It had to happen this way. It had been predestined since November 29,1976, when Reginald Martinez Jackson sat down on a gilded chair in New York’s Americana Hotel and wrote his name on a Yankee contract. That day he became an instant millionaire, the big honcho on the best team money could buy, the richest, least inhibited, most glamorous exhibit in Billy Martin’s pin-striped zoo. That day the plot was written for last night—the bizarre scenario Reggie Jackson played out by hitting three home runs, clubbing the Los Angeles Dodgers into submission and carrying his supporting players with him to the baseball championship of North America. His was the most lurid performance in 74 World Series, for although Babe Ruth hit three home runs in a game in 1926 and again in 1928, not even that demigod smashed three in a row.
Reggie’s first broke a tie and put the Yankees in front, 4-3. His second fattened the advantage to 7-3. His third completed arrangements for a final score of 8-4, wrapping up the championship in six games.
Yet that was merely the final act of an implausible one-man show. Jackson had made a home run last Saturday in Los Angeles and another on his last time at bat in that earthly paradise on Sunday. On his first appearance at the plate last night he walked, getting no official time at bat, so in his last four official turns he hit four home runs.
In his last nine times at bat, this Hamlet in double-knits scored seven runs, made six hits and five home runs and batted in six runs for a batting average of .667 compiled by day and by night on two seacoasts three thousand miles and three time zones apart. Shakespeare wouldn’t attempt a curtain scene like that if he was plastered.
This was a drama that consumed seven months, for ever since the Yankees went to training camp last March, Jackson had lived in the eye of the hurricane. All summer long as the spike-shod capitalists bickered and quarreled, contending with their manager, defying their owner, Reggie was the most controversial, the most articulate, the most flamboyant.
Part philosopher, part preacher and part outfielder, he carried this rancorous company with his bat in the season’s last fifty games, leading them to the East championship in the American League and into the World Series. He knocked in the winning run in the twelve-inning first game, drove in a run and scored two in the third, furnished the winning margin in the fourth and delivered the final run in the fifth.
Thus the stage was set when he went to the plate in last night’s second inning with the Dodgers leading, 2-0. Sedately, he led off with a walk. Serenely, he circled the bases on a home run by Chris Chambliss. The score was tied.
Los Angeles had moved out front, 3-2, when the man reappeared in the fourth inning with Thurman Munson on base. He hit the first pitch on a line into the seats beyond right field. Circling the bases for the second time, he went into his home-run glide—head high, chest out. The Yankees led, 4-3. In the dugout, Yankees fell upon him. Billy Martin, the manager, who tried to slug him last June, patted his cheek lovingly. The dugout phone rang and Reggie accepted the call graciously.
His first home run knocked the Dodgers’ starting pitcher, Burt Hooton, out of the game. His second disposed of Elias Sosa, Hooton’s successor. Before Sosa’s first pitch in the fifth inning, Reggie had strolled the length of the dugout to pluck a bat from the rack, even though three men would precede him to the plate. He was confident he would get his turn. When he did, there was a runner on base again, and again he hit the first pitch. Again it reached the seats in right.
When the last jubilant playmate had been peeled off his neck, Reggie took a seat near the first-base end of the bench. The crowd was still bawling for him and comrades urged him to take a curtain call but he replied with a gesture that said, “Aw, fellows, cut it out!” He did unbend enough to hold up two fingers for photographers in a V-for-victory sign.
Jackson was the leadoff batter in the eighth. By that time, Martin would have replaced him in an ordinary game, sending Paul Blair to right field to help protect the Yankees’ lead. But did they ever bench Edwin Booth in the last act?
For the third time, Reggie hit the first pitch but this one didn’t take the shortest distance between two points. Straight out from the plate the ball streaked, not toward the neighborly stands in right but on a soaring arc toward the unoccupied bleachers in dead center, where the seats are blacked out to give batters a background. Up the white speck climbed, dwindling, diminishing, until it settled at last halfway up those empty stands, probably 450 feet away.
This time he could not disappoint his public. He stepped out of the dugout and faced the multitude, two fists and one cap uplifted. Not only the customers applauded.
“I must admit,” said Steve Garvey, the Dodgers’ first baseman, “when Reggie Jackson hit his third home run and I was sure nobody was listening, I applauded into my glove.”
TWO MAVERICKS DEPART
1980
The two liveliest minds in baseball left the game high and dry last week, and it’s going to take more than snap judgment to decide whether this left the game richer or poorer. Did the welcome departure of Charlie Finley compensate for the loss of Bill Veeck?
“I called Lee MacPhail after the deal,” Veeck said yesterday from his hospital bed in Chicago, “and asked ‘How lucky can a guy get? This must be your biggest single week in twenty decades.’ “
As owner of the Oakland A’s, Finley picked a fight with the American League president every hour on the hour, and between skirmishes MacPhail had to deal with some of Veeck’s more outlandish promotions.
“What did Lee say?” Bill was asked.
“You know what a gentleman he is,” Veeck said.
Finley sold the A’s for about $12.5 million. Veeck and his partners got $20 million for the Chicago White Sox. When you consider that the New York Mets, who had lost money for three years in a row, finished last three times and last season had their smallest home attendance ever—788,905—went for $21.1 million last winter, and that the Baltimore Orioles, American League champions whose home business touched a record 1,681,009, changed hands for $12 million, you have to wonder about baseball economics. Oakland, if possible, cares less about baseball than Baltimore; attendance last season was 306,763.
“There’s one big difference,” Veeck said. “We had a very valuable piece of property the other clubs didn’t have—the real estate. We spent from $3.25 million to $3.5 million on it just in the few years since we’ve had the club. This is thirty-odd acres, the biggest contiguous piece of land in South Chicago.
“Count that as worth $7 million and it brings the price of the ball club down to $13 million, in the same area as Oakland and Baltimore. The Mets, of course, are something else.”
There is no reason to think that Finley would ever want to return to baseball and less than none to believe that he would not be black-balled if he tried. He ran the cheapest and loudest operation in the big leagues and his contributions would be a pleasure to forget—green and gold play suits; Herb Washington, the Olympic sprinter, as designated runner; night World Series games; a mule in the outfield.
Brassy vulgarity was his style.
Veeck, on the other hand, was born into baseball and belongs there. He is an independent thinker, imaginative, uninhibited, innovative. He is a promoter at heart but a baseball man at bottom and he always realized that his merriest promotional stunts would not enable a bad team to do good business.
“I still think our theories are sound,” he said, “but we were a little short of scratch to make the operation go. I have been advising for a couple of years that we would be wise to sell the club because we were a stock company and so couldn’t depreciate our players for tax purposes. We had to operate with 100-cent dollars while other clubs, limited partnerships or something, operated with 50-cent dollars because the government picked up the other half.”
Bill had pledged everything he owned to buy the club, and the free agent era found him unable to spend enough to keep players like Richie Zisk, Oscar Gamble, Rich Gossage, Terry Forster, and Bobby Bonds.
“I don
’t earn as much as a utility infielder,” he said a few years ago, “but baseball is my game and I can’t let one or two high-priced players drive me out of it.”
“I do think,” he said yesterday, “that we have again put together a good bunch of youngsters, especially pitchers. We’d like them to be able to develop together as White Sox instead of drifting away one by one like the others.”
As for Bill Veeck, the sixty-six-year-old entrepreneur, he’ll be back. Baseball can’t afford to let a mind like his go to waste.
“Once I catch my breath,” he said. “Oops, Kingman just hit one out of sight.” (He was obviously watching the Cubs’ game on television.) “After I learn to breathe again, I’ll start thinking about what to do.” He is in the hospital for a respiratory ailment, his room is full of free oxygen so he can’t smoke, but he hopes to be out next week.
Presumably he’ll get enough from the club’s sale to furnish a modicum of operating capital, maybe set him up again on the property in Easton, Maryland, which he left when he went to Chicago.
“I know you pledged everything you had to buy the club,” it was remarked.
“Yes,” he said, “and that place in Maryland was right in center field.”
WINNING BY STRIKING OUT
BROOKLYN, 1941
It could happen only in Brooklyn. Nowhere else in this broad, untidy universe, not in Bedlam nor in Babel nor in the remotest psychopathic ward nor the sleaziest padded cell could The Thing be.
Only in the ancestral home of the Dodgers which knew the goofy glories of Babe Herman could a man win a World Series game by striking out.
Only on the banks of the chuckling Gowanus, where the dizzy-days of Uncle Wilbert Robinson still are fresh and dear in memory, could a team fling away its chance for the championship of the world by making four outs in the last inning.
It shouldn’t happen to a MacPhail!
As Robert W. Service certainly did not say it:
Oh, them Brooklyn Wights have seen strange sights.
But the strangest they ever did see,
Today was revealed in Ebbets Field
When Owen fumbled strike three!
Among all the Yankee fans in the gathering of 33,813 who watched the fourth game of the World Series, only one was smiling when Tommy Henrich faced Hugh Casey in the ninth inning with two out, nobody on base, the Dodgers in front by one run, and a count of three balls and two strikes on the hitter.
That one gay New Yorker was Jim Farley, whose pink bald head gleamed in a box behind the Dodger dugout. He sat there just laughing and laughing—because he hadn’t bought the Yankees, after all.
Then The Thing happened.
Henrich swung at a waist-high pitch over the inside corner. He missed. So did Catcher Mickey Owen. Henrich ran to first. Owen ran after the ball but stopped at the grandstand screen.
That was Mickey’s biggest mistake. He should have kept right on running all the way back home to Springfield, Missouri.
That way he wouldn’t have been around to see and suffer when Joe DiMaggio singled, Charley Keller doubled, Bill Dickey walked, Joe Gordon doubled, and the Dodgers went down in horrendous defeat, 7 to 4.
Out of the rooftop press box in that awful instant came one long, agonized groan. It was the death cry of hundreds of thousands of unwritten words, the expiring moan of countless stories which were to have been composed in tribute to Casey.
For just as Owen has taken his place among the Merkles and Snodgrasses and Zimmermans and all the other famous goats of baseball, so now Casey belongs with the immortal suckers of all time.
The all-American fall guy of this series—round, earnest Casey—was only one pitch short of complete redemption for his sins of yesterday.
Remember that it was he whom the Yankees battered for the winning hits in the third game of the series. It was he whom Larry MacPhail castigated for failing, in MacPhail’s judgment, to warm up properly before relieving Fred Fitzsimmons yesterday.
Now he was making all his critics eat their words. He was making a holy show of the experts who snorted last night that he was a chump and a fathead to dream that he could throw his fast stuff past the Yankees.
He was throwing it past them, one pitch after another, making a hollow mockery of the vaunted Yankee power as each superb inning telescoped into the one before.
No one ever stepped more cheerfully onto a hotter spot than did Casey when he walked in to relieve Johnny Allen in the fifth inning.
The Yankees were leading, 3 to 2, had the bases filled with two out, and the hitting star of the series, Joe Gordon, was at bat.
Casey made Gordon fly to Jim Wasdell for the final putout, and from there on he fought down the Yankees at every turn.
He made Red Rolfe pop up after Johnny Sturm singled with two out in the sixth. He breezed through the seventh despite a disheartening break when DiMaggio got a single on a puny ground ball that the Dodgers swore was foul.
Leo Durocher said enough short, indelicate words to Umpire Lary Goetz on that decision to unnerve completely anyone within earshot. But Casey, determined to hear no evil and pitch no evil, shut his ears and shut out the Yanks.
In the clutch, the great Keller popped up. The ever-dangerous Dickey could get nothing better than a puerile tap to the mound.
So it went, and as Casey drew ever closer to victory the curious creatures that are indigenous to Flatbush came crawling out of the woodwork. They did weird little dances in the aisles and shouted and stamped and rattled cowbells aloft and quacked derisively on little reedy horns.
Their mouths were open, their breath was indrawn for the last, exultant yell—and then The Thing happened.
Far into this night of horror, historians pored over the records, coming up at last with a World Series precedent for “The Thing.”
It happened in the first game of the 1907 series between the Cubs and Detroit, when the Tigers went into the ninth inning leading, 3 to 1. With two out and two strikes against pinch-hitter Del Howard, Detroit’s Wild Bill Donovan called catcher Charley Schmidt to the mound for a conference.
“Hold your glove over the corner,” Donovan said, “and I’ll curve a strike into it.”
He did, but Schmidt dropped the strike, Howard reached base, and the Cubs went on to tie the score. The game ended in darkness, still tied after twelve innings, and the Cubs took the next four contests in a row.
That’s about all, except that it should be said the experts certainly knew their onions when they raved about the Yankee power. It was the most powerful strikeout of all time.
NEXT TO GODLINESS
BROOKLYN, 1947
The game has been over for half an hour now, and still a knot of worshippers stands clustered, as around a shrine, out in right field adoring the spot on the wall which Cookie Lavagetto’s line drive smote. It was enough to get a new contract for Happy Chandler. Things were never like this when Judge Landis was in.
Happy has just left his box. For twenty minutes crowds clamored around him, pushing, elbowing, shouting hoarsely for the autograph they snooted after the first three World Series games. Unable to get to Lavagetto, they were unwilling to depart altogether empty-handed. Being second choice to Cookie, Happy now occupies the loftiest position he has yet enjoyed in baseball. In Brooklyn, next to Lavagetto is next to godliness.
At the risk of shattering this gazette’s reputation for probity, readers are asked to believe these things happened in Ebbets Field:
After 136 pitches, Floyd Bevens, of the Yankees, had the only no-hit ball game ever played in a World Series. But he threw 137 and lost, 3 to 2.
With two out in the ninth inning, a preposterously untidy box score showed one run for the Dodgers, no hits, ten bases on balls, seven men left on base, and two more aboard waiting to be left. There still are two out in the ninth.
Hugh Casey, who lost two World Series games on successive days in 1941, now is the only pitcher in the world who has won two on successive days. One pitch beat him in 1941, a thi
rd strike on Tommy Henrich, which Mickey Owen didn’t catch. This time he threw only one pitch, a strike to Tommy Henrich, and this time he caught the ball himself for a double play.
Harry Taylor, who has had a sore arm half the summer, threw eleven pitches in the first inning, allowed two hits and a run, and fled with the bases filled and none out. Hal Gregg, who has had nothing at all this summer—not even so much as a sore arm—came in to throw five pitches and retired the side. Thereafter Gregg was a four-hit pitcher until nudged aside for a pinch hitter in the seventh.
In the first inning George Stirnweiss rushed behind second base and stole a hit from Pee Wee Reese. In the third Johnny Lindell caught Jackie Robinson’s foul fly like Doc Blanchard hitting the Notre Dame line and came to his feet unbruised. In the fourth Joe DiMaggio caught Gene Hermanski’s monstrous drive like a well-fed banquet guest picking his teeth and broke down as he did so. Seems he merely twisted an ankle, though, and wasn’t damaged.
Immediately after that play—and this must be the least credible of the day’s wonders—the Dodger Sym-phoney band serenaded Happy Chandler. The man who threw out the first manager for Brooklyn this year did not applaud.
In the seventh inning two Symphoney bandsmen dressed in motley did a tap dance on the roof of the Yankees’ dugout. This amused the commissioner, who has never openly opposed clowning.
In the eighth Hermanski smashed a drive to the scoreboard. Hen-rich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker. When he came down he had the ball.
In the ninth Lindell pressed his stern against the left-field fence and caught a smash by Bruce Edwards. Jake Pitler, coaching for the Dodgers at first base, flung his hands aloft and his cap to the ground.
And finally Bucky Harris, who has managed major-league teams in Washington, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, violated all ten commandments of the dugout by ordering Bevens to walk Peter Reiser and put the winning run on base.
Lavagetto, who is slightly less experienced than Harris, then demonstrated why this maneuver is forbidden in the managers’ guild.
The Red Smith Reader Page 20