Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  The Boston battery in the bottom half was Dick Ellsworth, a competent but unstartling left-hander picked up from the National League last winter and now counted on to bolster the thin Red Sox pitching (“Ex-Phil Elsie no Lonbrg”), and Elston Howard, who will be the top Boston catcher this summer, at the age of thirty-nine (“Eheu fug!”). The game moved on. The White Sox tied it in the third, on two singles and an error, and an inning later Tommy Davis pulled a low two-base screamer just inside the bag at third, apparently fossilizing Joe Foy, the young Boston third baseman. Davis, a lifetime .300 hitter who twice won the National League batting title, came over to the White Sox from the Mets in a major trade last winter (“Mets ckoo!”), and Foy, who swings a strong bat, was being offered another crack at the position he lost last year because of weak fielding (“Foy nonch. glove—Bost. 3b still up air?”).

  My list of scribbled guesses lengthened excruciatingly, and I was glad to abandon it in the middle innings, when most of the starters gave way to rookies and other figures of lesser omen. The game fell apart in the sixth, when a Chicago pitcher named Fred Klages could not find the plate, and six runs scored. The day’s final entertainment was a legal discussion between a subsequent Chicago pitcher, Bob Shaw, and the home-plate umpire, Bill Kunkel, centering on this year’s new spitball rule—a landmark ruling, already twice modified, which is apparently destined to become as controversial as Escobedo. Its central provision prohibits the pitcher on the mound from placing his bare hands anywhere near his mouth, even to cover a giggle. Shaw, a thirty-four-year-old veteran of six major-league clubs, is known to be a student of pitches and pitchers’ rights. He was making a hard, outside fight for a place on the White Sox staff and one more year in the majors; his name did not appear on the back of his uniform shirt, or even in the program. Now, working against Elston Howard with men on base, he heaved a sigh, passed his gloved hand briefly across his sweaty brow, and leaned in to get his sign. As he went into motion, Umpire Kunkel sprang out from behind the catcher, uttering shocked noises, and pointed first at heaven and then at the pitcher. “What, me?” cried Shaw. “What’d I do?” Kunkel, in a piece of vivid mime that would have done credit to Marcel Marceau, imitated a veteran right-hander spitting on his left wrist while apparently wiping his brow, and then craftily transferring the hideous moisture to his right fingertips. Out on the mound, Shaw threw his arms apart, displaying innocence, disgust, and dry paws. These two turns received loud, predictably mixed notices from the Chicago and Boston dugouts. In time, baseball resumed (“Spit horrid wd”), and Shaw got out the side. Boston won, 7–1.

  The following evening, at the Yankee’s bijou ballpark in Fort Lauderdale, the only vestige of drama came an hour before the game with the White Sox, when a storm blew in from the east just as night was falling. A watery wash of indigo clouds hung lower and lower over the field during batting practice, deepening the greens of the box-seat railings, the infield grass, and the tall hedges in center field, and for a time the field, a box of light in the surrounding darkness, resembled an aquarium full of small, oddly darting gray and white fish. The game, played in a chilly, moaning wind and occasional showers, was curious, for the two teams had evidently agreed to switch their traditional styles of baseball—the Yankees bunting, sacrificing, and stealing bases, and Chicago bashing the ball. Neither appeared comfortable in its new role. In the bottom of the first, the Yankees craftily combined a bunt, a perfect hit-and-run single, a stolen base, a wild pitch, another single, and a walk to produce one run, while the Sox, after eight innings, had rapped out eleven hits good for a total of one run. The baseball was unedifying. In the fourth inning, for instance, Tom Tresh played Pete Ward’s fly to left into a double, and Ward scored when four Yankees gathered under Tim Cullen’s fly and watched it fall to earth; in the Yankee half, Horace Clarke singled, stole his third base of the night, and came around when a rookie Chicago infielder named Reichenbach dropped a double-play ball at second and then threw the ball over the catcher’s head. There were eight errors in all, and the night of windy foolishness concluded, in almost total privacy, with the Yankees on top, 4–2.

  Back at Sarasota the next day, the White Sox managed some less fidgety fielding and beat the Tigers, 3–1. Among the spectators was a pathetic little band of Detroit sportswriters, utterly orphaned by the five-month-old newspaper strike in their home town. The only consolation for their plight that I could think of was that it might spare them the embarrassment of once again having to predict a pennant for the Tigers, a team endowed with muscular batters, fine pitchers, and habitual late-summer neurasthenia. On this warm, glazy Saturday, Al Kaline, Willie Horton, Jim Northrup, Norm Cash, and the other visiting long-ball hitters could do nothing much against Tommy John and Joel Horlen, who are both celebrated Chicago starters, and the game ticked slowly along in a deepening afternoon silence. I began studying the Payne Park crowd, which must be the oldest sporting audience in the world, and I wondered sleepily whether a demographer could discover why the capital of Gerontia seemed to have slid south in recent years from St. Petersburg to Sarasota. (One holder of a season ticket in Payne Park had informed me that he would request a seat away from the aisle next spring; too many tottery elders had been falling on him on their way out in the late innings.) Perhaps it was the winter presence of the Sox, themselves the oldest team in baseball, that had brought on this senectuous stampede.

  As if to confirm this theory, there was a stirring and some thin cries in the stands as the oldest Chisock of them all—the oldest active player in the majors, in fact—approached the mound and prepared to demonstrate his celebrated parlor trick. It was Hoyt Wilhelm, of course, who is, at forty-four, the best knuckleball pitcher in baseball. Last year, he won eight games and lost three for the White Sox in relief, and his earned-run average of 1.31 was his lowest in sixteen years in the majors. After forty-two more mound appearances—perhaps some day late this summer—he will break Cy Young’s all-time record of pitching in 906 big-league games. Here, in the top of the ninth, he cocked his head to one side to pick up his sign (a quirk caused by his poor vision), stretched languidly, and threw his knuckleball past the hitter. There was no surprise in it, and very little speed. The ball sailed up, made a sudden small swerve, like a moth in a hallway, and flumped feebly into the catcher’s glove, as the fans cried, “Ah-hah!” in unison. Wilhelm does not have to think too hard about his work, since he has no more idea than the batter which way the spinless ball will jump, and he delivers the pitch with approximately the same effort as a man tossing a pair of socks into a laundry hamper. He set down the Tigers on a handful of pitches—three weak infield taps and a scratchy single—and sent the old folks home happy.

  Mornings are the best time at a winter ballpark. After calisthenics, the players scatter—pickups and pepper, outfield wind-sprints, batting for the scrubeenies, infield practice for the regulars. The batting-practice pitcher throws and, with the same motion, drops his head below the low screen just in front of him; the man in the cage swings away, the ball flies over second, and, an instant later, coaches on the first and third baselines tap grounders that cross each other on the way to opposite sides of the infield. A couple of sportswriters, wearing T-shirts, shades, and team caps, emerge from the dugout carrying cardboard containers of coffee. The smell of coffee fills the air, mixing with the smell of freshly mown grass. From right field comes a curious, repeated pattern of sounds—a pitching machine. There is a slow hum and squeak as the machine’s metal arm gravely rotates, selecting a ball from the trough on its upward path; a quick, springy “Thwongg!” as the ball is released; then the crack of the bat and a whir as the ball skids along the rope netting that encloses machine and batter. Sometimes there is a muttered curse instead of the whir: pop-up.

  At Payne Park one morning, Marv Grissom, the Chicago pitching coach, was working on a sinker-ball with Bob Locker, a tall, right-handed relief man. Locker was wearing an uncomfortable-looking canvas vest buttoned over his uniform shirt; the vest was load
ed with bird shot, and Locker was sweating heavily, which was the whole idea. He was throwing from a mound along the right-field line, and down at the other end a large dummy in full uniform stood stiffly up to the plate, holding a bat and batting right-handed. The dummy had a painted face and mustache, making him look like a ballplayer from the nineties. Locker threw at three-quarter speed, keeping the ball low and inside. The catcher fired the ball back to him without rising out of his squat. “Turn it more,” said Grissom after a few minutes, leaning across and taking Locker’s wrist in his hand. “You got to turn it over. Open these two fingers a little.” He rotated Locker’s hand to the left.

  Locker wound and threw, and the ball came in just under the dummy’s left elbow. “Hey!” the young catcher called. “This batter really hangs in there, don’t he?”

  Now Grissom threw the pitch, and the ball seemed to dip off to the right just as it crossed the plate. “Don’t force it,” Grissom said. “You got to keep that wrist loose.”

  Locker kept at it, the sweat running down his face under his cap. The catcher whipped the ball back to him easily and precisely, not making him work at catching the ball. “This guy digs in at the plate better than anybody I ever seen,” the catcher said happily.

  Grissom watched each pitch, his arms folded. “Now you’re getting it,” he said. “Don’t hold it too tight.” Locker’s next pitch broke down and in, struck the dummy on the knee, and bounced in the dirt, and the catcher sprang after it quickly. “Look out, stupid,” he said, and hit the dummy in the stomach with the back of his glove. Then he threw the ball back and squatted down again.

  There was an overflow, standing-room crowd at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg for the Sunday game between the Red Sox and the Cardinals on St. Patrick’s Day. I got to the park a bit late, in the bottom of the first, just in time to see Bob Gibson throw a fast ball with his familiar flailing, staggering delivery and Yastrzemski slice it to left field, to score a run from third. The deep, sustained wave of noise that followed was startling and sweet; we were back in October, just where we had left off, and that unforgettable World Series had somehow been extended. Now here on the mound for Boston was José Santiago, who had started the first Series game against Gibson, and here, too, was that instant, reflexive Cardinal response—a double to left by Curt Flood and a single by Maris, to tie the game. There was nothing to choose between the two teams after that, and the tension and pride and almost visible mutual dislike on the field produced marvelous baseball. Santiago, displaying utter cool, pitched quickly into trouble and quickly out again. Gibson poured in his fast ball, shoulder-high, defying the hitters; he struck out George Scott and Reggie Smith in succession, both swinging. In the third, Curt Flood went back to the fence and jumped high for Joe Foy’s drive in front of the 398-foot sign, saving a homer. Later, Scott, the enormous Boston first baseman, went far to his right to scoop up Tim McCarver’s low shot, bobbled the ball, and then threw in time to Santiago while falling away from the bag. The sport was riveting and autumnal, but between innings there were subtropical distractions. My seat in the auxiliary press box offered a vista of a considerable section of nearby Tampa Bay, all ruffled and glittery and, on this day, cluttered with a heavy traffic of power yachts, water-skiers, and runabouts. A good distance out, the white sails of a gigantic Lightning-class regatta clustered thickly, and then, after the distant bump of the starting gun, the boats strung themselves out on their first reach like a line of drying wash. A series of racing hydroplanes appeared just inside a nearby seawall, threw themselves around a pylon in a snarl of noise and spray, and went bucking off to the west. I began to think I was watching the afternoon show at the Florida Pavilion in some World’s Fair.

  The best exhibit, however, was the one I had come for. In the sixth, Gibson and Santiago gave way to two other starters, Steve Carlton and Lee Stange, and the Cardinals quickly put together two singles around an error by Mike Andrews to go ahead, 2–1. Carlton, a left-hander, looked even more resolute than Gibson, throwing low and staying well ahead of the hitters, so there was no preparation for what happened in the Boston ninth, when Tony Conigliaro led off with a double to deep right center and moved along to third on Scott’s even deeper fly to the same spot. Reggie Smith tripled off the center-field wall, to tie it up in a crescendo of yawping from transplanted New Englanders. Reggie then scored on Petrocelli’s fly, sliding under McCarver’s spikes as the catcher leaped for the throw, and that was enough. A line-drive double play finished the champions in their half, and the whole thing was over in an hour and fifty-five minutes. Great game.

  Frank Robinson, the celebrated Baltimore outfielder, wears the highest cutouts in the American League. Ballplayers’ outer stockings are cut away at heel and toe, leaving a stirrup under the arch and exposing a scallop of white understocking fore and aft. Custom-made stockings can bring the cutouts halfway up the shin and calf, giving the wearer’s legs the unmistakable look of whitewall tires. Robinson’s late-Gothic cutouts soar to within an inch or so of his long, skin-tight pants, and the stocking stripes have disappeared under the pant legs. Last year, league executives tried to limit the length of cutouts, but nothing came of it, of course. What does affect the fad is the opinion within the trade that .250 hitters and other noncelebrities look silly in high cutouts. Robinson’s cutout rival in the other league is Willie McCovey.

  Watching Robinson in a game against the White Sox, I could sense that he was ready to challenge Yastrzemski this year for every one of those batting titles. Robinson missed a month of the season last year after a base-path collision but still wound up with thirty homers and an average of .311. He does not conceal his bitterness over the fact that nothing like the total celebrity that has descended on Yastrzemski came to him in 1966 after his triple crown, fine World Series, and Most Valuable Player award. The Yaz-Robby race would have to wait, but in the Sarasota game there was an absorbing contrast of baseball styles and instincts between Robinson and Tommy Davis. Robinson, who is a threat to break up a game each time he comes up, attempts to dominate the plate, but Davis wants only to dominate the bat. Twice already in Florida I had seen him stroke a hit-and-run ball to exactly the spot just vacated by the second baseman, and now, in the first inning against the Orioles, he singled straight up the middle on another hit-and-run. In the third inning, with Aparicio on third base after a triple, Davis swung away twice and then, on a 1–2 count, shortened his swing almost to a half-stroke and slapped an outside pitch to right for a dinky single and the run batted in. This kind of batting is sometimes underestimated, especially if the hitter plays for a team perpetually in need of catch-up homers in the late innings, which was Davis’s lot with the Mets last year. Davis is not fast or particularly aggressive in the field, and this spring he has required cortisone shots in his throwing shoulder. (His manager, Eddie Stanky, wanting that bat in his lineup, told him to kick the ball back to the infield if he had to.) The outcome of the White Sox’ adventures this summer will depend in good part on the margin between Davis’s success at the plate and his deficiencies in the field, and the other contending teams conducted probing operations this spring. In the fourth inning of the Orioles game, Robinson hit a low drive to left field, and then challenged Davis by steaming along to second, drawing only a weak and perfunctory throw. A moment later, there was another hit to left, and Robinson loped confidently around third, only to be nailed at the plate by Davis’s high-backed but dead-accurate peg. Robinson got up laughing and shaking his head.

  Eddie Stanky, a famously sharp-tongued and combustible manager (last summer he called Yastrzemski a “Most Valuable Player from the neck down”) has promised his wife to limit himself this year to “three or four aggravations.” He also told reporters in Florida that he would not attempt much lineup tinkering (in one game last September he used twelve pinch batters and base-runners in one-third of an inning), but would merely play his best hitters (“my big buffaloes”) every day. He has benefited from a series of remarkable trades in the past ye
ar, which has brought him such estimable senior buffaloes as Ken Boyer, Russ Snyder, Davis, and Aparicio while keeping his pitching intact, and it may be that he will at last be able to count on winning some ball games on base hits, instead of on nerve, defense, and opponent-baiting. When I last saw the White Sox—they beat the Orioles that day—Aparicio was batting .428 for the spring, Davis was at .417, the team average stood at .302, and Manager Stanky had not yet used up one of his aggravations. The most significant moment of preseason athletics for the Boston Red Sox took place not in Florida but on a mountain slope at Heavenly Valley, California, late in the afternoon of last December 24, when Jim Lonborg, taking a last run down an expert trail through heavy, crusty powder, crossed his right ski tip over his left while making an easy right-hand turn and fell slowly forward, snapping the anterior cruciate ligament of his left knee. The Knee, subsequently operated on and now slowly on the mend, was the object of intense daily ministrations, rituals, aspersions, invocations, and solemn preachments observed and participated in by the sixty-odd reporters at the Bosox camp in Winter Haven. Lonborg won twenty-four games last year, including the famous pennant-clincher and two World Series games, but his importance to the Sox may be even greater this year; most of his fellow staff members have shown only a minimum competence this spring, sometimes absorbing terrific pastings at the hands of such lightweights as the Senators and the Astros, and Lonborg’s value has seemed to rise every day, even though he has not yet thrown a pitch. When I saw him in March, he was lifting twenty-five pounds of weights strapped to a boot on his left foot, and had only slight flexibility of the leg. When he could lift forty pounds, he would be allowed to start throwing. He may be ready to pitch early in June, maybe later. Nobody knows, because baseball medicos have never had to study a skiing injury before, and ski-injury orthopedists rarely meet pitchers. The only person in Winter Haven who seemed interested in this sociomedical paradox (and the only one apparently able to look at the knee with something less than Trappist gloom) was Lonborg himself, a young man who is intensely interested in almost everything. He is even interested in skiing again. “You can understand the thrill of baseball,” he said, “but there’s something mysterious about skiing.” He told me that he could hardly wait to get back on skis, but added thoughtfully that there was an unspoken agreement between him and the Red Sox management that this moment should be postponed until after his baseball days were finished. This agreement is unspoken, I discovered, because Dick Williams, the Red Sox manager, can barely bring himself to say anything about Lonborg’s injury, the effect of Lonborg’s absence, the date of Lonborg’s return, or the permanence of Lonborg’s Killy-cure. Williams has spent his life in baseball, and the idea of a Cy Young Award winner’s risking his future for the mystery and joy to be found on a ski slope is beyond his experience. The generation gap is everywhere.