The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (52 page)

Don kept a scrapbook that summer, pasting up Greenberg’s pictures and box scores and headlines (
“HANK’S NINE DAYS AHEAD!”
). Under one photograph of Greenberg swinging a bat, he penciled “There she goes!” and under the headline
“HANK NEEDS FOUR HOMERS IN NINE GAMES TO TIE”
he wrote “Two bits he does it!” He was wrong; Hank hit fifty-eight, falling shy of the record by two. A year or two earlier, Greenberg had accepted an invitation to dinner with some friends of his who had a house in Max Lapides’ part of town, and word was sent out that he would shake hands with the neighborhood kids. The excited juniors lined up (in their sweatshirts with Greenberg’s number 5 inked on the back, and carrying, nearly all of them, first basemen’s mitts), but Max was not among them, for he had broken a leg a few days before and was forbidden to get out of bed. He cried himself to sleep that night, but he was awakened by his father turning on the light and ushering Hank Greenberg into the room. The sudden visitor was so enormous, Max recalls, that he had to duck his head to get through the door. Greenberg sat on Max’s bed and talked to him for half an hour. Before he left, he took out a pen and signed Max’s cast and then, seeing a copy of Max’s favorite baseball book—
Safe!,
by Harold Sherman—on the bedside table, he signed that, too.

“In our household, we used to talk about only three things—current events, the Jewish holidays, and baseball,” Max has said. “You have to try to remember how much easier it was to keep up with all the baseball news back then. For us, there were just the Tigers and the seven other teams in the American League, so we knew them by heart. All the games were played in the afternoon, and none of the teams was in a time zone more than an hour away from Detroit, so you got just about all the scores when the late-afternoon papers came. You could talk about that at supper, and then there were the stories in the morning papers to read and think about the next day. Why, in those days we knew more about the farms than I know about some of the West Coast teams right now. By the time a Hoot Evers or a Fred Hutchinson was ready to come up from Beaumont, we knew all about him.”

Max’s father, Jack, did not need Hank Greenberg to introduce him to baseball.
His
father, in turn, had been a butcher in Rochester, New York, and young Jack Lapides had often made the morning rounds in the family cart and then sat next to his father in a saloon and studied the pictures of the baseball players of the day—with their turtleneck uniforms and handlebar mustaches—up above the big, cool bar mirror. Jack Lapides had a laundry business in Detroit, and by the nineteen thirties he had arranged things well enough so that in the stirring seasons of 1934 and 1935 he was able to attend every single Tiger home game and many on the road. “My father used to take me to fifty or sixty games a year,” Max recalled this summer, “and I recently became aware that between us we encompassed just about the entire history of big-league ball in this century. He went to most of the games every year right up to the end of his life, in 1967. I’d met Don by then, and in those last few years he would come along with us, too.”

Don Shapiro’s father, a tallow merchant, knew nothing about baseball, but one of Don’s uncles was a junk dealer who owned a semipro team in Lapeer, Michigan; and even as a very young boy, Don was sometimes allowed to sit on the bench with the players. That was enough—more than enough—to start it all for him. Don has a vivid and affectionate memory of Jack Lapides. “He was a very formal man, a reserved sort of man,” he said not long ago, “and I can still see him sitting up there in the stands, in his coat and collar and tie, with one hand on the railing in front of him. He kept me and Max on our toes. ‘Pay attention, boys,’ he always said. ‘This is a serious business.’”

It is another Saturday, the last day in June, and Max is back from Chicago again, to be with his family and his Tigers and his Tiger friends. This time, it has been decided, the game will be watched on television, and the three meet for lunch at Bert’s big, comfortable house in Huntington Woods. Before lunch, Max and Don throw a baseball back and forth in Bert’s backyard; according to custom, each is wearing the top half of a gray Tiger road uniform. The name on Don’s back, above the number 42, is
SZOTKIEWICZ
; Max is 21,
ZEPP
. The shirts, which are both beautifully pressed, were gifts from Ernie Harwell, who extracted them from the Tiger clubhouse after the brief, almost unnoticed careers of two Tiger foot soldiers—Kenny Szotkiewicz and Bill Zepp—had come to a close. (Harwell, who is a friend and admirer of Don Shapiro, telephoned Don from Cleveland one afternoon late in the 1966 season, and asked if he would care to work out with the Tigers before their game with the Indians that evening. Don canceled his appointments, flew to Cleveland and suited up, was introduced to Tiger manager Frank Skaff—who may have been a trifle surprised to find that the “prospect” Harwell had promised him was a slight, forty-two-year-old oral surgeon—and then warmed up with Don Wert, Ray Oyler, Willie Horton, and the rest. In photographs of the event, which hang on the wall of Don’s living room, the ballplayers look bemused, but the prospect is ecstatic.) Max begins throwing harder now, and Don, who has a catcher’s mitt and is wearing a Tiger cap on backward, goes into a crouch. Max’s motion is a little stiff, but you can see in it the evidences of a fair high-school ballplayer. Don handles his glove elegantly, coming up smoothly and in one motion after each pitch and snapping the throw back from behind his shoulder. He is smiling. He caught briefly for the University of Michigan varsity and, later, on a Sixth Service Command team in Chicago. The ball is beginning to pop in the gloves, and Bert, umpiring from behind the invisible mound, expresses concern for his wife’s borders. Max pauses for breath and reminds everyone of a similar pregame workout some years ago when a small protective sponge fell out of Don’s glove. “All he could say was ‘These hands. These golden hands.’ From catcher to surgeon in one second.”

“Throw the ball,” says the catcher-surgeon.

“Knuckler,” says Max.

“Hey!” says Don. “Not bad. Again.”

The next knuckleball sails over Don’s head and through the hedge.

“OK, that’s it,” Bert declares, calling the game. “Zena will kill me.”

“Listen,” Don says as they troop toward Bert’s sun porch. “I think my arm is coming back. I really mean that. Wouldn’t that be
something,
to get my arm back after all this time?” He notices that a lacing on his mitt has come loose, and he stops to tie it up. “Goddam dog,” he murmurs.

The Tigers, who have recently lost eight straight and have slipped to fifth place, are playing the rising Orioles, but they score two unearned runs off Mike Cuellar in the first inning, and in the second Mickey Stanley hits a home run. The Tiger pitcher is a big, strong-looking young right-hander named Mike Strahler. The friends sit in easy chairs in Bert’s study, with plates of sandwiches and salad in their laps. Zena Gordon, Bert’s wife, brings around seconds. Brian Gordon, Bert’s younger son, who is sixteen, comes in and watches for an inning or two and then wanders out again. The Gordons’ other son, Merrill, is away at his summer job. He is a Michigan State sophomore, who wants to become a forester; he does not care about baseball. “He thinks it’s a lot of men running around in funny suits,” Bert explains. Bert used to take Merrill to games, but the summer Merrill was eleven years old he finally got up the nerve to tell his father that baseball meant nothing to him. “Everything you do in life, you do so that your son will go to ball games with you, and then he doesn’t want to,” Bert says now. He makes a joke of it, but at the time the news shook him so severely that he himself hardly went to the ball park for two years. “If my family wanted to be home, I wanted to be home with them,” he says. Max Lapides has two daughters, who are seven and eleven; he says he can’t tell yet about them and baseball. Don’s son, Alan, who is fifteen, is crazy about baseball. He catches for a team called the Rangers in his suburban Colt League, and he watches the Tigers with something of his father’s unhappy intensity. Still, there are no streetcars that run from his house to the ball park, and it is almost certain that he will never discover a baseball world that is as rich and wide as his father’s. “You know what I really wish?” Alan said to Don one day last spring. “I wish I had friends like yours.”

The wives of the three friends apparently accept their husbands’ zealotry and their arcane closed company; indeed, they have no choice, since they cannot enter it on anything like even terms, and none of them, in truth, is much of a fan. Max and Sissi Lapides used to go to several games together each year, but then during one Yankee game, with the score tied at 6–6 in the eighth inning, Max noticed that his wife was quietly reading a book under her program, and it was thenceforth agreed that their interests in the pastime were not really comparable. Sue Shapiro is an admitted front-runner, who gets excited about the Tigers only when they are doing well. “Don is a fan,” she said recently. “It’s a fact of his life, so I have no trouble with it at all.”

The game at Bert’s house glides along, with the Tigers leading the Orioles by 4–1 after the fifth, and everything apparently in hand; the lighted figures move distantly on the screen, the room deepens in shadow, and the men lean back in their big chairs and let the baseball lull them. There is nothing to be concerned about except Kaline’s average (computed today by Bert on a pocket calculator), and now, after his second unsuccessful trip to the plate, the figures slip at last to .2994788, and Al Kaline is no longer a lifetime .300 man. It is sad; this may be Kaline’s last year. Then, a bit later, Eddie Brinkman singles, and Tiger first-base coach Dick Tracewski slaps him on the rump as he stands on the bag. Max Lapides says, “I wonder who holds the lifetime record for handing out most pats on the ass.”

“It has to be Crosetti,” Bert says instantly. “All those years he stood there in the third-base box for the Yankees and slapped all those big guys as they came around. He must be ahead by thousands.”

“A true piece of baseball trivia!” Max shouts.

“You can’t
say
‘baseball trivia,’” Don says. “It’s a contradiction in terms. It’s antithetical. We don’t use the word ‘trivia.’”

“OK, then,” Max says. “OK—how about ‘A Compendium of Little-Known Facts’?”

We cannot quite leave these friends here—three aging men, laughing together still, but too comfortable with their indoor, secondhand sport, and too much like the rest of us. Perhaps this sort of unremarkable fandom is what is ahead for them now; perhaps not. Bert Gordon, who worries about his health, goes to fewer and fewer night games. “You get older,” he says. “It gets colder.” Max Lapides, much happier in his Chicago job than he was in the old one in Detroit, has less time to call Bert with a baseball stumper in the middle of the morning. “I’m beginning to change a little,” he confessed recently. “Sometimes I even put an old player on the wrong team by a year or two. I sometimes think that after the big years of ’67 and ’68 I couldn’t really stay intense
all
summer about the Tigers if they were playing under-.500 ball again. I’m looking at it all from farther off, I guess.” The Lapides family now lives in Highland Park, Illinois, where the new school year is just beginning; by next April the late Tiger scores will bother Max a little less. The Tigers, in any case, have just about slipped from contention for this year; now in third place, behind Baltimore and Boston, they trail the division-leading Orioles by seven games—a margin that, according to Bert’s calculator, will require them to play at an .864 clip throughout September (plus a helpful Baltimore slump to a .500 level) in order to bring about another miracle. The friends have also lost Billy Martin, who, despite their stamp of approval, was recently fired as the manager of the Tigers. It’s been a hard season. No matter; these three men should be remembered in full summer, and at their home ball park, for it is there that they, like a few other great fans in other cities, made their game into something resembling a private work of art. It is a modest genre, to be sure, and terribly dated now, but still perhaps not one to be put aside too quickly. At the very least, these gentle prodigals have used their sport to connect themselves to their fathers and to their boyhood and to their city—the inner city that they long since lost and left—and also to connect themselves to friends with whom they could share a passion, a special language, and an immense private history. Baseball has been a family to them.

Don Shapiro, perhaps the most intricate of the three, may be the only one who will not change—the last to give up that mad, splendid hope of one absolutely perfect season: one hundred and sixty-two straight wins for his Tigers. Late last May, Don went to a night game against the Oakland A’s, and after eight and a half innings the score still stood at 0–0. Mickey Stanley led off the ninth for the Tigers with a single, and Gates Brown came up to bat. “He’s got to bunt. He’s
got
to!” Don said, watching the field intently. “He’s got to bunt, but he can’t. Just wait and see.” He was right; Brown swung away and singled to right, sending Stanley to third, as vast sounds of joy rose in the night. Oakland changed pitchers, and Duke Sims struck out. Tony Taylor batted for Cash, and on the one-and-two count Stanley set sail for the plate at full career, and Taylor, bunting on the suicide squeeze, fouled the ball off and was out.

“I don’t
believe
it!” Don cried hoarsely. “They’ve lost their minds down there! They’re trying to kill me. They’re doing it on purpose. If they don’t do it, I’ll have to kill myself.”

Dick McAuliffe then struck out, taking the called third strike without moving his bat from his shoulder, and the rally and the inning ended. Don, who had been standing and clutching his temples, now sat down and buried his head in his arms. He shuddered, and at last forced himself to look out at the emerald field. “If we lose, this is the worst game I ever saw,” he announced.

Following the Tigers has not become any easier since this report was written. Kaline and Cash and Northrup and McAuliffe and other stalwarts have departed; the team finished third in its division in 1973, and dead last in 1974 and 1975. Thanks to some new stars like Ron LeFlore and Mark Fidrych, they moved up to fifth place in 1976 but finished twenty-four games behind the division-winning Yankees. The three great fans, it is comforting to report, have changed much less than their team. Max Lapides, now entirely at home in Chicago, has not turned to the White Sox or the Cubs for solace. He follows the Tigers as best he can, sometimes calling Bert for a good long catch-up on the team, and he goes to every Tiger game within reach. Two years ago, in June, he arranged things so that he was able to drive to Milwaukee and back on three successive days—a total of more than five hundred miles—to watch a Tigers-Brewers series. The Tigers lost the first game, 8–4; on the second day, they dropped a doubleheader, 5–0 and 4–2; they also lost the last game, 5–4. President Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, thus relieving Bert Gordon of one of his self-imposed morning tasks; the last reading on Bert’s calculator showed that Mr. Nixon had surrendered 30.62970 percent of his White House tenancy. Bert’s other vigil ended in October 1974, when Al Kaline retired. Shortly before game-time on the afternoon of the Tigers’ final home game that year, Bert suddenly realized that he was missing his last chance to see Kaline in action. He jumped in his car and raced for Tiger Stadium. He turned on the car radio and heard Ernie Harwell describe Kaline’s first turn at bat in the game; he parked in his regular lot and was hurrying across Michigan Avenue to the ball park when he heard the crowd roar that greeted Kaline’s second appearance. Bert went in and happily took his seat, and for an inning or two he did not notice that Kaline had left the lineup after that second time up—left it for good. “I got up and went home,” Bert said later. “There wasn’t even anybody there I could
tell
about it. It was the story of my life.” The next morning, in his office, he punched out the final Kaline numbers: 10,116 at-bats, 3007 hits, for a lifetime batting average of .2972518.