by Roger Angell
The pattern continued right to the end—a pattern of nearly forgivable little Dodger errors or youthful lapses in judgment, and deadly, coldly retributive play by the old and now doubly renewed champions. This was not in the end a distinguished World Series, because of the losers’ multiple mistakes, but rarely has any of these October seminars offered so many plain lessons in winning baseball, or such an instructive moral drama about the uses of baseball luck and the precision with which experienced, opportunistic veterans can pry open a tough, gnarled, closed-up game and extract from it the stuff of victory. In that fifth and final game, Dodger catcher Steve Yeager committed a throwing error in the very first inning, allowing Bill North to move along to third, and to score, a moment later, on a sacrifice fly. Ray Fosse’s homer off Don Sutton made it 2–0, but the Dodgers responded, bravely and necessarily, in the sixth—a pinch double by Tom Paciorek, a walk, a fine sacrifice bunt, a fly ball, and a single by Garvey (his eighth hit of the Series). The game was tied, 2–2.
The next bit of Dodger bad luck (or bad play) was not instantly recognizable, for it began with a brief flurry of violence—a small shower of debris and bottleware from the left-field stands directed at outfielder Bill Buckner, which delayed the game for perhaps six minutes. The Dodger pitcher was now Marshall again, and curiously he failed to continue warming with his catcher during the delay, which was his privilege—and, it turned out, his bounden duty. The tiny omission was observed by the leadoff Oakland hitter, Joe Rudi, who cogitated the matter and concluded that Marshall’s first pitch to him would not be anything fine and delicate like a curve but probably a fastball. He guessed right, pulled the trigger, and deposited Marshall’s delivery in the left-field seats, for the last run of the year, and the last and best baseball lesson, too: Thinking wins ball games. The last big play of the year came a moment later, in the eighth, when Dodger leadoff man Buckner whanged out a solid single and watched it slip away from center fielder Bill North. Not content with this free trip to second, he turned the bag and raced madly on toward third, as Reggie Jackson, backing up, swiftly scooped up the ball and fired to the relay man, Dick Green, who whirled—the runner was by now no more than five feet away from third base—and cleanly cut down Buckner with a low, perfect throw to Bando, while Jackson and North exchanged delighted double-slaps back out there at the beginning of it all. It was a play to remember (the throw from the outfield to third base is always one that sticks in memory), a play to carry us through the winter. Bill Buckner, I am sure, will remember it much longer than that, and so, too, will Walter Alston, and so will Sal and Reggie and Joe, and Rollie (who had been chosen as the most valuable player in the Series) and Dick and Campy and Catfish, and the other green-and-yellow champions, who now so clearly deserve our praise and gratitude and whatever other rewards they can extract from their inventor and tormentor and unique leader, Charlie Finley. Nor will Alvin Dark forget. In the lathery, liquid Oakland dressing room, Bando grabbed Alvin by the arm and pulled him up on the interviewers’ rostrum. “Come on up here, Skip,” he said, grinning. “You couldn’t manage a meat market!”
Sunny Side of the Street
— April 1975
IT WAS RAINING IN New York—a miserable afternoon in mid-March. Perfect. Grabbed my coat and got my hat, left my worries on the doorstep. Flew to Miami, drove to Fort Lauderdale, saw the banks of lights gleaming in the gloaming, found the ballpark, parked, climbed to the press box, said hello, picked up stats and a scorecard, took the last empty seat, filled out my card (Mets vs. Yankees), rose for the anthem, regarded the emerald field below (the spotless base paths, the encircling palms, the waiting multitudes, the heroes capless and at attention), and took a peek at my watch: four hours and forty minutes to springtime, door to door.
The journey and the arrival and then a few innings of mild, meaningless baseball would have been more than enough for my first day of spring training, but this particular evening promised a treat. It was the middle meeting of a three-game set between the Yankees and the visiting Mets, and the starting pitchers were Catfish Hunter and Tom Seaver. The ball park was sold out, and there were rows of standees three or four deep along the fences in left and right field. Yankee manager Bill Virdon and Met manager Yogi Berra contributed to this sudden party by starting their first-stringers—two lineups that looked to be very close to the teams that would take the field four weeks later, on opening day. Both New York front offices had been avid participants in an off-season of exceptionally complex trading activity, and as I studied the old names and the new names I had written on my scorecard, I sensed myself already awash in the kind of deep-water baseball speculation that usually becomes possible only in August or September. Among the new Mets were Del Unser (a useful if unbrilliant center fielder who had come over from the Phillies as part of a trade that had taken away Tug McGraw) and Joe Torre, who was with the Cardinals last year—a lifetime .300 hitter and a former Most Valuable Player, now thirty-four years old and well past his peak but perhaps still better than any previous Met third baseman. Starting in left field was Dave Kingman, a tall free-swinger and erstwhile (very recently erstwhile) Giant, who had just been picked up for $125,000 in a straight cash deal. Last of all, most of all, there was Tom Seaver, the Mets’ champion, who would be trying out the sciatic hip that afflicted him all last summer—a disability now tentatively but anxiously regarded as cured by rest and osteopathy.
The Yankee alterations were even more noticeable. Gone was the familiar and overburdened Bobby Murcer, who had been dealt to the Giants for another outfielder—another kind of outfielder—Bobby Bonds, a swift, powerful, mercurial and not altogether reliable courser, who had never quite attained the superstar status expected of him. Thurman Munson, the Yankee catcher, would be making his first appearance of the year and would be testing the damaged forearm that limited his effectiveness last year. And best of all, there was Catfish Hunter, the ex-Oakland ace, a twenty-game winner over four consecutive seasons, last year’s American League Cy Young Award winner (he was twenty-five and twelve, with an earned-run average of 2.49), undefeated in Seven World Series games, et cetera, et cetera, who was cut free from the A’s last December by an arbitrator’s decision, as a result of Oakland owner Charles O. Finley’s failure to make payments on a deferred portion of his salary. Thus suddenly empowered to sell his fealty and right arm to the highest or most attractive bidder, Hunter settled upon the Yankees, after receiving unimaginable cajoleries (“You want Helen of Troy, Cat? Listen, we’ll fix Helen up with a beautiful annuity and throw in a li’l old Dodge Charger for her, and …”) from almost every other club, for a sum in the neighborhood of three and a half million dollars in salaries and deferrals and shelters and other considerations, to be paid over the next five years, and more. Inevitably, some sportswriters have begun to refer to him as Goldfish Hunter.
Beyond these individual athletic and fiscal histories was the interesting business of the two clubs themselves and their impending summer-long fight for the affections of the same enormous and demanding baseball audience—the battle of Shea Stadium, the war for New York. There has been nothing quite like this since the departure of the Giants and the Dodgers, for the swift decline of the once mighty Yankees in the past decade and the even more precipitous ascent of the darling Mets had seemed utterly independent of each other. Now a big-city baseball reversal may be in progress, with the young and star-enriched Yankees, who were a close second in their division last year, apparently the possessors of the best pitching and the best outfield in their half-league, on the rise; and with the aging Mets, pennant winners in 1973 but a fifth-place club last year, apparently in pitching difficulties and thus possibly in very bad trouble indeed. This spring meeting was part of a good subway summer to come.
The game began, and baseball replaced speculation. Hunter in pinstripes was about the same as Hunter in green and gold—the flowing hair, the flowing motion, the big, oversize cap resettled between each pitch. Seaver, too, restored memory—the cold, inte
lligent gaze; the unwasteful windup; the sudden forward, down-dropping stride off the rubber. He struck out two of the first three Yankee batters, without really trying his fastball. Now, with one out in the top of the second, Dave Kingman stood in for the Mets, occasioning a small hum of interest because of his height, which is six feet six inches, and his batting style, which is right-handed, tilted, and uppercutting. The hum was replaced by an explosion of sustained shouting as Kingman came around on a high Hunter change-up, caught all of the ball—every inch and ounce of it—with his bat, and drove it out of the park and out of the lights in a gigantic parabola, whose second, descendant half was not yet perceptible when the ball flew into the darkness, departing the premises about five feet inside the left-field foul line and about three palm trees high. I have never seen a longer home run anywhere.
There were further entertainments and events—two hits by Munson; the Mets winning the game, 3–0, on sterling shutout pitching by Seaver and his young successors, Craig Swan and Rick Baldwin; and another homer by Kingman, also off Hunter—this one a high, windblown fly just over the fence, giving him a total of four round-trippers in his first five games as a Met. He also fanned weakly on his last two times up. In the fourth inning, Joe Torre took a backward step near third base as Bobby Bonds came down the base path from second (there was no play on him), and somehow severely sprained his right ankle. It was an inexplicable, almost invisible little accident that nonetheless ruined Torre’s spring, and the kind of pure bad luck that can sometimes darken a club’s entire season.
Nothing, however, could touch or diminish Kingman’s first shot. Catfish Hunter, after his stint, sat in the training room with his shoulder encased in an ice bag and his elbow in a bucket of ice water, and reminisced cheerfully about other epochal downtowners he had given up. There had been a preseason one by Willie McCovey and perhaps, years ago, a Mickey Mantle five-hundred-footer. Mantle, now a Yankee springtime coach, could not remember it. “I know I never saw one longer than this,” he said. Bill Virdon guessed that the ball had flown an additional two hundred and fifty feet beyond the fence, into an adjacent diamond, which might qualify it as a simultaneous homer and double: a six-base blow. The Yankees were still talking about the home run the next day, when Hunter told Ron Blomberg he hoped he hadn’t hurt his neck out there in left field watching the ball depart. Others took it up, rookies and writers and regulars, redescribing and amplifying it, already making it a legend, and it occurred to me that the real effect of the blast, except for the memory and joy of it, might be to speed Catfish Hunter’s acceptance by his new teammates. There is nothing like a little public humiliation to make a three-and-a-half-million-dollar executive lovable.
That night, the press clustered thickly around Kingman in the visiting clubhouse. He is a shy, complicated young man, twenty-six years old, and he seemed embarrassed by his feat, although he was noted for similar early-season tape-measure blows while with the Giants, as well as for his strikeouts. “I’m just trying to win a job here,” he said. “I’m putting home runs and strikeouts out of my mind. They’re not in my vocabulary.” Well, yes. Every spring is a new beginning, especially for a ballplayer with a new team, but in his three and a half major-league seasons to date, Dave Kingman has hit 77 home runs while striking out 422 times—once for every three trips to the plate—and his batting average is .224.
Rusty Staub, dressing in front of his locker, looked over at the tall newcomer and the eight or ten writers around him, and laughed. “The trouble with you, Dave,” he called over, “is you’re just having a slow start. You’ll get going once the season rolls along.”
Spring training is all hope. Hope is the essential, for every club and every player. Walt Williams, a black thirty-one-year-old journeyman outfielder, started for the Yankees in the Mets game the next afternoon, playing second base. He has had nine years in the majors, mostly with the White Sox; he hit .304 one season. Last year, however, his batting fell off to an abysmal .113, and he ended the season with the Yanks as a pinch-runner. He claims that he had an incorrect prescription in his eyeglasses. This year, he thought about the incoming Yankee talent and decided that his chances as an outfielder were “poor or none.” He received permission from Bill Virdon and general manager Gabe Paul to try to make the club as an extra infielder. The day before, he had played second in a B game against the Texas Rangers, and had made three hits, including a home run, and had been involved in a double play. Walt Williams is five feet six inches tall, with the shoulders and chest of a heavyweight prizefighter. At the plate, he stands with his arms and shoulders raised high, peering at the pitcher over his left biceps, and waggles the bat fiercely. While playing in Chicago, he was called No-Neck Williams—a name he does not like. He runs everywhere, runs out everything. He talks fast, in explosions of words, and smiles ceaselessly. It is impossible not to like him. Before the game, he said, “Listen, I’m just like a rookie in the infield, only I’ve got better hands than the average infielder. I’m a lifetime .280 hitter. Forget about last year—just throw it out. Aren’t too many guys going to outhit me. Truthfully, after last year I was going to go and play in Japan. I planned on winning the batting championship there. Then I got a little fan mail, letters that said ‘Don’t go,’ so I came and talked to Gabe about being an extra infielder. Those letters made me feel good. Listen, I know I can play second, but can I show them in time? When did I last play second base? Before yesterday? Oh, my, I think it was when I was about seventeen.”
In the game (which the Yanks won, 7–6), Walt Williams hit a single and a double, ran out everything, started one double play with a tag on the base path, and made an error when he dropped the ball in his eagerness to start another. In the clubhouse, panting and pouring sweat from the postgame squad sprints, he said, “I made a mistake out there—changed my mind at the last minute. But I think I showed them something. I know I can play this game. I know it.”
There are two utility infielders, Eddie Leon and Fred Stanley, already on the Yankee roster, and reserve infielders are kept on mostly for their steady gloves and their experience. But Walt Williams is hopeful; he has no other choice.
POSTCARDS
Saw Eddie Kranepool hit three singles today, against the Yanks. Eddie Kranepool always hits. Last year, he hit an even .300. Eddie will always be a Met. Mrs. Payson loves him, and, besides, why would you ever get rid of him? Eddie has it made. He has twelve years in as a major leaguer, twelve years on the pension. Eddie Kranepool is thirty years old. Good old Eddie.
Ron Blomberg came up the steps from the clubhouse and into the dugout, and saw a Times reporter reading the Mets’ press pamphlet. “Hey,” he said, “can I see that for a minute?” “Sure,” the writer said, tossing it to him. “Don’t drop it.” Blomberg nearly did drop it. “Jesus!” he muttered. Terrible hands. Bill Virdon said, “You got him thinking.” Everyone nearly died laughing.… Maybe you had to be there.
Pitchers are expected to do a lot of running in the spring. They sprint in groups of three or four along the outfield fence, from one of the foul lines to center field. They stop and rest, then run back. If the sun is out, they stop in the little slab of shade along the fence and bend over, with their heads down and their hands on their knees, and pant like dogs. This happens in every camp every day. Hundreds of pitchers running and panting.
Watched Los Angeles taking batting practice before the next game at Fort Lauderdale. A young Dodger was looking at three girls sunning themselves behind home. Coach Monty Basgall said, “Get out of the stands; you’re married now.”
The ballplayer said something short.
“You still married?” Basgall asked.
“I think so. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Basgall said. “I figure you for the kind’s going to get married three, four times.”
Bobby Bonds, sitting on a trunk in the clubhouse before the Dodger game, talking about his old Giant teammate Dave Kingman: “If you see him hit two singles, it’s amazing. If he’s m
aking contact, the ball’s going to go. You know he’s a great bunter? People don’t know everything about him.… I’m the DH today. Never did that before. What does the DH do when he isn’t up swinging? … It’s funny—I looked over at the Dodgers there today and I didn’t get that old feeling. We used to be so up for those games. They really counted.”
STRAIGHT ARROWS
A slim, tan, dark-eyed young man with a very thin mustache turned up in the Yankee clubhouse. He was not in uniform, but most of the Yankee regulars came over to shake his hand. “Hey,” they said. “Way to go. I just heard. Go get ’em there, now.” He was Ray Negron, a nineteen-year-old Queens resident, who was a Yankee batboy last year. This winter, he was taken on by the Pirates in the second round of the free-agent draft, and now he was on his way to report to Pirate City, in Bradenton, for the opening day of minor-league training camp. He hopes to play second base with the Pirates’ Class A club, in Charleston, South Carolina.