The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Not many warm fan feelings were evident in Montreal, where the Expos’ partisans, made wary by the team’s late failures in recent summers, took to booing their heroes at every opportunity; prime targets for la framboise were fifteen-million-dollar (for eight years) catcher Gary Carter, who had a subpar .270, seventeen-home-run season, and bullpen ace Jeff Reardon, who during one barren stretch was obdurately booed whenever he threw a ball or a strike. Reardon’s wife, making an invited appearance during a midseason charity affair at Olympic Stadium, was also booed, and left the field in tears. The Expos, fulfilling something or other, still held first place in their division on September 14th and then fell into the well again, finishing third, eight games out.

  Who else failed? Why, the Milwaukee Brewers, defending champions in the American League, who somehow remained afloat until Labor Day but went through September like an ember in a snowbank, to finish fifth, eleven games out—exactly the same distance from the top achieved in the other league by their rivals of last October, the World Champion Cardinals. There were other horrid collapses. For the second year running, the Atlanta Braves’ front office removed the tacky wigwam of then-club mascot, Chief Noc-A-Homa, from its reservation in left field, thereby making room for two hundred and fifty more paying customers, and once again the team suffered immediate disaster, this time losing its muscular third baseman Bob Horner for the rest of the year with a wrist injury, and its entire bullpen to an epidemic seizure of pitching vapors, while the club slipped from its comfy five-and-a-half-game lead in the N.L. West to a three-game deficit, behind the Dodgers, all in the space of a month. The tepee, which perhaps should be traded in for a Winnebago, was hastily re-reerected, but too late. Maybe next year the Great Spirit of Baseball, if left alone, will bring the Braves what they really need, which is some bench strength.

  On an up note, the most vivid statistic of the year was perhaps the .361 batting mark of the Red Sox’ resourceful and patient left-side swinger Wade Boggs, whose .357 average for his first two years’ work in the majors has not been exceeded (according to baseball historian Bob Davids) since Lefty O’Doul’s .358 (figured on a slightly different basis) in 1928–29. His teammate Jim Rice led the American League in homers (thirty-nine) and, as previously noted, tied for runs batted in (a hundred and twenty-six) with the Brewers’ Cecil Cooper; other reliable brand names came through in the National League, where Mike Schmidt won his sixth home-run title, with forty downtowners, and Bill Madlock, the Pirates’ short-stroke Zen master, captured his fourth batting title, at .323.

  Among the moundpersons, LaMarr Hoyt, of the White Sox, won twenty-four games (and the Cy Young Award in his league), mostly by the useful expedient of throwing strikes; he walked just thirty-one batters in two hundred and sixty innings. The National League, for reasons I don’t understand, produced not one twenty-game winner, for the first time in fifty-two years, but did wind up with both earned-run leaders: Atlee Hammaker, of the Giants (2.25), and Rick Honeycutt, of the Dodgers (whose 2.42, compiled in the American League before he was traded out of the league by the Texas Rangers, held up in the books). During this season, three famous hurlers—Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, and Gaylord Perry—sailed past Walter Johnson’s previously inviolate record of 3,508 lifetime strikeouts. Perry, who announced his retirement late in the summer, went home with 3,534 whiffs (and with the secret recipes for his famous jellies still intact), but Ryan, at 3,677, and Carlton, at 3,709, are still motoring. Carlton’s two hundred and seventy-five strikeouts were the most in either league in 1983, and this was the fifth time he has topped his league.

  All these heroes and Lee MacPhail, too. Mr. MacPhail is the president of the American League and, since late July, the author of the most discussed legal ruling in the land since Marbury v. Madison. This, of course, was his fair and sensible resolution of the monumentally entertaining pine-tar fuss, which came to pass during a July Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium when George Brett, of the Royals, rapped a two-run, two-out homer against Goose Gossage, thereby putting his team ahead by 5–4 in the top of the ninth—only to have the runs disallowed and the homer turned into an out on a ruling by the umpires, who accepted an ex-post-facto protest by Yankee manager Billy Martin that the pine-tar stickum on the handle of Brett’s bat extended beyond the eighteen inches above the bat knob specified by the regulations. Brett, in demurral, attempted thuggee upon the arbiters and was excused for the rest of the day, but the Royals protested the game, and after a few days they were upheld by MacPhail, who, citing “the spirit of the rules,” ordered the homer restored and the contest resumed at a later date. The remainder of the inning was played without incident a few weeks later (before an audience of 1,245 second-year torts students), with the Royals holding their 5–4 lead, and the teams swapped the won (and lost) game on their records. Mr. MacPhail’s statement attempted to mollify his umpires by deploring the fuzziness of the frequently amended baseball rule book but pointed out that the intent of the rule was simply to remove an offending bat from the game, and that there was no evidence of any sort to suggest that Brett’s homer had been aided or abetted by goo. (The rule, in fact, appears to have been written in order to keep pine tar from discoloring balls in play, and thus is intended to deprive pitchers of an unfair advantage.) For me, the MacPhail decision is bathed in the clear sunshine of fairness and common sense, but the immoderate responses to it by the Yankees suggest the extent of the distemper and the almost frantic distractibility of so many people now connected with the sport. George Steinbrenner said that if the Yankees lost a pennant because of the ruling it would not be safe for Mr. MacPhail to continue living in New York. Billy Martin, who cannot exactly be faulted for trying the ploy in the first place, said later that in making the ruling Lee MacPhail had encouraged every kid in the country to “go ahead…and cheat, and they can get away with it,” and then told his players during a team meeting that they had been bilked. If this was intended to inflame his troops for the remainder of the campaign, it did not succeed. At the end of the summer, Mr. Steinbrenner, looking back at the foolish crisis, said he thought that the game and its emotional offshoots might have cost his team a pennant, and there, for once, I agree with him.

  Mr. MacPhail, who is retiring as league president but who will serve now as head of the owners’ Player Relations Committee (a brilliant appointment, given his unflappable good sense and the approach of another negotiation of baseball’s basic contract with the players, in 1984), was twice required to suspend Billy Martin during the summer because of the manager’s intemperate disagreements with the umpires. In the Stadium pressroom one evening late in the season, I ran into Dick Butler, who is the chief of umpires for the American League, and made some reference to the hard times his minions had experienced in these and many other public disagreements, but Butler, who is as gentle and courtly in manner as his boss, dismissed the matter cheerfully. “It’s always the same,” he told me. “It’s been this way ever since I can remember.” He went on to say that only a day or two earlier he had happened upon some correspondence from the early nineteen-thirties in which Clark Griffith, the president of the Washington Senators, had complained angrily to A.L. president Will Harridge about the abilities and intelligence of the league’s umps. “It was exactly like this year,” Butler said. “Nothing was different—well, except for one thing, I guess. Nowadays, nobody calls my umpires Bolsheviks.”

  Dave Righetti, the Big Yankee left-hander, pitched a no-hit game against the Red Sox on July 4th,* and in September Bob Forsch, of the Cardinals, threw a 3–0 no-hitter against the Expos, and then Mike Warren, a twenty-two-year-old Oakland rookie, did the same thing to the White Sox. None of this is entirely surprising, nor should we be struck dumb with wonder by the news that there were no no-hit games at all during the 2,106 major-league encounters played in 1982, and that Bob Forsch’s and Mike Warren’s no-hitters came along within three days of each other. In baseball, Yogi Berra has told us, you don’t know nothing. What we do know, perhaps, is that
there is a splash of luck when any pitcher, no matter how imperious or crafty, gets by twenty-seven batters without seeing one harmless grounder bounced through the middle or a half-hit flare drop untouched in short right field. This late little scattering of no-hit games statistically illuminates the same essential attribute of the game. Luck does matter in baseball, as well as brilliant and resolute performance, and the proportions of the mixture—a recipe as subtle as the bearnaise at La Grenouille—are exquisitely pleasing. If the sport were easier—if it rewarded only the Carltons and Ryans (and Rices and Schmidts) of the game and never the Porsches or the Mike Warrens—we would almost know the outcome of every game in advance. If it were much easier—if there were a no-hitter every week and a grand-slam homer every evening—we would gossip or snooze or read in the stands until the ninth, for only the score would matter, and the constant surprises of baseball would seem only eccentric or else would elude us altogether. Baseball’s placid exterior and smooth, scheduled flow of games conceal so many possibilities for astounding circumstances that we old fans, picking up the morning paper or tuning in to the late-night sports, wait almost smugly for word of the newest first-ever play or utterly unexpected series of events. Early this August, the California Angels, playing a home game against the Minnesota Twins, appeared to have matters comfortably in hand when, already leading by 2–1, they put their first two batters on base in the bottom of the fourth, only to crash headlong into Yogi Berra’s dictum. The next California batter, Ron Jackson, hit a low line drive to third baseman Gary Gaetti, who flipped to second to double off the lead base runner, and in plenty of time for the relay over to first, which beat the other retreating Angel base runner to the bag. Triple play. The next pitch of the game—delivered by Tommy John to the Twins’ Gaetti, the leadoff batter in the top of the fifth—was smashed over the fence, and the next pitch, to Tom Brunansky, also departed the premises, tying the score of the game, which the Twins eventually won by 4–2. Three successive pitches, good for three outs, two runs, one ruined game, and uncounted broken hearts. According to the records, this had never happened before in major-league baseball. And no one could quite remember an inning like the one that the Orioles came up with a couple of weeks later, in a game against the Blue Jays at Baltimore. The Orioles had rallied for two runs in the bottom of the ninth, tying the game at 3–3, but in the process had used up their last catcher, who had given way to a pinch-hitter—a spendthrift maneuver that now required Baltimore manager Joe Altobelli to send a reserve infielder, Lenn Sakata, out to catch in the tenth. The visitors led off the extra inning with a home run and a single, thus bringing on a new Baltimore pitcher, Tippy Martinez. The Torontos, one may assume, had noted the presence of Sakata behind the plate, and were understandably eager—a bit overeager, in fact—to test him with attempted thefts of second, but they never did find the answer. Martinez instantly picked the base runner off first. He walked the next man but also picked him off, then surrendered a single, and notched the third out with his third pickoff of the inning. Ah, baseball. No one, I think, was particularly surprised when Sakata won the game in the bottom of the same inning, with a three-run homer.

  Another extra-inning contretemps came along in a bitterly contested game at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium on September 9th, at a moment in the race when the Expos, the Phillies, the Cardinals, and the Pirates were clumped within a game and a half of each other in the upper stories of the National League East. Tied with the Pirates at 3–3 in the top of the thirteenth, the Phillies had base runners Willie Hernandez at second and Mike Schmidt at first; Pittsburgh hurler Jim Bibby, facing Joe Lefebvre, let go a wild pitch, but while Hernandez scampered to third, Schmidt, who had somehow considered this remote set of possibilities beforehand, oddly held his base. Not so oddly, when you think about it: with first base still occupied, Bibby, a right-hander, was deprived of the option of walking Lefebvre, a lefty swinger, in order to bring up the next man in the Philadelphia order, Garry Maddox, who bats right. Lefebvre singled, thereby winning the game (it turned out), moving the Phillies into first place for the moment, and certifying Schmidt as a genius—all in one stroke.

  I said earlier that there were no late, great pennant races this summer, but that is not to suggest that there weren’t some brisk and telling patches of action along the way. On that same second weekend of September (the focal point of the baseball summer, it turned out), the Phillies and the Pirates split their next pair of games in thrilling fashion, in contest where the lead or tie was repeatedly surrendered, bitterly rewon, then lost again. By taking the rubber game, the Phillies remained a bare half game out of first place, behind Montreal; later in the week they went home and swept the Expos in a doubleheader, knocking them out of the lead for good, and then embarked upon an eleven-game winning streak, which captured the flag.

  Matters were less parlous in the American League on that same weekend (the White Sox, in the A.L. West, had already spread-eagled the field and were leading the nearest competition by a full fifteen games), but there was a sudden little stir of speculation when the Yankees won the opening game of a four-game set at the Stadium against the league-lending Orioles, to climb into second place, just four games back. The Saturday doubleheader, a twi-night affair, brought out fifty-five thousand fans and produced a horrific (for the Yankees) denouement, which started in the top of the ninth inning of the opening game, with the score tied at 2–2. Shortstop Roy Smalley threw wildly to first, putting the Orioles’ Lenn Sakata on base; a sacrifice moved him along to second and brought on Goose Gossage, who walked Rick Dempsey and then faced the left-handed pinch-hitter Joe Nolan; Nolan took a breaking ball for a strike, fouled off five consecutive fastballs, and then singled cleanly to center (against a sixth heater), to put the Orioles ahead. A double by Cal Ripken brought in another counter, and a bit later John Lowenstein, a left-side pinch-hitter, whacked Gossage’s second pitch over the right-center wall for a grand slam—to an accompanying sudden silence that suggested an electric plug pulled out of the wall. When Gossage and the Yanks came in off the field at last, they were booed. The Orioles also won the second game, and the game on Sunday, wrapping up the Yankee season for good.

  Hindsight is easy, but nothing about the Orioles-Yankees weekend surprised me (except for Gossage’s throwing six fast-balls in a row to a good left-handed hitter). Indeed, the games perfectly confirmed what we have all known for so long but have somehow failed to understand in its entirety. The Orioles, not the Yankees, are the dominant American League team of our time. They had come into the Yankee series on a roll: twenty victories in their past twenty-five games. This was an entirely typical sort of momentum for them in the late going; their September-October record this year (21–12), under manager Joe Altobelli, sustained almost exactly the same killing late-season winning percentage (.638) that they had compiled during the previous fifteen years, under Earl Weaver, who retired last fall. Since their first pennant, in 1966, the Orioles have won three World Series and lost three, while the Yankees are 2–2 in that same span, but the Orioles have taken seven divisional titles since the split-league plan went into effect, fourteen years ago, as against five for the Yanks. The Orioles, in fact, have won more games than any other team in the majors in the past five years and in the past ten years and (someone went to great pains to dig this out) in the past twenty-seven years. Why this is so is something we can get to shortly, when talking about the playoffs and the World Series, but the heart of it, clearly, is that the Orioles always cling to and personify the idea of a team, while the Yankees, by declaration and policy, prefer the idea of winning. Stated this way, the rival propositions seem to tilt unfairly toward the selfless, semi-anonymous, all-for-one fellowship of the O’s, if only because so many of us were taught to strive for such an ideal back when we were in school. But the celebrated and extremely successful Yankees, with their purchased stars, enormous salaries, and bumptious, self-publicizing ownership and management, have given such a good account of themselves in compet
ition that they have taught us—or should have taught us by now—that sweetness and selflessness are not automatically better. The many strands that go into the fabric of a winning or losing franchise include the club’s market area and audience potential, the financial resources of its owners, its scouting personnel and minor-league program, its luck (above all, its luck in avoiding injuries to significant players), and, in the end, its baseball philosophy. Fans incline toward the current personality and practices of their chosen team, as long as it shows sporadic faint signs of life, but I think we in the stands are capable of a little distance as well, and perhaps even a baseball philosophy of our own. The brusquely capable Baltimore style perfectly suits my own fancy, for the Orioles, by long observation, have proved both approachable and thoughtful, patient and combative. Their players instinctively avoid the attitudes of moneyed sullenness that so many teams fall victim to once they experience good fortune, but they also remember what matters in the end. They win.