Here, the baseball press was ignoring or was oblivious to the obvious, something they had refined to a science over the years. Had the traditionalists of the sport not noticed that professional baseball, in terms of general interest and paid attendance, was lingering in a state of advanced constipation? Wasn’t the media overlooking the fact that big-league baseball, the American League version of it in particular, had been lapsing into near-obsolescence as an entertainment venture?
To illustrate the sorry state of the American League in 1973, the major-league owners took a vote on introducing inter-league play in future seasons. The vote, for the first time in baseball ownership history, was unanimous. All of the American League owners voted “yes” and all of the National League owners voted “no.” Commissioner Kuhn could have cast a vote of his own that would have broken the tie, but he refused to do it and the issue was dead.
The advent of television and its splendid marriage with professional football was largely held out as the root cause of baseball’s broadening relationship with the empty seat. Baseball, conversely, was and always will be the paradigm of radio sports. An announcer like, say, Red Barber, after developing a following, could make the audio version of a baseball game more captivating to many fans than the version that was being served at the ballpark itself.
Baseball and TV have never really gotten along all that well, at least since the network people quit letting Dizzy Dean guzzle his sponsor’s product, Falstaff beer, while on the air. According to the legend, and I presume this to be apocryphal, Old Diz was doing his usual Saturday schtick, swilling down the Falstaff and singing “The Wabash Cannon Ball” when the CBS cameras picked up a youthful couple seated in the outfield at Wrigley Field, ignoring the game and involved in what was known at the time as light to moderate petting. “I know what’s going on there,” Diz supposedly told his nationwide audience. “He’s kissing her on the strikes and she’s kissing him on the balls.”
I can only presume that Dizzy Dean never actually uttered those lovely words. I do know that in the latter stages of his tenure with CBS, Diz seemed to employ a toned-down approach to his descriptions of the games that to me smelled of network-sponsor-imposed restraint. Whatever. His telecasts were no longer as much fun, and neither, in turn, was baseball.
There’s another theory, and this one is entirely mine, as to why baseball drifted from the mainstream of sports-fan attention. I blame Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. Nobody can deny that with the advent of the Seventies, the American League had ceased to produce the box-office stars. The Mantles and the Berras were retiring and little of replacement value was coming along. Why? The leading teenage athletes were mostly turning to football and basketball. The baseball signing bonus was eschewed in favor of the college athletic scholarship and the draft deferment that came with it.
Plus, the kids were simply beginning to wise up. Why subject themselves to those eternal bus rides in the Alfalfa League when they could go to college for free and devote endless evenings to porking Chi Omegas in the backseat of a new GTO presented courtesy of the booster club. Ten years earlier, I can guarantee you that Joe Namath would have been pitching somewhere in the big leagues and not having to worry whether Coach Bear Bryant might want to smell his breath an hour before a bowl game.
True, the military draft was about over by 1973, but the American League’s agenda of new names with any ticket-window magnetism was practically zilch.
Another problem. The baseball owners were not individuals renowned for their cutting-edge approach to the mysteries of modern marketing. At the annual owners’ meeting, almost always held at Palm Springs so that the richest of the owners, Gene Autry, wouldn’t have to travel too far to get there, the owners were recognizable as the fellows prowling the hotel lobbies with Cream o’ Wheat on their chins and approaching strangers to ask them if they knew what day it was.
Bob Short and Charles O. Finley stood alone as American League owners who were equipped with a fundamental sense of direction of where the game was heading, and they knew the exact station where they intended to get off.
Milwaukee, for sure, stood out as a living example of a baseball venue that was not what it once was. Certainly, the American League Brewers, an expansion team that landed in the American Malt Capital only after it had flopped in Seattle, was a watered-down facsimile of the great Braves teams of Henry Aaron, Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews, Lou Burdette, et al … the Braves who left town and moved to Atlanta because ownership sniffed a quicker buck down there.
Crowds of about 10,000 were more commonplace now when the Brewers played in Milwaukee—an old Iroquois word that means “land of many Polish-Americans.” That 10,000 was about what was on hand when the Rangers opened a series on Friday night. Jim Merritt, still field-testing his newly lubricated lefthanded offerings, picked up still another win and Jeff Burroughs hit a homerun.
Afterward, the thought occurred to me that Burroughs might be the only player in the majors to use a game-winning homer as the topic of a forum for his pet polemic, which was the hostile prevailing winds at his home park back in Arlington. “That homerun? Just a long out back in Texas. Just another long fuckin’ out,” he was telling Lou Chapman of the Journal, who I think was approaching his second century of covering baseball in Milwaukee. (Chapman’s special claim to fame was when, so it is said, he hid in an equipment trunk in the clubhouse of the old Braves to eavesdrop on a team meeting.)
“That wind in Arlington has turned me into a singles hitter,” Burroughs said. “No reason to swing for the fences down in Texas because if you do, you’re going to suffer.” Bitch, bitch, bitch. The Texas press had heard it all before. Lou Chapman, though, was taking it all down.
To be fair, by the end of the season Burroughs would hit thirty homeruns, and no Ranger would hit as many for the next thirteen seasons.
The next game, on Saturday afternoon, brought 15,000 to the stands. Few, I suppose, would remember what happened, but this game was memorable because it gave David Clyde an accurate gauge as to exactly where his baseball future would eventually lead. In Clyde’s third-ever major-league start, the Milwaukee Brewers, rarely mistaken for a juggernaut at the plate with the lineup featuring Bob Coluccio and Sixto Lezcano, beat David Clyde and the Rangers, 17-2.
This was not a case of the wholesale collapse of a neonatal legend. The Brewers had already bounced Clyde around to the tune of seven runs in four and two-thirds innings when Whitey came out to fetch him from the mound. By the standards of the 1973 Rangers staff, that effort constituted a routine start. The remainder and uglier portions of the damage were heaped on the relief corps, or what Herzog often termed the “arson squad,” the relief tandem of Mike Paul and Lloyd Allen.
County Stadium, by the way, contained (and still does) one of the more startling ballpark features of the American League. Next to the scoreboard in centerfield, high over the stands, a structure resembling an alpine chalet sits occupied by the team mascot, Bernie Brewer. Whenever a Milwaukee player hits a homerun, Bernie Brewer, clad in a traditional Oktoberfest getup, zips down a slide into a giant beer mug and releases some white balloons that represent, yes, beer bubbles. I am not going to suggest that the Bernie Brewer routine could or should be written off as hokey. That’s for greater minds than mine to decide. What I do know is that with Lloyd Allen pitching for the Rangers, Bernie Brewer was working his butt off.
After the game, Herzog tossed out a peculiar reason for David Clyde’s rough outing. “David said the ball felt big in his hand,” Herzog said. “That’s often a sign that a pitcher doesn’t have his real good stuff.” The kid who had just ascended straight from his manger and into the big leagues offered what seemed a more reasonable explanation: “Maybe I’m not so tough to hit in daylight games,” he said.
That night, while pondering the topic of how things could go so wrong so quickly, I would encounter a fact that many Americans probably do not realize. People in Milwaukee do not consume beer in conspicuously vast
quantities. But they do drink one hell of a lot of brandy. So, on a Saturday night in the Pfister Hotel, I decided to help them drink it, choosing an inexpensive brand. The label read: “Isaac Newton Brandy … What Goes Down Must Come Up.” A portion of this particular Saturday evening was spent with young Joe Lovitto, soon to be handed a reservation on Whitey Herzog’s transport to Spokane. I recall with some haziness pointing out to Lovitto that “all these women in Milwaukee seem to have fat ankles.” Lovitto shot back, “Beats the hell out of Cleveland, then. I’d rather look at a fat ankle than a fat ass.” I know, I know … what a couple of rank sexist porkers. Real different from the players and sportswriters of today, of course. You bet.
Upon my Sunday afternoon arrival for a double-header at County Stadium, my head was a gelatinous blimp-sized container of tortured nerve endings. That much, I deserved. Richly so. What I did not deserve was Bat Day, an event at which 31,000 representatives of the pride of Wisconsin youth receive a free bat. Why would they stage a thing like that in a steel ballpark, where the pressbox is located immediately beneath the base of the upper deck?
The pounding of wooden bat against metal grandstand started even before the first pitch of the first game, producing the sort of concussive effect that used to happen when we’d drop a cherry bomb down the toilet at junior high school. The acoustics in the pressbox were like the interior of a submarine under attack from depth charges. Wham! Wham! Wham! Louder and louder yet. Why were these children doing this to me? What had I ever done to harm them? Finally, I almost approached a stadium cop guarding the pressbox door and asked if there was any way he could make them stop.
All I could do, finally, was to place my head next to my typewriter and pray for the swift arrival of the Angel of Death. When I finally opened my eyes again, the first game was over. According to the numbers on the scoreboard, the Brewers had beaten Jim Bibby, 7-3, and from the sound of things, Bernie Brewer had been subjected to another active outing.
Now, in the third inning of the second game, the Rangers were already hopelessly beaten and Whitey Herzog was on the field, screaming at plate umpire Bill Haller and flapping his wings like some crazed gander.
Afterward, when the kids with the bats had ceased their assault and were filing out to go home to Oshkosh and Sheboygan and wherever else, I entered the Rangers’ clubhouse to inquire as to the source of Whitey Herzog’s affliction. His response provided what turned out to be the post-game highlight of my entire tour covering this outlandish baseball franchise:
“It started yesterday, when they were beating up on us with seventeen runs. I knew something was up and figured the third base coach was stealing Suarez’s [the catcher’s] signs,” said Herzog, speaking rapidly and making wild, pointing gestures, like in an old film of Mussolini making a speech. “But today, in the first game, I figured it out. I got some binoculars and looked out there in centerfield where they keep that little asshole in the costume.
“And that’s when I saw the other guy and that’s when I was positive. He had binoculars, too, picking up our signs. Then … the other one … in the costume … he wears these white gloves and he’d clap his hands. Once for a curve and twice for a fastball. That’s how they were doing it. That has to be it. Either they were getting our pitches or this is the greatest hitting team of all time.”
Herzog added that after the opening game loss “I wanted to send Bibby up there to Bernie Brewer’s little house and kick his goddamn ass. But I didn’t.”
Herzog concluded with a statement that encompassed the spectrum of what had largely amounted to a season of abject frustration: “Can you imagine,” Whitey demanded, “that a team would have to cheat to beat us?”
Milwaukee manager and baseball fixture Del Crandall, when presented with Whitey’s contention, shook his head. He’d seen Whitey’s Rangers on display here, too, and could sympathize with Herzog, perhaps now enduring what health professionals at the time might have termed an emotional breakdown. Some guy in the Brewers’ clubhouse took me aside and said that Bernie, in real life, was the son of some team employee. “The kid … and please don’t print this … but his blender doesn’t go all the way to puree, if you know what I mean. Steal signs? Hell. It’s all he can do to release those goddamn balloons.”
The Rangers left town and the Bernie Brewer incident never escalated into anything beyond Herzog’s post-game blowup. I didn’t know who to feel sorrier for … Whitey or Bernie.
In Detroit, the next stop on the road trip, Herzog’s forces continued to swing and sway with the official Rangers Dance. One step forward, two steps back. They won the Monday night opener, even though Steve Stunning gave up three homers. Jim Merritt surrendered two more on Tuesday, both by Dick Sharon, as the Tigers evened the series. On Wednesday, four homers by the Tigers (two by Jim Northrup and one apiece by Dick McAuliffe and Duke Sims) helped capsize the Rangers, 14-2. The starting rotation that Herzog had endorsed back in Texas was falling apart … was a shambles, in fact. Sonny Siebert was now out with a bad shoulder. Texas pitching had been lit up for seventeen homers in its previous six games.
The trip to Detroit was not entirely wasted. Several of the players replenished their wardrobes at a downtown clothing establishment called Hot Sam’s, which specialized in apparel not frequently found on the floor of the British House of Lords. Hot Sam’s featured suits suited for the Seventies. Polyester fibers. Wide lapels. Wider cuts yet … sweeping … around-the-pants cuffs. Colors that would match a Jamaican sunset. Several of the Rangers wore their Hot Sam’s ensembles with pride for the remainder of the season. Some looked like pallbearers at Bugsy Siegel’s funeral.
An additional highlight of the Detroit visit occurred at the airport, where I actually shook hands with Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat. Linda had been spotted by some fans as she was standing near a metal detector and signing autographs. (Other airport sightings that summer included Roy Rogers, Ted Kennedy and Howard Cosell.)
And, according to Detroit Free Press baseball writer Jim Hawkins, I’d come within a day of being introduced to Detroit Shirley. This was the lady famous for having shared various intimacies with celebrities in every professional sport from archery to tractor pulls. I wanted to ghostwrite Shirley’s book. She had been on the disabled list for almost twelve weeks after an encounter with a hockey player (a Frenchman, naturally) got out of control and now America’s Sweetheart was back in commission. “You just missed her,” Hawkins said. “Shirley’s in Cincinnati now. She just called me in the pressbox and wanted to know which hotel the Cardinals might be staying in. She said she’d never fucked the Cardinals before.” Hawkins, a reporter with sources, always seemed to know how to get in contact with Detroit Shirley whenever there was a crisis.
Next stop, Boston.
In the novel Dr. No, Ian Fleming wrote that James Bond liked Texans better than other Americans. But in my travels I’ve learned that most Americans do not exactly share the sentiments of James Bond.
Maybe it’s because of the notion that Texans make too much noise when they get drunk. Or am I projecting? Or maybe it’s because they think that most Texans maintain a primitive outlook when it comes to so-called gay rights. I don’t agree with that. Most Texans exhibit admirable levels of tolerance and understanding. If that’s their pleasure, then as we say in Texas … by God, we’re proud for ’em.
Anyway, I’m convinced there is no place where Texans are disliked more than in Boston, and at least in those days it didn’t have anything to do with concerns just mentioned. After arriving in Boston from Detroit, I was sharing a delicate Chardonnay with Bill Sudakis, one of the Rangers’ utility players. Some guy at the table next to our booth asked where we were from, and when I said, “Dallas,” the guy smirked and responded, “Dallas? That’s where they shot the President, didn’t they?”
Sudakis nodded, stuck an index finger against his right temple and said, “Right there.”
In the restaurant of the downtown Sheraton Hotel the next morni
ng, a waitress confirmed some other matters that I suspected about this team I was following. “What’s with the Rangers?” she asked me. “Every team in the American League stays here and the Rangers come in for breakfast a whole lot later than the rest. Also, they drink more coffee, smoke more cigarettes and order the heaviest things on the menu.” Emerson might call it compensation.
Two tables over, David Clyde, sitting alone, was reading about himself in the Boston Globe. A banner headline said: “Kid Sensation To Face Sox Tonight At Fenway.” That was not the sports page but the regular front section. The story about John Dean’s testimony in the Watergate hearings was positioned farther down on the page. Clyde looked at the headline without expression and took a deep drag off his Salem. The events of the previous two weeks were finally, I figured, about to make a cerebral impact. “Probably wishes now that he’d never left Westchester High. Fenway Park? Hostile crowd? The Green Monster? Carl Yastrzemski? Orlando Cepeda at DH? They’re going to light him up like the Coconut Grove fire.”
In fact, the near sellout crowd at Fenway Park was not all that hostile. Everyone stood up and applauded when the Kid made the long and lonely march in from the bullpen in rightfield before he started pitching the bottom of the first inning.
They also stood and applauded—and cheered loudly—when Clyde finally left the game after seven innings. He’d given up one run when the Rangers’ infield misplayed a grounder and another when Tommy Harper lofted a soft homer into the net atop the Green Monster. Clyde would take the loss, because the Rangers could muster only a solitary run in the way of support. For the night: Seven innings, two runs, seven hits, no walks and eight strikeouts. Not too shabby.
Afterward Yastrzemski told me, “In my second at bat, the kid threw as well as any pitcher I have faced in my career. The ball seemed to come out of nowhere. He struck me out and I wasn’t surprised when he did.”
Seasons in Hell Page 9