Everything They Had (17 page)

So it is, despite the weather, an almost perfect day. Mr. Rice seems to be swinging like he did a few years ago, and the Red Sox win, and for me the past and the future blend. I am both boy and man. I have gone to Opening Day, written sports for the
Globe
for the first time since I was their Harvard stringer in 1952 when I was 18 and was paid on the average $35 a week. Then I rush for the shuttle, because I plan to take my young daughter to a party for the 1969 Mets. And then, having disguised myself successfully as a boy all day, we'll go out and celebrate my 55th birthday.

My wife looks at me at the end of the evening, and I understand her look. “You are all still boys,” she is thinking. “Will you ever grow up?” We have been at an elegant dinner party in New York where, midway through the dinner, I name-dropped. I just returned from interviewing Ted Williams for 12 hours, and I have let this be known before an assemblage of talented and accomplished men and women—writers, Wall Street financiers, renowned television journalists. All other topics are dropped by the men. The dinner focuses now on only one subject, Ted Williams: What is he really like? Did I have fun? Was he
nice
to me? I watch all the attention shift to me. I drink in the pleasure of the palpable envy of my peers. This is how I make my living—interviewing people, writing books—but for the first time in my life I have a sense that I could, like Tom Sawyer, sublet my interviews and charge these grown men great sums of money for the right to do my work for me.

Men of my age are still bonded by baseball. I cannot vouch for young men who grew up in subsequent generations in greater affluence with greater stimuli at their disposal, but for the generation I know best—men in their late 40s and in their 50s—baseball still turns us into boys again. I think I know some of the reasons now. I am bonded to my father through baseball, because he took me to Yankee Stadium when I was 5 and pointed out the great DiMaggio, and from then on we often went to Yankee Stadium together. It might have been the first thing from his world that he shared with me. I saw this game through his eyes.

In addition, I know now that I felt more comfortable as an onlooker in the semi-fantasy universe of baseball than I did as a participant in my real life as I grew up, awkward and uncertain of myself in those years. The Yankees, whom I then favored, always won, while more often than not, in things which mattered to me, I always seemed to fail. Boys, when they are young and troubled, do not talk to each other about what bothers them, no matter how close the friendship. There is no real intimacy among us. We talk about things of the exterior, about sports. Baseball was not merely a subject for us, it provided us a social form as well.

It was also, as Bart Giamatti told me, a world with less stimuli. A. Bartlett Giamatti is now the commissioner of baseball, coming to his place after a rich life in academe, where he served first as a professor and then as president of Yale. In the town of South Hadley, Mass., when he was growing up in the late '40s, there was no movie theater, no computer games, no VCR, no television to speak of. There was baseball. He played every day with his friends; and then, when they were no longer playing, they talked about it. Living in the radio range of Boston, Bart Giamatti was a Red Sox fan, and his favorite player was Bobby Doerr. He played second base because Doerr played it. His room was nothing less than a small baseball museum, a little Cooperstown.

He had made his room into a baseball sanctuary, and he faithfully listened to every game he could. Years later, when I talked with him, he tried to analyze why baseball meant so much for him and others like him at that moment. Baseball, he said, was the first apprehensible myth for a young boy of that generation, the first universe he can comprehend. Sex is still beyond him, God is beyond him, war and politics can be discussed but in any real sense are distant and cannot be comprehended. Baseball is within reach. A boy could read the newspapers and listen to the radio and know that this game was important and that these men were great men, and then he could go out in the afternoon and emulate their acts. Bart Giamatti could be Bobby Doerr. Years later, one of the happiest days of his life came when he met Doerr at a Hall of Fame ceremony. Awkwardly (once again a little boy, although the ex-president of Yale University) he told Doerr that he was his hero. It was Mrs. Doerr who did the better job of putting the moment in perspective. “Mr. Giamatti,” she said, “you're the former president of Yale—you're a hero to people like us.”

If Bart Giamatti was a fanatic Red Sox fan, then Joe Lelyveld was an equally obsessed Yankee fan. Joe Lelyveld is one of the most distinguished journalists in the country, a veteran
New York Times
reporter who has reported from all over the world and who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on South Africa. But in 1949 he was a sixth-grader, newly arrived in New York, somewhat lonely in his new environs. At that moment he became, in his own words, a scholar of baseball and the New York Yankees. He owned some 30 books on baseball, all of which adorned his room. His allowance went for
The Sporting News
and assorted baseball magazines. He collected cards. He played baseball every day that he could. In his room on his bulletin board were the autographed photos of the Yankee team that you could buy at the stadium.

Tommy Henrich was his favorite player. Henrich was a wonderful player, an exceptional clutch hitter who made the most of his skills. Lelyveld was an expert on the life of Tommy Henrich. The articles about him in
Sport Magazine
were always complimentary. They told how good a family man he was and how respected he was by his teammates. The admiration of Mel Allen, the Yankee broadcaster, who called Henrich “Old Reliable” for his ability to hit in the clutch, was obvious. Henrich was a worthy role model. That spring, with Joe DiMaggio ailing, Henrich had to carry the team, and Lelyveld decided to come to his assistance. He did it by creating a ritual in which he could, through the skillful use of his own mental powers and by fierce concentration, aid Henrich in hitting the home runs required at critical moments. It was nothing less than youthful American voodoo.

He would sit by himself in his room on the West Side of Manhattan, listening to Mel Allen. When Henrich came up in a clutch situation, he would sit there in an armchair with his glove on, and he would bounce a ball off the wall. Then he would look out the window at the New Jersey side: There, right across the river, was a huge Spry factory with a flashing light with the company's name. It was mandatory for him, at precisely the moment that Henrich was hitting, to look at that sign. In his ritual, his role was clear: If Henrich came up and Lelyveld did not play his part perfectly, if he dropped the ball or if his eye wandered from the Spry sign, his powers—considerable though they might be—became useless.

Lelyveld used his powers carefully, and he was not promiscuous with them. He did not seek unnecessary home runs that merely added to Henrich's statistical prowess. But when Henrich came up in the late innings with the game tied or the Yankees a run or two behind, Lelyveld turned on his full powers. His eye did not wander from the sign. He did not drop the ball. His powers were nothing less than phenomenonal in the early part of the season. It seemed that his voodoo worked effectively again. Time and time again, Tommy Henrich came up in clutch situations and hit home runs to win the game.

So it was that 40 years later I ran into Lelyveld, by now an executive of the
Times
, at a party. I mentioned to him that I was writing a book about baseball in the summer of 1949.

“Did you know,” asked Lelyveld, “that in the final third of that season, Tommy Henrich hit something like 16 home runs, and 12 of them were game winners?”

“I knew that, Joe,” I answered, “because I'm immersed in the season. But how did
you
know it?”

“Because I helped him do it,” said Joe Lelyveld.

Roger Clemens of the Boston Red Sox, Doc Gooden of the Mets, Orel Hershiser of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Frank Viola of the Minnesota Twins are all part of the newest club in baseball—the $10,000 an inning club. Assuming they stay healthy and pitch around 200 innings a season, that will be their piece rate. (Mr. Viola, the newest and best paid member, is actually closer to the $15,000 club—or $5,000 an out.)

When I read of today's salary negotiations, I think of the very different age in baseball 40 years ago, and I think of George and Vic.

George was George Weiss, general manager and skillful architect of great Yankee teams, and Vic Raschi, who died last fall, was one of his great pitchers. They hated each other, and their annual salary struggles were landmarks of an era when management dealt all the cards in salary negotiations, and a player's recourse was to retire.

If there was a comparable price-per-inning club for pitchers, it was $150, and Raschi constantly struggled with Weiss for the right to be a member of it.

Weiss, almost completely devoid of charm, was ruthless and cold-blooded in contract negotiations; he had a God-given knack at contract time, one Yankee said, to turn what was a positive, healthy relationship into a cold, bitter one. He did not mind that at all. It did not occur to him that it was important for ballplayers to like him: That was not part of his job. He firmly believed that a well-paid ballplayer was a lazy one and that a hungry player, even one who resented management, was a winning one.

That attitude had helped create an important part of the ethos on those Yankee teams. The players, badly underpaid, needing their World Series checks, became the enforcers on the team. That gave Weiss the philosophical basis to be penurious, but he had a more basic one as well: The lower the sum of all the players' salaries, the greater the additional bonus he received from the owners.

The owners gave Weiss a budget, say, of $1 million a year. Weiss worked to keep the salaries down, say, to a total of $600,000 a year. Of that remaining $400,000, Weiss, by agreement, took 10 percent.

He had no illusion that sports was fun. Baseball, to him, was a business, and he never lost sight of this. Typically, at the team party celebrating the Yankees' four-game sweep of the Phillies in the '50 Series, a joyous occasion, he dampened the occasion for almost everyone by making a speech.

He reminded the players that because the Series had lasted only four games, the owners had not made as much money as they should have and therefore salaries would have to be held down in the coming year.

Weiss was so cold in his professional dealings that for a time Jimmy Cannon, the talented
New York Post
sportswriter, wrote columns referring to him as Lonesome George. One day, Weiss went to Toots Shor's restaurant, threw down a couple of columns, complained about Cannon and then said, “But what the hell, Toots, who reads that guy anyway?”

“You do, George,” Shor answered.

Vic Raschi became one of the great stars of the Yankee teams that won five pennants and five World Series in a row from 1949 through 1953. In those five years, he won 92 and lost only 40. He was, his teammates thought, possibly the fiercest competitor on the team. He was like a bulldog, tenacious, almost violent about losing a game, particularly after he had been given a lead.

Once during a game with the Red Sox in which Raschi had the lead, he seemed in the seventh inning to be struggling. With Walt Dropo up, Casey Stengel sent Jim Turner, the pitching coach, out to talk to Raschi. Turner ambled out and spoke a few words. The resentment in Raschi's face was visible from the dugout and Turner quickly returned to the bench.

“What did you say?” asked Stengel. “I asked him how he was going to pitch to Dropo,” answered Turner. “And what did he answer?” Stengel asked. “Hard,” said Turner.

In those five years, Raschi started 160 games and completed 73. He did this despite terrible physical pain. He hurt his knee in 1950 when Luke Easter of the Indians lined a ball off his leg. But he did not have an operation for two years because he was afraid it might cost him part of a season. That meant he played in almost unbearable pain and could barely run and hardly field his position.

His teammates were duly careful around him on the days he pitched. He snapped if they even offered him pleasantries. If they did not pick up on that signal, he would tell them to get away from him.

He did not want photographers to take his picture on a game day: They still used flash attachments, and Raschi hated the fact that for five or six minutes after each pop he could not see properly. He tried to warn them off, but if they did not listen to him, he would spray their shoes with tobacco juice.

Because Raschi gave everything of himself as a player, he expected nothing less than complete respect for his accomplishments.

Weiss seemed to want him to be a strong, forceful man as a pitcher—and a passive man as a negotiator. When Raschi went to negotiate with Weiss, it was as if he was a different pitcher, one who had won 10 games for a seventh-place team. Weiss came armed, not with the latest success of the Yankees and Raschi's integral part in that success but rather with what he had not accomplished—games he had not finished, games against lesser teams he had lost.