by Roger Angell
The question that remains, before we get back to the last few plays and innings of the year, is why or how it happened that so many extraordinary young pitchers came to the fore so suddenly in 1985—a season in which the ages of the two brand-new Cy Young Award winners, Dwight Gooden and Bret Saberhagen, together, fall four years short of Phil Niekro’s forty-six—a symbol, if I ever saw one. Better training methods, better nutrition, and a generally upward genetic curve come quickly to mind (think of all those young pre-Olympic swimmers breaking world records in every meet, or so it seems), and so does the much more intelligent and intensive present-day coaching of ballplayers at the school and college and minor-league levels. But why has there been no similar flowering of young hitters in the game? We will all be pondering this enigma over the next five years or so—a period in which I believe that pitching will more and more come to dominate the sport—but in the meantime I will relay the words I received from Seymour Siwoff, the Wizard of Elias, when I recently put this question to him.
“It’s television,” he said at once. “It’s gotta be the tube. All these kids have grown up watching baseball on television. They’ve watched all summer long, ever since they were boys, and they’ve learned how this game is played. That doesn’t help much if you’re a batter, because the truth is you’re either born with the ability to hit the ball or else you can’t do it. You can’t learn that—it’s not like a book or a theory. But pitching—well, anybody can see how that’s done. Move the ball around, change speeds, get ahead of the batter, throw strikes. There’s no mystery there, and if you’re a great young high-school athlete pretty soon you can just start doing it. The batters are in trouble right now, and it’s going to get worse. Just wait and see.”
The Cardinal fans were ready to celebrate a World Championship when they poured into Busch Stadium for the fifth game (“it’s iced!” said one fan’s placard), but some of the Cardinal players seemed less certain. Although the Redbirds were leading by three games to one, it had not quite escaped notice that the absence of Coleman and the parsimony of the Royals’ pitching had shut off the Cardinals’ free and easy way on the base paths. (By the end, the team had managed only two stolen bases.) “This is by far the best starting rotation we’ve seen all year,” Tom Herr said to me after Game Four. “They’ve taken us out of our game, and that’s the mark of a good club. We’re very tired. I’d sure like to win here tomorrow.”
Tomorrow’s Kansas City starter was Danny Jackson, who further validated Herr’s appraisal by going the full nine, in a 6–1 Kansas City win. Five Cardinal pitchers together struck out fifteen Royals batters—a Ry-Krisp sort of stat under these circumstances. The most discussed (or only discussed) play of the game was Sundberg’s dramatic slither past catcher Nieto in the second inning, when he touched the bag with his fingertips and was either: (a) safe, as umpire John Shulock called it, or (b) out, as the more distant, fifty-thousand-voice minority opinion had it. Watching closely from my privileged press perch in the right-field third deck, I abstained.
Game Six had it all: an excruciatingly cumulative tension as the two pitchers—Leibrandt for the Royals, Danny Cox for the Cardinals—had at each other over seven scoreless innings at Royals Stadium; dashing and sometimes exceptional infield play (Biancalana far to his right in the seventh; Biancalana far to his left on the very next play); and then the inevitable rip in the fabric, a knife-slit in its suddenness, when Pendleton singled in the Cardinal eighth, went to second on a walk, and scored on a little looped pinch single by Brian Harper. Leibrandt—again the hard-luck loser, it seemed, this time in a game he would remember always—was taken out, and we could see him slumped on the Kansas City bench, with his head twisted back in shock and disbelief. What followed, of course, turned the year around—the very close play at first base in the bottom of the ninth, when the Royals’ pinch-hitter Jorge Orta galloped out a nubbed bouncer and was called safe by umpire Don Denkinger as Clark flipped to pitcher Todd Worrell. I was in no doubt about that play, since I was watching the game, perforce, by television in eastern Maine, and many cameras and replays quickly showed us that Denkinger was wrong. It was not an outrageously bad call, as such matters are measured—it had been previously topped, or bottomed, by several decisions in the playoffs—and one could even tell how it happened. Umpires call these bang-bang affairs by sound as well as sight—they stare at the bag and listen for the sound of the ball hitting the mitt—and the cresting mass screech of the home crowd at Royals Stadium drowned out Denkinger’s chance to pick up the little tap of Worrell grabbing the toss. I can sympathize with the indignation of Cardinal fans and players who may still believe that at this precise instant they were jobbed out of a World Championship, even though I don’t agree. Baseball luck in an inescapable part of the game, and how a team responds to a sudden, unfair shock very often turns out to be what matters in the end. The Cardinals, wrongly placed in jeopardy, now lost the game when Clark allowed Balboni’s foul pop near the dugout to fall untouched behind him (Balboni then singled), and when—next, with one out—catcher Darrell Porter lost track of a Worrell pitch, for a passed ball: two runners moved up and then scored on Dane Iorg’s broken-bat pinch-hit single to right, which won the great game.
The last night’s doings—the disastrous 11–0 humiliation of the National League champions—should be passed over quickly. I grieved for John Tudor, who could not throw his off-speed pitch over the plate on this particular day, and quickly let us see how cruelly unprotected a fine-tune control pitcher becomes when so handicapped. He left in the middle of the third, after walking two successive batters, to force in a run—his earliest departure from a game all year. Saberhagen, for his part, was in top form—scudding down-wind, so to speak, and sticking to business out there in spite of the wonderful accumulation of good news and good fortune that came flooding his way at this early moment in his life: a new baby son, born the day before; his MVP selection in the Series; a Cy Young Award just ahead; and his overnight arrival as a wonderfully pleasing and talented new sports hero. He would have won the game, I sensed, if the final score had been 1–0. The Cardinals, by contrast, looked petulant and self-pitying in defeat. Whitey Herzog got himself ejected from the proceedings (not the worst of fates on this particular night) while defending the childish and uncontrollable Andujar, who shortly thereafter got the heave-ho himself for rushing and bumping the umpire in his insistence that two successive wide pitches had to be strikes, because he wanted it that way. The other Cardinals were silent in their suffering, but I think it must be said that this was a popular defeat. From the beginning of this World Series, several Cardinal players had made it plain that they thought of their team as being by far the better club-one that would quickly demonstrate that it had been unfairly slighted by the East Coast and West Coast media—and that it belonged somewhere up there in the panoply of great ball teams. What the “Show Me” World Series may have shown them in the end is that easy assumptions are probably a serious mistake in this pastime. They may have a longish time to think about their miscalculation, as the ABC game announcer Tim McCarver pointed out in the latter stretches of that seventh game. He had been a catcher on the 1968 Cardinals—a better Cardinals team than this one, in my estimation—who had led their American League opponents, the Tigers, by a three-games-to-one margin in that Series but then somehow let the thing slip away. “I haven’t been able to forget that for one day since it happened,” he said, “and that was seventeen years ago.”
Let us end on a happier note. Earlier in the week, I ran into Frank Cashen at one of the postgame press parties in St. Louis. Cashen, the general manager of the Mets, is a bluff, pleasant gent, with a pinkish Fenian phiz and an invariable bow tie. He was looking more cheerful than he had at our last encounter, which had been in the Mets’ clubhouse following the team’s elimination, and after we chatted a bit about the game we had just seen he said, “Listen, I was sitting at an owners’ meeting this afternoon—they go on forever, sometimes—and I suddenly beg
an thinking about all the great two-word phrases we have in this game. I’d never noticed before. I even started to write them down. I mean ‘Base hit,’ ‘Strike three,’ ‘Ball four,’ ‘Double play.’” He was counting on his fingers now. “‘Line drive,’ ‘Stolen base,’ ‘Home run.’”
“‘Rain delay,’” I put in. “‘Rain check,’ ‘Contract dispute,’ ‘Free agent.’”
“No, no—don’t do that,” Cashen said. “Keep listening: ‘Squeeze play,’ ‘Spring training,’ ‘Batter up,’ ‘Dwight Gooden!’”
*Subsequent archaeology shows that Cobb surpassed Wagner’s lifetime hits record on September 20,1923, in the course of a four-for-four afternoon against the Red Sox at Fenway Park.
The Cheers for Keith
— Spring 1986
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I made a leisurely swing south and then west to watch the major-league ballplayers going through their familiar rituals in preparation for the long 1986 season, which is now under full steam and will occupy much of our sports attention through the summer months and on into the extravaganza of the league playoffs and the World Series. Spring training is almost my favorite part of the baseball year, and the sunlit days I passed in Florida and Arizona this time around were exceptionally wanning and hopeful, because of the presence on every side of a remarkable group of rising young pitchers and batters—just about the best rookie crop I can recall—whose various fortunes I will happily follow now in the box scores and daily doings of their teams. But even as I began to put these fresh names to memory—Jose Canseco, Bob Tewksbury, Pete Incaviglia, Wally Joyner, Will Clark, Bobby Witt, Dan Plesac, and the rest—and scribbled notes to myself about their unfamiliar mannerisms on the mound and in the batter’s box, it occurred to me that there was a special reason for my optimism over the arrival of another freshman class of shining youngsters and for my pleasure in the evergreen renewals of still another baseball season: I hoped they would let me at last put aside my anger and confusion about the drug scandals that so altered the game last year. Sometime during this past winter, I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to think about cocaine in baseball anymore. Most of my friends felt the same way, and so did a lot of the players I talked to about the matter during spring training. “Let’s get it over with,” one of them said. “Let’s get on with the game.” And the fans, I think, were more upset about drugs than anyone else. Like them, I was sick to death of the whole matter, and badly wished that those afflicted and now notorious stars and journeyman players had stayed away from the stuff in the first place, thus sparing me many anxieties and second thoughts about the nature of our sports infatuation in this country—about the realities of celebrity and big money and repeated, on-demand extraordinary athletic performance—and about the inflexibility of our old wish to keep the world of sports (no matter how artificial and commercial and exploitative it has plainly become) as a place of moral certitude and preserved values. I was also bored and wearied by the statements of position coming from the baseball commissioner and the players’ union, and from lawyers and agents and sports columnists and editorial writers and drug therapists, and by speculations about the proper forms of drug detection and punishment and medical support that the game should now accept and endorse.
As a baseball writer, however, I dutifully did my work and tried to pay attention. I began to keep a file of drug stories, with annotations and reminders, and I interviewed a good many players and front-office people about drugs. But at the same time another part of me—the fan side—still felt aggrieved and bitter about the whole thing. None of this had anything much to do with baseball—the delectable and marvelously difficult old game that has brought me almost undiminished pleasure since I first began to take notice of it, more than fifty years ago. Like many other fans, of course, I could recall a previous clash of ideas and feelings—between baseball as I wanted it to be and baseball as it now inescapably and unhappily seemed to be in reality—during the seven-week baseball strike that brought the game to a halt during the summer of 1981. The same malaise had also afflicted me, in a creeping, fungoid fashion, during the gross inflation of salaries that followed the arrival of free agency for players in 1976, and raised the average major-league stipend from about forty-five thousand dollars in 1975 to the present four hundred and thirty thousand dollars—a swing that has taken these young athletes from the economic and social level of barkeepers and small farmers and veterinarians, say, to that of rock performers and Wall Street lawyers and corporate CEOs. Now the presence of drugs in still another baseball crisis seemed almost too much. For the first time, I felt that I might be on the edge of turning away from baseball altogether, and consigning it in my mind to the inner forgettery, where I have tucked away so many other lost amenities and sweet, once-certain surroundings and institutions that most middle-class, middle-aged Americans have learned to do without. It was this horrid possibility—no more baseball for me, or else baseball seen with a distant, half-cynical, chilled attention—that shook me out of my self-pity, and forced me at last to try to sort out and set down some of the difficulties and angry conflicts that surround the matter, and even to venture some speculations about what has happened and why we feel so bad about it. Thinking about drugs and sports just now is probably not such a bad idea, in any case, because sooner or later the baseball owners and the Players Association (the major-leaguers’ union) will compromise their differences and agree on a new drug program for the major leagues—and at that moment, of course, we fans will start to forget about the whole business as quickly as possible.
News about drug abuse turned up elsewhere in the media over this past winter: first when it was learned that some of the players for the New England Patriots, of the National Football League, who surprisingly played their way into the Super Bowl in January (and were there unmercifully demolished by the Chicago Bears), had been known by their coach to be struggling with drug problems during the regular season (the story was far less sensational in its details and implications than was first suggested in the Boston press); and then when Michael Ray Richardson, a star guard with the New Jersey Nets, was incapacitated for a third time by his severe drug addiction and, under the rules of the National Basketball Association, was banned for life from play—a private tragedy that saddened and silenced everyone in the sport. Drugs are an inescapable presence in all sports, it seems, and I suspect that the whole mysterious, titillating, and scary subject is more on our minds than we care to admit. The widespread recent use of cocaine—research findings tell us that up to thirty percent of the eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds in our society have been at least one-time users of the drug—is a disturbing matter no one can be quite certain who among his friends or colleagues or relatives may now be trying the stuff, or is about to. Many of us already know a few young men or women whose lives and careers have been permanently damaged by cocaine; certainly anyone who has been involved with the sports world can easily bring to mind a particular athlete whose wonderfully promising career was cut down by drug addiction. (For me, this will always be Mike Norris, the angular and elegant right-handed pitcher—he had a killing, over-the-top screwball—with the A’s, who went twenty-two and nine with the young Oaklands in 1980, and deserved but did not win the American League’s Cy Young Award for his work that summer. I can still see the unique little flourish of his trailing leg as he finished his delivery, and his comical, hotdog mannerisms on the mound, and recall the charm and intelligence of his interviews. Injuries set him back after that season, but cocaine and alcohol finished the job, as he himself has admitted.) Cocaine addiction is a miserable illness, and there are peripheral risks to the innocent as well, who can conceivably fall victim to accidents at the hands of drug-affected vehicle drivers or pilots or surgeons. Work performance may be diminished in less critical places and professions, and the flow of enormous sums of money into the criminal substratum (where illicit dealers receive not only our cash but our tacit approval, since they are essential to the processes of the habit) inflicts
cynicism and other psychic bruises on our society. Nothing much about cocaine use is known for certain, however, and the highly publicized trials of two accused drug dealers in Pittsburgh last September—when seven players, all but one of them still active in the majors, testified that they and many other players (seventeen were named) had been in-season cocaine users in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties—provided a sudden focus for much free-floating concern. Previously, more than a dozen individual players—including established regulars like Tim Raines, Claudell Washington, Alan Wiggins, Steve Howe, and the aforementioned Mike Norris—had admitted to difficulties with the drug in recent years and had undergone therapy (and sometimes suspension by their clubs) while they attempted to deal with their problems. Four members of the Kansas City Royals—Willie Wilson, Vida Blue, Willie Aikens, and Jerry Martin—had even served jail terms for cocaine offenses. But the news from Pittsburgh was different, for it seemed to confirm some long-standing rumors about the prevalence of cocaine in the sport, and the September parade of stiff-faced testifying players (with some very familiar figures among them: Dale Berra, Dave Parker, Keith Hernandez), sent a seismic wave of dismay through the baseball world. A bare four days after the Pittsburgh debacle, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, whose understanding of the public-relations process is regarded with awe in the business world, came forward with a proposal, presented in dramatic fashion at simultaneous pre-game club-house meetings around the leagues, that all major-leaguers should forthwith sign individual pledges to agree to a system of compulsory urine-testing for drugs, so that the good name of baseball could be restored “for us, our children, and for the generations to come.” Mr. Ueberroth, who took office as commissioner in October of 1984, had come to baseball with a reputation as a swift, self-assured problem-solver. His achievements as president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee had been dazzling, ultimately winning him Time’s accolade as 1984’s Man of the Year. In that post, he had supervised a system of compulsory drug testing of Olympic competitors, although the screenings were not primarily for cocaine or marijuana but for performance-boosting amphetamines, steroids, and the like, and the athletes involved, of course, were amateurs. On taking over as baseball commissioner, he stated that the drug problem stood at the top of his agenda, and in the spring of 1985 he imposed a system of compulsory urine-testing for all minor-league players and for front-office workers throughout the sport (neither group has a union); he has since claimed that minor-league testing has been an unqualified success, although precise data about it have been hard to come by. Since Mr. Ueberroth did not present his sudden September testing plan to the Players Association, which had been a party to all such past discussions, he could not have been much surprised when the players balked, insisting that these matters should be resolved through their union. A charge of unfair labor practice in connection with this substantial issue has been filed by the Players Association, and a verdict is expected very soon. There were expressions of cynicism, and even bitterness, from many players about the Commissioner’s motives in going public with his testing proposal directly after the Pittsburgh trials, since the whole tangled issue of drug abuse and drug testing had been a matter of intense study by the owners and the union for several years. Discussions between the two sides had resulted in a Joint Drug Agreement, signed in May 1984, which provided an essentially voluntary system of diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation for drug abusers, with many provisos—up to but not including compulsory testing—designed to involve even recalcitrant players in extended therapy without immediate penalty and with accompanying guarantees of privacy. The program, to be sure, had not been much used and was generally seen to be a tentative beginning to sorting out an obdurately difficult combination of social and medical and corporate issues, but the owners, in any case, announced during the World Series last fall that they were unanimously withdrawing from the Joint Drug Agreement, and they have since made it plain that their strategy would be secure compulsory urine-testing from each player as part of his next contract. The Commissioner, I should add, has said that he regrets the owners’ impetuosity in throwing away the Joint Drug Agreement, but it is hard for me to believe that he was not consulted about the matter, or that his advice, if presented, would not have had more effect. Drug testing, we must conclude, had been suddenly perceived by the owners as a dramatic and politically useful simplification of an intractably complex private vice. (Mr. Ueberroth has also raised the spectre of cocaine-afflicted players’ being blackmailed by their underworld suppliers and presumably forced to throw games at the behest of crooked gamblers, but this scare seems to have expired from unlikelihood; fixing the 1919 World Series required the mob to bribe seven or eight doltish, vastly underpaid members of the Chicago White Sox, and even then the trick almost misfired.)