by Roger Angell
THE LESSER WONDERS OF baseball—the sacrifice fly, the three-six-three double play, the wrong-side hit-and-run bouncer through a vacated infield sector, the right-field-to-third-base peg that cuts down a lead runner, the extended turn at bat against an obdurate pitcher that ends with a crucial single squiggled through the middle—are most appreciated by the experienced fan, who may in time also come to understand that expertise is the best defense against partisanship. This game can break your heart. No other sport elucidates failure so plainly (no other sport comes close), or presents it in such painful and unexpected variety. My favorite team, the Mets, won a World Championship last fall, but the pleasure of that drained away much more quickly than I thought it would, and now, in company with their millions of other fans, I am stuck with the increased anxieties and diminished pleasures of a possible repeat performance. The 1986 league championships and World Series produced so many excruciations and twists of the knife that these, I suspect, are now remembered more vividly than anything else: the Mets’ and Astros’ day-into-night sixth game, which brought the Mets their pennant after sixteen innings of nearly insupportable tension and ennui; the fifth game of the American League playoff, when the California Angels, three outs away from their first World Series, surrendered four runs in the Boston ninth on a pair of home runs and a hit batsman, and eventually lost both game and championship; and, of course, Game Six of the World Series, in which the Mets, trailing in the tenth by two runs, came down to their last out of the year with nobody on base, and then—I still don’t believe it—beat the Red Sox on three singles, a wild pitch, and an ugly little error, and went on to take the last game as well. Hundreds of thousands of TV spectators must have fallen in love with baseball in the course of watching these soap operas, but during the winter I sometimes wondered how many of those newborn fans would stay with the game once they perceived its slower and less melodramatic midsummer flow, and whether (if they were Mets rooters) they were giving thought to the lingering, inexorably recalled off-season sufferings of the worthy (and, together, much more numerous) fans of the Astros and the Angels and the Red Sox, some of whom or all of whom may have to wait for many seasons—decades, perhaps—before they find better luck and a shot at redress. There are easy days and lesser rewards for every fan, of course, but losing, rather than winning, is what baseball is about, and why, in the end, it is a game for adults.
Spring training is meant to bring surcease to such dour notions. There are young faces and fresh arms, the northbound sun is delicious, and the games, which mean nothing, are apprehension-free. This year, as is my custom, I toured the March camps in Arizona and Florida and tasted these old pleasures, but restoration came slowly. Some old friends and familiar faces were missing. Tom Seaver was gone, after twenty major-league seasons; he required a knee operation last fall, to repair an injury that kept him from pitching for the Red Sox in the playoffs and the World Series, and no team had invited him to camp this year. Absent as well were the free agents who had been closed out of the sport, at least for the time being, by the owners’ apparently concerted plan to avoid competitive bidding for the services of any player who had chosen to take his chance in the marketplace this year rather than sign up again. By the time the season opened, a couple of dozen teams with an ostensible interest in winning a pennant had found no use at all for the likes of Tim Raines, Bob Boone, Ron Guidry, Rich Gedman, Bob Horner, Lonnie Smith, and Doyle Alexander. According to the rules governing such matters, these men would be free to rejoin their original clubs on May 1st, possibly chastened by the knowledge that they weren’t worth as much as they (and we) thought they were. Raines, by the way, has been a lifetime .305 hitter for the Montreal Expos, with four hundred and sixty-one stolen bases. A teammate and fellow free agent of his, Andre Dawson—who has batted .280 over eleven years, with two hundred and twenty-five home runs—was so disgusted with the freeze-out that he instructed his agent to accept any offer that the Chicago Cubs wished to make him, and signed on for five hundred thousand dollars (with some further incentives contingent upon his durability), which was five hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars less than his previous year’s stipend. Just recently, Bob Horner, of the Braves, went off to play for the Yakult Swallows, in Japan. Earlier, Lance Parrish, a fixture behind the plate for the Tigers over the past decade, signed with the Phillies, in the only unblemished deal of its kind this year. A batterymate of his, the Detroit ace Jack Morris, who has won more games in this decade than any other pitcher, gave up on free agency even before the bidding season began, in January, when he and his lawyer discovered that no other team was interested in his wares; he took the Tigers to salary arbitration instead, and won a salary raise to a million eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Both Raines and the Red Sox’ Gedman, by the further way, also agreed this spring to accept less money than they had been offered by their previous clubs, but when they did, the teams with whom they were negotiating inexplicably withdrew or altered their perhaps less than serious offers. I take no pleasure in these ironies, but the owners, I am convinced, don’t give a damn about what we fans feel; they wish us to believe that the free agents and the rest of the players are paid far too much and should be taught a lesson—a lesson in economics, I suppose. I sympathize with the owners’ wish to lower their payrolls and balance their books, but what they are doing looks to me like an unfunny coincidence, of Thoreau’s trout-in-the-milk variety. The matter is now in the hands of an arbitrator, who will rule on a grievance plea on this issue brought last year by the Players Association. Lawyers tell me that collusion is hard to prove and almost impossible to police, even if a finding of conspiracy is made, but what is all too plain is that this is the weather pattern that may bring baseball to another strike two years hence, when the present agreement concludes. I did find a scattering of rookies to admire, but not nearly as many as last spring, in the great vintage year of ’86, when I had my first, awed look at the Angels’ Wally Joyner, the Rangers’ Pete Incaviglia (an even better Texas youngster, Ruben Siena, didn’t join the club until midseason), the Giants’ Will Clark, and the Athletics’ (“the A’s” has undergone official unabbreviation) Jose Canseco. This year’s sprouts appear to have a little less ability and, for a change, a lot less size. Joey Cora, the Padres’ new second baseman, and Luis Polonia, a future Oakland outfielder, are both five feet eight inches tail, and Casey Candaele (it’s pronounced “Candell”), a young backup in-fielder for Montreal, goes five-nine; all three are switch hitters, and exude the glitter and elan of players who show us the best of themselves at every instant. I was at Winter Haven one afternoon when Candaele made some slick plays afield and went four for five against the Red Sox’ pitchers, with a home run and three runs batted in. (“Who was that little guy at second base?” Boston manager John McNamara asked the writers when the game was over.) Jose Canseco (six feet three inches) has gained twenty pounds since last spring, when he was listed at two hundred and ten—all muscle, by the look of him, and most of that in his arms, which now resemble pipeline sections. Last spring, I saw him waft several pitches into distant sectors of Arizona real estate (he went on to hit thirty-three home runs and bat in a hundred and seventeen runs, and was voted the American League’s rookie of the year), but this time around I arrived a day too late for a memorable pair of home runs he hit against the Cubs at their home park, in Mesa. Joe Rudi, now an Oakland coach, told me that the first of these blows, which sailed over his head in the visitors’ bullpen, in left field, was easily the longest homer he had ever seen; the next one, on about the same arc and flight plan, was a bit longer. Canseco didn’t oblige me with any homers this year, but he startled me in other ways. He kept hitting rocketlike singles through the infield, he bunted once for a base hit and a run batted in, and he struck out only twice in the twelve at-bats I saw. He may be a ballplayer as well as a legend.
Back in Florida, I spent much of my time with the Red Sox and the Mets, as might be expected, but I noticed that my baseball holiday was less fun as the season g
ot closer and the teams got better. The Bostons had resumed the sour, withdrawn misanthropy that had made up such a traditional part of their team psyche before last summer (Jim Rice and Don Baylor were not speaking, I was told), and anxiety over Roger Clemens’ absence (he was holding out—nothing to do with free agency—and agreed to a new two-year and perhaps two-million-dollar contract only a day or two after the new season began) seemed to haunt their doings on the field. The Mets were more cheerful and optimistic, as is their nature, but their vast attendant media corps added an air of frazzled, election-year foolishness to their comings and goings; one morning, I counted fourteen writers encircling Keith Hernandez as he talked about Darryl Strawberry’s brief, petulant walkout when he was fined for missing practice. All this, to be sure, was before the very bad news came about Dwight Gooden’s cocaine troubles, and his departure from baseball while he embarked upon a course of drug rehabilitation that may keep him off the field for months, and perhaps for a full season. The pain and sadness we feel about this are off to one side of baseball, I think—or should be—but there is a sense of loss that reminds us of the kind of wishful hero worship that every real fan has within him or her, even in middle age; we think we have outgrown it, but in truth we can hardly wait for the next shy and shining, extraordinarily talented young man to come along and make the game thrilling for us once again. Doc will return to baseball, I’m sure, and I hope he will be as good as or better than before, but it will be a little while, I think, before I will be able to love a ballplayer in quite that way again—to make him a man and myself a boy. To be fair about it, we should remind ourselves that the players have not agreed to these ancient but unwritten conditions of our affiliation, and may not understand them at all. Addiction in any form is a mystery.
Trying to learn the game, as I have suggested, protects us from its overattachments and repeated buffetings, and for me, as the years go by, this has become almost the best part of baseball. This spring and last spring, I passed many hours in the company of coaches and managers and players—older players, for the most part—as I tried to learn a bit more about pitching. I wasn’t so much concerned with strategy—where the ball is pitched, and with what intention, to different batters in different game situations (the heart of the game, in fact)—for that art is better pursued during the regular season, when each pitch matters. Rawer, I wanted to learn for certain how the different pitches are thrown and why; how the ball is held and what happens to it in flight and which styles in pitching and pitchers’ thinking are undergoing alteration. (In the course of these talks, I often found myself moving a ball this way and that in my right hand—I pitch and write righty—while some pitcher or coach tried to arrange my fingers around it in different ways, and I would suggest to readers who wish to accompany me closely over the ensuing paragraphs that they might do well to hunt around the house for an old baseball and keep it close by as a teaching aid.)
Early on, I found out about—or was confirmed in my guesses about—an amazing revolution in pitching style and theory that has been in progress for more than a dozen years now. Pete Rose put it well (Pete puts everything well) in Tampa a year ago. “The two biggest changes I’ve noticed in baseball in my twenty-three-year career are, first and obviously, the much bigger salaries and, second, the maturity of big-league pitchers today,” he said. “There’s a reason for this, which is that in every class and level of baseball today there is a pitching coach. It didn’t used to be that way when I was coming up. I don’t think the pitchers are faster than they used to be, but I think they’re better. By the time a pitcher is twenty or twenty-one years old now, he’s very comfortable throwing 2–0 changeups and 3–1 curveballs. We’ve gotten used to that, but it’s something real different. When I first came up, most of the relievers were freak-ball pitchers, who threw screwballs or knuckleballs or forkballs or palmballs. Now the hardest throwers—I’m only talking National League, because that’s where I’ve been—the hardest throwers are in the bullpen. Gooden is an exception. Most of the other burners—Gossage, Lee Smith, Jeff Reardon, Ted Power, Niedenfuer—are coming out of the pen.” Ted Power, it should be noted, was moved into the Reds’ starting rotation last summer—a move made by the Reds’ manager, Pete Rose. “I mean, the top relievers are smokers, and most of the starters are the other way,” he went on. “More and more, the starters in this league pitch backward—2–0 breaking balls and changeups, and 0–2 fast-balls. They don’t give in to you. It’s a good way to pitch, if you can do it, because you can win that way.”
Steve Garvey, the first-base perennial—he is thirty-eight years old and is now in his nineteenth season in the majors—agreed with Pete Rose right down the line, and said as well that the advent of the new split-finger fastball (which we will examine in more detail shortly) has brought a fresh dimension of difficulty for the batter. He thinks that the batter who tends to go with a pitch and rap it up the middle of the diamond—a hitter like his Padre teammate Tony Gwynn, for example—will have more success against the new pitch than someone who likes to pull the ball. Garvey told me that the swift arrival of very talented relievers in a game also adds to the batter’s burdens. “The second guy to pitch now is as good as a fifth starter,” he said, “and that’s pretty decent.” The man up at bat gets to see three and maybe four pitchers pitch in the same game, he noted, each with a different style and size and delivery point, and batting averages in both leagues are drooping as a result. Garvey feels that the old respectable, upper-level .280-to-.295 hitter is being forced down into mediocrity merely by much better pitchers and tougher pitches.
“Basically, we’re all fastball hitters,” Garvey said. “If we couldn’t hit the fastball, we wouldn’t be here. But if you have to look at breaking balls all the time you’re only as good as your ability to adjust. It’s a whole different game. When I came up, there was more of that pure challenge from the starting pitchers. Seaver threw hard, Jerry Koosman threw hard. Bob Gibson threw, I mean, hard. Fergie Jenkins threw hard and had that good slider away. Jerry Reuss and Steve Carlton threw hard when they were together on the Cardinals in the seventies. So did Candelaria, when he came along, and that same Pirates team had Terry Forster and Goose Gossage coming out of the bullpen. Hard throwers. The 2–0 breaking ball used to be a special trait of the American League, because they had smaller ballparks and it’s harder to hit the breaking ball out. But now, because of free agency, the National League has a lot of American League pitchers in it, and even with our bigger ballparks the whole pitching staff is saying, ‘Why don’t we do it that way, too, instead of being the hardball league?’ It’s tougher on hitters every day.”
Joe Rudi told me that when he first came up the slider was a relatively new pitch and he had to deal with the new masters of the genre, like Jim Lonborg. “Now it’s this split-finger fastball,” he said. “It seems like the pitchers are always getting ahead. The real change, to me, is that middle-innings relief specialist—the long man. You hear pitching coaches talking about your rookies, and they’ll say, ‘This guy is going to be a real good middle-innings pitcher.’ That’s something new. What it really means is you never get that fourth at-bat against a great pitcher. I used to have to face Jim Palmer in maybe three or four games a year, and the first two or three at-bats against him were tough, believe me. But the fourth time up I thought maybe I had a chance. Nowadays, that pitcher is out of the game by men and you’re looking at a sinker-bailer like Quisenberry or a Jay Howell throwing gas. That good last at-bat is gone.”
Doug DeCinces, the California third baseman, said he almost missed the old challenge of waiting for a guaranteed fastball (“sitting dead fastball,” in baseballese) on a 3–1 count, but not if the pitcher was Goose Gossage. He said, “You didn’t want that every day, but Goose sure liked it. It was ‘Here it is, what are you going to do about it?’ You knew that before you stepped in there. But I wouldn’t say that the hard throwers are all the same. I mean, they’re not dumb. I remember when I was younger I was with th
e Orioles, and Nolan Ryan threw a no-hitter against us at Anaheim Stadium one day. He struck out Bobby Grich on a 3–2 changeup for the last out of the game. He made Bobby look so bad it was pathetic. I mean, everybody in the park knew that with a 3–2 count it had to be a fastball coming. Only it wasn’t.”
There were echoes and variations on these themes everywhere. In Mesa, Herm Starrette, the Cubs’ pitching coach (he has held the same post with the Braves, the Giants, the Phillies, and the Brewers), said, “There’s no doubt in my mind that pitchers are better than they used to be. They know more things.” Starrette is kindly and gently pedagogic in manner; he wears outsized spectacles and reminds you a little of a smalltown insurance man. “I think a starting pitcher in the big leagues has to have three pitches he can get over the plate in any situation, and now the man who comes in and relieves him is just about as good,” he went on. “You don’t follow a starter with a reliever who has the same kind of delivery. It’s like dancing with somebody—if you shift to a partner with a different sense of rhythm, it takes a time around the floor to get used to it. It’s not easy for the batter to pick up the change—from left-hander to right-hander, or a new release point of the pitcher’s hand, or whatever—and by the time he does the game is about over. Then here comes Lee Smith, who’s throwing ninety-per or better, and now he’s got a slider to go with it, and that hard sinker, too. It’s unfair. I think pitchers are the smartest people on the field. They’ve got to know every batter and understand every situation in the game. If a guy wins twenty games, he’s real smart. If he doesn’t—well, he’s proved it: he’s not so smart.” He laughed.
Hotdog: Nothing is easy in baseball, of course, even for the pitchers. In Phoenix Stadium last spring, Bill Rigney and my teen-age son, John Henry, and I watched from behind home plate while Oakland’s Joaquin Andujar worked in a little B-game against the Indians one day. It was about ten-thirty in the morning—a time of day when a ballgame feels like a special treat, like a children’s birthday party—and the desert sunlight was putting a fresh-paint sheen on the empty rows of reserved-seat stands around us. Four or five scouts sat together on little metal chairs in a box-seat section down behind the screen, and now and then one of them would pick up a coffee container from between his feet and sip at it and put it down again. There were about thirty fans in the rest of the park, and the only unhappy folks in view may have been Andujar, out on the mound, and Rig, just to my right, who were equally unimpressed with the pitching just then. Andujar, a combustible 21–12 pitcher with the Cardinals the year before, had been acquired in a trade over the winter and was expected to add some zing to the lacklustre Oakland pitching corps. Rigney, a former manager of the Giants and the Twins and the Angels, is the chief baseball adviser to the Athletics, and now he exchanged a couple of sharp glances with me as Andujar kicked unhappily at the rubber and stared around at a couple of Cleveland base runners he had put aboard on a walk and then a single that was hit off an unimpressive 3–1 pitch. A white-haired, mahogany-tan gent with a cigar came along the aisle and sat down behind us and put his arms up on the back of our row of seats. “You see it, don’t you, Rig?” he said instantly in a deep, mahogany-colored voice. “The whole key to Joaquin is that front knee. If he don’t pick it up in his motion and bring it right up ’longside the back leg, it opens him up too soon. There—he just did it again. He throws three-quarters that way, and when he’s three-quarters the goddam ball gets up, and his slider just goes shh-shh-shh. When he gets tired, he does that all the time, and his sidearm is horseshit. He’s got to tuck in that front knee—just that much more gives him time to get up on top of the ball…. Like that—he did it that time.”