Summer Game Read online

  At about this time, I began to pick up a dialogue from the seats directly behind me—a flat, murmurous, continuous exchange in Middle Western accents between two elderly men.

  “Look at the skin on my hands, how dry it is,” said one.

  “You do anything for it?” asked the other.

  “Yes, I got some stuff the doctor gave me—just a little tube of something. It don’t help much.”

  I stole a look at them. They were both in their seventies, at least. Both were sitting back comfortably, their arms folded across this stomachs.

  “Watch that ball,” said the first. “Is that fair?”

  “No, it’s foul. You know, I haven’t seen a homer this year.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Maybe Musial will hit one here tomorrow.”

  The White Sox, down one run after the first inning, could do nothing with Jackson. Weis struck out again in the fifth, made a wild throw to first in the sixth, and then immediately redeemed himself with another fast double play. The voices went on.

  “This wind melts your ice cream fast, don’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. It feels nice, though. Warm wind.”

  In the top of the eighth, with the bases loaded, Weis grabbed another line drive and doubled up the runner at second base. There were chirps from the stands.

  “It don’t seem any time at all since spring training last year.”

  “That’s because we’re older now. You take my grandson, he’s always looking forward to something. Christmas and his birthday and things like that. That makes the time go slow for him. You and me, we just watch each day by itself.”

  “Yes. You know, I didn’t hardly think about life at all until I was sixty-five or seventy.”

  “I know.”

  Weis led off the bottom of the eighth, and popped up to left. He started still another double play in the ninth, but his afternoon was ruined. The Cardinals won the game, 2–0.

  This evening, I looked up Al Weis’s record. He is twenty-two years old and was an All-Scholastic player at Farmingdale High, on Long Island. In his three years in organized baseball, he has played with Holdrege, in the Nebraska State League; with Lincoln, in the Three-I League; and with Charleston, in the Sally League. His batting averages in those years—.275, .231, .261—tell the story: good field, no hit. Time has run out for him this spring, and it must seem to him that it went too quickly. Next week, he will report to the White Sox farm camp in Hollywood, Florida, for another year in the minors.

  St. Petersburg, March 22

  This is Gerontium, the elders’ capital—city of shuffleboard courts, city of sidewalk benches, city of curious signs reading “Youtharama,” “Smorgarama,” and “Biblegraph.” Today it was also the baseball capital of the world, for the game at Al Lang Field was the first encounter between the Yankees and the New York Mets, the new National League team that sprang—not simply full-grown but middle-aged—out of the forehead of George Weiss last winter. Some of the spectators’ curiosity and expectancy about this game resembled the unbecoming relish with which party guests watch a newly divorced couple encountering each other in public for the first time, for they could watch General Manager Weiss, in his box behind the home dugout, and Casey Stengel, in the dugout, staring over at the team that had evicted them so scandalously two years ago. But there was another, more valid tension to be tasted; one sensed that this game was a crisis for the Mets—their first chance to discover, against the all-conquerors, whether they were truly a ball team. A rout, a laugher, a comedy of ineptitude might destroy them before the season ever began.

  St. Petersburg fans are elderly, all right, but they are noisier, keener, and more appreciative than their counterparts to the south. For one thing, they know more baseball. Al Lang Field has for years been the late-winter home of two good teams, the Yankees and Cardinals; when the Yankees moved to new quarters at Fort Lauderdale this year, the Mets moved in to take their place. I had guessed that this switch of home teams might cause some confusion of loyalties, but I was wrong. There was a respectable burst of applause when Mickey Mantle stepped up to the plate in the second inning, but this was almost immediately smothered by a full roar of pleasure when Charlie Neal collared Mantle’s streaking grounder in short right and threw him out. Groans and headshakings followed when the Yanks collected three singles and a run off Roger Craig’s pitching, but the Mets failed to collapse. Frank Thomas hit a double in the Mets’ half of the inning—the first hit given up by Bill Stafford, the Yankees’ starting pitcher, all spring—and there was another startled shout a few minutes later when Hodges and Chacon pulled off a 3-6-3 double play on Maris’s bouncer. The Mets not only belonged, they were winning converts every minute.

  The Mets are an attractive team, full of echoes and overtones, and one must believe that George Weiss has designed their clean, honest, but considerably frayed appearance with great care. Gus Bell, Frank Thomas, Eddie Bouchee, and Richie Ashburn are former headliners whose mistakes will be forgiven and whose accomplishments will win sentimental affection. Coach Cookie Lavagetto and pitchers Roger Craig and Clem Labine will bring the older Dodger fans up to the Polo Grounds this summer. Neal and Zimmer looked unchanged—Neal intense, withdrawn, talented, too tightly wound for an ideal infielder, and Zimmer eager and competitive, angrily trying to make pugnacity compensate for what he lacks in size, skill, and luck. Gil Hodges still cannot hit pitches over the outside corners, but his stance and his mannerisms at the plate are a cup of limeflower tea to those with memories: The bat is held in the left hand while he fiddles with his eyelashes with his right hand, then settles his helmet, then tucks up his right pants leg, then sweeps the hand the full length of the bat, like a duelist wiping blood off a sword, and then at last he faces the pitcher. Finally, there is Casey himself, a walking pantheon of evocations. His pinstripes are light blue now, and so is the turtleneck sweatshirt protruding above his shirt, but the short pants, the hobble, the muttering lips, and the comic, jerky gestures are unaltered, and today he proved himself still capable of the winning move.

  The Mets went ahead, 3–2, in the sixth inning, on two Yankee errors, two walks, and Zimmer’s single. After that, the St. Petersburg fans began a nervous, fingers-crossed cry of “Keep it up, Mets!” and welcomed each put-out with shouts of incredulity and relief. In the ninth, though, the Mets’ second pitcher, a thin young Negro named Al Jackson, up this year from Columbus, gave up four singles and the tying run after Neal messed up a double play. With the winning runs on base, Stengel showed how much he wanted this game for his team, for he came out to the mound and relieved Jackson. (Pitchers are almost never yanked in mid-inning in spring training.) The relief man, Howie Nunn, retired Blanchard on a pop behind second for the last out. More wonders followed. Joe Christopher, another unknown, led off the Mets’ ninth with a triple, and after Zimmer had fouled out, Stengel looked into his closet of spare parts, which is far less well stocked than his old Yankee cornucopia, and found Ashburn there. Richie hit the first pitch into right field for the ball game, and George Weiss nodded his head, stood up in his box, and smiled for the first time today.

  I doubt whether any of the happy six thousand-odd filing out of Al Lang Field after the game were deluding themselves with dreams of a first-division finish for the Mets this year. The team is both too old and too young for sensible hopes. Its pitchers will absorb some fearful punishment this summer, and Chacon and Neal have yet to prove that they can manage the double play with any consistency. Still, though, the Mets will be playing in the same league with the Houston Colt .45s, another newborn team of castoffs, and with the Phillies, who managed to finish forty-six games out of first place last year and will have eight more games this year in which to disimprove that record. The fight for the National League cellar this summer may be as lively as the fight for the pennant. What cheered me as I tramped through the peanut shells and discarded programs and out into the hot late sunlight was not just the score and not just Casey’s triumph but a fre
shly renewed appreciation of the marvelous complexity and balance of baseball. Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world’s champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.

  Tampa, March 24

  The population of Tampa is 275,000. I looked it up this morning, but I could have saved myself the trouble. Anyone attending a game in the big, modern reinforced-concrete-shell grandstand of Al Lopez Field (named for the White Sox manager, who is a Tampa native) could figure out that this is the big town in these parts; he could tell it by the sound of the crowd alone—a steady, complex, cosmopolitan clamor made up of exhortation, laughter, outright booing, the cries of venders, and the hum of garrulous city talkers. Today the old people in the stands were outnumbered. There were young women in low-cut sun dresses, children of all ages (two boys near me were wearing Little League uniforms with “Western Fertilizer” emblazoned on the back), and Negroes and Cubans in the grandstand. The sun was hot and summery, and I felt at home: this was July in Yankee Stadium. Nevertheless, I had trouble concentrating on the first few innings of the game, which was between the Cincinnati Reds, who train here, and the visiting Dodgers. My mind kept returning to an incident—a sudden visual snapshot of a scene—in the game I saw yesterday in Bradenton, where Milwaukee had beaten the Yankees.

  Bradenton yesterday was nothing like Tampa today. The weather was cold early spring, with low clouds and a nipping wind blowing in from left field. The stadium might have been a country fairgrounds, and the elders who had come early and filled up the park to see the mighty Yankees had the gravity, the shy politeness, and the silence of a rural crowd at a tent show. A rain the night before had turned the infield into a mudpie, and while we waited patiently for it to dry, three bearded men wearing plumed Spanish helmets, silvery chest plates, short striped pants, and high boots trooped out in front of the dugout, carrying swords, to have their picture taken with Mickey Mantle. They were local citizens participating in Bradenton’s annual de Soto celebration. Mickey grinned and brandished one of the swords for the photographer, and the conquistadors looked awed. At last, the game began, in tomblike silence. No one complained when Mantle, Howard, Boyer, and Berra failed to appear in the opening lineup. Hardly anyone cheered when the Braves got to Jim Coates for a run in the third. A man standing in front of the scoreboard in deep center field hung up a numbered placard for each ball, strike, and out. When the sun began to break through, another employee came out of the Braves’ clubhouse beside left field and hung a dozen sweatshirts—white, with black sleeves—out to dry on a clothesline strung between two palm trees. The game turned out to be a good one; there was some small shouting when the Braves came from behind to tie the score in the bottom of the ninth on a home run by Tommie Aaron, Hank Aaron’s kid brother, and some guffaws when the Yanks lost it on an error in the tenth. In spite of the score, and perhaps only because of the peacefulness and stolidity of the fans, I came away with the impression that the Braves have become a middle-aged team, now somehow past the point of eagerness and energy that has made them champions or fearsome contenders for the last nine years.

  The incident that startled me at Bradenton was one of those astonishing juxtapositions that are possible only in spring training. In the seventh inning, with the sun now fully out and the grass turning soft and emerald as it dried, Whitey Ford came in to pitch for the Yankees. At the same moment, in the Braves’ bull-pen in deep left field, Warren Spahn began throwing—not warming up but simply loosening his arm. Suddenly I saw that from my seat behind first base the two pitchers—the two best left-handers in baseball, the two best left- or right-handers in baseball—were in a direct line with each other, Ford exactly superimposed on Spahn. It was a trick photograph, a trompe-l’oeil: a 158-game winner and a 309-game winner throwing baseballs in the same fragment of space. Ford, with his short, businesslike windup, was all shoulders and quickness, while, behind him, Spahn would slowly kick his right leg up high and to the left, peering over his shoulder as he leaned back, and then deliver the ball with an easy, explosive sweep. It excited me to a ridiculous extent. I couldn’t get over it. I looked about me for someone to point it out to, but I couldn’t find a recognizable fan-face near me.

  The Tampa crowd this afternoon would have spotted it. They knew their baseball, and they were tough and hard to please. Joey Jay, the Reds’ top starter, was having all kinds of trouble on the mound. His control was off, he had to throw too many pitches, and he kept shaking his head disgustedly. After the first two innings, the Dodgers were waiting for him to get behind and come in with a fat pitch. They batted around against him in the third inning, scoring five runs; two of them came on a home run by Daryl Spencer, and then in the fifth Spencer knocked another pitch over the fence. Manager Hutchinson left Jay in, letting him take his punishment while he got the work he needed. The fans, though the Reds are their team, seemed to enjoy it all. They booed Jay lightly; they didn’t mind seeing him suffer a little—not with that $27,500 salary he won after a holdout this spring. They applauded Koufax, the Dodger pitcher, who was working easily and impressively, mixing fast balls and curves and an occasional changeup, pitching in and out to the batters, and hitting the corners. Koufax looked almost ready for opening day.

  There were fewer rookies and scrubs in the lineups today; the season begins in just over two weeks. These two teams will almost certainly fight it out with the Giants for the pennant, and I was tempted to make comparisons and private predictions. But then I reminded myself that baseball would be competitive and overserious soon enough. The city crowd around me here, the big park, and the approaching time for headlines, standings, and partisanship had almost made me knowing and Northern again. Already I had begun to forget the flavor of Florida baseball—the older, easier pleasures of baseball in the spring in the country.

  THE SHORT SEASON

  — March 1968

  BASEBALL HAS BEGUN. EAST and west, this is the week of the unfurled bunting, the flexed mayoral or gubernatorial wing, the restored hope, the repainted seat, the April fly ball falling untouched on resodded turf, the windblown shout, and the distant row of pitchers and catchers huddling deeper into their windbreakers as the early-spring sunlight deserts the bullpen. Now everything counts; from now until October, every pitch and every swing will be recorded. In another month, some order will begin to emerge from the standings. Infields will have hardened, some arms and expectations will have gone bad, and enormous crowds will pour out for the first weekend doubleheaders. The long season will engage us once again. Before this happens, however, there may still be time to set down some notes about the other, shorter baseball season that is just past—the time of spring training. I know, of course, that spring ball games in Florida and Arizona are meant to be forgotten. March standings and averages are written in the sand; winning is incidental. Many ballplayers hate spring training—rookies because of the anxieties of trying to win a job, the regulars because of the immense labor and boredom of physical conditioning, the fear of injury, and the threat, heavier each year, of losing a starting position. Only the fan—and perhaps only the big-city fan, at that—is free to savor the special taste of this time and place. After a recent week in Florida, spent mostly in the company of the White Sox and Red Sox, I came home with the curious feeling that I had been retrained, too—that the short season had renewed my fondness for small ballparks and small crowds and the country quiet of afternoons given over without regret to the sunshine game.

  Spring baseball is all surmise. This year, of course, the pleasures of comparison and speculation were sharpened by the memory of last summer’s extraordinary baseball events, which concluded with the closest pennant race in history�
��a four-way struggle won by the Red Sox on the last afternoon of the season—and a brilliant World Series, won by the Cardinals in the seventh game. On my first mid-March afternoon at Payne Park, the wooden, old-timey stadium of the Chicago White Sox in Sarasota, the Red Sox were the visiting team, and the warm, windy air was instantly full of hints and auspices. Pitching for the home side was Cisco Carlos, a young right-hander who had run up a slick late-season record with the White Sox last year, when he gave up a bare five runs (and no extra-base hits) in forty-two innings, for an earned-run average of 0.86. “Cn. Crls. kp. it up?” I scribbled on the margin of my scorecard—a note suggesting that Carlos might be a formidable additional starter for the Chicago pitching staff, already the best in the league, which kept the club in contention with Boston, Minnesota, and Detroit until the last three days of the 1967 race. Carlos gave up a wrong-field triple by José Tartabull, the Boston lead-off man, who scored a moment later on an infield out—a chopper that was briskly charged and flipped by Luis Aparicio, the quick and admirable shortstop who has returned to the White Sox after a five-year absence with the Orioles. “Apar. to glue Chisox i.f.?” I wrote. Next up was Carl Yastrzemski, the Boston demigod who won the American League titles for batting, home runs, and runs batted in last year. He was welcomed by awed applause from the Sarasota old folks, and a full shift by the Chicago infield. He grounded out to Aparicio, who was playing a good ten feet on the first-base side of second. “Yaz rbbd.,” I noted. “Tgh. yr. ahead.” Tony Conigliaro then lined out quickly, offering no immediate evidence about the results of the terrible injury he suffered last August, when he was struck in the face by a pitch and was finished for the season. “Tony C. gnshy?” I asked myself. “Wt. & see.”