The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 16

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Another tip-off to a truly fine club is that a fan constantly finds himself discovering fresh stars in the lineup. Most of us know all about Pete Rose and Joe Morgan and Tony Perez and Johnny Bench by now. The other four Cincinnati regulars are Dave Concepcion, who is the best defensive shortstop in the National League; Ken Griffey, whose speed and .336 batting have been mentioned here; George Foster, who hit twenty-nine home runs this year and batted .306; and Cesar Geronimo, who has the best center-field arm in the business, and who, hitting in the seventh and eighth positions this year, batted .307. All are between twenty-six and twenty-eight years old, which means that they are just arriving at their peak seasons. For me, the discovery of the Series was Concepcion, who seemed to be forever coming up with the essential play at some vital turn of events. During a Yankee uprising in the fourth inning of the first game, he stopped a wild throw behind second base-stopped it by sticking out his leg-and then made a heartbreaking, inning-ending grab and throw of an apparent hit by Willie Randolph: two runs saved. In the first inning of the last game, he went yards behind second base to seize a shot by Carlos May and throw him out, again snuffing out what looked like a big inning. Concepcion also batted .357 in the Series-but this, it must be said, was not exactly a feat. The Yankee pitching corps contained the first two men in the Reds" batting order-Rose and Griffey-holding them to .188 and .059, respectively, but was a little less fortunate after that. The next seven Cincinnati regulars batted .333, .313, .357, .429, .533 (Bench, who was voted the best player of the Series), .308, and .357 (Concepcion). Further comment, I somehow sense, is superfluous.

These feats and colors are dimmed by the fact that the championship games and the World Series were played this year-as they will almost surely be played for years to come-in the wrong season and at the wrong time of day, with twisted rules and abnormal playing conditions, and, for the most part, in frightful weather. The players and the customers suffered doubly-from the discomfort and the loss of pleasure of having the chief festival of their sport held in depressing and inappropriate circ.u.mstances, and from the unmeasurable but inexorable loss in the quality of the baseball. I heard players in both dugouts cursing the cold. Billy Martin said, "When are we going to stop letting TV tell us when we are going to play? This is asinine, playing night games in October. It"s d.a.m.n near freezing out there." Before the Sunday-night game, in Cincinnati, Bob Howsam, the Reds" president, said, "The football people must be laughing at us"-a reference to the fact that NBC, for the price of seven hundred thousand dollars, bought the right to move the Sunday game to prime evening time and was thus able also to present its pro football games in the afternoon.

All this happened with the enthusiastic approval of the Baseball Commissioner. Responding to heavy criticism in the sporting press, Bowie Kuhn said that baseball had made these scheduling decisions independently of the networks, and then pointed to the game"s need for increased revenues and to the much larger television audiences for the World Series produced by night games. But no one had suggested that the Commissioner had been bought off by television interests. That was never necessary, for Mr. Kuhn has shown that he shares the television producers" sense of priorities and state of mind. His prime concern is for audiences and profits, and he has proved willing to go along with almost any alteration of the game that will enhance or protect "the numbers." In addition to Arctic night ball, this has so far resulted in the designated hitter (a barbarism that was first conceived of to stimulate slumping attendance in the American League, and that found its way into the World Series this year), artificial turf (far cheaper for owners to maintain, of course, than real gra.s.s), and the extension of the already swollen season to make room for the playoffs (an instant television special that has automatically pushed the World Series ten days closer to winter).

The fans" deepening feeling of cynicism and hopelessness about the plight of baseball comes, I think, from their slow realization that apparently nothing can be done to alter this state of things. The profits of the game have become the preeminent consideration, and no one in the inner councils of the game seems much concerned about the quality of the product-the needs of the players, the claims of lifelong fans, the depth of attachment of the paying customer, in contrast to that of the television watcher, and so forth. The issue of artificial turf is a case in point. Almost without exception, the players detest the chemical carpet, which causes unusual injuries and imposes such wear and tear on their legs that it may prove to shorten outfielders" careers by as much as two years, and which is, in addition, miserably hot to play on in sunny weather. Now some of the fake surfaces are beginning to wear out (the infield at Veterans Stadium, in Philadelphia, for instance, is almost rocklike, because of the decay of the protective cushion beneath the green coverlet), but no owner (except Bill Veeck, a known maverick) has admitted that a mistake was made or has offered to give up the cheaper spread. Any change would go against the numbers, so nothing can be done.

An even darker view of baseball must now be set forth. It is my own pure, horrified guess that if the complaints about the weather and about the playing conditions of the autumn games persist or grow wider, the Commissioner and the owners will present us with a plan that will seem to solve everything: Mr. Kuhn will propose that the site of the World Series be moved permanently to some friendly metropolis in the Sunbelt, perhaps one that has a large, domed enclosure waiting to be filled-New Orleans, say, or Houston-or rotated each year, in the style of the Super Bowl, among two or three such cities. The World Series will thus be instantly transformed into Superweek-the Super Bowl multiplied by seven, the ultimate Sportsfest USA. It will become an obligatory status trip and expense-account holiday for business executives, prime corporate accounts, network people, politicians, and show-business celebrities. It will also be an unbeatable television property-the first all-American sports show truly worthy of a Howard Cosell. A few objections may be expected, of course, including some carping from hometown baseball fans, who will suddenly realize that, with the exception of a wealthy few among them, they have been done out of the chance ever to cheer for their team at a World Series game. But this will seem a trifling consideration when it is understood that, in addition to solving the weather difficulty, the plan will do away with the present expense and annoyance to the clubs involved in printing tickets and preparing concessions and finding hotel s.p.a.ce for a World Series that often ends up at the last instant in another city. And, perhaps best of all, the unruly and pa.s.sionate hooligan fans that make up part of some big-city sports crowds can at last be kept away from the game.

Superweek will be an enormous initial success. It will instantly surpa.s.s the Super Bowl, and its immense profits will lead to further promotion of the event and ever-increasing television revenues. And if it should happen (it will happen, of course) that at some future point there come two or three World Series in succession that are as one-sided and dull as the one we have just seen, and if the public, as a result, begins to sense that the sport has not measured up to the Event-that the games have been hyped out of all meaning, and that the World Series has become just another inflated and vulgarized TV show, another stop on the "Wide World of Sports"-well, then, the game of baseball can be changed, of course, like anything else on television: changed in some terrific new way that will take care of the numbers.

This nightmare vision will not affect or deter Mr. Kuhn or his employers. Their att.i.tude toward those of us who share such fears is perhaps epitomized by the Commissioner"s patronizing gesture during the three icy night games of the Series, which he attended wearing a business suit and no topcoat: You"re wrong, folks-it isn"t cold here. It has not occurred to these men (nor would it matter to them if it did) that we are entirely in earnest, that we are trying to conserve something that seems as intricate and lovely to us as any river valley. A thousand small relationships, patterns, histories, attachments, pleasures, and moments are what we draw from this game, and that is why we truly worry about it, grieve for it now, and are filled with apprehension and despair at the thought of its transformation into another bland and deathlike pause on the evening ribbon of dog food and gunfights and deodorants and crashing cars. Not everyone feels this way, of course, but who among us feels none of this?

But it is wrong to leave baseball in such a dark corner for the winter, for the game rewards and surprises us still, and may outlast even its proprietors. (It never has belonged to the "owners," of course.) While I was watching batting practice at Yankee Stadium just before the third game of the World Series, I noticed that the thin, long-faced man standing directly to my right, wearing a tan raincoat, was Lefty Gomez, a great pitching star for the Yankees in the nineteen-thirties. I got up my nerve and introduced myself to him, and we shook hands.

"I saw you pitch your very first game in Yankee Stadium," I told him at once. "I still remember it. I was about nine years old."

Old ballplayers hear this sort of thing every day, of course, but Gomez was gracious about it. "Is that right?" he said. "I remember it, too. It was in May of 1930, against the White Sox. I beat Red Faber, 41." He pointed up at the great triple-decked stands and said, "I remember walking out here just before that game and looking around, and there were so many people in the stands that-well, there weren"t just more people here than in my home town but in my home county!"

We laughed, and then Gomez looked down at the ground and shook his head a little. "Nineteen thirty," he said. "My G.o.d, do you realize that"s forty-six years ago? I can"t believe it."

"Neither can I," I said.

I think we both sensed the same thing. Time had destroyed the once-immeasurable difference between us, between a small boy and a hero. Now we were the same-two gents in winter raincoats watching the young men getting ready to play another game.

That Series game, it turned out, wasn"t much. It wasn"t nearly as interesting, for instance, as a Mets-Cubs game I went to on a Sunday back in the middle of September, with my wife and my son John Henry. It was the boy"s first big-league game-he is six years old-so I had arranged to get good seats at Shea Stadium, right behind home plate. The only trouble was that it came up rain that morning. John Henry kept watch at the windows, however, and about one o"clock in the afternoon he discovered an almost invisible lightening in the clouds, and we decided to give it a try. By the time we arrived at Shea, it was raining again, but I parked the car, and we ran through the downpour and went into the park. There was a surprising crowd there, milling about in the dank pa.s.sageways under the stands, and we all looked at each other in a self-congratulatory way. The Mets against the Cubs, in the rain? We were crazy, but we were fans, all right. John Henry announced that the three of us should sit down in our seats and get ready for the game to start, and we did. We found our places-an island of three people in the surrounding sea of slatted yellow seats-and huddled there cheerfully enough in our foul-weather gear, unsuccessfully trying to share a single umbrella. I watched my son as he inspected the lights and the scoreboard and the empty stands around and above us and the soaking tarpaulins and-now and then, glimpsed in the dugout-a player.

"Where"s home plate?" he asked.

"Out there someplace," I said, gesturing.

Then, unexpectedly and after several false alarms, it stopped raining. The grounds crew came out and rolled up the tarps and put down the white bases, and the waiting crowds filled up a few hundred of the wet seats. The pitchers warmed, and the umps and players came out on the field, and we stood for the anthem, and sat down and clapped. Rick Monday came up to lead it off for the Cubs, and Jerry Koosman struck him out, swinging, and we yelled-and then it really began to rain.

We stuck it out there for another forty minutes or so, observing the unrolling of tarps and studying rain patterns and watching the out-of-town scores beginning to go up on the scoreboard. John Henry kept occupied somehow (1 c.o.ke, 1/3 box popcorn, 1 ice cream, 1 Mets cap), and I kept looking up at the sky, hoping against hope. But at last we said the h.e.l.l with it and went home, and by the time we got back to our part of the city the rain had stopped, of course, and the streets were almost dry. When we got home, I flipped on the TV set, and, sure enough, there were the Mets and the Cubs.

"I"m sorry, John Henry," I said. "I didn"t think they were going to play today."

"Oh, that"s all right," he said at once. "I liked it there. That was cool."

So it was all right, after all, and maybe one batter is plenty to see, the first time. It was a beginning.

Season Ticket.

Roger Angell.

"Don"t you know how hard this all is?"

TED WILLIAMS, on batting in particular and baseball in general.

Preface.

IT IS MY HOPE in this book a rough replica of their own actual or imaginary explorations of the game over the past five years-a journey through the seasons, with stopovers at the spring camps; notes and exclamations about the midsummer campaigns; conversations with vivid players or movers of the pastime; excursions and distractions (including a consideration of the most distracting issue of drugs); and the intensive pursuit of the late pennant races, the championship playoffs, and the World Series. As before, I have covered this beat in haphazard fashion, following my own inclinations and interests. Friends and critics have sometimes called me a historian of the game or a baseball essayist or even a baseball poet, but I decline the honors. It seems to me that what I have been putting down for a quarter century now is autobiography: the story of myself as a fan. I have tried to do this seriously, because fans matter, but with a light hand, for baseball has brought me much pleasure.

This is my fourth baseball book, and if there has been a shift of gaze, it is because I have at last sensed that there is more losing than winning in our sport, and that a fan"s best defense against inexorable heartbreak is probably to learn more about how the game is really played. I care a lot about the games and the moments and the men on the field-the 1986 MetsRed Sox World Series still seems a cruelly unfair test of my deepest loyalties-but in recent years I have become engrossed in the craft and techniques of the game: not just how the runs were scored but why. I have talked for hours on end with catchers and pitchers (famous starters and young blazers, and an exceptional relief artist), and infielders, hitters, coaches, managers, scouts, executives, and owners, and most of the time I started with the same question: "How do you do what you do?" They responded with floods of information and instruction, example and anecdote, all put forth with an intensity that confirmed my belief that this placid, easy game is in fact a thing of such difficulty that it easily holds off our wish to master it and bend it to our desires. No team in this decade has established itself as a dynastic power-it is quite the contrary, in fact-despite the best corporate and strategic efforts of twenty-six major-league duchies to achieve that end: a macrocosm of the resistance presented by every game, almost every inning, on the long summer schedule. Since I am a fan, I will always be an amateur of baseball, but I no longer feel like an outsider; none of the old pros I talked to on the field or in the dugout or up in the stands gave me the impression that he had subdued the game, either. We are baffled but still learning, and we keep coming back for more.

-R.A.

TWO CHAPTERS HAVE BEEN shuffled out of calendar order in the book, in the interest of better flow. In the interest of sanity, I have omitted mention (for the most part) of the trades or other shifts of affiliation that have moved some players and managers along to other teams since their appearance in these pages.

La Vida.

- Summer 1987.

BASEBALL OPENS YOUR EYES. Each new season, it takes me four or five games before I begin to see what"s really happening on the field-how the pitcher is working to this particular batter, the little shifts in the infield defense, with men on base, as the count progresses; how bold or how cautious this manager will be with his fresh a.s.semblage of hitters and base runners. Over the winter I also seem to forget another part of baseball-the stuff away from, or off to one side of, the teams and the standings and the vivid events on the diamond, which can reward the experienced and reawakened fan. But that, too, comes back in time. At Tiger Stadium, early in JuneJune, 1984: the Year of the Tiger, it turned out-I watched the Toronto Blue Jays valiantly trying to chip away at Detroit"s mountainous early-season lead in the American League East in a contest that the visitors eventually won, 63, thus narrowing the Detroit margin to three and a half games. (The Jays never came as close again.) There was a big, apprehensive crowd and plenty of action-back-to-back doubles by the Jays" Dave Collins and Lloyd Moseby and an inside-the-park homer by George Bell-but between all the action and the cheering and the rest of it my attention was taken by a spider I happened to notice up in one corner of the frame of the open press-box window before me. It was a very small spider-a dot, really-but a busy one. It was working on a web. Inning by inning, the creature persisted, laying out struts and cables, catwalks and connectors, and the stadium floodlights illuminating the green field below us also lit up the little construction project as it grew in size and beautiful design. The white light struck each fresh thread with silver as it appeared, magically, where there had been none before, and was stretched to its planned and perfect mooring. I pointed out the web to my seatmate in the press box, and he studied it, too, and in time I noticed that each of us was following the game in the same way-watching the pitch or the play below and sometimes making an entry in his scorecard, but then returning at once to the smaller event above us in the window. I ran into that writer, an old friend, in October at the World Series in Detroit, and after we"d exchanged some remarks about the players and the pitching and the coming game he said, "Say, do you remember that night back here in the summer, with that little spider? Wasn"t that something? You know, I woke up the other night and I was thinking that again. Funny..."

Then I might add that the thing we remember at my house about a Fourth of July Mets-Astros game at Shea (four of us had gone to it: a family party) isn"t the terrific postgame fireworks or a little bloodletting of Astro runs in the first inning but our getaway from the parking lot afterward. (I hope soon to complete my small monography on stadium-quitting.) Actually, by the time we turned up at Shea the lot was full, with the gates and pay booths closed, and we had to make do with a narrow, muddy little junkyard off some street out beyond the center-field parking sectors, where a local entrepreneur took our seven bucks and then absolutely buried us in a welter of other late-comers. No hope, but when we found our way back there, hours later, beyond the motionless thousands of overheating cars and captive fans and patriots self-blocked in the main lot, someone in our group spotted a little alley at the back of the yard, and we took a chance and swung that way, against the flow of cars inching out, and found a miracle there: an empty street. I zipped through a couple of blocks, hung a right away from the honking tangle, extemporized a dazzling U-turn under the Whitestone Expressway, guessed and grabbed another right, spotted the good old boat basin off to my right, and laid a little left onto the Grand Central Parkway: home free, homeward bound, with the cheers of my fans loud in the car and cascades of Queens-side Roman candles on either hand celebrating our brilliant departure.

Nor is there anything in my baseball notebooks about the second game of a Sat.u.r.day doubleheader in the middle of August-the Twins against the Red Sox at Fenway in the latter stretches of one of those long, nearly eventless games when the sawdust slowly begins to leak out of the pastime. Why do I remember it so well? The pitcher out there has run the count to 31. There is a foul, then another foul. The pitcher doesn"t want the new ball the umpire has thrown in and asks for another one. He gets it and rubs it slowly in his hands. He winds and throws: another foul. The outfielders shift from foot to foot and stare deeply into the gra.s.s before them. A base runner leads cautiously away from first, then trots back as the pitcher steps off the rubber. The third-base ump walks seven steps out toward left field, turns, and strolls back again. Another foul ball, bounced softly past first base. "Throw it straight," somebody in the press box mutters. There are spatters of applause in the stands, but they die away for lack of hope. The lights are on, for evening has crept closer, and here and there in the lower decks I can see some fans getting up, in twos and threes, and heading up the aisles for home and dinner. The park is half empty by now. Out in the sloping right-field sector of the seats, there is a thin, a-cappella rendering of "Happy Birthday," for somebody-her name is Ella, it turns out-and other fans around the park join in on the last "happy birthday to you-ooo!" and Ella gets a little round of applause, too. But that ends as well (a coach is out talking to the pitcher now), and even the everyday noises of the baseball park-the hum of voices, the undercurrent of talk and cheers and laughter and vender cries-drop and fade, and Fenway Park is almost silent, just for a minute. The flag in center field hangs motionless in the last late sunlight, its pole a startling pink. The rightfield bleachers are bathed in pastel, and a first breath of evening cool floats up from the lighted field below. I sigh and stretch, wanting the game to get on with itself, but in no hurry, really. No place to go, no place I need to be. Midsummer.

Baseball is not life itself, although the resemblance keeps coming up. It"s probably a good idea to keep the two sorted out, but old fans, if they"re anything like me, can"t help noticing how cunningly our game replicates the larger schedule, with its beguiling April optimism; the cheerful roughhouse of June; the grinding, serious, unending (surely) business of midsummer; the September settling of accounts, when hopes must be traded in for philosophies or brave smiles; and then the abrupt running-down of autumn, when we wish for-almost demand-a prolonged and glittering final adventure just before the curtain. But nowhere is this metaphor more insistent than in baseball"s sense of slippage; our rueful, fleeting awareness that we tend to pay attention to the wrong things-to last night"s rally and tomorrow"s pitching match-up-while lesser and sweeter moments slide by unperceived. Players notice this, too. Bob Gibson, the most compet.i.tive man I have ever seen on a ballfield, once told me that what he missed most after he had retired wasn"t the compet.i.tion at all. "I don"t miss the pitching but I can"t say I don"t miss the game," the Cardinal Hall of Famer said. "I miss it a little. There"s a lot I don"t want to get back to....I think it"s the life I miss-all the activity that"s around baseball. I don"t miss playing baseball but I miss...baseball. Baseball. Does that sound like a crazy man?"

I told him he wasn"t crazy, and I think I also said that I"d heard some other players and managers use the same phrase in the same way: the life. It was a little while, however, before I began to appreciate that this other side of the game was there for me, as well. La vida is not the same for a middle-aged baseball writer as it is for the players (scribes-even the beat men-never wholly belong in the clubhouse, the way the players do), but there are some compensations; for one thing, the life is easy for me to bring back, because I wrote down so much of it. For another, I was encouraged to write about myself, myself as a fan, which is a kind of reporting that other lucky baseball writers should be given as their beat. I could be lighthearted or even trivial, if it suited me, and I could revisit old baseball friends whenever I wished.

Earl Weaver, for one. Here he is, as jaunty as ever, even when seen in serious circ.u.mstances-just before his last game in baseball (or so he thought and we all thought), on the first Sunday in October, 1982. He lost that day, and the Brewers, not his Orioles, progressed to the playoffs and then on into a bruising seven-game World Series with the Cardinals. When the Orioles" season came to its end that afternoon in Baltimore, the downcast but grateful mult.i.tudes in Memorial Stadium repeatedly summoned Weaver back to the field with their applause. He waved his cap again and again, and then led the funny local letter-cheer for the fans one more time, stubbily spelling out the name of their team, with tears glistening on his face. But never mind that; here is the beginning: This is the final day of the regular season, the last tick on the great summerlong, hundred-and-sixty-two-game clock, and the two teams here in Memorial Stadium-the Orioles and the visiting Milwaukee Brewers-are tied for first place in the American League East. The winners of this game will finish up with ninety-five victories and sixty-seven losses (the best record in either league in 1982) and will catch an evening flight to the Coast to begin preparations for the league-championship series that opens on Tuesday against the California Angels. There is such a thing as caring too much, and here on the sun-warmed field, chattering with writer friends and watching the batters in the cage, I realize that I almost don"t want this game played, for one of these two sterling, embattled clubs-equal favorites of mine, if that is possible-must lose before the day is done. But play they must, and, deep down, I want the Orioles to win, because of Earl. He is retiring after fourteen and a half seasons at the helm, during which span his teams have twelve times won ninety games or more, with six divisional championships, four pennants, and one World Championship. Only the late Joe McCarthy had a better managerial record in this century. Retiring now is Weaver"s idea, announced more than a year ago; he wants less time in airplanes and hotel lobbies, more time to give to his vegetable garden, to the dog track, to visiting his grandchildren. "Anybody has to be stupid to work when he doesn"t have to," he has said, but he is only fifty-two years old, and the betting is that he will be back in a year or two, managing somewhere, at a very large salary, and talking baseball better than anyone else.* Here, sitting at ease in his dugout, his cap pushed back, one leg comfortably crossed, ankle on knee, over the other, and with the press kneeling and sitting and leaning in about him in a three-deep semicircle, he is hoa.r.s.e and cheerful and profane, and so eager in response that he makes each reporter"s questions sound simply conversational. He is himself, that is, and the burdens of this special day have not dimmed him. No, he tells us, making out the lineup card this morning didn"t require any more care than usual. "I think hard about all my lineup cards," he says, "so this was no harder than the other hundred and sixty-one." No, he hadn"t worried about the games ahead when he was out in Detroit the other day and down by four. "What happened in that game and what was happening to Milwaukee in the game over in Boston was what mattered. It"s always one game at a time. You can"t do nothing about the other ones." The talk shifts to Jim Palmer, who will start today, and to his opponent, the veteran Don Sutton. "I"ll get goose b.u.mps when Jimmy walks in from the bullpen before the game," Weaver says. "I always do. He"s a lot responsible for us being here today, you know." Palmer, at 154 for the year, has lost only one game in his last twenty-four starts. "There"ve been times when he did it with just this"-he taps his forehead-"and the other man out there today can do the same thing if he has to. It"s always easy for the scouts to say "Pitch a good fastball up and in on this batter," but maybe the guy on that little hill can"t always do it."

There is more, and in the next few minutes Earl stands up (not an extended process for him, at five feet six and a half inches) to ill.u.s.trate a right-handed batter leaning out over the plate in pursuit of an outside slider and to show how good in-fielders all reflexively lean to their left in response; sits down again and recalls the pain he experienced in the spring of 1948, when he was an aspiring seventeen-year-old second baseman and was suddenly cut from the roster of the Cla.s.s B Lynchburg, Virginia, club and had to watch his teammates depart on a train while he and another unfortunate waited for the bus that would take them to join the Cla.s.s D West Frankfort, Illinois, team ("The guy to feel sorry for," Earl says, "is the kid with West Frankfort who thought he had the second-base job nailed down until I turned up"); and gets up again to ill.u.s.trate a play in 1964, when he was managing the Elmira (N.Y.) Pioneers. Coaching at third base, he watched a wild pitch that struck the corner of the plate and bounced crazily into the air. "I go halfway down the line to see if the catcher can make the play," he says, "and when he does I try to stop my base runner, Paul Blair, who is coming in all the way from second, but by the time I spin around, Paulie is there"-he puts the palm of his hand an inch in front of his nose-"and when I pick myself up I"ve got footprints here and here and here. Yes, he scored."

In time, he goes off to talk for the television cameras, and when he steps up out of the dugout there is an instant response from the early crowd-a fervent little scattering of "Wea-ver! Wea-ver!"-which he acknowledges with a shy half wave. Like the fans, I want more Earl, but I can console myself by remembering how many dugout monologues and postgame interviews and springtime dissertations and late-night World Series battle summations I have heard from him over the years-all of them, without exception, a lesson and a treat. Back in August, almost two months earlier, I interrupted a seaside vacation in eastern Maine to catch a couple of Orioles-Red Sox games at Fenway Park-to see the teams and hear the crowds and revisit my true favorites, the Bosox, in their jewel-green home park, but mostly to call on Earl Weaver in his last summer of baseball. I had no idea then, of course, that his club would make it back from its third-place spot in the standings, and neither did he, I think. In the dugout just before that series began, Weaver said, "This is a big game for us-I hate to say it. We"ve lost eleven of sixteen, and our a.s.s is about to hit the water. We just died in Chicago." Rick Dempsey, his veteran catcher, came by at that instant and murmured, "Outmanaged again," and Earl laughed. Clif Keane, the emeritus professor of insults of the Boston press, asked Dempsey about his .129 lifetime batting average (he is in fact a career .235 hitter), and Dempsey said, "Yes, I got to admit it. I got fourteen years in and I"ve never been hot." Earl lit another Raleigh and politely asked a hovering young woman sportswriter from a suburban Ma.s.sachusetts paper if she knew any two-syllable words, and when she said yes, she did, he said, "Then you"ll go far. This man"-he nodded toward Keane-"got by all these years on just one syllable at a time: "They-played-a-game-on-this-day-and-our-team-beat-their-team-by-a-score-of-two-to-one."" "That was for you!" Keane cried. "I always did that when I knew you were in town and might buy the paper!" And so on. But there was some real baseball in it, too, and soon Earl was on his feet to show us how he and his coaches had been working with the brilliant young Baltimore rookie Cal Ripken, who was making the difficult transition from third base to shortstop in midseason and had just begun to learn not to take the tiny half step toward the plate which every third sacker makes with the pitch-because he must be so quick to respond to a bunt or a bulletlike line drive-but which the shortstop must avoid, since it can cost him a full stride to one side or the other in the much wider area of the field he must cover. "Wherever he plays, you can write him in for the next fifteen years, because that"s how good he is," Earl said of Ripken. "He"s got fifteen home runs already, and he ain"t missed a ground ball yet, and that"s amazing."

The following day at the Fens, Earl was sitting beside Jim Palmer during the dugout levee and, in response to some question or other, unwarily said, "I watch a game with my mind completely blank. Most of the time, I"m only thinking that I"m glad I don"t have to make a decision." Palmer, nodding his head happily, said, "Me, too, Earl. I"m always glad about that." The next exchanges have slipped my mind, but when Palmer picked up his glove and went up onto the field I noticed how Weaver followed him with his gaze. The little manager and the tall pitcher have been together on the Orioles ever since the summer of 1969-over two thousand games now-and they have had some celebrated disagreements. Most of the time, though, they remind me of a father and son who have been forced to spend too many days and hours together behind the counter in the family stationery store or delicatessen. There are hundreds of shared anecdotes that they tell differently and squabble over, and a few serious, semi-public differences of opinion between them about business strategy and comportment, but mostly they convey the pleasingly complicated impression that while they can hardly bear each other"s company for a single day longer, they care about and count on each other more than either one can admit. The moment one of them is out of earshot of the other, what you hear is a compliment. This time, Earl turned to one of the Baltimore writers and said, "Do you remember Jim pitching that day against Oakland-the old Oakland team, when they were so tough-when he started rearranging our outfielders, the way he does? Bando is coming up, with men on base, and he"s a right-handed hitter, of course, and Jimmy begins to move our right fielder-I think it"s Rettenmund-in, and then over a step, and then back a half step, like a G.o.ddam photographer arranging a picture, and then he holds up his hands-Hold it! Right there!-and the next pitch, the very next G.o.ddam pitch, Bando hits a shot out to right, and the fielder goes like this and like this, bending in and leaning back while he"s watching the ball, but he never has to take a single G.o.ddam step, and he makes the catch. Jim Frey was coaching with us then, and he turns to me on the bench and says, "Well, now I"ve seen everything."" Weaver laughed and coughed, and shook his head at the memory of it. "n.o.body like Jim Palmer," he said.

One spring in Mesa, Arizona, I ran into Gene Autry, the owner of the California Angels, who was chatting with some of his players in the visiting-team dugout. He was wearing cowboy boots and a narrow string tie. He looked gentle and old and agreeable, the way he always does. When the Angels lost the American League playoff in 1982 by dropping three games in a row to the Brewers (after winning the first two games), and then threw away another championship series in 1986 under even more unlikely and scarifying circ.u.mstances, everybody in baseball felt bad, I think, because they so wanted a Gene Autry team in a World Series. We chatted a little, and he told me about his baseball beginnings. "I was always a Cardinals fan then," he said, "because I came from Oklahoma, and they had the Dean brothers and Pepper Martin and all those other Okies playing for them. Then I followed the Cubs, because I"d started in singing over Station WLS, in Chicago. The Gabby HartnettCharlie Grimm Cubs, I mean. Oh, I had a lot of baseball friends. I have a photo at home of me and Casey Stengel and Mantle and Whitey Ford. I wouldn"t take anything in the world for that photo. You know, I was thinking just the other day about the old days down home, when we"d listen to Bob Kelley, who did those game recreations from the Coast over the radio, from a telegraph ticker. You don"t remember that, I imagine. There"d be nothing, and then you"d hear the ticker begin to go and you"d know something was happening in the game, and then he"d describe it. He could bring it all alive for you."

But I did remember. I still do-me, at ten or eleven, with my ear next to the illuminated, innerly-warmed gold celluloid dial of the chunky, polished-wood family radio, from which there emerges, after an anxious silence, the rickety, train-depot sounds of a telegraph instrument suddenly bursting with news. Then a quick, closer tock!-the announcer or some studio hand rapping on the mike with a pencil, I suppose-and the re-creator, perched in his imaginary press box, says, "Uh-oh....Hafey really got hold of that delivery from Fat Freddie. The ball is rolling all the way to the wall in left, and here come two more Cardinal runs across the plate...." The front door slams-my father home from work, with the New York Sun under his arm (and the early-inning zeros of that same Giants road game on the front page, with the little white boxes for the rest of the line score still blank), and I get up to meet him with the bad news.

Spring training is the life. One march day in Phoenix Munic.i.p.al Stadium, I strolled slowly away from the batting cage in the dazzling desert sunlight and climbed the shallow grandstand steps behind the Oakland home dugout, on my way to grab a pre-game hamburger and a cold Coors at the little free-load picnic grounds for the media out by left field. The fans were coming in-old folks carrying seat cushions and score-cards, college kids in T-shirts and cutoff jeans, young women in sandals with serious tans and white "A"s"-emblazoned painter"s caps, kids balancing mammoth cups of popcorn-and unhurriedly scouting around for good seats in the unreserved rows. A last fly ball rose and dropped untouched behind second, where an Oakland coach and a batboy were picking up the batting-practice b.a.l.l.s and dropping them into a green plastic laundry basket. The first visiting ballplayers, fresh off their bus, were playing catch over in front of their dugout; it was the Giants this time, and I was looking forward to seeing Al Oliver again and to watching this kid pitcher Garrelts (if he did work on this day, as promised) and a couple of others, but there was no hurry about the game"s starting, of course, and nothing to worry about even if I did miss a few pitches and plays while I lingered over my lunch. A friend of mine, a beat man with the San Francisco Chronicle, came along and fell into step beside me. Smiling a little behind his shades, he nodded toward the field and the players and the filling-up stands and murmured, "You know, it"s a shame to have to mess all this up with the regular season." Teams in Arizona and Florida play with identical rules and before the same sort of audiences, but the two spring flavors are quite different. I don"t understand it. Florida ball seems more citified, hurried, and temporary; no matter how rustic the setting, I always have the sense that the regular season impends, and that these humid, sunny afternoons are just postcards, to be glanced at later on and then thrown away. Arizona baseball is slower, sweeter, and somehow better fixed in memory. For one thing, there seem to be more young children in attendance at the western parks; the stands are stuffed with babies and toddlers-or else I just notice them more. In Phoenix one afternoon, a small barefoot creature came slowly and gravely up the aisle behind the home dugout wearing nothing but a Pamper. Six- or seven-year-old home-team batboys are already veterans of two or three Arizona seasons. In one game at Scottsdale, matters were suspended briefly when a very young rookie bat-person in pigtails went out on the field after a base on b.a.l.l.s, picked up the bat (they were both the same length: the thirty-three-inch model), and paused, staring slowly back and fourth, until she remembered which dugout she had come from, and then returned there, smiling in triumph. The home-plate umpire, I noticed, made a good call, holding up one hand and watching over his shoulder until we were ready for baseball once again. It wouldn"t have happened in Florida.

For me, Arizona baseball is personified by a young woman vender at Phoenix Stadium I came to recognize, after several springs, by her call. She would slowly make her way down an aisle carrying her basket and then sing out a gentle, musical "Hot dog!...Hot dog!"-a half note and then down four steps to a whole note. She"d go away, and later you heard the same pausing, repeated cry at a different distance, like the cry of a single bird working the edge of a meadow on a warm summer afternoon. "Hot dog!"

Old fans and senior scribes want the spring camps to remain exactly the same; they should be like our vacation cottages at the lake or the sh.o.r.e-a fusty and familiar vicinity in which we discover, every year, the sparkle and renewing freshness of another summer. The wish is doomed, of course. Each succeeding March, the small ballparks are visibly more crowded and the audiences younger and more upscale, with affluent, Hertz-borne suburban families on the kids" spring break lately beginning to outnumber the cushion-carrying retirees in the stands. Authors and television crews cram the sidelines at the morning workouts, and by game time the venders at the souvenir stands look like Bloomingdale"s salesgirls during Christmas week. Spring training is "in," worse luck, and even the most remote baseball bivouacs are incipient Nantuckets. Out in Mesa, descending hordes of Cubs fans absolutely swamp little HoHoKam Park every game day, lining up at breakfast time to buy up the twenty-three hundred unreserved seats that go on sale at ten o"clock; the park put in new bleacher seats in 1985, enlarging its capacity to eight thousand, but this was insufficient to handle the numbers of the new faithful. A friend of mine-a retired Chicago baseball writer who lives in Arizona now-told me that he drove over to the Cubs training complex on the very first day of spring training that same year, when only the pitchers and catchers had reported, and counted license plates from twenty-six states in the parking lot. "There were maybe a thousand fans at the workout," he said. "A thousand, easy, just watching the pitchers doing sit-ups."

Chain O"Lakes Park, the Red Sox training site in Winter Haven, is less frantic, but it has changed, too. It was an inning or two into my first game there in 1985 when I saw the difference: the old, fragrant orange grove out beyond the right-field and center-field fences was gone, replaced by a cl.u.s.ter of low, not quite finished white buildings, with a drooping banner out front that said "LAKEFRONT CONDOMINIUMS." I gestured miserably at this phenomenon, and my seatmate, a Boston writer, said, "Yes, I know. Remember when we used to write "and Yaz hit it into the orchard"? Now what do we say?"

Trying to perk me up, he pointed out that the two nesting ospreys I had seen here on prior spring trips were still in residence in their big, slovenly nest on top of the light pole in short right-field foul ground; just the day before, he said, a batter with the visiting Reds had skied a foul ball that had landed in the nest-landed and stayed there, that is-but the birds did not seem discomposed. I kept an eye out, and over the next few innings I saw one or perhaps both of them depart and return to their perch, coming in with a last flutter of their great wings and then settling down on whatever they were keeping there above the field. Someday soon, I decided, we would hear about the first confirmed sighting of a young red-st.i.tched osprey (Pandion ueberrothiensis) here, hard by the banks of Lake Lulu. I cheered up. A little later in that game, we had a brief shower-the first rain in weeks, I was told-and some of the older fans got up from their unprotected seats along the left- and right-field lines and came and stood in the aisles of the roofed grandstand, out of the wet. The game went on, with the sitting and standing fans quietly taking it in, and I had a sudden, oddly familiar impression (this has. .h.i.t me before, in this park at this time of year) that I had found my way into a large henhouse somewhere and was surrounded by elderly farmyard fowls. We perched there together, smelling the aroma of mixed dust and rain, and waited for the sun to come out again.

The life-baseball as a side order, so to speak-is not necessarily slow or reflective. What I remember about an October now seven years gone isn"t an unmemorable World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees (the Dodgers won it) but the crowds at the Stade Olympique, up in Montreal, during the stirring Dodgers-Expos playoff games there. All that is still clean the middle innings of Game Three, say (the clubs had come back from Los Angeles with the series tied), with the Dodgers" Jerry Reuss and the Expos" Steve Rogers locked in hard combat, and the Dodgers up a run-the only run of the game so far-and the encircling, in-leaning rows upon rows of avid, baseball-mad Canadians, seeming to sway and shudder and groan and cry in the chilly northern night air with every pitch and movement of the fray. And to sing. When I wrote about this, several days later, I still half heard in the dusty back chambers of my head the vapid, endlessly repeated chorus of that d.a.m.nable Expo marching song-"Val-de-ri! Val-de-rah!"-that the locals bellowed together, in enormous and echoing cacophony, at every imaginable st.i.tch and wrinkle of the games" fabric. The song is not some famous indigenous voyageurs" chantey, as one might suppose, but only the old, implacably jolly "Happy Wanderer" hiking ditty that generations of sub-adolescents across the continent have had to warble through ("Val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!") during mosquitoey marshmallow roasts at Camp Pineaway. But the Montrealers sang it with a will-sang it because they wanted to, of all things-and they won my heart. I didn"t even mind the weather, which was unsuitable, if never quite unbearable, or the appalling ballpark. The round, thick-lipped, inward-tilted concrete upper wall of the Stade Olympique appears to hang over the stands and the glum, Astro-Turfed field in a glowering, almost threatening way, shutting out the sky, and fastb.a.l.l.s and hard-hit grounders are so hard to see from above, for some reason, that the accompanying noise from the crowd is always an instant or two out of sync. This time I didn"t care, because the teams and the players and the quality of play were all so good that every part of the games mattered and made you glad you were there and no place else in the world just then.

In the sixth inning of that third game, the Expos tied things up with a single and a walk and a little roller by Larry Parrish, just through between Cey and Russell at third and short. Reuss, perhaps ever so slightly distracted by the blizzards of torn-up journeaux, and the layered explosions of noise, and the illuminated "PLUS FORT!" up on the scoreboard, and the back-and- forth billowings of an enormous white Quebecois flag, and the hundredth or perhaps thousandth bellowed cascade of "Val-de-ri!"s" and "Val-de-rah!"s"-now got a fastball a millimeter or two higher than he wanted to against the next batter, outfielder Jerry White, who socked the ball up and out into the left-field stands for a homer and three more runs and, it turned out, the game.

I imagine everyone who thinks of himself or herself as an Expo fan still clings to that moment, for the team lost the next two games-lost them late, under grindingly painful circ.u.mstances-to miss out on the World Series, and sank into a long baseball torpor. Sometimes it"s wiser to remember the byplay of big games-the songs and the rest of it-instead of their outcome, because losing hurts so much. Players understand this all too well. A day or two before the end, Steve Rogers, talking about all the singing and happiness in the Montreal stands, shook his head a little and said, "Yes, it"s beautiful, but-well, euphoria is not always the name of the game."

People who don"t follow baseball very closely a.s.sume that fans care only about their own club. I don"t agree. Whenever I happen upon a Little League game or a high-school game or a Sunday game in Central Park between a couple of East Harlem amateur nines, it only takes me an inning or so before I find myself privately rooting for one of the teams out there. I have no idea how this choice is arrived at, but the process is more fun if the two sides offer a visible, almost moral, clash of styles and purpose, and-even better-if each seems to be personified by one of its players. At that 1982 Cardinals-Brewers World Series, York and Lancaster were brilliantly depicted by the rival center fielders; the frail, popeyed, apologetic-looking Cardinal rookie, Willie McGee; and the hulking, raggedy-a.s.s veteran Brewer slugger, Gorman Thomas. McGee had a great series, it turned out, both at the plate and in the field; in the third game, which the Cardinals won, 62, he smacked home runs in two successive at-bats, and in the ninth he pulled down a mighty poke by Gorman Thomas (of course) after running at full tilt from mid-center field into deep left center and then to the top of the wall there all in one flowing, waterlike motion-a cat up a tree-with no pause or accelerations near the end to adjust for the catch; at the top of his leap, with his back to the field, he put his glove up and bit to his left, and the ball, in the same instant, arrived. The play almost broke my heart, for I had already somehow chosen the Brewers and Gorman Thomas as my own. Thomas, as it happened, did nothing much in the Series-three little singles, and this after a summer in which he had hit a league-leading thirty-nine home runs-so I certainly wasn"t front-running. The frowsy Thomas was a walking strip mine; he had worn the same pair of uniform stockings, now as threadbare as the Shroud of Turin, since opening day of 1978. I recall a moment in the Brewer clubhouse during the Series when a group of us were chatting with Thomas"s father-he was the retired postmaster of Charleston, South Carolina-and some genius reporter asked what Gorman"s room had looked like back when he was a teen-ager. "Tumble!" Thomas pere said, wincing at the thought. "Why, I could hahdly make myself look in theah!"

Events on the field qualify in the life, as well; they only have to be a little special. In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 66. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 32, and then sailed a ma.s.sive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly"s accountbook for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driven in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, "This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone." I wasn"t at Candlestick that day, but I don"t care; I have this one by heart.

Or consider an earlier concatenation that began when Phil Garner, a stalwart Pirate outfielder, struck a grand slam home run against the Cardinals at Three Rivers Stadium one evening in 1978. Every professional player can recall each grand slam in his career, but this one was a blue-plate special, because Garner, who is not overmuscled, had never hit a bases-loaded home run before-not in Little League play; not in Legion or high-school ball; not in four years with the University of Tennessee nine; not in five years in the minors; not in six hundred and fifty-one prior major-league games, over two leagues and five summers. Never.

We must now try to envisage-perhaps in playlet form-the events at the Garner place when Phil came home that evening: P.G. (enters left, with a certain swing in his step): Hi, honey.

Mrs. P.G.-or C.G. (her name is Carol): Hi. How"d it go?

P.G.: O.K. (pause) Well?

C.G.: Well, what?

P.G.: What! You mean...

C.G.: (alarmed): What what? What"s going on?

P.G.: I can"t believe it. You missed it....

Yes, she had missed it, although Carol was and is a baseball fan and a fan of Phil"s, as well as his wife, and was in the custom of attending most of the Pirates" home games and following the others by radio or television. When he told her the news, she was delighted but appalled.

C.G.: I can"t get over not seeing it. You can"t imagine how bad I feel.

P.G.: (grandly): Oh, that"s O.K., honey. I"ll hit another one for you tomorrow.

And so he did.

Attention must be paid. In March, 1984, I watched a talented left-handed Blue Jay rookie pitcher named John Cerutti work three middle innings against the Red Sox at Winter Haven; at one point he struck out Jim Rice with a dandy little slider in under his fists. I talked to Cerutti after the game and learned that he was four credits away from his B.A. degree in economics at Amherst (he has since graduated) and that his senior thesis had to do with the role of agents in major-league player salaries. I also discovered that he had a baseball hero: Ron Guidry.

"I don"t have many fond memories of baseball until I was about eighteen and pitching for the Christian Brothers Academy, in Albany," he said. "Then I got the notion that I might make it in the game someday. I had a real good year that year-it was 1978-and, of course, that was the same time that Guidry had his great year. I was a Yankee fan-always had been-so naturally I followed him and pulled for him, and that spring I began to notice that something weird was happening to us. I mean, I won seven games in a row, and he won his first seven. Then I was 90 when he was exactly the same-we were winning together, me and Ron Guidry! School ended and I graduated, but I went on pitching in American Legion ball. I was 130 when I lost my first game, and I thought, Uh-oh, that"s the end of it, but that very same night Guidry lost, too, for the first time-I was watching on TV-so we were still the same. Well, I guess you know he finished up the year with a 253 record, and was the Cy Young winner and all, and I ended at 252. So you could say we both had pretty good years. That affinity began."

Cerutti said all this a little offhandedly-with a trace of college-cool irony, perhaps-but his face was alight with humor and good cheer.

"So do you want to know my dream now?" he went on. "My dream is that first I make this club some day, and then I end up pitching a game against Ron Guidry. It"s a big, big game-a Sat.u.r.day afternoon at the Stadium, one of those big crowds, with a lot riding on it-and I beat him, 10. It could just happen."

"I know," I said.

"Keep watching," he said.

"I"ll be there," I said.

Making the Blue Jays took a little longer than Cerutti had expected, but when he was called up from Syracuse in the spring of 1986, it was noticed that he had his stuff together at last; he went 94 for the season, with a shutout along the way, and took up his place in the Toronto starting rotation. I was happy about the promotion (I had renewed acquaintance with him briefly a couple of times in the interim, mostly in Florida), and in June this summer I watched him work a game against the Yankees in New York one evening-watched him over the tube, I mean. It was a significant game for both clubs, since the Blue Jays were a half game up on the Yankees at the top of the American League East. There I was, with my dinner and a drink before me and with John Cerutti, big as life, up there on the screen, when several rusty synapses clicked on at last. "My G.o.d!" I cried. "It"s Guidry, too. It"s happened."

I had blown our date, but Cerutti kept his, all right, beating the Yankees by 72, it turned out, to solidify his teams"s hold on first place. Not Cerutti"s plan exactly, but close enough. I considered rushing up to the stadium to catch the later innings, but I didn"t. I got there early the next evening, however, and at batting practice a couple of writer friends said, "You see John Cerutti? He was looking for you last night."

He came in from the field at last-he had been doing his sprints out there-and found me in the dugout. "Hey," he said cheerfully. "Where were you?"

"I blew it," I said. "I"m sorry, John-I stood you up. I feel bad about it. Only you said it would be a Sat.u.r.day."

"Well, I looked for you," he said. "Everyone else was here. I heard a couple of days ago that it might be me and the Gator, so I called my mom and she came down for it. In the end, I had to leave sixteen tickets for people from home. They knew how long I"d been waiting. It was all just the way I"d dreamed about it. In the first couple of innings, I kept thinking, Here I am, with my spikes on the same pitching rubber where Ron Guidry"s spikes were a minute ago. It was a thrill."

"I know-I saw it at home," I said miserably. "There"s no excuse, only well, you know...I didn"t believe it. Life isn"t like this."

"I know," he said. "But this is different."

"This is baseball, you mean."

"That"s right," he said. "In baseball-well, stuff can happen.

*Quite right, and the job, it turned out, was managing the Orioles. Earl took up the reins again in midseason of 1985, and helped steer his old club to a second-place finish. The next year, however, everything went sour-most of all, the pitching-as the team slipped into the cellar of the American League East, and when it was over Earl stepped down for good. In retrospect, I think I should have known that the first retirement wouldn"t work. Earlier in 1982, I recall, I asked him in a casual sort of way if he was truly ready to leave-and in particular if he"d be able to stick to his promise to stay out of baseball altogether. Wasn"t it possible that he"d end up coaching a college team or even a high-school team somewhere, the way so many other retired skippers had done? "I hate kids and I hate f.u.c.king kid baseball!" he barked, startling us both into laughter. He wanted the real thing, nothing less.

In the Fire.

- Winter 1984.

CONSIDER THE CATCHER. BULKY, thought-burdened, unclean, he retrieves his cap and mask from the ground (where he has flung them, moments ago, in mid-crisis) and moves slowly again to his workplace. He whacks the cap against his leg, producing a puff of dust, and settles it in place, its bill astern, with an oddly feminine gesture and then, reversing the movement, pulls on the mask and firms it with a soldierly downward tug. Armored, he sinks into his squat, punches his mitt, and becomes wary, balanced, and ominous; his bare right hand rests casually on his thigh while he regards, through the portcullis, the field and deployed fielders, the batter, the base runner, his pitcher, and the state of the world, which he now, for a waiting instant, holds in sway. The hand dips between his thighs, semaphoring a plan, and all of us-players and umpires and we in the stands-lean imperceptibly closer, zoom-lensing to a focus, as the pitcher begins his motion and the catcher half rises and puts up his thick little target, tensing himself to deal with whatever comes next, to end what he has begun. These motions-or most of them, anyway-are repeated a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty times by each of the catchers in the course of a single game, and are the most familiar and the least noticed gestures in the myriad patterns of baseball. The catcher has more equipment and more attributes than players at the other positions. He must be large, brave, intelligent, alert, stolid, foresighted, resilient, fatherly, quick, efficient, intuitive, and impregnable. These scoutmaster traits are counterbalanced, however, by one additional entry-catching"s bottom line. Most of all, the catcher is invisible. He does more things and (except for the batter) more difficult things than anyone else on the field, yet our eyes and our full attention rest upon him only at the moment when he must stand alone, upright and unmoving, on the third-base side of home and prepare to deal simultaneously with the urgently flung or relayed incoming peg and the onthundering base runner-to handle the one with delicate precision and then, at once, the other violently and stubbornly, at whatever risk to himself. But that big play at home is relatively rare. Sometimes three or four games go by without its ever coming up, or coming to completion: the whole thing, the street accident-the slide and the catch, the crash and the tag and the flying bodies, with the peering ump holding back his signal until he determines that the ball has been held or knocked loose there in the dust, and then the wordless exchanged glances ("That all you got?"..."You think that hurt, man?") between the slowly arising survivors. Even when the catcher has a play on the foul fly-whipping around from the plate and staring up until he locates the ball and then, with the mask flipped carefully behind him, out of harm"s way, following its ampersand rise and fall and poising himself for that crazy last little swerve-our eyes inevitably go to the ball at the final instant and thus mostly miss catch and catcher.

But this slight is as nothing compared to the anonymity we have carelessly given to our receiver in the other, and far more lengthy, interludes of the game. Because he faces outward-I think: none of this seems certain-and because all our antic.i.p.ation of the events to come (in this most antic.i.p.atory of sports) centers on the wide green-sward before us and on its swift, distant defenders, our awareness of the catcher is glancing and distracted; it is as if he were another spectator, bent low in order not to spoil our view, and although at times he, too, must cover ground quickly, he is more often waiting and seemingly out of it, like the rest of us. We fear or dote upon the batter, depending on which side is up; we laugh at pitchers a little, because of their contortions, but gasp at their speed and stuff; we think of infielders as kids or terriers, and outfielders are gazelles or bombardiers or demiG.o.ds; but catchers are not so easy to place in our imagination. Without quite intending it, we have probably always patronized them a little. How many of us, I wonder, have entirely forgotten "the tools of ignorance," that old sports-page epithet for the catcher"s impedimenta (it was coined in the nineteen-twenties by Muddy Ruel, a catcher with the Senators, who practiced law in the off-season). And think for a moment of the way the umpire watches the catcher as he goes about his housekeeping there behind the

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