Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (50 page)

Famished for a pennant race, I packed a bag on the last Monday of the regular season and impulsively flew to Oakland, where the young Kansas City Royals were opening a three-game set against the veteran, campaign-hardened A’s, who now suddenly trailed them by only four and a half games. The Royals, who had fallen into an epochal batting slump, had scored a total of five runs in their last five games. My trip almost made up for the whole bland summer. In the first game, a rain-delayed affair played before an enormous and cacophonous Family Night (i.e., half-price) audience, the A’s had to abandon their customary go-go, base-stealing offense because of the slow track, but by the fourth inning they had begun to whack some long line shots off the Royals’ starter, Dennis Leonard, including a homer by a newly acquired late-season helper, Ron Fairly. The Royals evened things up at 3–3, with pokes off Vida Blue by their marvelous hitting duo of George Brett and Hal McRae, but Fairly, in his next at-bat, in the fifth, hit a double off the wall, eventually coming around to score, and Sal Bando led off the sixth with another screamer, which disappeared over the center-field fence. This was clearly more than enough for Leonard, whose next pitch, by no mischance, caught Don Baylor on the right shoulder, thus emptying both benches and bullpens. The lengthy ensuing scrimmage around the mound was eventually dispersed, but it resumed almost immediately, with different topography and tactics, out at the visitors’ bullpen in short right field, where some hometown fans had been showering the K.C. pitchers with beer—not a trifling insult, since some of the Oakland Coliseum beer containers are half-gallon jobs. Six of the malt-dampened relief men eventually got into the game, to little avail, as the A’s won by 8–3.

The next evening, after another rainstorm, we were given a perfect counterpiece to these rowdy doings—a thrilling pitching duel between Oakland’s Mike Torrez and the Royals’ Marty Pattin, who is a slider specialist. Pattin limited the on-rushing A’s to four hits, but lost, 1–0, to Torrez’s two-hitter. The game distilled itself into two splendid moments. In the third, with Fred Patek on second base for the visitors, Tom Poquette smashed a Torrez fastball on a lofty arc toward the left-center-field wall; Joe Rudi, running at full tilt from the moment the ball was struck, slithered and splashed through the mud of the warning track and made a sailing, last-second grab at the base of the wall, saving a sure triple and a run, and then easily doubled up Patek, who was well around third by the time the great catch was made. Then Sal Bando, leading off in the seventh, duelled with Pattin for several minutes, fouling off pitches repeatedly until he found the one he wanted, a fastball, and drove it into the left-field seats for the only run of the day.

This was my farewell taste of such famous Oakland specialties. I could not stay for the next game, in which the Royals’ Larry Gura at last closed the door on the Oakland hopes, winning by 4–0; the A’s were eliminated two nights later, when they lost to the Angels in twelve innings. I also missed the champagne party in the A’s clubhouse after the last game of the season, when six of the newborn Oakland free agents—Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Campy Campaneris, and Don Baylor—celebrated a moment more exquisite than a mere championship: liberation from Charles O. Finley.

Any observations here about the Phillies, whom I watched in their home park as they dropped their first two playoff games to the Cincinnati Reds, will strike Philadelphia fans as being typically insufficient and unfair. (Lifelong Phillies fans closely resemble the victims of a chronic sinus condition; they sometimes feel better, but never for long.) Their team, of course, will now be remembered mostly for having almost collapsed in the later stages of the pennant race and then playing miserably in the championship playoffs, but such is the heartless way of the world. The Phillies did in fact finish strongly, winning thirteen of their last sixteen after their late-summer catalepsy, and ended with 101 victories in the regular season. Their lineup offered three .300 hitters (Jay Johnstone, Garry Maddox, and Greg Luzinski), three genuine slugging threats (Luzinski, Mike Schmidt—who led the majors with thirty-eight homers—and Dick Allen); a splendid double-play combination in shortstop Larry Bowa and second baseman Dave Cash; and three tough, experienced front-line pitchers (Steve Carlton, Jim Lonborg, and Jim Kaat). On paper, the club looked almost a match for the Reds. Those first games, however, were played on the faded green Tartan Turf carpet of Veterans Stadium—where the Phillies, strangely enough, seemed not at all at home. They lost the opener by 6–3, largely because of some frightful defense—right fielder Ollie Brown played two singles into triples, and Larry Bowa allowed two routine grounders to skid under his glove untouched—and because the home-team pitchers, Carlton and Tug McGraw, permitted the speedy Cincinnati base runners to take enormous leads off first base, thus encouraging four stolen bases and the infliction of a debilitating nervousness on the Philadelphia defense. Anxiety, of course, is the Reds’ prime weapon; their speed and power and opportunism and experience breed the conviction in the opposing team that it must play an almost superhuman level of baseball to have any kind of a chance. This is the same brain fever that used to afflict opponents of the old, all-conquering Yankees. The state of mind became perfectly visible the next afternoon, when the Phillies started off in much better fashion, and actually led by 2–0 after five innings. Jim Lonborg had not permitted any Cincinnati hits at all in this span, but he began the sixth by walking Dave Concepcion—an apparently insignificant lapse that seemed utterly to destroy his concentration and control. His elbow began to drop down and his pitches came up; singles by Pete Rose and Ken Griffey swiftly produced a run, center fielder Garry Maddox threw to a wrong base, and within a bare few minutes Lonborg and the Phillies’ lead were gone together, and the Reds won again, this time by 6–2.

It is not suggested here that this Reds Fever is purely psychosomatic or easily resistible. The next—and, this time, fatal—onset of the disease came in the bottom of the ninth inning of the third game, which was played in Cincinnati and watched by me on television. The Reds at this point were behind in the game by 4–6—a deficit and a setting that suddenly caused me to recall a leadoff home run under almost identical circumstances, hit by Johnny Bench against the Pirates in 1972, and
two
catch-up homers, by Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, that ruined Tom Seaver and the Mets in a 1973 playoff game. The same frightful visions undoubtedly came shimmering into the mind of Ron Reed, the Phillies’ pitcher, who worked too carefully on the Reds’ leadoff hitter, George Foster, ran up a 1–2 count, and came in, unnecessarily, with a fastball, which Foster hit for a homer. Reed repeated the process exactly with the next batter, Bench, with exactly the same inexorable, incredible result. The game was tied, and Reed’s jittery, doom-stricken successors then swiftly gave up the single (by Concepcion), walk, sacrifice, intentional walk, and infield chopper (by Griffey) that meant the game and the pennant.

I also tried to take in the first two games of the Royals-Yankees playoffs, in Kansas City, by television, but the medium just about wiped out the message. In the first game, the Yankees left the post swiftly, scoring two runs in the very first inning on a pair of singles and a pair of throwing errors by the Royals’ third baseman, George Brett—a winning margin right there, since Catfish Hunter, who started for the visitors, was in impeccable form, giving up five hits (three of them by Brett) and a lone run, for a 4–1 win. In the second game, played on Sunday evening, the Yanks rapped out twelve hits but played egregiously afield, committing five errors, while losing, 7–3; Paul Splittorf, coming on for K.C. in relief in the third inning, was the winning pitcher. These minimal messages would seem well within the capabilities of a major television network, but ABC almost buried them under a mind-bending barrage of statistics, color, bad jokes, personality struggles, distracting intercut interviews with players and other people (this often while the game was actually in progress), useless information, misinformation—and rivers, estuaries, tidal basins, oceans of talk. (I will not bother to complain about the commercials, except to mention a series of repellent house ads touting baseball as an institution or a way of life, and a super-schlock promotion, evidently approved by the Commissioner, in which a man from the Rolaids company was permitted to give an award to somebody as the Relief Pitcher of the Year.) ABC took up baseball for the first time this summer, and, by general critical consensus, had formidable difficulties with the old pastime. The telecasting team that the network dispatched to Kansas City did not, for some reason, include either of its two best baseball reporters—Al Michaels (who was doing the Phillies-Reds games) and Bob Gibson. This three-man crew was captained by Howard Cosell, and included Bob Uecker and a visiting celebrity-expert, Reggie Jackson. Mr. Cosell has been a long-term disparager of baseball, which he considers to be old-fashioned and draggy, but it became clear within the first inning or two of the first game that his handicap was not prejudice but lack of knowledge. In the second inning, John Mayberry, a left-handed Royals slugger, flied out to the left fielder, causing Cosell to state that he had been attempting to hit the ball to left field. Mayberry, in truth, suffered acutely last summer from the fact that he could not, or would not, hit the ball to the opposite field—a widely known weakness that was mostly responsible for his miserable .232 average and mere thirteen homers this year—and it had also been clear on my screen that Hunter had simply jammed him for the out. Reggie Jackson corrected Howard Cosell gently, but Cosell does not take contradiction lightly, and he now evidently set out to prove that he knew more baseball than Reggie Jackson. Through the last few innings, he predicted insistently that Catfish Hunter was tiring, or was about to tire and be driven to cover, when it was plain that the Cat, who had to face only thirty batters over the full nine innings, was breezing. Again Jackson tried to enlighten him: when Catfish Hunter gets knocked out, it usually happens in the
early
innings.

The next day, the third man in the crew (replacing Bob Uecker) was Keith Jackson, a football specialist, whose excited, rapid-fire delivery makes a routine double play sound like a goal-line stand. Three-man broadcasting crews, by the way, probably make sense covering football, where a great many things happen at the same time, but baseball has no such problem, and three hyperglottal observers usually succeed only in shattering the process of waiting that is such a crucial part of the game. People who don’t know or don’t like baseball make poor announcers, for they are too impatient to sense the special pace of each game, and thus habitually overdramatize. Since they suggest that almost every play we see is memorable, we become distracted and then dulled, so that we are unlikely to remember the actual incidents in a game—sometimes very small ones indeed—on which the outcome truly depended. In the third inning of the second game, the Yankees scored two runs, to take a 3–2 lead, and had Chris Chambliss on first base, with one out. The next batter, Carlos May, hit a bounder to the right side that took a high hop off the artificial carpet and over first baseman Mayberry’s head. It went for a single, but Chambliss progressed only as far as second base, thanks to a bit of mime by the Royals’ shortstop, Fred Patek, who put out his glove for the imaginary incoming peg with such verisimilitude that Chambliss actually slid into the bag. The fake deprived the Yankees of a run when the next batter flied out; it may even have cost them the game. Yet the telecast buried this pivotal moment in its customary over-reporting, and it was soon forgotten. Network television makes every baseball game sound just about like every other. But this is perhaps an inescapable handicap of an instantaneous and unreflective medium. What I cannot forgive is the networks’ implacable habit—and NBC, which handles the World Series, is almost as much at fault here as the ABC people—of dismantling the game of baseball and putting it back together on our screens in a form that they find more manageable. That form, of course, is “entertainment,” and thus centers on personalities rather than events. Reggie Jackson is a perceptive young man, and by the middle of the second game from Kansas City it had become plain that he was no longer just describing a ball game; he was engaged in an open duel with his more-celebrated colleague for dominance in the proceedings. He had already come to understand a first principle of television—that while we at home may think we are simply watching a game, what we are in fact attending is Howard Cosell.

This playoff now moved east, permitting me to take in the action at Yankee Stadium, unfiltered. In Game No. 3, it will be recalled, the Yankee starter, Dock Ellis, was on the verge of extinction in the first inning, when he gave up three runs, but then got his down-breaking stuff together and shut out the visitors the rest of the way, allowing only three fly balls during his eight-inning stint. The Yankees started back with a two-run homer by Chris Chambliss and then batted around in the sixth against five K.C. pitchers, to win by 5–3. The next afternoon—a startling time of day by now for postseason baseball, which permitted the action to be peculiarly illuminated by a single large overhead light—the visitors treated Catfish Hunter with extreme disrespect and went on to an easy 7–4 win, rapping out an awesome assortment of triples and tweener doubles to the distant reaches of the Stadium lawns.

I had by this time developed a considerable attachment to the spirited visiting nine, in their powder-blue double-knits, who had now twice come back to tie up this interesting series. Their veteran shortstop, Patek—who, at five feet four inches, is the smallest man in the major leagues—was having a splendid time of it afield and at the plate, and the whole lineup, although clearly short on power (their main muscle man, Amos Otis, had been lost with an injury in the first inning of the first game), seemed to be crowded with youngsters who attacked the ball with great confidence and relish. Foremost among these, of course, was George Brett, who had begun to look like the hardest out I had seen since my first glimpse of Al Kaline. (Brett batted .444 for the playoffs.) He is a lefty swinger who stands deep in the box and begins his action with a sweeping forward stride, his bat flattening and his hands held well back. He goes with the pitch, hitting the ball to all fields but most often to center or left—a classic inside-out, high-average swing. I had heard that Brett and a number of his young teammates, including Hal McRae and Tom Poquette, were pupils and fervent admirers of the Royals’ batting coach, Charley Lau, who had profoundly altered their physical and mental approach to batting. Lau avoids interviews (and is known, of course, as the Mysterious Dr. Lau), but George Brett is not at all reticent about Lau’s influence and teaching powers. “He’s made hitting seem like the easiest thing in the world,” he told me. “I used to be embarrassed against some pitchers. I was getting jammed a lot and sort of stepping out even before I’d take a swing. No more. I can hardly wait to get up there, even when I’m in a slump. He changed my whole style, and I went from being a Carl Yastrzemski hitter to a Joe Rudi hitter almost overnight.” Brett said that he first asked Lau for tutelage about midway through the 1974 season, when he was batting in the neighborhood of .225. Lau told him that he could have the option of being a .330 hitter with about ten home runs per season or a .280 hitter with twenty homers. Brett, who did not take either prediction seriously, chose the former. He finished that season at .282, batted .308 last year, and wound up, as we all know, at .333 this summer.