The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  We won’t know for some time where the 1984 Cubs will fit into this sweet, dismal history, but I think we can already do honor to the principals—Dallas Green and Jim Frey, and the newborn or new-bought stars on the field—for reversing this deep-running tide so precipitately. There was no preparation for this at the beginning of the year, when the Cubs, fifth-place finishers the year before, lost eleven straight games in spring training, but some late trades suddenly filled the team’s needs—a leadoff man, a center fielder, more speed (Bob Dernier, who came from the Phillies on March 27th, took care of all three), more and then still more pitching—and they began to win and began to be noticed. On June 23rd, before a national television audience, the Cubs beat the Cardinals, 12–11, in eleven innings, in a game in which Ryne Sandberg, their remarkable young star, hit two home runs against Bruce Sutter—one in the ninth and another in the tenth (with two out and a man aboard), each time retying the score. “Sandberg is the best player I have ever seen,” Cardinal manager Whitey Herzog said afterward.

  It is the cub fans who will have to sort out this season—most of all, the unshirted, violently partisan multitudes in the Wrigley Field bleachers, who sustain the closest fan-to-player attachment anywhere in baseball—and I will not patronize them by claiming a share of their happiness during the summer or pretending to understand their pain and shock at its end. Baseball, as I have sometimes suggested, is above all a matter of belonging, and belonging to the Cubs takes a lifetime. But to Chicago the Cubs are something more than just a team. Wrigley Field is almost the last of the old neighborhood ballparks, and the antiquity of the place (it was built in 1914, two years after Fenway Park opened for business in Boston) and the absence of night ball there (the Wrigley family believed that the crowds and the noise would be an affront to the nearby residents) remind us what the game once felt like and how it fitted into the patterns of city life. I took a little stroll around the blocks off to the north and east of Wrigley Field one morning before game time and fell into conversation with a short, cheerful young woman named Debra Price, who was out jogging. She was wearing a sweatshirt with huge Cubs emblazoning, and was accompanied by her black cat, Dufus, who runs with her. She told me she had lived just around the corner, on Kenmore Avenue, until August, when she took a job in Denver (she is in labor relations), but had come back for the games because her old roommate, Karen Miller, had been lucky enough to get hold of a pair of tickets. “I was going through a bad Cubs withdrawal out there,” she said. “It used to be incredibly convenient living so close to the park here. You could walk over at nine in the morning and pick up your seats for that afternoon. It was always easy to get seats, because the team wasn’t going anywhere. I can’t quite believe this whole year, or understand it. I’m a little young to be a real Cubs fan, but I think I qualify. I was there two years ago the day Bill Buckner got his two-hundredth hit of the season, and Jody Davis has been sort of a constant for me. There’s a lot of character and sentimentality in what the Cubs are. They’ve always seemed older than the White Sox in this town—I don’t know why. They have this kind of humor about them. The Cubs are outside the realm.”

  On Grace Street, I paid an impromptu visit to the House of the Good Shepherd, a convent whose sizable, unmarked backyard parking lot has been a public secret shared by suburban Cubs fans for forty years or more. The parking revenue now accounts for more than a third of the annual budget for the convent, which does its main work in family care. I was told by a pleasant, impressive nun named Sister Patricia, who said she respected and admired the Cubs for sticking to daytime ball. She wouldn’t quite declare her own feelings about this year’s team, but I thought I could tell that she was—well, pleased. I asked about a vender I had seen out on Grace Street who was selling wonderful T-shirts with the message “THE CUBS—A TICKET TO HEAVEN,” but Sister Patricia shook her head. “Not ours,” she said. “That’s outside the walls.” When I took my leave, I noticed that the sister who let me out was wearing a little paper Cubs logo—the red letter “C” inside a circle of blue—over her heart on her white habit.

  The side blocks off Grace Street were made up of elderly detached three-story houses, with scraps of lawn and flower beds out in front; the grass had a worn, late-summer look to it, and the low-hanging tree branches were heavy with dusty leaves. Here and there, the narrow concrete sidewalk had a half-circle cut out, making room for a fat tree trunk. I could have been in Keokuk or Kirksville, but whenever I crossed a street I could look off to my left a couple of blocks and see the great back wall of Wrigley Field. Down another street, Clifton Avenue, I came upon a man named Barry Flanagan, who was carefully brushing a fresh coat of green paint on his front stoop. When I stopped to talk, we were joined by his father, James Flanagan, a retired gent with a ruddy face and gold-rimmed glasses. The senior Mr. Flanagan was born in England—there was still a trace of that when he talked—and used to root for the West Ham football team, but he took up the other game when he came to the new country and the Cubs’ neighborhood. The Flanagans had been in the same house for twenty-seven years, and before that they had lived just next door. They were great Ernie Banks fans, of course. They could hear the games, Barry told me, but couldn’t quite see them—not even from the roof. I had the feeling that they didn’t get around to going very often. “I can tell by the people walking home after a game whether they’ve won or lost,” the elder Flanagan said. “When the Cubs lose, they’re saying, ‘Oh, we should have done this, we should have done that.’ Some days, if there’s been a bad game, they trample the flowers a bit. But it’s nice having the Cubs. You know there’s always going to be parking space right after the games, when you’re coming home from work.”

  I said goodbye and headed off for the park, and all along the street I noticed yellow signs put up in the lower windows of the little houses: “NO NIGHT BASEBALL”—a response to the rumor, back in midsummer, that the postseason games in Chicago might be played under some temporarily installed floodlights in order to placate the demands of the networks for night ball and its vast audiences and numbers. Now (it’s only to be expected, I suppose) Dallas Green is talking about building a new ballpark somewhere for the Cubs, with more seats, improved parking, and, of course, night baseball.

  I watched the rest of the N.L. playoffs, out in San Diego, by television: some fine pitching by Ed Whitson in the 7–1 Padre victory in Game Three; the riveting attacks and ripostes of the next game, in which Steve Garvey again and again surpassed himself—surpassed possibility, almost—in the 7–5 Padre victory that tied things up; and some useful work by the top two hitters in the San Diego lineup, Alan Wiggins and Tony Gwynn, in the team’s 6–3 comeback victory over Rick Sutcliffe in the Sunday finale. Garvey, it will be recalled, batted in the second San Diego run in Game Four with a double; tied it with a single in his next at-bat; drove in the go-ahead run in the seventh, and, with matters again tied, whacked the game-winning two-run line-drive homer in the ninth, against Lee Smith; five runs batted in for the day. Garvey has his detractors, who are put off at times by his smiling, TV-host persona, but I am not among them; I was startled by his great day at the plate, but not surprised. What I can’t decide, even at this distance, is whether Jim Frey should have taken out Rick Sutcliffe, his star and stopper, much sooner in the final game, when he proved unable to hold a three-run lead. To be sure, Sutcliffe had often found himself in similarly horrid places during the summer, as all pitchers do, and had pitched out of them, but even in the middle innings of this game, before the Padres had been able to put anything together at the plate, he had looked uncharacteristically uncertain and unhappy out there—an amazing and disconcerting sight. The pressure of such a too short series is killing, of course, and a deepening and palpable weight and doubt about the outcome of this last game had begun to swing against the Cubs well before it began. It’s second-guessing, but I would have pitched Sutcliffe on Saturday.

  The Padre fans, it will be recalled, kept up an unending, unquenchably ferocious d
in through all those games at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium. They actually seemed to make a difference, and thus had some part in the great comeback—all the Padre players said so at the end—but I must confess that I resented them a little, once their team had triumphed. The Padres had not come close in their fifteen previous years of campaigning, never finishing above fourth place, and I did not think that their supporters quite understood the kind of waiting and the hope and pain that Cubs fans know by heart. Now, to be sure—since the playoffs, I mean—the Padres have been in a World Series and lost it, which changes everything. Their fans have won and then lost, and they are in the game at last.

  These games—and the American League championship series as well—were contested without the supervision of major-league umpires, who were striking for a larger share of the playoff and World Series (and All-Star Game) profits, and for a distribution of that share among all their members instead of among the few who actually worked the games. The impasse was resolved before the Series by the intervention of the brand-new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, who came down very strongly on the side of the umps—a most surprising and (to me, at least) pleasing turn of events. The playoff games were supervised by locally recruited amateurs—college and high-school umpires, for the most part—who looked a bit tense and ragged on the field but who, very fortunately, never had to make a crucial call. Some people in baseball can’t accept even the smallest disruption of their sport—among them a crabby scribe friend of mine, now with the Chicago Tribune, who watched the first Cubs-Padres game from his regular perch in the press box and, in his column next morning, stated without hesitation that the home plate ump-for-a-day had missed twenty-three ball-and-strike calls through the first seven innings.

  The Tigers, over in their half of the playoff draw, took care of the Royals in the minimum distance—not an astonishing outcome, given their records; Detroit’s 104–58 was the best season put together by an American League divisional champion since 1970, and Kansas City’s 84–78 was the worst ever. Dick Howser’s young troops gave it their best, of course, but I think the heart went out of them when they came back from a three-run deficit in the second game only to see their stopper, Quisenberry, beaten in the eleventh on a double by John Grubb. I caught up with the teams in Detroit at Game Three—an austere, tense little pitching battle between the Tigers’ Milt Wilcox and K.C.’s Charlie Leibrandt. The only run of the game came home in the bottom of the second, when, with one out and men on first and third, Royals shortstop Onix Concepcion and second baseman Frank White were a fraction late in turning a double play (they are more accustomed to the fast infield carpet on their home field), and the Tiger batter, Marty Castillo, ran out the play hard and beat the relay by a whisker. You never know. The other critical moment went the other way. With two outs and a Kansas City base runner aboard in the top of the eighth, Willie Wilson smashed a grounder well to the right of first baseman Darrell Evans—past him, it seemed. Evans made an airborne dive to his right, barely gloved the ball as it came off the bounce, and somehow held on to it as his body slammed into the dirt. The force of the fall made his hat fly off, but he was up in an instant and came scrambling back in the other direction, staggering in his haste, as his pitcher, Wilcox, sprinted over to cover the bag, and Wilson, perhaps the fastest man in the league, barrelled up the line. There was no chance for a play to Wilcox, even if he could have held on to a flipped toss somehow, and the pitcher danced away at the last instant as the two others-runner and fielder—flew together in an amazing double slide for the bag, with Evans winning the event by an inch or so. The inning was done and, a few minutes later, so were the Royals. I loved the play—I can still see it—but I was even more taken with Darrell Evans’ reaction to it, which, for once, gave us a glimpse of the players’ responses in these moments of tension and courage that the rest of us pay to watch. Evans is thirty-seven—an old-pro third and first baseman who came over to the Tigers as a free agent last winter, after hitting thirty homers for the Giants. He was expected to add some sock to the Detroit batting order, but he had a disappointing sort of season at the plate—.232 and sixteen home runs. But Evans brings other qualities to any team he plays for. He was team captain on his two previous clubs, the Braves and the Giants, in the first case succeeding Hank Aaron and in the second Willie Mays. This was his sixteenth major-league season but his very first taste of postseason play.

  After the game, Evans was a center of attention in the Tigers’ shouting, jubilant clubhouse. He has a pale, somewhat pouchy face and a thoughtful way of talking, but now he was voluble. He was holding a bottle of champagne in one hand, but I never saw him take a sip. “A game like that, a time like that—it takes you over,” he said. “It consumes you. You’re thinking so far in advance, you’re making mental pictures of plays two or three pitches ahead. You have to experience it to understand it. It’s another level—other guys told me that, but I had to get into it to know what they meant. You feel that there’s no one else around but you. You have to take all the responsibility for the game, and it takes it out of you. You know, the other day, after we’d won that game in the eleventh, I had to go and lay down in the training room—I was spent emotionally. You want it to be a little easier than it is, but it can’t be that way.”

  He went on like this, going over the play again and again for different groups of reporters and camera crews that surrounded him in succession, but, if anything, he grew more excited and exalted by his memory of the play and the moment each time he described it. “Everyone enjoyed it—everyone in the park!” he exclaimed at one point. “In that situation, you don’t have time to think, you just react. You get in sort of a panic—you have to think of something. This is what you want from the game. It’s what you play for. This is the whole thing.”

  All sorts of praise showered down on the Tigers during and after the World Series, but the most tolling compliment I heard came during the late summer, when several players on three other clubs—the Blue Jays, the Twins, and the Red Sox—separately offered the opinion that the best group of games, the best single series, that their club had played during the year had been against Detroit. The Tigers had won most of those games, but the quality of their play, the combined pressure of their pitching and power and speed, and their day-to-day elan on the field had brought out the finest efforts of their rivals and raised the level of the games to the highest calibre. This is the same sort of spontaneously offered professional endorsement that used to be reserved for the imperial Yankees back in the nineteen-fifties, when A.L. managers would sort out their pitching rotation weeks in advance in order to have their top performers ready for some forthcoming home set with the Bronx Bombers—and, when the games came, they would sell out the park and, most of the time, end up losers. Nowadays, the only evaluation of supremacy in the sport that goes entirely unchallenged is the No. 1 rating given to the Tigers’ up-the-middle core: catcher Lance Parrish, second baseman Lou Whitaker, shortstop Alan Trammell, and center fielder Chet Lemon. The quartet is currently without a peer or a close rival, and is now being seriously compared with the Dodgers’ early-fifties middle line of Campanella, Robinson, Reese, and Snider. The star qualities of the Detroit four—Parrish’s power (he holds the all-time A.L. record at the position with thirty-two homers in 1982) and deadly, quick-release arm; Whitaker’s ball-bearing smoothness afield and remarkable hand-speed at bat; Trammell’s all-around skill and his consummate calm (coming after Cal Ripken and Robin Yount, he is the third marvellous shortstop in a row to play for the American League in the World Series); and Lemon’s range and speed and passion for the game (he is the only outfielder I can recall who actually works on his defense during batting practice)—suggest that their club may not be easily susceptible to the kind of falling off that has afflicted other recent champions after they’ve won. I also find it significant that the Tigers did so well in a season when many of their regulars (Parrish, Whitaker, Trammell, Evans, Larry Hemdon) had poorer records at the plate than they ha
d in 1983. The prime pickup for the team this year, aside from Kirk Gibson’s coming of age out in right field, was in pitching, and most of that, of course, followed upon the acquisition of Willie Hernandez. This year’s Tigers led their league both in runs scored and in fewest runs allowed: a killing balance. Their fifteen-game winning margin was achieved in the only powerful division in either league, and, as Sparky Anderson kept saying even before the Series began, that was the true championship test.

  The Tigers had an impatience to win, as we saw all through this Series. Their first two batters, Whitaker and Trammell, got on base in the very first inning nine times in under ten leadoff at-bats over the five games, and scored six runs. The Tigers, as I have said, scored first in every game, and they outscored the Padres 13–4 over the first and second innings. The corps of San Diego starting pitchers, to be sure, did not distinguish itself in any way, and even in Game Two, which the Padres eventually won, the first three Tiger hitters (Gibson was up third) ripped singles off Ed Whitson on his first three pitches of the day; after the game, the Padre catcher, Terry Kennedy, said that he’d contemplated calling a pitchout on the next delivery, just so he could handle the ball. Once aboard, the Tiger base runners yearned to be farther along. The most significant play of the first game, in the opinion of Tom Lasorda (on hand as a columnist for USA Today), was Kirk Gibson’s unsuccessful steal of second in the fifth inning—a plain message about the Tigers’ battle plan, which was to run, rather than to play it safe and wait for their power to bring people home. Many clubs seem to think that they lack the personnel to make this option available, but hit-and-run and taking an extra base is mostly a state of mind, implanted (or cautiously suppressed) by the manager. The Tiger skipper, Sparky Anderson, is a man of zeal, and his teams at their best give their opponents the impression that they are about to be buried in a game—as, indeed, they often are. And this year-let’s face it—Sparky had the horses. Kirk Gibson, to name one horse, is a slugger by any measurement, but he is also the fastest man on the Tiger roster. The other prime indicator in Game One (in the opinion of this bystander) was an ugly little two-base error by the young Padre left fielder, Carmelo Martinez, in the fourth inning—a misjudgment that seemed to paralyze him, afield and at bat, for the rest of the week, thus adding to the burdens of the Padres, who had already lost another starting outfielder, Kevin McReynolds, because of an injury.