This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  The weight of records and their breaking could be seen in Barry Bonds’s vapid swings and feeble pop-ups and dribblers during the six homerless games he endured before tying Aaron’s mark. By coincidence, the same frailty overtook Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees’ celebrity thumper and third baseman, who is leading all comers in home runs this year but fell into a career-worst, oh-for-twenty-two stretch at the plate while he attempted to deliver the round-tripper that would put him into the élite five-hundred lifetime home-run club, with every pitch to him now weirdly illuminated by the glisten and flare of thousands of digital cameras. The same strain, for that matter, lay within the preoccupied, baggy-eyed stares of Tom Glavine, the slim elder lefty of the Mets, as he went for his splendid three-hundredth lifetime victory. The reprieves almost overlapped—A-Rod’s first-inning homer against the Royals arriving on Saturday afternoon, and Glavine’s win the next night, against the Cubs—and two days later Barry set us free. He is not much liked—“churl” and “churlish” have had a wide revival in the media lexicon when he is under discussion—but his smile after the homer and the hoopla was benign. This was Opening Day.

  Talk, August, 2007

  NOTHING DOING

  With the Yankees’ pitching in a perpetual flummox and the distraction of a home All-Star Game looming into view in the last summer of baseball up at the Stadium, this is a good time to bring up a vivid, semi-obscure Yankee team record that almost rivals those fabled thirty-nine pennants and twenty-six World Championships. Telling it only takes a minute. On Sunday, August 2, 1931, the Yanks were shut out on the road by the Red Sox, 1–0, in a game played, mysteriously, at Braves Field, the home of Boston’s National League club in those days. The Yanks were not shut out again, away or at home, until August 3, 1933, a span of three hundred and eight games, or, as measured back then, exactly two seasons. Zeroes are baseball’s most insistent number, but no other major-league team has come anywhere close to this astounding skein. The parallel record in the National League, for instance, is the Cincinnati Reds’ two hundred and eight games not-shut-out, between April 3, 2000, and May 23, 2001. Last year’s Yankees were shut down eight times, while last year’s Twins were goose-egged fourteen times.

  The statistically minded might suppose that the endless connivings of chance played a role in the Yankees’ great run, but any eleven-year-old interested enough to punch up the 1931–33 Yanks on his bedroom iMac would know better the moment he saw that their starting lineup in those days included six regulars subsequently voted into the Hall of Fame: catcher Bill Dickey, first baseman Lou Gehrig, second baseman Tony Lazzeri, third baseman Joe Sewell, and outfielders Earle Combs and Babe Ruth (who was nearing the end of his career). There were also three future Hall of Fame pitchers on the Yankee roster—Herb Pennock, Red Ruffing, and Lefty Gomez—although, with one exception, the Yankee pitchers didn’t play much of a part in avoiding shutouts. The exception is Ruffing, who, on August 13, 1932, blanked the Washington Senators over a scoreless nine innings—scoreless for both teams—in their home park, Griffith Stadium.

  Allowed to bat again in the tenth (he was good enough at the plate to be called on regularly as a pinch-hitter), Ruffing hit a solo home run, and then closed out the Senators in the bottom half, to preserve the win and the string. Ruffing, the Yankees’ ace, had slitted eyes and high cheekbones, and held further interest for every New York boy fan of that time because he’d lost four toes on his left foot in a mining accident, back home in Illinois, at the age of fifteen. Now he had accounted for both scores in the same game. No other pitcher has matched this extra-innings deed in the ensuing seventy-six—well, almost—years.

  But how come the Yankees played at Braves Field on the day of their last previous zero? For the answer, we called up Seymour Siwoff, the founder and proprietor and chief enthusiast of the Elias Sports Bureau, the Fort Knox of sports statistics, and put the question.

  “Back in a minute,” he said, and 2.316 minutes later he was back. “Sunday blue laws!” he cried. “Oh, I love this place—we have everything! You couldn’t play ball on Sunday at Fenway because there was a church within a thousand feet of the park. Maybe more than one. So they’d go over and play at Braves Field instead. The Monday game, back at Fenway, was the beginning of the Yankee streak. Listen, do you know who ended it—who shut them out finally? Should I look that up?”

  “It was Lefty Grove,” we said, naming the Philadelphia Athletics grandee, the primo starter of his era.

  “Grove, of course!” said Siwoff. “I had an inkling. I almost knew.”

  Talk, July, 2008

  YAZ’S TRIPLE CROWN

  Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera’s new triple crown—he led the American League in batting, home runs, and runs batted in this year—has brought Carl Yastrzemski back in the news again, and about time. Yaz was the last player in either league to turn the grand trick, in 1967, when his deed helped propel the Red Sox into the World Series and won him an M.V.P. award as well. Cabrera’s M.V.P. will have to await the postseason balloting, but there shouldn’t be much news in it this time around: a feat outweighs an honor any day.

  Yastrzemski carried the Red Sox on his back through that month of September, collecting twenty-three hits in his last forty-four at-bats. On the final weekend, with the Twins, the White Sox, and the Tigers also still in contention for the pennant, he went seven for eight in the season’s last two games, at Fenway Park, against the visiting Twins, hit a game-winning home run, and threw out a base runner at second with a rally-killing peg from left field. I was elated by all this but not exactly surprised. Earlier that month, when Yaz came up to bat in a critical moment against the Tigers in Detroit, the Globe’s Clif Keane, then the reigning baron of the Boston media, addressed him from behind my seat in Tiger Stadium. “Go ahead!” he cried. “Prove that you’re the M.V.P.! Prove it to me! Hit a homer!” Yaz hit the homer.

  He played on for another sixteen years, retiring in 1983 with the third most at-bats and the seventh most hits in the history of the game. One of my poignant private regrets when he departed was the same one I felt when Nikita Khrushchev stepped down: I knew how to spell their names without looking. I also knew about an honor of his that never came to pass. A Sox-smitten friend of mine had determined to name his awaited new baby boy Yaz, and was only thwarted by his wife’s absolute veto. Pity. The kid, grown up now and a valued colleague and pal, could have shared his zingy byline with the likes of Jay-Z, Dizzy Dean, Itzhak Perlman, and Zooey Deschanel: Yaz McGrath.

  Post, October, 2012

  THREE AT A TIME

  The Yankees’ triple play last night, which came in the second inning against the home-team Tampa Bay Rays, received the customary tepid buildup in the ensuing media recountings. Customary because triple plays, despite their rarity, are over almost before they begin, and rarely involve a great play or a close call anywhere. Someone grabs a line drive, steps on a base, and gets off an everyday infield fling: one, two, three, the inning is over, the teams are changing sides, the TV goes to a commercial, and the mini-event is done in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Last night’s play came after a second-inning leadoff double against Yankee starter C. C. Sabathia by the Rays’ Evan Longoria, then a walk to the right fielder Wil Myers. The next batter, Sean Rodriguez, hit a bouncer to third baseman Yangervis Solarte, who backed up and touched third, flipped to second, where the pivoting Brian Roberts stepped on second and got off a poor throw to first, where Scott Sizemore uneasily swiped at and held on to the one-bounce relay. Bang-bang-bang. Not much news there, so let’s quickly add that Sabathia was also on the mound for the Yanks on the occasion of the previous Yankee triple play, at Baltimore, on April 12, 2013. And then, wow, let’s not forget that Sizemore was playing first base for the first time ever in his career.

  Triple plays are rare—they happen three or four times a year, on average—so it’s a good bet that you never saw one. What’s great about them isn’t really their scarcity but the fact that they beautifully illustr
ate the invisible force that hovers about each pitch and play and inning and game in this pausing, staccato, and inexorably accruing pastime: the laws of chance. Neither Sizemore nor Roberts nor Solarte had ever been involved in a triple play before, and there is an excellent chance that none of the three ever will be again. The only triple play I ever witnessed came at Yankee Stadium on May 29, 2000, when Oakland second baseman Randy Velarde grabbed a mild liner from Yankee outfielder Shane Spencer, took a step or two forward to tag out the oncoming runner from first, Jorge Posada, and, without hurrying or changing direction, stepped on second to easily triple-off Tino Martinez, who had been heading for third. Yay, wow—I mean Wow!—but Velarde, arriving at the visiting team’s dugout, appeared almost embarrassed: Geez, guys, it just happened. I stood up at my press-box seat to yell, but everyone else was still seated and at work. Unless it’s the lottery, you can’t scream over a number that’s fallen out of the sky.

  I wasn’t on hand on August 23, 2009, when Phillies second baseman Eric Bruntlett grabbed a low liner, tagged a nearby runner, and almost dazedly stepped on second for a game-ending unassisted triple play, becoming the first player to pull off this caper since 1927. The abruptly losing team against Bruntlett’s play was the Mets, which simultaneously and perfectly illustrated the opposite of unexpected.

  Post, April, 2014

  ZIM

  Don Zimmer, who died yesterday at eighty-three, was an original Met and an original sweetie pie. His sixty-six years in baseball were scripted by Disney and produced by Ken Burns. (Grainy black-and-white early footage, tinkly piano, as he marries for life at local home plate in bushy, front-porchy Elmira, New York; smiling baggy-pants young teammates raise bats to form arch.) As a stubby, earnest third baseman and utility infielder, he compiled a .235 batting average over twelve seasons for six teams, including the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, the Chicago Cubs, those 1962 ur-Mets, and the Washington Senators. In the off-seasons, he played ball in Puerto Rico and Cuba and Mexico. Turning coach, he was hired eleven times by eight different teams (there were three separate stints with the Yankees) and along the way managed the Padres, Red Sox, Rangers, and Cubs. Two championship rings as a player with the Dodgers, four as a coach with the Yanks. He finished up with the Rays, in his home-town Tampa: a coach, then a local presence.

  But never mind Disney: only baseball could have produced a C.V. like this, and it’s not likely to happen again. I think Zim is best remembered as the guy right next to manager Joe Torre on the right-hand side of the Yankees dugout in the good years: a motionless thick, short figure, heavily swathed in Yankee formals. The bulky dark warmup jacket and the initialled cap neatly and monastically framed his layered white moon-face, within which his tiny, half-hidden eyes remained alive and moving. He could also run and yell, of course. Boston fans—no, fans everywhere—will not forget the night he charged Pedro Martinez on the mound in that Fenway Park playoff fracas in 2003—and instantly wound up on his back, like a topped-over windup toy. Zim burned hard, and the hoots and yells and laughter that ran through the fiercely partisan Back Bay stands were familial and affectionate.

  Zim sitting is the way he comes back to mind, for me. Like a few other old coaches, he had converted clubhouse silence and immobility—elbows on knees, hands folded, head aimed forward and downward, lips zipped—into something like a regional religious practice. If he caught your gaze as you walked past the coaches’ little anteroom on your way to Joe Torre’s office after another late game—he was down to sweats and clogs by now—he might manage an infinitesimal nod of recognition. Yep…same old.

  Our affection for Zim is complicated, beginning as it does with our childlike joy in his bald cannonball head and stumpy bod and jack-o’-lantern grin, but encompassing as well, I think, a deep trust in and respect for his decades of exemplary competitive service, without stardom or contemporary distraction. He was a baseball figure from an earlier time: enchantingly familiar, tough and enduring, stuffed with plays and at-bats and statistics and anecdotes and wisdom accrued from tens of thousands of innings. Baseball stays on and on, unchanged, or so we used to think as kids, and Zimmer, sitting there, seemed to be telling us yes, you’re right, and see you tomorrow.

  Post, June, 2014

  CLASS REPORT

  When the news came, not late on Tuesday night, we did some hugs and high fives at my place, drank a little champagne, and dampened up at the sight of Jesse Jackson in tears amid the crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand or so in Chicago. In bed but not asleep, I thought back predictably to Selma and Birmingham, Oxford (Oxford, Mississippi), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and tried but failed to remember another name. In the morning, it still wouldn’t come—an old college classmate of mine. His name wasn’t far from mine in the alphabet, which meant that he sat close to me in a couple of classes. I could almost see him, and though I never knew him or exchanged a word with him, he had been in my mind all this time—and in the minds, I’m almost sure, of most of the 1,097 of us in the Harvard Class of 1942.

  I found him again in an old reunion report, and filled in the blank: Lucien Victor Alexis, Jr., of New Orleans. In our junior year, he’d been briefly in the news, when the Navy lacrosse coach refused to allow his team to take the field at Annapolis, because of Lucien’s presence as a player on the visiting Harvard team. Lucien was black—the only black player on the team, just as he was the only black member of our class. The Harvard lacrosse coach refused to withdraw him, but was overruled on the scene by the Harvard athletic director, William J. (Bill) Bingham. Alexis was sent back to Cambridge on a train; Harvard played and lost, 12–0. There was a subsequent campus protest at Harvard, a petition was signed (I can’t remember if I signed it), and soon afterward the Harvard Athletic Association announced that Harvard would never again withdraw a player for reasons of race. Harvard’s president, James B. Conant, had been away in Europe at the time of the lacrosse incident, but when he came back he apologized to the commanding admiral at Annapolis for the breach of cordial relations that Harvard had occasioned by bringing Lucien Alexis along.

  Alexis graduated and went into the service, as most of us did then. When he came back, he was accepted at Harvard Medical School but then told that he couldn’t attend after all, because there was no other black student in the entering class and thus no one he could room with. He went to Harvard Business School instead. He got his degree, went back to New Orleans, married and had children, and became the head of a small business college there. He died in 1975, at the age of fifty-three. He and I belong to what has sometimes been called “the Greatest Generation.” If most of us have felt uncomfortable about the honor, it may be because we’ve known that in some ways we haven’t been all that great. The election of Barack Obama as President could mean that all of us in the United States belong to the Greatest Generation now, and though this astounding event seems to have happened all of a sudden, for some people my age it wasn’t soon enough.

  Talk, November, 2008

  JACKIE ROBINSON AGAIN

  I’ll catch the new Jackie Robinson movie, “42,” over the weekend—it’s great, friends say—but I need no sports-clip reminders or careful re-creations to bring his front-footed swing or his shouldering, headlong style on the base paths clearly back into view. I will keep some of his games forever—in particular, that final meeting with the Phillies, in 1951, to force a playoff for the pennant, which he saved with an astounding dive and stop behind second base in the twelfth, and won with a home run in the fourteenth. But that was just baseball; my first thought about him to this day was never a play or a famous hit but an idle, almost inexplicable midsummer, mid-game moment at the Polo Grounds in June or July of 1948.

  I was sitting in a grandstand seat behind the third-base-side lower boxes, pretty close to the field, there as a Giants fan of long standing but not as yet a baseball writer. Never mind the score or the pitchers; this was a trifling midseason meeting—if any Giants-Dodgers game could be called trifling—wit
h stretches of empty seats in the oblong upper reaches of the stands. Robinson, a Dodger base runner, had reached third and was standing on the bag, not far from me, when he suddenly came apart. I don’t know what happened, what brought it on, but it must have been something ugly and far too familiar to him, another racial taunt—I didn’t hear it—that reached him from the stands and this time struck home.

  I didn’t quite hear Jackie, either, but his head was down and a stream of sound and profanity poured out of him. His head was down and his shoulders were barely holding in something more. The game stopped. The Dodgers’ third-base coach came over, and then the Giants’ third baseman—it must have been Sid Gordon—who talked to him quietly and consolingly. The third-base umpire walked in at last to join them, and put one hand on Robinson’s arm. The stands fell silent—what’s going on?—but the moment passed too quickly to require any kind of an explanation. The men parted, and Jackie took his lead off third while the Giants pitcher looked in for his sign. The game went on.

  I have no memory of who won, but that infinitesimal mid-inning tableau stayed with me, quickly resurfacing whenever I saw Jackie play again, in person or on TV, over the next eight seasons and then again on the day he died, in 1972. He was fifty-three years old but already white-haired and frail. We all knew his story by heart, of course, and took a great American pride in him, the very first black player in the majors: a carefully selected twenty-eight-year-old college graduate and Army veteran primed and prepped in 1947 by Dodger president Branch Rickey, who exacted a promise from him that he would never respond, never complain, never talk back, no matter what taunts or trash came at him from enemy players or out of the stands.