by Roger Angell
Game Six must be given here in extreme precis—not a bad idea, since its non-stop events and reversals and mistakes and stunners blur into unlikelihood even when examined on a score-card. I sometimes make postgame additions to my own score-card in red ink, circling key plays and instants to refresh my recollection, and adding comments on matters I may have overlooked or misjudged at the time. My card of Game Six looks like a third grader’s valentine, with scarlet exclamation points, arrows, stars, question marks, and “Wow!”s scrawled thickly across the double page. A double arrow connects Boggs, up on top, to Spike Owen, down below, in the Boston second—a dazzling little hit (by Wade)-and-run (by Spike) that set up Boston’s second score of the game. Two red circles are squeezed into Jim Rice’s box in the Boston seventh—one around the “E5” denoting Ray Knight’s wild peg that put Rice on first and sent Marty Barrett around to third, and the other around the “7–2” that ended the inning, two outs and one run later, when Mookie Wilson threw out Jim at the plate. A descendant arrow and low-flying exclamation points mark Clemens’ departure from the game after the seventh (the Red Sox were ahead ,by 3–2, but Roger, after a hundred and thirty-one pitches, had worked up a blister on his pitching hand), and an up-bound red dart and “MAZZ PH” pointing at the same part of the column denote Lee Mazzilli’s instant single against Schiraldi, while the black dot in the middle of the box is the Mazzilli run that tied the score. But nothing can make this sprawling, clamorous game become orderly, I see now, and, of course, no shorthand can convey the vast, encircling, supplicating sounds of that night, or the sense of encroaching danger on the field, or the anxiety that gnawed at the Mets hordes in the stands as their season ran down, it seemed certain, to the wrong ending.
The Red Sox scored twice in the top of the tenth inning, on a home run by Dave Henderson (“Hendu!” is my crimson comment) and a double and a single by the top of the order—Boggs and then Barrett—all struck against Rick Aguilera, the fourth Mets pitcher of the night. Call it the morning, for it was past midnight when the Sox took the field in the bottom half, leading by 5–3. Three outs were needed for Boston’s championship, and two of them were tucked away at once. Keith Hernandez, having flied out to center for the second out, left the dugout and walked into Davey Johnson’s office in the clubhouse to watch the end; he said later that this was the first instant when he felt that the Mets might not win. I had moved down to the main press box, ready for a dash to the clubhouses, and now I noticed that a few Mets fans had given up and were sadly coming along the main aisles down below me, headed for home. My companion just to my right in the press box, the News’ Red Foley, is a man of few words, but now he removed his cigar from his mouth and pointed at the departing fans below. “O ye of little faith,” he said.
It happened slowly but all at once, it seemed later. Gary Carter singled. Kevin Mitchell, who was batting for Aguilera, singled to center. Ray Knight fouled off two sinkers, putting the Red Sox one strike away. (Much later, somebody counted up and discovered that there were thirteen pitches in this inning that could have been turned into the last Mets out of all.) “Ah, New England,” I jotted in my notebook, just before Knight bopped a little single to right-center, scoring Carter and sending Mitchell to third—and my notebook note suddenly took on quite a different meaning. It was along about here, I suspect, that my friend Allan, who is a genius palindromist, may have taken his eyes away from his set (he was watching at home) for an instant to write down a message that had been forming within him: “Not so, Boston”—the awful truth, no matter how you look at it.
Schiraldi departed, and Bob Stanley came on to pitch. (This was the Steamer’s moment to save what had been an unhappy 6–6 and 4.37 season for him, in which his work as the Sox’ prime right-handed stopper had received increasingly unfavorable reviews from the Fenway bleacher critics; part of me was pulling for him here, but the game was out of my hands—and evidently out of his as well.) Mookie Wilson, batting left-handed, ran the count to two-and-two, fouled off two more pitches, and then jumped away, jackknifing in midair, to avoid a thigh-high wild pitch that brought Mitchell flying in from third, to tie it. Wilson fouled off two more pitches in this at-bat of a lifetime and then tapped a little bouncer down toward first, close to the baseline, that hopped once, hopped twice, and then slipped under Buckner’s glove and on into short right field (he turned and stared after it in disbelief), and Knight thundered in from around third base. He jumped on home plate with both feet—jumped so hard that he twisted his back, he said later—and then disappeared under an avalanche of Mets.
The post mortems were nearly unbearable. “This is the worst,” Bob Stanley said.
“I’m exhausted,” Ray Knight said. “My legs are trembling.”
“As close as we came…” whispered John McNamara. “As close as we came, I can only associate it with California.”
“It’s baseball,” said Dave Henderson. “It’s baseball, and we’ve got to live with it.”
Questions were asked—they always are after major accidents—and some of them must be asked again, for this game will be replayed, in retrospect, for years to come.
Q: Why didn’t Davey Johnson double-switch when he brought in Jesse Orosco to get the last out of the eighth inning? Without an accompanying substitute at some other slot in the order, Jesse was forced to depart for a pinch-hitter an instant later, in the Mets’ half, thus requiring Johnson to wheel in Aguilera, who was a much less certain quantity on the mound, and who quickly gave up the two runs that so nearly finished off the Mets. A: I still don’t know, for Davey is a master at the double switch—a textbook maneuver in National League tactics, since there is no designated hitter—and a bit later on he made a much more questionable switch, which removed Darryl Strawberry from the game. It came out all right in the end, but I think Davey just forgot.
Q: Why didn’t McNamara pinch-hit for the creaking Buckner in the tenth, when another run could have nailed down the Mets for sure? And, having decided against this, why didn’t he at least put the much more mobile Stapleton in to play first base in the bottom half—perhaps to gobble up Wilson’s grounder and make the flip to the pitcher? More specifically, why didn’t he pinch-hit Baylor, his designated hitter, who batted in the No. 3 slot throughout the regular season and in the playoffs but rode the bench (no D.H.) almost to the end during the games played at Shea? A: Johnny Mack has defended himself strongly against both of these second-guesses, citing Buckner’s excellent bat (a .267 year, with eighteen home runs and a hundred and two runs batted in) and Buckner’s glove (“He has good hands,” he said), in that order. His answer to the Baylor puzzle is to say that Baylor never pinch-hits when the Red Sox are ahead—sound strategy, one can see, until a game arrives when they might suddenly fall behind at the end. McNamara also claims that Stapleton normally substitutes for Buckner at first base only if there has been an earlier occasion to insert him as a pinch-runner for Buckner; this is mostly true (it wasn’t the case in Game Five), but the fact remains that Stapleton was playing first base in the final inning of all three games that the Sox did win. My strong guess is that McNamara is not beyond sentiment. He knew the torments that Buckner had gone through to stay in the lineup throughout the season, and the contributions he had made to bring, the club to this shining doorstep (he had mounted a seventeen-game hitting streak in mid-September, and at one stretch drove in twenty runs in a span of eight games) and he wanted him out there with the rest of the varsity when the Sox seemed certain to step over it at last.
We need not linger long on Game Seven, in which the Mets came back from a 3–0 second-inning deficit and won going away (as turf writers say), 8–5. It was another great game, I suppose, but even noble vintages can become a surfeit after enough bottles have been sampled. A one-day rainout allowed us to come down a little from the sixth game and its astounding ending, but then we came to the last day of all, and the sense of that—a whole season rushing to a decision now—seized us and wrung us with almost every pitch once
play resumed. Ron Darling, who had given up no earned runs in the Series so far, surrendered three in the second inning (Evans and Gedman whacked home runs on successive pitches) and was gone in the fourth. Hurst, for his part, permitted only a lone single in five full innings, but ran dry in the sixth, when the Mets evened the game. They had specialized in this sleeping-dragon style of play all through the championship season, and this last time around they showed us once again how dangerous they really were: nine hits and eight runs in their last three innings of the year. Somehow, the anguish of the Red Sox mattered more than the Mets’ caperings at the very end, because it was plain by now that it could have just as easily gone the other way. In the Boston clubhouse, Al Nipper, who was badly battered during his very brief appearance in the New York eighth, sat at his locker with his back turned and his head buried in his hands. Dennis Boyd, who had not been called on in the Sox’ extremity, rocked forward and back on his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television closeup of Wade Boggs sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face, and a couple of them who are not fans asked me how it was possible for grown men to weep about something as trivial as a game. I tried to tell them about the extraordinary heights of concentration and intensity that are required to play baseball at this level, even for a single trifling game in midseason, but I don’t think they believed me. Then I remembered a different moment on television—something I saw a couple of years ago on a trip abroad, when the captain of the Australian cricket team was interviewed over the BBC just after his eleven (I think) had lost a protracted test match to the West Indies. I listened to the young man’s sad recapitulations with predictable American amusement—until I suddenly noticed that there were tears in his eyes. He was crying over cricket! I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.
The acute moment in Game Seven was produced in the Mets’ sixth, when Keith Hernandez came up to bat against Hurst with the bases loaded and one out and the Red Sox still ahead by 3–0. Anyone who does know baseball understood that this was the arrangement—this particular batter and this precise set of circumstances—that the Mets wanted most and the Red Sox least at the end of their long adventures. It was the moment that only baseball—with its slow, serial, one-thing-and-then-another sittings and sortings—can produce from time to time, and its outcome is often critical even when reexamined weeks later. I think the Red Sox would have won this game if they had got Hernandez out. As it was, he took a strike from Hurst (a beautiful, dipping off-speed breaking ball) and then rocketed the next pitch (a fastball, a bit up) to deep left-center for a single and the Mets’ first two runs and the beginning of their championship comeback. I’m not sure that anyone remembered at the time, but we should remember now that Hernandez, then a member of the Cardinals, hit a crucial two-run single up the middle in the sixth inning of the seventh game of the 1982 World Series, to start that team on its way to a comeback 6–3 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers.
Many fans think of Gary Carter as the quintessential Mets player, while some may see Lenny Dykstra or Wally Backman or Dwight Gooden, or even Ray Knight (who won the Series MVP award), or perhaps Mookie Wilson in that role (Mets-haters despise them all, for their exuberance, their high-fives, their cap-waving encores, their vast publicity, their money, and their winning so often: winning is the worst mannerism of all), but for me the Mets are Keith Hernandez. His game-long, season-long intensity; his classic at-bats, during which the contest between batter and pitcher seems to be written out on some invisible blackboard, with the theorems and formulas being erased and rewritten as the count progresses; his style at the plate, with the bat held high (he is mostly bare-armed), and his pure, mannerism-free cuts at the ball; and, above all, his demeanor afield—I would rather watch these, I think, than the actions of any other player in the game today. Watching him at work around first base—he is sure to earn his ninth consecutive Gold Glove for his performance at the position—you begin to pick up the little moves and glances and touches that show what he is concerned about at that instant, what dangers and possibilities are on his mind. Holding a base runner close, with a right-handed pull hitter up at bat, he crouches with his left foot planted on the baseline and toeing to right—a sprinter’s start, no less—and he moves off so quickly with the pitch that he and the runner appear to be tied together, one mass zipping along the base path. When there’s a left-handed batter in the box under the same circumstances, Keith leaves his post just as quickly once the pitcher lets fly, but this time with a crablike backward scuttle, quicker than a skater. He makes the tough 3–6 peg down to second look easy and elegant, and he attacks bunts with such assurance that he sometimes scoops up the ball on the third-base side of the invisible pitcher-to-home line (I have seen only two or three other first basemen pull this off even once; Ferris Fain, of the late-nineteen-forties Athletics, was one of them) and then gets off his throw with the same motion. If you make yourself notice where Hernandez has stationed himself on the field, you will sometimes get a sudden sense of what is really going on down there. Wade Boggs, the best hitter in baseball, usually raps the ball up the middle or to left, even though he is a left-handed swinger, but his failure to pull even one pitch up the line to right in the course of the World Series allowed Hernandez to play him more and more into the hole as the Series went on, and contributed to Boggs’ problems at the plate in these games. Even one pulled foul would have altered his positioning, Keith said after the Series ended; he was amazed that Boggs hadn’t attacked him in this way. Hernandez is probably not an exceptionally gifted athlete, but his baseball intelligence is remarkable. Other Mets players say that he always seems to be two or three pitches ahead of the enemy pitcher and catcher, and that he almost seems to know the other team’s coaches’ signals without looking, because he understands where they are in their heads and what they hope to do next. He shares all this with his teammates (keep count in a game of the number of different players he says something to in the course of a few innings), and the younger players on the club, including Darryl Strawberry, will tell you that Keith’s counsel and patience and knowledge of the game and its ways have made them better ballplayers, and winners. All this comes at a price, which one may guess at when watching Hernandez chain-smoke and put away beers (there is a postgame ice bucket at his feet by his locker) in the clubhouse as he talks and comes down after the game. The talk is a season-long seminar that Mets writers attend, day after day, taking notes and exchanging glances as they write. The man is in the game.
Davey Johnson also has some baseball smarts, and in this last game he showed us, if we needed showing, how far ahead he had been all along. Sid Fernandez, the Mets’ dumpling left-handed strikeout pitcher—their fourth starter this year, and during some stretches their best—came into the game in the fourth inning, with the Mets down by 3–0, and stopped the Sox dead in their tracks: a base on balls and then seven outs in succession, with four strikeouts. “That did it,” Keith said afterward. “When Sid was in there, we began to feel that we might win this game after all. He was the necessary hero.” Johnson had passed over Fernandez as a starter in the Series (he is streaky and emotional), but he had brought him along, all right. Fernandez had pitched a shaky one-third of an inning in Game Two, surrendering three hits and a run late in a losing cause; in Game Five, which the Mets also lost, he had pitched four shutout innings, with five strikeouts. He was Series-tested by the end, and he became Johnson’s last and best move.
The Sox, for their part, mounted a courageous rally in their eighth inning, when three successive solid blows accounted for two runs and closed the score to 6–5 before Orosco came in and shot them down for good. By this time, the Mets hitters had done away with Schiraldi and were loose in the Boston bullpen—John McNamara’s worst dream come true. Strawberry’s homer
and the cascade of Mets runs at the end released the fans at last, and their celebrations during the final outs of the year—the packed thousands together chanting, roaring out the Freddie Mercury rock chorus “We will, we will…ROCK YOU!” while pointing together at the Boston bench—were terrific fun. There was a great city party there at Shea, and then all over town, which went on into the parade and the ticker tape (it’s computer paper now) the following afternoon, but when it was all over I think that most of us, perhaps all of us, realized that the victory celebration didn’t come up to the wonderful, endless sixteen innings of Game Six, back during the playoffs. As one friend of mine said later, “For me, that night was the whole thing. Whatever there was to win had been won.”
There was a surprise for me, there at the end. I am a Mets fan. I had no idea how this private Series would come out, but when the Mets almost lost the next-to-last game of the Series I suddenly realized that my pain and foreboding were even deeper than what I had felt when the Red Sox came to the very brink out in Anaheim. I suppose most of my old Red Sox friends will attack me for perfidy, and perhaps accuse me of front-running and other failures of character, but there is no help for it. I don’t think much has been lost, to tell the truth. I will root and suffer for the Sox and the Mets next summer and the summers after that, and if they ever come up against each other again in the World Series—well, who knows? Ask me again in a hundred and sixty-seven years.
The Arms Talks
— Spring 1987