The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 3

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To begin with, this was the first Series played between runaway orphans-the former Brooklyn Dodgers, who went west in 1958, vs. the former Washington Senators, who became the Twins in 1961. Both of them play before home crowds of less than ten years" loyalty. It should not be forgotten, however, that half the present twenty major-league clubs were born or have pulled up stakes since 1953, and that two of the rovers are changing homes again this year, which means that the Dodgers and the Twins are now among the more typical big-league teams, and that holdfast veterans like the Red Sox, the Cubs, the Pirates, and the Yankees are slipping into the minority. Attendance figures at all parks are memorized and whispered over with an almost rabbinical intensity by contemporary baseball executives, and the complex bond of loyalty, home-town pride, and critical favor that binds, or fails to bind, the man in the stands to the man at the plate has become the game"s leading mystery. Two ghosts haunted the 1965 Series-the Yankees and the Braves. The Braves became the first modern team to move its franchise, when they left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953. In the ensuing five years, they won two pennants, set a major-league single-season gate record, and regularly enjoyed attendance in excess of two million per year. This same Milwaukee team is now defunct; it has just moved to Atlanta, leaving behind a mixed residue of indifference, bitterness, and lawsuits. At the Series this fall, at least a dozen Eastern fans, sportswriters, and baseball men separately described to me an identical experience-a sudden doubt, a momentary shivery silence, that they had felt when their plane paused in Milwaukee before carrying them on to Minneapolis and the noisy, unquenchable joys of another Series. I, too, had been chilled by that same cold breath at the Milwaukee airport: Perhaps baseball was not, after all, immortal.

The ghost of the Yankees was even more perceptible at the opening games of the Series; you could almost hear the distant rattle of IRT trains above center field. The Yankees are not dead, of course-only their era is dead. The team collapsed and fell to the second division this year, and there is only the smallest reason to believe that it can substantially improve its performance in the seasons immediately ahead. This was only the third time in the past seventeen years that the Yankees had failed to appear in the Series, and the monstrous crash of this Ozymandian figure is still shaking the ground. For a generation, the team was the premier attraction of its league, drawing more fans on the road than at home and sustaining a good many clubs at the box office even while in the act of destroying them on the field. The dilapidation of the Yankees over the past four years can be seen not only in declining attendance at the Stadium (it has fallen off by 280,000 in that period) but also in the entire league"s loss of fans. American League attendance was down to 8,860,175 in 1965, a drop of over a million in four years; the National League gained more than two million spectators in the same span, and this year"s attendance of 13,576,521 set an all-time record. The disparity can be seen in other, even more painful comparisons. Those late-September dogfights in the National League recur, of course, because there are generally four or five powerful teams in contention; six different teams have won the NL pennant in the past eight years. The National League has won five of the last seven World Series, eight of the last dozen All-Star Games. This could be carried further, into an evaluation of the two leagues" individual players, but the point is already clear. The incomparable Yankees are gone, and their departure has at last permitted us to see the pitifully undermuscled condition of the other members of their family, whom they bullied over a period of decades into a condition of hostile but abject dependency. The 1965 World Series, even if it lacked the sense of moral drama that made the old autumn Yankee wars so exciting, at least began the essential and hopeful process of rebalancing the leagues.

The above, I must admit, is a most ungenerous way of introducing the Minnesota Twins, but politeness cannot cover the curious fact that this team, which won the American League pennant by seven games, went through its season without having to survive a single game or set of games that might truly be termed crucial. To put it plainly, no challengers appeared. The Twins had the best batting in the league and the third-best pitching, but neither was overpowering. This was almost exactly the same team that finished in a tie for sixth place in 1964, when it led both leagues in home runs, with two hundred and twenty-one; this year its homer output dropped to a hundred and fifty. The Twins won largely because their manager, Sam Mele, hired a new set of coaches last spring and taught his team a new kind of ball. They eschewed the bomb and studied the hit-and-run, the stolen base, the stretched single. Pitching coach Johnny Sain put Jim Grant and Jim Kaat through a summer-long seminar on spin ballistics, and they won twenty-one and eighteen games, respectively. Third-base coach Billy Martin persuaded the shortstop, a moody Cuban named Zoilo Versalles, that aggressiveness at the plate, quickness on the bases, and a capacity for instantly getting rid of ground b.a.l.l.s can make a star out of a small infielder. Finally, no coaches at all were allowed near young Tony Oliva when he approached the plate, and he wound up with his second batting championship in as many years in the majors. Oliva, an outfielder who bats left, has leopardlike reflexes and great speed in the field, and he may become the best American League hitter since Ted Williams. The presence of the Dodgers in this year"s Series was only faintly more explicable, since they too had finished sixth in 1964, and they won this year with a team batting average of .245-the lowest of any championship team since baseball"s dark ages. In May, the Dodgers lost their two-time batting champion, Tommy Davis, who broke an ankle and was finished for the season. Unlike the Twins, they had to battle every day to survive in their junglelike league, and they saw their carefully h.o.a.rded little lead wiped out in September by a fourteen-game winning streak of the Giants". The Dodgers had great pitching and great cool, however, and they responded with a thirteen-game streak of their own, which put them back on top. They clinched their pennant that last Sat.u.r.day of the season with an almost typical performance-a 31 win by Sandy Koufax over the Braves in which the Dodgers collected only two hits. They won this year not just because of Koufax and Drysdale and Maury Wills but because of a combination of speed, pride, and managerial intelligence that enabled them actually to overturn the entire structure of modern offensive baseball, which had been built around the home run. The Dodgers. .h.i.t only seventy-eight homers all year, but they stole a hundred and seventy-one bases, thereby inventing a brand-new sport-"tap-ball," perhaps, or "hot wheels"-which was more exciting and certainly more successful than the old game played by the rest of the league this summer.

No doubt there were some residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul in early October who were untouched by the impending clash of these oddly matched, oddly similar rivals, but I met none. On the eve of the opening game, the infection seemed absolute-perhaps not the loudest case of baseball fever I have observed but one of the happiest. Bunting and triple-life-size portraits of the Twins filled the windows of banks and department stores along Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, and homing automobiles bore exhortatory b.u.mper stickers reading "Sam Mele for President" and "Twins A-Go-Go-Go!" At dusk, I saw cars with Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, and Manitoba license plates debouching fans at hotels and restaurants-country loyalists wearing platter-size Twins b.u.t.tons, and straw boaters emblazoned with Twins heraldry. The local papers had made a brave try for balance, but they could not control their advertisers ("Homer after homer, Harmon Killebrew enjoys the Major League Benefit Plan underwritten by Equitable"), or even their headline writers ("Series Lures Recluse from Kentucky Cabin"). That evening, badge-wearing delegates to a recreation-industries convention wandered about in the lobby of the Leamington Hotel, nudging each other whenever they recognized a face-Red Schoendienst, Bobby Bragan, Eddie Lopat, Bill Veeck-among the cheerful, noisy knots of baseball people. Down at the Pick-Nicollet Hotel, a handful of students from the University of Minnesota danced in the Pic-Nic Locker Room, an impromptu cabaret that had been set up that afternoon right in the lobby and decorated in a hopeful attempt to resemble the Twins" clubhouse. The Fruggers were studied glumly by a cl.u.s.ter of tall teen-age boys in green blazers-members of the Charlotte Hornets" Nest Post No. 9 baseball team, from Charlotte, North Carolina, which had won the national American Legion baseball t.i.tle in early September and thereby, a free trip to the Series. Late that night, I watched a taped TV show over WCCO-Channel 4 in which an announcer interviewed an almost interminable number of employees at the Twins" ballpark. "Tell me," he said to the groundskeeper. "Are you responsible for putting down these nice straight lines?"

By midmorning the next day-a cool, burnished fall day-Minnesota had given up almost all pretense of civic equilibrium. In the State Supreme Court, in St. Paul, an attorney cut short his argument with "There are more important matters before us today!" He received grateful applause from both sides, court adjourned, and various jurists departed for their grandmothers" funerals. On Summit Avenue, also in St. Paul, a meeting of a ladies" study group was ruined when five members put down their copies of Troilus and Cressida and tiptoed out, off to meet their husbands at the ballpark. At about the same time, three suspected members of the Kansas City Cosa Nostra under surveillance by the Minneapolis Morals and Narcotics Squad aroused the darkest suspicions among their tailing detectives by not heading for the game. And on Minnehaha Drive the cabdriver who was taking me out to the game turned in his seat and said, "You know, five years ago we had nothing here but the Lakers, and they were bush. Now we got the Vikings, we got the Twins, we got the pennant, and Hubert is Vice-President!"

Hubert Humphrey-a Twins fan, of course-was there to throw out the first ball at Metropolitan Stadium, an airy cyclotron standing amid cornfields in Bloomington, precisely equidistant from Minneapolis and St. Paul. The most notable absentee that afternoon was Sandy Koufax, who was observing Yom Kippur. (Women"s-page feature writers invariably refer to Koufax as "the world"s most eligible Jewish bachelor.") The fans around me behind first base celebrated this bit of calendarial good fortune with hopeful yawps and bayings, even though Koufax"s stand-in was Drysdale, a twenty-three-game winner and the world"s most formidable No. 2 pitcher. Their cries died abruptly when Ron Fairly led off the Dodger second with a homer into the right-field bleachers (at least two spectators within my hearing muttered, "The Dodgers aren"t supposed to hit homers!"), but the Twins" first baseman, Don Mincher, balanced matters with an almost identical poke a few minutes later. Then, in the bottom of the third, Swedish-American credulity and tonsils were imperiled by a swift succession of astonishments. Frank Quilici, the Twins" rookie second baseman, doubled just inside the left-field foul line. Pitcher Jim Grant bunted, Drysdale fell while fielding the ball, and both runners were safe. Versalles. .h.i.t a three-run homer into the lower left-field deck. Two outs and two hits later, Drysdale walked Mincher, loading the bases, and Earl Battey, the Twins" catcher, popped a little Texas leaguer to right for his second hit of the inning, and Drysdale departed. When the side was out at last, the scoreboard operator had to try three times before he managed to put up the correct, incredible number of runs for the half-inning: six. That, of course, was the ball game, though the crowd sat tight through the rest of the affair, smiling in the afternoon sunshine. Versalles drove in another run and stole a base in the seventh, and Jim Grant, working quickly and perhaps a bit carelessly, permitted the visitors nine more scattered hits and one more run. The smiles remained as everyone trooped out to the parking lots. It was like a family wedding.

The following afternoon, a considerable number of those Twin-boosting straw boaters showed bitten-off brims-evidence of late celebrations of the famous victory. But it was a drizzly, sobering sort of day. Two roaring helicopters hovered just above the outfield gra.s.s, trying to dry out the surface, and when the game finally did start, amid light showers, there was Koufax. There, too, was the Twins" own ace left-hander, Jim Kaat, and for five full innings there was no way to choose between them-three hits for the Twins, two for the Dodgers, no runs at all. Tension and damp feet kept the crowd quiet until the Dodger fifth, when Bob Allison, in left field for the Twins, saved at least one run with a mad spring to the foul line and a diving, cross-handed grab of Lefebvre"s long drive. He slid a good fifteen feet into foul territory, and when he came up still holding the ball, I was suddenly persuaded that this, too, would be the Twins" day-a conviction that seemed to strike everyone else, even Koufax, at the same time. Versalles, leading off the sixth, slashed a grounder off third baseman Gilliam"s glove for a two-base error. Nossek neatly sacrificed him to third, and Tony Oliva brought him home with a shot to left that he somehow stretched into a double. Killebrew scored Oliva with a single. Koufax steadied and pitched out of it, having actually given up only one earned run, but it was too late; he vanished, necessarily but uselessly, for a pinch-hitter in the seventh, when the Dodgers scored once on three singles. Versalles, who was now clearly running for governor, bashed a triple off Ron Perranoski in the same inning, and then scored, all unaided, when he feinted down the line so convincingly that Perranoski bounced a pitch past his catcher. The Twins, having devoured Drysdale and Koufax on successive afternoons, now disposed of Perranoski, the Dodgers" brilliant relief man; Kaat delivered the final two runs with a bases-loaded single in the eighth. The fans around me were laughing and hooting by now, and one next to me kept repeating, "It"s all over now! It"s all over now!" I hope he meant the game, and not the entire Series. After I had visited the clubhouse and heard Sandy Koufax"s precise, unapologetic, and totally unruffled a.n.a.lysis of the game, I came away with the curious impression that the Twins, after two straight victories, were only slightly behind in the World Series.

Rival baseball executives sometimes talk about Walter O"Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, with less than total admiration, but always with undisguised envy. For one thing, his Dodger Stadium, at Chavez Ravine, is the finest plant in baseball-a model of efficiency and attractiveness which is brightening the design of new ballparks across the country. For another, he has found in Los Angeles the perfect baseball audience. Dodger fans are numerous (attendance has averaged over two and a half million in the new park, by far the best in the majors), steadfast, and suffused with love. They need the Dodgers fully as much as the Dodgers need them, for the team seems to serve as a civic center or model home-a hearth to pull up to in a land of dusty patios. Caring about the Dodgers in Los Angeles is a form of mother love, and there were times during the three Series games in the Taj O"Malley when I had the feeling that I had wandered into a radio breakfast show for moms. It wasn"t just the ma.s.s sing-alongs, encouraged by the electric signboard in left field-"Happy Birthday to You!" warbled, c.u.m Wurlitzer, to a Dodger bat boy or a pitcher"s father-but my growing conviction that the men and women around me, in their green stretch pants and russet golf cardigans, had, in some mild, innocent fashion, lost their marbles. They accepted the Dodgers" three one-sided and fundamentally unexciting victories at home as a source of continuous and uncritical self-congratulation, maintaining a nonstop high-decibel babble of joy ("Marvelous! Oh, marvie, marvie, marvie!" one woman cried after each Dodger base hit) during a span of twenty-seven innings in which the Dodgers outscored the Twins 182. It was a phenomenon; love of team had utterly eclipsed love of sport.

In the first Los Angeles game, Claude Osteen gave the National Leaguers the best pitching they had yet enjoyed in the Series, allowing five lonely hits and keeping the ball so consistently low that the Twins managed only three flies to the outfield all afternoon. The Dodgers displayed some nifty base-stealing and sacrifices, but almost to no purpose, since they were hitting Camilo Pascual so energetically. Every home-team starter came up with at least one hit (there were ten hits in all), and the final score was 40. This outcome only nourished in me the belief that the next game, the fourth, would be the key to the Series; with a three-one lead, the Twins would be almost impossible to beat, but a two-two tie would require the Twins to beat Koufax once again-perhaps twice again. Both the Dodgers and the Twins played that fourth game as if they too had come to this conclusion-and the Twins, for all practical purposes, utterly blew the Series in six innings.

Wills, the very first Dodger batter, was knocked sprawling when various Twin infielders converging on first base failed to handle his infield bouncer. He got up and stole second, proceeded to third when Jim Grant forgot to cover first on a grounder by Willie Davis, and scored when Versalles messed up a double play. In the next inning, a second run scored on a bunt by the Dodgers" Wes Parker, another steal of second, another gift of third (on a wild pitch), and an infield error by Quilici. The Dodgers were playing their favorite kind of baseball on their favorite grounds (the infield gra.s.s there resembles shrunken worsted, and a chopped grounder sometimes bounces thirty feet in the air, like a golf ball landing on a highway), and the Twins grew badly rattled. They almost stayed in the game until the sixth, but then two high, useless throws by Minnesota outfielders allowed a Dodger runner an extra base, and the last vestiges of the Twins" poise vanished. Their subsequent butcheries are best forgotten; the game wound up 72, Los Angeles, and the Series was even.

It was unevened after the first two Dodgers had batted the next afternoon, when Wills doubled and steamed home on Gilliam"s single. There were twelve more Dodger hits and six more runs, but that first score, as it turned out, would have been enough, for Koufax was back on the mound, and this time the W.M.E.J.B. was performing very close to his peak. By the end of seven innings, he had faced only one more than the absolute minimum number of batters, and he wound up with a four-hit shutout and ten strikeouts. It was the twenty-second time this year that he had struck out ten or more batters in a single game. There were other things to admire that afternoon (Willie Davis"s three stolen bases, for instance, and the Twins" not falling apart again), but I concentrated on watching Koufax at work. This is not as easy as it sounds, for there is the temptation simply to discredit what one sees. His fast ball, for example, flares upward at the last instant, so that batters swinging at it often look as if they had lashed out at a bad high pitch. Koufax"s best curve, by contrast, shoots down, often barely pinching a corner of the plate, inside or out, just above the knees. A typical Koufax victim-even if he is an excellent hitter-having looked bad by swinging on the first pitch and worse in letting the second go by, will often simply stand there, hit bat nailed to his shoulder, for the next two or three pitches, until the umpire"s right hand goes up and he is out. Or if he swings again it is with an awkward last-minute dip of the bat that is a caricature of his normal riffle. It is almost painful to watch, for Koufax, instead of merely overpowering hitters, as some fast-ball throwers do, appears to dismantle them, taking away first one and then another of their carefully developed offensive weapons and judgments, and leaving them only with the conviction that they are the victims of a total mismatch. Maybe they are right, at that; the records of this, Koufax"s greatest year, suggest as much. In the regular season, he won twenty-six games, struck out three hundred and eighty-two batters (an all-time record), and pitched his fourth no-hit game-a perfect game, by the way-in as many years, which is also a new record. In the Series, he won two shutouts pitched within three days of each other, and gave up exactly one earned run in twenty-four innings. He was the difference between the two clubs; he won the Series.

I watched the last two games at home, on television, because I did not want to see or share the pain that I felt certain was waiting for the Minnesota fans. Besides, it had become clear that this was not to be a Series that would go echoing down the corridors of time. A curious, dissatisfying pattern to the games had emerged, for neither team had displayed the smallest ability to come from behind. In the first five games (in all seven games, it developed), the winning pitcher lasted the full nine innings, and no resolute power hitter stepped up to the plate to challenge him-to reverse matters with an explosion at a crucial moment. That pin-striped ghost remained; what I wanted-what we all wanted-was a moment of Yankee baseball. Still, my decision to stay away from Metropolitan Stadium was probably a mistake, because I missed some innings of rare tension and some sudden rewards for two or three ballplayers who deserved them wonderfully. There was, for instance, Jim Grant"s slick, courageous 51 victory in the sixth game, in which he outpitched Claude Osteen, kept those Dodger sprinters off the bases, drove in three runs with his own sixth-inning homer, and generally restored the Twins to joy and self-esteem. Mudcat Grant himself is a singularly joyful and estimable young man, who has emerged this year as a pitcher of the first magnitude. He is a tall, self-possessed Negro who is also pursuing a second, cold-weather career as a singer and entertainer; he will make a nightclub tour this winter with a turn called "Mudcat and the Three Kittens." Even without those two big wins for the Twins, he would be notable for the most startling ballplayer"s quotations to come out of this year"s Series: "I was a member of the NAACP before it became Camp."

There were two more homers to remember with grat.i.tude. Bob Allison"s, in the sixth game, must have been at least a momentary salve for the unimaginable tortures he had suffered at the plate this year in his endless batting slump. And then, on the final afternoon, there was Lou Johnson"s homer-a looping, dying blow to left that actually caromed off the foul pole. It came in the fourth inning, with no score and the bases empty, but it demolished Jim Kaat and the Twins, for Koufax had already struck out six batters and again appeared untouchable. Ron Fairly doubled on the next pitch, and Parker singled him home, but Johnson had really done the job. Lou Johnson is a somewhat shopworn Negro outfielder (he even looks a little tattered, because of an automobile accident years ago that cost him the top of his right ear) who has spent most of the past twelve years in the minors; he took over left field when Tommy Davis was injured, and hung on with the Dodgers as a regular by playing the best ball of his career. The sound, the weight, the feel and flight of that home run will stay with Johnson, I would bet, for at least twelve years to come.

Koufax"s three-hit, ten-strikeout shutout in the final game was in many ways his finest feat, for he pulled it off without his curve ball. Discovering somewhere in the first or second inning that his curve was unreliable, perhaps because he was at last exhausted, he simply did without it; he threw the fast ball and challenged the Twin batters to touch him. Again he was too much. In the ninth, Killebrew reached first on a single, with one out, and the homeside zealots aroused themselves for some final, crepuscular yelling. Earl Battey struck out on three pitches. Bob Allison fouled one, took two b.a.l.l.s, swung and missed, swung and missed, and winter descended on the northlands. As the Minnesotans filed out of Metropolitan Stadium in awful silence, I suddenly thought of the optimistic cabdriver who had driven me to the ballpark on the first day of the Series. I hope by now he has added another line to his little speech: "Anyway, we were beaten by the best-maybe the best pitcher in the whole history of baseball!"

PART IV.

THE FUTURE, MAYBE.

THE COOL BUBBLE.

- May 1966.

WITH TWO OUT IN the top of the first inning on the afternoon of May 23, 1965, Jimmy Wynn, the center fielder of the Houston Astros, moved under a fly ball just struck by Jim Ray Hart, of the visiting San Francisco Giants. Looking upward, Wynn pounded his glove confidently, then anxiously, and then froze in horror. The ball had vanished into a pure Monet cloud of overhead beams, newly painted off-white skylights, and diffused Texas sunlight, and now it suddenly rematerialized a good distance behind Wynn and plumped to earth like a thrombosed pigeon. Three runs scored, the Giants eventually won, 52, and the next day a squad of workmen ascended the skies and, with paint guns, made the final severance between Houston baseball and the outdoors. Up to the moment of Hart"s fly, it might have been a.s.sumed that the summer sport played last year in Houston"s gigantic new air-conditioned Astrodome, which is the world"s first indoor ballpark, was merely baseball under gla.s.s-the same old game, now happily sheltered from the voracious mosquitoes and dismaying swelter of the Texas Gulf Coast. However, the unexpected local discovery that sunshine had become inimical to the national pastime (in preseason practices and exhibition games, before the initial coat of paint was slapped on the skylights, a few players had begun wearing their batting helmets in the outfield) only completed what actually was a radical break with baseball"s past and hastened further changes. Through the rest of last season, the gra.s.s in the crepuscular dome yellowed and withered, was painted green in the infield, and finally had to be replaced with new sodding, which fared no better. When ballplayers reconvened in the Astrodome this spring, they stepped out onto an infield made of new green plastic carpeting called AstroTurf.

It was not just the prospect of witnessing weatherless baseball played on Chemstrand gra.s.s under an acrylic-painted Lucite sky that induced me to travel to Houston last month to see the Astros open their first 1966 home stand. There was also the fact that the Astros" first indoor season had been a rousing success, in spite of their customary ninth-place finish. Houston jumped from a 1964 home attendance of 725,773, smallest in the National League, to a gate of 2,151,470, barely second to that of the World Champion Dodgers, and more than six hundred thousand higher than the best American League home draw. Since half of the majors" twenty teams have been born or have moved to new cities in the past twelve years, all in panting search of new audiences, these figures were of remarkable interest; Houston seemed on its way to becoming the capital of Baseball"s Age of Alteration.

So it was that I found myself, early in the evening of April 18, sitting in a cushioned deep-purple loge seat in left field of the Harris County Domed Stadium (as the Astrodome is formally named) and listening to the Jeff Davis High School band"s pre-game rendition of "The Good Old Summertime." The only good and old object in view at the time was Robin Roberts, the erstwhile ace of the Phillies and Orioles and now the Astros" senior mound statesman, who was warming up near the right-field stands preparatory to taking on the Dodgers. He toiled earnestly, though surrounded by distractions. A group of female scholars from Tyler Junior College a.s.sembled along the foul lines and did some high kicks in unison, wearing cowboy hats and peach satin body stockings. The groundkeepers smoothing the base paths were dressed in fake bright orange s.p.a.ce suits and fake white plastic s.p.a.ce helmets. Each level of the stands was painted a different color-royal blue, gold, purple, black, tangerine, and crimson-and I had the momentary sensation that I was sinking slowly through the blackberry-brandy layer of a pousse-cafe. The AstroTurf infield was green, but more the shade of a billiard table than a lawn. Only the outfield gra.s.s (which will be replaced with AstroTurf later this year) was rea.s.suring; it looked like any Westchester back yard after a five-year drought. The lacy overhead pattern of beams and cloudy panes arching up from the brilliant circle of field lights made a soft and surprising sky above me. Leaning back in my theater seat, I measured its height by eye and saw that it was far above the reach of any fly ball, and then I wondered why someone hadn"t placed an alt.i.tude mark at the apex of the roof, to match the "340," "390," and "406" signs along the outfield wall and thus supply us with baseball"s latest statistic.

The elegant stands slowly filled, the ceremonials slipped by (the National League president with a plaque, Dinah Sh.o.r.e with the anthem, a county judge with the first ball), and baseball was allowed to begin. It turned out to be the same old game, the same game as ever. I could tell, because there was Robin Roberts out on the mound fiddling with his right pants leg between pitches. There, too, were the Dodgers, the champions, instantly ripping off singles, bunting, scurrying for the extra base, taking charge of the game from the very beginning, just as they did in the World Series last fall. Only the fact that Maury Wills was thrown out stealing second kept them down on two runs in the first inning and sustained the hopes of the locals. I presumed that the Houston fans were hopeful, but it was hard to be certain. It was a thinnish turnout for an opening game-just over twenty-five thousands-and the spectators near me, who were remarkably well dressed, also appeared to be unaccustomed to indoor shouting. It developed, however, that they were merely waiting for directions. With two out in the home half of the first, Jimmy Wynn drew a base on b.a.l.l.s, and the center screen of the Astrodome"s huge, three-panel electronic scoreboard above the outfield pavilion seats burst forth with a noisy, animated depiction of a bugle bugling, followed by the lettered command "CHARGE!" "Charge!" responded the crowd with one voice. The fans near me were still laughing over this display of a capella ferocity when Joe Morgan flied out and the tiny rally came to a close.

Several scoreboards in big-league parks are now wired for bugle calls and CHARGE! injunctions (the device was born, I believe, in Los Angeles), but comic cavalry attacks are only the beginning of the Houston scoreboard"s repertoire. The thing is four hundred and seventy-four feet long and cost two million dollars, and there is room on its various part.i.tions for simultaneous presentation of the game"s lineups and scoring, out-of-town baseball results, messages of welcome to fan groups, plugs for Astro souvenirs, and gigantic animated commercials. These last flash on between innings-routine cartoon plugs for potato chips, gasoline, an airline, and so forth, accompanied by sound effects but without a spoken message. This is the only mercy, for the giant set is impossible not to look at, and there is no "off" switch. Actually, there was plenty to watch and enjoy on the field in that first game, in which Roberts, in search of his two-hundred-and-eighty-second major-league win, was throwing a potpourri of soft junk and being outpitched by a twenty-one-year-old Dodger rookie named Don Sutton, who has been in organized baseball for exactly one year, but the scoreboard and its busy screen seemed anxious to improve on the baseball. In the second inning, second baseman Morgan and third baseman Bob Aspromonte came up with successive brilliant stops for the Astros, to rob Jim Lefebvre and Lou Johnson of base hits; there were shouts and applause in the stands, but the scoreboard commanded "OLe!" and was obeyed. By the middle innings, I found that I was giving the game only half my attention; along with everyone else, I kept lifting my eyes to that immense, waiting presence above the players. In the eighth, with the Astros behind, 51, Sonny Jackson led off the home half with a nifty bunt, and when Morgan singled him along, some fans began a hopeful, rhythmic clapping, instantly surpa.s.sed by the appearance on the screen of a giant female silhouette dancing the Frug, and then the words "GO-GO." The Astros went-went for two runs, but the Dodgers added another of their own and won the game, 63. As I walked down the broad ramps of the Astrodome and, oddly, stepped outdoors, I heard a good many Texans around me still talking about something that had taken place way back in the second inning, when Chuck Harrison had doubled off the left-field wall, for the Astros" first hit. The man in charge of the scoreboard evidently thought the ball had gone into the stands, for he pressed the b.u.t.ton touching off the board"s home-run celebration display-an immense, multicolor, forty-five-second extravaganza depicting an exploding ballpark, shooting cowboys, ricocheting bullets, a snorting steer with flags on his horns, a mounted cowboy with lariat, and a fusillade of skyrockets. This time, when it was all over Harrison was still standing on second, and the screen boffed the crowd with its next message, "OPPS." A minute or two later, catcher John Bateman also doubled, and the home team scored, but no one in the postgame crowd seemed to remember that. The board had been the big hit of the evening.

Baseball, of course, is not the only main event at the Domed Stadium. In the past year, it has put on such disparate attractions as Judy Garland, the Ringling Brothers circus, a rodeo, a boat show, a polo match, the home football games of the University of Houston, a bloodless bullfight, and a Billy Graham crusade. Some of these bombed and some did excellent business, but what emerged most startlingly was the fact that the Astrodome itself is its own best attraction. In the first year, close to four hundred and ninety thousand visitors paid a dollar apiece just to walk around inside the place. Most of these were out-of-towners, but in Houston itself the Astrodome seems to rank second only to the nearby Manned s.p.a.cecraft Center as a source of self-congratulation. Certainly there is far more conversational enthusiasm about the building than about the sport it was built to house; a local sportswriter told me he had never heard anyone say, "I"m an Astro fan." During my stay, I found that when I forced myself to look at the Astrodome as a work of art, my admiration for the improbable cool bubble grew with each visit. The exterior is especially pleasing-a broad, white-screened sh.e.l.l of such excellent proportions that you doubt its true dimensions until you stand at its base. The Astrodome is the world"s biggest indoor arena, but its ramps are gentle, its portals and aisles brilliantly marked, and its various levels so stacked and tilted that immensity is reduced and made undiscouraging. There are almost no bad seats in the house, and the floors are so antiseptically clean that one hesitates before parting with a peanut sh.e.l.l or a cigarette b.u.t.t.

Ballplayers like the Astrodome, too. Descending to the playing field during batting practices (I tried to pull up a blade of AstroTurf to chew on while standing behind the batting cage, but the stuff is pluckproof), I talked to various Dodgers and Astros and found them unanimous in the view that the lighting is now excellent, the prefab infield very fast but perhaps not as fast as Dodger Stadium"s brickyard, but the chilled, windless air profoundly unconducive to the long ball. Last year, only fifty-seven homers were struck in Houston, which is only a third of the total in most parks. Wes Parker, the young Dodger first baseman, said, "It"s a park for singles-hitters. Hit the ball on the ground, ffft, and it"ll likely go through. Good for our kind of team. I"ll tell you, though, I just discovered something funny about this fake gra.s.s. Watch bunts on it. Watch what happens to them." I studied the next dozen-odd bunts laid down in practice, and each time, the spinning ball, catching the nap of the AstroTurf, suddenly veered off toward first base, like a marble dropped on the floor in a housing development. Later, after practice, I went out and walked around on the new surface, which has the consistency of an immense doormat. I dug down with my fingers and found the spine of one of the hidden foul-line-to-foul-line zippers that hold the new infield together; I had the sudden feeling that if I unzipped it, I might uncover the world"s first plastic worm.

The worst seats for baseball in the Astrodome are the most expensive-the narrow topmost ring of "Sky Boxes," which are sold on a season-long basis in blocks of twenty-four or thirty seats. Such an investment in the national pastime costs a minimum of $14,784 per season, and ent.i.tles the boxholder to approximately the same view of the ballplayers as he might have of a herd of prize cattle seen from a private plane. There are other perquisites, though, including membership in the Skydome Club, a private snuggery in the Astrodome that offers Lucite womb chairs, a picture-window view of downtown Houston, and an Oriental restaurant equipped with kimono-clad j.a.panese waitresses and electric hibachi stoves. (Buyers of single season tickets have to make do with membership at the Astrodome Club, a capacious Turkey-red lounge and restaurant, with beaded curtains, swinging saloon doors, and the longest bar in Texas.) Each Sky Box is connected to an individual small apartment containing a living room, bathroom, refrigerator, and closed-circuit TV set. These roomettes are heavily decorated in Texas provincial, motel Tudor, and other "themes," and I can only say I found them immensely glum-sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen. The inst.i.tution is popular, however; women who are invited to a Sky Box dinner party and game can sometimes find their names in the society columns the next day, and a Texas businessman standing behind the Sky Box seats, with his foot on a railing, a gla.s.s of bourbon in his hand, and a ball game in progress far below, is sometimes in the mood for a little wheeling and dealing with the other good old boys he finds up there at the top level of the biggest new arena in the world.

Studying millionaires in Houston"s favorite year-round entertainment, and Judge Roy Hofheinz, the Kublai Khan of the Domed Stadium, is the most entertaining millionaire in town. He has been, variously, a campaign manager for Lyndon Johnson, a boy-wonder jurist, mayor of Houston, a real-estate developer, and a promoter and owner of radio and television stations. Hofheinz is not one of the big rich, like John W. Mecom, who seems to have succeeded the late Jesse Jones as Houston"s financial vizier, but he talks more and gets into more fights than any other moneyman in sight. Hofheinz"s fallings-out are epochal. Among others, he has squabbled with Jesse Jones; with K.S. (Bud) Adams, Jr., the owner of the American Football League"s Houston Oilers (the Oilers do not play their home games in the Astrodome); and with R.E. (Bob) Smith, his former senior partner in Houston Sports a.s.sociation, Inc., the company that owns the Astros and rents the stadium from Harris County for an annual payment of three-quarters of a million dollars. This last blowup, a year ago, ended with the Judge buying up most of Smith"s interest, and he now owns 86 per cent of the Astros. Hofheinz"s experience in baseball is minimal, and most of the club"s field operations rested in the hands of general manager Paul Richards, a former manager of the Orioles and a widely admired baseball thinker. Experienced Hofheinz-watchers predicted that there would be amity in the organization until the day Hofheinz decided he had surpa.s.sed Richards in baseball wisdom-a day that apparently arrived last December, when Hofheinz abruptly fired Richards (whose contract had five years to run), along with farm director Eddie Robinson and manager Luman Harris. The new team manager is Grady Hatton, and the Astros are now a pure Hofheinz fief.

Houston looks on Hofheinz with a mixture of awe, amus.e.m.e.nt, and anxiety. There is the undeniable fact that the prodigious idea of a domed year-round stadium was entirely the Judge"s, and without his plans for the new miracle park Houston almost certainly would not have been granted a franchise in the league expansion of 1962. It was also Hofheinz"s energy and promotional optimism that got the necessary bond issues approved and launched, and his hand is recognizable in every corridor and catwalk of the finished marvel. Any remaining Houston doubts about the Judge"s genius are now centered on the awesome financial weight that is being balanced on top of the dome, and on the recent population implosion of top executives at the Houston Sports a.s.sociation. The precise break-even point of Astroperations has not been made public, but the stadium"s financial overhead is known to be Texas-sized. The electric bill alone, covering lights and air-conditioning, comes to thirty thousand dollars a month. The best estimates of the amount of business required to keep the Domed Stadium afloat come down to about a hundred and twenty-five days of active operation at an average attendance of twenty thousand. This means that the Astros must continue to draw handsomely during their eighty dates at home, and that numerous additional attractions will have to be encouraged. No one in Houston doubts the Judge"s energy and imagination, but Harris County voted in an investment of some thirty-one million dollars toward the success of the Astrodome-a sum that adds a certain sense of zesty involvement to each taxpayer"s daily Hofheinz-watch.

I visited the Judge one afternoon in his famous Astrodome office-a two-story business pad of such comically voluptuous decor and sybaritic furnishings that I was half convinced it had been designed by, say, John Lennon. My awed gaze took in hanging Moorish lamps and back-lit onyx wall panels in His Honor"s sanctum, a pair of giant Oriental lions guarding the black marble and rosewood judicatorial desk, a golden telephone awaiting the Hofheinzian ear, and, at the far end of the boardroom, a suspended baldachin above the elevated red-and-gilt magisterial throne. It would have been irreverent to talk baseball in these surroundings, but luckily the Judge received me in his box on an upper floor, which offered an expansive vista of the lofty, gently breathing dome and a distant view of some Astros working out in the batting cage. Hofheinz is a tall, thick-waisted man with lank hair, heavy black-rimmed spectacles, and small hands, in which he constantly rotates a giant cigar. We sat in gold plush swivel chairs overlooking the field and drank coffee out of gold cups, while the Judge talked about the long, tedious process of building a pennant contender from scratch. I asked about the Houston audience"s devotion to baseball, observing that I had seen very few local patrons keeping score during the game, and Hofheinz said, "This park keeps "em interested enough so they don"t have to keep busy with a pencil and scorecard. Why, in most other parks you got nothing to do but watch the game, keep score, and sit on a hard wooden seat. This place was built to keep the fans happy. They"ve got our good seats, fine restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don"t have to make a personal sacrifice to like baseball." He tapped the ash from his heater into a gold ashtray shaped like a fielder"s glove, and went on. "We have removed baseball from the rough-and-tumble era, I don"t believe in the old red-necked sports concept, and we are disproving it here. We"re in the business of sports entertainment. Baseball isn"t a game to which your individuals come alone just to watch the game. They come for social enjoyment. They like to entertain and be entertained at the ballpark. Our fans are more like the ones they have out in California. We don"t have any of those rowdies or semi-delinquents who follow the Mets."

I started to put in a small word for rowdies, but Hofheinz continued. "We have by far a higher percentage of fans in the upper economic brackets than you"ll find in any other park," he said, "but we also have the best seats and service at the dollar-fifty level. You"re competing for attention in sports entertainment, and you"ve got to create new kinds of fans. We make a big effort to bring out the ladies. There are plenty of mothers and grandmothers who have just learned about the double play from some Little Leaguer, and now for the first time here"s a ballpark where you would want to bring them and let them develop into real fans. And once they"ve seen what it"s like here, they won"t feel so bad about letting their husbands and boys go off to the ball game any old time they want."

For the remainder of my stay, I tried to concentrate on Houston baseball, instead of its setting, and I saw the Astros split a pair of lively games with the Dodgers. The first was one of those baseball rarities, a complete turnabout, in which the Astros, after giving up ten hits and five runs in the first four innings, suddenly bounced back with batches of runs of their own while entirely bottling up their tormentors, and won going away, 85. John Bateman"s fourth-inning homer set off the scoreboard"s steers and rockets for their first sanctioned gala of the year, and in the fifth the home side, a.s.sisted by some absent-minded Dodger fielding, batted around and drove Don Drysdale from the mound. This was perhaps less of a feat than it sounds, for Drysdale was far from sharp after his long, much-publicized dual holdout with Sandy Koufax, but it was popular; there is nothing like the public shaming of a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man to tone up a crowd. The Astros got some first-cla.s.s pitching from a tough workmanlike reliever named Mike Cuellar, who struck out nine Dodgers with his down-breaking screwball. The next night, the Astros almost pulled out another, but they were up against Claude Osteen, the least publicized and perhaps the best No. 3 pitcher in the league, who fanned Jim Gentile with the tying run aboard in the ninth, and they lost a 32 squeaker.

The Astros are a curiosity, for they are a team without a star, present or past, unless one counts such mini-celebrities as Jimmy Wynn or Larry Dierker. Invented, along with the Mets, in the league expansion of 1962, they have consistently displayed a shabby competence that has kept them above New York in the standings every year, and has probably cost them much of the rich affection and attention generated by the Mets" anti-heroes.

There is no real doubt, however, that the Astros are on the way and will someday break into the tough, embattled territory of the National League"s first division, but a healthy franchise, particularly in new baseball territory, also requires the building of a sizable body of young, resilient, and truly knowledgeable fans. No one knows much about the loyalties and pa.s.sions of the Houston baseball audience, in spite of those enormous attendance figures of last season, for it is impossible to guess how many of the two million ticket-buyers came to see the Astros and how many to see the Astrodome. During the Dodger games, I kept moving about in the stands and changing neighbors, but I could not penetrate the placid bonhomie of those small, citified, early-season crowds or convince myself that we were watching a sporting event. There was applause at the appropriate moments, but not much tonsil-straining, and the scattered booing was mostly directed at the ball and strike calls of the home-plate umpire, which is bush. No one booed an Astro player. No one got into a fight; a fight at the Astrodome would be as shocking as fisticuffs in the College of Cardinals. And always, as before, the applause and attention of the fans around me would be interrupted, redirected, and eventually m.u.f.fled by the giant scoreboard and its central screen. It commanded "CHARGE" and "GO-GO" for every Astro base-runner, it saluted a homer by the Dodgers" Wes Parker with the word "TILT," and when it broke in on a lively dispute at third base, the spectators forgot about the real thing and sat back in their armchairs to watch a cartoon umpire argue with a cartoon manager.

Toward the end of the last game, my irritation took me out to the pavilion seats in center field (Astropatrons, untouched by the sun, do not sit in bleachers), and here I found the first unscattered group of recognizable fans in Houston. It was a shirt-sleeved, short-sleeved crowd, Negro and white, full of young people. There were some big families, complete with sleeping babies, and a blond teen-age girl next to me wore a patch on the arm of her sweater that said "Future Homemaker of America." Some of the men wore straw cowboy hats, some were in city coconut straws. Shortly after I arrived, Dave Nicholson led off the Astro sixth with a triple off Osteen that almost landed in our laps, and at once the entire pavilion crowd was on its feet, shouting and cheering. The scoreboard, I remembered later, was behind us, but we didn"t seem to need it. And then in the top of the seventh, when Houston pitcher Bob Bruce was in heavy trouble, first baseman Chuck Harrison speared a hopper by Maury Wills and then hesitated a moment over his play. I jumped up and yelled, "Home! Throw home!," and it came to me suddenly that I had company: a hundred fans near me were screaming the same advice. Harrison got our message and threw to Bateman, who tagged out Nate Oliver at the plate, and we all sat down, grinning at one another.

Baseball is an extraordinarily subtle and complex game, and the greatest subtlety of all may well be the nature of its appeal to the man in the stands. The expensive Houston experiment does not truly affect the players or much alter the sport played down on the field, but I think it does violence to baseball-and, incidentally, threatens it own success-through a total misunderstanding of the game"s old mystery. I do not agree with Judge Hofheinz that a ballpark is a notable center for socializing or propriety, or that many spectators will continue to find refreshment in returning to a giant living room-complete with manmade weather, wall-to-wall carpeting, clean floors, and unrelenting TV show-that so totally, so drearily, resembles the one he has just left. But these complaints are incidental. What matters, what appalls, in Houston is the attempt being made there to alter the quality of baseball"s time. Baseball"s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher"s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own. Any persistent effort to destroy this unique phenomenon, to "use up" baseball"s time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and stylized curiosity.

It seems to me that the Houston impresarios are trying to build a following by the distraction and entire control of their audience"s attention-aiming at a sort of wraparound, programmed environment, of the kind currently under excited discussion by new thinkers of the electronic age. I do not wish them luck with this vulgar venture, and I hope that in the end they may remember that baseball has always had a capacity to create its own life-long friends-sometimes even outdoors. One Houston lady told me that she had been a fan for more than thirty years, beginning when she was a schoolgirl and the Houston Buffs were a Cardinal farm. "I remember a lot of players from back then," she said. "I saw them all before they went up to the majors and became famous. Howie Pollett and Danny Murtaugh were my G.o.ds. And I remember something else. Buff Stadium back in the old days used to be right next to a bakery-Fehr"s Bakery, that"s what it was called! I"ll never forget sitting in the stands in the afternoon and watching the games, and the sweet smell of fresh bread in the air all around."*

*Now, six years later, the Astrodome remains our only domed ballpark, but newer and larger bubbles are on the way. The Astros" home attendance has leveled off in the neighborhood of 1,350,000-an extremely attractive neighborhood for a perennially noncontending club-so the park and its peculiar attributes are almost universally considered a success. Only the enormously increased costs of construction have delayed the erection of similar sports-tanks in other localities, but New Orleans has now sunk pilings for the 80,000-seat Louisiana Superdome, thus proving the American axiom that it is perfectly O.K. to go ape at the bank as long as you are drawing out the money for nuclear weapons or sports. Official estimates place the cost of the bayou balloon at one hundred and forty million dollars, but some irate taxpayers are suggesting final figures closer to three hundred million. This dome is promised for 1974, and will house the New Orleans Saints, of the National Football League; it is also expected that it will const.i.tute an irresistible lure for some poor, heavily rained-upon baseball club, such as the Cleveland Indians.

The next roofed stadium will probably appear in Detroit, where the Tigers have already signed a forty-year lease on a projected downtown dome. A Buffalo dome has apparently been scrubbed, but the idea of the roofed field as a cure-all for many of the ailments of sport remains widespread. In New York last summer, the enlargement and doming-over of Shea Stadium was proposed by the customarily cautious New York Times as a solution to the decay of Yankee Stadium and the unhappiness of the football Giants. What the price of this roof would be and who would pay it were not specified. Neither did the paper wonder whether any New York fans wanted indoor baseball and football.

The Houston scoreboard has been surpa.s.sed, by the way, by a three-million-dollar double-panel job in Philadelphia"s new Veterans Stadium. The home-run display, I am told, includes plashing fountains, the Liberty Bell, comical high-jinks by giant animated colonial dolls named Philadelphia Phil and Phyllis, and a guided tour of the downtown area, including Independence Hall, ending up with a lobster dinner at Bookbinder"s. Something like that, anyway.

PART V.

CLa.s.sICS AND CAMPAIGNS-II.

A TERRIFIC STRAIN.

- October 1966.

SPECTATORS BACK FROM THIS year"s minimum-sized World Series have been required to defend themselves against the repeated, baffled cry of "What happened?" The question, put by wives, office mates, cabdrivers, children, bartenders, and querulous grandfathers over the long-distance telephone, is at once redundant and very nearly unanswerable. Everyone knows what happened, of course: the American League"s Baltimore Orioles, a young and almost purely untested team of exuberant hitters and indifferent pitchers, humiliated the defending champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, possessors over the last decade of the best pitching staff and the best Series record in either league, in four straight games. The Dodgers scored no runs at all after the third inning of the opening game, thereby establishing a Series unrecord that may stand for the balance of the century. Contrariwise, two Baltimore starting pitchers and one relief man will now be able to open their contract negotiations next spring with the claim that their lifetime Series pitching records surpa.s.s those of Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. The brevity and inscrutability of this year"s Series were no less mysterious to eyewitnesses than to the millions who were done out of two or three happily wasted afternoons in front of their TV sets; fans and sportswriters straggling out of Baltimore"s Memorial Stadium after the fourth game suggested theatergoers who had bought tickets to a famous melodrama only to find that the bill had been changed at the last minute to a one-acter by Samuel Beckett. Baseball of the Absurd, however, invites criticism and afterthoughts, and it is just possible that this Series will become more intelligible in retrospect.

One must begin with the suggestion that the turning point in a drama can appear three or four minutes after the curtain goes up. The Orioles moved into first place in the American League after the second week in June. By the end of July, they led the pack by the debilitating margin of thirteen games, and though they glided through the remainder of the season, winning twenty-eight games and losing twenty-eight, they finished in front by a comfortable nine without playing one game or series that could be called crucial. In all those weeks, the team"s numerous front-line youngsters-including catcher Andy Etchebarren, second baseman Dave Johnson, outfielders Paul Blair and Curt Blefary, and pitchers Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, and Wally Bunker-could only fill the languid hours with speculation about their coming test in the World Series. To be sure, they owned a large security blanket, made up of Frank Robinson, who was winning every important batting t.i.tle in the league, the incomparable Brooks Robinson at third, and such unshakables as shortstop Luis Aparicio, ace pitcher Steve Barber, and reliever Stu Miller. But then Barber was lost with a sore arm, and Brooks Robinson fell into a horrendous slump at the plate, and waiting in October were the flutter and noise of the Series and the a.s.sured violence of whichever National League team survived a summer of daily warfare. The Dodgers, by contrast, won their race with the Pirates and the Giants in what has come to be obligatory style in the National League-a September catch-up, some last-minute stumbling, and the pennant on the final weekend (this time, in the final game) of the season. The superlative Dodger pitchers were perhaps a bit tired, but the champions walked onto the field for the first game in Los Angeles like a synod of elders proceeding to the front pews. For that matter, the only visible sign of pre-Series nerves among the Orioles as they took batting practice might have been the excessive cheerfulness of their manager, Hank Bauer, who exchanged quips with a thick cl.u.s.ter of sportswriters while his eyes followed his athletes with a preoccupied, headmasterish flicker. But the tension was there; a full hour before the ceremonies and the anthem, Curt Blefary said, "If this d.a.m.ned thing doesn"t start soon, I"m going to fly straight up into the air!"

The young Orioles" first flying, it developed, was delightful, being merely up out of their seats in the dugout. Don Drysdale, the Dodger starter, walked Russ Snyder in the top of the first, and then Frank Robinson hit his second pitch into the left-field stands. A minute later, the other Robinson, Brooks, sailed one even farther, into a descending cone of unbelieving silence, and the visitors were able to take the field with that best of all tension-dissolvers, a three-run lead. They added another in the second, less spectacularly but with admirable neatness, when Etchebarren walked, was bunted along by McNally, and came across on Snyder"s single. McNally"s bunt was his last sign of competence. In the Dodger second, he gave up a gargantuan homer to Jim Lefebvre, a double to Wes Parker, and four straight b.a.l.l.s to Jim Gilliam, and was saved from disaster only by a nifty running catch in right center by Russ Snyder. No one could help him in the third, when his control entirely evaporated. Etchebarren was leaping and diving for his pitches, and in a matter of minutes McNally walked the bases full, with one out, and then disappeared, having thrown sixty-three pitches, more or less in the style of a wedding guest heaving rice, and thus destroyed the pace and pattern of the game. His successor, Moe Drabowsky, struck out Parker, walked in a run, and then got Roseboro on a foul. That, it turned out, was the ball game.

Might Have Been is dull sport, but the Dodgers, who have been frequently disparaged for being a lucky team, suffered such appalling bad luck in this s.p.a.ce of two innings that fairness now calls for some second-guessing. In the second inning, with Parker on second and Gilliam on first, Roseboro ducked away from a McNally wild pitch that was headed straight for Cary Grant in the celebrity boxes behind the backstop; the ball just ticked Roseboro"s bat, behind his head, and the runners had to stay planted. Without that freak, Parker would have scored easily from third on Roseboro"s long fly, which Snyder ran down. In the next inning, Drabowsky, after walking in one run, still had the bases loaded when he threw a fourth ball, inside, to Roseboro, who checked his swing but again saw the ball just tick his bat. Except for these two kisses from providence, the game would have now been tied, and-much more significantly-Drabowsky would have joined McNally in the showers. Drabowsky, a tall, experienced middle relief man, is a streaky pitcher, and now, miraculously unhooked, he streaked in the other direction. After Roseboro"s foul, he struck out the next six Dodgers in succession, to tie a Series record, and then established a wholly new Series mark for relievers by striking out a total of eleven Dodgers on the way to his easy 52 victory. Within an inning or two after he settled down, his dominance over the homeside was so evident that I was free to wander about in the back aisles of the ballpark and resume research on the monograph I may someday write about Dodger fans. Someday, that is, if I ever begin to understand them. The crowd that afternoon was the biggest in Dodger Stadium history, and it had paid more money for its seats than any previous Series audience, and yet the spectators sat there, inning after inning, in polite, unhappy silence, like parents at a rock concert. They were mostly middle-aged or elderly-men with long bellies and golf caps, women with elaborately waved white or dyed hair, their mahogany hands crossed in their laps. Their team was losing, but few hopeful or encouraging cries escaped their lips, and there were few children among them to venture a shout or two. Win was what they had come for, and, deprived of that, they sat in silence and listened to an amplified play-by-play description of the game that explained to them, by loudspeaker, what they were seeing. The bright field below, the running players, the game of baseball seemed a hundred miles away.

By good fortune, I had brought along to Los Angeles the ideal companion for a sometimes discouraging, sometimes embarra.s.sing, and undeniably historic World Series-an almost perfect new baseball book called The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence S. Ritter. The author, a professor of economics at New York University, has spent all his recent vacations tracking down famous old ballplayers and inducing them to reminisce about their youth and their extraordinary companions and the long-flown summer days they gave to the great game. The result is a vivid, gentle, and humorous narrative, accompanied by marvelous photographs, which is somehow both saddening and rea.s.suring for the contemporary fan. That night, after the first game in Los Angeles, I read Tommy Leach"s account of the first World Series of all, played in 1903 between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Red Sox, then sometimes known as the Pilgrims. Leach, a small third baseman with that pirate team, recalls, "That was probably the wildest World Seri

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