The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Splittorff went on to say how much he enjoyed Quisenberry, and told me that if I were a golfer Quis would be no threat: he is a sprayer, with an amazing slice. Then we went back to baseball. “He’s in his sixth year, and this is the first time he’s come under fire from the fans and the media,” Splitt said. “It’s remarkable that he’s gone this far without having a real downslide, and it’s going to be interesting to see how he handles it. It’s going to be a big point in his career. I don’t anticipate any problems for him, no matter how this year turns out. Whatever comes, he’s smart enough to handle it and he has the character he needs to survive.”

  Quisenberry didn’t get into the first game of the Orioles series—the Royals lost, 8–3—and the next day I was unexpectedly called back to New York: a turn of events that ended my plans for another weekend with the Royals. I had a couple of hours that morning before I had to catch the Metroliner, however, and Quis and I spent them together. The club was staying at the Cross Keys Inn—an attractive, tree-shaded suburban hostelry on the north side of Baltimore—and Quisenberry and I visited its little shopping center, window-shopping, and then went into a bookstore. Quisenberry’s on-the-road reading this year has included Evan Connell’s biography of General Custer, “Son of the Morning Star;” the Elmore Leonard thriller “Glitz;” and “Blue Highways,” by William Least Heat Moon. But here he stopped before the juvenile shelves and then asked me in some detail what books my children had counted on when they were growing up and how much reading aloud there had been. Out in the sunshine again, he suddenly said, “You know, I really love the road. Or maybe I love-hate it. I miss Janie and the kids, but this kind of day—being quiet, for a change, and all the time you get to put in with the guys: going out to meals, the camaraderie….It’s a special part of baseball.”

  In time, we sat down on a low brick terrace wall, in the dappled shade. Birds were twittering. Quis was wearing freshly pressed jeans and a gray T-shirt (ballplayers on the road are as neat as cadets). He told me which teams and players had given him the most trouble over the years—Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper and the Brewers, by a wide margin in all cases—but added that he always looked forward to getting back to Milwaukee to take another crack at them. “There’s also the strange thrill of giving up line drives past your ear that you didn’t really see at all—and knowing somehow they missed you,” he said.

  When he went on, it was in a different tone. “It’s been strange,” he said. “Here we are in July, and I’m still telling myself ‘Keep the ball down.’ I’ve had to do a lot more work on the side and a lot more thinking. In spring training, Gary Blaylock and I were talking about our young pitchers—we have a lot of them—and about which ones were going to be his main project this year. And then it turns out that I’m the project. If I don’t like this, it’s not because I expect to be great all the time—I know better than that. But I enjoy pitching the ball and getting it right. I don’t enjoy getting it wrong, or getting it half wrong or a third wrong. At the very least, I should throw the ball right, night after night.”

  He sounded deeply puzzled—more troubled man I’d ever heard him.

  “Do you remember that Olympics cross-country skier named Koch—Bill Koch, I think it is?” he went on. I said I did, and Quis said, “Well, in the 1984 Winter Olympics he was one of the big favorites—he’d won a medal eight years before, I think—but when his race came he didn’t do well. He finished eighteenth, or something like that, but when he got interviewed afterward he didn’t seem upset at all. He looked sort of calm and happy, and he said—I don’t remember the words exactly—he said he felt good, because he’d been at his best level in that race. He couldn’t have done better, he said, and he didn’t need a medal, because he was satisfied with his effort on that day. I’ve heard the pitcher Ray Burns say the same kind of thing, and Phil Niekro, too. Live with what you’ve got that day, they’re saying. Well, that’s the kind of athlete I hope to be. I don’t believe in fate. I’m not an advocate of good luck. I know that players get hot, just like teams get hot, and then there are times when they can’t do better than what you’re seeing. They can’t. All this year means is that I’ve got to go out and do a job when baseball life is tougher. I don’t think I should complain, because that’s what most major-league players go through every season, year in and year out. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Who’s to say what the kids of the future will say about me—will I be Mr. Normal and experience a lot of hard days from now on, or will I be a hero again? Janie said the other day that if it turns out that I’m pitching in the top third of major-league pitchers now instead of the top fifth, the way it’s been, those numbers would still be considered a good career by most people. And I know that—I know she’s right.”

  He paused and then gave a little shrug.

  “This summer—we’ll find out about this summer. It would be very weak of me if I couldn’t accept a whole year like this. I’m really stuck, though. I’m between a rock and a hard place. I want to have balance—I want to accept failure and accept success, and be human. But at the same time I have these unrealistic goals and ideas on the mound. So part of my fight for balance will never be answered, because I’m expecting perfection.”

  Afterword: The two seasons since this account was written have been the most difficult in Dan Quisenberry’s baseball career. Almost nothing went right for him in 1986, when he finished with a 3–7 won-lost record and an earned-run average of 2.77—his highest since his first full season in the majors. He had finished up with thirty-seven saves in 1985, to lead the league in that department for the fourth consecutive year, but in 1986 he accounted for only twelve. His game appearances and innings-pitched were drastically reduced. He pitched well in patches, but the rocky stretches were longer and more noticeable: no saves in the months of May, eleven outings in July that produced no wins and three losses, and a 5.27 earned-run average. Left-handed batters rocked him with a cumulative .310 for the season. Manager Dick Howser (who left the team in July, when it was discovered that he was suffering from a malignant brain tumor) and his replacement at the helm, Mike Ferraro, stopped wheeling in Quisenberry in his accustomed closing role, and Quis, who knows that his peculiar, fine-tuned stuff cannot be counted upon unless he works regularly, felt ill-used as well as ineffectual. The world had turned upside down for him. He tried to accept this without complaint, as one would expect, but Jack Etkin, of the Kansas City Star, told me that the summer had been a “typhoon of emotions” for Quisenberry. His difficulties, in any case, were only one part of a horrendous season for the defending World Champion Royals, who fell into a tie for third place in their division, sixteen games behind the pennant-winning Angels; nothing, of course, affected the team as much as the loss of Howser, who died the following July.

  Quis pitched a little better in 1987, but neither of the new Royals managers, Billy Gardner and then John Wathan, used him much in his accustomed role; he pitched only fifteen innings after the All-Star Game break in July. Early in the year, a rookie right-hander, John Davis, was tried in Quis’ old spot, and early in September, when the club was caught up in a four-team pennant scramble in the A.L. West (the Royals finished second in the A.L. West, two games behind the Minnesota Twins), the Royals purchased Gene Garber, an accomplished seventeen-year veteran short reliever, from the Braves—a final signal, if one was needed, that they had given up on their old submariner. Quisenberry’s final figures for 1987 were a mixed bag. He finished up 4–1, with an earned-run average of 2.76 and eight saves, but twenty-eight of the forty-seven baserunners he inherited in game situations came around to score. When the season ended, Quisenberry asked the Royals to trade him to another team. “I don’t really want to do this,” he said. “This is the only uniform I know. This is the only locker room that I know. These are the only stadium and front office that I know. These are the only fans that I know. I’m comfortable with everything here, except not being a participant.”

  Finding a new team for Quis will pre
sent difficulties, starting with his $1.1 million guaranteed annual salary; the Royals must also contrive to separate his baseball pay from his lifetime partnership with Avron Fogelman—the multi-million-dollar real estate contract mentioned above. The Royals’ affection for Quisenberry is undiminished and they will try to honor his wish to be traded, but his future in the game looks uncertain at best.

  The puzzle of Quisenberry’s sudden loss of mastery will probably never be answered, but he himself looks on these mysterious reversals with composure now. “I still miss not being the guy—being out there every day,” he said to me at lunch one day in midseason, “but I’m not miserable all day, the way I was, thinking how I can get the ball again. I’ve got peace of mind. Maybe I’m not the same pitcher that I was. I never got my ERA under two last year, and my hits-per-inning were over one. They’re a little over one right now. Maybe that’s because I’m not working so much, or maybe it’s because my sinker isn’t as good. Maybe my sinker is sunk. Left-handed batters have always hit me pretty hard, on and off, even in my best years, but now I’ve lost the luxury of weathering the storm. I still covet that, but I may never be in that spot again in my career. I think there’s always been some skepticism about me, because I look funny out there, but it’s plain enough that people on the club think I don’t have what I had. I don’t get into conversations about it. I still want to pitch a lot, but I have no trouble sleeping at night.”

  Knowing what I did about Quis, I probably shouldn’t have worried about his courage and demeanor under these unhappy circumstances, but reactions elsewhere have been less admirable. Often last summer or this summer, I noticed that when his name came up some baseball people—writers or front-office men: never players—would smile knowingly and say something like, “Well, yeah, but he was always—you know, just trickin’ them.” And the speaker would waggle his arm and wrist side-arm in a comical, disparaging way. I didn’t like this, but then I realized that I had begun to disparage Quis a little, too, in my mind. I would find his pitching line at the bottom of another box score and see that he hadn’t done very well, hadn’t quite closed down the other team, and part of me would think, Maybe he isn’t so good, after all. Maybe he’s just a nice guy who did pretty well, considering. Not quite a great pitcher, maybe not exactly a big-leaguer…This is bitterly unfair, but what are we to do about it? We want our favorites to be great out there, and when that stops we feel betrayed a little. They have not only failed but failed us. Maybe this is the real dividing line between pros and bystanders, between the players and the fans. All the players know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong for them in their line of work—they’ll stop hitting, or, if they’re pitchers, suddenly find that for some reason they can no longer fling the ball through that invisible sliver of air where it will do its best work for them—and they will have to live with that diminishment, that failure, for a time or even for good. It’s part of the game. They are prepared to lose out there in plain sight, while the rest of us do it in private and then pretend it hasn’t happened.

  *Quisenberry’s subsequent work in the 1985 season and his adventures in the championship playoffs and the World Series are described in the next chapter.

  To Missouri

  — Fall 1985

  BASEBALL HAS HAD THE shutters up for more than a month now, but its devotees still hang around outside the old saloon in the evenings, out of habit, recalling the lights and the talk and the smoky laughter, and hoping to hold in memory the way so many of us—old regulars and excited newcomers, families and friends and kids—were swept up in what came to feel like a summer-long party. It went on too long, of course, and some parts of it weren’t much fun at all, come to think of it, but never mind—it was a fine baseball summer, and I miss it. Good parties come back to us in a blur of names and shouts and too close faces and overlapped talk, and it would be wrong somehow to try to get every part of that in order later on, even if it could be done. This was the summer when Pedro Guerrero hit all those homers (fifteen of them) in the month of June, and Gary Carter hit all those homers (five in two days and eight in a week) in September; it was the summer when nobody caught up with the Blue Jays, and the autumn when the Royals caught up with everybody; it was the beginning of Vince Coleman and Bret Saberhagen, but also the time of Ron Guidry and Dave Parker, once again, and of Wade Boggs and George Brett and Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly and Willie McGee some more. It was the time of John Tudor vs. Dwight Gooden—two rows of zeros up in lights. It was the year of Tom Herr yet again coming up to bat with Coleman or McGee already on base, and the pitcher out there running the count to 3–1 and then going to the rosin bag….Nineteen eighty-five was when three of the four pennant races were settled on the final Saturday of the season, and when the Giants lost one hundred games, for the first time ever—the last of the proud old flagships to suffer that indignity. It was the summer in which catchers Carlton Fisk and Buck Martinez each separately accounted for two outs on one play at the plate, and in which Tom Seaver, Rod Carew, Nolan Ryan, and Pete Rose made us aware of some larger numbers. It was the year of another players’ strike, which came on miserably and unstoppably, continued for two days, and then was settled and instantly forgotten. It was the year when the Cubs lost all their starting pitchers to injury, and when a creeping mechanical tarpaulin caught the fastest man in the National League and probably cost the Cardinals a World Championship. Baseball was in court in Pittsburgh, where cocaine was the topic, and in Chicago, where state and city edicts banning night baseball at Wrigley Field were at issue and were upheld, thereby almost assuring the eventual abandonment of that grand old garden by the restless, neo-Yuppie Cubs. There was no Subway Series in 1985, it turned out; instead, the year wound down to the enthralling, suddenly turned-about sixth game of an all-Missouri World Series, followed by a horrific 11–0 laughter the next day, which simultaneously enthroned the Kansas City Royals as World Champions and the St. Louis Cardinals as world-class soreheads. There was more, to be sure, but this is enough, unless anyone cares to remember that this was also the year when a singer named Mary O’Dowd stood up to deliver the Canadian and American national anthems before a sellout Yankees-Blue Jays game at Yankee Stadium and then utterly forgot both the words and the tune of “O Canada.” I’ll never get over that.

  Toward the end, this baseball summer took on a special savor, a tang of particularity, that brought it to the attention of even the most casual fans. “Quite a season, isn’t it?” friends of mine kept saying in August and September, and since most of them weren’t folks who had demonstrated any prior fealty to the pastime, it usually took me a minute or two to realize that they weren’t talking about the weather. I live in New York, where it suddenly was quite a baseball season along about back-to-school time, but I can’t assume that my own symptoms of attachment—clicking on the bedside radio in the dark at one in the morning to hunt out a late score from the Coast; lifting my gaze from a book or a magazine to see again in my mind Keith Hernandez sprinting in across the infield to short-hop a bunt (my God, on the third-base side of the pitcher!) and then firing to third for the force; opening the newspaper before breakfast to the critical “GB” column in the standings (and knowing beforehand what it would show)—also afflicted families in Winnetka and Del Mar, say, where Cubs fans and Padres fans of necessity went to sleep and woke up thinking about last year’s baseball. For all that, the game did seem to matter more this summer, perhaps because of Pete Rose, perhaps because of the strike that struck out, perhaps even because of the bad news: the drug trials in Pittsburgh, with their celebrity witnesses, pale-faced and in coats and ties for the day, telling us what we wished not to hear about some of their friends and teammates. Baseball had a record year at the gate in 1985, and the over-all attendance of 46,838,819 included best-ever seasons for both leagues and for the Orioles, the Cubs, the Twins, the Cardinals, the Padres, the Blue Jays, and the Mets, whose 2,751,437 was the highest attendance mark in New York baseball history.

  Th
e Mets and the Yankees didn’t get to the World Series after all, and neither did the Dodgers (in the end) or the Phillies or the defending-champion Tigers or any of the other grand predictables—not even the vivid and appealing Blue Jays, whose demise in the seven-game American League playoffs was almost insupportably painful to their wildly hoping, secretly doubting supporters. After the playoffs, some friends of mine—and some baseball colleagues, too—confessed that they were finding it hard to summon up much enthusiasm for this year’s heartland finalists, yet I have the conviction that the Royals-Cardinals World Series excited and warmed great sectors of the game’s fan family by the time it was done. It wasn’t an epochal Series—the pitchers were too good (four hundred and fifty-two official at-bats produced four home runs), and the last game should have been called after the fifth inning—but the games were somehow life-sized and pleasing, which is a rare result in this era of ceaseless gargantuan spectacle, which we watch, for the most part, with a deepening inner silence.

  At 8:01 p.m. E.D.T. on Wednesday, September 11, in the first inning of a game with the San Diego Padres in Riverfront Stadium, Pete Rose stroked a soft single off the Padres’ righthander Eric Show. It was Hit No. 4,192 for Rose, at last putting him one ahead of Ty Cobb’s life total on the all-time hit parade, and by the time it struck the ground in short left-center field there were some of us in the land who had the impression that we had already witnessed and counted each of Pete’s 3,161 other singles, and even his 13,767 previous at-bats in the majors. I was delighted for many reasons, most of all for Rose himself, whose stroke and style and fervor and ebullient good cheer I have written about for more than two decades now, but I think I was almost more pleased by Pete’s next hit—a triple to left, in the seventh—which broke the new record (as will every hit of his from now on) and suggested that baseball as we know it would now be permitted to resume, and that games, not monuments, are its purpose and reward. The “Cobb Countdown” had been a daily feature of the sport pages for better than two years, appearing even on the many mornings when it was dutifully noted that Pete hadn’t played the previous evening, or that he’d gone oh-for-three in the game. The slowly oncoming Blessed Bingle had given rise to a whole cottage industry of Rosean artifacts, including 4,192 autographed Pete Rose ceramic plates ($25 to $125 apiece), 4,192 numbered Pete Rose color prints ($175 apiece), fifty silk-screened Pete Rose prints by Andy Warhol ($3,000 apiece), and much more, of course—possibly including a four-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety-two-percent rise in the national riboflavin intake, thanks to those Pete Rose Wheaties commercials. I did not attend the game, however, being of the impression that I would probably not spot anything there that was invisible to the three hundred and seventy-five reporters and cameramen who were on hand that evening. I’m sorry I missed Pete’s company and his jokes and one-liners (there were fifteen mass press conferences in the ten days prior to and including Der Tag), and even his tears when he broke the record. I also treasure some of the footnotes and substats that were turned up by the press moles digging back through Rose’s 3,475 prior box-scoring appearances—for instance, his twenty-nine hits against future dentists (Jim Lonborg is one of them); his hundred and thirty-one hits against Hall of Famers (Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Robin Roberts, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Don Drysdale, and Hoyt Wilhelm); his hundred and three hits against the Niekro brothers (“I wish they’d been triplets,” Pete said); and his six hits to date against Dwight Gooden, who wasn’t born until after Rose had already rapped out three hundred and nine major-league blows.