Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (52 page)

BOOK: Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion

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All this happened with the enthusiastic approval of the Baseball Commissioner. Responding to heavy criticism in the sporting press, Bowie Kuhn said that baseball had made these scheduling decisions independently of the networks, and then pointed to the game’s need for increased revenues and to the much larger television audiences for the World Series produced by night games. But no one had suggested that the Commissioner had been bought off by television interests. That was never necessary, for Mr. Kuhn has shown that he shares the television producers’ sense of priorities and state of mind. His prime concern is for audiences and profits, and he has proved willing to go along with almost any alteration of the game that will enhance or protect “the numbers.” In addition to Arctic night ball, this has so far resulted in the designated hitter (a barbarism that was first conceived of to stimulate slumping attendance in the American League, and that found its way into the World Series this year), artificial turf (far cheaper for owners to maintain, of course, than real grass), and the extension of the already swollen season to make room for the playoffs (an instant television special that has automatically pushed the World Series ten days closer to winter).

The fans’ deepening feeling of cynicism and hopelessness about the plight of baseball comes, I think, from their slow realization that apparently nothing can be done to alter this state of things. The profits of the game have become the preeminent consideration, and no one in the inner councils of the game seems much concerned about the quality of the product—the needs of the players, the claims of lifelong fans, the depth of attachment of the paying customer, in contrast to that of the television watcher, and so forth. The issue of artificial turf is a case in point. Almost without exception, the players detest the chemical carpet, which causes unusual injuries and imposes such wear and tear on their legs that it may prove to shorten outfielders’ careers by as much as two years, and which is, in addition, miserably hot to play on in sunny weather. Now some of the fake surfaces are beginning to wear out (the infield at Veterans Stadium, in Philadelphia, for instance, is almost rocklike, because of the decay of the protective cushion beneath the green coverlet), but no owner (except Bill Veeck, a known maverick) has admitted that a mistake was made or has offered to give up the cheaper spread. Any change would go against the numbers, so nothing can be done.

An even darker view of baseball must now be set forth. It is my own pure, horrified guess that if the complaints about the weather and about the playing conditions of the autumn games persist or grow wider, the Commissioner and the owners will present us with a plan that will seem to solve everything: Mr. Kuhn will propose that the site of the World Series be moved permanently to some friendly metropolis in the Sunbelt, perhaps one that has a large, domed enclosure waiting to be filled—New Orleans, say, or Houston—or rotated each year, in the style of the Super Bowl, among two or three such cities. The World Series will thus be instantly transformed into Superweek—the Super Bowl multiplied by seven, the ultimate Sportsfest USA. It will become an obligatory status trip and expense-account holiday for business executives, prime corporate accounts, network people, politicians, and show-business celebrities. It will also be an unbeatable television property—the first all-American sports show truly worthy of a Howard Cosell. A few objections may be expected, of course, including some carping from hometown baseball fans, who will suddenly realize that, with the exception of a wealthy few among them, they have been done out of the chance ever to cheer for their team at a World Series game. But this will seem a trifling consideration when it is understood that, in addition to solving the weather difficulty, the plan will do away with the present expense and annoyance to the clubs involved in printing tickets and preparing concessions and finding hotel space for a World Series that often ends up at the last instant in another city. And, perhaps best of all, the unruly and passionate hooligan fans that make up part of some big-city sports crowds can at last be kept away from the game.

Superweek will be an enormous initial success. It will instantly surpass the Super Bowl, and its immense profits will lead to further promotion of the event and ever-increasing television revenues. And if it should happen (it
will
happen, of course) that at some future point there come two or three World Series in succession that are as one-sided and dull as the one we have just seen, and if the public, as a result, begins to sense that the sport has not measured up to the Event—that the games have been hyped out of all meaning, and that the World Series has become just another inflated and vulgarized TV show, another stop on the “Wide World of Sports”—well, then, the game of baseball can be changed, of course, like anything else on television: changed in some terrific new way that will take care of the numbers.

This nightmare vision will not affect or deter Mr. Kuhn or his employers. Their attitude toward those of us who share such fears is perhaps epitomized by the Commissioner’s patronizing gesture during the three icy night games of the Series, which he attended wearing a business suit and no topcoat: You’re wrong, folks—it
isn’t
cold here. It has not occurred to these men (nor would it matter to them if it did) that we are entirely in earnest, that we are trying to conserve something that seems as intricate and lovely to us as any river valley. A thousand small relationships, patterns, histories, attachments, pleasures, and moments are what we draw from this game, and that is why we truly worry about it, grieve for it now, and are filled with apprehension and despair at the thought of its transformation into another bland and deathlike pause on the evening ribbon of dog food and gunfights and deodorants and crashing cars. Not everyone feels this way, of course, but who among us feels none of this?

But it is wrong to leave baseball in such a dark corner for the winter, for the game rewards and surprises us still, and may outlast even its proprietors. (It never has belonged to the “owners,” of course.) While I was watching batting practice at Yankee Stadium just before the third game of the World Series, I noticed that the thin, long-faced man standing directly to my right, wearing a tan raincoat, was Lefty Gomez, a great pitching star for the Yankees in the nineteen-thirties. I got up my nerve and introduced myself to him, and we shook hands.

“I saw you pitch your very first game in Yankee Stadium,” I told him at once. “I still remember it. I was about nine years old.”

Old ballplayers hear this sort of thing every day, of course, but Gomez was gracious about it. “Is that right?” he said. “I remember it, too. It was in May of 1930, against the White Sox. I beat Red Faber, 4–1.” He pointed up at the great triple-decked stands and said, “I remember walking out here just before that game and looking around, and there were so many people in the stands that—well, there weren’t just more people here than in my home town but in my home
county!”

We laughed, and then Gomez looked down at the ground and shook his head a little. “Nineteen thirty,” he said. “My God, do you realize that’s forty-six years ago? I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I,” I said.

I think we both sensed the same thing. Time had destroyed the once-immeasurable difference between us, between a small boy and a hero. Now we were the same—two gents in winter raincoats watching the young men getting ready to play another game.

That Series game, it turned out, wasn’t much. It wasn’t nearly as interesting, for instance, as a Mets-Cubs game I went to on a Sunday back in the middle of September, with my wife and my son John Henry. It was the boy’s first big-league game—he is six years old—so I had arranged to get good seats at Shea Stadium, right behind home plate. The only trouble was that it came up rain that morning. John Henry kept watch at the windows, however, and about one o’clock in the afternoon he discovered an almost invisible lightening in the clouds, and we decided to give it a try. By the time we arrived at Shea, it was raining again, but I parked the car, and we ran through the downpour and went into the park. There was a surprising crowd there, milling about in the dank passageways under the stands, and we all looked at each other in a self-congratulatory way. The Mets against the Cubs, in the
rain?
We were crazy, but we were fans, all right. John Henry announced that the three of us should sit down in our seats and get ready for the game to start, and we did. We found our places—an island of three people in the surrounding sea of slatted yellow seats—and huddled there cheerfully enough in our foul-weather gear, unsuccessfully trying to share a single umbrella. I watched my son as he inspected the lights and the scoreboard and the empty stands around and above us and the soaking tarpaulins and—now and then, glimpsed in the dugout—a player.

“Where’s home plate?” he asked.

“Out there someplace,” I said, gesturing.

Then, unexpectedly and after several false alarms, it stopped raining. The grounds crew came out and rolled up the tarps and put down the white bases, and the waiting crowds filled up a few hundred of the wet seats. The pitchers warmed, and the umps and players came out on the field, and we stood for the anthem, and sat down and clapped. Rick Monday came up to lead it off for the Cubs, and Jerry Koosman struck him out, swinging, and we yelled—and then it
really
began to rain.

We stuck it out there for another forty minutes or so, observing the unrolling of tarps and studying rain patterns and watching the out-of-town scores beginning to go up on the scoreboard. John Henry kept occupied somehow (1 Coke, 1/3 box popcorn, 1 ice cream, 1 Mets cap), and I kept looking up at the sky, hoping against hope. But at last we said the hell with it and went home, and by the time we got back to our part of the city the rain had stopped, of course, and the streets were almost dry. When we got home, I flipped on the TV set, and, sure enough, there were the Mets and the Cubs.

“I’m sorry, John Henry,” I said. “I didn’t think they were going to play today.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said at once. “I liked it there. That was cool.”

So it was all right, after all, and maybe one batter is plenty to see, the first time. It was a beginning.

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Except for Chapter 4, all of the material in this book first appeared in
The New Yorker
, some of it in different form.

cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-0166-2

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com