Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (11 page)

For two decades, the central affliction of big-league baseball has been its sagging batting averages. Last year, the cumulative National League average stood at .248, and the American League at .239. These are figures to be taken seriously by any baseball fan or baseball magnate not just because they indicate that the game is declining in pleasure and energy but because they suggest that today’s big-league stars are less capable than their famous predecessors. It is this unspoken belief that has the most serious effect upon the game’s national popularity, and yet it is probably false. In every sport where comparable performances can be fairly measured—track and swimming come to mind—the modern athlete regularly and overwhelmingly exceeds the best marks recorded twenty or thirty years ago. There is no reason to assume that the strength and capabilities of contemporary baseball players are an exception. The hitting drought, then, is almost certainly due to a number of technical alterations in the game—night baseball, bigger ball parks, bigger infielders’ gloves, the slider, the size and strength of today’s pitchers, and the vastly increased and more effective use of relief pitchers. The redress should be minimal and precise—a further alteration of the strike zone, a livelier baseball, a more visible baseball, a shaving of the dimensions of the plate. By some means, baseball must bring back its long-lost hero, the .350 hitter—who is, in all likelihood, the same deserving young slugger now struggling so earnestly to maintain himself at .275. The designated-hitter ruling simply misses the point: it is the
batters
who have been killing the game at the plate, not the pitchers. The DH is a hype.

Wrigley Field, in Chicago, is a splendid argument against baseball chic. Built in 1914, it was originally intended as the home park for the Chicago Whales, of the outlaw Federal League, but has served instead, of course, as the honored family mansion of the Cubs. No Monday night games will be televised from Wrigley Field this summer (or any other summer soon), because the Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, has as yet found no reason to install floodlights in the park. He believes that baseball is a sunshine game, best played by athletes who can see both the top and bottom halves of a baseball in flight, and best enjoyed by a family audience, and he has absolutely resisted the game’s first and most radical alteration. With one exception, all the other major-league clubs now play the great majority of their games at night; a good many of them—the Dodgers, the Astros, and the Royals, for example—schedule
all
their home games, except for Sundays or holidays, at night. At least half of the Giants’ home games are held in the afternoon, because in the evening their stadium, Candlestick Park, is comfortably habitable only by penguins. A mere handful of the other teams, including the Mets and the Indians, have made any attempt to hold some vestige of balance between day and night games and their dissimilar audiences. With baseball’s declining attendance figures, the question of whether the game should continue to throw itself wholly and perpetually into competition with prime-time television and other night entertainments is no longer a dated or insignificant issue.

P. K. Wrigley is not entirely unadaptable. In contrast to many of his competitors, who severely restrict the telecasting of their teams’ home games in order to compel fans toward the turnstiles, Wrigley has decreed that all the Cubs’ home engagements are to be televised. This particular convenience, to be sure, is enjoyed by Wrigley himself, who never attends a game at Wrigley Field; an intensely private man, he recently told a Chicago reporter that he was sometimes tempted to drop in on his team but always thought better of it because he knew that too many ushers would fuss over him. The Wrigley eccentricities are endlessly discussed in high baseball circles, mostly because the Cubs’ attendance has remained so healthy over the years; last season, the Cubs and their downtown rivals, the White Sox, both finished second in their divisions, and yet the Cubs’ afternoon audience was a shade larger than the Sox’ nightpeople—1,299,163 to 1,177,318. Chicago is a terrific baseball town.

I happily renewed acquaintance with the Cubbies and their habitat in early June, during two weekday-afternoon games against the Dodgers. Wrigley Field is one of the few remaining enclosures that still merit the title of “ball park”—a grassland enclosed by an ancient red brick wall and a gentle, curving, spacious sweep of stands, two levels high along the foul lines, that is surmounted by a low, shadowy pavilion roof. Unlike many of the surviving original stadiums, the place is handsomely tended and painted—an estate that matches the charms of the Petit Palais of the East, Fenway Park. In the outfield, the brick wall is entirely overgrown with ivy and rises toward elevated banks of bleacher seats. In 1969, when the Cubs led the league for most of the distance—only to fall disastrously before the onrushing Mets in September—the bleachers were inhabited by vociferous, beery, baiting hordes wearing yellow hardhats; the left-field pack was sometimes led in organized cheering by a Cub relief pitcher named Dick Selma. After a Cub victory, everyone waited to scream in unison when Ron Santo performed a happy leap and click of the heels as the Cubbies streamed out to their clubhouse in left field. This year, most of the hardhats are gone, the bleachers are filled to overflowing with teen-agers, and Ron Santo has given up his
entrechats.
The Cubs, who lost so bitterly under their old manager, Leo Durocher, are winning in more modest, and perhaps more mature, fashion under his successor, Whitey Lockman, who took the helm last summer. The club’s fixed stars—Santo, Billy Williams, Glenn Beckert, Don Kessinger, Fergie Jenkins—are, in truth, a bit more than mature, and Lockman has so far performed a subtle orchestration of his famous elders and eager juniors. The first thirteen wins by the Cub pitching staff this year were recorded by ten different pitchers, and second baseman Glenn Beckert was rested six times during the course of a twenty-six-game hitting streak. Whitey Lockman is cheerful, low-key, and approachable, and, as more than one Chicago fan has observed, enjoys the enormous initial advantage in his new job of not being Leo.

My appreciation of the Cubs was at first deflected by the visiting team, the Dodgers, who, having just completed the most successful May record of any club this year, arrived in Chicago leading the league in both batting and pitching and were, in fact, ascending rapidly toward their suite at the Top o’ the West. They bolted from the mark in the first game, jumping on Fergie Jenkins for four lightning-fast runs in the first, mostly thanks to a homer propelled completely out of the park by Ron Cey, the Los Angeles third baseman. (A stiff breeze was blowing out toward center field—a frequent local meteorological phenomenon that causes National League pitchers to mutter in their sleep.) Cey, a compact, bunchily muscled youngster with a wad of sandy hair protruding from his helmet, was a stranger to me, as were the new second baseman—a jackrabbit named Dave Lopes—and the catcher, Joe Ferguson, who was the current league leader in runs batted in. Ferguson and Cey have solved the Dodgers’ perennial problems at their respective positions. In the third inning, Ferguson helped to fashion a run by flicking a dandy hit-and-run single to right, deposited so precisely that Glenn Beckert, the Chicago second baseman, fell to his knees in his attempt to reach the ball as it hopped through the spot he had just vacated. All the Dodgers seemed transported with confidence, bashing out fifteen hits in a runaway 10–1 win. The Cubs were flat. In the fifth, their right fielder, José Cardenal, ran down a long drive by Willie Davis, which he seemed to glove just as he got to the center-field wall; looking around happily, with his arms still deep in the ivy, Cardenal was startled to see Davis streaking past second, and only then discovered the ball lying behind his left foot: triple.

The Cubs kept their self-possession, winning the next day. (One-game losing streaks have been their specialty this year.) They amputated another potential big first inning by the visitors with a fine peg and relay to third, wiping out Ferguson, who had overrun the bag by a foot or two, and then came back to knock out Don Sutton with two runs in the fifth and with four more in the sixth; along the way, we were given a picture double play—a lovely pastoral by the Chicago-school Old Masters, Beckert and Kessinger. The Cubs won, 6–4, surviving a ninth-inning scare by the scary Dodgers, and Cubs fans—opinionated adult critics with the sparrowlike alertness of old Brooklyn fans, and
swarms
of youngsters, including perhaps every eleven-year-old boy in the greater Chicago area—nearly split themselves in appreciation. I was grateful, too—for these fans and these teams, and for Mr. Wrigley. The day before, there had been a brief rain delay in the seventh inning—a mild shower that held things up for about twenty minutes. The people down front came up under the roof, and the ground crew put the tarp on and took it off and then put it on again, and some of the teen-age couples stayed in their seats, squashing happily together under newspapers and pieces of plastic. The little kids, their hair plastered down with rain, ran about in the aisles with their heads cricked back, catching rain in their open mouths. The organist kept playing (“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”), and the rest of us stayed in our seats and stretched and waited—no place to go, and nothing to hurry for—and in time the sun came out and lit up the wet, deep-green grass in the outfield. It was nothing—a summer moment, but part of other summers, too.

Baseball, we sometimes need reminding, is meant to be played by the young. This homely truth came back to me during some illustrated lectures by the visiting Giants at Shea Stadium. Although on the decline (this was mid-June, and the team had just lost three straight to Montreal), the San Francisco touring kindergarten, the youngest team in the majors, still included Dave Kingman, who is twenty-four, along with five .300 hitters among their regulars, and a dazzling new outfield—Gary Matthews, Garry Maddox, and Bobby Bonds—whose averages came out to twenty-four (age), .331 (batting), and 9.4 (hundred-yard dash, unofficial). I am a lifelong Giants fan, and since I understand that the unique quality of my club (even more distinctive than the June swoon) is its habit of discovering outstanding young baseball talent and then perversely trading it away (Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Jose Pagan, Gaylord Perry, the three Alou brothers, etc.), I looked on these new prodigies with what I can only call anticipatory nostalgia, as I prepared to say goodbye to them even in the act of saying hello. They did look dashing, particularly in the first game against the Mets. In the third inning, shortstop Chris Speier darted to his right to scoop up a grounder and somehow released the ball, all in the same instant, back over his shoulder to second base, in time for a force. A moment later, Gary Matthews ran back in deep left field for Felix Millan’s long drive, made a twisting, last-second leap, and plucked back the ball after it had cleared the bullpen fence. Speier, who is twenty-three, has range and a tremendous arm, and is something like a continuous surprise on the field. With the fading of Brooks Robinson, he is almost my favorite infielder.

The Mets persevered, dropping that first game by 2–1 and then capturing the brief series with 5–4 and 3–1 wins. They are, however, a team now so afflicted with injuries, bad luck, weak hitting, and disappointing pitching (especially by the bullpen) that even their victories are almost dispiriting. Their injury list, this year as last year, encompasses almost the entire club roster, and the current absence of Bud Harrelson, out with a broken wrist, has finally extinguished the last, low fires of 1969. No team can be blamed for injuries, but the Mets are suffering just as much from a plain dearth of talent; when compared with other clubs in their league—not just the Dodgers and Giants but also the likes of the new Phillies—they are a team truly without prospects.
*
One of their problems, it must be admitted, is Willie Mays, who is now, at forty-two, the oldest player in the National League and has so far resisted the clear evidence that he should retire. He plays sporadically, whenever he is well and rested, and gives his best, but his batting reflexes are gone, and so is his arm. In that opening game against the Giants, the first San Francisco run came in on a long double to the left-center-field fence struck by young Ed Goodson, the Giants’ third baseman. Mays chased down the ball at the fence, picked it up, and unexpectedly flipped it to his left fielder, George Theodore, an, innocent spectator of the action. Theodore was so surprised that he bobbled the ball for an instant before making the throw, far too late, to third. I had never seen such a thing. Theodore was given an error, but the horrible truth of the matter was that Mays was simply incapable of making the play. In the bottom of the same inning, Mays grounded out to short, and his batting average for the year slipped below .100. He has subsequently done a little better—.202, with three homers, at this writing—but his failings are now so cruel to watch that I am relieved when he is not in the lineup. It is hard enough for the rest of us to fall apart quite on our own; heroes should depart.

July 4: Boston at N.Y. (2): Ah, friends, can this be the real thing at last? The Yanks, in first place at the traditional mid-season milepost, in a holiday doubleheader against their ancient enemies the Red Sox! Our boys (strengthened by the recent purchase of two strong and combat-tested starting pitchers, Pat Dobson and Sam McDowell) have run off a record of 30–15 since May 20, winning fourteen of the last fifteen at home. How
about
that, fans? Yes, the crowds have materialized at last, in thickening numbers, and the Fourth is to be their reward—the first proper baseball celebration in the Bronx in almost a decade … and also the last Fourth here for some years to come, while the old ballyard is closed for major alterations. So come
on,
everybody. Nothing can spoil this day!

Well, almost nothing. As it turned out, our hosts for the afternoon, having gone to such pains to provide us with a memorable party, first dropped the watermelon off the back of the truck and then forgot to bring the fireworks—losing the first game by 2–1, on errors, and the second by 1–0, on vapid hitting. A miserable Fourth, in short, for most of the 41,693 of us who made the scene. The crowd itself was the only happening of the day—a hoarse, eager, sweating, half-dressed multitude that cheered hopefully and then derisively, that ate and drank without cease, flew paper airplanes, scattered trash, dropped showers of beer from the upper deck, set off salvos of firecrackers and ashcans, got into fights, roused itself again and again for shouted encouragement, and lapsed at last into irritated torpor. Handmade banners flew from the railings (“We Love You Bobby #1” for Bobby Murcer; “BA Boomer” for Ron Blomberg, who was leading the league in batting), and there were heads visible along the back wall of the very top deck—the sure sign of a huge, old-fashioned Stadium crowd, right out of the nineteen forties or fifties. All began eagerly and happily, with the home-team hitters—almost dangerous now, in our renewed and hopeful estimation—swinging for some hard, deep outs off the Boston starter, Ray Culp, and with Mel Stottlemyre setting down the visitors without strain. In the fourth inning, a wonderful baying of pleasure welcomed Bobby Murcer’s low homer into the right-field bullpen—a Yankee run that would have earned a longer commemoration if its unique nature had been appreciated at the time. The hot, damp afternoon wore along, and the audience, preoccupied with feeding its face and mopping its brow, sustained an uninterrupted cheerful racket, a deep undertow of noise, that suggested little anxiety about the difficult event at hand. Then, in the top of the ninth, Stottlemyre gave up a leadoff single to Reggie Smith—the cue, of course, for the Datsun and Sparky Lyle, the fabled reliever. Yastrzemski singled on Lyle’s second pitch. Cries of “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” from the top deck—a plea now utterly ignored by the Yankees. Cepeda dropped a tiny, unsurprising bunt in front of the plate that Thurman Munson somehow kicked away. Petrocelli fanned, but with the bases still loaded, Fisk rapped a bouncer to Nettles, who seemed to consider various options—Throw home? Step on third and then throw to first?—and finally chose the wrong one: a peg to second in time for one out but not nearly in time for the essential relay to first. That throw got away from Blomberg, who chased down the ball, saw Yastrzemski sprinting in from third, and bounced a wild heave past Munson which allowed the second run to score. Disaster. The Yanks, in their half, put their lead runner aboard, but Matty Alou’s pinch-hit bunt was too deep, ruining the sacrifice, and a few minutes later, the shouting was over—a game literally thrown away.