The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 20

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He went on like this, going over the play again and again for different groups of reporters and camera crews that surrounded him in succession, but, if anything, he grew more excited and exalted by his memory of the play and the moment each time he described it. "Everyone enjoyed it-everyone in the park!" he exclaimed at one point. "In that situation, you don"t have time to think, you just react. You get in sort of a panic-you have to think of something. This is what you want from the game. It"s what you play for. This is the whole thing."

All sorts of praise showered down on the Tigers during and after the World Series, but the most tolling compliment I heard came during the late summer, when several players on three other clubs-the Blue Jays, the Twins, and the Red Sox-separately offered the opinion that the best group of games, the best single series, that their club had played during the year had been against Detroit. The Tigers had won most of those games, but the quality of their play, the combined pressure of their pitching and power and speed, and their day-to-day elan on the field had brought out the finest efforts of their rivals and raised the level of the games to the highest calibre. This is the same sort of spontaneously offered professional endors.e.m.e.nt that used to be reserved for the imperial Yankees back in the nineteen-fifties, when A.L. managers would sort out their pitching rotation weeks in advance in order to have their top performers ready for some forthcoming home set with the Bronx Bombers-and, when the games came, they would sell out the park and, most of the time, end up losers. Nowadays, the only evaluation of supremacy in the sport that goes entirely unchallenged is the No. 1 rating given to the Tigers" up-the-middle core: catcher Lance Parrish, second baseman Lou Whitaker, shortstop Alan Trammell, and center fielder Chet Lemon. The quartet is currently without a peer or a close rival, and is now being seriously compared with the Dodgers" early-fifties middle line of Campanella, Robinson, Reese, and Snider. The star qualities of the Detroit four-Parrish"s power (he holds the all-time A.L. record at the position with thirty-two homers in 1982) and deadly, quick-release arm; Whitaker"s ball-bearing smoothness afield and remarkable hand-speed at bat; Trammell"s all-around skill and his consummate calm (coming after Cal Ripken and Robin Yount, he is the third marvellous shortstop in a row to play for the American League in the World Series); and Lemon"s range and speed and pa.s.sion for the game (he is the only outfielder I can recall who actually works on his defense during batting practice)-suggest that their club may not be easily susceptible to the kind of falling off that has afflicted other recent champions after they"ve won. I also find it significant that the Tigers did so well in a season when many of their regulars (Parrish, Whitaker, Trammell, Evans, Larry Hemdon) had poorer records at the plate than they had in 1983. The prime pickup for the team this year, aside from Kirk Gibson"s coming of age out in right field, was in pitching, and most of that, of course, followed upon the acquisition of Willie Hernandez. This year"s Tigers led their league both in runs scored and in fewest runs allowed: a killing balance. Their fifteen-game winning margin was achieved in the only powerful division in either league, and, as Sparky Anderson kept saying even before the Series began, that was the true championship test.

The Tigers had an impatience to win, as we saw all through this Series. Their first two batters, Whitaker and Trammell, got on base in the very first inning nine times in under ten leadoff at-bats over the five games, and scored six runs. The Tigers, as I have said, scored first in every game, and they outscored the Padres 134 over the first and second innings. The corps of San Diego starting pitchers, to be sure, did not distinguish itself in any way, and even in Game Two, which the Padres eventually won, the first three Tiger hitters (Gibson was up third) ripped singles off Ed Whitson on his first three pitches of the day; after the game, the Padre catcher, Terry Kennedy, said that he"d contemplated calling a pitchout on the next delivery, just so he could handle the ball. Once aboard, the Tiger base runners yearned to be farther along. The most significant play of the first game, in the opinion of Tom Lasorda (on hand as a columnist for USA Today), was Kirk Gibson"s unsuccessful steal of second in the fifth inning-a plain message about the Tigers" battle plan, which was to run, rather than to play it safe and wait for their power to bring people home. Many clubs seem to think that they lack the personnel to make this option available, but hit-and-run and taking an extra base is mostly a state of mind, implanted (or cautiously suppressed) by the manager. The Tiger skipper, Sparky Anderson, is a man of zeal, and his teams at their best give their opponents the impression that they are about to be buried in a game-as, indeed, they often are. And this year-let"s face it-Sparky had the horses. Kirk Gibson, to name one horse, is a slugger by any measurement, but he is also the fastest man on the Tiger roster. The other prime indicator in Game One (in the opinion of this bystander) was an ugly little two-base error by the young Padre left fielder, Carmelo Martinez, in the fourth inning-a misjudgment that seemed to paralyze him, afield and at bat, for the rest of the week, thus adding to the burdens of the Padres, who had already lost another starting outfielder, Kevin McReynolds, because of an injury.

The Padres" comeback win in Game Two was made possible by some startling relief pitching by a young right-hander, Andy Hawkins, and a young left-hander (and terrific screwballer), Craig Lefferts, who between them m.u.f.fled the Tiger offense over the last eight and one-third innings. The winning runs came in on a three-run homer by their raffish and exuberant veteran designated hitter, Kurt Bevacqua, who did pirouettes and threw kisses to the crowd as he rounded the bases. All this was vastly appreciated by the cacophonous, Wave-running local mult.i.tudes-far and away the loudest baseball audience I have ever encountered. Some aspects of the San Diego persona elude me-I am thinking of the persistent, semi-weepy references to the team"s late owner, Ray Kroc, the millionaire McDonald"s-hamburger man, in the local journals and news shows, where he was depicted as being almost visibly in attendance at the revels-but I took pleasure in the game and its result. Most of all, I admired the top two men in the Padre order, second baseman Alan Wiggins and right fielder Tony Gwynn, who for a time almost rivalled the Whitaker-Trammell wizardry at the plate. Wiggins, who is a switch hitter, is skinny and quick, and a master of the push bunt-the exquisite little offensive tap that must be rolled just to the pitcher"s left and past him, so that the play (no play at all, usually) can be made only by the inrushing first baseman. He is a useful foil for Gwynn, who sees an inordinate number of fastb.a.l.l.s from pitchers who don"t want Wiggins to steal second, and thrives on them; his .351 led the National League this year, but it was .413 when Wiggins was on base. Gwynn is chunky and aggressive, and mobile in the batting box: a left-handed Bill Madlock up there-a pistol.

We repaired to Tiger Stadium for Game Three, the unenthralling contest in which the Padres" pitchers almost walked the ball boys along with everyone else; no explanation for it, nothing to be said. It was 52, in the end, with twenty-four base runners left aboard by the two clubs. Game Four, on Sat.u.r.day, was pretty well over by the third inning, by which time Alan Trammell had hit two home runs into the left-field stands against Eric Show-one downstairs, one upstairs-each of them with Whitaker aboard. The Detroit starter was Morris (back from his victory in the opener), who threw first-cla.s.s fastb.a.l.l.s and down-breaking split-fingered semi-fastb.a.l.l.s, almost all of them strikes; somebody keeping count declared in the eighth that he had delivered one ball in his previous twenty-one pitches. He won 42, cruising.

Morris, who has won a hundred and three games for the Tigers over the past six summers (only the Phillies" Steve Carlton, with a hundred and six, has more), is an exceptional athlete and a violent compet.i.tor who would succeed, no doubt, with any club, but Roger Craig has had a part in his making. Craig, the Detroit pitching coach, is the Leonardo da Vinci of the split-fingered fastball, which he claims to have invented at his own California baseball school a few years back, when he was instructing teen-agers and was looking for a variant pitch that would not damage their arms. The pitch is not the old forkball, which is held more deeply between forefinger and middle finger, and which, being spinless, behaves a good deal like the knuckler; this delivery arrives more quickly, looking very much like a fastball until its late little pause and duck, which result in handfuls of lovely four-hop ground b.a.l.l.s. Craig has taught the pitch to anyone on the Tiger club who was interested, including the catcher-third baseman Marty Castillo, who had such success with it on the sidelines that he had sudden wild hopes of becoming a pitcher as well. Craig"s prime pupil is probably Milt Wilc.o.x, a veteran righty starter with fourteen years in the bigs; on Craig"s advice, he subst.i.tuted the s.-f.fb. for his rather shopworn slider this year and, despite some chronic long-term aches and frays in his arm and shoulder, came up with a 178 summer-by far the best of his career. Craig, by the way, calls the Tiger pitchers" pitchouts and pickoff moves from the bench-not always on pure hunch. Late in the final game, when the Padres had a pinch-runner, Luis Salazar, on first, Craig, who had been eying the Padre dugout from across the field, suddenly announced, "Salazar is going and we"ve got his a.s.s." So he was and so they did: he was picked off on the next pitch.

Like most coaches, Roger Craig has been around. He coached for the Padres, and moved up to be their manager in 1978 and "79; before that, he had managed and coached in the minors. Early Mets m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts will remember him as a tall, extremely patient mound stalwart who lost twenty-two games for the good guys in 1963-an improvement over 1962, when he lost twenty-four. Before that, to be sure, he was a successful starter with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He is an engaging, lanky North Carolinian, with a sizable nose and a pleasing resemblance to the late Slim Summerville. Before one of the games, he was telling some of us about his first look at the major leagues, back in July 1955, when he and another rookie pitcher, Don Bessent, were suddenly called up to join the Dodgers. "I was with our Montreal club on a road trip down in Havana, where I was supposed to pitch on a Sunday against the Havana Sugar Kings," he said, "but my manager, Greg Mulleavy, called me in and said no, I was pitching against the Reds on Sunday, in Ebbets Field. I called my wife collect, and she asked what the h.e.l.l was I doing calling long-distance all that way, and I said, "I"m goin" to the big leagues." Well, Bessent won his game and I won mine-I pitched a three-hitter, and it was the first major-league game I"d ever seen-and when it was over Walter Alston told me I"d better fly back to Montreal and get my wife, since I was a major-league pitcher now. I didn"t have but a dollar on me, and I had to borrow the money. Jackie Robinson, he drove me to the airport. I"ll never forget that."

Tiger Stadium, as the end drew near, was roiling and pleasure-mad. It didn"t quite come up to San Diego for pure noise, but Detroit fans certainly know how to express themselves. Over the summer, the turned-on Tiger-made throngs evolved simultaneous clockwise and counter-clockwise Waves in the upper and lower decks, which then somehow reversed themselves. Sometimes there came a funny, slow-motion Wave in the center-field bleachers (always a place of humor and invention this summer), which would be succeeded by a right-to-left sprint Wave that could circle the stadium (I clocked it) in twenty-seven seconds flat. There was also the foolish, comical business of the two bleacher sectors" yelling a beer commercial back and forth ("tastes great!" from one side, and then "less filling!" from the other) while brandishing ringers and programs at each other. Other worked-up routines involved rotating hands and jingling car keys-G.o.d knows how they started, or why-and, of course, banner variations on this summer"s inescapable "bless you boys" campaign slogan, which, I believe, was born on WDIV, the local TV channel, no comma and all. Tiger Stadium is a steep-sided, squared-off city enclosure, whose boxy dimensions, like those of many ballparks back then, were dictated by the cross streets and avenues that hem it in. Downtown stadiums like this (Comiskey Park, in Chicago, is the other surviving relic) seem to hold and intensify the sounds and hopes and intimate oneness of their crowds, and when you"re inside, watching your team (in its old brilliant home whites, with the same famous, old-timey gothic initial) violently at play, it"s possible to wonder for a moment which decade you are in and which wonderful, hero-strewn lineup is on view down there, in the instant of its pa.s.sing from action to history. Just above my vertiginous press-row perch, high in the park, I could see the backward "MUIDATS REGIT" sign on the roof, with each of its tall letters illuminated in blue neon, and for another odd instant I felt as if I were in one of those rooftop "LETOH" chase scenes in a black-and-white gangster movie, with the watching crowds breathless below.

All through the playoffs and all through the Series so far, Sparky Anderson had kept telling us that we hadn"t really seen the Tigers yet-the Tigers doing it all: the hitting and the power and speed all together in one game, the Tigers at their best-but in Game Five that happened at last. The obligatory first-inning explosion (against Mark Thurmond this time) was for three runs, with the first two sailing home, on surges of noise, on Kirk Gibson"s first-pitch homer into the second deck. The third was scored because Parrish, up next, singled and then stole second, and came in on a single. A bit later, there was a double steal. The Padres, it will be recalled, obdurately tied things up again in the fourth, but Gibson, back on first base after a single in the fifth, tagged up and thundered down to second after a deep fly to left field-a play one sees very rarely indeed-and when he scored, a moment or two later, on a very short sacrifice fly, the Tigers went ahead for the winter.

The rest of it probably didn"t matter, but it was nearly pure pleasure. Aurelio Lopez, the other famous and stubborn Detroit reliever, worked some quick innings, sometimes seeming to dismiss a San Diego batter with a blur of slicing strokes, like a j.a.panese sushi chef (when he and the Padres" Craig Lefferts were in the game over the same stretch, we had a marvellous a.s.sortment of tough, hard pitching stuff on display); and Garvey and Templeton pulled off a dazzling three-six double play for the other guys, with Tempy making the tag on Marty Castillo"s fingertips down at second. Lance Parrish came up in the seventh, and in came Goose Gossage for the Padres (the loudspeakers played the "Ghostbusters" theme full blast, with the fifty-one-thousand-voice home-town choir roaring out "GOOSE-BUSTERS!" in the right places), and Lance busted the Goose, smacking a line drive into the lower left-field pavilion on the second pitch, for a two-run lead, and I think it was about then that I spotted a little parade of stadium venders, in their red-striped jackets, snake-dancing down an upper-deck aisle with their boxes held up over their heads.

The party still wasn"t over, though, for the Tigers put runners on second and third in the eighth, with the discouraged Padres" mistakes helping a bit now, and there was a mound conference about the open base, at which Gossage somehow persuaded d.i.c.k Williams to let him pitch to the waiting and wildly hopeful Gibson. I couldn"t believe it, and neither could Sparky Anderson, in the dugout, who flashed a little one-hand-up five-dollar bet to Gibson, in the on-deck circle, that Gossage would never pitch to him-to which Gibson responded with all ten fingers: Ten bucks he will, and I"m going to hit it out. And so he did, on the second pitch-a heater down the middle and then, very quickly, up into the middle rows of Topside Section 436. Gibson circled the bases, rejoicing as he went, and came home with some very nice totals for the day: two homers, three runs, five runs batted in, ten bucks, and one World Championship. The score at the end was 84.

Kirk Gibson was an All-American flanker back at Michigan State, and he chose a career in baseball, as against one with the National Football League, almost at the last moment. Baseball hasn"t been easy tor him. He played in the minors for two years and then put in the better part of three seasons with the Tigers before he became a regular; a year ago, he went through a tortured .227 season, in which he raged at his coaches and his manager and the local writers and (most of all, of course) at himself. This year, he got it together, and then some; there are many baseball people who think he could be the next Mickey Mantle. He is twenty-seven years old, with a thick neck and enormous shoulders, but when you see him up close-in the middle of a boisterous clubhouse party, say, with his blond hair soaked with champagne, and his pale, darting eyes alight with triumph-your first, startled thought is: Look how young he is! Why, he"s just a kid-it"s all just beginning for him. Quite a few of the Detroit players look like Gibson; tall and aggressively athletic, with little gunslinger mustaches and an air of great, insouciant confidence. The Tigers are of different ages and temperaments and degrees of experience, but there is a sense about them-I felt it all summer-that they are just beginning. Next year will be different-it always is-and, as Sparky Anderson has said, it will be much, much harder, but still...If baseball wants a dynasty, why not start here?**

*I almost walked out there to pay my respects to Veeck, a favorite old friend of mine, but then I decided that I didn"t want to add to the distracting crush of admirers around him. So many reporters wanted to interview him during the playoffs that he was forced to set up a schedule of incoming telephone interviews at his house; one writer told me he had got his story at seven-twenty in the morning. Bill Veeck died fifteen months later, but I treasure this distant last glimpse of him at home in his favorite old ballpark and relishing a game. Baseball, he always said, should be savored.

**Why not, indeed? But the Tigers finished third in the American League East in 1985 and again in 1986, fifteen and eight and a half games out; in 1987, they won their division on the very last day of the regular season but then suffered an unexpected elimination in the championship playoffs at the hands of the Minnesota Twins, who went on to beat the Cardinals in the World Series as well. Sparky"s Muhammad Ali, an imperial baseball power for our times, has yet to step forward, and each autumn we writers and experts fall victim to the wishful delusion that the skills and vivid demeanor of this year"s World Series winner will prevail in the coming season, when in truth the fixed factor in our game just now is that champions do not repeat.

Taking Infield

- Spring 1985 BILL RIGNEY (FORMER INFIELDER, New York Giants; former manager, Giants, Angels, Twins): "Sometimes you should remind yourself that of all the things we have in this game-hits and runs and stolen bases and home runs-the thing we have the most of is outs. So it"s important to be able to catch the ball out there and then to know what to do with it. You can"t give a major-league team four outs in an inning and expect to win."

Frank White (second baseman, Kansas City Royals): "I don"t notice that anybody thinks about defense a lot-not the fans, not all the managers, not even the front office. If they find some infielder who can hit, they"re more likely to go with that kind of player than stay with one who can field and not hit much. The theory is that you can always shake another defensive infielder out of the trees when you want one. I don"t believe it. Baseball is offense-minded because the fans like that. Defense isn"t discussed unless your club is going good and it"s close to World Series time."

Clete Boyer (coach, Oakland A"s; former third baseman, Athletics, Yankees, Braves): "First bas.e.m.e.n have a lot more to think about than third bas.e.m.e.n. The shortstop-I don"t know what"s the hardest play for him. They"re all hard, I guess. There"s not much of a problem for him on the double play, because the whole situation"s right in front of him, but the second baseman-he knows he"s got to turn that thing, and the guy"s breathing down his neck. You can get your legs torn up. More often than not, you see the second baseman turn it when he didn"t have a chance, really. The judgment of infielders is something."

Keith Hernandez (first baseman, New York Mets): "There"s a small percentage of left-handed batters today who are real pull hitters. There"s an even smaller number of right-handed hitters who can hit the ball away and up the line. I play away from the bag, and that lets our second baseman play more up the middle man what"s done on most clubs. I"ve got enough range so that I can be very aggressive about going for anything in the hole."

Dave Conception (shortstop, Cincinnati Reds): "I think being able to play the infield, especially playing shortstop, is something you"re born with. You can"t learn it-you have to have that ability from the beginning."

No, we fans will never quite learn this game, but there are rewards in trying. We can"t step up to bat or take infield or get to play, ever, but we can look and listen and, most of all, try to make ourselves notice what we"ve been watching all along. Spring is the best time for this, before we get involved in scores and standings, or are distracted by hope. Players and coaches and managers are more willing to reflect on their profession when you approach them in the preseason: bring a notebook and a good No. 10 sunscreen-mornings and afternoons were a white blaze in Florida and Arizona this year-and, with luck, you can improve yourself in the happiest fashion, which is to learn something you thought you already knew. This March, as the names of the deponents above suggest, I tried to sharpen up my infielding, and within days I felt more alert to all the different ways the ball is picked up and got rid of in the quicker instants of the pastime. Once again, I discovered how much more difficult baseball is than I had imagined. Although these seminars seemed less exacting than those I encountered in a recent survey course in catching, I soon understood that this was because infielding is a fine art, not a science-an aesthetic to be thrillingly glimpsed but, as Dave Concepcion suggested, never quite understood. The conventional wisdom about spring training is that it doesn"t mean anything (it is never mentioned in the sporting press after the bell rings), but its languid, noncombative pace suits me very well, I find, not only for the pursuit of some special baseball discipline but because it provides me and the other early fans with a procession of trifling moments and glimpses and connections that feed our intuition about players and teams and skills, and so keep us in the game.

I began my infield tutorials on the very first day of my trip, and I tried to keep at them every day, waylaying pract.i.tioners or infield coaches or managers who came my way, and asking them what was hard or easy or unappreciated about their work in the field. I happily took whoever came along-some veterans, some journeymen, a few famous performers, some newcomers. All of them were established professionals. They didn"t always agree with one another, of course, and I quickly realized that I lacked the expertise to weigh or evaluate their responses, even if I had wanted to. There is no right way to pick up a one-bounce rocket at third base, or to charge a soft hopper at second and make a whirling flip to the shortstop as he crosses the bag off to your right, and many of the men I talked to said that they themselves weren"t always quite clear how they made the hard plays. The personalities of the different infielders-thoughtful, impatient, ironic, exuberant-seemed a very important part of their style of play, as they described it, and the number and variety of the answers I gathered left me with a flickering, videolike impression of the ways infielders do their work, rather than with any freeze-frame rules or cert.i.tudes. "How do you do what you do out there?" I kept asking, and the answer was mostly, "Any way I can."

Jerry Remy, who has put in ten years at second base with the Angels and the Red Sox, told me that positioning himself in the field before every pitch required him to pick up the catcher"s signal to the pitcher about the forthcoming delivery, to which he added his acc.u.mulated knowledge and hunches about the abilities and habits of the batter, and of the base runner (if any). Most of all, though, he had to know his pitcher. "With Bob Stanley pitching, I wouldn"t play a dead-pull left-handed hitter the way I would if it was Roger Clemens pitching, let"s say, because n.o.body pulls Stanley. Stanley is easy. He doesn"t walk anybody, and you get almost all ground b.a.l.l.s, because of that sinker. I played behind Nolan Ryan a couple of years, and you could throw all that stuff out the window, because the batters were just trying to make contact. There were high counts and fouls and walks and-well, it wore you out. Then, if you"ve got a real quick base runner on first-a Rickey Henderson, say-it makes a tremendous difference in the way the whole infield plays. On bunt situations then, I"ve got to be cheating toward second base all the time. If the runner fakes a steal and you make one little move toward second to cover, you can be dead: the ball"s. .h.i.t by you. If he"s on second, you got to be keeping him close, and that means you might miss anything hit off on the first-base side. A runner doesn"t even need a whole lot of speed to make that work. A team like the Tigers doesn"t have all that much speed, but they think aggressively on the bases, and that changes the way you have to play them."

Remy, who is thirty-two, has a narrow face, a small mustache, and a contained, street-smart way of talking. I was surprised and then touched by his willingness to talk about his work at all, for it had been announced only the day before that he was probably finished as a second baseman. Once a wonderfully quick and spirited infielder, he has played with increasing difficulty over the past six seasons, as a result of an accident in July 1979, when he caught his spikes while sliding into home plate at Yankee Stadium. Five operations on his left knee have failed to relieve the intense pain he feels whenever he attempts the twisting pivot at second base in the middle of a double play, and now he was trying to hang on with the club as a pinch-hitter. I suggested to Jerry that he might not want to talk to me just then, in view of the news, but he smiled and made a dismissing gesture. "It doesn"t hurt to talk," he said. (Just before the season opened, the Red Sox, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g their roster to the obligatory twenty-five players, placed him on the twenty-one-day disabled list-a message that the club had decided that it couldn"t afford to keep him on only as a pinch-hitter. He took the news in good part-there were no hard feelings, he told me by telephone-and he and Dr. Arthur Pappas, the Red Sox physician, have just decided that one more arthroscopic procedure, the sixth and final surgical tinkering, might possibly relieve his pain. No major surgery would be attempted. "I want this because it will settle things once and for all," Remy said. "I didn"t like the idea of just being a pinch-hitter-not playing the infield at all. This way, I can get better and be a real player again, or else that"s it-it"s over and I"ll know it, and I"ll go on to the next thing. So it"s all right.") Remy said that the most difficult play for him at second base had always been the one on a ball hit off to his left, with a base runner on first, which meant that he had to turn completely around, spinning three hundred degrees or so and making the throw back to second with the same motion. We were sitting side by side on a railroad-tie embankment next to the Red Sox batting cages, and as Remy described this he made a little half-turn in ill.u.s.tration, with his arms reaching to his left for the invisible ball; the gesture of his upper body was like a snapshot, and I had a sudden flash of Remy in the field again, making the play.

"If that ball"s. .h.i.t at all soft, you"re probably not going to make the play," he went on. "But even if you think you"ve got a chance, you"ll tend to rush your throw, and the ball can fly all over the place. You want to try to take the extra second to make that throw. Turning the double play can be real tough, of course. I always try to hit the bag with my left foot when I"m taking the throw. Then I can either back off or go across or go behind the bag, depending on the situation. The hardest D.P. is probably going to come on the throw over to you from third base, because the runner"s going to be a little closer. You end up making all different kinds of pivots and throws, depending on who"s giving you the ball. When Carney Lansford played here, his ball from third was always the same, and you could count on getting off your own same throw across to first. A guy like Wade Boggs, now, his throw tends to sink. If the man at third doesn"t have such good control, or if it"s a tough play of some kind for him, I"ll try to straddle the bag, if I can get there in time, so"s to be more ready. Then when I do go to first-well, I guess I"ve made every kind of throw there is."

I asked where such things could be learned and perfected, and Remy said that most of his habits afield had been instilled years ago, when he was a young infielder coming up in the Angels system and had worked with a coach named Bob Clear. "I"ve used the same moves ever since, I guess," he said. "Things like going over to the bag a little bit bent, so you can handle the ball better and get it off quicker. And if you"re there a little early, even staying behind the base, so if there"s a wild throw you"re not stretched out by being up on top of the bag. Adjust to the ball, adjust to the base runner. If you ask me after the game how I made the play, I probably can"t tell you. If I"ve got Don Baylor comin" in on me, I"m sure not thinking about how it"s done. But at least in certain situations-say, first and third, with less than two outs-you know they"ll be coming after you. A select few will take a crack at you every time. Baylor"s probably the best at it-or he was when he could run better. Hal McRae, of course. George Brett. Hrbek does it well. Winfield, because he"s so d.a.m.n big-he can slide five feet out of the baseline and still take you down. Big guys with speed are what you watch for. With all that going on, I don"t think there"s anybody playing second base who can say he"s real technical about it. There"s no time for that-you just get it done. You do it in infield practice and then in games, but you don"t work on it, if you see what I mean. You take extra batting practice all the time, but in my whole career I never practiced taking extra double plays."

Marty Barrett, who replaced Remy at second for the Red Sox last year (and batted .303 in the process), mentioned most of the same runaway-truck base runners that Remy had listed for me, and threw in Reggie Jackson and Chet Lemon for good measure. "You have to have an idea about these guys and how they come at you," he told me. "But knowing the batters-knowing where to play them all, and being with the pitcher-is the main thing. You pick that up quicker than you"d think. I won"t have to make as many tough plays this year, because I"ll be positioning myself better. Of course, I was up with the Sox for most of "83, even though I didn"t get in a lot of games, and I really paid attention to where Jerry played everybody. Position, and all that-the pitchers, the batters-means everything for me, because I don"t have that much range. You look at a Frank White or a Lou Whitaker"-the Gold Glove second baseman with the World Champion Tigers-"and they basically stay within a three- or four-foot spot on the field. I really believe they can play a whole game just from there-they"re that quick-while I"ll be starting from over in the hole to way up the middle. I"m twenty to thirty feet different, depending on the batter."

Frank White, it turned out, had just about the same ideas as Barrett about positioning. "I think as you learn the players more, over the years, the great plays are going to come easier, because you"re in the right place and ready for the ball," he said to me. "When I first came up, I was making these super plays all over the place-wow! hey!-because I didn"t know where I was supposed to be. When I knew the hitters and knew the pitchers, that kind of slowed down. I"d learned where to play, I"m saying. Maybe I"m playing better now but getting noticed less." He laughed.

White is an engaging fellow-an intelligent, invariably cheerful star player, with a dazzling smile. He is thirty-four and has played second base for the Royals for more than eleven seasons, winning six consecutive Gold Gloves through the 1982 campaign; the honor (it is voted by each team"s players, coaches, and manager) went to Whitaker the last two years, but you can still get an argument in clubhouses around the league about which of the two is the better second baseman. White told me that there was less sudden body contact around his base now than when he came up. "The runners aren"t so bad now that they make them slide a little sooner," he said. "Before they changed the ruling, everything was a cross-body block. When we played the Yankees in the 1977 playoffs, Hal McRae took out Willie Randolph with a shot way over beyond the bag at second-you remember that [I did indeed]-and it was legal, because at that time base runners didn"t have to slide at all. They could just run right over you. The rules were changed after that, so at least they have to slide first now. Most of the times now when a guy gets taken out it"s on the first-and-second situation or a bases-loaded situation, where the man on first isn"t being held close, so he gets down at you in a hurry on an average-hit ball. I"ve only been hit bad twice, and it was in a bases-loaded situation both times. Once was by Doug DeCinces, back in "78, and I twisted my knee. And then I got hit by Dwight Evans once and landed on my shoulder and missed a couple of weeks."

Two damaging collisions in fifteen hundred-odd games: I expressed amazement.

"I"m awake out there," White said. "By the time I get to the base, I know if I"m going to get one or try for two. I never bail out. You only have to bail out if you haven"t made up your mind." He told me that a second baseman"s throw to first under these circ.u.mstances is often less than picture-perfect. Like all fielders, he tries to take the ball with his fingers across the seams when getting off a throw, because the ensuing spin makes the peg much more accurate. "You try to grab seams, but you don"t always have time for it," he said. "In most cases, your hand sort of goes there automatically. But on the D.P. sometimes I"m throwing over with three fingers, or even with the ball in the palm of my hand. The general idea is any way you can, and as quick as you can. That"s why you appreciate having a real big first baseman over there to throw to-a guy like Steve Balboni, here. It"s a comfort to your mind."

Dave Concepcion has been the Cincinnati Reds" short-stop ever since 1970. He played in four World Series and five league-championship playoffs in the nineteen-seventies-the glory days of the Big Red Machine-and he has won five Gold Gloves and has been tapped for nine All-Star Games. Nowadays, other shortstops-Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, Cal Ripken, Robin Yount (who has moved to left field this year for the Brewers, because of a shoulder problem), Tony Fernandez-are mentioned before he is in most press-box comparative-lit seminars, but none of them has played as well for as long as he has. (It is the opinion of a lot of front-office people, by the way, that there has rarely been an era in the game when there were as many remarkable athletes on view in the middle-infield positions as there are right now.) Concepcion, in any case, is approaching the end of his career. He had bone chips removed from the elbow of his throwing arm in 1980 and an operation on his left shoulder in 1983. He is thirty-six years old, and looks it-a rangy, narrow infielder (he is six-one), with bony shoulders and a careworn expression. He is a Venezuelan, and speaks with a slight accent. He seemed a bit reticent in talking about his position, but then so was I; perhaps we both felt that playing short is almost too difficult to be put into words.

"For me," he said at one point, "the hard play is always the ball that"s. .h.i.t easy and right at you. You don"t know if you should charge it or stay back. You"re on your heels, and sometimes you have to stop, so the ball can come to you. The hard ground ball, it comes with the bounces right there, and you can always play the right one-the one you have to. You see what I mean?"

I asked about the play in the hole-the difficult chance that sends the shortstop far to his right to grab the ball and simultaneously plant his right foot for the long, quick throw.

"It"s tough, because you got to stretch yourself to get to the ball and right away try to make that good throw. You got no time to get yourself set. Making the throw-that"s the main thing. Be quick and make a good throw."

Riverfront Stadium has AstroTurf, and for some years now Concepcion has been making his longer pegs over to first base-especially on plays from the hole-by bouncing the ball on the infield carpet. He does this only on artificial gra.s.s, where the bounce is true. The innovation seemed controversial at first, perhaps because it looked so much less pleasing and powerful than the full, airborne throw, but now a few other shortstops have taken it up; some players believe that a bounced throw actually picks up speed as it skips off the carpet. "I use it a lot of the time on AstroTurf now," Concepcion said. "I first saw that when Brooks Robinson did it at Riverfront in the World Series of 1970. He got a ball hit down the line way behind third and got rid at it, bang!"-he slapped his hands together-"like only he could do. It bounced, but Boog Powell dug it out, and they got the runner. I couldn"t hardly believe it. It was in the second game of that Series, I think. I don"t think Brooksie meant it-he had no chance, you know-but I thought about it that winter. I could still see the play. Then I had elbow trouble the next spring, so I began trying it-but on purpose, you know, to protect my arm. Our first baseman-it was Lee May; Perez was later-didn"t complain, and I kept on with it. On turf, it"s a good play. Brooks Robinson started it, but I registered the patent."

We discussed some other matters-grabbing seams, relaying the catcher"s signals to the third baseman, what it was like to play with Joe Morgan at second base all those years (it was great), why you should always get to the bag early if you"re making the throw from second on a double play (because you may throw low but you"ll never throw wide that way)-and then there was a pause. "Defense, it always meant a lot to me," he said unexpectedly, glancing at me to be sure I understood. "Batting gives you some great moments, but defense, it"s-Defense is a joy to me every day. I think fans like defense next best to the home runs. I really think that. A lot of guys can catch the ball and make the great play, but not a lot can throw the ball with control. Decent hands and a steady arm is what you want. You got that, you got it made."

Keith Hernandez is more outspoken and more intense than Concepcion-he exudes confidence and precision in conversation, just as he does on the field-but you hear the same pride in his work when he talks defense. "I can win a game with my glove just as easy as I can with my bat," he said to me. "The most difficult thing when you"re a young player and you"re trying to establish yourself is to learn to separate that part of it from the rest of your game. You get in a slump and you tend to take it with you out onto the field. Now when I"m going bad up at bat I make it a point to be good at what I"m doing on defense."

Hernandez, of course, is very good at what he"s doing at all levels of the game. He batted .311 for the Mets last year, and finished second to the Cubs" second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, in the postseason balloting for the league"s Most Valuable Player. I have hesitated to mention defensive statistics here, since there are so many variables (team pitching, gra.s.s and artificial playing surfaces, and so on), but the easiest way to convey Hernandez" exceptional range and mobility is to point out that he had one hundred and forty-two a.s.sists in 1984, while the nearest National League first baseman had fewer than a hundred. Hernandez committed eight errors last year; Steve Garvey, who plays first for the Padres, did not make an error all year, but he accounted for only eighty-seven a.s.sists.

Not quite believing such evidence, I once asked Hernandez" manager, Davey Johnson, how he appraised the man"s work. "That"s easy," Johnson said. "He"s the best I ever saw."

"I"ll make more plays than some, because I"m willing to go so far in the hole" is the way Hernandez explained it. "The hard play for me is when I have to throw overhand from the hole back to a pitcher who"s breaking for the bag. It"s like being a quarterback throwing to an end on a look-in pattern in football. I want to try to get the ball to him before he gets to the bag-about two steps before, if I can-so he can catch it and then look for the bag. The 3-6-3"-this is the pleasing play when the first baseman takes a grounder, wheels to the shortstop to retire a base runner going down to second, and gets back to his base in time to take the return throw to beat the batter-"used to be tough for me, but it"s not so bad now. About six years into my career, I suddenly realized-it just came to me-that there was no point in my waiting around to see if I"d made a good throw in that situation. If I"ve thrown it away, I"ve thrown it away. Now I throw the ball and then turn my back and run straight to the bag. You want to be there to take that throw back, because it"s the hardest thing in the world for the pitcher to get all the way over and make that catch."

I asked if any other first bas.e.m.e.n made the 3-6-3 that way.

"Not that I"ve noticed," he said.

What I understood in time-it just came to me-is that there is nothing defensive about Keith Hernandez" thinking about defense. "How many right-handed hitters can hit the ball up the line to right?" he asked me at one point, and then answered his question at once. "A few. Sandberg does it very well. Moreland does it. Maybe a couple of others. It"s funny, but almost n.o.body who bats left-handed in my league can really pull the ball down the line. If that"s true, there"s just no point in playing the line so close. In the late innings, you"re supposed to stay up next to the line if you"re defending a one-run lead, so you won"t let a ball get by you for extra bases. Everybody knows that-it"s almost a rule-so you see them all playing three feet from the line. But I"ll be six feet or more away from it, depending on the batter and the pitch, and that"s fine with Davey Johnson-we agree. If you ask most players and managers about it, they"ll say yes, of course, you get beat more on b.a.l.l.s. .h.i.t into the hole-it"s nine times out of ten, I think-but they don"t play it that way. It"s ridiculous."

Playing the infield requires a perpetually honed antic.i.p.ation, and if you make yourself watch for them you can almost always notice the little quirks and twitches that each player at an infield position uses to bring himself onto his toes at the instant the pitch is delivered, with his body poised in preparation for a ball suddenly smashed in his direction. (Frank White believes that this constantly repeated preliminary little hop, made thousands of times over a season, wears down infielders" knees and quadriceps muscles over the years, and may be even more damaging in the long run than playing on AstroTurf.) What you can"t pick up, for the most part, is the accompanying small dialogue of signals that constantly flies about this four-man perimeter a moment or two before that-the language of defense. As I have indicated, both the shortstop and the second baseman peer in at the catcher to pick up his sign to the pitcher about the next pitch-a sign that cannot be seen by the first or third baseman, of course. They-the middle pair, I mean-will lead or edge a bit to one side or the other in response, and if the pitch is to be a breaking ball, one or the other will also relay the message to the infielder at his corner-to the first baseman if there"s a left-handed hitter up, or to the third sacker if it"s a right-handed hitter. A word will do it: if Leon Durham, a left-handed swinger with the Cubs, is to see a breaking ball from Ron Darling on the next pitch, let"s say, Keith Hernandez will hear his second baseman, Wally Backman, say "Keith!" at the instant that Darling is at the top of his windup. It"s a trifle-perhaps only a mental knock-on-wood-and probably doesn"t help much, but it"s there if the first baseman or third baseman wants it. Some don"t want to know. Jerry Remy said that one of his Boston first sackers, George Scott, never wanted the signal; another, Carl Yastrzemski (he often played first in the latter stages of his career), did want it. There are other messages as well-notably the hand signal or glove flick or special glance between the shortstop and the second baseman with a base runner on first, which determines who is to cover second on the coming play. This, too, is a response to the catcher"s sign to the pitcher, for the man who covers will be the one less likely to have the next pitch hit to his side. A common semaph.o.r.e here is a quick grimace flashed by one man or the other to his partner behind his raised glove-a closed-mouth mime for "Me" or an open mouth for "You." It"s nothing much-kids might make up a code like this-but it can be needed thirty or forty times in a game, and it"s always done. The keystone pair must also understand which of them is to make the first try at a ball that is chopped over the pitcher"s head and short of second-a very hard chance that is usually taken by the shortstop, since his momentum is toward first base. But they must know. Frank White said that all this comes as second nature to him by now, but that sometimes the burden of so many repeated and altered fragments of intelligence-letting the shortstop know, letting the first baseman know, and sometimes relaying signals from the bench to the Royals outfielders about which direction to shade in a tough situation-can suddenly be too much. "I get a mental blowout now and then," he said. "I can"t handle it, and then I tell my coaches I"m going to beg off from that for a couple of days and let the shortstop be the main man. The mental strain is unbelievable sometimes."

Buddy Bell, the Texas Rangers" third baseman, doesn"t want to know the next pitch to the batter. "I gave up looking for signs on breaking b.a.l.l.s, because I found I was cheating too much," he told me. "I was counting on it, and I"d begun putting myself out of position. I"d rather just go on the situation and what I know about the batter." Then he added, "Besides, we"ve had a big turnover of pitchers on this club in the past few years." This took me a minute: Bell was saying that there weren"t many Ranger pitchers just now whom he trusted to put the ball where it was meant to go on the next pitch-to throw what the catcher had asked for.

Bill Rigney had already mentioned the same thing. Rig (he is sixty-six years old, but still has the eager gaze and lanky quickness of gesture of the born infielder) said that he had noticed a recent decline in strategic conversations between infielders and pitchers in hard situations-the moment when a shortstop or third baseman might step over to the mound in a jam and murmur, "Where do you want me? How are we going to come at this guy?" Rigney said, "I can remember times on the Giants when there were men on base and all, and I"d go in and ask Sal Maglie or Larry Jansen, and they"d say, "With this guy, play him in the hole, because the way I pitch him, that"s where he"s going to hit it." But I noticed with some other pitchers we had, they"d always say, "Play him straight away." That was because they didn"t know what the batter was going to do, or where the pitch would be. They had no idea."

Buddy Bell is the nonpareil third baseman in his league-perhaps in both leagues. He looks all wrong for an infielder-he"s six feet two, with powerful shoulders and a long upper body; with his blond hair and mild blue eyes, he reminds you of a Southern Cal football player. Actually, he grew up in Cincinnati, and is the son of the Reds" (and dawn-Mets") outfielder-slugger Gus Bell. Buddy Bell played third for seven years with the Indians and is now starting his seventh season with the Rangers at the same position. He"s thirty-three years old, and last year batted .315 and picked up his sixth consecutive Gold Glove. He has an outstanding arm, he is durable (he plays about a hundred and fifty games, year after year), and his manner is efficient, pleasantly brusque, and (you learn in conversation with him) ironic-essential attributes for a third baseman, it seems, if you stop and think about the position a little: they must deal with those bazooka shots that are lined past them or at them, and must also cope with the sneaky, skulking bunt down the line, baseball"s shiv in the ribs. When they fail, as they often must, they look terrible-flat on their bellies in the dirt behind the bag, or foolishly grabbing at the bunted ball in the gra.s.s...and missing it altogether.

"I play a deeper third than most," Bell said to me, "and that kind of takes the do-or-die away from the play on that hard-hit ball down the line. You can cover more ground if you"re back a little deeper and can still make the throw. Third bas.e.m.e.n need a rock-hard body-I hope we"re getting away from the rock-hard hands a little. No, you really need some kind of hands to play the position now. The infields aren"t as good as they used to be, and with the artificial turf now..." He winced and shook his head. "Defense is the most important part of the game. If you don"t believe that when you start out, you learn it pretty soon playing third. You let a ball go through, and it"s probably the ballgame. I"d say that ninety-five percent of the pitchers have serious trouble in a game if there"s been an error at third and a ball"s gone through that shouldn"t have. Most of "em sort of blow up after that. So you"re out there not only protecting yourself and your team but knowing that the pitcher is relying on you to do well. Dimensional ballplayers"-he meant the ones who can play all aspects of the game-"are easy to find, because there aren"t all that many of them."

I asked how he tried to defend against the obligatory-bunt situation-the strategic late-inning tangle that begins with base runners on first and second, no outs, and an unthreatening, bottom-of-the-order batter up at the plate.

"On that play-well, first, it depends on who the runner is coming down to third, and who the pitcher is," he said. "Then, if the ball"s bunted down toward me I try to draw an imaginary line up the infield between the pitcher"s mound and the third-base line, and anything that"s. .h.i.t to the right of it should be mine. Either way, I"ve got to call it-yell to the pitcher which one of us is going to make the play, or try to. But that"s a tough, tough chance. You have to make the decision, and if you don"t make it right you may not get the runner you want-you may not get anybody. I don"t mind the swinging bunt"-the sudden surprise tap, for a base hit-"so much, because it"s just a yes-or-no thing: you make the play or you don"t. There"s no think in it."

Rigney had said that there was more of an effort being made these days to defend against that late-inning must-bunt situation than there had been in his time, and he cited the Chinese-fire-drill set plays that send the first and third bas.e.m.e.n charging in on the squared-around bunter, with the second baseman dashing to cover first and the shortstop whirling over to race the front base runner down to third base.

Clete Boyer agreed. "Baseball is a lot of little things," he said. "You keep learning them and trying them out. There"s always something new."

Clete is forty-eight now and looks a little heavier than he was when he was playing third base for the Yankees and the Braves, back in the sixties-he put in sixteen years at the hot corner, in all-but it"s hard to think of him in anything but a baseball uniform. He and his brothers, Ken and Cloyd, make up one of baseball"s first families. (Ken, who died a couple of years ago, also played third base, of course, mostly for the Cardinals, and later managed the Cards, too; Cloyd, a pitcher, is now a coach with the Syracuse Chiefs.) Clete talks baseball almost stolidly, with a little Ozark legato in his husky voice-the family comes from western Missouri-but his face lights up wonderfully once he gets into it a little.

"There are those bunt situations you plan about, and all," he said to me one morning in Phoenix, "but I still think the hardest play at third is when you"ve got a man on second who can steal a base and a left-handed batter up at the plate who can bunt. You"ve got to play up front on the gra.s.s and you know what they"re thinkin". My great example for that kind of trouble is Aparicio and Nellie Fox"-Luis Aparicio, the Hall of Fame shortstop with the White Sox and the Orioles in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and his stellar Chicago second-base teammate, Nelson Fox. "They could work that just perfect. If there"s none out or one out, I"ve got to guess on each pitch if Luis is going to steal or if Nellie"s up there to bunt. If I think Luis is stealing and he breaks, I got to get back and cover third, and then if Fox bunts the ball it"s a base hit. If I break in two steps instead of one toward the plate, I can"t get back-it"s all over. Fans look at you playing back on the gra.s.s and grabbing that big line drive, but that play"s routine, really. The other part is where the game is played."

We went back to the must-bunt a bit, and after a while I suddenly realized that Clete had changed sides in the midst of the conversation. He was like a chess Grand Master expounding upon the Nimzowitsch Defense who had shifted over to the white pieces. "You can"t always protect against that bunt in the same way, you know," he said. "You can"t always charge, or stuff like that, because I can kill you once I see that. I think you might have your third baseman charge that bunt two or three times in a season, but not more, and that would depend on who you had running at second base. We"-he meant the Oakland A"s-"beat Cleveland three times in the last two years because they always charged their third baseman and first baseman. When that happens, I tell the batter either to take the pitch or else hit away. Forget the bunt, and if you swing don"t give me a little half-a.s.sed effort up there. Don"t fall into their trap. Mike Heath hit a ball that went three inches past Toby Harrah"s head one day, and we win the game. Last year, Tony Phillips. .h.i.t a little plinker up the middle for us, but their second baseman was goin" over to first to cover, and the shortstop is way down here by third, and n.o.body can get near the ball. We got five runs in the inning."

The school term is over, but I think we should call back our distinguished infield faculty for a few more pointers. I did not talk to these players and coaches in a group, of course, but the same subjects kept coming up. There was a great deal of talk about infield surfaces, for instance-gra.s.s versus artificial turf. (Six parks in the National League now have the chemical carpet, while six have gra.s.s; in the American League, there are four synthetic-turf diamonds and ten natural.) "If you got a turf field, you have to have middle infielders who can move-people who can cover a degree of ground very quickly," Frank White said. "I"ve played on turf all my career. It"s a cleaner game-no bad hops, no dust blowin" in your face, or stuff like that. Turf shows all your natural ability-your quickness, your leg strength, your range. Most of all, it tests your durability, because it does wear you down. You also find out that when you"re planting your foot to make the throw over to first you almost have to take an extra little jab-step on turf. It grabs your leg so quick you"ll lose your balance without that, and that"s hard on your legs, too. My biggest complaint about turf is the pounding you take."

Jerry Remy likes the better bounce on the carpet, too, but almost nothing else. Ground b.a.l.l.s. .h.i.t right at him are less of a strain on turf, he said (everyone said this), but the ball seems to pick up speed after the bounce. "I hold my glove a little looser playing on turf, because the ball can spin right out," he said. "I play back, of course-sometimes I"m so deep I wonder if I can ever get the ball over to first in time. But even then somebody will hit a little bouncer up the middle that goes right by you, and you think, My G.o.d, how did that go through? I like to hit on artificial gra.s.s, but I don"t like to field on it."

Bill Rigney told me that, as a group, the athletes playing the middle infield now were undoubtedly better than the ones who had played in his time, and that this was due in great part to the demands of artificial turf. "A few years back, a lot of clubs were just making do at short and second, but that"s impossible nowadays," he said. "If you think about it, you begin to notice that the teams who get to play in the Rose Bowl every year"-this is Rigneyese for playing in the World Series-"are the ones who can put an Ozzie Smith or a Cal Ripken out there. Yount and Frank White and Trammell and Sandberg and that little Whitaker-there"s a whole gang of them. I admire them-even though Mr. Ozzie has made so many kids coming up try to play one-handed, the way he does. But, you know, there"s been a price. That pretty play by a shortstop or a second baseman on a ball hit over second is just about gone. That was one of the nicest things in the game-you enjoyed it-but now almost anything that"s through the box is gone. It"s a base hit."

Steve Garvey, whom I saw for a few minutes before a Padres-Giants game in Arizona, told me that it was the shifting back and forth from one surface to another that took it out of your legs in time. "I"m fortunate that I"ve always played on gra.s.s at home, but you go out on the road and onto AstroTurf, and your legs suddenly get that pounding," he said. "Then you come back to gra.s.s again and your legs stretch out more, and on the second day you"ll have a lot of soreness, no matter how good condition you"re in. It"s like running on pavement and then on the beach." Wet AstroTurf is more slippery than gra.s.s, he added-or, rather, is slippery in a special way. Relays from the outfield that strike wet tuff become hockey pucks that can shoot right past the cutoff man.

White said that it seemed to take him three or four days of playing on a different surface, either gra.s.s or fake gra.s.s, before he was quite comfortable again. "What I hate," he said, "is being at home for a couple of weeks and then arriving at a gra.s.s-field park on the road, and there"s been rain there, or else there"s a ceremony before the game or something, so you don"t get any infield practice. I just wonder what I"m going to be able to do out there. It shakes you up."

Infields have a barbered look, and infielders compare notes about the "cut" of the various parks-the dimensions of the circular pattern of infield dirt, that is. Munic.i.p.al Stadium, in Cleveland, recently enlarged its cut; before that, Remy said, it was ridiculously small-almost like a Little League field. "n.o.body wants to be back on the gra.s.s, so that cut really limited your play," he said. "Anaheim has a big cut, which gives you much better range. I like that, but it"s kind of strange there, because everybody looks farther apart. It"s like you"re playing a different game."

Artificial infields used to be all the same-hard and quick-but now there are variations. The surface at the Metrodome, in Minneapolis, is called SuperTurf, which is softer and spongier than AstroTurf, and thus more forgiving to the infielders" legs, but the bounce is ridiculously high; an infield chop can sail ten feet over the first baseman"s head on the first ricochet. For all that, Remy said, he found the bounce there a trifle more consistent than it is on the AstroTurf at Toronto, for instance. Frank White told me he was looking forward to the brand-new turf at Royals Stadium, which has just been refinished with a softer, quick-drying carpet-AstroTurf-8 Drainthru-which is said to offer the closest resemblance to real gra.s.s that has yet emerged from the laboratories.

Yankee Stadium has real gra.s.s, of course, but Remy dislikes the hump-backed infield there. "The whole thing slopes away toward the outfield," he said. "It"s worst of all from the pitcher"s mound on down to the second baseman. Sometimes I get the feeling there that the batter is standing above me. You"ve got to stay real low on a ground ball, or else it can shoot under your glove. You even see that happen to Willie Randolph sometimes." Remy paused and then smiled a little. "Look," he went on, "don"t get me wrong about Yankee Stadium. I"d rather play there than anywhere, because of all it means. I love to play there."

Infields, whether gra.s.s or turf, are as interestingly various as the men who play on them. The gra.s.s infield at Jack Murphy Stadium, in San Diego, for instance, is famously unreliable, possibly because its groundskeepers are employees of the city"s Parks Department. Garvey told me that it played differently during each Padre home stand last year. "They never could seem to find the right composition," he said. "One time, you"d come home and find that the dirt was so firm that your cleats could hardly dig into it. The next time it would be low tide at the sh.o.r.e. They say it will be better this year, but we"ve heard that before."

Jerry Remy likes the Fenway Park infield, where the gra.s.s is thick and well watered; the bounce there is low but consistent. The dirt at Tiger Stadium is a little quicker than at his home field, he told me, but the gra.s.s is slow and kept high-an advantage from a defensive point of view but not much fun to hit on. American League players have complained for years about the infield at Arlington Stadium, the Rangers" home park, where the midsummer Texas sun bakes the dirt to a brick-hard finish, but Remy said it didn"t bother him much. "You just expect it to be fast, and it is," he said. "It"s like spring training-all spring training infields are hard. I think Oakland gives me more trouble than any of the other parks. The dark infield dirt there is OK for the first couple of innings, but for some reason it gets chopped up during the game-by the base runners and all-and by the sixth or seventh inning it"s like a plowed field. I always figured I was lucky if I finished a series there with nothing against me."

Interdependence was another persistent topic on my "Meet the Infield" show-a recognition that a brilliant pitching staff or an outstanding defensive infielder would in time add to the reputation of adjoining players on the team. "I"ve always thought it was that super Baltimore pitching staff that"s made Dauer such a good defensive second

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