (ten cities, actually, since Washington lost its original Senators to Minneapolis after 1960 and was given a substitute, Inflato model for the next season), have had to watch such abrupt departures, and the ugly style and detail of this latest decampment are so familiar that the temptation is merely to ignore the whole thing and turn our attention at once to the loud surprises of the Series. But this is surely what the baseball moguls would prefer us to do. (“Wow, sonny, how about those Buccos!”)
Meeting with his fellow American League owners in Boston in mid-September, Bob Short, a Minneapolis millionaire who purchased the Senators three years ago, cited dropping attendance (a falloff of 169,633 ticket-buyers from last year’s unawesome total of 824,789) and rising debts (he claims to have taken a three-million-dollar bath in the Potomac) as compelling reasons for his pulling up stakes instanter. Previously, he had sought redress from Congress and the District of Columbia, offering to stay put in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in return for impossible rent concessions or, alternatively, to unload the team on the first buyer who came forward with twelve million dollars. He also made ungracious remarks about the loyalty of Washington fans, whom he had stuck with the highest ticket prices and perhaps the dullest team in the majors. (Mr. Short had helped put his own mark on the club by trading away most of his infield last year in return for Denny McLain, a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year pitcher who lost twenty-two games for the Senators this summer.) There was also the long-range handicap of the World Champion Baltimore Orioles next door, and, very close-range, an imminently payable note of two million dollars. Help for such problems, one might suppose, comes only from Heaven, but Texas sometimes does just as well. Better. At the Boston meeting, Mr. Short introduced the mayor of Arlington, Texas, a hamlet midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, who offered safe harbor to the Senators, along with a low-interest, delayed-amortization seven-and-a-half-million-dollar bank loan; a one-dollar lease on a ballpark called Turnpike Stadium, which could be enlarged to forty-five thousand seats within two years; and a million-dollar television-and-radio contract. Unspoken but also guaranteed was the certainty that, with the eyes of Texas upon them, the same somnolent Senator ball team—now renamed the Rangers or the Horns or the Rustlers or the Spurs, or perhaps the Absconders, and improved if not b
y the purchase of any new ballplayers then surely by a set of those far-out double-knit Mod uniforms and a winter of heavy down-home public relations (Frank Howard in a ten-gallon Stetson! Manager Ted Williams astride a prize Hereford heifer!)—would surpass the old Washington box-office figures by God only knew what unimaginable margins for … well, at least for a couple of years. The American League owners voted, ten to two, to accept the offer.
They did so, it must be added, with pain and distress. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn fought a long, almost frontal campaign against the switch, and the final meeting dragged along for thirteen and a half hours as the executives considered and finally rejected a counter-offer of nine and a half million dollars (from the owner of a chain of Washington supermarkets) that turned out to be incompletely financed. After the vote, American League President Joe Cronin said, “Our conscience is clear,” but it is fair to suppose that no one there was untroubled by the sudden erasure of such an ancient and affectionately regarded franchise (“First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”), or by the implications of the disappearance of baseball from the baseball nation’s capital. One may look on the event with anger, or with sentimentality (President Nixon said he was heartbroken), or with sociological dispassion, seeing it as merely another case history in the economic shift away from the black inner city and toward the white, autoborne, and nearly cityless suburban middle class—the Turnpike People. Strangely, the act seems least defensible when it is regarded from the baseball owners’ point of view—as a straight business deal. Professional baseball is a national business, and the abandonment of the capital territory must therefore be taken as a confession of enormous corporate ineptitude. Furthermore, even the most muttonheaded investor might have doubts about a concern that proposes to save a losing line simply by changing its name and then trying to fob off the same shabby item on unsuspecting consumers in a different territory.