Summer Game

by Roger Angell

  Baseball thrives on personality, but the cult of the team is even more essential to its well-being than the cult of the star. Two decades ago, the sixteen major-league clubs were entirely distinguishable; one knew them by heart and could recognize them as quickly and surely as one recognized the different flavors in a jar of sourballs. Now there are twenty-four teams, split into four subdivisions, and, because of expansion and the shifting and scattering of franchises, there sometimes seem to be no more than half a dozen teams that are known to us—not just the names of their stars or managers but the way they play ball, the way they look on the field, the way they are remembered. Only sharper competition, marked by the arrival of new challengers at the upper levels of contention, can alter this, and it is precisely that phenomenon which has brought such a sense of quickening and excitement to the young season. Who does not know the news? The Baltimore Orioles, who so admirably and drearily discouraged all opposition in their division for the past two years, took wing in rather leaden fashion this year, thus permitting hope in such unexpected places as Boston and Detroit; the world champions have only recently retaken their accustomed topmost perch, and there may be a good deal of teetering and flapping there before all is secure. Meanwhile, the American League West has been entirely dominated by the startling Oakland A’s, a team heretofore notable only for its white baseball shoes and the Caligulan whims of its owner, Charles O. Finley, who has fired ten managers in ten years. The National League East is once again the scene of a two- or three-team fight that may not be resolved until the final days or hours of the season. The contenders—the Cardinals, Mets, and Pirates—have offered a sustained lesson in different styles of winning baseball; the best of the three may be the Cardinals, back from two years of utter despond, whose new style is hitting. The Cincinnati Reds, last year’s pennant winners, are in disarray, their pitching almost nonexistent and the other parts of the Big Red Machine sputtering badly or in the repair shop. Their demise was predicted even before the season started; their successors at the top of the National League West, everyone agreed, were to be the Dodgers—an excellent prediction entirely ignored by the San Francisco Giants, who almost ran away from the field in the first six weeks. Many of these clubs, it will be noticed, have honored, familiar names, but as 1971 contenders they are not at all the same good old clubs we thought we knew—as we may discover when we call on the good old (or, in most ways, much better and not so old) Giants in their airy seaside home.

  Before that journey, though, a brief further look should be directed at the Mets, whose baseball personality has subtly altered. Last year, the memory of their brilliant, unforgettable success of the previous autumn seemed to hang on them like a sea anchor. They played somberly, warily, and, in the end, exhaustedly, as if they had forgotten how many games they had once captured on sheer exuberance. This season is much more like ’69; the players are mature, but one sometimes catches glimpses on the field of that same mad young expectation—the conviction that the team just might win every single game from now to October. This is a hope still unreinforced by such baseball realities as the long ball. The team has won on hitting by gentle belters like Jerry Grote, Dave Marshall, and Bud Harrelson, and by the surprise of the year, if not the century, Eddie Kranepool, now in his tenth summer in a Mets uniform. The pitching has been excellent, of course—most especially the bullpen of McGraw, Taylor, and Frisella—and Nolan Ryan has succeeded Jerry Koosman as the stopper next to God, Tom Seaver. Watching Ryan work can be wearing; a typical Ryan inning (as confirmed by my scorecard of a recent game against Houston) consists of a walk, another walk, a swinging strikeout, another swinging strikeout, another walk, and a line drive straight into the glove of the right fielder. One way or another, he gets the job done—he has won six games so far, and has an earned-run average of 1.72. For that matter, watching the Mets in almost any game can be exhausting; things are often settled, along about the ninth or tenth or eleventh inning, by a piece of wild baseball luck—an enemy drive that just falls foul, or a Metsian screamer that suddenly becomes the game-closing DP. This kind of baseball requires a superior infield, enormous team courage, and strong-hearted, insatiable fans—exactly what the Mets have the most of.

  Giant fans are famous front-runners. Made wary over the years by the Giants’ obligatory June swoon and patented furious, insufficient September rush, which have kept the team habitually in second place, the fans have stayed away from Candlestick Park in notable numbers. It is in many ways an excellent place to avoid—a dour, wind-whipped gray concrete tureen that is currently being enlarged, of all things, so that it may similarly test the loyalties of pro football fans this autumn. When I arrived there on a Friday night in mid-May, I thought for a moment that I would be just in time for the Forty-Niners’ opening kickoff, because the fans around me were accoutered in mackinaws, scarves, gloves, and watch caps, and carrying steamer rugs and Thermosed fortifiers. But they were baseball fans, in sensible Bay-side evening attire, who had finally appeared in real numbers to see the beginning of a three-game set against the Dodgers and warily to encourage their Giants, off to the greatest start in their history, with a lead of eight full games in their division. The Dodgers added to the wind-chill factor with two instantaneous runs on a long double by Willie Davis, but reassurance was quickly supplied. The second home-sider to come to the plate was Chris Speier, a thin twenty-year-old shortstop, still only in his second year of organized baseball, who has nailed together the Giant infield for the first time in a decade and driven San Franciscans into an uncharacteristic tizzy of admiration; he lofted one of Al Downing’s pitches up into the westerly gale, which carried it over the right-field fence. The next pitch was hit somewhat more firmly by Willie Howard Mays and disappeared in the direction of San Leandro. It was Speier’s first major-league homer (he waved his clenched fist in the air as he rounded the bases), and, with its successor, it raised the record for most combined home runs by a still active shortstop and center fielder on the same team to six hundred and thirty-seven.

  The game was a brisk, noisy affair that kept us continuously, if not warmly, entertained. The Giants went ahead on the second of Willie McCovey’s three hits, were passed in the fourth on a two-run Dodger homer by Duke Sims, and then put the game away, 8–4, in the seventh on a long succession of singles, walks, sacrifices, and Dodger mistakes. Dodger manager Walter Alston made two defensive infield shifts in this inning, and each of his specialists committed an error—the kind of gift that streaking teams like the Giants accept without surprise.

  The next afternoon, another big crowd, now reassured by the Giants’ nine-game lead, saw an even better game—a vivid pitchers’ battle between the Dodgers’ Bill Singer and the perennial Juan Marichal, who has won more games for the Giants than anyone except Carl Hubbell and Christy Mathewson. The innings zipped along, and, washed in sunshine and a river of clean ocean air, I had plenty of time to admire the new Giants and sympathize with the new Dodgers. The Los Angelenos’ Willie Davis, now resplendent in the largest Afro in baseball, is hitting the ball and playing the outfield as never before in his life; his celebrated new teammate Richie Allen is also hitting the ball as never before—which is to say that he is hardly hitting it at all. The Giants, so far, have been entirely free of such mysteries and bad luck. Willie McCovey has sore knees, but they do not prevent him from batting with his old exciting, scythe-swinger’s style. The pitching, recently no deeper than Marichal and Gaylord Perry, has been firmed up by admirable younger arms belonging to Ron Bryant and Steve Stone and a reliever named Jerry Johnson, whose ERA at this writing is 0.70. The outfielders—Mays, Ken Henderson, and Bobby Bonds—are wonderfully fast afoot, an essential attribute on Candlestick’s slick AstroTurf, which now covers the whole infield except for dirt cutouts around the mound and the bases. (The all-chemical lawn is perhaps forgivable at Candlestick, for it has done away with the appalling dust storms that used to swirl among the cowering participants.) Chris Speier, I suspect, is a model of baseball’
s infielder of the future, the AstroPlayer—wide-ranging, with extremely quick hands and the ability to get off deep, rifle-shot throws with almost no visible arm-cocking or windup. Old-time Giant front-office men think he may turn out to be the finest Giant shortstop since Travis Jackson, back in the early thirties. (Speier, by the way, is a local product, who still lives at home in Alameda, across the Bay. His fourteen-year-old brother, Bill, one may imagine, is grappling with something of a sibling problem this year. When a reporter recently asked Speier if Bill gave him much flak at the family’s breakfast table, the new star shrugged and said, “Not much. I mean, what can he say?”)

  Candlestick’s classic pastime—and the best entertainment in baseball this year—is watching Willie Mays. Now just turned forty, and beginning his twenty-first year in the majors, he is hitting better than he has hit at any time in the past six or seven seasons, and playing the game with enormous visible pleasure. Veteran curators in the press box like to expound upon various Maysian specialties—the defensive gem, the basket catch, the looped throw, the hitched swing, and so forth. My favorite is his base-running. He may have lost a half-second or so in getting down to first base, but I doubt whether Willie Davis or Ralph Garr or any of the other new flashes can beat Mays from first to third, or can accelerate just as he does, with his whole body suddenly seeming to sink lower when, taking his turn at first and intently following the distant ball and outfielder, he suddenly sees his chance. Watching him this year, seeing him drift across a base and then sink into full speed, I noticed all at once how much he resembles a marvelous skier in midturn down some steep pitch of fast powder. Nobody like him.

  No one knows how long Mays can sustain all this. He will sit out perhaps thirty or forty games this year, resting, but the only other concession to age is his habit, in a Giants’ half when he is unlikely to come to bat, of sitting down with the pitchers out in the right-field bullpen, thus saving himself the trip to the dugout. His real race with his years is measured—in the mind of the public, at least—in that perpetual comparison with Babe Ruth’s home-run record of 714. Willie is at 641 as this is written, and he will need three homer-productive years—say, twenty-five more this season, then thirty, then twenty—to make it. I doubt whether he will quite run the course—but I care much less about his breaking the record than I care that the last Mays homer, whenever it comes and whatever its number, be struck with joy.

  The Singer-Marichal matchup sailed scorelessly along into the later innings, with the Dodgers seeming to have a little the better of it. Singer was striking out Giants in clusters, while Marichal—who throws like some enormous and dangerous farm implement—was putting men on but still managing to get through innings on no more than eight or ten pitches. Mays led off the seventh and took a huge cut at a Singer fast ball, kicking up a puff of dust in the batter’s box as he missed. Singer now craftily essayed a curve (the strategy of pitchers is limited), which Willie leaped at and lined into deepest left field for a double. It was the Giants’ first hit of the game, and a few moments later Dick Dietz, the excellent Giant catcher, delivered the second—a single that scored Mays with the only run of the afternoon. Afterward, in his clubhouse office, Giant manager Charlie Fox poured a little Galway Mist for a visiting reporter and said, “It’s always useful to watch him play this game. You know he moves the players around out in the field? Hell, he’s been in this game twenty years—he’s picked up a couple of pointers. Yes, it’s a nice feeling to come to the ballpark every day and know he’s on your side. The leader is still leading.”

  Charlie Fox, who has been in the Giant organization for thirty years, ascending to the helm last May, gets along splendidly with Willie Mays. (“We’re like brothers,” Fox says, “only I’m the big brother.”) The center fielder, who has a distaste for time-wasting, occasionally posed difficulties for some of Fox’s less accomplished predecessors. A few seasons ago, when Willie was suffering through an epochal slump, striking out repeatedly or popping up in crucial situations, it occurred to the Giant management that their star might benefit from a checkup by an oculist. Somehow, neither the manager nor any of his coaches nor anyone in the front office felt any eagerness to make this suggestion to Mays, and eventually somebody approached a San Francisco sportswriter named Charles Einstein, who is a biographer and close friend of Willie’s, and asked if he would undertake the mission. A little startled, Einstein agreed, and a few days later he greeted Mays near the batting cage. The exchange, Einstein says, went like this:

  EINSTEIN: Er—say, Buck [some of Mays’ friends call him Buck], have you noticed how many players are wearing glasses this year?

  MAYS: Like who?

  EINSTEIN: Well, let’s see.… Oh, yes—Howard. Frank Howard is wearing glasses now.

  MAYS: He ain’t hittin’ either.

  The subject was never reopened.

  On Sunday, a sellout crowd confidently turned out to watch another Dodger-Giant pitching classic—Claude Osteen vs. Gaylord Perry—and a further extension of the home team’s infinitely extensible lead. It was Cap Day at Candlestick, and the rows of kids in the top deck, each wearing a dark baseball cap with white central insignia, looked exactly like a congress of raccoons. Noise and delight everywhere—except, it turned out, on the playing field. The ball kept coming loose in the infield; there were four errors in the first two innings and eight errors in all, and at one point Tito Fuentes, the Giants’ second baseman, struck out on a wild pitch and eventually came around to score. That kind of baseball. Still, all seemed saved when the Giants pulled ahead on a three-run homer by Bobby Bonds in the sixth, but then Don McMahon, the Giants’ elderly relief pitcher, found it impossible to get anybody out during his eight-hundred-and-forty-ninth (and perhaps his worst) lifetime mound appearance; Chris Speier, in an admirably eager and youthful but absolutely hopeless and mistaken attempt at a double play, threw a ball away that he should have held on to; the Dodgers scored six runs in the last two innings, beating their old rivals by 9–6; and the San Francisco fans went home with the anxiously renewed knowledge under their new caps that the season still had a few weeks to run after all.

  Ten days later, I paid a visit to the American League side of San Francisco Bay, calling upon the other surprise of this baseball season—the Oakland A’s, who, like the Giants, had opened a startling lead over their Western Division rivals. The two Bay-area teams have coexisted amicably since the A’s migrated from Kansas City in 1968, competing only for the annual regional low-attendance crown, which the Giants carried off by a whisker last year, 740,220 to 778,355. The A’s, in spite of their recent and discouraging success at winning ball games, have come back bravely this year, opening up a margin of over a hundred thousand fewer fans than the Giants in their first twenty home games; this time the issue may not be settled until after the World Series. My first view of the handsome new triple-decked Oakland Coliseum, just before game time on a cold Tuesday night, suggested that the tenants of Candlestick Park held an unfair advantage, but then I observed that almost every one of the fifty thousand shiny, brightly painted seats in the place was entirely visible, being empty. The umpires and the teams—the A’s and the visiting California Angels—took the field; a serenade played by a strolling jazz combo echoed thinly among the few hundred patrons scattered between the two dugouts; the familiar icy Pacific winds whistled up my pant legs; and I sensed myself, as in a Terence Rattigan bad dream, exiled to a dying seaside resort in January.

  Nobody knows why northern California has taken so gingerly to big-league baseball. The population of the immediate area—perhaps three and a half million, if Sacramento is thrown in—is probably too meager to sustain two baseball teams, but this has not proved to be a difficulty for the two pro football teams, the two major college football teams, and the professional basketball team that also sell tickets in the region. The subject is endlessly speculated upon in local bars and pressrooms, and the only sensible theory I have heard put forward suggests that there are a good many other th
ings to do outdoors in the summer in the environs of San Mateo and Marin and Contra Costa Counties. The owner of the A’s, Charles O. Finley, has attacked the problem in characteristic style, with a numbing flood of promotions, but it is still possible that his talented and exciting ball team, with its incomparable new hero, Vida Blue, may eventually succeed in attracting more people into the Coliseum than have yet turned out for Hot Pants Day, cow-milking contests, or a gate prize of two free season tickets to the home games of Charles O. Finley’s hockey team, the Golden Seals.

  The game that first night went to the Finleyites, 7–5, in thirteen gelid innings; the next evening the Angels reversed matters by the same score in twelve. The two games, in fact, had a creepy, mirrorlike similarity. On Tuesday, the Angels jumped away to a 3–0 and then a 4–1 lead on home runs by Ken McMullen and Roger Repoz, but the bottom of the Oakland batting order kept bashing the ball, too—a homer by catcher Dave Duncan, a three-run job by second baseman Dick Green. Duncan, a tall young receiver with a pleasingly mobile style behind the plate, hit a double in the seventh, but when he came up to bat with two out in the ninth, the A’s were still one run shy. He ran the count to three and two and then lined another homer to left. I was startled. More accustomed to the sight of looped two-hundred-foot bingles in Shea Stadium, I had forgotten about this style of baseball. Bob Locker, a veteran relief man for the A’s, now entirely muffled the visitors with his sinker ball, and in the thirteenth Dagoberto Campaneris, the Oakland shortstop, got on via an error and then stole second—quite unnecessarily, it turned out, because his teammate Reggie Jackson hit one out into an uninhabited and perhaps unexplored section of the bleachers, to end matters. It was the fifteenth home run for the A’s in seven games—fifteen homers hit by nine different players.