by Roger Angell
The Toronto fans, I need hardly add, are fans. Even in the closer sectors of Exhibition Stadium, the seats are uncomfortable and sight lines abominable, but the rooters turn out in very large numbers (2,110,009 of them last year) to cram themselves into the intimately serried, knee-creasing grandstand rows and to cheer with more discriminating loyalty and sensible hope than they used to back in the early days of the franchise. Ontario fans—particularly those off to the west of Toronto, in sectors like Wingham and London—used to be Tiger rooters, but most of them have switched over in the last couple of seasons, and the Blue Jays have supplanted the hapless hockey Maple Leafs as the No. 1 team in town. The seventh-inning stretch (to return to the stadium) is a wholesome little session of sing-along calisthenics, directed by numerous Ken and Barbie look-alikes in sweatsuits, to a fight song called “O.K., Blue Jays!,” and almost everyone joins in happily. Happily and for the most part soberly, if only because each row in the stands is forty-one seats wide, aisle to aisle, making beer vending an impossibility. A new stadium—a dome, perhaps with a retractable roof—has been promised by the province, but it sounds years away. A World Series played at Exhibition Stadium would hurry the project wonderfully.
Around suppertime, the rain lessened and then turned itself off, the fog banks began to show pinkish gleams (greeted by “Here Comes the Sun” on the loudspeaker), the Zamboni—after a brief, embarrassing breakdown—thrummed back and forth across the green carpet, sucking up water and spouting it off-field, the gulls flapped off to other engagements, and a handful of fans (kids, mostly) reappeared and filled up the good seats around home: not enough of them to make a Wave, for once. The game resumed, with new pitchers, and the Blue Jays lost, 5–3—almost a foregone conclusion, it seemed, although I wasn’t quite sure why. Bobby Cox, who can’t stand to lose, missed the second part of the odd little double header, having become embroiled during the delay in argument with Brinkman the Rain King, who gave him the heave-ho. None of it could have happened on grass.
The next afternoon, in the Sunday sunshine, Stieb had at the Red Sox at last, and whipped them, 8–1, impatiently setting down their hitters with his tough fastball, a biting slider, and some unsettling off-speed stuff as well; he didn’t give up a hit until the sixth inning. Tony Fernandez hit a triple and a double-to date, he was sixteen for twenty-seven against the Boston pitchers for the year—and Ranee Mulliniks, who switches with Iorg at third base (they were both well over .300 so far), socked a home run. Fernandez, who is twenty-two years old, gets rid of the ball at short with an oiled swiftness that makes you catch your breath; he switch-hits, starting with his hands held high but then dipping at the last moment to a smooth, late, flat-bat stroke that meets the ball in classic inside-out style and drives it, often to the opposite field, with power and elegance. There are others in the Blue Jays lineup whom I admire and enjoy, including the crisp Damo Garcia, at second, and the quick, strong young outfielders Bell and Moseby (they and the regular right fielder, Jesse Barfield, who didn’t start on this day, will all turn twenty-six within two weeks of each other this fall), but, watching them here, I still could not envision them and their teammates holding on through the summer against the likes of the Tigers and the tough oncoming Yankees, and then playing in and perhaps winning a championship elimination or a World Series. I had discussed this feeling just before the game with Tony Kubek, who handles the Jays’ color commentary over the CTV television network (he also works the backup “Game of the Week” shows on NBC), and then with Buck Martinez, the veteran Blue Jays catcher, who replaces Ernie Whitt against the lefties. In different ways, both of them echoed the same doubts.
“There’s nobody on the club who scares you, which is what you see on so many other teams in this division,” Kubek said. “Or, rather, two guys scare you—Parrish and Gibson with the Tigers, Murray and Ripken on the Orioles, Winfield and Baylor on the Yanks. Maybe it’ll happen here, maybe somebody will come along, but I don’t quite see it. You know, a lot of people picked us to win this year, and that changes how a club thinks about itself. Some of the guys have become a little defensive in their thinking. You can see that Gillick built this team to fit this ballpark. It’s a hitter’s park, with the carpet and the short fences, but I always feel we’re a little light when we get into those bigger parks on the road.”
Martinez said, “I cut that photograph out of the paper yesterday that showed Bill Buckner putting a flying block on Garcia in the Thursday game and showed it to some guys in the clubhouse. I said, ‘This is the difference between winning and being a bunch of good guys, which is what we are so far.’ I played five years on the Royals, with people like George Brett and Hal McRae, and I saw how they play this game. McRae always said, ‘If you can’t be good, you got to be rough.’ You remember that slide he put on Willie Randolph in the playoffs, don’t you? Now the game has changed a little, and the people take that sort of thing more personally, almost. But that’s the kind of play that can get into an infielder’s mind and maybe make for a moment of hesitation later on and win a game for you. Stieb is like that for us, but he’s a pitcher and too often it’s directed against himself. There were times on our last road trip when we could have used a little more of that McRae stuff, that Thurman Munson personality—somebody who’ll get a leadoff double when you want it most, or knock somebody down at second. Maybe it’ll come—you never know.”
Ah, yes. Yogi Berra has enunciated this same great principle (“In baseball, you don’t know nothin”), and so, too, in his own field, did the late Fats Waller (“One never knows, do one?”). With one out in the bottom of the fourth, I lifted my gaze from my scorecard to see, on the instant, a fastball delivered by the Boston hurler, Bruce Kison, ricochet off the shoulder—high on the shoulder—of the Toronto batter, George Bell. A certain testiness had been evident all along in this series-going back to Doyle Alexander’s very first pitch on Thursday evening, which had nailed leadoff man Steve Lyons right on the chest (or, more precisely, on the “S” of his “BOSTON” road-uniform logo)—but Bell’s response, even under such duress, was surprising. Batless, he reached the mound in full sprint and aimed a sudden high, right-legged karate kick at Kison, which mostly missed its mark. Bell then spun quickly and landed a fairish one-two combination (fists, this time) to the chops of Rich Gedman, the pursuing Boston catcher. Now batting .666 for this one turn at bat (if we may agree that he had fouled out against Kison), Bell retreated toward third base in a wary backward-boogie style, apparently inviting other participants, just emerging from their dugouts, to share the action, which they did, in typically earnest but inefficient fashion. When it was over, Bell was banished from the proceedings and Kison permitted to continue, though under admonishment. A tall, bony right-hander, now in his fifteenth season in the bigs, Kison knows the outs and ins of his profession, and earlier in the game he had somehow allowed a little off-speed pitch to sail behind the head of Ernie Whitt, who here stepped up to bag again—and walked, muttering. An end to the affair, one might have imagined, but writers of these summer operettas do like that last, excessive twist to the plot. Whitt, coming up to bat again, with one out in the sixth, found Kison still on hand, although tottering, for he had just walked the bases full. Whitt poled the first pitch over the right-field fence—it was the first grand slam of his entire baseball career—and circled the bases talkatively, taking time to direct the appropriate phrasings and rhetorical flourishes toward the mound as he went. The tableau looked like an eccentric windup toy from Bavaria, with the circling outer figure, in the white uniform, twitching his arms and waggling his jaw as he went from base to base, and the central inner player—the little man in gray—rotating more slowly but in perfect concentric rhythm, so as to keep his back turned to the other chap all the way around. I much preferred this baseball keepsake to the George Bell model, but of course it will take the rest of the summer to learn what it meant, if anything, to the Blue Jays.
As it turned out, an even more vivid exemplification of that
McRae stuff, that Thurman Munson personality, was presented to the Blue Jays by the man who had enunciated the need for it in the first place, Buck Martinez. While behind the plate for the Jays in a game out in Seattle (I saw the moment on a television replay that night, a couple of weeks after my visit to Toronto), Martinez took a peg from the outfield and attempted to tag an onflying Mariner base runner, Phil Bradley, who collided violently with the catcher. Martinez, knocked onto his back, suffered a broken right fibula and dislocated ankle. Somehow, he held on to the ball and made the out, and then, half rising, threw toward third base, where another Seattle base runner, Gorman Thomas, was now swiftly approaching. The throw went wild, and Thomas turned third and headed for the plate. George Bell picked up the ball in left field and fired it home, where the dazed and badly injured Martinez, still down and writhing, caught it on the bounce and tagged the runner, thus accounting for both putouts in the double play—possibly the last but certainly the most extraordinary moment of his baseball career.
Hitting is the hovering central mystery of this sport, and continues to invite wonder. Tommy Herr, a decent singles-and doubles-hitting second baseman with the Cardinals, batted .276 last year and drove in forty-nine runs—almost exactly matching his career averages, compiled in the previous five summers. This year, batting third in a much altered lineup, he has led the league in hitting over most of the first half (he is at .330 at this writing) and has sent teammates already on base scurrying home in great numbers; his three home runs and seventy runs batted in to date have turned the writers to the Baseball Encyclopedia, where they have divined that he may well become the first National League to bat in a hundred runs or more while hitting fewer than ten home runs in the process since Dixie Walker did it (116, with nine) for the Dodgers in 1946. Some contributing reasons for Herr’s sudden prosperity will be presented a little farther along, when we take a closer look at the Cardinals, but I love to think about the absolute unpredictability of this almost typical turnabout; every year, it seems to me, something of this sort comes along and is then made to look logical and almost inevitable by us scholars and explainers of the game—none of whom, of course, had any idea beforehand where and to whom it would happen. Baseball, to its credit, confirms continuity and revolution in equal parts, thus keeping its followers contented but attentive. Pedro Guerrero, unhappy all spring at third base with the Dodgers, was returned to his old position in the outfield on June 1st, and responded by whacking fifteen home runs in the month of June, a new National League record—a new record, of course. Carlton Fisk has hit twenty-six homers for the White Sox so far this year, thereby tying his full-season best in a career stretching back over sixteen major-league summers; he leads both leagues in downtowners to date and seems a good bet to erase Lance Parrish’s one-season total of thirty-two homers, the most by any American League catcher.* Sudden extraordinary performance at the plate is never truly explicable, then, and even the batters themselves aren’t much help. “I’m in a good groove,” “I’m in that realm,” or “I’m seeing the ball real good” is what you hear, and the words are accompanied with an almost apologetic little shrug.
It’s all right, then, for the rest of us to feel the same way. The two hottest hitters of 1985 are Rickey Henderson and George Brett, and while I thought that I was seeing them real good during several turns at bat this year, I still don’t know how they do it. Henderson, facing the Orioles’ Mike Boddicker and Sammy Stewart one night up at the Stadium, rapped three singles and drove in three runs (he also stole a base) in the course of the Yankees’ 7–4 victory, and somehow looked a bit off his form in the process. A week earlier, while the Yankees were administering a frightful three-game pasting to these same Orioles down in Baltimore (they had forty-four hits along the way), Henderson went eight for nine in the first two games, and ten for thirteen over the three, at one stretch getting to first base safely ten straight times. Like a perfectly cooked roast, his June statistics look wonderful no matter where you slice them: a three-for-four night against the Tigers, with two home runs; a one-for-three effort against the Orioles again, with four stolen bases again; and so forth. It is this almost unique combination of batting eye, power, and speed that makes him so dangerous, and when you see him approach the plate (with that preliminary little baton-twirler mannerism, during which he alternately taps the head and the heel of the bat with his gloved hand) and then fold himself down into his odd, knock-kneed, doubled-over posture as he awaits the pitch you suddenly perceive what a mean little knot of problems he presents to the pitcher. His scrunched-down strike zone means that he is almost always ahead on the count (Earl Weaver has said that Henderson draws walks as well as anyone he has ever seen in the majors), but the pitcher, uncomfortably aware of his devastating quickness on the base paths, is unwilling to settle for ball four and thus very often gives up a line drive instead. Again, these explanations look easy—except for the last part: the hitting. His stroke is at once so quick—almost an upward and outward jump at the ball—and yet so full and flashing…Well, I give up. The Stadium throngs love him, of course, and he has been very much at the center of the Yankees’ vivid drive to the fore (almost to the fore) in the past two months.
I saw Brett in a stretch of three games against the Angels in Kansas City, at a time when he had just returned to the Royals lineup after a spell on the bench with a hamstring pull. He has always been prone to injury, and almost always seems to return to action at full bore—this time with ten hits in his first twenty at-bats. Brett, who is thirty-two, took off twenty pounds over the winter, and looked younger and more cheerful than I had seen him in years. He was meeting the ball well (here we go again) when I saw him, showing that full, exuberant cut every time, and was hitting a lot of long fouls, but he didn’t do much, except for a three-for-three performance in one fourteen-inning game, finally captured by the Royals—almost an amazing day, at that, since he walked on his four other appearances, thus ending up on base seven times. A couple of days later, after I’d left town, Brett went three for three against the A’s with two three-run homers; starting there, he ran off a .538 week, with three doubles, two homers, a triple, and eleven runs batted in. I have written so often about Brett’s batting style—going back to his great .390 summer in 1980, and before—that I will not attempt another likeness here of that uniquely pausing, balanced, and then suddenly free and whirling grace. Observing him repeatedly at work there on his home field, though, it did seem to me that one part of his swing—the cocked, attentive tilt of his head as he awaits the ball, and the abrupt downward tuck of his chin as he watches his bat drive through at the pitch—is especially satisfying to an onlooker. In some strange fashion, Brett always appears to be watching himself being a hitter. There is a considering, almost intellectual presence there, even during the most violent and difficult unleashing of forces, and it suggests—it almost looks like—that waiting and expectant inner self, the critical watcher, who remains at rest within each of us and is spectator to all our movements and doings, however grand or trifling. Even crossing a street, we can find ourselves in that good groove sometimes, and take note of it with secret surprise.