The training period made it clear that nothing had altered with him (he walked twenty-five men in fourteen innings in exhibition play), and when the club went north he was left in Bradenton for further work. He joined the team in Chicago on April 16, and entered a game against the Cubs the next afternoon, taking over in the fourth inning, with the Pirates down by 104. He pitched five innings, and gave up eight runs (three of them unearned), five hits, and seven bases on b.a.l.l.s. The Cubs batted around against him in the first inning he pitched, and in the sixth he gave up back-to-back home runs. His statistics for the game, including an ERA of 9.00, were also his major-league figures for the year, because late in April the Pirates sent him down to the Charleston (West Virginia) Charlies, their farm team in the Cla.s.s AAA International League. Bla.s.s did not argue about the decision; in fact, as a veteran with more than eight years" service in the majors, he had to agree to the demotion before the parent club could send him down. He felt that the Pirates and Joe Brown had been extraordinarily patient and sympathetic in dealing with a baffling and apparently irremediable problem. They had also been generous, refusing to cut his salary by the full twenty percent permissible in extending a major-league contract. (His pay, which had been ninety thousand dollars in 1973, was cut to seventy-five thousand for the next season, and then to sixty-three thousand this spring.) In any case, Bla.s.s wanted to go. He needed continuous game experience if he was ever to break out of it, and he knew he no longer belonged with a big-league club.
The distance between the minors and the majors, always measurable in light-years, is probably greater today than ever before, and for a man making the leap in the wrong direction the feeling must be sickening. Bla.s.s tries to pa.s.s off the experience lightly (he is apparently incapable of self-pity), but one can guess what must have been required of him to summon up even a sc.r.a.p of the kind of hope and aggressive self-confidence that are prerequisites, at every level, of a successful athletic performance. He and Karen rented an apartment in Charleston, and the whole family moved down when the school year ended; David and Chris enjoyed the informal atmosphere around the ball park, where they were permitted to s.h.a.g flies in batting practice. "It wasn"t so bad," Bla.s.s told me.
But it was. The manager of the Charlies, Steve Demeter, put Bla.s.s in the regular starting rotation, but he fared no better against minor-leaguers than he had in the big time. In a very brief time, his earned-run average and his bases-on-b.a.l.l.s record were the worst in the league. Bla.s.s got along well with his teammates, but there were other problems. The mystery of Steve Bla.s.s"s decline was old stuff by now in most big-league-city newspapers, but as soon as he was sent down, there was a fresh wave of attention from the national press and the networks; and sportswriters for newspapers in Memphis and Rochester and Richmond and the other International League cities looked on his arrival in town as a G.o.d-given feature story. Invariably, they asked him how much money he was earning as a player; then they asked if he thought he was worth it.
The Charlies did a lot of traveling by bus. One day, the team made an eight-hour trip from Charleston to Toledo, where they played a night game. At eleven that same night, they reboarded the bus and drove to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for their next date, arriving at about nine in the morning. Bla.s.s had started the game in Toledo, and he was so disgusted with his performance that he got back on the bus without having showered or taken off his uniform. "We"d stop at an all-night restaurant every now and then, and I"d walk in with a two-day beard and my old Charleston Charlies uniform on, looking like go-to-h.e.l.l," Bla.s.s said. "It was pretty funny to see people looking at me. I had some books along, and we had plenty of wine and beer on the bus, so the time went by somehow." He paused and then shook his head. "G.o.d, that was an awful trip," he said.
By early August, Bla.s.s"s record with Charleston was two and nine, and 9.74. He had had enough. With Joe Brown"s permission, he left the Charlies and flew West to consult Dr. Bill Harrison, of Davis, California. Dr. Harrison is an optometrist who has helped develop a system of "optome-therapy," designed to encourage athletes to concentrate on the immediate physical task at hand-hitting a ball, throwing a strike-by visualizing the act in advance; his firm was once retained by the Kansas City Royals baseball team, and his patients have included a number of professional golfers and football players. Bla.s.s spent four days with him, and then rejoined the Pirates, this time as a batting-practice pitcher. He says now that he was very interested in Dr. Harrison"s theories but that they just didn"t seem to help him much.
In truth, nothing helped. Bla.s.s knew that his case was desperate. He was almost alone now with his problem-a baseball castaway-and he had reached the point where he was willing to try practically anything. Under the guidance of pitching coach Don Osborn, he attempted some unusual experiments. He tried pitching from the outfield, with the sweeping motion of a fielder making a long peg. He tried pitching while kneeling on the mound. He tried pitching with his left foot tucked up behind his right knee until the last possible second of his delivery. Slow-motion films of his delivery were studied and compared with films taken during some of his best games of the past; much of his motion, it was noticed, seemed extraneous, but he had thrown exactly the same way at his peak. Bla.s.s went back and corrected minute details, to no avail.
The frustrating, bewildering part of it all was that while working alone with a catcher Bla.s.s continued to throw as well as he ever had; his fastball was alive, and his slider and curve shaved the corners of the plate. But the moment a batter stood in against him he became a different pitcher, especially when throwing a fastball-a pitcher apparently afraid of seriously injuring somebody. As a result, he was of very little use to the Pirates even in batting practice.
Don Osborn, a gentle man in his mid-sixties, says, "Steve"s problem was mental. He had mechanical difficulties, with some underlying mental cause. I don"t think anybody will ever understand his decline. We tried everything-I didn"t know anything else to do. I feel real bad about it. Steve had a lot of guts to stay out there as long as he did. You know, old men don"t dream much, but just the other night I had this dream that Steve Bla.s.s was all over his troubles and could pitch again. I said, "He"s ready, we can use him!" Funny ..."
It was probably at this time that Bla.s.s consulted a psychiatrist. He does not talk about it-in part out of a natural reticence but also because the Pirate front office, in an effort to protect his privacy, turned away inquiries into this area by Pittsburgh writers and persistently refused to comment on whether any such therapy was undertaken. It is clear, however, that Bla.s.s does not believe he gained any profound insights into possible unconscious causes of his difficulties. Earlier in the same summer, he also experimented briefly with transcendental meditation. He entered the program at the suggestion of Joe Brown, who also enrolled Dave Giusti, Willie Stargell, pitcher Bruce Kison, and himself in the group. Bla.s.s repeated mantras and meditated twice a day for about two months; he found that it relaxed him, but it did not seem to have much application to his pitching. Innumerable other remedies were proposed by friends and strangers. Like anyone in hard straits, he was deluged with unsolicited therapies, overnight cures, naturopathies, exorcisms, theologies, and amulets, many of which arrived by mail. Bla.s.s refuses to make jokes about these nostrums. "Anyone who takes the trouble to write a man who is suffering deserves to be thanked," he told me.
Most painful of all, perhaps, was the fact that the men who most sympathized with his incurable professional difficulties were least able to help. The Pirates were again engaged in a close and exhausting pennant race fought out over the last six weeks of the season; they moved into first place for good only two days before the end, won their half-pennant, and then were eliminated by the Dodgers in a four-game championship playoff. Steve Bla.s.s was with the team through this stretch, but he took no part in the campaign, and by now he was almost silent in the clubhouse. He had become an extra wheel. "It must have been h.e.l.l for him," Dave Giusti says. "I mean real h.e.l.l. I never could have stood it."
When Bla.s.s is asked about this last summer of his baseball career, he will only say that it was "kind of a difficult time" or "not the most fun I"ve had." In extended conversations about himself, he often gives an impression of an armored blandness that suggests a failure of emotion; this apparent insensitivity about himself contrasts almost shockingly with his subtle concern for the feelings of his teammates and his friends and his family, and even of strangers. "My overriding philosophy is to have a regard for others," he once told me. "I don"t want to put myself over other people." He takes pride in the fact that his outward, day-to-day demeanor altered very little through his long ordeal. "A person lives on," he said more than once, smiling. "The sun will come up tomorrow." Most of all, perhaps, he sustained his self-regard by not taking out his terrible frustrations on Karen and the boys. "A ballplayer learns very early that he can"t bring the game home with him every night," he said once. "Especially when there are young people growing up there. I"m real proud of the fact that this thing hasn"t bothered us at home. David and Chris have come through it all in fine shape. I think Karen and I are closer than ever because of this."
Karen once said to me, "Day to day, he hasn"t changed. Just the other morning, he was out working on the lawn, and a couple of the neighbors" children came over to see him. Young kids-maybe three or four years old. Then I looked out a few minutes later, and there was a whole bunch of them yelling and rolling around on the gra.s.s with him, like puppies. He"s always been that way. Steve has worked at being a man and being a father and a husband. It"s something he has always felt very strongly about, and I have to give him all the credit in the world. Sometimes I think I got to hate the frustration and pain of this more than he did. He always found something to hold on to-a couple of good pitches that day, some little thing he had noticed. But I couldn"t always share that, and I didn"t have his ability to keep things under control."
I asked if maintaining this superhuman calm might not have damaged Steve in some way, or even added to his problems.
"I don"t know," she said. "Sometimes in the evening-once in a great while-we"d be sitting together, and we"d have a couple of drinks and he would relax enough to start to talk. He would tell me about it, and get angry and hurt. Then he"d let it come out, and yell and scream and pound on things. And I felt that even this might not be enough for him. He would never do such a thing outside. Never." She paused, and then she said, "I think he directed his anger toward making the situation livable here at home. I"ve had my own ideas about Steve"s pitching, about the mystery, but they haven"t made much difference. You can"t force your ideas on somebody, especially when he is doing what he thinks he has to do. Steve"s a very private person."
Steve Bla.s.s stayed home last winter. He tried not to think much about baseball, and he didn"t work on his pitching. He and Karen had agreed that the family would go back to Bradenton for spring training, and that he would give it one more try. One day in January, he went over to the field house at the University of Pittsburgh and joined some other Pirates there for a workout. He threw well. Tony Bartirome, the Pirate trainer, who is a close friend of Steve"s, thought he was pitching as well as he ever had. He told Joe Brown that Steve"s problems might be over. When spring training came, however, nothing had altered. Bla.s.s threw adequately in brief streaks, but very badly against most batters. He hit Willie Stargell and Manny Sanguillen in batting practice; both players told him to forget it. They urged him to cut loose with the fastball.
Joe Brown had told Bla.s.s that the end of the line might be approaching. Bla.s.s agreed. The Pirate organization had been extraordinarily patient, but it was, after all, in the business of baseball.
On March 24, Steve Bla.s.s started the second game of a doubleheader against the White Sox at Bradenton. For three innings, he escaped serious difficulty. He gave up two runs in the second, but he seemed to throw without much tension, and he even struck out Bill Melton, the Chicago third baseman, with a fastball. Like the other Pirates, Dave Giusti was watching with apprehensive interest. "I really thought he was on his way," he told me. "I was encouraged. Then, in the fourth, there were a couple of bases on b.a.l.l.s and maybe a bad call by the ump on a close pitch, and suddenly there was a complete reversal. He was a different man out there."
Bla.s.s walked eight men in the fourth inning and gave up eight runs. He threw fifty-one pitches, but only seventeen of them were strikes. Some of his pitches were close to the strike zone, but most were not. He worked the count to 32 on Carlos May, and then threw the next pitch behind him. The booing from the fans, at first scattered and uncomfortable, grew louder. Danny Murtaugh waited, but Bla.s.s could not get the third out. Finally, Murtaugh came out very slowly to the mound and told Bla.s.s that he was taking him out of the game; Dave Giusti came in to relieve his old roommate. Murtaugh, a peaceable man, then charged the home-plate umpire and cursed him for the bad call, and was thrown out of the game. Play resumed. Bla.s.s put on his warm-up jacket and trotted to the outfield to run his wind sprints. Roland Hemond, the general manager of the White Sox, was at Bradenton that day, and he said, "It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen in baseball."
Three days later, the Pirates held a press conference to announce that they had requested waivers from the other National League clubs, with the purpose of giving Bla.s.s his unconditional release. Bla.s.s flew out to California to see Dr. Bill Harrison once more, and also to visit a hypnotist, Arthur Ellen, who has worked with several major-league players, and has apparently helped some of them, including Dodger pitcher Don Sutton, remarkably. Bla.s.s made the trip mostly because he had promised Maury Wills, who is now a base-running consultant to several teams, that he would not quit the game until he had seen Mr. Ellen.
Bla.s.s then returned to Bradenton and worked for several days with the Pirates" minor-league pitching coach, Larry Sherry, on some pitching mechanics. He made brief appearances in two games against Pirate farmhands, and threw well. He struck out some players with his fastball. After the second game, he showered and got into his Volkswagen and started north to join his family, who had returned to Pittsburgh. It was a good trip, because it gave him time to sort things out, and somewhere along the way he decided to give it up. The six-day waiver period had expired, and none of the other clubs had claimed him. He was encouraged about his pitching, but he had been encouraged before. This time, the fastball had been much better, and at least he could hold on to that; maybe the problem had been mechanical all along. If he came back now, however, it would have to be at the minor-league level, and even if he made it back to the majors, he could expect only three or four more years before his effectiveness would decline because of age and he would have to start thinking about retirement. At least that problem could be solved now. He didn"t want to subject Karen to more of the struggle. It was time to get out.
Of all the mysteries that surround the Steve Bla.s.s story, perhaps the most mysterious is the fact that his collapse is unique. There is no other player in recent baseball history-at least none with Bla.s.s"s record and credentials-who has lost his form in such a sudden and devastating fashion and been totally unable to recover. The players and coaches and fans I talked to about Steve Bla.s.s brought up a few other names, but then they quickly realized that the cases were not really the same. Some of them mentioned Rex Barney, a Dodger fastball pitcher of the nineteen forties, who quit baseball while still a young man because of his uncontrollable wildness; Barney, however, had only one good year, and it is fair to say he never did have his great stuff under control. d.i.c.k Radatz, a very tall relief pitcher with the Red Sox a decade ago, had four good years, and then grew increasingly wild and ineffective. (He is said to have once thrown twenty-seven consecutive b.a.l.l.s in a spring-training game.) His decline, however, was partially attributable to his failure to stay in shape. Von McDaniel, a younger brother of Lindy McDaniel, arrived suddenly as a pitcher with the Cardinals, and disappeared just as quickly, but two years" pitching hardly qualifies as a record. There have been hundreds of shiningly promising rookie pitchers and sluggers who, for one reason or another, could not do their thing once they got up to the big time. Bla.s.s"s story is different. It should also be understood that his was not at all the somewhat commonplace experience of an established and well-paid major-league star who suffers through one or two mediocre seasons. Tom Seaver went through such a slump last summer. But Seaver"s problems were only relatively serious (his record for 1974 was 1111), and were at least partly explicable (he had a sore hip), and he has now returned to form. Bla.s.s, once his difficulties commenced, was helpless. Finally, of course, one must accept the possibility that a great many players may have suffered exactly the same sort of falling off as Bla.s.s for exactly the same reasons (whatever they may be) but were able to solve the problem and continue their athletic careers. Sudden and terrible batting and pitching slumps are mysterious while they last; the moment they end, they tend to be forgotten.
What happened to Steve Bla.s.s? n.o.body knows, but some speculation is permissible-indeed, is perhaps demanded of anyone who is even faintly aware of the qualities of Steve Bla.s.s and the depths of his suffering. Professional sports have a powerful hold on us because they display and glorify remarkable physical capacities, and because the artificial demands of games played for very high rewards produce vivid responses. But sometimes, of course, what is happening on the field seems to speak to something deeper within us; we stop cheering and look on in uneasy silence, for the man out there is no longer just another great athlete, an idealized hero, but only a man-only ourself. We are no longer at a game. The enormous alterations of professional sport in the past three decades, especially the prodigious inflation of franchises and salaries, have made it evident even to the most thoughtless fan that the play he has come to see is serious indeed, and that the heart of the game is not physical but financial. Sport is no longer a release from the harsh everyday American business world but its continuation and apotheosis. Those of us (fans and players alike) who return to the ball park in the belief that the game and the rules are unchanged-merely a continuation of what we have known and loved in the past-are deluding ourselves, perhaps foolishly, perhaps tragically.
Bla.s.s once told me that there were "at least seventeen" theories about the reason for his failure. A few of them are bromides: He was too nice a guy. He became smug and was no longer hungry. He lost the will to win. His pitching motion, so jittery and uncla.s.sical, at last let him down for good. His eyesight went bad. (Bla.s.s is myopic, and wears gla.s.ses while watching television and driving. He has never worn gla.s.ses when pitching, which meant that Pirate catchers had to flash him signals with hand gestures rather than with finger waggles; however, he saw well enough to win when he was winning, and his vision has not altered in recent years.) The other, more serious theories are sometimes presented alone, sometimes in conjunction with others. Answers here become more gingerly.
He was afraid of injury-afraid of being struck by a line drive.
Bla.s.s was injured three times while on the mound. He cracked a thumb while fielding a grounder in 1966. He was struck on the right forearm by a ball hit by Joe Torre in 1970, and spent a month on the disabled list. While trying for his twentieth victory in his last start in 1972, he was. .h.i.t on the point of the elbow of his pitching arm by a line drive struck by the Mets" John Milner; he had to leave the game, but a few days later he pitched that first playoff game for the Pirates and won it handily. (Bla.s.s"s brother-in-law, John Lamb, suffered a fractured skull when hit by a line drive in spring training in 1971, and it was more than a year before he recovered, but Bla.s.s"s real pitching triumphs all came after that.) He was afraid of injuring someone-hitting a batter with a fastball.
Bla.s.s did hit a number of players in his career, of course, but he never caused anyone to go on the disabled list or, for that matter, to miss even one day"s work. He told me he did not enjoy brushing back hitters but had done so when it was obviously called for. The only real criticism of Bla.s.s I ever heard from his teammates was that he would not always "protect" them by retaliating against enemy hitters after somebody had been knocked down. During his decline, he was plainly unable to throw the fastball effectively to batters-especially to Pirate batters in practice. He says he hated the idea of hitting and possibly sidelining one of his teammates, but he is convinced that this anxiety was the result of his control problems rather than the cause.
He was seriously affected by the death of Roberto Clemente.
There is no doubt but that the sudden taking away of their most famous and vivid star affected all the Pirates, including Steve Bla.s.s. He and Clemente had not been particularly close, but Bla.s.s was among the members of the team who flew at once to Puerto Rico for the funeral services, where Bla.s.s delivered a eulogy in behalf of the club. The departure of a superstar leaves an almost visible empty place on a successful team, and the leaders next in line-who in this case would certainly include Steve Bla.s.s-feel the inescapable burden of trying to fill the gap. A Clemente, however, can never be replaced. Bla.s.s never pitched well in the majors after Clemente"s death. This argument is a difficult one, and is probably impossible to resolve. There are Oedipal elements here, of course, that are attractive to those who incline in such a direction.
He fell into a slump, which led to an irreparable loss of confidence.
This is circular, and perhaps more a description of symptoms than of the disability itself. However, it is a fact that a professional athlete-and most especially a baseball player-faces a much more difficult task in attempting to regain lost form than an ailing businessman, say, or even a troubled artist; no matter how painful his case has been, the good will of his a.s.sociates or the vagaries of critical judgment matter not at all when he tries to return. All that matters is his performance, which will be measured, with utter coldness, by the stats. This is one reason that athletes are paid so well, and one reason that fear of failure-the unspeakable "choking"-is their deepest and most private anxiety. Steve Bla.s.s pa.s.sed over my questions about whether he had ever felt this kind of fear when on the mound. "I don"t think pitchers, by their nature, allow themselves to think that way," he said. "To be successful, you turn that kind of thought away." On the other hand, he often said that two or three successive well-pitched games probably would have been all he needed to dissipate the severe tension that affected his performances once things began to go badly for him. They never came.
The remaining pieces of evidence (if, indeed, they have any part in the mystery) have been recounted here. Bla.s.s is a modest man, both in temperament and in background, and his success and fame were quite sudden and, to some degree, unexpected. His salary at the beginning of 1971-the year of his two great Series wins-was forty thousand dollars; two years later it was ninety thousand, and there were World Series and playoff checks on top of that. Bla.s.s was never thought of as one of the great pitchers of his time, but in the late sixties and early seventies he was probably the most consistent starter on the Pirate staff; it was, in fact, a staff without stars. On many other teams, he would have been no more than the second- or third-best starter, and his responsibilities, real and imagined, would have been less acute.
I took some of these hard questions to Bla.s.s"s colleagues. Danny Murtaugh and Bill Virdon (who is now the Yankees" pilot) both expressed their admiration for Bla.s.s but said they had no idea what had happened to him. They seemed a bit brusque about it, but then I realized, of course, that ballplayers are forever disappearing from big-league dugouts; the manager"s concern is with those who remain-with today"s lineup. "I don"t know the answer," Bill Virdon told me in the Yankee clubhouse. "If I did, I"d go get Steve to pitch for me. He sure won a lot of big games for us on the Pirates."
Joe Brown said, "I"ve tried to keep my distance and not to guess too much about what happened. I"m not a student of pitching and I"m not a psychologist. You can tell a man what to do, but you can"t make him do it. Steve is an outstanding man, and you hate to quit on him. In this business, you bet on character. Big-league baseball isn"t easy, yet you can stand it when things are going your way. But Steve Bla.s.s never had a good day in baseball after this thing hit him."
Bla.s.s"s best friends in baseball are Tony Bartirome, Dave Giusti, and Nelson King (who, along with Bob Prince, was part of the highly regarded radio-and-television team that covered the Pirate games).
Tony Bartirome (He is forty-three years old, dark-haired, extremely neat in appearance. He was an infielder before he became a trainer, and played one season in the majors-with the Pirates, in 1952): "Steve is unique physically. He has the arm of a twenty-year-old. Not only did he never have a sore arm but he never had any of the stiffness and pain that most pitchers feel on the day after a game. He was always the same, day after day. You know, it"s very important for a trainer to know the state of mind and the feelings of his players. What a player is thinking is about eighty percent of it. The really strange thing is that after this trouble started, Steve never showed any feelings about his pitching. In the old days, he used to get mad at himself after a bad showing, and sometimes he threw things around in the clubhouse. But after this began, when he was taken out of a game he only gave the impression that he was happy to be out of there-relieved that he no longer had to face it that day. Somehow, he didn"t show any emotion at all. Maybe it was like his never having a sore arm. He never talked in any detail about his different treatments-the psychiatry and all. I think he felt he didn"t need any of that-that at any moment he"d be back where he was, the Bla.s.s of old, and that it all was up to him to make that happen."
Dave Giusti (He is one of the great relief pitchers in baseball. He earned a BA and an MA in physical education at Syracuse. He is thirty-five-dark hair, piercing brown eyes, and a quiet manner): "Steve has the perfect build for a pitcher-lean and strong. He is remarkably open to all kinds of people, but I think he has closed his mind to his inner self. There are central areas you can"t infringe on with him. There is no doubt that during the past two years he didn"t react to a bad performance the way he used to, and you have to wonder why he couldn"t apply his compet.i.tiveness to his problem. Karen used to bawl out me and Tony for not being tougher on him, for not doing more. Maybe I should have come right out and said he seemed to have lost his will to fight, but it"s hard to shock somebody, to keep bearing in on him. You"re afraid to lose a friend, and you want to go easy on him because he is your friend.
"Last year, I went through something like Steve"s crisis. The first half of the season, I was atrocious, and I lost all my confidence, especially in my fastball. The fastball is my best pitch, but I"d get right to the top of my delivery and then something would take over, and I"d know even before I released the ball that it wasn"t going to be in the strike zone. I began worrying about making big money and not performing. I worried about not contributing to the team. I worried about being traded. I thought it might be the end for me. I didn"t know how to solve my problem, but I knew I had to solve it. In the end, it was talking to people that did it. I talked to everybody, but mostly to Joe Brown and Danny and my wife. Then, at some point, I turned the corner. But it was talking that did it, and my point is that Steve can"t talk to people that way. Or won"t.
"Listen, it"s tough out there. It"s hard. Once you start maintaining a plateau, you"ve got to be absolutely sure what your goals are."
Nellie King (A former pitcher with the Pirates. He is friendly and informal, with an attractive smile. He is very tall-six-six. Forty-seven years old): "Right after that terrible game in Atlanta, Steve told me that it had felt as if the whole world was pressing down on him while he was out there. But then he suddenly shut up about it, and he never talked that way again. He covered it all up. I think there are things weighing on him, and I think he may be so angry inside that he"s afraid to throw the ball. He"s afraid he might kill somebody. It"s only nickel psychology, but I think there"s a lost kid in Steve. I remembered that after the "71 Series he said, "I didn"t think I was as good as this." He seemed truly surprised at what he"d done. The child in him is a great thing-we"ve all loved it-and maybe he was suddenly afraid he was losing it. It was being forced out of him.
"Being good up here is so tough-people have no idea. It gets much worse when you have to repeat it: "We know you"re great. Now go and do that again for me." So much money and so many people depend on you. Pretty soon you"re trying so hard that you can"t function."
I ventured to repeat Nellie King"s guesses about the mystery to Steve Bla.s.s and asked him what he thought.
"That"s pretty heavy," he said after a moment. "I guess I don"t have a tendency to go into things in much depth. I"m a surface reactor. I tend to take things not too seriously. I really think that"s one of the things that"s helped me in baseball."
A smile suddenly burst from him.
"There"s one possibility n.o.body has brought up," he said. "I don"t think anybody"s ever said that maybe I just lost my control. Maybe your control is something that can just go. It"s no big thing, but suddenly it"s gone." He paused, and then he laughed in a self-deprecating way. "Maybe that"s what I"d like to believe," he said.
On my last morning with Steve Bla.s.s, we sat in his family room and played an imaginary ball game together-half an inning of baseball. It had occurred to me that in spite of his enforced and now permanent exile from the game, he still possessed a rare body of precise and hard-won pitching information. He still knew most of the hitters in his league, and probably as well as any other pitcher around, he knew what to pitch to them in a given situation. I had always wanted to hear a pitcher say exactly what he would throw next and why, and now I invited Bla.s.s to throw against the Cincinnati Reds, the toughest lineup of hitters anywhere. I would call the b.a.l.l.s and strikes and hits. I promised he would have no control problems.
He agreed at once. He poured himself another cup of coffee and lit up a Garcia y Vega. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt and an old sweater (he had a golfing date later that day), and he looked very young.
"OK," he said. "Pete Rose is leading off-right? First of all, I"m going to try to keep him off base if I can, because they have so many tough hitters coming up. They can bury you before you even get started. I"m going to try to throw strikes and not get too fine. I"ll start him off with a slider away. He has a tendency to go up the middle and I"ll try to keep it a bit away."
Rose, I decided, didn"t offer. It was ball one.
"Now I"ll throw him a sinking fastball, and still try to work him out that way. The sinking fastball tends to tail off just a little."
Rose fouled it into the dirt.
"Well, now we come back with another slider, and I"ll try to throw it inside. That"s just to set up another slider outside."
Rose fouled that one as well.
"We"re ahead one and two now-right?" Bla.s.s said. "Well, this early in the game I wouldn"t try to throw him that slow curve-that big slop off-speed pitch. I"d like to work on that a couple of times first, because it"s early and he swings so well. So as long as I"m ahead of him, I"ll keep on throwing him sliders-keep going that way."
Rose took another ball, and then grounded out on a medium-speed curveball.
Joe Morgan stood in, and Bla.s.s puffed on his cigar and looked at the ceiling.
"Joe Morgan is strictly a fastball hitter, so I want to throw him a bad fastball to start him off," he said. "I"ll throw it in the dirt to show it to him-get him geared to that kind of speed. Now, after ball one, I"ll give him a medium-to-slow curveball and try to get it over the plate-just throw it for a strike."
Morgan took: one and one.
"Now I throw him a real slow curveball-a regular rainbow. I"ve had good luck against him with that sort of stuff."
And so it went. Morgan, I decided, eventually singled to right on a curve in on the handle-a lucky hit-but then Bla.s.s retired his next Cincinnati hitter, Dan Driessen, who popped out on a slider. Bla.s.s laid off slow pitches here, so Sanguillen would have a chance to throw out Morgan if he was stealing.
Johnny Bench stood in, with two out.
"Morgan won"t be stealing, probably," Bla.s.s said. "He won"t want to take the bat out of Bench"s hands." He released another cloud of cigar smoke, thinking hard. "Well, I"ll start him out with a good, tough fastball outside. I"ve got to work very carefully to him, because when he"s hot he"s capable of hitting it out anytime."
Ball one.
"Well, the slider"s only been fair today.... I"ll give him a slider, but away-off the outside."
Swinging strike. Bla.s.s threw another slider, and Bench hit a line single to left, moving Morgan to second. Tony Perez was the next batter.
"Perez is not a good high, hard fastball hitter," Bla.s.s said. "I"ll begin him with that pitch, because I don"t want to get into any more trouble with the slider and have him dunk one in. A letter-high fastball, with good mustard on it."
Perez took a strike.
"Now I"ll do it again, until I miss-bust him up and in. He has a tendency to go after that kind of pitch. He"s an exceptional offspeed hitter, and will give himself up with men on base-give up a little power to get that run in."
Perez took, for a ball, and then Bla.s.s threw him an intentional ball-a very bad slider inside. Perez had shortened up on the bat a little, but he took the pitch. He then fouled off a fastball, and Bla.s.s threw him another good fastball, high and inside, and Perez struck out, swinging, to end the inning.
"Pretty good inning," I said. "Way to go." We both laughed.
"Yes, you know that exact sequence has happened to Perez many times," Bla.s.s said. "He shortens up and then chases the pitch up here."
He was animated. "You know, I can almost see that fastball to Perez, and I can see his bat going through it, swinging through the pitch and missing," he said. "That"s a good feeling. That"s one of the concepts of Dr. Harrison"s program, you know-visualization. When I was pitching well, I was doing that very thing. You get so locked in, you see yourself doing things before they happen. That"s what people mean when they say you"re in the groove. That"s what happened in that World Series game, when I kept throwing that big slop curveball to Boog Powell, and it really ruined him. I must have thrown it three out of four pitches to him, and I just knew it was going to be there. There"s no doubt about it-no information needed. The crowd is there, this is the World Series, and all of a sudden you"re locked into something. It"s like being plugged into a computer. It"s "Gimme the ball, boom! Click, click, click ... shoom!" It"s that good feeling. You"re just flowing easy."
The Companions of the Game
- September 1975 THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS, it seems, are about to be sold to some j.a.panese businessmen. The news, which appeared in the Times late last month, was somehow both startling and boring-instant antipodal emotions that only stories about quintuplets or the business side of sports arouse in me. The Times" account was a blurry, hedging affair, beginning with a denial by the Giants" front office of the reported deal, followed by several paragraphs explaining why it probably would go through. It was generally known, of course, that the club has been in financial difficulties for several years, and earlier this summer its president, Horace C. Stoneham, announced that his controlling share of the National Exhibition Company (which is the team"s florid, nineteenth-century corporate handle) was up for sale. A San Francis...o...b..sed group, headed by a real-estate man named Robert A. Lurie and including the National League president, Chub Feeney, who is a nephew of Stoneham"s, and Bill Rigney, a former Giant manager, had been talking with Stoneham, but the j.a.panese offer of seventeen million dollars-for the club, its minor-league affiliates, and some baseball and hotel properties at the Giants" spring-training headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona-is apparently a good deal higher than any other bids so far.* The sale, in any case, will require the approval of the other National League owners, who will vote on the matter sometime after the World Series.
As a lifetime Giants fan whose pa.s.sionate boyhood attachment had been slowly cooled by the departure of my heroes from the Polo Grounds in 1958, by the decline and eventual retirement of Willie Mays, and by the pale neutrality of middle age, I tried to summon up a semblance of outraged xenophobia at the news of the possible Toyotafication of my old team and my old pastime, but it became clear to me in the same instant that I simply didn"t give a d.a.m.n. Big-league baseball is a commercial enterprise, and the business of j.a.pan, as Calvin Coolidge probably meant to tell us, is business. There was a time when the ownership of a ball team by a hometown brewer or chewing-gum family did not seem an especially important part of its public ident.i.ty, but in the past twenty years eight of the original sixteen big-league clubs have been sold (and in some cases resold and re-resold) to new business interests, while eight new clubs have been born, four of which have later changed hands. As a result, the financial adventures of some teams are almost better publicized (and often a good deal more interesting) than their achievements in the pennant race. A typical modern ball team is operated coldly and from a distance, just like any other conglomerate subent.i.ty with interesting tax-depletion build-ins and excellent PR overtones. Their owners and operators are men whose money derives from, and whose deepest loyalties adhere to, insurance companies, broadcasting chains, oil wells, whiskey manufacture, real-estate sales, trucking and shipping lines, quick-lunch chains, and the like, and it doesn"t seem to make much difference if one of the teams should now land in the portfolio of some enterprising visitors whose hero is Sadaharu Oh instead of Babe Ruth, and whose cash comes from the marketing of sake or electronic calculators or sushiburgers.
For all that, there is one aspect of the sale of the Giants that seems worth attention, worth caring about, and that is the departure of Horace Stoneham from baseball. The Stoneham family has owned the Giants ever since Horace"s father, Charles A. Stoneham, purchased the club, in 1919, in partnership with a New York City magistrate named Francis X. McQuade and the team"s famous manager, John J. McGraw. Charles Stoneham, who held the majority interest in the team, died in 1936, and Horace Stoneham, then thirty-two years old, succeeded him, thus becoming the youngest club president in baseball history. The Stoneham family has been the Giants for more than half a century, for it has had no other business in that time. Along with Calvin Griffith, of the Minnesota Twins (formerly the Washington Senators), Stoneham is the last of the pure baseball men, the owners who owned nothing but their team and cared for nothing but the game. (Tom Yawkey, the longtime Red Sox owner, is of the same breed, but he is also the possessor of a sizable fortune.) In recent years, it has been the custom for men at baseball gatherings to talk about Horace Stoneham with affectionate and patronizing sadness. "I like Horace," the conversation always begins. "h.e.l.l, everybody likes him, but ..." The sentence trails off, and the speaker shakes his head in the manner of a young lawyer who has undertaken to bring order out of his mother"s checkbook. Nothing has gone right for Stoneham in recent years, but there was a time when he had his share of success. His Giants have won five pennants, a world championship, and one divisional t.i.tle. He has hired winning managers. In his father"s time, he recommended the selection of McGraw"s successor, Bill Terry, who captured a world championship in his first year at the helm, and in 1948 he s.n.a.t.c.hed Leo Durocher from the despised Brooklyn Dodgers. Stoneham was capable of risky and decisive moves, such as the house-cleaning in 1949, when he traded away the stars of a popular but nonwinning Giants club-Johnny Mize, Walker Cooper, Sid Gordon, Willard Marshall, and Buddy Kerr-to make room for Eddie Stanky and Alvin Dark and the others who would, under Durocher, fashion the marvelous winning summers of 1951 and 1954. The Giants" scouts and farms delivered up some true stars-Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and Orlando Cepeda-and estimable front-liners like Sal Maglie, Whitey Lockman, Bobby Thomson, Larry Jansen, the Alou brothers, g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, and Bobby Bonds. Until quite recently, in fact, the Stoneham record has been one of the better ones in baseball, a high-risk business in which true dynasties are extremely rare.
The Dodgers, to be sure, were far more successful than Stoneham"s club in the last decade of their co-tenancy of New York, and when the two clubs moved west, in 1958, the disparity widened. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won five pennants and three World Series since their relocation, and the extraordinary season-long outpouring of fans to Dodger Stadium, which regularly tops the home-attendance figures of all other clubs, has made the team the most profitable franchise in baseball. For the San Francisco Giants, it has been quite the other way. The team was idolized in its first few summers, drawing one million eight hundred thousand customers in its first season in Candlestick Park, and there was a famous pennant (and very nearly a world championship) in 1962. From the day Candlestick opened, however, it was plain that its site and its design were disastrous. Its summer-long icy winds and swirling bayside fogs, which often made the act of watching a ball game into something like an Eskimo manhood ritual, have become an old, bad local joke. These discouragements, coupled with five straight second-place finishes between 1965 and 1969, cut attendance in half by 1970, a particularly heavy falloff coming in 1968, when the A"s established residency across the Bay. Since then, the proximity of the two clubs has clearly strained the limited audience and the dim baseball fealty of the area, but the A"s, now three-time world champions, have had much the better of it. Last year, the A"s drew 845,693, while the Giants, who finished fifth in their division, drew 519,991-the worst in either league.**
The most riveting difference between the Oakland A"s and the San Francisco Giants is not, however, in their comparative records or attendance figures but in their owners. Indeed, the temperament and reputation of the two men are at such utter removes that they almost seem to represent polarities of human behavior, and their presence in the same business and the same metropolis suggests nothing so much as fictional irony flung off by Ayn Rand. Charles O. Finley, the owner of the A"s, is a relative newcomer to baseball, who has in a short time achieved an extraordinary success, and perhaps even greater notoriety. He is a self-made man, a millionaire insurance salesman, who has built a formidable championship club by relying almost exclusively on his own intelligence, quickness, hunches, and energetic dealing. He is a great promoter, with a perfect inner instrument attuned to the heat of the crowd, the glare of the event, and he is an instinctive and embarra.s.sing self-aggrandizer. He is an innovator who has disturbed the quiet, dim halls of baseball and altered the game irrevocably. As an executive, he takes a personal hand in all the daily details of his club, including the most minute decisions on the field, and he swiftly disposes of managers and subalterns who cannot abide his meddling. The A"s headquarters, in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, consists mainly of empty offices. Most of the time, Finley follows his team by telephone from an office in Chicago, either plugging into a local radio broadcast or being provided with a running play-by-play account of the action by someone on the scene. Baseball as occasion-the enjoyment and company of the game-apparently means nothing to him. Finley is generally reputed to be without friends, and his treatment of his players has been characterized by habitual suspicion, truculence, inconsistency, public abas.e.m.e.nt, impatience, flattery, parsimony, and ingrat.i.tude. He also wins.
Horace Stoneham is-well, most of all he is not Charlie Finley. He inherited his team and his position, and he does not want baseball quickly or wildly altered. Indeed, it may well be that he wishes the game to be more as it was when he first came to it as a youth. He is shy, self-effacing, and apparently incapable of public att.i.tudinizing. He attends every home game but is seldom recognized, even by the h.o.a.riest Giants fans. His decisions are arrived at after due consideration, and the most common criticism leveled at him is that he often sticks with a losing manager or an elder player long after his usefulness to the club has been exhausted. He relies on old friends for baseball counsel and for company; most of his advisers and colleagues-men like Tom Sheehan; Garry Schumacher; Rosy Ryan; Carl Hubbell, director of player development; and Jack Schwarz, farm director-have been with the Giants for thirty or forty years. Perhaps because Stoneham grew up in a time when baseball was the only game in town and thus seemed to succeed on its own merits, he has a limited interest in vivid public relations, commercial tie-ins, and other hypes. His relations with the press have been cordial (in the words of Wells Twombly, of the San Francisco Examiner, he treats reporters like "beloved guests"), and his dealings with his players are marked by generosity and mutual admiration. In 1972, when his dwindling financial resources forced him at last to trade away Willie Mays, perhaps the greatest Giant of them all, he arranged a deal that permitted Mays to move along to the Mets with a salary and a subsequent retirement plan that would guarantee his comfort for the rest of his life. Horace Stoneham is convivial with his friends but instinctively private, and it is possible to guess that the only quality he may share with Charlie Finley is loneliness. He has been losing, and now he has lost, and he is thus fair game for the glum attention of writers and the secret scorn of men who understand nothing but success.
Early this summer, I began compiling information and talking to West Coast ballplayers and baseball writers with the idea of trying to interview Charlie Finley, perhaps while watching a game with him. For some reason (for several reasons), I kept holding off on the story, however, and then, when I read that the San Francisco Giants were up for sale, it suddenly came to me that the baseball magnate I really wanted to spend an afternoon with was Horace Stoneham. I got on the telephone to some friends of mine and his (I had never met him), and explained that I did not want to discuss attendance figures or sales prices with him but just wanted to talk baseball. Stoneham called me back in less than an hour. "Come on out," he said in a cheerful, gravelly, Polo Grounds sort of voice. "Come out, and we"ll go to the game together."
I dressed all wrong for it, of course. The game that Stoneham and I had fixed upon was a midweek afternoon meeting between the Giants and the San Diego Padres in late June-a brilliant, sunshiny day at Candlestick Park, it turned out, and almost the perfect temperature for a curling match. I had flown out from New York that morning, and I reported to Stoneham"s office a few minutes before game time. He shook my hand and examined my airy East Coast midsummer getup and said, "Oh, no, this won"t do." He went to a closet and produced a voluminous, ancient camel"s-hair polo coat and helped me into it. He is a round, pink-faced man with close-cropped white hair, round horn-rimmed spectacles, and a hospitable Irish smile, and he looked much younger than I had expected. (He is seventy-two.) He was wearing tweeds, with an expensive-looking silk tie-a gambler"s tie-but he, too, put on a topcoat and b.u.t.toned it up before we went out into the sunshine. Stoneham"s box, on the press level, was capacious but utilitarian, with none of the Augustan appointments and Late Hefner upholsteries I have seen in some sports-owners" piazzas. There was a perfect view of the ballplayers arrayed below us on the AstroTurf, a few hundred scattered fans-most of whom seemed to be kids in variously emblazoned windbreakers-and thousands of empty orange-colored seats. The game matched up two good young right-handed fast-ballers-the Giants" John Montefusco and the Padres" Joe McIntosh. I kept track of things for a few minutes, but then I quickly gave it up, because an afternoon of Horace Stoneham"s baseball cannot be fitted into a scorecard.
"I think the first Giants game I ever saw was the first half of a doubleheader on the Fourth of July in 1912," he told me. "The Giants" battery was Christy Mathewson and Chief Meyers. They opened with their stars in the first game, you see, because they charged separate admissions for the morning and afternoon games, and that way they got out the crowds early. I"ve forgotten who the other team was. I was nine years old. My father grew up in New Jersey, and his boyhood idol, his particular hero, was the great Giant left fielder Mike Tiernan, who came from Jersey City. Later, when my pop bought the club, he liked to say that he"d followed Tiernan over to the Giants.
"My father bought the team in 1919, and in 1921, as you may know, we played the first of three consecutive World Series against the Yankees, who shared the Polo Grounds with us in those days. That Series in "21 had a funny kind of ending. We were ahead by one run-I think it was 10-in the ninth, and Aaron Ward got on base for the Yanks. Frank Baker-Home Run Baker-came up and knocked a ball to right that looked like a sure hit, but our second baseman, Rawlings, made a great play on it, running it down almost in right field, and threw to Kelly to get him. Ward must have thought the ball had gone through, because he pa.s.sed second and just kept on running. George Kelly-oh, he had the best arm in baseball-saw him, and he fired the ball across to Frisch at third, and Frisch took the throw and tagged Ward just as he slid in. I can still see that, with Ward in the dirt and Frank Frisch making the tag and then landing on his f.a.n.n.y, with the ball still in his glove. It was a double play and it ended it all, but it happened so fast that everybody in the stands just sat there for a minute. They couldn"t believe the Series was over."
Stoneham talked in an energetic, good-humored way. He reminded me of a good standup, middle-of-the-night bar conversationalist. "I was in the stands that day. I was still in school, at Loyola School. I was a mediocre second baseman on the team there. I went to a lot of Giants games, of course. Jimmy Walker was a state a.s.semblyman then, and he used to come to the game every day. I got to know him very well-Hey, look at this!"
Von Joshua, the Giant center fielder-the 1975 Giant center fielder-had singled, and a run was coming across the plate. Within another minute or two, the Giants were ahead by 30, still in the first inning, and McIntosh had been knocked out of the game.
Stoneham resumed, but we were in 1939 now, at a famous Polo Grounds disaster that I had seen. "You were there?" Stoneham said. "Then, of course, you remember what happened. It was early in the summer, but that game cost us the pennant. We were playing the Cincinnati Reds head and head, and if we win we have a good shot at first place. Then somebody hit that ball for them-maybe it was Harry Craft-that hooked foul into the left-field upper deck, and the umpire called it fair and waved the runners around. Everybody could see it was foul, so there was a big squabble, and Billy Jurges, our shortstop, he spit right in George Magerkurth"s face, and Magerkurth swung on him. Well, they were both suspended, of course-the player and the umpire both together. We called up Frank Scalzi to take Jurges"s place, but a few days later Lou Chiozza and Joe Moore had a collision going after a fly ball and Chiozza got a broken leg, and we never did get going again."
I asked Stoneham about his first job with the Giants, and he told me that he had gone to work in the ticket department when he was in his early twenties. "We had a lady, Miss Wilson, who ran it all then," he said. "None of this computer business. Well, bit by bit I got into the running of the ball park, and then my father put me in charge of operations there. In those days, in the twenties, the Polo Grounds was open for events maybe two hundred days out of the year. The Coogan family owned the real estate, but the park belonged to the club. We had football-pro games and college games-we had the circus there, we had tennis and the midget automobiles. We had a skating rink in the outfield once, and even a week of outdoor opera. We had soccer-the Hakoah team came in after they won some international t.i.tle, I think it was, and drew fifty-two thousand, so we knew it was a popular sport even then. We had visiting British soccer teams, and a team, I remember, that represented the Indiana Flooring Company. I think we had every sport at the Polo Grounds except polo. I did my best to arrange that, but we never could work it out.
"I came to know the ballplayers then, of course. I used to see them in the mornings. I got to be friends with some of them, like Ross Youngs, the great outfielder who died so young. Ross Youngs, from Shiner, Texas. When he first came along-before I knew him-he was signed by the Giants at a time when the team was on the road. Ross was in town and the Giants were away, and he went right over and got into a pickup baseball game over by the docks on Seventy-ninth Street, next to the railroad yards there. It"s where they have the marina now. He had that intense desire to play ball.
"I was about twenty years old when Mr. McGraw asked my father to let me go to spring training. We trained in Sarasota back then. I remember that Mr. McGraw called me up to his room there and showed me a letter he had just written to my father about a young prospect named Hack Wilson, who"d been on a Cla.s.s B team in Portsmouth, Virginia. He wore a red undershirt under his uniform. Mr. McGraw had written, "If hustle counts, he"s sure to make it." Everybody called him "Mr. McGraw"-everybody but my father, of course. Mr. McGraw, he called my father "Charlie" or "C.A."-C.A. for Charles Abraham Stoneham, named after Abraham Lincoln."
We were in the third inning, and the Padres had a base runner on second. The next Padre batter, shortstop Enzo Hernandez, is an indifferent hitter, but now he singled to left and drove in the first San Diego run. "Oh, you sucker," Stoneham said, shaking his head sadly. "That"s the history of the game. The pitcher lets up on the out man, and he hurts you."
The rally died, and Stoneham cheered up quickly. "We were talking about John McGraw," he said. "Well, another time in spring training he wrote a letter back to my father that said, "There"s a young fellow down here named Ott who is the best hitter on the farm level I"ve ever seen." As you know, Mr. McGraw never did let Mel Ott go out to the minors. He brought him up to the Giants when he was just seventeen years old. He didn"t want anybody spoiling that funny batting style-some manager telling him, "You can"t hit that way. You"ve got to put that front foot down." When Ott started out, he was a switch-hitter. He never hit righty in a game, as far as I know. Ott didn"t get to play much the first couple of years, and McGraw would sometimes let him go over to New Jersey on the weekends and pick up some extra cash by playing with a semipro team. He played with the Paterson Silk Sox. Later on, Ottie and Carl Hubbell were roommates. Oh, my, there were so many games that Carl won by 20, 10-something like that-where Ott knocked in the winning run. You couldn"t count them all."
In the fourth inning, Stoneham took a telephone call at his seat, and I overheard him say, "We"ve sent flowers, and I wrote Mrs. Gordon this morning." I had read in the newspaper that morning that Sid Gordon, a Giant infielder-outfielder in the nineteen forties, had dropped dead while playing softball. Strangely enough, I had read a story about him and Horace Stoneham in a sports column only a few days earlier. Gordon had been a holdout in the spring of 1949, but he finally came to terms for twenty-five hundred dollars less than he had demanded. Horace Stoneham was always made uneasy by prolonged salary disputes with his players, and in December of 1949 he mailed Gordon a check for the twenty-five hundred dollars-a considerable gesture, since Gordon had been traded in the autumn and was by then a member of the Boston Braves.
Now Stoneham hung up the telephone, and I asked him about the business of trades. "Well," he said, "you always hate to see your players leave. Maybe I"m too much of a sentimentalist. You can make mistakes trading, of course, but if you never make a mistake, you"re not really trying. We made that big trade with the Braves involving Sid Gordon and the others because Leo Durocher wanted his own kind of team. He always had great success with players that could maneuver the bat. With younger players he was-well, he could be a little impatient. Everything with Leo was ... spontaneous.
"One of the times that really hurt was when it came time to trade Freddie Fitzsimmons, who went over to the Dodgers in the middle thirties there, after more than ten years with us. He was really upset when he left us. He cried. What a compet.i.tor he was! He had no friends when he was out there on the mound. He"d show the batter his back when he pitched-he had that big rotation-and he was a remarkable fielder, with great agility for somebody with such a bulky build. Sometimes there"d be a hard grounder or a line drive hit through the box there, and he"d stick out his foot at it to stop it going through. Anything to win. I can still see him sticking out that foot and knocking the ball down or maybe deflecting it to some infielder.
"All those games in the Polo Grounds-well, most of the time I watched them from a window in the clubhouse, way out beyond center field. You remember what it was like there?" I did indeed. I always used to wonder about the distant figures that one could sometimes see peering out of the little screened windows set into that green, faraway wall. "There was just a table and chairs there-the same place where my pop used to sit and watch. I was out there when Bobby Thomson hit the home run in 1951 that beat the Dodgers in the last playoff game. We were down three runs in the ninth, and I was commiserating with Sal Maglie, who"d been taken out of the game, and trying to tell him what a great year it had been. We saw Lockman"s. .h.i.t that brought in the first run, but the side of the bleachers blocked our view so we couldn"t see if Bobby"s. .h.i.t was going to go in, but I knew it was up the wall, so I said to Sal, "Well, at least we"ve tied it up." Some tie! The same thing with Willie"s catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 Series. I watched him come all the way out after it, and then he went out of sight behind that big black screen we had there that formed a background for the hitters. But I heard the crowd, and I knew he"d made the catch. I knew it anyway, I think, because I"d seen him make all those other impossible catches. I liked that view of things in the Polo Grounds. The last day we played there, I couldn"t go to the game. I just didn"t want to see it come to an end."
We were in the fourth inning and the Giants had a couple of runners on, and now the Giants" second baseman, Derrel Thomas, delivered them both with a sharp single up the middle. A thin scattering of cheers reached us, and Stoneham beamed. I ventured to ask him if he had a favorite among all the Giant clubs he watched down the years.
"Ah, I"ve seen so many of them," he said. "You"d have to break them down into periods. People are always asking me how the ballplayers compare now with the old-timers, and all you can say is they"re at least the equal. The equipment is much better now, of course, but the compet.i.tion for athletes [he gave it the old New York sound: "athaletes"] is greater, with the other sports getting so big. The best of them can play all sports, you know. We"ve lost some of our top draft choices to football. When I was a young fellow, all the colleges had good baseball programs, but now a lot of them have given up the game.