by Roger Angell
As the teams moved along to Pittsburgh, it seemed there was nothing to do but commiserate with the Pirate manager, Danny Murtaugh. His best pitcher, Dock Ellis, was finished for the year with a sore elbow; all his remaining starters had been recently shelled or injured. His big bat, Willie Stargell, was deep in a slump that had gripped him since the onset of the playoffs. His team, badly beaten in two games, had been entirely unable to employ one of its true assets—speed on the bases. Murtaugh—a seamed, tobacco-chewing, contemplative pilot—could only murmur that his outfit was at home now and did not seem to have lost any of its confidence. Baltimore had been terrific, he said, but still, perhaps … These are managerial bromides, but accurate enough in their way, for in this sport, game plans and rousing rhetoric are of no use; managers must wait, like the rest of us, for the disclosures and marvels of each new game. The marvel of the third game played in the immense plastic cylinder called Three Rivers Stadium, was Steve Blass. Pitching this time with an almost surgical finesse, and using his slider and changeup in textbook fashion to set up the fast ball, he dispatched the Orioles, inning by inning, in minutes. His rival, Mike Cuellar, was almost as fine, and by the bottom of the seventh inning the Pirates were leading by a minimal 2–1. It was a glazy, beautiful late-summer day, hot in the sunshine and cool and autumnal in the shaded stands. Each infielder moved in company with his etched attendant shadow on the ground, and a hushed, blurred quiet, broken by an occasional clank of cowbells, had fallen over the anxious multitude. It was ended by a groan and then a sudden shout: Roberto Clemente, swinging for the seats this time, half topped a pitch and sent an easy bouncer back to the mound. Cuellar turned to make the leisurely toss and was astonished to discover Clemente running out the play at top speed; now hurrying, Cuellar flipped the ball high, pulling Powell off the bag, and Roberto was on. Disconcerted, Cuellar walked Stargell, and an instant later Bob Robertson, the dour and muscular Pirate first baseman, sailed a drive over the fence in deepest right center, to put the game away at 5–1. Ecstasy along the Monongahela. Robertson, it turned out, had missed a bunt sign when he hit the homer, but Danny Murtaugh somehow forgave him.
Game Four, now not quite crucial, brought out a record 51,378 Steeltowners; being the first World Series game in history to be played in prive evening time, it also opened to an estimated sixty-one million home freeloaders. For a few minutes, it seemed certain that millions of sets would shortly be tuned to The Carol Burnett Show, because the first three batters in the game hit dinky little singles and were brought around, dully and undramatically, to put the Orioles way ahead. The ratings were saved, however, by a walk and two doubles in the bottom half that made it 3–2, and by the Emmy Award performance now staged by the Pirates’ relief pitcher, Bruce Kison. A lanky, long-legged twenty-one-year-old who seems to have recently outgrown his uniform, Kison throws a swift, riding fast ball, delivered sidearm, that arrives from the direction of third base and sometimes ends up in a right-hand batter’s ribs. Kison gave up one bloop double in the second inning, and from then until he retired for a pinch-hitter, after the seventh, the only Baltimore hits were plunked batters—a record-breaking three. Although the Orioles were clearly unnerved, the enormous effort involved in bringing home the tying and winning Pirate runs kept the audience in a lather of excitement. In the Pittsburgh dugout, Dock Ellis, wearing a warmup jacket and white golf gloves, kept jabbing and weaving like a prizefighter, urging his teammates onward. In the third, with a man on, Clemente leaned over and struck an outside pitch so severely that the ball streaked away and, without the smallest discernible fade or droop, banged high off the right-field wall—foul, by perhaps two inches. Thus spared, the Oriole pitcher, Pat Dobson, tried a different serving, which Clemente rapped almost as swiftly into right for a single, and Al Oliver thereupon singled in the tying run. After that, the Bucs, who were swinging joyfully and taking liberties on the base paths, kept putting runners on, moving them along, and not quite scoring them. In the seventh, with Robertson and Sanguillen aboard, pinch-hitter Vic Davalillo hit a drive to deep left, which Paul Blair caught after a long chase and then dropped; Sanguillen came skidding around second and was wiped out by a fine relay and tag, and appalled groans rose into the night air. But the next pinch-hitter, for Kison, was another twenty-one-year-old, named Milt May, and he immediately cracked a single to right that at last put the rackety, wonderful game away, 4–3. Dave Giusti retired the next six Orioles in order with his palm ball, and the Series was all even.
The following afternoon, the Pirates continued to have things all their own way, fashioning runs out of speed, power (another Robertson homer), and various Baltimore mistakes (including, of all things, an error by Brooks Robinson). I kept my eyes on their pitcher, the admirable Nelson Briles, late of the Cardinals, who was pitching even better than his two recent predecessors. In the end he shut out the now almost ex-champions, 4–0, on exactly two hits, and I had plenty of fresh material for the doctoral thesis I have been preparing on the subject of monosyllabically monikered Pirate pitchers. As all baseball scholars know, the one unchallengeable all-time Pittsburgh mark in the record books is “Most years leading league in pitchers with one-syllable names.” That record, by my computation, now stands at seventeen consecutive years, going back to the Pirate squad of 1955, which included the three great perennial Pittsburgh spondees, Bob Friend, Vern Law, and Roy Face, along with two other blurts, Ron Kline and Dick Hall (now of the Orioles). The World Champion Pirates of 1960 counted on pitchers Friend, Law, Face, Green, Gross, and Witt, and the decade rose, in an inexorable staccato, to the great vintage year of 1964, when the Pittsburgh mound staff was Friend, Law, Face, Veale, Blass, Sisk, Schwall, and a couple of foreigners named Gibbon and McBean. This year’s Buccos recklessly disposed of Mudcat Grant, but with Blass, Briles, Moose, Lamb, and Veale still on hand (I plan an extensive footnote on this startling incursion of ungulates), and the club’s coffers now heavy with championship loot, they can easily swing a deal for Vida Blue that should bring them safely through the seventies.
There was no joking about the sixth game, back in Baltimore; it was late now, and the baseball had grown grim and dangerous. Clemente tripled off the center-field fence in the very first inning. He died on third, but the next time up, in the third, he hit Jim Palmer’s first pitch into the right-field bleachers. The Pirates, ahead now by 2–0, continued to get men aboard—they had base-runners in twenty consecutive innings—but Palmer had his pitching rhythm back, and Manager Earl Weaver let him bat for himself in the fifth, though the Birds were still two runs shy. Buford homered in the sixth for the first Oriole run in twenty-three innings, and in the seventh Mark Belanger singled with one out. Palmer was up again, facing reliever Bob Johnson, and the infield came way in. With the crowd shrieking, with the benches whimpering and cursing at each called ball and strike, with the bunt sign on and off and then on again, Palmer ran the count to three and two and fanned. Two out now, and, with Buford up, Belanger flew away for second and made it by a whisker, barely nipping in under Sanguillen’s peg. Dave Giusti came in and walked Buford, and then Davey Johnson hit a weak little looper to short left that dropped in and tied it up at last.
It went along like that, through the eighth and ninth and beyond—excruciating baseball, almost painful to watch. Giusti set down the O’s in order in the eighth; in the Pirate ninth Sanguillen hit an easy bouncer to Belanger that suddenly leaped over the shortstop’s head, but Manny, sensing a championship only three bases away, tried to stretch it and was nailed at second. Two Orioles were stranded in their half, after Clemente unfurled a peg to the plate that sent the runners scurrying like mice back to their bases. Palmer at last departed for a pinch-hitter, and Earl Weaver brought in Pat Dobson to pitch the tenth. Cash singled and stole second, and, with two out, Clemente was walked intentionally. Dave McNally was now summoned to face Stargell (this must have been the first baseball game in which two twenty-game winners were used in relief in the same inning), and walked him, to load th
e bases, and then retired Al Oliver on a fly, and the home crowd breathed again. The end came very swiftly: a one-out walk by Bob Miller to Frank Robinson, and then a little single by Rettenmund, just past second, that barely brought Robby, sliding on his belly, safely into third. Now Brooks hit a short fly to Vic Davalillo in left; Robinson, his long legs churning, raced for the plate, and the peg came in, a little up the line and bouncing high. Robinson slid in under Sanguillen’s spikes, and the Series was tied up for the last time.
We forgathered for the last day, a Sunday, and several unanimous conclusions seemed to have been reached. There had been some disappointments, to be sure—too many mistakes in the field by the Orioles, too many men left on the bases by the Pirates—but no matter who won this we had watched a Series that both teams fully deserved to win. Instead of determining a loser, one wished in some way to continue these games indefinitely, to play until winter came, and then throw away the scores. And then, too, there was the shared experience, already permanently fixed in memory, of Roberto Clemente playing a kind of baseball that none of us had ever seen before—throwing and running and hitting at something close to the level of absolute perfection, playing to win but also playing the game almost as if it were a form of punishment for everyone else on the field. He is a frightening batter. He can be retired at times by low curves to the very outside sliver of the plate, but a pitch that comes in a half-inch higher is in his power zone, and thus in imminent danger of departure. One of his power zones. During batting practice one day, I saw Clemente step into the cage and take up an unnatural stance, with his legs and feet together. Frozen like that, and swinging only from the waist up, merely getting his eye in, he lined the next three pitches successively to right, to center, and to left—pop, pop, pop—all hits in any game. A proud and bitter man, with a haughty, striking profile, Clemente is convinced that he is the finest ballplayer in the world. He believes that for various reasons—his frequent injuries, the fact that he is black, the fact that he is a Puerto Rican and speaks English with an accent—he has been deliberately damaged by the press and kept from the kind of recognition and adulation that we have given to the Aarons and Mayses and Mantles of our time. Before that last game he said to me, “I want everybody in the world to know that this is the way I play all the time. All season, every season. I gave everything I had to this game.”
There are other styles of winning in baseball, of course. During batting practice just before this last game of all, I saw Steve Blass, who would start for the Pirates, hit a fly ball that just dropped into the front row of the half-empty bleachers in left. Blass, who hit .120 this year, watched it go and then arched his back, cricked his neck oddly, rolled his head a few times, took up a stance in the back corner of the batter’s box with his bat held high, and glared out at the pitcher imperiously—Clemente, to the life. Blass is a bright, witty, and self-depreciating man, and his dazzling successes on the mound this year may have been of less value to his team than his contribution as the main inventor and sustainer of the Pirates’ clubhouse tone, which is warm and profoundly unserious.
An hour or so later, in the third inning, Clemente—standing, as usual, too far back in the box, and swinging, as usual, off the wrong, front foot—hit Mike Cuellar’s first pitch to him on a line toward left center; the ball, withdrawing itself rapidly, became smaller, became a speck, than vanished over the fence. It was the first Pittsburgh hit of the game, the first run for either side. After that, it was a pitchers’ game, right to the end—Cuellar against Blass again. We knew their styles by heart: Cuellar hunched on the mound, staring at the ground and slowly shaking both his arms, then a quick glance up for the sign, and the pitch—a fast ball in or the screwball away—arriving in a swift port-side swoop; Blass, a right-hander, standing almost primly on the right-hand, first-base corner of the mound, and throwing with a quick pump and a double flurry of legs and elbows ending in an unstylish little stagger. They each gave up two hits through the seventh, and there were some breathtaking infield plays—Cash for the Pirates, Belanger for the Orioles—to keep the proceedings brisk and close.
With nothing to wait for now, the game rushed along into the eighth and its quick resolution. Stargell, dropped for the first time out of his clean-up slot and down to sixth place in the order, led off the inning with a single up the middle, past Belanger, who was over behind second in the standard Stargell shift. José Pagan now drove a long poke that bounced off the left-center-field wall. Rettenmund bobbled the ball for just an instant out there—a fraction of a second, at most—and since the subsequent relay was perfect and Stargell was running at top speed all the way, that amounted to the game and the Series. Powell cut off the peg just as Willie began to slide, but I don’t think the play would have caught him. The two runs were just enough, because the dogged old champions scored one in their half and brought the tying run around to third. That was all, though. Blass wrapped up his nifty bundle in the ninth and hurried indoors for deserved refreshments. Champagne, one wanted to cry, for everybody!
PART VI
THE INTERIOR STADIUM
THE INTERIOR STADIUM
SPORTS ARE TOO MUCH with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching—mostly watching on television—we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes. Professional leagues expand like bubble gum, ever larger and thinner, and the extended sporting seasons, now bunching and overlapping at the ends, conclude in exhaustion and the wrong weather. So, too, goes the secondary business of sports—the news or non-news off the field. Sports announcers (ex-halfbacks in Mod hairdos) bring us another live, exclusive interview in depth with the twitchy coach of some as yet undefeated basketball team, or with a weeping (for joy) fourteen-year-old champion female backstroker, and the sports pages, now almost the largest single part of the newspaper, brim with salary disputes, medical bulletins, franchise maneuverings, all-star ballots, drug scandals, close-up biogs, after-dinner tributes, union tactics, weekend wrapups, wire-service polls, draft-choice trades, clubhouse gossip, and the latest odds. The American obsession with sports is not a new phenomenon, of course, except in its current dimensions, its excessive excessiveness. What is new, and what must at times unsettle even the most devout and unselective fan, is a curious sense of loss. In the midst of all these successive spectacles and instant replays and endless reportings and recapitulations, we seem to have forgotten what we came for. More and more, each sport resembles all sports; the flavor, the special joys of place and season, the unique displays of courage and strength and style that once isolated each game and fixed it in our affections have disappeared somewhere in the noise and crush. Of all sports, none has been so buffeted about by this unselective proliferation, so maligned by contemporary cant, or so indifferently defended as baseball. Yet the game somehow remains the same, obdurately unaltered and comparable only with itself. Baseball has one saving grace that distinguishes it—for me, at any rate—from every other sport. Because of its pace, and thus the perfectly observed balance, both physical and psychological, between opposing forces, its clean lines can be restored in retrospect. This inner game—baseball in the mind—has no season, but it is best played in the winter, without the distraction of other baseball news. At first, it is a game of recollections, recapturings, and visions. Figures and occasions return, enormous sounds rise and swell, and the interior stadium fills with light and yields up the sight of a young ballplayer—some hero perfectly memorized—just completing his own unique swing and now racing toward first. See the way he runs? Yes, that’s him! Unmistakable, he leans in, still following the distant flight of the ball with his eyes, and takes his big turn at the base. Yet this is only the beginning, for baseball in the mind is not a mere returning. In time, this easy summoning up of restored players, winning hits, and famous rallies giv
es way to reconsiderations and reflections about the sport itself. By thinking about baseball like this—by playing it over, keeping it warm in a cold season—we begin to make discoveries. With luck, we may even penetrate some of its mysteries. One of those mysteries is its vividness—the absolutely distinct inner vision we retain of that hitter, that eager base-runner, of however long ago. My father was talking the other day about some of the ballplayers he remembered. He grew up in Cleveland, and the Indians were his team. Still are. “We had Nap Lajoie at second,” he said. “You’ve heard of him. A great big broad-shouldered fellow, but a beautiful fielder. He was a rough customer. If he didn’t like an umpire’s call, he’d give him a faceful of tobacco juice. The shortstop was Terry Turner—a smaller man, and blond. I can still see Lajoie picking up a grounder and wheeling and floating the ball over to Turner. Oh, he was quick on his feet! In right field we had Elmer Flick, now in the Hall of Fame. I liked the center fielder, too. His name was Harry Bay, and he wasn’t a heavy hitter, but he was very fast and covered a lot of ground. They said he could circle the bases in twelve seconds flat. I saw him get a home run inside the park—the ball hit on the infield and went right past the second baseman and out to the wall, and Bay beat the relay. I remember Addie Joss, our great right-hander. Tall, and an elegant pitcher. I once saw him pitch a perfect game. He died young.”