Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  The Astros are a curiosity, for they are a team without a star, present or past, unless one counts such mini-celebrities as Jimmy Wynn or Larry Dierker. Invented, along with the Mets, in the league expansion of 1962, they have consistently displayed a shabby competence that has kept them above New York in the standings every year, and has probably cost them much of the rich affection and attention generated by the Mets’ anti-heroes.

  There is no real doubt, however, that the Astros are on the way and will someday break into the tough, embattled territory of the National League’s first division, but a healthy franchise, particularly in new baseball territory, also requires the building of a sizable body of young, resilient, and truly knowledgeable fans. No one knows much about the loyalties and passions of the Houston baseball audience, in spite of those enormous attendance figures of last season, for it is impossible to guess how many of the two million ticket-buyers came to see the Astros and how many to see the Astrodome. During the Dodger games, I kept moving about in the stands and changing neighbors, but I could not penetrate the placid bonhomie of those small, citified, early-season crowds or convince myself that we were watching a sporting event. There was applause at the appropriate moments, but not much tonsil-straining, and the scattered booing was mostly directed at the ball and strike calls of the home-plate umpire, which is bush. No one booed an Astro player. No one got into a fight; a fight at the Astrodome would be as shocking as fisticuffs in the College of Cardinals. And always, as before, the applause and attention of the fans around me would be interrupted, redirected, and eventually muffled by the giant scoreboard and its central screen. It commanded “CHARGE” and “GO-GO” for every Astro base-runner, it saluted a homer by the Dodgers’ Wes Parker with the word “TILT,” and when it broke in on a lively dispute at third base, the spectators forgot about the real thing and sat back in their armchairs to watch a cartoon umpire argue with a cartoon manager.

  Toward the end of the last game, my irritation took me out to the pavilion seats in center field (Astropatrons, untouched by the sun, do not sit in bleachers), and here I found the first unscattered group of recognizable fans in Houston. It was a shirt-sleeved, short-sleeved crowd, Negro and white, full of young people. There were some big families, complete with sleeping babies, and a blond teen-age girl next to me wore a patch on the arm of her sweater that said “Future Homemaker of America.” Some of the men wore straw cowboy hats, some were in city coconut straws. Shortly after I arrived, Dave Nicholson led off the Astro sixth with a triple off Osteen that almost landed in our laps, and at once the entire pavilion crowd was on its feet, shouting and cheering. The scoreboard, I remembered later, was behind us, but we didn’t seem to need it. And then in the top of the seventh, when Houston pitcher Bob Bruce was in heavy trouble, first baseman Chuck Harrison speared a hopper by Maury Wills and then hesitated a moment over his play. I jumped up and yelled, “Home! Throw home!,” and it came to me suddenly that I had company: a hundred fans near me were screaming the same advice. Harrison got our message and threw to Bateman, who tagged out Nate Oliver at the plate, and we all sat down, grinning at one another.

  Baseball is an extraordinarily subtle and complex game, and the greatest subtlety of all may well be the nature of its appeal to the man in the stands. The expensive Houston experiment does not truly affect the players or much alter the sport played down on the field, but I think it does violence to baseball—and, incidentally, threatens it own success—through a total misunderstanding of the game’s old mystery. I do not agree with Judge Hofheinz that a ballpark is a notable center for socializing or propriety, or that many spectators will continue to find refreshment in returning to a giant living room—complete with manmade weather, wall-to-wall carpeting, clean floors, and unrelenting TV show—that so totally, so drearily, resembles the one he has just left. But these complaints are incidental. What matters, what appalls, in Houston is the attempt being made there to alter the quality of baseball’s time. Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own. Any persistent effort to destroy this unique phenomenon, to “use up” baseball’s time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and stylized curiosity.

  It seems to me that the Houston impresarios are trying to build a following by the distraction and entire control of their audience’s attention—aiming at a sort of wraparound, programmed environment, of the kind currently under excited discussion by new thinkers of the electronic age. I do not wish them luck with this vulgar venture, and I hope that in the end they may remember that baseball has always had a capacity to create its own life-long friends—sometimes even outdoors. One Houston lady told me that she had been a fan for more than thirty years, beginning when she was a schoolgirl and the Houston Buffs were a Cardinal farm. “I remember a lot of players from back then,” she said. “I saw them all before they went up to the majors and became famous. Howie Pollett and Danny Murtaugh were my gods. And I remember something else. Buff Stadium back in the old days used to be right next to a bakery—Fehr’s Bakery, that’s what it was called! I’ll never forget sitting in the stands in the afternoon and watching the games, and the sweet smell of fresh bread in the air all around.”*

  *Now, six years later, the Astrodome remains our only domed ballpark, but newer and larger bubbles are on the way. The Astros’ home attendance has leveled off in the neighborhood of 1,350,000—an extremely attractive neighborhood for a perennially noncontending club—so the park and its peculiar attributes are almost universally considered a success. Only the enormously increased costs of construction have delayed the erection of similar sports-tanks in other localities, but New Orleans has now sunk pilings for the 80,000-seat Louisiana Superdome, thus proving the American axiom that it is perfectly O.K. to go ape at the bank as long as you are drawing out the money for nuclear weapons or sports. Official estimates place the cost of the bayou balloon at one hundred and forty million dollars, but some irate taxpayers are suggesting final figures closer to three hundred million. This dome is promised for 1974, and will house the New Orleans Saints, of the National Football League; it is also expected that it will constitute an irresistible lure for some poor, heavily rained-upon baseball club, such as the Cleveland Indians.

  The next roofed stadium will probably appear in Detroit, where the Tigers have already signed a forty-year lease on a projected downtown dome. A Buffalo dome has apparently been scrubbed, but the idea of the roofed field as a cure-all for many of the ailments of sport remains widespread. In New York last summer, the enlargement and doming-over of Shea Stadium was proposed by the customarily cautious New York Times as a solution to the decay of Yankee Stadium and the unhappiness of the football Giants. What the price of this roof would be and who would pay it were not specified. Neither did the paper wonder whether any New York fans wanted indoor baseball and football.

  The Houston scoreboard has been surpassed, by the way, by a three-million-dollar double-panel job in Philadelphia’s new Veterans Stadium. The home-run display, I am told, includes plashing fountains, the Liberty Bell, comical high-jinks by giant animated colonial dolls named Philadelphia Phil and Phyllis, and a guided tour of the downtown area, including Independence Hall, ending up with a lobster dinner at Bookbinder’s. Something like that, anyway.

  PART V

  CLASSICS AND CAMPAIGNS—II

  A TERRIFIC STRAIN

  — October 1966

  SPECTATORS BACK FROM THIS year’s minimum-sized World Series have been required to defend themselves against the repeate
d, baffled cry of “What happened?” The question, put by wives, office mates, cabdrivers, children, bartenders, and querulous grandfathers over the long-distance telephone, is at once redundant and very nearly unanswerable. Everyone knows what happened, of course: the American League’s Baltimore Orioles, a young and almost purely untested team of exuberant hitters and indifferent pitchers, humiliated the defending champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, possessors over the last decade of the best pitching staff and the best Series record in either league, in four straight games. The Dodgers scored no runs at all after the third inning of the opening game, thereby establishing a Series unrecord that may stand for the balance of the century. Contrariwise, two Baltimore starting pitchers and one relief man will now be able to open their contract negotiations next spring with the claim that their lifetime Series pitching records surpass those of Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. The brevity and inscrutability of this year’s Series were no less mysterious to eyewitnesses than to the millions who were done out of two or three happily wasted afternoons in front of their TV sets; fans and sportswriters straggling out of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium after the fourth game suggested theatergoers who had bought tickets to a famous melodrama only to find that the bill had been changed at the last minute to a one-acter by Samuel Beckett. Baseball of the Absurd, however, invites criticism and afterthoughts, and it is just possible that this Series will become more intelligible in retrospect.

  One must begin with the suggestion that the turning point in a drama can appear three or four minutes after the curtain goes up. The Orioles moved into first place in the American League after the second week in June. By the end of July, they led the pack by the debilitating margin of thirteen games, and though they glided through the remainder of the season, winning twenty-eight games and losing twenty-eight, they finished in front by a comfortable nine without playing one game or series that could be called crucial. In all those weeks, the team’s numerous front-line youngsters—including catcher Andy Etchebarren, second baseman Dave Johnson, outfielders Paul Blair and Curt Blefary, and pitchers Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, and Wally Bunker—could only fill the languid hours with speculation about their coming test in the World Series. To be sure, they owned a large security blanket, made up of Frank Robinson, who was winning every important batting title in the league, the incomparable Brooks Robinson at third, and such unshakables as shortstop Luis Aparicio, ace pitcher Steve Barber, and reliever Stu Miller. But then Barber was lost with a sore arm, and Brooks Robinson fell into a horrendous slump at the plate, and waiting in October were the flutter and noise of the Series and the assured violence of whichever National League team survived a summer of daily warfare. The Dodgers, by contrast, won their race with the Pirates and the Giants in what has come to be obligatory style in the National League—a September catch-up, some last-minute stumbling, and the pennant on the final weekend (this time, in the final game) of the season. The superlative Dodger pitchers were perhaps a bit tired, but the champions walked onto the field for the first game in Los Angeles like a synod of elders proceeding to the front pews. For that matter, the only visible sign of pre-Series nerves among the Orioles as they took batting practice might have been the excessive cheerfulness of their manager, Hank Bauer, who exchanged quips with a thick cluster of sportswriters while his eyes followed his athletes with a preoccupied, headmasterish flicker. But the tension was there; a full hour before the ceremonies and the anthem, Curt Blefary said, “If this damned thing doesn’t start soon, I’m going to fly straight up into the air!”

  The young Orioles’ first flying, it developed, was delightful, being merely up out of their seats in the dugout. Don Drysdale, the Dodger starter, walked Russ Snyder in the top of the first, and then Frank Robinson hit his second pitch into the left-field stands. A minute later, the other Robinson, Brooks, sailed one even farther, into a descending cone of unbelieving silence, and the visitors were able to take the field with that best of all tension-dissolvers, a three-run lead. They added another in the second, less spectacularly but with admirable neatness, when Etchebarren walked, was bunted along by McNally, and came across on Snyder’s single. McNally’s bunt was his last sign of competence. In the Dodger second, he gave up a gargantuan homer to Jim Lefebvre, a double to Wes Parker, and four straight balls to Jim Gilliam, and was saved from disaster only by a nifty running catch in right center by Russ Snyder. No one could help him in the third, when his control entirely evaporated. Etchebarren was leaping and diving for his pitches, and in a matter of minutes McNally walked the bases full, with one out, and then disappeared, having thrown sixty-three pitches, more or less in the style of a wedding guest heaving rice, and thus destroyed the pace and pattern of the game. His successor, Moe Drabowsky, struck out Parker, walked in a run, and then got Roseboro on a foul. That, it turned out, was the ball game.

  Might Have Been is dull sport, but the Dodgers, who have been frequently disparaged for being a lucky team, suffered such appalling bad luck in this space of two innings that fairness now calls for some second-guessing. In the second inning, with Parker on second and Gilliam on first, Roseboro ducked away from a McNally wild pitch that was headed straight for Cary Grant in the celebrity boxes behind the backstop; the ball just ticked Roseboro’s bat, behind his head, and the runners had to stay planted. Without that freak, Parker would have scored easily from third on Roseboro’s long fly, which Snyder ran down. In the next inning, Drabowsky, after walking in one run, still had the bases loaded when he threw a fourth ball, inside, to Roseboro, who checked his swing but again saw the ball just tick his bat. Except for these two kisses from providence, the game would have now been tied, and—much more significantly—Drabowsky would have joined McNally in the showers. Drabowsky, a tall, experienced middle relief man, is a streaky pitcher, and now, miraculously unhooked, he streaked in the other direction. After Roseboro’s foul, he struck out the next six Dodgers in succession, to tie a Series record, and then established a wholly new Series mark for relievers by striking out a total of eleven Dodgers on the way to his easy 5–2 victory. Within an inning or two after he settled down, his dominance over the homeside was so evident that I was free to wander about in the back aisles of the ballpark and resume research on the monograph I may someday write about Dodger fans. Someday, that is, if I ever begin to understand them. The crowd that afternoon was the biggest in Dodger Stadium history, and it had paid more money for its seats than any previous Series audience, and yet the spectators sat there, inning after inning, in polite, unhappy silence, like parents at a rock concert. They were mostly middle-aged or elderly—men with long bellies and golf caps, women with elaborately waved white or dyed hair, their mahogany hands crossed in their laps. Their team was losing, but few hopeful or encouraging cries escaped their lips, and there were few children among them to venture a shout or two. Win was what they had come for, and, deprived of that, they sat in silence and listened to an amplified play-by-play description of the game that explained to them, by loudspeaker, what they were seeing. The bright field below, the running players, the game of baseball seemed a hundred miles away.

  By good fortune, I had brought along to Los Angeles the ideal companion for a sometimes discouraging, sometimes embarrassing, and undeniably historic World Series—an almost perfect new baseball book called The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence S. Ritter. The author, a professor of economics at New York University, has spent all his recent vacations tracking down famous old ballplayers and inducing them to reminisce about their youth and their extraordinary companions and the long-flown summer days they gave to the great game. The result is a vivid, gentle, and humorous narrative, accompanied by marvelous photographs, which is somehow both saddening and reassuring for the contemporary fan. That night, after the first game in Los Angeles, I read Tommy Leach’s account of the first World Series of all, played in 1903 between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Red Sox, then sometimes known as the Pilgrims. Leach, a small third baseman with that pirate tea
m, recalls, “That was probably the wildest World Series ever played. Arguing all the time between the teams, between the players and the umpires, and especially between the players and the fans. That’s the truth. The fans were part of the game in those days. They’d pour right out onto the field and argue with the players and the umpires.… I think those Boston fans actually won that Series for the Red Sox.” He tells how the Red Sox partisans, who called themselves the Royal Rooters, drove the Pirates to the edge of distraction by their endless bawling of a hit song called “Tessie,” with extemporaneous insulting variations. “Sort of got on your nerves after a while,” Leach says. “And before we knew what happened, we’d lost the World Series.”