The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (33 page)

The Singer-Marichal matchup sailed scorelessly along into the later innings, with the Dodgers seeming to have a little the better of it. Singer was striking out Giants in clusters, while Marichal—who throws like some enormous and dangerous farm implement—was putting men on but still managing to get through innings on no more than eight or ten pitches. Mays led off the seventh and took a huge cut at a Singer fast ball, kicking up a puff of dust in the batter’s box as he missed. Singer now craftily essayed a curve (the strategy of pitchers is limited), which Willie leaped at and lined into deepest left field for a double. It was the Giants’ first hit of the game, and a few moments later Dick Dietz, the excellent Giant catcher, delivered the second—a single that scored Mays with the only run of the afternoon. Afterward, in his clubhouse office, Giant manager Charlie Fox poured a little Galway Mist for a visiting reporter and said, “It’s always
useful
to watch him play this game. You know he moves the players around out in the field? Hell, he’s been in this game twenty years—he’s picked up a couple of pointers. Yes, it’s a nice feeling to come to the ballpark every day and know he’s on your side. The leader is still leading.”

Charlie Fox, who has been in the Giant organization for thirty years, ascending to the helm last May, gets along splendidly with Willie Mays. (“We’re like brothers,” Fox says, “only I’m the big brother.”) The center fielder, who has a distaste for time-wasting, occasionally posed difficulties for some of Fox’s less accomplished predecessors. A few seasons ago, when Willie was suffering through an epochal slump, striking out repeatedly or popping up in crucial situations, it occurred to the Giant management that their star might benefit from a checkup by an oculist. Somehow, neither the manager nor any of his coaches nor anyone in the front office felt any eagerness to make this suggestion to Mays, and eventually somebody approached a San Francisco sportswriter named Charles Einstein, who is a biographer and close friend of Willie’s, and asked if he would undertake the mission. A little startled, Einstein agreed, and a few days later he greeted Mays near the batting cage. The exchange, Einstein says, went like this:

EINSTEIN: Er—say, Buck [some of Mays’ friends call him Buck], have you noticed how many players are wearing glasses this year?

MAYS: Like who?

EINSTEIN: Well, let’s see.… Oh, yes—Howard. Frank Howard is wearing glasses now.

MAYS: He ain’t hittin’ either.

The subject was never reopened.

On Sunday, a sellout crowd confidently turned out to watch another Dodger-Giant pitching classic—Claude Osteen vs. Gaylord Perry—and a further extension of the home team’s infinitely extensible lead. It was Cap Day at Candlestick, and the rows of kids in the top deck, each wearing a dark baseball cap with white central insignia, looked exactly like a congress of raccoons. Noise and delight everywhere—except, it turned out, on the playing field. The ball kept coming loose in the infield; there were four errors in the first two innings and eight errors in all, and at one point Tito Fuentes, the Giants’ second baseman, struck out on a wild pitch and eventually came around to score. That kind of baseball. Still, all seemed saved when the Giants pulled ahead on a three-run homer by Bobby Bonds in the sixth, but then Don McMahon, the Giants’ elderly relief pitcher, found it impossible to get anybody out during his eight-hundred-and-forty-ninth (and perhaps his worst) lifetime mound appearance; Chris Speier, in an admirably eager and youthful but absolutely hopeless and mistaken attempt at a double play, threw a ball away that he should have held on to; the Dodgers scored six runs in the last two innings, beating their old rivals by 9–6; and the San Francisco fans went home with the anxiously renewed knowledge under their new caps that the season still had a few weeks to run after all.

Ten days later, I paid a visit to the American League side of San Francisco Bay, calling upon the other surprise of this baseball season—the Oakland A’s, who, like the Giants, had opened a startling lead over their Western Division rivals. The two Bay-area teams have coexisted amicably since the A’s migrated from Kansas City in 1968, competing only for the annual regional low-attendance crown, which the Giants carried off by a whisker last year, 740,220 to 778,355. The A’s, in spite of their recent and discouraging success at winning ball games, have come back bravely this year, opening up a margin of over a hundred thousand fewer fans than the Giants in their first twenty home games; this time the issue may not be settled until after the World Series. My first view of the handsome new triple-decked Oakland Coliseum, just before game time on a cold Tuesday night, suggested that the tenants of Candlestick Park held an unfair advantage, but then I observed that almost every one of the fifty thousand shiny, brightly painted seats in the place was entirely visible, being empty. The umpires and the teams—the A’s and the visiting California Angels—took the field; a serenade played by a strolling jazz combo echoed thinly among the few hundred patrons scattered between the two dugouts; the familiar icy Pacific winds whistled up my pant legs; and I sensed myself, as in a Terence Rattigan bad dream, exiled to a dying seaside resort in January.

Nobody knows why northern California has taken so gingerly to big-league baseball. The population of the immediate area—perhaps three and a half million, if Sacramento is thrown in—is probably too meager to sustain two baseball teams, but this has not proved to be a difficulty for the two pro football teams, the two major college football teams, and the professional basketball team that also sell tickets in the region. The subject is endlessly speculated upon in local bars and pressrooms, and the only sensible theory I have heard put forward suggests that there are a good many other things to do outdoors in the summer in the environs of San Mateo and Marin and Contra Costa Counties. The owner of the A’s, Charles O. Finley, has attacked the problem in characteristic style, with a numbing flood of promotions, but it is still possible that his talented and exciting ball team, with its incomparable new hero, Vida Blue, may eventually succeed in attracting more people into the Coliseum than have yet turned out for Hot Pants Day, cow-milking contests, or a gate prize of two free season tickets to the home games of Charles O. Finley’s hockey team, the Golden Seals.

The game that first night went to the Finleyites, 7–5, in thirteen gelid innings; the next evening the Angels reversed matters by the same score in twelve. The two games, in fact, had a creepy, mirrorlike similarity. On Tuesday, the Angels jumped away to a 3–0 and then a 4–1 lead on home runs by Ken McMullen and Roger Repoz, but the bottom of the Oakland batting order kept bashing the ball, too—a homer by catcher Dave Duncan, a three-run job by second baseman Dick Green. Duncan, a tall young receiver with a pleasingly mobile style behind the plate, hit a double in the seventh, but when he came up to bat with two out in the ninth, the A’s were still one run shy. He ran the count to three and two and then lined another homer to left. I was startled. More accustomed to the sight of looped two-hundred-foot bingles in Shea Stadium, I had forgotten about this style of baseball. Bob Locker, a veteran relief man for the A’s, now entirely muffled the visitors with his sinker ball, and in the thirteenth Dagoberto Campaneris, the Oakland shortstop, got on via an error and then stole second—quite unnecessarily, it turned out, because his teammate Reggie Jackson hit one out into an uninhabited and perhaps unexplored section of the bleachers, to end matters. It was the fifteenth home run for the A’s in seven games—fifteen homers hit by nine different players.

The next evening (before an enormously increased audience of 4354), the Oakland starter, Catfish Hunter, in search of his ninth win in a row, was staked to an early five-run lead, which he slowly but obdurately threw away, surrendering twelve hits to the visitors, including, of course, a tying ninth-inning homer, by Jim Spencer. The winning round-tripper (the tenth of the two-game series) was struck in the twelfth by pinch-hitter Jim Fregosi, the Angels’ All Star shortstop, who has been absent most of this season with an ailing foot. The visitors’ lineup also included a stranger named Alex Johnson, who had been sprung that afternoon by manager Lefty Phillips from the most recent of his many suspensions for languid play;
almost
languidly, Johnson lined out three singles.

The Athletics (to give them their honored ancient name, which the front office is, for some reason, phasing out) are a poised, eager, and extremely dangerous
équipage
. Their speed and power (an unusual combination that also distinguishes the Giants) are personified in Bert Campaneris, who has won the AL title for stolen bases in five out of the past six years, and Reggie Jackson, who hit forty-seven homers in 1969. Jackson had a miserable season last year, full of sulks and strikeouts, but he seems to have flowered under this year’s manager, Dick Williams (who might even be next year’s manager, too). Among the other regulars is Sal Bando, an experienced and hard-bitten third baseman. Only the pitching, surprisingly, may be a trifle below championship caliber; the bullpen, for instance, is mostly untested, having rusticated through a span of weeks this spring when two starters, Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter, ran off a string of eighteen wins without defeat.

Vida Blue. The name (it is pronounced “Vye-da”) could have been invented by Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon—Lardner or Runyon on a good day. It can be sung with feeling (I have heard it) to the tune of “Lida Rose,” the quartet from
The Music Man
. It suggests other baseball monickers—summertime names, now all but lost to memory: June Green, Jimmy Lavender, Lu Blue (a switch-hitting first baseman with the Tigers, long ago). It also suggests, to current American League batters, a quick and unrewarding day’s work. Blue, still only twenty-one years old and playing his first full season in the majors, has struck out about three times as many batters as he has walked, which is phenomenal control for a young fireballer; his 13-and-2 record (at this writing) includes five shutouts. Last year, up from the minors for six late appearances, he threw a no-hitter and a one-hitter. I did not see Blue pitch in Oakland (I had a better plan), but I had no difficulty in picking him out in the clubhouse, or even on the field during batting practice, for he went everywhere with a small attendant cloud of out-of-town and local sportswriters. Their task was unenviable. Every one of them was there to ask what is, in effect the sportswriter’s only question—the question that remains unanswerable, because it scratches at the mystery that will always separate the spectator from the athlete: “How does it
feel
to be you?” Vida, to give him credit, did his best. One day, pushed for the hundredth time to explain what he, a young black ballplayer from a small town in Louisiana (Mansfield, thirty-five miles south of Shreveport), thought when he heard himself favorably compared to Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and Bob Feller, Blue said, “I find it quite astounding.”

Vida Blue, by the way, is not the most publicized member of the Oakland A’s. That honor goes, by a wide margin, to Charles O. Finley, who must be the only baseball executive whose biography takes up more pages in the team’s souvenir yearbook than the space given to any of his stars or to his manager. He is the sole owner of the A’s and, in effect, their stage manager. He designed the team’s horrendous uniforms (“Kelly Green, Wedding Gown White, and California Gold”) and put his ballplayers into white spikes, a combination that makes them look like members of a tavern-league bowling team. At each home game, his signature, spelled out in lighted script on the scoreboard, begins the announcement “Charles O. Finley presents his Million Dollar Baby.… I hope you find her very entertaining.” He has pushed hard for multicolored bases and for the awarding of first base on three balls instead of four. He is, in short, an embarrassment to baseball and an infuriating goad. Only one thing can be said in his defense: The Oakland A’s are
his
ball team. Through player development, through trades, through drafts, through planning and hiring and spending and firing—all with the absolute minimum of outside advice or delegated authority—he alone has fashioned the personnel and character of this excellent club. He is a baseball man.

My better plan about Vida Blue was to see him pitch in the proper surroundings—in front of a crowd. That happened just two nights later, on Friday, at baseball’s prettiest diamond, the Bijou of the East, Fenway Park. The game promised wonders. It simultaneously matched up the league’s two division-leading teams and two best pitchers. Blue was coming into the game after those ten straight wins, having lost only on the opening day of the season; five of his victories had been shutouts, and he had not permitted an earned run in his previous twenty innings. His opponent, the Red Sox’ Sonny Siebert, stood at 8 and 0 for the year, and, going back to the middle of the 1970 season, had won seventeen of his last twenty decisions; he had surrendered a total of four runs in his last four games, and not a single home run this year. Vida, a southpaw, would be pitching for the first time in Fenway Park, whose hovering, over-adjacent green left-field wall is known as a ravenous devourer of lefties. There were other vibes: Dick Williams, the Oakland manager, was returning to the park in which, from the opposite dugout, he had led the Red Sox to their extraordinary pennant in 1967. He was fired two years later, when the Red Sox slid to third place. That 1969 season ended for the Red Sox, in effect, during a disastrous June series at Fenway Park in which the visiting Oakland A’s—Kismet!—scored thirty-eight runs in three games; in one of those games Reggie Jackson bombed Dick Williams’ pitchers for ten runs batted in.

None of this was lost on the Boston fans. An hour before game time, there were standees stacked three-deep behind the seats back of home, and a swarm of young human flies had alighted on the rooftop billboard behind left field. The paying crowd—35,714—was the biggest at Fenway Park in more than three years. What we saw fulfilled every wish—a dashing and memorable party that was over almost before we knew it. Reggie Jackson, third up for the A’s in the first inning, banged a Sonny Siebert pitch into the right-field bleachers; Reggie Smith singled off Vida Blue in the bottom half, and Rico Petrocelli, batting clean-up, bombed a Blue darter ten or twelve rows up into the triangular fold of bleachers above the wall in exact center field. Enormous noises rose into the spring air.