The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  I stayed home the next night, enjoying the quieter vistas of Sony Stadium, and watched the Jays put away Phil Niekro by 3–2 and resume their two-and-a-half-game margin. The score suggests a brisk, well-kempt pitchers’ duel, but my scorecard, which notes a bare two errors for the evening, is in fact a picture of Dorian Gray, repulsive to behold or think about. Early on, after I had observed the Toronto left fielder, George Bell, mis-play a drive by Bobby Meacham, on which the Yankee shortstop impulsively scurried over to third base, only to find it occupied—oops!—by a teammate, Willie Randolph, and then returned without hindrance to second base, since no Blue Jay had bethought himself to cover the bag, I realized that some new form of game notation might be needed to capture the special flavor of this one, and so sketched two inky Maltese crosses in the margin of my notebook. Another cross was quickly needed when Ken Griffey, in left for the Yanks, played Al Oliver’s single into a two-run triple; and two more crosses appeared in no time when the Blue Jay middle infielders messed up two successive clear chances at a double play. And so it went—two crosses for Tony Fernandez when he twice failed to make contact on a sacrifice-bunt attempt, a fat one for Rickey Henderson when he allowed himself to be picked off first base in the seventh, a two-cross effort by Henderson and Griffey on a looped, catchable fly that bounced between them for a double, a black mark for second-base ump Mark Johnson, who blew the call on Barfield’s plainly safe steal of second, etc., etc. When the long night was done, I counted fifteen black marks in my notebook, which had taken on the appearance of a First World War aerodrome under attack by Fokkers.

  The Blue Jays beat the Yankees the next day, Saturday, and again on Sunday—winning, without strain or undue effort, by 7–4 and 8–5—and left town with their first-place cushion up to four and a half. Although the Yankees did not fall apart on the field, they certainly did in other quarters. During the Saturday game, George Steinbrenner visited the press rows and there delivered himself of critical comments about the abilities of some of his well-paid stars—predictable deportment for him, with predictable results. “The guys are going to get upset,” Dave Winfield said when the owner’s remarks reached him. “It’s like rattling a stick across the bars of a cage with some animals in it.” The Yankees left town in disrepair, and the three Toronto losses became part of an eventual eight-game losing streak. Manager Billy Martin seemed to take sulky pleasure in punishing his players in his own ways: permitting his ace pitcher, Ron Guidry, to stay in a game in which he was pummelled for five home runs; allowing the fine young reliever Brian Fisher to absorb a six-run pounding by the Indians; and even ordering one of his players, Mike Pagliarulo, to turn around and bat right-handed, for the first time in his professional career. (He struck out.) The trip ended with Martin’s bar fight in Baltimore—and eventually, one may conclude, with his postseason firing, his fourth and possibly last fall from the post. None of this requires comment here, since it speaks for itself and is part of a long and miserable pattern of events for the once-proud Yankees.

  If there is an impatient or aggrieved sound to these remarks, it is not directed at the Yankee players, whom I mostly admire and wish well. I would like to root wholeheartedly for the Yankees one of these days, but somebody is always jumping up and spoiling the view—the owner, the manager, some of the fans. The resonance of the game up at the Stadium has gone sour, and often comes across as being ill-tempered, distracted, patronizing, and frantically concerned with winning. That tone is perfectly represented by the Stadium organ music—if that is the right word for the puerile and infuriating assault of noises, nudges, and schlocky musical references with which the management (it must be a management decision, after all) attempts to cajole the players, bait the visitors, and whip up the helpless captive masses in the stands. The mighty electronic wurstmaker is scarcely silent for the duration of a foul tip, it seems, and its mindless and almost ceaseless commentary abrades the fabric of the game and the soul of the watching fan. This year, forcing myself actually to listen to the thing for once, I tried to pick out the main phrasings and modulations of a mid-inning concerto jurioso:

  Organ: “Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da-da-da! Buh da-da! Buh da-da! BUH da-da-da-da-da-da!” (theme from “Gaite Parisienne,” here repeated in mad up-tempo.) Pause. “Tah-tah-tah TAHHH!” (Beethoven’s Fifth, opening theme.) Pause. “Beedle-di-deet, dah-dah-dah-deet! Beedle-di-tweet, dah-dah-dah-tweet!” (Theme from “Dardanella,” for seven seconds.) Pause. “Tah-tah-tah-tah-ta-TAHHHHHH!” (The “Charge!” bugle call, accompanied by a gigantic illuminated “CHARGE!” command out on the scoreboard.) Then, ominously, as Rickey Henderson comes up to bat: “Buh-buh bum-bum, buh-buh bum-bum, BUH-BUH BUM-BUM, BUH-BUH BUM-BUM!” (Shark music from “Jaws.”) Pause for the pitch. Single to center field. Organ, joyfully: “Tee-tah tattle-tah tattle-TAH!” (“Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue,” quickly segueing into the “Colonel Bogey March.”) Pause. David Winfield steps in, to a low-register “Grrummmm buddledy-dummmml” (Crypt theme: Bach? Mussorgsky?) There is a base hit, sending Rickey to third base and bringing us the theme from “Over There” (“The Yanks are coming.” Get it?) fortissimo, and then, very quickly, an irritating repeated upbeat “Blim-blim blah! Blim-blim blah! Teedle-weedle-dee dah-blim-blim-blah!” which drives me bananas for the minute or two before I can recall it as an asinine and once nearly inescapable commercial jingle for Campbell’s soup: “Mhmm-hmm good! Mhmm-hmm good! That’s what Campbell’s soup is—mhmm-hmm good!” Well, enough of this, I think, except that it should perhaps be added that whenever Mike Pagliarulo came up to bat at the Stadium he was greeted with “Funiculi-Funicula”—except for the times when he heard “Oh! Ma-Ma” (“It’s the butcher boy for me,” etc.). He batted .239 for the year.

  The Mets relinquished their mini-lead in the National League East when they lost two weekend games in Montreal immediately after the great baseball party at Shea, and they never got back to first place. But let’s say this the other way around: The Cardinals nailed down their half-pennant this year with two seven-game winning streaks in mid-September. At home in Busch Stadium one night, they beat the Expos, 5–3, after being behind by 3–2 in the seventh; successive triples by Cesar Cedeno and Terry Pendleton produced the go-ahead run. The next day, they trailed the Expos by 6–1 but won the game by 7–6, with a two-run homer by Jack Clark. The next afternoon, they were losing to the Expos by 5–4, with two out in the ninth, when Tom Herr hit a two-run homer. It was Pendleton’s turn again in the next game—a two-run triple in the eighth pulled out a 5–4 win over the Pirates. This is top-grade championship stuff, of course, and reminds us that the Cards were not just the little speed-and-pitching windup toy that we had somehow come to believe. The Mets, for their part, could not seem to put together more than two winning efforts in a row, and lost on three occasions to the abysmal, gallant Pirates. Mildly afflicted, I fell into pathetic fan postures: finding an office radio on which to follow a Mets-Cubs game out at Wrigley Field, and sending couriers down the halls with inning-by-inning bulletins (“Gary just hit a grand slam!”…“There’s trouble in the seventh”…“I think we blew it”); overvaluing good news (Sid Fernandez’ two-hit, 7–1 win over the Phillies); betraying my own “Bench Strawberry! The man may not hit again in our lifetime!”); secretly relishing hard luck in the enemy camp (Jack Clark was out of the Cardinal lineup with a pulled muscle). On the last weekend of the month, I passed two afternoons on a splintery lakeside dock, upcountry from Manhattan, where I simultaneously took in the lovely slanting sunshine, an occasional beer, and the news, via WHN, from Three Rivers Stadium. There the Mets, closing ground at last, were achieving some heroics of their own: on Saturday, Jesse Orosco came in with the bases loaded and fanned the last two Pirates of the day; on Sunday, Howard Johnson delivered the tying homer in the ninth, and Carter won it with a two-run homer in the tenth. We hugged and danced and did high-fives on our dock, startling the swans.

  Down by a bare three, the Mets moved along to St. Louis for their last, cruci
al series—the games we had been thinking about all summer. Misfortune kept me at home at the last moment, and I had to make do with televised glimpses of the Tuesday classic: Tudor once again, Tudor prim-faced and imperturbable, Tudor the perfectionist, but this time opposed by Ron Darling, who pitched the game of his professional life. They were both gone after ten scoreless frames, and then Strawberry won the thing with one stroke—a humongous, crowd-stilling bases-empty home run in the eleventh that bounced off the digital clock at the top of the right-center-field scoreboard. Da-wight (as Ralph Kiner pronounces his name on television) pitched the next game and won on an off day—it was his last effort of the year—in which he permitted Cardinal batters to reach base in every inning and tinkered like a Mercedes mechanic with his suddenly recalcitrant breaking ball. The Cards scored a run in the ninth, to close to within 5–2, and the last out of the game was a bases-loaded screamer by Tom Herr—bang into the glove of Wally Backman. I think we all knew that this was the Mets’ high-water mark. They had closed to within a game of the leaders, with four to play, and it was not a shock or really much of a surprise when they lost to the Cards the next night, 4–3, in spite of Hernandez’ five-hit outburst at the plate. The Mets had required a sweep of the series—a fantasy, a child’s dream—and there was even a dour satisfaction when that did not come to pass. It is the difficulty of sustained winning baseball, the rarity of sweeps and miracles, that keeps us interested, even when we lose. I did feel bad about missing the Tudor-Darling encounter. Friends back from St. Louis told me that it had been the kind of silent, seizing ballgame that is remembered for a lifetime, and now I have begun to hold on to it in invisibility, like that one boulder in a Japanese rock garden that one cannot see from any vantage point, even though one knows it is there.

  I had comfort in the knowledge that other fans were suffering, in other places. The Dodgers kept a cushy lead in their unferocious half of the National League and won without effort, so I exempt their fans (if that’s what they are) in this assessment, but rooters for the Kansas City Royals and the California Angels and the Toronto Blue Jays never drew an easy breath after midsummer. Through the late weeks, I kept receiving baseball letters and telephone calls from Alison Gordon, a friend of mine in Toronto, who used to cover the Blue Jays as a beat writer for the Toronto Star but now does features. Suddenly this summer, she became, for the first time, an absolute fan; it was like a marriage counsellor falling in love. She and her barrister husband had season tickets behind first at Exhibition Stadium this year, and from time to time she would send me news about the games and the players—Dave Stieb’s near no-hitter against the White Sox, George Bell’s beginning to look like the team leader and then not looking that way—and then, as the Jays hung on and October drew near, about the excesses of the local press (a quarter page per day in the Star given to poems and prayers by reader fans; a statement in Maclean’s by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood that the Blue Jays’ challenge to American baseball supremacy was “like Richard the Lion-Heart going out to war,” etc.), but mostly, I think, she wanted to lean on me a little because she knew that I was a long-term Red Sox and Mets rooter, which meant that I had been here before. “I can’t stand it anymore,” she said on the phone one morning. (It was October, and the Yankees had unexpectedly risen once again, while the Jays had just dropped three in a row to the Tigers.) “We’re going to blow this thing, I know it. I was sitting at breakfast this morning and all of a sudden I burst into tears—I couldn’t believe it.”

  I was wise and gentle and insufferable in response. Pain and trouble, I told her, were what it was all about. She was a true fan now—she belonged. The Jays would pull it out—and if they didn’t she would survive. At most, she would feel heartbroken if they lost—not angry and vengeful, like Yankee fans. (That helped: she despises the Yankees.) I pointed out that some true rooters—Cubs fans, Indians people, and the like—never get to pull for a winner in their lifetimes. And so forth. Alison recovered, along with her Jays, at least until they lost the seventh game of their league playoff to the Royals, but in retrospect I think I wasn’t being quite fair with her. For one thing, she was fresh to the strains of winning; the daily stabs and downers and sudden zinging highs of it all were nearly new to her, while I, an old addict, could barely recall how I had really felt back in 1967, say, when Yaz was marching the Red Sox to the finish line, or in ’69, when Tom Seaver and the Mets made all New York feel young again. What I also failed to tell her was something that I fully understood only at the very end of the season, after the Mets didn’t catch the Cardinals, and the Kansas City Royals did catch, in turn, the Angels, the Blue Jays, and, at the very end, the Cardinals themselves. Most of the time, I see now, the place to be is a close second. That way—for a challenging team, for its players and manager, for its fans—there is always the taut, delicious possibility that you will nail the other guys at the very end. If you don’t—well, it’s too bad, we weren’t quite the best after all, damn it, and if only, etc., etc. Long-term leaders like the Blue Jays (who stayed in first place from May 20th until the last hours of the A.L. playoffs) have no such release, and neither do their fans. If your team picks up a game on its pursuers, to go ahead by two, your response is: Great! Now we got ’em!…Only, I wish it were three. Why can’t it be three? Lose a game, and it’s: Here we go! I knew it all the time. I can’t stand it anymore. Your summer is like walking down a long, dark alley with the conviction that a jaguar is about to bite you in the seat of the pants.

  We Metsvolk regathered at Shea on the last Saturday of the season for a farewell afternoon of scoreboard-watching. The magic number was down to one, and there was a small yell when the Cubs, who were playing the Cardinals out in St. Louis, put a “1” on the board in the fourth, to tie up that game for the moment, but the news before us on the field was all too clear from the beginning. The visiting Expos were cuffing Ron Darling—a homer by Dawson, a homer by Hubie Brooks in the early going—and it was plain that there would be nothing much to shout about today. (I was wrong about that, it turned out.) On the board, there were other pennant-settling engagements to think about—the Yankees losing at Toronto (beaten there by Doyle Alexander, a Yankee castoff), the Angels beating Texas (but the Royals, who would play that night, won their game, it turned out, and got to open the champagne). Hopes leaked slowly away at Shea, but no one around us in the mezzanine looked desolate or upset. It was a blowy afternoon, and dozens, then hundreds of paper airplanes took to the air, to the accompaniment of cheers. The Mets had handed out orange-and-blue scarves to the ticket holders (it was Fan Appreciation Day), and suddenly—I don’t know what set it off—all forty or fifty thousand of us there began waving our scarves in the air, a festival of butterflies, and then we laughed and applauded and cheered for that. Through most of this, two women seated just behind me kept up a sociable running commentary about the day and the team and the season. They were side by side: comfortable-looking, Mets-blazoned ladies in their upper thirties—old friends, by the sound of them. Their husbands were over in the adjoining seats.

  “They tried, you know,” said one of the women, sounding not unlike a Little League mom. “They didn’t have it easy, with all those guys out.”

  “Yes, what was it with Strawberry—seven weeks, with the thumb?”

  “Yeah, and Gary’s knees, and then Mookie, you know. Imagine if we’d’ve had Strawberry all the time, it might be different. But that’s the way baseball is.”

  The Mets had been giving away prizes and promotional gifts through the afternoon, and when the loudspeaker now announced a trip to St. Pete for two and listed the seat numbers of the winners, one of my Euripidean chorus girls said, “Why don’t they give like a trip to the dugout?,” and they giggled together.

  On the board, the Cards went ahead by 5–1, and then 7–1, and somebody near me said, “Good. I hope they win by five hundred to one.” A few folks began to head home. One man looked back up the aisle just as he turned into the exit tunnel and spotted a
friend up behind me somewhere, and he tipped his head back and made a little throat-cutting gesture. He was smiling.

  At last, the red light went out next to the Cubs-Cards game on the scoreboard—the Cardinals had won their pennant—and then everyone in the ballpark came to his feet to applaud the Mets. Gary Carter was up at bat just them, and when he grounded out, we called him back—“GAR-EE!” “GAR-EE!” “GAR-EE!”—and he came out and waved his helmet and gave us his engaging grin. Strawberry stepped in, to more yells and cheers, and hit a homer over the right-center-field fence—the first home run of next year, so to speak—and then he got more yells and came out again and waved his hat. It went on a longish while—the Expos batted around in the ninth, and won the game by 8–3, it turned out—but we stayed to the end, almost all of us, and cheered some more for our team, and for ourselves. The lights on the scoreboard gleamed in the late-afternoon shadow, and the clock there said “4:52” at the end. I went down to the clubhouse to shake hands with a few friends and wish them a good winter. The Mets looked tired and almost relieved. There was a joke floating around (nobody could remember who in the clubhouse said it first): “If only Doc hadn’t lost those four games, we’d have had ’em then!”—but the players kept coming back to the cheers and the ovations on the field at the end there. They couldn’t get over the fans.

  Back in June, I received a stimulating letter from a ninety-two-year-old baseball tan named Joe Ryan, of Yountville, California, who wrote to tell me about a trip he made to New York in October 1913, to take in the opening game of the World Series between the Giants and the Philadelphia Athletics. He was twenty years old that fall and was working for an insurance company in Hartford, at a salary of fifteen dollars per week, but he and a colleague named Dave were Giants fanatics and impulsively determined to attend the classic. Mr. Ryan’s letter is wonderfully precise, conveying not only news of the sport (“It was a good game, but apprehension turned to despair when Home Run Baker put one of Marquard’s best into the right-field stands…”) but a careful accounting of every penny disbursed during the long-ago two-day outing. Viz: Railroad fares for two, round trip: $4.40. Room at Mills Hotel: 800 (two nights at 400 per night). Restaurants: $2.50 (Childs Restaurant breakfast, 250 per person; Childs Restaurant fried-oyster dinner, $1 per person). Hotdog lunches: 400. Transportation: 200 (nickel rides uptown and back via Ninth Ave. elevated). Tickets: $2. Lagniappe: 500 (tip to a wino who directed the out-of-towners to a gate at the park where same-day tickets were still available). Theatre tickets: $2 (balcony seats, at $1 each, to see Jane Cowl in “Within the Law”). This last was consolation for the Giants’ 6–4 loss to the A’s in the opener. “Just to look at Jane helped a lot,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “We thought she was the most beautiful creature who had been allowed to live.” The total budget came to $12.80, plus a possible 250 (Mr. Ryan isn’t sure about this) for three Blackstone cigars.