This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  “Read it?” Craig said. “Hell, I wrote half of it.”

  Funny works for me, too. The almost unbeatable Catfish Hunter, gruesomely hammered in some game or other, smiled afterward and said, “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every afternoon.” Another time, after he’d lost the second game of the 1977 World Series, coughing up three early dingers to distant parts of Dodger Stadium, he said, “Well, I had some folks here from North Carolina who’d never seen a major league home run, and I thought I’d give them a couple.”

  But let’s go back for just a minute to Bob Gibson, and Game One of the 1968 World Series, when he’s just shut out the Detroit Tigers, 4–0, striking out seventeen batters, a new World Series record. The Tiger players have nothing to say. Asked to compare Gibson to other pitchers he’d faced, Dick McAuliffe said, “He doesn’t remind one of anybody. He’s all by himself.” In the clubhouse we writers gather around Gibson’s locker. We’re awed too. “Were you surprised by your performance today, Bob?” somebody offers at last. Gibson looks at him without smiling. “I’m never surprised by anything I do,” he says.

  A little later I ask, uh, have you always been this competitive? “Oh, I think so,” Gibby says in his grave way. “I’ve played about a hundred games of tick-tack-toe with my six-year-old daughter and she hasn’t beat me yet.” He meant this.

  Amazing men, extraordinary competitors, but there’s too much winning here. Baseball is mostly about losing. These all-time winners in the Hall of Fame are proud men—pride is what drives every player—but every one of them knows or knew the pain of loss, the days and weeks when you’re beat up and worn down, and another season is about to slip away. Nobody understood this better than Joe Torre, my friend and maybe my favorite baseball talker, who is part of this brilliant entering class that so honors the Hall on its 75th Anniversary. Joe Torre, the manager who never threw a player under the bus. “Oh, Paulie isn’t happy with his at-bats right now,” he’d say. Or: “Maybe David’s not as proud of his stuff as he’d like to be”—and we writers would shift our impatient and insatiable minds a little and think about the player instead of the story. Joe Torre batted .376 as a Cardinals catcher in 1971, winning a batting title, but as a manager, he always brought up the following season with his players, when his average went down ninety points. Then he’d mention July 21, 1975, the day he became the first National League player ever to bat into four double plays in one game. His guys loved him for this. “I’d play for him any time,” Mike Mussina said.

  On one of his last days as the Yankees’ manager, Torre said, “I understand the requirements here, but the players are human beings, and it’s not machinery here. Even though they get paid a lot of money, it’s blood that runs through their veins.”

  There was a little more like this but then he cheered up. “For a guy who never got to the postseason as a player, I’m having a whole lot of fun when you look at the whole thing.”

  Me, too, Joe.

  Thank you, baseball.

  July, 2014

  EXTRA INNINGS

  DEREK’S MMM

  Derek Jeter hit two singles on Sunday against the Cleveland Indians, up at the Stadium, and, each time, the balls were taken out of play and handed over to the Yankees’ dugout for posterity. Well, call it pre-posterity: these were Derek’s two-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-second and -ninety-third base hits, leaving him seven shy of three thousand. He will deliver the trimillennial bingle some time this week, no doubt, and with another Yankees home game against the Tribe scheduled for tonight, followed by three against the Texas Rangers, there’s a good chance he’ll oblige us by getting it done here, setting off fireworks, game-stopping ceremonials, and tears from the packed house of fans, who may be too busy tweeting (!SAWT!) to actually clap and scream. Three thousand lifetime base hits is fabulous. Only twenty-seven prior major-leaguers have attained this holy altitude, and the variety list of those who got there—Ty Cobb, Wade Boggs, Willie Mays, Honus Wagner, Rickey Henderson, Roberto Clemente, et al. (Al Kaline)—is all the more impressive because of those who didn’t: Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth. Fabulous, yes, but, with all respect, not all that interesting, because of the wedding-anniversary blandness that surrounds the arrival of a sure thing.

  Derek could add zing to the party by making No. 3,000 a home run, matching his old teammate Boggs in the feat (Paul Molitor hit the lone triple); it’s less likely that he’ll go in the other direction and do a Carl Yastrzemski. The eminent forty-year-old Yaz, a true Red Sox hero, was slumping and gimpy when he attained his own No. 2,999, on September 9, 1979, and then went oh-for-ten over three ensuing games before the jam-packed but deflating Fenway multitudes, at last rolling an eighth-inning single past the Yankee second baseman Willie Randolph’s glove and on into right field. I was in close TV attendance that night and can testify that Randolph gave the play his professional all, and I could almost hear his murmured “Thank God” that accompanied mine and Yaz’s as the ball went by.

  A more vivid three-thousandth hit, the most by miles? Try Lou Brock’s, at Busch Memorial Stadium, on August 13th of that very same year, 1979. Brock, the Cardinals’ star left fielder, stroked a single against the Cubs’ right-hander Dennis Lamp in the first inning, to bring himself one short of the mark. Facing Lamp again in the fourth, he fell behind by one and two, then got a pitch up under the chin that put him in the dirt. Brock hammered the next pitch on a low line toward center field—his hardest hit all year, he said later—and saw the ball strike Lamp on the leg, ricochet off his pitching hand, and roll off into foul territory. Lamp, injured, had to leave the game. “I was probably as big a fan of the event as anyone else there,” Brock told me. “After all, I’d never seen anybody get three thousand hits, either.”

  Post, June, 2011

  S’LONG, JEET

  We know Derek Jeter by heart, so why all this memorizing? The between-pitches bat tucked up in his armpit. The fingertip helmet-twiddle. The left front foot wide open, out of the box until the last moment, and the cop-at-a-crossing right hand ritually lifted astern until the foot swings shut. That look of expectation, a little night-light gleam, under the helmet. The pitch—this one a slow breaking ball, a fraction low and outside—taken but inspected with a bending bow in its passage. More. Jeter’s celebrity extends beyond his swing, of course, but can perhaps be summarized by an excited e-mail once received by a Brearley School teacher from one of her seventh graders: “Guess what! I just Googled ‘Derek’s butt!’ ”

  This is Derek Jeter’s twentieth and final September: twenty-seven more games and perhaps another hundred at-bats remain to be added to his franchise record, at this writing, of 2,720 and 11,094. He’s not having a great year, but then neither are the Yanks, who trail the Orioles by seven games in the American League East and are three games short of qualifying for that tacky, tacked-on new second wild-card spot in the postseason. It’s been a blah baseball year almost everywhere, and, come to think of it, watching Derek finish might be the best thing around.

  Jeter has just about wound up his Mariano Tour—the all-points ceremonies around home plate in every away park on the Yankees’ schedule, where he accepts gifts, and perhaps a farewell check for his Turn 2 charity, and lifts his cap to the cheering, phone-flashing multitudes. He does this with style and grace—no one is better at it—and without the weepiness of some predecessors. His ease, his daily joy in his work, has lightened the sadness of this farewell, and the cheering everywhere has been sustained and genuine. Just the other day, Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon groused about the rare sounds of cheering offered up to Derek by his customarily sleepy attendees.

  At every stop, there have been replays of Jeter’s famous plays and moments up on the big screens—the no-man’s-land relay and sideways flip to nab the Athletics’ Jeremy Giambi at the plate in the 2001 American League Division Series; that horizontal dive into the Yankee Stadium third-base stands against the Red Sox in 2004. I don’t expect further dramatics—he’
s forty and often in the lineup as d.h. these days—but closings have been a specialty of his, and it’s O.K. to get our hopes up one more time. I’m thinking of the waning days of the old Stadium, in 2008, when Derek’s great rush through September carried him to the top of the all-time career hits list at the famous crater, each fresh rap of his coming as accompaniment to the deep “Der-ek Je-tuh!” cries from the bleachers that the new restaurant site has pretty well silenced. The next year, up there, he passed Lou Gehrig for Most Yankee Base Hits Ever. Two years after that, he delivered his three-thousandth career hit: a home run that touched off a stunning five-for-five day at the Stadium against the Rays.

  All right, I’ll settle for one more inside-out line-drive double to deep right—the Jeter Blue Plate that’s been missing of late. It still astounds me—Derek’s brilliance as a hitter has always felt fresh and surprising, for some reason—and here it comes one more time. The pitch is low and inside, and Derek, pulling back his upper body and tucking in his chin as if avoiding an arriving No. 4 train, now jerks his left elbow and shoulder sharply upward while slashing powerfully down at and through the ball, with his hands almost grazing his belt. His right knee drops and twists, and the swing, opening now, carries his body into a golf-like lift and turn that sweetly frees him while he watches the diminishing dot of the ball headed toward the right corner. What! You can’t hit like that—nobody can! Do it again, Derek.

  It’s sobering to think that in just a few weeks Derek Jeter won’t be doing any of this anymore, and will be reduced to picturing himself in action, just the way the rest of us do. On the other hand, he’s never complained, and he’s been so good at baseball that he’ll probably be really good at this part of it too.

  Talk, September, 2014

  BOGGLER

  2014 National League

  Wild-Card Elimination Game

  Giants 8: Pirates 0

  Forty thousand six hundred and twenty-nine black-clad Pirates fans tromped home last night, their summer’s screaming stilled and their thoughts fixed upon the San Francisco Giants’ lefty starter Madison Bumgarner, who had utterly ruined their autumn. Bumgarner threw a shutout, surrendering four singles, walking one batter, and striking out ten. The Giants won, 8–0. They will play against the Washington Nationals tomorrow to open their half of the National League Divisional Series. The Pirates won’t. End of story—or almost.

  Madison Bumgarner. Madison Bumgarner. What can you do with anybody like that? All night long, Pittsburgh lay sleepless, sorting out the name and the headline.

  NAME GRABS OUR MIND.

  Post, October, 2014

  AHOY, THE SERIES!

  With Derek Jeter a wisp and two wild-card teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals, preparing to tee it up in Game One of the World Series tonight, a quick tour d’horizon of the recent postseason games could help get us in the mood for further surprises. Let’s start with Underpants. Actually, that’s Hunter Pence, the Giants’ right fielder—a name misheard by my wife, Peggy, in the next room during an announcer’s introduction of him as a batter in the early innings of the ESPN telecast of that one-game preliminary shoot-out between the Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates. “ ‘Underpants’? ‘Underpants’—what kind of a name is that?” she cried indignantly. I murmured a correction, but the brain-worm had been implanted, of course, and has proved inoperable. Peggy was not much deterred. “What were his parents thinking?” she said now, coming into the room with me. “He has to have heard this in every grade of elementary school, you know—every day of it, poor guy.” Underpants, oddly enough, was also distinguishable by his actual pants, I’d noticed—the bottoms of his Giants uniform are cut back to the tops of his kneecaps, a height not seen in the majors since the White Sox briefly sported those team Bermudas, back in 1976.

  Pence or Pants diverted us from his clothing in the sixth inning of Game Four of the National League Divisional Series, at San Francisco’s A.T.&T. Park, when the Washington Nationals outfielder Jayson Werth hammered a deep drive to the right-field corner. Pence, racing to his left, launched himself upward and outward along the wall, stuck out his mitt and nailed the catch, saving the one-run lead, and perhaps the game and the day, for the Giants. In the replays, he looked like a dissected frog splayed up there, and will remain so forever in the Bay Area unconscious, a twin specimen to Joe Rudi, the Athletics left fielder, who did more or less the same thing against the Cincinnati Reds, back in the 1972 World Series.

  Werth, whose flowing fox-colored beard and shoulder-length hair suggest a discarded droshky lap robe, went one for seventeen in the Nats’ wipeout loss—a miserable showing but not the worst of this painful October. Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers’ stellar young Cuban outfielder, struck out eight times in the course of twelve at-bats against Cardinals pitching—a crater-sized hole had developed in his defense against inside pitches—and was benched for the last game.

  Yasiel can bring us to the Giants’ bearded righty reliever named Petit (it’s pronounced like the dress size), who set a record this summer by retiring forty-six consecutive batters. The man and the mark were unknown to me when I watched him deliver six middle innings of one-hit ball against the Nationals, in Game Two of the Divs, but I slowly became aware that the Fox telecasters seemed oddly unwilling to call him by his first name, and then familiarly shorten it, as is the custom. “Who Petit?” I muttered once or twice. “Tell us, guys—O.K.?” Finally it showed up in a visual: he’s Yusmeiro.

  So many well-regarded and heavily armed teams were going down so quickly—the Nats, the Tigers, the Dodgers, the Angels, the Orioles—that I had a passing flash of towering French or Spanish ships of the line blowing up or foundering with all hands in battles taken from another Jack Aubrey novel. If that had been the case, his fast frigate, his lightly armed but lucky and venturesome H.M.S. Surprise, would be the Kansas City Royals. Possessors of the lowest home-run total in the league, they stole thirteen bases in the post, tied up and then won three games in which they had trailed—including the qualifying opener against the Oakland A’s—and won four times in extra innings. The eager crew—Alex Gordon, Billy Butler, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Salvador Perez, Jarrod Dyson, Brandon Finnegan, and the rest—will be piped to quarters very shortly, where we will come to know them and like them even better. Cain, the center fielder, and the tall, immensely talented catcher Perez will win further citations, and the Giants, because of their bullpen, will win this splendid engagement (it says here) in seven.

  Post, October, 2014

  THE BEST

  Game 7, 2014 World Series

  Giants 3: Royals 2

  Giants Win Series

  I missed Christy Mathewson somehow but caught almost everyone else, down the years—Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Jack Morris, Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson—but here was the best. Madison Bumgarner, the Giants’ left-handed ace, coming on in relief last night in the fifth inning of the deciding seventh game of this vibrant World Series, gave up a little opening single, then retired fourteen straight Kansas City batters, gave up another hit, and then closed the deal. The Giants won, 3–2, claiming their third World Championship in five years. It was almost his third victory of this Series—the scorers had it that way for a time, then gave the W back to Jeremy Affeldt, the left-handed reliever who was still the pitcher of record when the Giants went ahead in the fourth. Bumgarner, who lost a game along the way, in the Divisionals, on a little throwing error of his own, winds up at 4–1 for his October. He had won a game in each of the Giants’ World Championships, in 2012 and 2010, and now, at twenty-five, stands at 4–0 in the classic, with an earned-run average of 0.25. He was pitching on two days’ rest but also on manna: possibly the best October pitcher of them all.

  Sure, we can talk about this: we’ve got all winter. Christy Mathewson threw three shutout victories for the Giants in the 1905 World Series, and won two more games (while losing five) in the Series of 1910, 1911, and 1912, but, as Matty would point ou
t if he were here—he was famous for his fairness—even at his best he would not fare well against the enormous, toned-up athletes of our day.

  I don’t know what it felt like watching Mathewson pitch, but watching Bumgarner is like feeling an expertly administered epidural nip in between a couple of vertebrae and deliver bliss: it’s a gliding, almost eventless slide through the innings, with accumulating fly-ball outs and low-count K’s marking the passing scenery. It’s twilight sleep; an Ambien catnap; an evening voyage on a Watteau barge. Bumgarner is composed out there, his expression mournful, almost apologetic, even while delivering his wide-wing, slinging stuff. Sorry, guys: this is how it goes. Over soon.

  I don’t know how to bring this up, but attention must be paid, as Mrs. Willy Loman used to say. In the last line of my pre–World Series post here, I startled myself with a prediction: the Giants, because of their bullpen, would win this in seven. Yes, exactly so—and who now wants to step up with a wayd-a-minnit objection, claiming that Madison Bumgarner, though he actually emerged from there—we saw him—did not exactly represent the Giants’ bullpen last night? Eat my shorts.

  Post, October, 2014

  THE SILENCE OF THE FANS

  Security is the given reason for this afternoon’s scheduled weirdness in Baltimore, where the Orioles played the Chicago White Sox at Camden Yards, but without any fans in attendance. This is a first-ever in major-league history—one can imagine some nineteen-thirties low-level minor-league game in the Ozarks, where the ticket booths were open but no one happened by on that particular afternoon—and also a clearly missed opportunity for a struggling sci-fi screenwriter, whose attendant normal turnout of 18,462 could have been abruptly and silently transported to SpaceKlon 7 with two outs in the bottom of the third.