Everything They Had (21 page)

One of the things that has always fascinated me when looking at men who are engaged in fierce pursuits, in the military or sports, for example, is the difference between being strong and being tough. Steinbrenner, for whatever insecurities, has always struck me as someone who wants to be tough (there was an unusually stupid Howard Cosell piece about him years ago which called him the George Patton of the Yankees—though, of course, Steinbrenner had never heard a shot fired in anger), but does not know the difference between being tough and strong. From his own background, and from his own self-doubt, I suspect, come a certain amount of swaggering, bullying and tough guy talk, as if that is the way real tough guys talk.

Torre is, very quietly, something quite different. He is quietly strong—a strength that comes from a healthy sense of accurately appraised self-value, and a willingness, if need be, to walk away from any situation which might be unacceptably difficult or abusive. As such, there has been an invisible line drawn in the sand at the Stadium without him ever having to draw it. Because of that, he has not only done an exceptional job managing the Yankees, but has also helped do something that a number of us thought once could not have been done—he has helped turn George Steinbrenner, though still a work in progress, into a good owner.

In late August of 1946, When I was 12, I watched Ted Williams hit the most vicious drive I have ever seen. The ball, in my memory at least, was still soaring majestically when it hit the seats in the third tier in Yankee Stadium. Forty-two years later, when I was 54 and he was nearly 70, I spoke with Williams about the drive, both of us magically still boys on this date because of the subject matter. As I did, and as the details of that game all came back, I watched a smile spread over his face. “Tiny Bonham,” he said at the end, naming the Yankee pitcher. I am sure he remembered the exact quality of the light and what Bonham threw as well.

He remembered because he was highly intelligent and he employed the full force of that ferocious, aggressive intelligence in the pursuit of only one objective: being the greatest hitter who ever lived, which he might well have been. Pitchers, in his words, were dumb by breed, and he studied them constantly looking for, and usually finding, their weaknesses.

He transcended baseball. He was a link not just to one of baseball's golden eras, the last man to bat over .400. He also had served during two wars that have long since passed into history and was someone our parents and grandparents had seen play, and about whom they surely had strong opinions. He leaves men of my generation still debating the same questions we argued about when we were boys: What he might have done had he played in Yankee Stadium, with its more accessible right-field seats; and what his statistics might have been had he not had to give up nearly five full seasons to military service.

Difficult and cantankerous when he was young, and easily wounded, he had been the victim of some of the sleaziest journalism of modern times, particularly on the part of the Boston sportswriters whose tabloid papers were struggling to survive in a too crowded field. But he always held true to his own beliefs; reporters were, in his phrase, “knights of the keyboard.” How amused he might have been with the coverage of his death. He led the evening news on ABC and the two surviving Boston papers treated his passing as a virtual state event.

Relatively late in life, considerably mellowed, he let the world in to see him. What we saw was a surprisingly warm and generous man, someone rich within himself, who had always lived by his own codes and to his own specifications when it was immensely costly to him. The things he did, both good and bad, he did because he could never do otherwise.

The defining Ted Williams moment came on the last day of the 1941 season. He was hitting .39955 that morning, which in baseball statistical terms rounds off to .400. Joe Cronin, the Boston manager, offered to let him sit—the .400 would be his. No way that Ted Williams was going to sit that out: he played both games of a doubleheader, went 6 for 8, and finished with a .406 average, well outside the reach of purists. We can only imagine the pressure that, in today's society, agents and advertisers would use in begging a lineal successor not to go out and risk so much for so little.

He was a completely authentic man and he never bent to fashion; he remained to his final days the unvarnished man. His failure to wear a tie in an era when ballplayers were supposed to wear ties, particularly at events in their honor, was more than a fashion statement, it was a statement of personal freedom: if he showed, he showed as Ted Williams. It also reflected the fact that he was completely comfortable in the universe of baseball but quite uncomfortable in the larger universe around it. He had great status in the former and was completely uncomfortable with status as granted in the latter. When he retired from baseball, he moved to Islamorada, Fla., where in lieu of his former teammates, his pals became the local fishing guides—grizzled, rough men with much the same earthy view of life. Nor did he doubt that as one of the most passionate fishermen of our time, he could fly-cast better than they could.

He was politically conservative but in his core the most democratic of men. Few players of his generation championed the rise of black athletes as he did. His speech at his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1966 is notable for its generosity to Willie Mays: “The other day Willie Mays hit his 522nd home run. He has gone past me and he's pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get 'em, Willie.'” Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as anyone else, but to be better. That is the nature of man and the name of the game.

What he loved most of all was hitting. No one ever did it better. He was among the first of the great power hitters to go to a much lighter bat because bat speed was of the essence, and whippier was better. He even noticed that in the summer, on moist muggy days, bats picked up extra weight from the grass, perhaps a critical half ounce, which would be 1.5 percent of the total weight. Some teammates argued with him. Off they all went to the post office to weigh the bats. Williams was right, of course.

Once when he was younger he was called out on strikes at Fenway. He came back to the dugout ranting and raving about the injustice of the call, and more, the fact that home plate was out of line—that, he said, was why the umpire had blown the call. Some of the Boston pitchers teased him about it, a serious mistake on their part. So the next day Joe Cronin went out and measured the lines and as ever Williams was right—it was out of line.

So here is our chance to make one last correction. Keep all the other records, the career .344, the 521 home runs and the career on-base percentage of .482. But change the career strikeout number from 709 to 708. It's the least we can do.

My friend Richard Berlin and I had spent four days up on the Tabusintac River in New Brunswick, happily fishing for giant brook trout, and now we were on our way back to the United States. About 50 miles from Presque Isle, Maine, where we would board our plane back to Boston, we finally picked up the Red Sox–Yankees game on the radio, the last of a three-game series.

By the time we could hear it, the Yankees were leading 7–6, and Jeff Weaver, whose arrival in New York from Detroit had seemingly threatened to throw baseball permanently out of kilter, was pitching. At that moment, Weaver, in the words of one of the Boston announcers, could smell the end of his day's work, and his seemingly sure victory. Then Nomar Garciaparra hit a two-run homer to put the Red Sox ahead, the fifth of the day off Weaver, a man who had only a few weeks ago seemed to have ended competitive baseball.

Berlin, a man of Boston, was thrilled. I—who was born in the Bronx, grew up in New England, live in New York but have a summer house in Massachusetts, and loved the older Red Sox players I met when I did a book on the 1949 Yankees–Red Sox pennant race—had mixed feelings.

I feel a certain orbital pull to the Yankees, by dint of living in the same city and the inevitable emotional pull toward players you watch almost every day on television, but I feel a different kind of emotional pull to the Red Sox, particularly because they have over the years seemed overwhelmed by their fates (or by their DNA). My good friend Marty Nolan, the distinguished and now retired
Boston Globe
editor, once summed up the frustrations of being a lifelong Red Sox fan by saying, “They killed my father, and now they're coming after me.”

In theory, a Red Sox victory fits in with my greater code of fairness, and yet because I'm a New Yorker, there is a sense of having more complicated feelings. I can be as nostalgic about Williams, Doerr, Pesky and DiMaggio, as I can about Keller, Henrich and DiMaggio.

I told Berlin simply that I did not think this one was over yet and that the Yankees' strength was their bullpen. Radio remains a marvelous instrument by which to pick up and enjoy baseball, and in the ninth inning with Ugie Urbina pitching, and Jason Giambi batting, our rented SUV was as good as being in the ballpark. Giambi is a very good hitter, one of those rare players who, inflationary salary or not, is worth almost what he is paid. He has an uncommon eye, he picks the ball up very quickly, and he knows his job, which means that he knows it is as important in certain situations to get on base as it is to hit a home run.

Urbina had Giambi 0-2, starting him out, joy of joys, with a change. And then Giambi using all his skills, hung in, and worked the count, fouling off good pitches, until he finally hit a dribbler against the Boston shift, and started what would be the winning rally. All in all, it was a great at-bat. And then the Red Sox fell apart. It had been, though we had missed the first two games, baseball at its very best, two very good teams representing two heralded franchises, playing at almost exactly even levels. Giambi vs. Urbina had showcased one of the very best hitters in baseball working against a tough, nasty reliever.

There had been little more any serious fan could ask for in terms of confrontation—if the Yankees won, they would go up four games, if Boston won, it would be behind only two and would continue to show that it could outplay the Yankees in head-to-head competition. Both now had ownerships that seemed to reflect the passion of their fans. The Yankees had improved themselves over the offseason, but the Red Sox had improved themselves perhaps even more, and they might have, unlikely though it might have seemed before the season started, better starting pitching than the Yankees, and they seemed to have the most un–Red Sox–like of attributes, considerable team speed, and better fielding than in the past. They did something that few Red Sox teams have ever done—they fielded better than their Yankee rivals.

I mention all this because we are being told that a strike is imminent—that the date has even been picked out, Sept. 16; the people who make these decisions do not, after all, for reasons of good manners want it to be before Sept. 11 because they do not want to look petulant and spoiled on the anniversary of the terrorist bombings. That might not be good public relations, and good public relations are very important these days.

Perhaps sometime after that special date the players will walk out. So be it. If they walk, they walk. We have been told for more than a year and a half that a strike (or a lockout) is in the cards, that the differences between the sides are irreconcilable, and that if the players don't walk at a certain point the owners will lock them out.

The truth is, that in all that time as far as I can tell, there has not been the slightest serious movement on either side for any kind of settlement. No give at all. A commissioner, whose own baseball team seems to be the prototype for a kind of perennial loser, runs the show. (As I write, Milwaukee is a mere 22 games below .500, and a mere 22½ games behind St. Louis. Only Tampa Bay, that most storied franchise of franchises, has lost more games in all of major league baseball. Is there anyone connected to baseball who does not think that if Peter Gammons was given this same franchise with the same budget, and had two years to move players around, he would not have somehow come up with a much better, younger, more interesting team?)

What we have is a world of greed and arrogance and some measure of stupidity: arrogant owners, arrogant players, and arrogant agents. No one willing to work on (or even try to come up with) any kind of formula that would give even the semblance of negotiation. The idea—I suppose this is the genius of it—is to wait until the very moment when fan interest should be at its peak, when the pennant races are in full bloom, and then turn it all off. The fans will be angry, it is presumed, and will demand some kind of action. I'm not so sure.

I have no strong feelings at all on this one because I gave up thinking long ago that the conflicting sides care very much. I see no point in caring more about baseball than the chief operators and chief beneficiaries do; that is, the people who are ostensibly in charge of its health and who make their living off the game.

So if they want to walk, it's all right with me. If they can't find an equitable formula for revenue sharing, to give the game some measure of economic balance, they don't deserve to be in charge of, or profit from the game. The players have turned out to be capitalists, very shrewd ones at that, and the owners are caught between being capitalists and hobbyists, and have lost control of their own domain over a period of years.