Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (23 page)

The Yanks were not quite done. They swept a four-game home series from the Indians and were back in first by a single game when the Red Sox came to Shea on September 24 and won both games of a wintry twi-night doubleheader. That was the stunner. Luis Tiant, the venerable Cuban master, threw a six-hit, 4–0 shutout in the opener, thereby achieving his twenty-first win, after five successive defeats. (Exactly one month earlier, he had been the first pitcher in the majors to win his twentieth game of the season, and the Sox had been comfortably ahead. “In baseball,” he said now, puffing a post-game cigar as he soaked his arm in ice water, “you don’t know
nothin’.”
) The Bosox won the nightcap by 4–2 as the Yankees and their fans both began to come apart a little. Bobby Murcer fell on the base paths and was tagged out, and there were two errors by the Yankee infield and an unearned Boston run. On the scoreboard, the Orioles, playing at home, trailed for a time, but then they came back and beat the Tigers and took over first again (for good, this time, it turned out), and the shivering, unsatisfied 46,448-man crowd at Shea fell into disputation and anger, showering the field with firecrackers and old tennis balls. In the seventh, the game was stopped for several minutes while squads of special police separated the participants in three or four violent and prolonged fistfights and pulled them, writhing, from the stands. This was September baseball—or a part of it, at least. There was something cold and miserable about it, beyond the pain and disappointment of watching a whole, long summer’s work going for nothing. Winter was coming. Both clubhouses were quiet that night. Bobby Murcer, asked about the violent fans, said, “I don’t blame ’em. Tonight, I wanted to get up there and whale with them.”

The next Saturday—a cool, drizzly afternoon—I began a vigil in front of my television set, and tried to keep up with things. Less than a week of baseball remained. The Cardinals and the Cubs were scheduled for Channel 4 on the NBC Game of the Week, the Yankees were away for a double-header in Cleveland on Channel 11, and the Mets were entertaining the Pirates at Shea on Channel 9, so most of the contenders were available to me. The Yanks sprang away to a quick 2–0 lead over Gaylord Perry, on a homer by Ron Blomberg, and out in Chicago, on a gloomy day, the Cub and Cardinal pitchers worked two quick scoreless innings. Switching channels, I became aware of distractions. On Channel 7, Texas Tech was leading Texas in football—a possible upset there—and on Channel 5 W. C. Fields was suddenly visible at work in a grocery store. Could it be? It was: Channel 5 was running a super Fields movie,
It’s a Gift.
On Channel 4, Cub pitcher Rick Reuschel knocked down Ken Reitz with a pitch, then fanned him. On 11, Pat Dobson put away the Indians one-two-three, throwing mostly sliders. On Channel 5, Fields wrapped up a five-cent order of chewing gum with paper and string while a customer shouted “Where are my
kumquats?”
On Channel 4, Reuschel walked Ted Simmons. It was beginning to rain out there in Chicago. On Channel 9, they were taking off the tarpaulin at Shea—a delayed start. On Channel 7, Texas Tech had gone up by 26–3. Back on Channel 5, W. C. Fields called out to a blind man, “Sit still, Mr. Muckle, honey!” but Mr. Muckle blundered into an enormous display rack of light bulbs. I could not tarry. Back to Channel 11, where Elliott Maddox ripped a double down the left-field line. The Indians held a mound conference and decided to pitch to Ron Blomberg (“Which I like to see,” Phil Rizzuto announced), and Blomberg hit his second home run into the right-field upper deck, for a 5–0 Yankee lead. On Channel 5, Baby LeRoy hit Fields on the elbow with a can of clams. On Channel 9, the Pirates were leading, 1–0. On Channel 4, NBC had given up on the delayed Game of the Week and was offering a costume drama in its place: Tyrone Power, wearing tights, was in prison. Someone was asking him to sign a confession of heresy; Power smiled enigmatically. On Channel 9, Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh yelled at an umpire. On Channel 5, W. C. Fields groaned as he attempted to go back to sleep on a porch swing up on a third-floor balcony; a man on the ground was calling up to him asking for someone named Carl LaFong. “Carl LaFong!” he shouted. “Large ‘C,’ small ‘a,’ small ‘r,’ small ‘l,’ large ‘L,’ small ‘a,’ large ‘F,’ small ‘o’ …” On Channel 7, Texas Tech kicked off to Texas, and the ball went right out of the end zone. I looked out my study window and saw that it had cleared up a little, and took my son out to the park for a quick snootful of air.

When we got back, Richie Zisk was in the act of hitting a homer for the Pirates off Tug McGraw on Channel 9, and the Pirates were leading the Mets by 6–1. The scoreboard at Shea showed that the Yankees had won their first game against the Indians, 9–3. The game in Chicago had resumed, with the Cubs ahead by 4–3 in the seventh; NBC had blown it. W. C. Fields had vanished from Channel 5. Apparently, Channel 11 was not going to telecast the second Yankee game; an Abbott and Costello program was on instead. The Orioles would not play until evening.…

Three nights later, again encamped at the tube, I watched the Yankees lose to the Brewers, 3–2, in Milwaukee, thus delivering the divisional pennant to the Orioles. It was terrifically cold in Milwaukee, and the stands were almost deserted. In the bottom of the eighth, a long drive to right field was misplayed by Maddox and Piniella, and the Brewers tied the game at 2–2. The ball could have been caught by Bobby Murcer, the regular right fielder, but he was absent because of the injury he had suffered in that senseless hotel-lobby scuffle. None of the Yankee telecasters explained this; baseball announcers work for the club and are not encouraged to give out bad news. On this evening, however, their obligatory ebullience faded to whispers in the tenth inning, when the Brewers put the game and the Yankees away at last.

The playoffs were swift, tasty, light—a confection of baseball pleasures. I went first to Pittsburgh, and repeated a favorite autumn stroll of mine—over the Fort Duquesne Bridge to Three Rivers Stadium, with the water taxis churning up the sparkling Allegheny below, the sound of a band playing somewhere, the eager early arrivals filing along quietly together, and our expectation almost visible in the soft sunshine. Most of all, I looked forward to watching the Dodgers, a young and wonderfully talented club that had led its division all year and had fought off a scary challenge by the Cincinnati Reds that was a good deal too reminiscent of the late charge to which Los Angeles succumbed the summer before. This year, the Reds had closed to within a game and a half of the Dodgers on September 15, but a grand-slam homer by Dodger outfielder Jimmy Wynn beat them that day and, it turned out, broke them for the year. The Dodgers had pitching and speed and power—they led their league in homers and collective earned-run average—and absolute self-confidence. The Pirates’ record, by contrast, was built on plain hitting—by warm young bats like Richie Zisk and Al Oliver, and heavy boppers like Willie Stargell and Richie Hebner. Their pitching, never much to admire, had been weakened by the loss of Dock Ellis. The Dodgers, however, had not won a game in Pittsburgh all year.

All such speculation dwindled away and became perfectly useless in the course of the next couple of hours, as the Dodgers’ starter, Don Sutton, shut out the Pirates, 3–0, with four bare singles. It was a sight to remember—a fine pitcher working nine innings at a pinnacle of knowledge, strength, delicacy, and control, and so dominating the event that everything else that happened on the field became nearly superfluous. The Dodgers, for the record, scored once in the second, on a pair of singles and a pair of walks off Pirate starter Jerry Reuss, and twice in the ninth, on three hits and a stolen base. Sutton, a right-hander, was not overpowering; he gave up one walk and struck out six. Above all, perhaps, he was intelligent, adjusting every pitch to the precise situation and batter at hand, controlling the corners, throwing patterns—up and in, out and away, curve and fastball and slider—and reaffirming the enormous imbalance between hurler and hitter that makes baseball look so difficult when pitching is at its prime. Afterward, Sutton admitted that no more than four of his deliveries had disappointed him. “I’d like to write this game down in a textbook and use it for the rest of my career,” he said. The performance could not have come as a total surprise to him, however, since it was his tenth victory in a row and his fourteenth in his last fifteen games. I had previously seen Sutton at Dodger Stadium in June, when he was suffering through a frustrating and depressing slump. Manager Walter Alston had left him alone, permitting him to work out his problem while he absorbed six consecutive losses. “It’s just some little mistake,” Alston told me at the time. “Probably his body is not in exactly the right position over his leg when he delivers. It’s puzzling, but you have to be patient. Pitching is a subtle thing.”

A few more Dodgers got into the act the next afternoon, when a 5–2 win for the visitors put the unhappy Pirates into a very deep hole. (Three losses in the Championship Series means elimination, of course, and so far in the series’ six-year history a two-game deficit has invariably proved fatal.) Andy Messersmith, the Dodgers’ only twenty-game winner this year, continued the starvation of the Pirate sluggers, giving up nothing but singles. The golden Californians won in characteristic style, getting on the board in the first inning with a ringing single by their young first baseman, Steve Garvey (a picture-book hitter, who batted .312 this year, knocking out 200 hits and delivering 111 runs), and then breaking the game open in the eighth with three runs. Third baseman Ron Cey started things off with his second successive double (he was four for five on the day, with nine total bases), and then shortstop Bill Russell laid down a perfect, killing bunt to the left side, which catcher Manny Sanguillen threw hopelessly to third base. Then Crawford bonked a little handle-hit over the drawn-in infield, and Mota singled and Lopes singled, and Sanguillen added a wild pickoff throw—five successive hits and a little luck, too, but the Pirates had clearly been cracked apart by the pressure of speed and eager, winning baseball. Cey’s outburst at the plate also looked lucky, until one noticed that he had driven in ninety-seven runs in the season—one more than Willie Stargell.

I now bade farewell to the two NL squads, who were off to Chavez Ravine for the rest of their exercises. (The Pirate bats, it will be recalled, came alive there one afternoon, for a 7–0 Pittsburgh victory, in which Stargell and Hebner homered. The following day, the Dodgers took the pennant with a gruesome 12–1 laugher.) My next engagement was the renewal of the A’s-Orioles playoff rivalry in Baltimore—by now an autumn event nearly as heartwarming and as poorly attended as an Ivy League football game. The teams here were back from the West tied at one game apiece; the Orioles, finding Catfish Hunter uncharacteristically wild and high, had whacked him for three homers and a 6–3 victory, and had then been stopped cold by Ken Holtzman, 5–0.

The pitching matchup in game three looked unfair—Jim Palmer, whose Championship Series record for the Orioles was four victories and no defeats, against Vida Blue, who had never won a playoff game or a World Series game, being 0–2 in each category. Everyone knew Vida’s pattern—blinding heat for a time, then a slight lapse in concentration, a few walks, a reduction of speed in favor of control, then a couple of telling base hits, and, all too often, another game gone. Absolutely true, except that here in Baltimore it didn’t happen. Instead, it was Vida nonstop; Vida burning with concentration and impatience; Vida overpowering everything and everyone, including himself; Vida wall-to-wall. He threw 101 pitches, all but six of them fastballs, gave up two singles, struck out seven batters, walked none, and came in with a 1–0 victory in less than two hours. It was another nearly awesome performance, but one that bore almost no relation to Sutton’s game; one felt that the two pitchers might have been engaged in different sports. For that matter, there was still a third splendid and courageous effort—Jim Palmer’s losing four-hitter. Palmer has been afflicted with an injury to the ulnar nerve in his pitching arm this year, and he now throws very few fastballs. All the same, he went the distance, too, facing only two more batters than Blue did, and the game eventually turned on a brief personal duel between him and Sal Bando in the fourth, when Bando fouled off several pitches and then lined a home run into the left-field stands. “I should have walked him,” Palmer murmured afterward. Manager Weaver, summing up Blue’s great game, said, “Our best shot against him was ball four, and he never threw it all day.”

Pitching is very nearly the whole story in the playoffs, and so it was again on the final afternoon. A one-hitter
must
be a pitching story, even if that hit is accompanied by eleven walks, even if the other team wins, and even if everyone in the stands is driven absolutely bananas by the anxiety and emptiness and disappointment of it all. Mike Cuellar, the Oriole junk man, is a famously slow starter, so no one was much surprised when he walked the bases loaded in the first inning before recording the third out. On this day, however, he never did find his accustomed groove on the outer fringes of the strike zone. Hunching his shoulders and growling at the home-plate umpire, he threw an intolerable number of near-misses and full counts, until at last, with two out in the fifth, he walked Bando, walked Jackson, threw a wild pitch, walked Rudi on purpose, walked Tenace by mistake, and was gone, responsible for no hits and no satisfaction. The other Oakland run came in the seventh, on the team’s only safety—a double by Jackson that scored Bando all the way from first. Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers kept the door closed on the Orioles until the ninth, when a walk and two singles brought in the first Baltimore counter in thirty innings. But, with the tying run on third base and the Oriole fans screaming and weeping and pleading, Fingers fanned Don Baylor, to win the game, 2–1, and wrap up the third straight Oakland pennant. California, here we came.

The series was called to order before the largest (and perhaps happiest) crowd in the history of Dodger Stadium, and in the midst of the liveliest kind of advance speculations. The Dodgers’ team statistics for the year were the best in their league, overall, while the World Champions presented more clouded data: the finest pitching (by far) in the AL but a flaccid .247 team batting average (twenty-five points below the Dodgers’). The All-Cal final offered an even more vivid difference in personalities and living styles. The Dodgers—somehow personified by their shining new star Steve Garvey—were young, modest, articulate, polite, intelligent, optimistic, brave, clean, reverent … They very much suggested a UCLA or USC varsity baseball team, and the campus image was reinforced by their gentle, fatherly manager and by a front office (or dean’s office) that liked to talk about an ineffable, enlightened, shared motivation pervading and guiding the entire organization—a spirit known as “Dodger Blue.” The two-time-champion A’s were something else—whiskery veterans, grown men, distinct and famously quarrelsome personalities, stars who were motivated by their own reputations and the team’s fame and success but also, quite openly, by money. Their manager, Alvin Dark, had brought the team home in spite of the players’ known fondness and respect for his predecessor, Dick Williams, and their bitterness over the meddling of owner Charles O. Finley, which had caused Williams to give up the reins. Dark, who is a devoutly religious Baptist, had not had an easy summer of it (“You couldn’t manage a meat market!” team captain Sal Bando said to him one day), and there were other causes for contention, including Finley’s latest
coup de tête:
the signing and use of an athlete who had never played a day in organized ball until he joined the A’s. He was Herb Washington, a world-class professional sprinter, whom Finley, via Dark, employed frequently as a pinch-runner. Finley, the inventor and promulgator of the designated hitter, is now campaigning to admit designated base runners to the game, and Washington was his showpiece, or puppet. Learning the rudiments of the game as he went along, Washington stole twenty-nine bases this summer, and was caught stealing sixteen times—not a useful percentage. The company line on Washington, repeated at frequent intervals by Alvin Dark, was “He won eight games for us this year”—to which various old regulars responded with a muttered “Yeah, and how many games did he take us out of?”