Everything They Had (19 page)

Let me begin with a memory. It was Oct. 5, 1947, and I was in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, with the Yankees trailing 8–5 in the sixth. With two men on and two men out, Joe DiMaggio hit a tremendous drive to the deepest part of center field. A huge roar went up from the Yankee partisans in the bleachers, and then, as Al Gionfriddo made his celebrated catch, it seemed to ebb and turn into a gasp, while from the same section a second roar of approval exploded from the Dodger fans seated right there with us. Did I actually see the catch? I think I did. Did I see DiMaggio famously kick the dirt as he reached second, a moment replayed on countless television biographies of him because it was the rarest display of public emotion on his part? Again, I think I did. Who knows? Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

I think memories like this are critical to the current excitement in the city—baseball remains the most rooted of our sports and connects us to generations before, so that at a moment like this past and present merge. When I was young there were three teams in the city and all three were good. Since there were only 16 teams in both leagues and only about four or five of them were actually competitive, a Subway Series for a time seemed something of a New Yorker's birthright.

The last time two New York teams played in a Series, Dwight Eisenhower was running against Adlai Stevenson, the subway token was 15 cents and the door was just beginning to open for black and Hispanic players. In 1956 the Yankees, not exactly an affirmative action employer, were ever so timidly making their first accommodations to a more diverse sports world. Elston Howard had joined the club the year before. These days, on the occasion that El Duque pitches, the current Yankees will start as many as six players of black and Hispanic origin.

There was in those Octobers now past a great sense of celebration. A Subway Series helped New Yorkers do one of their favorite things—think about themselves. You could, in some of those years before television and air conditioning made their great strides forward, walk down the street in one of the boroughs, hear radios blasting out through open windows and never miss a play.

It's all different now. If you get in a cab these days the odds are slim (it must be those foreigners that John Rocker was complaining about) that the driver will care about baseball. Today's players are bigger, stronger, faster and much, much richer. Ballantine beer is gone, as are Old Gold cigarettes. Baseball no longer dominates the landscape of sports as it did. Because of television, by the late '50s and early '60s pro football was beginning to reach parity with pro baseball. But it's going to be fun here for about two weeks, and it's going to flood many of us with memories of what we will choose to think of as a simpler era and where we were on a given day when baseball ruled the city.

Normally getting just one team into a championship event serves to bring a community together, and people talk to each other about sports across the normal barriers of class, age, and ethnicity. A Subway Series is slightly different; it both unites and divides. Right now the city seems quite pleasantly wired for the event: after all, there's nothing more exciting than a war within a family, which in a way this is.

On a brief poll on our block, I find a doorman and a super who are for the Yankees, and a doorman and a super who are for the Mets. In our building, Ralph Thomas, who runs the elevator, is, I think, covertly for the Mets, but he's quite low-key about it because he knows that Jeff and Linda Drogin and I are Yankee fans.

The crowds will be noisier than in the past—there's less civility at the ballpark because there's less civility in the society. The networks may be worried about the lack of geographic diversity and its effect on ratings. The rest of the nation will probably be under-whelmed. After all, much of America, for reasons that continually perplex most New Yorkers, sees us as loud, noisy, and aggressive, above all insensitive to the nuances and pleasures and culture of other places. That is, the rest of the country sees New York much the way the rest of the world sees America.

Both teams seem to me very good, well balanced with good pitching. If anything, the Mets have been playing better all-around baseball for the last six weeks. But I'll go with my roots. The first game I remember hearing was in 1941, when Mickey Owen dropped Strike Three on Tommy Henrich and we still lived in the Bronx at the Grand Concourse and 174th Street. Rooting for the Yankees, it seems, is in my gene pool. Besides, I like Joe Torre. He's as decent and wise a man as I've met in professional sports. The Yankees in six or seven.

When it was time to arrange our schedule for Nantucket this summer—a watering hole that I have gone to for 32 straight years since I bought a house there as a young man—I was aware that we would have a shorter season than most because of various impending deadlines. But, year-round resident of Manhattan that I am, I was buoyed nonetheless by the fact that in addition to my other pleasures, if I skillfully bent my schedule to his, I would get to watch Pedro pitch three or four times, not in person, of course, but on television.

Pedro, naturally, is Pedro Martinez, and he is, to my mind, not merely the best pitcher in baseball today, but something rarer still—a genuine artist.

I say artist, because of the level of craftsmanship involved, the assortment of pitches, the variety of speeds, the perfection of location. Pedro Martinez is not only ahead of the hitters, he is ahead of the fans, the announcers, and most likely his own catcher.

Roger Clemens is having a great year, and his work ethic is admirable; he is still something of a power pitcher at 39 because of his remarkable offseason workout schedule. But though he has evolved from a power pitcher to a more complete pitcher, he is not an artist—what carries him is talent and willpower, and a true predator's desire to triumph. Pedro is an artisan; for the true fan, watching him pitch is like getting a lesson in the infinite possibilities of the game.

(If I refer to him as Pedro in this piece instead of Martinez, it is not that we are intimate pals; it is because that is the way the Boston fans—who feel they are intimate with him—refer to him.)

Therefore the chance to watch him work—or operate—was something I greatly looked forward to. Alas for me, and for millions of others, and especially for Boston fans and his teammates, Pedro has been suffering from an inflammation of his pitching shoulder since late June. So I am undergoing, like so many others, Pedro deprivation. His absence has surely cost the Red Sox five or six wins, but for me it was more personal; I now had something of a hole in my vacation schedule, and would have to be able to find other less leisurely sources of entertainment. Might I, in order to fill the void, have to learn to be a bird watcher, or take up tennis again or go on long bike rides or learn to play golf?

Still, that the Sox have stayed so close to the Yankees without Pedro and Nomar Garciaparra means that we will surely have something of a pennant race, even if the drama doesn't heat up until after my vacation. That the Red Sox have two great players like Martinez and Garciaparra strikes me as showing the hands of the gods at work, not unlike coming across for a long overdue bill—say, in return for Bill Buckner's misplay and Bucky Dent's home run. (I think the gods also had a hand in deciding that Nomar would play in Boston where his name could always be “Nomah.”)

And Martinez and Garciaparra are not just two of the very best in the game, but also two of the most likeable—players who self-evidently love the game and whose every move reflects it.

I have watched the Red Sox closely since the pennant-winning team of 1946, when I saw my first game at Fenway. That was the season that Dave Ferriss of Shaw, Miss., won 25 and lost six. Years later he told me that the crowds were so large and noisy that he would on occasion step off the mound and look around him, in order to take note that it was real, and that there were so many people out there cheering for him and who cared that much about what he was doing. I do not know if I have ever seen a more popular player there than Garciaparra (he seems to have played with Ty Cobb, his manager Jimy Williams once noted, describing his love of the game).

I do not want to get into some kind of competition here about which team in sport has the best or the most long-suffering fans, but from my own distinctly nonscientific survey, it strikes me that there is a commitment and a passion—and, finally, a loyalty—in New England for the Red Sox that is different and greater than that of all other sports fans. And so, I believe, New England fans deserve them both.

I have always suspected Red Sox fanaticism is the product of three exceptional confluences: the long, hard winter that makes ordinary fans long for the spring and the summer, with the symbol of it being baseball; the distinct geographic formation of greater New England that makes the Sox a truly regional team, a region totally connected by radio and television coverage of the team's games; and, finally, the Red Sox are almost always very good—which is to say, just good enough to break your heart.

How fortunate then that someone who loves the game so much and plays it with such elegance and intelligence as Pedro Martinez performs before fans who know what baseball is about and are able to appreciate and value his singular skills. He loves—and understands—the game, and it shows every time he pitches.

So I feel partially deprived this summer. I saw him in one game earlier in the year. I betook myself to Yankee Stadium with my friend Gay Talese, the writer, and we watched what was in effect a perfect game—not in the literal sense, but in the more figurative sense, in that it was baseball played in all ways to perfection. Martinez had hooked up with Mike Mussina, in what was simply one of those rare games when fans could understand that the teams were so evenly matched, that every pitch count mattered, and that every runner on base, even in the early innings, might be the deciding moment.

Mussina, for my money, though not really a power pitcher of Pedro's range, is also an artist, and great fun to watch. Though he can occasionally throw a fastball at 93 or 94, he does not live off his fastball. He is the ultimate pitcher's pitcher, he knows the craft, he lives off his intelligence, his sense of the hitters, a great instinct for location, and the ability to keep the hitters off-balance. Watching him pitch is like going back in time and watching Bob Feller hook up with a more powerful version Eddie Lopat—that is, a Lopat who in key moments could reach back and throw heat.

That day they both struck out 12. Mussina, remarkably, was the equal of Martinez. One of the great things about watching Pedro pitch is the pressure he puts on other teams—spot him a run, and it can seem like the biggest hole in the earth. The Red Sox took an early lead, but the Yankees scored twice, on a Bernie Williams home run and a run they scratched out. On this day, it was like watching two masters pitch. I did not keep a scorecard—I stopped scoring long ago—but if Mussina went to three balls on any batter, I have no memory of it. It was a very good pitcher rising to greatness, and exerting the maximum leverage on opposing hitters, because pitching against Martinez meant that he was allowed almost no mistakes.

Some colleagues of mine believe Pedro Martinez is the best pitcher ever. There are even statistics which point this way: He has the best winning percentage of any pitcher in baseball history; he is No. 2 in hits allowed per nine inning game, 6.73; he is No. 2 in strikeouts per nine innings, 10.36, right behind Randy Johnson; he has the lowest career ERA of any starting pitcher in the last 80 years—if you don't count Hoyt Wilhelm, who should not count because he was a knuckleballer, and there ought to be a separate category for them anyway; and, of course, about 10 other indices.

That seems a little heady, and it is very hard to compare different eras. Is he better than Koufax or Gibson or Carlton, or Feller, or Clemens, when they were in their prime? We might ponder that.

There are those great Koufax years: from 1961, when he finally discovered where the plate was and harnessed that great talent—up to then he seemed to be dangerously near being a reincarnation of Rex Barney, who it was said would have been a great pitcher if the plate had been high and outside—through 1966. In 1960, Koufax was just beginning to get there: He walked 100 and struck out 197. But the next year was the breakthrough one, an 18–13 record, 96 walks and 269 strikeouts, and it signaled the beginning of a great six-year run of almost complete domination, ending in 1966 with a 27–9, 317 strikeouts and only 77 walks, and an ERA of 1.73. Then, seemingly still in his prime, having pitched a total of 54 complete games in his last two season, he walked away from baseball at the age of 30.

Or Bob Gibson, in those marvelous mid-'60s and early-'70s years, when he was so dominating that they actually changed the level of the mound because of him. We can cite 1968, when he was 22–9, struck out 268 with only 62 walks, pitched 13 shutouts and 28 complete games—take that, Sandy!—had a season ERA of 1.12, and in one memorable game, a fierce and majestic prince on the mound, the drive and passion and ferocity clear for the entire nation to see, struck out 17 Tigers, a great fastball hitting team, in the World Series.