The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Tom Haller put in a dozen years at catch for the Giants and Dodgers and Tigers. Now he runs the baseball side of things for the Giants, as V.P. for Baseball Operations. The other catchers in our group, who are leaning forward in the chairs a little restlessly over there as they wait to be heard from, are probably more familiar. The long lanky one is Carlton Fisk, and the intense fellow, smoking a cigarette, is Ted Simmons. In a minute, you guys—all right?

  Surprisingly, there was more agreement about umpires among the panelists than about anything else. Grudging respect was what I heard for the most part, and then, after the conversation had run in that direction for a few minutes, even the grudgingness seemed to drop away. Ted Simmons, the Milwaukee Brewers veteran, described the catcher-umpire relationship in social terms. “It’s like meeting people at a cocktail party,” he said. “Some you like and some you can’t stand, but you know you have to be at least polite with everybody in order to keep things going.”

  “You can beef about pitches, but you always do it when you’re walking back toward the plate from the mound—after a play maybe,” Haller put in. “You don’t turn around and do it, you know. Young catchers are always being tested by the umps, and they have to learn to take some bad calls and not say anything. Catchers who are moaning and bitching all the time really can hurt their team, but there’s such a thing as being too quiet, too. You hear an umpire say, ‘Oh, he’s a good catcher—you never hear a word of complaint out of him,’ but to me that’s a catcher who isn’t sticking up for his team out there.”

  “I don’t mess with umpires,” young Terry Kennedy said. “Let ’em sleep. They say, ‘The ball missed the corner,’ and I say unwaveringly, ‘No, it hit the corner,’ but I’m quiet about it.” He laughed, almost helplessly.

  Carlton Fisk: “Any game where there’s a lot of situational friction—all that yelling and screaming—it can suddenly be very hard on your team. Young umps and young catchers are both new kids on the block, trying to establish themselves, but in time the respect appears, and it can grow. After a while, a good umpire knows you’re not going to give him a hard time, and you start to feel he won’t squeeze you too much back there. I got along real well with Bill Haller”—he’s Tom Haller’s older brother—“who just retired. The same for Richie Garcia and Dave Phillips and Steve Palermo. I get along with Ken Kaiser, who can’t get along with a lot of players. He umpired with me in the minor leagues, so we go back a long way together. With most of them, it’s strictly professional—a ‘How’s it going?’ and then you get on with the game.”

  Tom Haller: “Al Barlick was the best ball-and-strike umpire I ever worked with. He took a lot of pride in that. Others—well, Dusty Boggess was on the way out, I think, when I was coming up, and one day I’d been getting on him back there and I said something he didn’t like. The next pitch was right down the middle and I’d hardly caught it when he yelled ‘Baw-ell!’ In time, I learned. As I got older, I began to appreciate how good most of them were.”

  Bob Boone: “The umpire has to be himself, so I try to be as honest with him as I can. You’re not going to fool a major-league umpire for long. If one of them asks me about a borderline pitch that went for us—a called strike, I mean—he may do it a couple of pitches later: ‘What did you think about that pitch?’ and I’ll tell him, even if I’m saying ‘Well, I thought it was a little outside’ or ‘I thought it was a little high.’ That way, he knows if I make a gripe on a pitch later on I’m not trying to steal anything from him.”

  Milt May: “They respect your opinion because they know you respect them. Some days, I’m not seein’ the ball too well, and after the hitter’s gone I might ask, ‘Say, where was that second pitch? Did you think it was high enough?’—or whatever. I think the instant replays have made the umps look good, because it’s turned out they’re right so much of the time. Only a catcher who’s down there with them can know how hard it is. They don’t know what pitch is comin’—whether it’s meant to be a slider or a sinker, or what. That ball is travelling and doin’ different things, and maybe one half inch of it is going to catch the black. If there’s a hundred and forty pitches in a game, fifty of them are balls and fifty are strikes, and the other forty are so close—well, dad-gone, somebody’s going to be mad.”

  Carlton Fisk: “If I know an umpire’s preferences, that gives me some borders to aim at. Some are notorious high-ball umps, and others have a very low strike zone. If you have a high-strike umpire and your pitcher is a sinkerball specialist, you might remind the umpire early in the game: ‘Hey, this guy’s keepin’ the ball down real good the last few games—he’s pitching real well.’ That puts him on notice. And if your pitcher is the kind that’s around the strike zone all the time he’ll always get more calls from the umpire.”

  Tom Haller: “Umpires tend to be good at what a pitcher is good at because they anticipate that pitch.”

  Bob Boone: “When you change leagues, the way I did, you have to learn the new umpires’ strike zones, and when you can argue and when you can’t. Paul Runge has a low strike zone—he’s going to make you swing that bat when you’re up there. He’s got a little bigger plate than some, but he’s very consistent. You certainly can’t change him. Lee Weyer has an extremely wide strike zone. Everyone knows it, and the catchers sort of count on it. Others have a smaller strike zone, and they’re known as hitters’ umpires.” (Both Runge and Weyer are National League umps, and later on, after this part of our conversation, I realize that Boone, a diplomat, has not discussed his umpire preferences in the American League, where he now goes to work.)

  Milt May: “You come to appreciate a pitcher who’s always around the plate, because he’s helping himself with that ump so much. He might miss the black by an inch sometimes, but the umpire will ring it up right away, because he’s come to expect strikes from him. It’s only natural.”

  Bob Boone: “The real negotiation isn’t between the catcher and the umpire—it’s between the pitcher and the umpire. The pitcher has to show that he can put the ball where he wants it and move it around. If he establishes that he knows where the ball is going, and that he’s not just lucking out on the corners, the umpires will be a lot more forgiving with him than they will with the man who’s all over the place and suddenly comes in with something close. A good pitcher—a Tommy John, who lives on the corners—sets up a rhythm with the umpire, and anything he throws will get a good long look. That’s what control is all about.”

  Milt May: “The only thing that gets me upset is having two or three pitches in the same spot that are called strikes, and then you come back to that spot and the umpire misses it, just when you most needed that strike. But—well, I’d hate to call about twenty of those pitches myself.”

  Bob Boone: “When I’m back there, I want my umpire to call his very best game ever. That’s the ideal.”

  Every catcher exudes stability and competence—there’s something about putting on the chest protector and strapping on those shin guards that suggests a neighborhood grocer rolling up the steel storefront shutters and then setting out the merchandise to start the day—but Milt May seemed a little different from the other professionals I consulted. For some reason, I kept thinking that he and I could have played on the same team. I am much older than he is, and I never even lettered in baseball, so this was a dream of some sort. May and I talked during a Giants morning practice in Scottsdale, and he apologized to me each time he had to break off and go take his hacks in the batting cage. He was thirty-two, but he looked a bit older—or perhaps only wearier. Established catchers take on a thickness in their thighs and a careworn slope around the shoulders. Or possibly we only imagine that, from thinking about all those bent-over innings and hours—many thousands of them in the end. But May sounded young and even chirpy when he talked baseball, and up close his face was almost boyish. He hadn’t shaved yet that day, and the stubble along his chin was red-gold in the morning sunshine. At one point, he said, “I think I’m like some other catchers—if
I hadn’t been able to catch I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it to the big leagues at all. Maybe you can’t run, but if you’ve got good hands and don’t mind the work you can play. Not too many people want to do it.” A bit later in the day, I noticed that when May flipped off his mask behind the plate his on-backward cap pushed his ears out a little on either side of his head. Then I understood my dream. Milt May is the kind of kid who always got to catch back when I played on pickup teams as a boy. He was big and slow, and he looked sort of funny out there, but he didn’t mind the bumps and the work and the dirt, because that way he got to play. None of the rest of us wanted the job, and most of us couldn’t have done it anyway.

  That afternoon, Tom Haller and I sat on folding chairs in a front-row box in the little wooden stadium in Scottsdale and took in an early-March game between his Giants and the Seattle Mariners. Haller is a large, pleasant man, with an Irish-touched face, and a perfect companion at a game—silent for good long stretches but then quick to point out a telling little detail on the field or to bring up some play or player from the past, for comparison. He was watching his own rookies and stars out there, of course, but he had generous things to say about the young Mariner receiver, Orlando Mercado, who somehow folded himself down to about the height of a croquet wicket while taking a pitch.

  “These kids we’re seeing today—this one, and that Pefia that the Pirates have—are lower than anybody I used to play with,” he said in his light, faintly hoarse voice. “Maybe they’re better athletes than they used to be—more agile, and all. I still wish they’d move the top half of their bodies more when they’re after the ball. That glove has made everybody lazy. You just stick out your hand.”

  There was an infield bouncer to deep short, and Mercado trailed the play, sprinting down behind first base to back up the peg from short. Haller nodded in satisfaction. “It’s hard on you physically behind the plate,” he said. “All that bending and kneeling. One way to help yourself is to get on down to first base on that play and do it every single time. You let yourself out a little, so you’re not cramped up all day.”

  A bit later, he said, “Mainly, you have to be a student of the game. There are so many little things to the job. You have to look the same when you’re setting up for the fastball and the breaking ball, so you don’t tip the pitch. A batter steps up, and he may have moved his feet in the box since the last time you saw him play, and that might completely change the way you and your pitcher’ve decided to pitch to him. You can’t stop everything and call a conference to discuss what to do. You have to decide.”

  Then: “What you do can get sort of subtle sometimes. If you’re ahead by a few runs or way behind in a game, you might decide to give a real good hitter the pitch that he’s waiting forms favorite pitch. Say he’s a great, great breaking-ball hitter. Normally, you’d absolutely stay away from that pitch with anything over the plate, but in that special situation you might think, Let’s let him have it, this once—let him hit it. That way, you put it in his head that he might get it again from you, later on in the game or the next time he faces that same pitcher. He’ll be looking for it and waiting for it, and he’ll never see it again. You’ve got a little edge on him.”

  In the game, the Giants had base runners on second and third, with one out, and the Mariners chose to pitch to the next batter, outfielder Chili Davis, who instantly whacked a double to right, for two runs. “If you’ve got an open base, you should try to remember to use it,” Haller observed. “So often, you have the intention of putting a good hitter on, rather than letting him hurt you. You go to work on his weakness—let’s say, something outside and away—and you get lucky and get two strikes on him, and men the pitcher decides, Hey, I can strike this bozo out. So you come in with the fastball and, bam, he kills you. You got greedy and forgot.

  “Sometimes the little breaks of the game begin to go against your pitcher, and you can see him start to come apart out there. You have to watch for that and try to say something to him right off, because you can’t do much to settle down a pitcher once he really gets upset. If he’s sore, it means he’s lost his concentration and so he’s already in big trouble. You go out and try to get him to think about the next pitch, but you know he’s probably not going to be around much longer.”

  The game flowed along quietly—nothing much, but not without its startlers. Orlando Mercado, batting against a Giants righthander named Segelke, in the fifth, spun away from a sailing fastball, but too late—the pitch caught him on the back of his batting helmet and he sagged to the ground. It looked bad for a minute—we’d all heard the ugly sound of the ball as it struck and ricocheted away—but in time Mercado got up, albeit a little groggily, and walked with a Mariner trainer back to his dugout, holding a towel to his ear, which had been cut by the edge of the helmet.

  In another part of the game, the Seattle second baseman, Danny Tartabull, cued a high, twisting foul up over the Giants dugout. Milt May came back for it, but it was in the stands, close to the front rows somewhere, and as I peered up, squinting in the sun, I realized at last that it was very close to the good seats. I cringed away, holding my notebook over my dome, and Tom Haller stood up beside me and easily made the bare-handed catch. Sensation. The Giants dugout emptied as the San Francisco minions gave their boss a standing O and Haller’s friends in the stands—hundreds of them, by the sound of it—cheered noisily, and then a couple of former Giant managers, Wes Westrum and Charlie Fox (they are both scouts now), waved and called over to him from their seats nearby to express raucous awe. Haller flipped the ball to Bob Lurie, the Giants’ owner, who was in an adjoining box. “I think I just saved you three bucks,” he said. He was blushing with pleasure.

  It had been a good five years since anything hit into the stands had come anywhere near that close to me—and, of course, it was the most immediate lesson in catching I was to get all year. Then I realized I’d missed the play again. “How did you take that ball, Tom?” I said. “I—”

  He made a basket of his hands. “I was taught this way,” he said. “Then if you bobble it you can still bring it in to your chest.”

  Haller’s paws are thick and gnarled, and there seems to be an extra angle in the little finger of his right hand. He saw me looking at it now, and held out the hand. “Richie Allen hit a foul and tore up that part,” he said. “I had a few dislocations and broken fingers along the line, and this split here needed seven stitches. Usually, you looked for blood, and if there wasn’t any that meant you were all right. You could pop a dislocation back in and stay in the game. We were trained to tuck your right thumb inside your fingers and curve the fingers around, so if there was a foul tip the ball would bend them back in the right direction. Nowadays, catchers can just hide that hand behind their leg, because of the new glove. So it has its advantages.”

  Late in the game, the third Mariner catcher of the afternoon—a rookie named Bud Bulling—was struck by a foul that caromed into the dirt and up into his crotch. He remained on his knees in the dirt for a minute or two, waiting for that part of the day to be over, while the Giants players called to him in falsetto voices. “I got hit like that in the spring of my very first year up with the Giants,” Haller said. “I tried not to say anything, and when I got back to the clubhouse I took the cup out of my jock all in pieces. Each spring, you wait for that first shot between the legs and you think, All right, now I’m ready to start the season.”

  The game ended (the Giants won it, and Chili Davis had racked up a homer, two doubles, and a single for the day), and as we stood up for the last time Haller called to a Mariner coach out on the grass. “I see some of us get old and gray!” Tom said.

  “Yeah, I saw you,” the coach said. “Your hands still look pretty good!” He waved cheerfully.

  “That’s Frank Funk,” Haller said to me. “Frank was my first roommate in organized ball. We were in spring training together in the Giants’ minor-league complex in Sanford, Florida, in 1958. He was a pitcher and I w
as a catcher, and they put us together to see if we could learn something.”

  He’d had a great afternoon—you could see that. He was tickled.

  No catcher of our time looks more imperious than Carlton Fisk, and none, I think, has so impressed his style and mannerisms on our sporting consciousness: his cutoff, bib-sized chest protector above those elegant Doric legs; his ritual pause in the batter’s box to inspect the label on his upright bat before he steps in for good; the tipped back mask balanced on top of his head as he stalks to the mound to consult his pitcher; the glove held akimbo on his left hip during a pause in the game. He is six-three, with a long back, and when he comes straight up out of the chute to make a throw to second base, you sometimes have the notion that you’re watching an aluminum extension ladder stretching for the house eaves; Bill Dickey, another straightback—he was the eminent receiver for the imperious Yankee teams of the thirties and forties—had that same household-contraption look to him when getting ready to throw. Fisk’s longitudinal New England face is eroded by reflection. He is a Vermonter, and although it has been three years now since he went over to the White Sox, he still looks out of the uniform to me without his Fenway habiliments. Pride is what he wears most visibly, though, and it’s also what you hear from him.

  “I really resent that old phrase about ‘the tools of ignorance,’” he said to me in the White Sox dugout in Sarasota. “No catcher is ignorant. I’ve caught for pitchers who thought that if they won it’s because they did such a great job, and if they lost it’s because you called the wrong pitch. A lot of pitchers need to be led—taken to the point where they’re told what pitch to throw, where to throw it, when to throw it, and what to do after they’ve thrown it. The good pitcher knows that if you put down the fastball”—the catcher’s flashed signal: traditionally one finger for the fastball, two for a breaking ball, three for a changeup, and four for variants and specials—“it’s also meant to be down and in or down and away, and if you put down a breaking ball then it’s up to him to get that into some low-percentage area of the strike zone. The other kind just glance at the sign and fire the ball over the plate. That’s where you get that proverbial high hanger—and it’s your fault for calling it. But you know who the best pitchers are, and they know you. I worked with Luis Tiant as well as with anybody, and if he threw a fastball waist-high down the middle—well, it was nobody’s fault but his own, and he was the first to say so. Not many fans know the stats about catchers, but smart pitchers notice after a while that they’ll have a certain earned-run average with one catcher, and that it’ll be a point and a half higher with another catcher on the same club. Then they’ve begun to see that it isn’t just their talent that’s carrying them out there.”