Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (8 page)

The penultimate meeting was played the next afternoon, a Saturday—also prime viewing time, which meant that the teams were not permitted the customary travel holiday. It was probably just as well, however, for in Riverfront Stadium a bone-chilling easterly suggested that this pastime had already overstayed its season. Vida Blue, given his first start of the Series because of the compressed pitching schedule, did not seem to have his hummer and kept falling behind the Red batters. Bench homered in the fourth, and the Reds sent four men to the plate in the fifth, and five men to the plate in the sixth, and (joyfully falling upon Oakland’s second-line pitching) ten men to the plate in the seventh, to wrap up an 8–1 landslide. It was a sad end to Vida’s sad year, but there was some satisfaction in watching the Reds’ sluggers doing their thing at last. The Cincinnati fans were utterly transported, and with reason: this was the first World Series game to be won by the Reds at home since 1940.

The full seven, then, with a resolution that was still impossible to forecast or guess at. Strangely, no single player had emerged—in the manner of a Clemente, a Brooks Robinson, a Brock—to put his stamp and style on this Series. The closeness of the games and the continuous action on the field almost concealed the fact that the level of play had been less than distinguished. Most of the Cincinnati starting pitchers had been inadequate, both teams had suffered inordinate difficulties in executing the double play, the Oakland pitchers and catcher Gene Tenace had among them surrendered eleven stolen bases, and the teams together were hitting a desultory .203. Still, the original elements of the drama remained, now deepened to a wonderful expectancy—the Oakland pitching and woolly
élan
against the Reds’ hitting, speed, and pride. Something would give way here today.

Dick Williams, in an attempt to bolster his hitting and defense simultaneously, moved Tenace to first base, put Duncan behind the plate, and started Angel Mangual in center. (Tenace looked understandably edgy about his new responsibilities. “Tomorrow,” he said during batting practice, “I’ll probably be playing goalie.”) Mangual made a difference in the very first half-inning, when he struck a long drive off Jack Billingham to straightaway center field. Bobby Tolan raced in, absolutely misjudging the play, and then made a leap for the sailing ball, which glanced off his glove and rolled to the fence, with Mangual winding up on third. (Extraordinarily, most of this game seemed to be played at the foot of that center-field fence, 404 feet away.) Gene Tenace, now batting cleanup, pulled a sharp grounder to left that struck the edge of the AstroTurf carpet at the back of the third-base dirt patch and suddenly bounded over Menke’s head; and the Yellowlegs, not exactly on merit, had the first run.

Blue Moon Odom, the Oakland starter, has a splendid motion to first base (a gift he has evidently never tried to pass along to his co-workers), and he had stated the night before that no Cincinnati runners would steal on
him.
Now, in the fourth, Pete Rose led off with an enormous smash to center that Mangual one-handed just at the fence. A little startled, Odom walked the swift Morgan, and the crowd began a breathless nonstop shouting: “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Odom would have none of it. Fixing Morgan with a sidewise, over-the-shoulder stare (friends who saw the game on television told me later that the closeups of Odom’s face were remarkable), pausing, waiting almost interminably, he whirled and threw to his first baseman five times in succession, twice nearly erasing Morgan. He delivered a ball to Tolan, then made two more pick-off throws, then threw another pitch—a ball—as Morgan flew away to second, where he was cut down, narrowly but plainly, by Duncan’s peg. The game, I was suddenly certain, had been won right there.

The Reds were far from done. Tony Perez led off the fifth with a double to the left-field corner, and two successive walks then loaded the bases with only one out. Hal McRae, pinch-hitting, struck the first delivery to him all the way (need it be added?) to the center-field wall, where Mangual made the catch. The score: 1–1. Rose, who had singled in the first, unloaded another rocket to precisely the same spot, and again to no avail. He had now struck two successive clouts, good for a total of more than eight hundred feet, producing two outs. Some baseball games do not yield themselves, even to a Rose.

Billingham had been given up for the pinch-hitter, and Campaneris greeted his successor, Pedro Borbon, with a single. He was sacrificed to second, and Tenace scored him with a double to deep left—and was taken out of the game, to his surprise, for a pinch-runner. (He had won the sports car, clearly, as the top player of the Series, and also became the recipient of a hug and a retroactive raise from the All-father, Charlie Finley.) The next batter, Sal Bando, hit another enormous shot to the battered center-field salient, and this ball landed untouched when Tolan fell at the warning track. The score was 3–1, and Cincinnati’s luck had run out.

Pete Rose, leading off for the Reds perhaps for the last time this season, began the eighth with a single off Catfish Hunter, and the despairing Reds rooters hoarsely roused themselves once again. Holtzman, a lefty, came in to pitch to Joe Morgan, a lefty, and the last touch of baseball misfortune now descended on the Reds. Morgan cracked the ball on a low line to right—pulling it so violently, in fact, that Rose had to dodge back to avoid being struck, and then was forced to leap over Mike Hegan, the Oakland first baseman, sprawled in the dirt after his dive for the ball. The ball was in the right-field corner—a sure triple, a certain run, except for that infinitesimal accident at first; Rose came churning around third, with Morgan not far behind, but the ball was on the way in now, and third-base coach Alex Grammas threw up his hands at the last instant, stopping Rose so abruptly that his helmet came flying off. The runners retreated. (Second-guessing, I thought Grammas had made a mistake, but we would never know.) Fingers came in to pitch, and Rose eventually scored on Perez’ fly, to bring it to 3–2, but that was all, and a few minutes later the exhausting, searching season was over.

One of the wearers of the green-and-gold in the happy Oakland clubhouse was Rick Williams, the fifteen-year-old son of the victorious manager, whom I had last seen five years ago, when his father piloted the Red Sox to their remarkable pennant. Rick looked only a little younger than most of the whooping and grinning new champions, whose hair and mustaches—now streaming with champagne—had somehow always made them look more boyish than any other big-league team I could remember. Reggie Jackson, in civvies, also had a bottle of champagne. He exchanged hugs and hand-slaps with his teammates, but he had not played in this, the only World Series of his life. In time, he limped unnoticed into another room and sat down to watch a football game on television.

The Reds’ clubhouse was utterly quiet. I heard no complaining about the breaks. (Baseball luck is inescapable, and professionals know that in order to win you must dominate the game to the point where it is no longer a factor.) Bobby Tolan, ignoring the reporters, toured the locker room and apologized to every one of his teammates. “I’m sorry I let you mothers down,” he murmured. The silence was so profound that three-year-old Pete Rose, Jr., who was carrying a little baseball bat and wearing a miniature version of his father’s uniform, kept staring up at the men’s faces all around him, trying to understand it. In time, he wandered into the deserted equipment room, where he examined a large bin filled with fresh, untouched ice cubes. Then he assumed a left-handed batting stance and swung his small bat again and again and then again, swinging at an invisible ball—perhaps the only person anywhere at that instant who was ready for more baseball.

Summer 1976

T
HE TARPAULIN IS DOWN,
and a midafternoon rain is falling steadily. Play has been halted. The lights are on, and the wet, pale green tarp throws off wiggly, reptilian gleams. The scoreboard is lit up, too, bringing us fair-weather scores from other cities, and showing us where this game stood a few minutes ago, when the home-plate umpire threw up his hands to call time and everybody on the field ran for cover. Now the players are back in their locker rooms, and both dugouts are empty. A few fans have stayed in their seats, huddling under big, brightly colored golf umbrellas, but almost everybody else has moved back under the shelter of the upper decks, standing there quietly, behind the seats, watching the rain. The press box is deserted except for a couple of writers knocking out sidebars or an early column; a teletype operator is sitting next to his machine and reading a newspaper. The huge park, the countless rows of shiny-blue wet seats, the long emerald outfield lawns, the rain-spattered tarps—all stand silent and waiting. By the look of it, this shower may hold things up for a good half-hour or more. Time for a few baseball stories.

One story concerns another rain delay, a deluge that interrupted a night game in Baltimore, way back in the nineteen fifties. This happened only a year after the Orioles came to town, in 1954, when the American League franchise in St. Louis was shifted east and the worn-out Browns suddenly became the brand-new Orioles. For a while, everybody in Baltimore was happy about the team, but it became clear within a few weeks that the new uniforms could not alter the abilities of the players who had done so horribly in their previous incarnation. The team finished seventh in its first eastern season, losing one hundred games. A new manager, Paul Richards, came aboard the next year, and he shifted the lineup around a little and tinkered with his pitchers, while the front office put out hopeful reports about better times ahead, but the team went right on losing, and by this time it had also begun to lose its following. On this particular damp midsummer night, the Orioles were behind again (the name of the other team has been forgotten), in a game that had been held up two or three times by brief showers. By the bottom of the ninth, only a few hundred silent, pessimistic fans were still in attendance at Memorial Stadium. A light rain had started again. Unexpectedly, the Orioles rallied. A couple of runs scored, and another base hit drove out the enemy pitcher; suddenly the Orioles had the bases loaded, with the tying run at third base and the winning run at second. The reporters paused over their typewriters, where they had begun their customary irritable or apologetic lead paragraphs for further bad-news stories; a few hoarse cries of hope came out of the stands. The next batter was Clint Courtney, probably the most reliable player on the club. Richards came out of the dugout and whispered in Courtney’s ear and whacked him encouragingly on the rump. Clint stepped into the box and scowled at the pitcher through the deepening damp. The count went to two and two. Courtney fouled off a couple of pitches, then there was another ball. Three and two, and the bases loaded! There was some real yelling from the stands. Now, however, the rain suddenly became a downpour, almost hiding the outfielders from view. The umpire unwillingly called time, the players came in, and the tarps went back on the field.

It rained and rained. The perpetually gloomy Baltimore fans stared up at the sky and nodded their heads disconsolately. The thing would be called, of course, and the score would revert to the bottom of their eighth—another game gone. Nobody went home, though; this one had to be waited out. Midnight struck, and still the rain went on. Then, wonder of wonders, it began to ease up. It lightened to a drizzle, then to a mist, and then stopped. The ground crew appeared and rolled back the tarp. The field had been flooded, and another fifteen or twenty minutes went by while the men worked with rakes and shovels, and scattered sawdust on the mound and in the batters’ boxes. The umps came back on the field, and the pitcher returned to the mound and warmed up for a considerable time, as was his privilege. The teams took the field at last, more than an hour after they had left it, and the few dozen surviving fans came down to the front rows and took up a hopeful caterwauling.

The home-plate umpire checked his indicator and looked out at the scorecard. Still three and two. He pointed to the pitcher. Play ball! Courtney stood in, chomped down on his wad of tobacco, waggled his bat, and glared out at the pitcher. The fans screamed. The pitcher got his sign. He went into his stretch, paused, rocked back, and threw. The three base runners were off with his motion, running like jackrabbits. The pitch crossed the heart of the plate. Courtney looked at it, motionless. The ump threw up his hand. Strike three. Everybody went home.

That may not be a story to please every palate. I am fond of it, but I can see that as drama it wants work. Baseball-haters will complain about it for their old, dumb reason: nothing
happens.
But never mind. The best baseball stories are probably appreciated only by true fans, who know the possibilities for unlikelihood, letdown, and wild mischance in their game, which can swing in an instant from morality play to variety show to farce.

Anything can happen in baseball, but it may almost be taken as a rule that the most appalling accidents happen to the worst teams. It was the Mets—the early Mets, of course—who were involved in a play one day at Wrigley Field in which an errant heave from one of their outfielders wound up in the Cubs’ ball bag. And it was the Cubs themselves—a similarly gentle and innocuous club—who once were caught up in a calamity undreamed of even in the
Metsungsaga.
On an afternoon in 1959, the Cardinals were the visitors at Wrigley Field, and the batter was Stan Musial. Nobody on base. With the count at three and one, Musial almost offered at the next pitch but checked his swing, and the ball somehow skipped by the Chicago catcher, Sammy Taylor, and went all the way back to the screen. The umpire, Vic Delmore, called ball four, and Musial, unaware of the misplay, trotted toward first. Taylor whirled on Delmore and shouted that the ball had been foul-tipped, and Cub manager Bob Scheffing ran out to back him up. The ball, meantime, was picked up by a ball boy and handed to the Cubs’ field announcer, who in those days sat in a chair near the home dugout. Two other Cubs—pitcher Bob Anderson and third baseman Alvin Dark—now made their entrances in the plot, each sprinting in to retrieve the ball. Musial, becoming aware at last of these disturbances, rounded first at full speed and set sail for second. The announcer, horrified to observe that he was somehow an active participant in the National League pennant race, hastily dropped the ball on the ground, where it was seized simultaneously by Anderson and Dark, with Alvin finally winning possession.