Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (51 page)

I also asked Hal McRae what Charley Lau meant to a hitter.

“Charley Lau means one hundred grand,” he said.

The fifth game, a night affair played before 56,821 frigid, roaring watchers, was a marvel. It began with a double flurry of hits and runs in the first inning—a two-run homer by John Mayberry; a countering triple by Mickey Rivers, followed by two singles and a sac., to tie it. The Yankees relentlessly chewed away at the Kansas City pitching, getting rid of Leonard, Splittorf, and Pattin within four innings, and led after six innings by 6–3, with Ed Figueroa comfortably in charge of things. The top four hitters in the Yankee lineup—Rivers, White, Munson, and the red-hot Chambliss—had truly outdone themselves in their first four times around: sixteen trips to the plate, good for six runs, ten hits, two walks, two sacrifices, two stolen bases, and a bare two outs. Figueroa gave up a leadoff single to Cowens in the eighth and was taken out, to a screeching ovation (“Ed-
die!
Ed-
die!
Ed-
die!
”). Jim Wohlford singled off Grant Jackson; and George Brett, on the count of 0–1, socked a middling-deep, medium-high fly ball that landed just within the second or third row of the short-right-field seats, for a tying three-run homer. The silence of the Stadium was so sudden and startling that one had the impression that somebody had kicked a plug out of a wall socket. Brett had confirmed himself as a great hitter, for if ever a home run was intentional it was this one. It was the first pitch I had ever seen him try to pull.

The ending was a sudden multiple tableau—almost a series of movie stop-frames—now fixed in the New York sporting memory. Frame 1: Chris Chambliss has just swung at Mark Littell’s very first pitch of the ninth inning, a fastball. He has swung from the heels, and the ball is now suspended somewhere out in the darkness above the right-center-field fence. Chambliss stands motionless at the plate, with his feet together and the bat still in his right hand and his head tipped back as he watches the ball—watching not in admiration (as Reggie Jackson has been known to do) but in true astonishment and anxiety. Frame 2: Al Cowens and Hal McRae, the Kansas City center fielder and right fielder, stand together at the base of the wall, waiting and looking straight up in the air, like a pair of bird-watchers anxious to confirm a rare species. Frame 3: McRae leaps, twisting his whole body into a single upward plane, with the left arm extended and the open, straining glove at its apex. Frame 4: McRae descends empty-handed, and falls back against the fence in despair, slumping there like a discarded marionette. A whole season is gone. Frame 5: Now it is Chambliss’s turn to leap—a great bound of joy, with both hands raised high in triumph. He begins his ritual tour of the bases, running slowly at first and then (Frame 6, Frame 7) with increasing attention and urgency, as he sees surging, converging waves of out-scattering, frantically leaping spectators pouring onto the field from the left-field and right-field grandstands. These people sprint through descending streamers of toilet paper and torn-up newspaper and other debris, and through the reverberating, doubly and triply reëchoed explosions of shouting. They all meet near second base—Chambliss, the thickening and tumbling crowds, the waves of noise, and the waves of people (multiple frames here, faster and faster, all blurring together)—and now it is plain that he is almost running for his life. He is knocked down between second and third, and springs up again, holding on to his batting helmet and running now like a fullback, twisting and dodging through the appalling scene. It is a new game—one for which we have no name yet, and no rules. Chambliss makes it at last to the dugout, without touching third or home (third base has disappeared), and vanishes under the lip of the dugout, with his uniform shirt half torn away and the look on his face now is not one of joy or fear or relief but just the closed, expressionless, neutral subway look that we all see and all wear when abroad in the enormous and inexplicable city. Later, Chris Chambliss comes back onto the ripped-up, debris-strewn field with two cops, and after a few minutes’ search they find home plate and he steps on it.

The World Series, as we know, brought us no such games or passions, and can thus be dealt with here in brief summary. The Yankees, undoubtedly flat after their long and late playoff exertions, played languidly in the opener at Riverfront Stadium, losing, 5–1, to Don Gullett before a full house of confident and captivated hometown rooters, who—to judge by a good many smug comments I overheard—were fully as proud of their litter-free, un-Bronxlike playing field as they were of their team’s brisk performance. A pattern of these games began to suggest itself in the sixth inning, when the Yanks messed up an attempted sacrifice bunt and also had their whippet, Mickey Rivers, cut down while stealing; the Reds, given about the same chances, broke up an attempted double play, pulled off a steal, and scored a run. Joe Morgan had hit a homer earlier, and Tony Perez wound up with three hits off the Yankee starter, Doyle Alexander. Game No. 2 was the only absorbing or truly close contest of the four—thanks not at all to the Baseball Commissioner or to the National Broadcasting Company, who, having together scheduled the thing for eight-thirty on a Sunday night in the middle of October, were then together forced to pretend that the evening’s miserable, bone-chilling weather was a trifling surprise, hardly worth anyone’s notice. In the game, Catfish Hunter threw high and wild during most of the second inning (he was having trouble with his footing on the mound), and was lucky to escape with no more damage than three runs. He loaded the bases again in the third but wriggled free, and then, almost startlingly, became very nearly untouchable. No other pitcher in baseball settles into stride with quite this sort of nearly audible click, or, once there, throws such elegant, thoughtful, and flowing patterns—up and out, up and in, down on the hands, out and away, with each part and pitch connected, in psychology and tactics, to its predecessor and its quickly following next variant. The Yankees now caught up, with a run in the fourth and two more in the seventh, and the game stuck there, frozen fast at 3–3. The wretched, blanket-wrapped, huddled masses in the stands flumped their mittened paws together in feeble supplication, pleading now for almost any result that would send them home. Hunter sailed through the first two outs of the ninth, and then threw a slider that Ken Griffey bounced weakly to the middle of the infield. Yankee shortstop Fred Stanley galloped in, taking the ball on the dead run and coming down on his right foot—the wrong foot, that is, for a proper throw. He had to fling the ball to first off-balance and across his body, and threw it instead into the Reds’ dugout. Griffey, who is the fastest of all the Cincinnati fliers—he had thirty-eight infield hits this year—had very nearly beaten the play in any case, but the error automatically moved him along to second, from where he scored, after an intentional pass to Morgan, on Tony Perez’s first-pitch single. Speed kills. Now a World Series came back to Yankee Stadium for the first time in twelve years, and even the wrong weather and the wrong time of day (it was another shivery, after-dark affair) and the altered details and colors of the park could not dim for me its evocative visions—the unique, flattened declination and cavelike depths of the sweeping, entirely filled lower stands, and the steep, tilted topmost deck stuffed with spectators to its highest, farthest reaches: a great beach of faces, a surf of sounds. Only the baseball failed us. Again the Reds ran away with the game, notching three quick runs off Dock Ellis in the second inning, on four hits and a pair of stolen bases—all helped no end by some sudden uncertainty in the Yankee infield. Matters stood at 4–1 in the fifth inning—still anybody’s game, really—when Mickey Rivers led off with a single, and Roy White walked. Munson, who was having a terrific Series, whacked a bulletlike drive to the right side but almost directly at first baseman Tony Perez, who jumped and gloved the ball, pivoted, and threw instantly to Concepcion, covering second, to double Rivers off the bag. It was a moment when one suddenly sensed how the game of baseball should be played. The other base runner, White, had been only a couple of yards in front of Perez when he caught the liner, and four out of five—or perhaps nineteen out of twenty—first basemen would have made a dive at him, or tried to beat him back to that base. But Perez, without an instant’s pause, knew the right play, the deadly play, and made it. Rivers, it must be added, did not. Any low line drive is a red light for a well-trained base runner—a signal for a sudden full stop until the ball has gone through. Mickey was caught in flagrante delicto. The two parts of the play, commission and omission, summed up these two teams like an epigram. The Reds went on to win, 6–2.

The final game, which was played after a rainout, was closer for most of its distance, and was not actually resolved until the second of Johnny Bench’s two home runs put the issue beyond reach in the ninth inning. The Yankees, although behind by only 3–2 up to that point, had struggled glumly from the beginning against the impossible burden of the Reds’ three-game lead. They scored first, but the visitors’ catchup began when Ed Figueroa, the Yankee pitcher, allowed Morgan such an enormous jump off first base that he stole second without drawing a peg. Thurman Munson had four straight singles, but the Yankees stranded nine base runners. Billy Martin, unstrung by despair, was ejected from the game in the ninth. The Reds won, 7–2, and the arctic night and the premises were no longer embarrassed by these leftover summer doings.

It would be an injustice if this one-sided and undramatic World Series should somehow cause us to overlook the breadth and versatility and effulgent skills of the Cincinnati Reds. The first evidence is the simple fact that they have now won the world championship two years running—a feat too difficult for any other National League team since 1921. Another indication of their quality—a double hallmark—is the manner in which they seemed to strip bare their opponents, leaving the Yankees almost without hope or resource (and, incidentally, exposing serious deficiencies in their outfield defense and their right-handed hitting), while they themselves did not even have to call on some of their own best abilities. They did not, for instance, often show us their marvelous and habitually impeccable ways of getting a base runner from first to third or from second to third by having the batter hit the ball to the proper side of the infield—“give himself up,” in the parlance. All the Reds, it seems, know how to use the bat both ways—with power, and with punch and intent. This is the very stuff of inside, winning baseball, and it is far more exciting, when it is understood, than any mere slugging. It seems to me that not enough of us have recognized the fact that this is probably the first great team that has been specifically designed to take advantage of AstroTurf, which puts such a premium on team quickness and superior throwing, and that it is thus as much of a revolutionary innovation as the Yankees’ first “Murderers’ Row” club, in the mid-twenties, which was built around Babe Ruth, the home run, and the jackrabbit ball. The Reds’ team speed puts enormous psychological pressure on every part of their opponents’ defenses, but on Astro-Turf it also forces the opposing shortstop and second baseman to “cheat”—to play much closer to second base, that is, in order to be able to make the force play—which, in turn, opens the field for more base hits. There is almost no way to win against this parlay.

Another tip-off to a truly fine club is that a fan constantly finds himself discovering fresh stars in the lineup. Most of us know all about Pete Rose and Joe Morgan and Tony Perez and Johnny Bench by now. The other four Cincinnati regulars are Dave Concepcion, who is the best defensive shortstop in the National League; Ken Griffey, whose speed and .336 batting have been mentioned here; George Foster, who hit twenty-nine home runs this year and batted .306; and Cesar Geronimo, who has the best center-field arm in the business, and who, hitting in the seventh and eighth positions this year, batted .307. All are between twenty-six and twenty-eight years old, which means that they are just arriving at their peak seasons. For me, the discovery of the Series was Concepcion, who seemed to be forever coming up with the essential play at some vital turn of events. During a Yankee uprising in the fourth inning of the first game, he stopped a wild throw behind second base—stopped it by sticking out his leg—and then made a heartbreaking, inning-ending grab and throw of an apparent hit by Willie Randolph: two runs saved. In the first inning of the last game, he went yards behind second base to seize a shot by Carlos May and throw him out, again snuffing out what looked like a big inning. Concepcion also batted .357 in the Series—but this, it must be said, was not exactly a feat. The Yankee pitching corps contained the first two men in the Reds’ batting order—Rose and Griffey—holding them to .188 and .059, respectively, but was a little less fortunate after that. The next seven Cincinnati regulars batted .333, .313, .357, .429, .533 (Bench, who was voted the best player of the Series), .308, and .357 (Concepcion). Further comment, I somehow sense, is superfluous.

These feats and colors are dimmed by the fact that the championship games and the World Series were played this year—as they will almost surely be played for years to come—in the wrong season and at the wrong time of day, with twisted rules and abnormal playing conditions, and, for the most part, in frightful weather. The players and the customers suffered doubly—from the discomfort and the loss of pleasure of having the chief festival of their sport held in depressing and inappropriate circumstances, and from the unmeasurable but inexorable loss in the quality of the baseball. I heard players in both dugouts cursing the cold. Billy Martin said, “When are we going to stop letting TV tell us when we are going to play? This is asinine, playing night games in October. It’s damn near freezing out there.” Before the Sunday-night game, in Cincinnati, Bob Howsam, the Reds’ president, said, “The football people must be laughing at us”—a reference to the fact that NBC, for the price of seven hundred thousand dollars, bought the right to move the Sunday game to prime evening time and was thus able also to present its pro football games in the afternoon.