The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 4

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During that long, painful interval in the clubhouse, there was time to look back on Yastrzemski"s season. He had won the triple crown-a batting average of .326, a hundred and twenty-one runs batted in, forty-four homers-but this was not all. Other fine hitters, including Frank Robinson last season, had finished with comparable statistics. But no other player in memory had so clearly pushed a team to such a height in the final days of a difficult season. The Allison peg was typical of Yastrzemski"s ardent outfield play. In the final two weeks at the plate, Yaz had hammered twenty-three hits in forty-four times at bat, including four doubles and five home runs, and had driven in sixteen runs. In those two games against the Twins, he went seven for eight and hit a game-winning homer. This sort of performance would be hard to countenance in a Ralph Henry Barbour novel, and I found it difficult to make the connection between the epic and the person of the pleasant, twenty-eight-year-old young man of unheroic dimensions who was now explaining to reporters, with articulate dispa.s.sion, that his great leap forward this year might have been the result of a small change in batting style-a blocking of the right hip and a slightly more open stance-which was urged on him in spring training by Ted Williams. There was something sad here-perhaps the thought that for Yastrzemski, more than for anyone else, this summer could not come again. He had become a famous star, with all the prizes and ugly burdens we force on the victims of celebrity, and from now on he would be set apart from us and his teammates and the easy time of his youth.

Detroit led for a while in its last game, and then the Angels caught up and went ahead, but the clubhouse maternity ward was an unhappy place. Players in bits and pieces of uniform pretended to play cards, pretended to sleep. Then, at last, it was the ninth inning, with the Angels leading, 85, and the Red Sox formed a silent circle, all staring up at the radio on the wall. The Tigers put men on base, and I could see the strain of every pitch on the faces around me. Suddenly there was a double-play ball that might end it, and when the announcer said, "... over to first, in time for the out," every one of the Boston players came off the floor and straight up into the air together, like a ballet troupe. Players and coaches and reporters and relatives and owner Yawkey and manager Williams hugged and shook hands and hugged again, and I saw Ricky Williams trying to push through the mob to get at his father. He was crying. He reached him at last and jumped into his arms and kissed him again and again; he could not stop kissing him. The champagne arrived in a giant barrel of ice, and for an instant I was disappointed with Mr. Yawkey when I saw that it was Great Western. But I had forgotten what pennant champagne is for. In two minutes, the clubhouse looked like a YMCA water-polo meet, and it was everybody into the pool.

Cardinal fans who have managed to keep their seats through this interminable first feature will probably not be placated by my delayed compliments to their heroes. The Cardinals not only were the best ball club I saw this season but struck me as being in many ways the most admirable team I can remember in recent years. The new champions have considerable long-ball power, but they know the subtleties of opposite-field hitting, base-running, and defense that are the delight of the game. Their quickness is stimulating, their batting strength is distributed menacingly throughout the lineup (they won the Series with almost no help from their No. 4 and No. 5 hitters, Cepeda and McCarver, while their seventh-place batter, Javier, batted .360), they are nearly impregnable in up-the-middle defense, and their pitching was strong enough to win them a pennant even though their ace, Bob Gibson, was lost for the second half of the season after his right leg was broken by a line drive. In retrospect, the wonder of the Series is that the Cards did not make it a runaway, as they so often seemed on the point of doing.

Fenway Park was a different kind of place on the first day of the Series. Ceremonies and bunting and boxfuls of professional Series-goers had displaced the anxious watchers of the weekend. Yastrzemski, staring behind the dugout before the game, said, "Where is everybody? These aren"t the people who were here all summer." The game quickly produced its own anxieties, however, when Lou Brock, the Cardinals" lead-off man, singled in the first and stole second on the next pitch. Though we did not recognize it, this was only a first dose of what was to follow throughout the Series, for Brock was a tiny little time pill that kept going off at intervals during the entire week. He failed to score that time, but he led off the third with another single, zipped along to third on Flood"s double, and scored on Maris"s infield out. The Cardinals kept threatening to extinguish Santiago, the Red Sox starter, but bad St. Louis luck and good Boston fielding kept it close. Gibson, hardly taking a deep breath between pitches, was simply overpowering, throwing fast b.a.l.l.s past the hitters with his sweeping right-handed delivery, which he finishes with a sudden lunge toward first base. He struck out six of the first ten batters to face him and seemed unaffronted when Santiago somehow got his bat in the path of one of his pitches and lofted the ball into the screen in left center. It was a one-sided but still tied ball game when Brock led off the seventh (he was perpetually leading off, it seemed) with another single, stole second again, went to third on an infield out, and scored on Roger Maris"s deep bouncer to second. That 21 lead was enough for Gibson, who blew the Boston batters down; he struck out Petrocelli three times, on ten pitches. The crowd walking out in the soft autumn sunshine seemed utterly undisappointed. They had seen their Sox in a Series game at last, and that was enough.

Five members of the Red Sox had signed up to write byline stories about the Series for the newspapers, and Jim Lonborg, not yet ready to pitch after his Sunday stint, kept notes for his column as he sat on the bench during the opener. He must have remembered to look at those earlier memoranda on his glove, however, for his first pitch of the second game flew rapidly in the suddenly vacated environs of Lou Brock"s neck. It was Lonborg"s only high pitch of the afternoon, and was fully as effective in it"s own way as the knee-high curves and sinking fast b.a.l.l.s he threw the rest of the way. None of the Cardinals reached first until Flood walked in the seventh, and by that time Yastrzemski had stroked a curving drive into the seats just past the right-field foul pole for one run, and two walks and an error had brought in another for the Beantowners. There were marvelous fielding plays by both teams-Brock and Javier for the Cards, Petrocelli and Adair for the Sox-to keep the game taut, and then Yaz, who had taken extra batting practice right after the first game, hit another in the seventh: a three-run job, way, way up in the bleachers. After that, there was nothing to stay for except the excruciating business of Lonborg"s possible no-hitter. He was within four outs of it when Javier doubled, solidly and irretrievably, in the eighth, to the accompaniment of a 35,188-man groan. (Lonborg said later that it felt exactly like being in an automobile wreck.) When Lonborg came in after that inning, the crowd stood and clapped for a long, respectful two minutes, like the audience at a Horowitz recital.

Everyone in St. Louis was ready for the third game except the scoreboard-keeper, who initially had the Cardinals playing Detroit. More than fifty-four thousand partisans, the biggest sporting crowd in local history, arrived early at Busch Memorial Stadium, most of them bearing heraldic devices honoring "El Birdos"-a relentlessly publicized neologism supposedly coined by Orlando Cepeda. Home-town pride was also centered on El Ballparko, a steep, elegant gray concrete pile that forms part of the new downtown complex being built around the celebrated Saarinen archway. I admired everything about this open-face mine except its shape, which is circular and thus keeps all upper-deck patrons at a dismaying distance from the infielders within the right angles of the diamond. The game, like its predecessors, went off like a pistol, with Lou Brock tripling on the first pitch of the home half. After two innings, Gary Bell, the Boston starter, was allowed to sit down, having given up five hits and three runs to the first nine Cardinal batters. That was the ball game, it turned out (the Cards won, 52), but there were some memorable diversions along the way. Nelson Briles, the Cards" starter, decked Yastrzemski in the first with a pitch that nailed him on the calf. Lou Brock, having led off the sixth with a single, got himself plunked in the back with a justifiably nervous pick-off throw by pitcher Lee Stange, and chugged along to third, from where he scored on a single by Maris. L"affaire Yaz was the subject of extended seminars with the press after the game. St. Louis Manager Red Schoendienst stated that inside pitches were part of the game but that his little band of clean-living Americans did not know how to hit batters on purpose. Pitcher Briles stated that the sight of Yastrzemski caused him to squeeze the ball too hard and thus lose control of its direction. (He had improved afterward, not walking a man all day.) Manager Williams pointed out that a pitcher wishing to hit a batter, as against merely startling him, will throw not at his head but behind his knees, which was the address on Briles" special-delivery package. This seemed to close the debate locally, but that night the publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader wrote an editorial demanding that the Cardinals be forced to forfeit the game, "as an indication that the great American sport of baseball will not allow itself to be besmirched by anyone who wants to play dirty ball."

The great American sport survived it all, but it almost expired during the next game, a 60 laugher played on a windy, gray winter afternoon. The Cardinals had all their runs after the first three innings, and the only man in the park who found a way to keep warm was Brock, who did it by running bases. He beat out a third-base tap in the first and went on to score, and subsequently doubled off the wall and stole another base. Gibson, the winner, was not as fast as he had been in the opener, but his shutout won even more admiration from the Red Sox batters, who had discovered that he was not merely a thrower but a pitcher.

The Red Sox, now one game away from extinction, looked doomed after that one, but Yastrzemski pointed out to me that most of his teammates, being in their early twenties, had the advantage of not recognizing the current odds against them. "Lonborg goes tomorrow," he said, "and then it"s back to Boston, back to the lion"s den." Lonborg went indeed, in a marvelously close and absorbing game, that I watched mostly through Kleenex, having caught a pip of a cold in the winter exercises of the previous day. The Red Sox won, 31; two former Yankees settled it. In the Boston ninth, Elston Howard, who can no longer get his bat around on fast b.a.l.l.s, looped a dying single to right to score two runs-a heartwarming and, it turned out, essential piece of luck, because Roger Maris. .h.i.t a homer in the bottom half, to end Lonborg"s string of seventeen scoreless innings. Maris, freed from his recent years of Yankee Stadium opprobrium, was having a brilliant Series.

Laid low by too much baseball and a National League virus, I was unable to make it back to the lion"s den, and thus missed the noisiest and most exciting game of the Series. I saw it on television, between sneezes and commercials. This was the game, it will be recalled, in which the Red Sox led by 10, trailed by 21, rallied to 42, were tied at 44, and won finally, 84, burying the Cardinal relief pitchers with six hits and four runs in the seventh. Brock had a single, a stolen base, and a home run. Yastrzemski had two singles and a left-field homer. Reggie Smith hit a homer; Rico Petrocelli hit two homers. This was the first Series game since the Cardinal-Yankee encounters in 1964 in which any team rallied to recapture a lost lead, which may account for the rather stately nature of most of the recent fall cla.s.sics. My admiration went out not only to the Red Sox, for evening the Series after being two games down, but to d.i.c.k Williams, for having the extraordinary foresight to start a young pitcher named Gary Waslewski, who had spent most of the season in the minors, had not started a Boston game since July 29, and had never completed a game in the major leagues. Waslewski didn"t finish this one, either, but he held the Cards off until the sixth, which was enough. Williams" choice, which would have exposed him to venomous second-guessing if it had backfired, is the kind of courageous, intelligent patchworking that held his young, lightly manned team together over such an immense distance. In the opinion of a good many baseball people, his managerial performance this year is the best since Leo Durocher"s miracles with the Giants in the early nineteen-fifties.

Nothing could keep me away from the final game of the year, the obligatory scene in which Lonborg, on only two days" rest, would face Gibson at last. Fenway Park, packed to the rafters, seemed so quiet in the early innings that I at first attributed the silence to my stuffed-up ears. It was real, though-the silence of foreboding that descended on all of us when Lou Brock hit a long drive off Lonborg in the first, which Yastrzemski just managed to chase down. Lonborg, when he is strong and his fast ball is dipping, does not give up high-hit b.a.l.l.s to enemy batters in the early going. After that, everyone sat there glumly and watched it happen. Maxvill, the unferocious Cardinal shortstop, banged a triple off the wall in the third and then scored, and another run ensued when Lonborg uncorked a wild pitch. In time, it grew merely sad, and almost the only sounds in the park were the cries and horns from Cardinal owner Gussie Busch"s box, next to the St. Louis dugout. Lonborg, pushing the ball and trying so hard that at times his cap flew off, gave up a homer to Gibson in the fifth, and then Brock singled, stole second, stole third, and came in on a fly by Maris. A fire broke out in a boxcar parked on a railway siding beyond left field, and several dozen sportswriters, looking for their leads, scribbled the note, "... as Boston championship hopes went up in smoke." Manager Williams, out of pitchers and ideas, stayed too long with his exhausted hero, and Javier hit a three-run homer in the sixth to finish Lonborg and end the long summer"s adventure. The final score was 72. Gibson, nearly worn out at the end, held on and finished, winning his fifth successive Series victory (counting two against the Yankees in 1964), and the Cardinals had the championship they deserved. I visited both clubhouses, but I had seen enough champagne and emotion for one year, and I left quickly. Just before I went out to hunt for a cab, though, I ducked up one of the runways for a last look around Fenway Park, and discovered several thousand fans still sitting in the sloping stands around me. They sat there quietly, staring out through the half-darkness at the littered, empty field and the big wall and the bare flagpoles. They were mourning the Red Sox and the end of the great season.

A LITTLE NOISE AT TWILIGHT.

- October 1968 SOME YEARS AGO, DURING a spell of hot-stove mooning for summer and baseball, I jotted down on a slip of yellow paper the names and batting averages of the top National League hitters in the year 1930. I have carried the slip in my wallet ever since, and on occasion, when comfortably surrounded with fellow baseball bores, I produce it. While being unmemorable in every other way, 1930 was a hitters" year. The combined National League batting average was .303, and the top finishers, all full-time regulars, were: Bill Terry .401 Babe Herman .393 Chuck Klein .386 Lefty O"Doul .383 Freddy Lindstrom .379 Paul Waner .368 Riggs Stephenson .367 Lloyd Waner .362 Kiki Cuyler .355 During the season just past, which concluded with the Detroit Tigers" stimulating seven-game, come-from-behind victory over the Cardinals in the World Series, I reread this list often, with a deepening incredulity; once an oddity (attributable in part to the jackrabbit ball), it suddenly had become a doc.u.ment of almost paleographic significance-a record of another sport, now clearly gone forever. The 1968 season has been named the Year of the Pitcher, which is only a kinder way of saying the Year of the Infield Pop-Up. The final records only confirm what so many fans, homeward bound after still another shutout, had already discovered for themselves; almost no one, it seemed, could hit the d.a.m.n ball any more. The two leagues" combined batting average of .236 was the lowest ever-four points below even the .240 compiled by the Mets in 1962, their first year of hilarious inept.i.tude. This year, there were three hundred and forty shutout games, as against a hundred and ninety-nine in 1962, and 1994 home runs, as against 3001. Only five National League batters finished over the .300 mark, and only one batter-Carl Yastrzemski-in the American; his average of .3005 was the lowest ever to win a batting t.i.tle. Baseball owners and other positive thinkers will find more joy in studying these statistics from the pitcher"s mound, from which direction 1968 becomes a year of triumph. Denny McLain, of the Tigers, won thirty-one games and lost six, thus becoming the first thirty-game winner since 1934. Bob Gibson"s earned-run average of 1.12 was the lowest in the history of the National League. Don Drysdale ran off a record fifty-eight and one-third scoreless innings; a Mets rookie named Jerry Koosman pitched seven shutouts; g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, of the Giants, and Ray Washburn, of the Cardinals, threw no-hitters on consecutive days in the same ballpark; and there was only a minimal stir when a journeyman hurler, Catfish Hunter, of Oakland, achieved the ultimate rarity, a perfect game-no runs, no hits, no one on base, twenty-seven up and twenty-seven out.

Adding up zeros is not the most riveting of spectator sports and by mid-July this year it was plain to even the most inattentive or optimistic fans that something had gone wrong with their game. Why were the pitchers so good? Where were the .320 hitters? What had happened to the high-scoring slugfest, the late rally, the bases-clearing double? The answers to these questions are difficult and speculative, but some attempt must be made at them before we proceed to the releasing but somewhat irrelevant pleasures of the World Series. To begin with: Yes, the pitchers are better-or, rather, pitching is better. All the technical and strategic innovations of recent years have helped the defenses of baseball; none have favored the batter. Bigger ballparks with bigger outfields, the infielders" enormous crab-claw gloves, more night games, the mastery of the relatively new slider pitch, the persistence of the relatively illegal spitter, and the instantaneous managerial finger-wag to the bullpen at the first hint of an enemy rally have all tipped the balance of this delicately balanced game. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that that young relief pitcher motoring in from the bullpen in a golf cart is significantly different from the man who walked the same distance twenty or thirty years ago, and so is the pitcher he is replacing on the mound. Like all young athletes, they are an inch or two taller and twenty or thirty pounds heavier than their counterparts of a generation ago, and they throw the ball harder. The batter waiting in the on-deck circle is also enormous, but all that heredity and orange juice are going to be of no help to him if he can"t meet the ball with his bat. And here, precisely, the batter is most disadvantaged, for hitting has nothing much to do with size or strength but is almost wholly a matter of reflexes. A number of thoughtful students of athletics, including Ted Williams, consider hitting a baseball to be the most difficult reflex-the hardest single act-in all sports.

Almost any strong and pa.s.sably coordinated young man can learn to pitch, but batting is not generally teachable; even after a lifetime in the game, most pitchers still swing like their old aunties. The solid-gold reflex of the natural hitter is capable of some polishing, but only through many years of practice. There was a time when American boys so endowed spent most of their afternoons playing nothing but baseball, yearned only after a career in baseball, and once signed, spent at least three years in the minors learning their trade-that is, learning to hit. All this is changed. Boys have more afternoon diversions, many of which do not require seventeen companions and an empty sandlot, and baseball must now compete with pro football, basketball, and golf in signing up the best teen-age athletes. Even if the young phenom does choose baseball, he no longer enjoys the same lengthy apprenticeship. Expansion and television have dried up most of the minor leagues, and the baseball draft now makes it impossible for the parent club to train and protect a promising young slugger down in Rochester or El Paso for more than two years. Hurried through the minors, brushed up in the winter instructional leagues, the would-be Gehringer or Musial suddenly finds himself in the batter"s box in a big-league park, where he is expected to begin repaying at once the investment of his owners and the hopes of the fans. Unsurprisingly, he pops up.

Baseball executives might disagree with some of these observations, or place a different emphasis or interpretation on others, but it is difficult to believe that they are totally unaware of the problem itself. Yet their decisions in this decade not only have ignored the imbalance and the decline in quality of baseball but have directly and profoundly worsened it. The expansion of big-league baseball was inevitable and perhaps defensible, but the addition of two new teams to each eight-team league in 1962 permanently watered the quality of the game; the new teams were not permitted anything like a fair share of the available talent, and none of them have yet risen to full contention in their leagues. Since that time, of course, all twenty teams have had to scout and bid in a player market tightened by 25 per cent more buyers. At this moment, four new teams are being created-Montreal and San Diego in the National League and Kansas City and Seattle in the American-and both leagues next year will be divided into six-team Eastern and Western divisions. Every team will play an unbalanced schedule-eighteen games against each team in its own division and twelve against each team in the other division; the divisional champions in each league will meet in three-out-of-five game autumn playoffs to determine the pennant winners and World Series partic.i.p.ants. However neatly or awkwardly this complex plan works in practice, and however rich a revenue the existing clubs will derive at once from the price of the new franchises and the attendance of fans in the new cities, there should be no illusions about the stature of the new teams or the true quality of the leagues. Each existing club lost six players to the new teams in the draft just concluded, but sympathy should be reserved for the fans of the Expos, the Padres, the Royals, and the Pilots, who will have to watch these st.i.tched-together, rivet-necked monsters in action next year. The rosters of the new clubs have been a.s.sembled out of culls and spare parts-the sixteenth, twentieth, twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth, thirty-second, and thirty-sixth best ballplayers on each present club. One-third of all the players in the majors next April would have been minor-leaguers in unexpanded baseball.

A few owners have opposed expansion for precisely these reasons, but the majority are executives caught up in the old business fiction that says bigger is better. Their usual defense against charges of greed and shortsightedness is a dictum first propounded by Branch Rickey in the nineteen-fifties, which postulated that the increase in national population guaranteed an increase in the number of first-cla.s.s ballplayers, thus justifying expansion. This year"s batting averages do not support the theory, for reasons I have suggested, and neither do the sharply declining attendance figures in the parks of some famous old teams that have not been in recent pennant contention. The new expansion, in the owners" dreams, will remedy the attendance anemia, particularly in September, by doubling the number of pennant races and adding two new playoff extravaganzas before the Series itself. The scheduling of these playoffs means that baseball will now be extended into mid-October, and that there will be three full weekends of national television coverage right in the heart of the professional-football season. Clearly, the conservative owners-the non-expansionists-never had a chance. It is expected that baseball fans will somehow not notice that the new playoffs will make most of the long baseball season meaningless, and that the fans will accept at once a system that, had it been in effect this year, would have required the Detroit Tigers to qualify for the Series by winning a playoff against the sixth-place Oakland Athletics, who finished twenty-one games behind them in the standings.

The World Series just past carried an extraordinary burden of hopes. It was counted on to make up for everything-not only the deadly zeros of the Year of the Pitcher but the bad luck of two one-sided pennant races, whose winners were virtually decided by mid-July. This last pre-inflationary, pre-playoff Series meant the end of something, and there was pleasure in the knowledge that both champions represented ancient baseball capitals that had flown a total of eighteen previous pennants. Many of us could remember the last Tiger-Cardinal Series, in 1934, which went seven memorable games and concluded in a riot of acrimony and garbage. Each of the current rivals presented deep, experienced, and exciting teams, whose individual attributes were admirably designed for the dimensions of their home parks-the Cardinals, the defending world champions, quick on the bases, brilliant in defense, knowing in the subtleties of cutoff, sacrifice, and hit-and-run; the Tigers a band of free-swingers who had bashed a hundred and eighty-one homers and could eschew the delicate touch in the knowledge that their runs would come, probably late and in cl.u.s.ters. At almost every position, there were dead-even matchups of ability and reputation. Curt Flood and Mickey Stanley were the best center fielders in their leagues, and Tim McCarver and Bill Freehan the best catchers; Roger Maris, retiring this winter, would play opposite Al Kaline, now in his sixteenth year with the Tigers, who had finally been rewarded for his refusal ever to attend a Series except as a partic.i.p.ant; at first base, Orlando Cepeda and Norm Cash presented faded but still formidable reputations as game-busting clean-up hitters. Best of all, the opening game (and probably the key fourth and seventh games) would offer what few sportswriters could resist calling a "meaningful confrontation" between Bob Gibson, the best pitcher in baseball, and Denny McLain, who had won more games in a season than anyone since Lefty Grove. With squads like these, neither Manager Red Schoendienst nor Manager Mayo Smith had been called on through the season to attempt more than minimal prestidigitation. Then, on the eve of the Series, Smith announced that he was moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop, a position he had played in only eight games in the majors. Some sort of shuffle like this was inescapable, because room had to be found in the outfield for Kaline, who had been injured too often of late to hold down a regular spot, but Mayo"s switch offered the heady possibility of disaster every time a ball was. .h.i.t to the left side of the Tiger infield.

A sellout crowd of 54,692 turned out at St. Louis"s Busch Stadium for the meaningful confrontation. The meanings were there, if hard to decipher immediately. Gibson fanned two batters in the first, but he threw a lot of pitches and looked less imperious than he had against the Red Sox last fall. In the second, though, he settled into his astonishing, flailing delivery, which he finishes with a running lunge toward the first-base line, and struck out the side on eleven pitches. After four innings, he had eight strikeouts-halfway toward a new Series record. McLain, who stands hunchily on the mound, like an Irish middleweight in his ring corner, was mostly high and wild. He gave up an enormous triple to Tim McCarver in the second, but Mike Shannon and Julian Javier were too eager to nail his chin-level fast b.a.l.l.s and went down swinging. McLain escaped again in the next inning, when Lou Brock was stranded at third after stealing second and sailing along to third when catcher Bill Freehan"s abysmal throw bounced behind the pitcher and on into center field. Freehan was known to have an ailing arm, but this frail peg promised something like a free visa to all bases for the Cards" winged messengers. In the fourth, Maris and McCarver both walked on four pitches, and this time Shannon and Javier waited for pitches in the strike zone and then hit singles, good enough for three runs, because w.i.l.l.y Horton misplayed Shannon"s. .h.i.t in left, moving up the runners. They were also good enough for the ball game. McLain vanished after the fifth, Brock hit a loud but superfluous homer in the seventh, and then there was nothing to watch but Gibson setting the new Series record of seventeen strikeouts.

It made memorable watching-not just the three last batters whiffed in the ninth but a whole lineup of fine hitters utterly dominated and destroyed by the man on the mound. Gibson worked so fast that I was constantly falling behind the actual ball-and-strike count. His concentration was total. Not once, it seemed, did he look at his outfielders, tug at his cap, twitch his sleeve; he didn"t even rub up the new ball after a foul. The instant he got his sign, he rocked, flailed, threw, staggered, put up his glove for the catcher"s throw back, and was ready again. He threw more curves than expected-good, sharp-breaking, down stuff-and though he always seemed to be working at a peak of energy, he had reserves when needed. In the sixth, after d.i.c.k McAuliffe singled with one out, he fanned Stanley on three pitches, and when Kaline then doubled down the left-field line he fanned Cash on five. He was tired by the ninth, and he had to throw twenty-eight pitches to four batters (Stanley singled, leading off), yet the count never went above two b.a.l.l.s on any of them. Kaline went down swinging at a fast ball, which tied Sandy Koufax"s old Series record of fifteen strikeouts, and then, after many fouls, Gibson got Cash on a beautiful half-speed curve that may have been the best pitch of the game, and Horton on a called third strike that just nicked the back inside corner. Afterward, in the clubhouse, the Tigers sounded like survivors of the Mount Pelee disaster. "I was awed," said McLain. "I was awed." McAuliffe, asked to compare Gibson with some pitcher in his league, said, "There is no comparison. He doesn"t remind me of anybody. He"s all by himself." Gibson proved just as difficult for the reporters as he had for the batters. He is a proud, edgy, intelligent, and sensitive man, very aware of his blackness and all its contemporary meanings. He could stand in front of a circle of fifty reporters and say something impossible, like "I"m never surprised at anything I do," without making it seem anything less or more than truth. He smiled briefly when someone asked him if he had always been deeply compet.i.tive. "I guess you could say so," he said. "I"ve played a couple of hundred games of ticktacktoe with my little daughter, and she hasn"t beaten me yet. I"ve always had to win. I"ve got to win."

The next day"s baseball was of more human proportions. Detroit"s starter, Mickey Lolich, is a swaybacked, thick-waisted left-hander whose sinker ball becomes more difficult to hit as he grows tired in late innings. This curious propensity may account for his near invulnerability in late-season ball; by midsummer this year he was reduced to bullpen work, but his record after August 6 was ten wins and two losses. Here, he fell into difficulties in the first, and was saved from immediate extinction only by Al Kaline"s long gallop to right, where he grabbed Cepeda"s foul drive just before crashing into and disappearing through an unlocked field gate. The Tiger batters, perhaps relieved at being able to see what they were swinging at, were doing a lot of first-ball hitting, and, in the second, w.i.l.l.y Horton sailed Nelson Briles"s first delivery deep into the left-field seats, to the accompaniment of a long, low moan of pain from the local partisans. The only sounds that greeted Lolich"s modest round-tripper in the third were hilarious cries from the Detroit bench, for it was his first home run in ten years of professional ball. In the sixth, Norm Cash made it three homers, three runs, and then the Tigers added a pair more modestly, on two singles, a walk, and d.i.c.k McAuliffe"s low drive to center that skidded off Curt Flood"s glove. Lou Brock twice stole second, but Lolich"s only anxieties were suddenly eased when, with one run in and two men on base in the sixth, Mickey Stanley flew to his right to seize Shannon"s grounder and begin a nifty double play. Mayo Smith"s alchemy had produced gold. The Tigers won, 81, and the teams moved on to Detroit even up.

After twenty-three years without a pennant, and perhaps a decade without any good news of any description, Detroit could almost be forgiven for its susceptibility to the worst kind of baseball fever-the fence ripped down at the airport by the mob welcoming the team home; the billboards crying "Tigertown, U.S.A."; the tiger-striping on dresses, hats, suits, menus, and street crossings; the prefixative "our" before every mention of the team in the papers; and the "Sock It to "Em, Tigers!" motto, with excruciating variations ("Soc et Tuum, Tigres!" "Duro con Ellos, Tigres!"), in every bar and department-store window. The fever reached a critical point in the third inning of the home opener, when Kaline lined a two-run homer into the top left-field deck of the boxy old canoe-green stadium, and then it plummeted rapidly as the weather and the ball game turned icy cold. Curiously, though the Tigers led for almost half of the going, only the Cardinals looked dangerous, and no one was much surprised when they went ahead at last and won it, 73. Brock had stolen second in the top of the first, but was nailed at third as Maris fanned. He came up again in the third, singled, stole again, and was stranded. A Cardinal double steal went awry in the fourth, when McCarver was thrown out at third on a close call, but the angry shouting from the Cardinal bench suggested that this kind of teetery, edge-of-the-cliff shutout could not be sustained for long. Brock singled to lead off the fifth and again helped himself to second; it was his fifth straight time on base in two games, and his fifth straight steal of second. Earl Wilson, the Detroit starter, was by now in an understandably poor state of nerves, and after he gave up a run-scoring double to Flood and a walk to Maris he was excused for the afternoon. A moment or two later, McCarver hit a three-run homer off Pat Dobson, to put the Cards ahead for good. Ray Washburn, the Cardinal pitcher, also departed, after a homer to McAuliffe in the fifth and two walks in the sixth, but the reliever, Joe h.o.e.rner, stopped the Tigers, and then Cepeda, emerging from an autumn hibernation that had stretched back through three World Series, hit a low liner in the seventh that just reached the left-field seats, to score the last three runs and conclude the arctic maneuvers.

Sunday"s game, played in a light-to-heavy Grand Banks rainstorm and won by the Cardinals, 101, offered several lessons, all of them unappreciated by the Tigertowners. (1) Lou Brock does not always steal second. He led off the game with a homer, tripled and scored in the fourth, grounded out in the sixth, and then doubled and stole third in the eighth. It was his seventh stolen base of the Series, tying the record he set last year against Boston. He was at this point batting .500 in the Series and .387 for eighteen Series games, going back to 1964. (2) Some meaningful confrontations are meaningless. McLain met Gibson again, and was gone after two and two-thirds innings, having surrendered four runs and six hits. He turned out to have a sore shoulder, and might not be seen again in the Series. Gibson stayed for his customary nine (he was not knocked out of the box once this season), gave up a home run to Jim Northrup, hit a home run himself, and struck out ten batters without the benefit this day of a reliable curve ball. (3) There are several ways to try to delay a ball game, and just as many to try to speed it up. When rain interrupted matters for an hour and a quarter in the third, with the Cardinals ahead, 40, the bleacherites set up a chant of "Rain! Rain! Rain!" hoping for a postponement. This didn"t work, so in the fourth and fifth, with the score now 61, the Tigers tried their own methods-long pauses for spike-digging and hand-blowing by the batters, managerial conferences, and inexplicable trips to the dugout, all conducted while they glanced upward for signs of the final and reprieving deluge. w.i.l.l.y Horton even feigned an error, dropping a fly by Shannon that he had already caught, but the umpire would have none of it. Meanwhile, the Cardinals, fully as anxious to reach the legal limit of five innings as the Tigers were to avoid it, gave their special and highly secret steal-but-steal-slow sign to Cepeda and Javier in successive innings; both runners, looking like Marcel Marceau"s mime of a man running while standing still, were thrown out, and the game eventually went into the books. (4) Some baseball games that should not be played because of terrible weather are played anyway, especially if they happen to be Series games televised by NBC on prime Sunday-afternoon time.

At this point, with four one-sided games gone and the Tigers facing imminent deletion, the strongest memories this Series had brought forth were of last year"s long rouser between the Cards and the Red Sox. The Sock It to "Ems filing into their seats for the fifth game looked distraught, for the papers that morning had informed them that only two clubs had ever recovered from a one-three Series deficit. Surprisingly, the Tigers themselves, gathered around the cage during batting practice, seemed in remarkable fettle for a group apparently awaiting only the executioner"s blindfold. Norm Cash was telling George Kell, a retired Tiger demiG.o.d, that he had just figured out how to hit Gibson. "It"s like duck-shooting," he said. "You gotta lead the G.o.ddam bird. When he"s up here [he imitated Gibson at the top of his windup], you gotta start swinging. Pow!" Northrup, in the cage, laced a long fly to right, and several Tigers, watching the ball, cried, "Get out of here!" Northrup then broke two bats on two swings and was urged to open a lumberyard. There was some giggling over Vice-President Humphrey"s visit to the Tiger clubhouse after the previous game. "He kept congratulating everybody," d.i.c.k Tracewski said. ""Congratulations! We"re proud of you." I mean, didn"t he see the game? Didn"t he see us get pasted?" "Maybe he thought he was in the other clubhouse," someone suggested.

I concluded that these high spirits among the losers were induced only by antic.i.p.ation of their coming winter holiday, a hunch that appeared swiftly verified when the Cards teed off on Lolich in the top of the first-a double by Brock, a single by Flood, and a homer by Cepeda. The stands fell into a marmoreal hush, and the cheering in the third when Freehan, on a pitchout, finally threw out Brock stealing had a bitter edge to it. But then, in the Tiger fourth, Mickey Stanley"s lead-off drive to right landed a quarter-inch fair, and he would up on third. Kaline was decked by Nelson Briles"s inside pitch, but the ball trickled off his bat and he was out at first. Cash scored Stanley on a fly, and then w.i.l.l.y Horton bashed a triple to deepest right center field. Northrup"s hard grounder right at Javier struck a pebble on the last hop and sailed over the second baseman"s head, and suddenly the breaks of the inning were even and the Tigers only one run down. From then on, it was a game to treasure-the kind of baseball in which each pitch, each catch, each call becomes an omen.

Brock doubled again in the fifth, going with an outside pitch and flicking the ball to left, exactly as he had in the first. Javier singled to left, and when Brock, in full stride, was within six feet of the plate it looked as if he had w.i.l.l.y Horton"s throw beaten by yards. He must have thought so, too, for he failed to slide. The ball came in on the fly, chest-high to Freehan, he and Brock collided, and umpire Doug Harvey"s fist came around in a right hook: Out! Brock, storming, thought Harvey had missed the call, and so, I must confess, did I. Later, photographs proved us wrong (though nothing would have been altered, of course, if they"d proved us right). The pictures show Brock"s left heel planted and his toes descending on the plate; an instant later he has. .h.i.t Freehan"s right arm and left leg, and his foot, banged away, twists and descends on dirt instead of rubber.

The game rushed along, still 32 Cardinals, and when the Tigers loaded the bases in the sixth and Freehan, now zero for fourteen in the Series, came up to the plate, I thought Mayo Smith would call on a pinch-hitter. He let Freehan bat, and Freehan bounced into an inning-ending force. With one away in the seventh, and the Tigers only seven outs away from extinction, Smith also permitted Lolich to bat for himself, and, extraordinarily, his short fly fell safe in right. h.o.e.rner came in to pitch, and McAuliffe singled just past Cepeda. Stanley walked, loading the bases, and Kaline came up to the plate. Now I understood. Clearly, Mayo had planned it all: the famous old hitter up to save the day and the game and the Series in a typical Tiger seventh, and the stands going mad. Kaline swung and missed, took a ball, and then lined the next one to right center for the tying and go-ahead runs. Cash singled another in. Moments later, it seemed, we were in the ninth, and the Cards had the tying runs aboard. Lolich, however, took a deep breath and fanned Maris, pinch-hitting. He then pounced on Brock"s weak tap, ran a few steps toward first, and lobbed the ball to Cash, and the great game was over.

In baseball, a saying goes, things have a way of evening up, but the cliche is not usually as quickly or remorselessly proved as it was in the sixth game, back in St. Louis. The Tigers, having racked up two second-inning runs off Washburn, sent fifteen men to the plate in the third and tied a famous Series record by scoring ten runs in one inning. Jim Northrup hit a grand-slammer into the right-field bullpen, Kaline and Cash had two hits apiece, the top three Tiger hitters scored six runs, and eight men reached base before the first out was made, and my totals indicated six singles, one homer, four walks, one hit batsman, one sacrifice bunt, four disheartened pitchers, and one bollixed scorecard. This kind of rockslide is not quite the rarity it might seem, and whenever it happens I am left with the impression that all the players involved are mere bystanders at a statistical cataclysm. The batters become progressively more certain that each hit will drop in for them, the fielders less surprised by each unreachable fly or untouchable grounder, the pitchers more and more convinced that their best stuff will be bombed. In the end, there seems nothing to do but wait until the riot exhausts itself and probability can again be placed under the rule of law. Eventually, the Tigers won the game, 131. The beneficiary of all this ferocity and good fortune was Denny McLain, suddenly restored to action by a mixed shot of cortisone and Novocaine, and I was glad for him. McLain, who is also a professional organist, has an immense appet.i.te for celebrity, a hunger for big money, and hopes of a profitable winter career in the night clubs. But he is also an engaging and combative young man who had sustained his prior Series humiliations in good humor. Now he was off the hook and ready for Vegas.

So the Series came down to its last game, and the confrontation, it turned out, was between Gibson and Lolich. Both had won two games, and both had tired arms, though Lolich was starting with one less day of rest. He pitched the first two innings like a man defusing a live bomb, working slowly and unhappily, and studying the problem at length before each new move. He threw mostly sidearm, aiming at corners and often missing. After he had defused Brock for the second time, in the third, he seemed to gain poise and began getting ahead of the hitters. Gibson struck out five of the first nine men to face him, and the game was still scoreless, and now infinitely more dangerous, when Brock led off again in the sixth and singled. After one pitch to the next batter, he took an extraordinary lead off first-a good twenty feet. It was a challenge. Lolich remembered that Brock had succeeded with this identical maneuver in the second game, drawing the throw to first and then beating Cash"s hurried peg down to second. Now, given no other choice, Lolich flipped to Cash. Brock burst away and was in full stride, at least halfway down the line, when Cash was able to wheel and throw. This time, the ball whistled right past Brock"s left ear to Stanley, covering, and Brock was out, by a hair. One out later, Flood got to first on a single and was erased on almost exactly the same pickoff, ending this time in a rundown. Two singles and no double plays, but Lolich had somehow set down the side in order.

Still no score. Summer and the Series were running out. Gibson had permitted only one base-runner in the game, and here were the Tigers down to their last seventh inning of the year. Gibson fanned Stanley, for his thirty-fourth strikeout of the Series, and Kaline grounded out. At three and two, Cash singled to right. Horton hit to the left side, and the ball went through for a single. Northrup lined the first pitch high and deep, but straight to center, where Curt Flood started in, reversed abruptly, and then stumbled, kicking up a divot of gra.s.s. He recovered in an instant and raced toward the fence, but the ball bounced beyond him, a good four hundred feet out; Northrup had a triple, and two runs were in. Freehan doubled past Brock in left, for the third.

Gibson stayed in, of course. It was inconceivable that Schoendienst would take him out. He batted for himself in the eighth and fanned, and gave up another run in the ninth, on three singles. His stillness, his concentration, his burning will kept him out there, where he belonged, to the end. Lolich, too, lasted the distance, surviving an error in the seventh, a walk in the eighth, and a final, anticlimactic homer by Shannon in the ninth, which closed matters at 41. It was still the Year of the Pitcher, right to the last, but the Tiger hitters had restored the life and noise that seemed to go out of baseball this year.

THE LEAPING CORPSE, THE SHALLOW CELLAR, THE FRENCH PASTIME, THE WALKING RADIO, AND OTHER SUMMER MYSTERIES.

- August 1969 I FIRST HEARD ABOUT the death of baseball one night last December. A friend of mine, a syndicated sports columnist, called me after eleven o"clock and broke the news. "Hey," he said, "have you seen the crowds at the Jets" games lately? Unbelievable! It"s exactly like the old days at Ebbets Field. Pro football is the thing, from now on. Baseball is finished in this country. Dead." He sounded so sure of himself that I almost looked for the obituary in the Times the next morning. ("Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness. Remains on view at Cooperstown, N.Y.") Though somewhat exaggerated, my friend"s prediction proved to be a highly popular one. In the next three or four months, the negative prognosis was confirmed by resident diagnosticians representing most of the daily press, the magazines, and the networks, and even by some foreign specialists from clinics like the New Republic and the Wall Street Journal. All visited the bedside and came away shaking their heads. Baseball was sinking. Even if the old gent made it through until April and the warmer weather, his expectations were minimal-lonely wheelchair afternoons on the back porch, gruel and antibiotics, and the sad little overexcitement of his one-hundredth birthday in July. I haven"t run into my dour friend at any ball games this summer, but I doubt whether the heavy crowds and noisy excitement of the current season, which is now well into its second half, would change his mind. The idea of the imminent demise of baseball has caught on, and those who cling to it (and they are numerous) seem to have their eyes on the runes instead of that leaping corpse. This new folk belief centers on the new folk word "image." Baseball, the argument goes, has a bad image. The game is too slow and too private, and offers too little action for a society increasingly attached to violence, suddenness, and ma.s.s movement. Baseball is cerebral and unemotional; the other, fast-growing professional sports, most notably pro football, are dense, quick, complex, dangerous, and perpetually stimulating. Statistics are then cited, pointing out the two-year decline in baseball attendance, as against the permanent hot-ticket status now enjoyed by football. (Last year, the National Football League played to 87 per cent of capacity in its regular season.) A recent Harris poll is quoted, which showed football supplanting baseball for the first time as the favorite American sport. The poll, which was taken last winter, indicated that football appeals most to high-income groups and to those between thirty-five and forty-nine years old, while baseball still comes first with old people, low-income groups, and Negroes. Bad, bad image.

Most of the statisticians and poll-watchers I have talked to have declined my invitation to come along to Shea Stadium to see what"s been happening to the old game this summer, so I must pause here to make my own reading of those same bones and entrails. The decline of baseball at the box office (down from 25,132,209 in 1966 to 23,103,345 last year) has taken place over two seasons that produced only one real pennant race (in the American League in 1967) and that included last summer"s dispiriting Year of the Pitcher-a complicated phenomenon that, for various reasons, seems to have subsided. Baseball has had previous recessions, including a four-year sag from 1950 through 1953, from which it recovered brilliantly. The larger statistics are more to the point. In the nineteen-sixties, the game has been going through the wrenching, loyalty-testing business of expansion-generally with a minimum of tact and common sense-and yet it is clearly holding its own. Average seasonal attendance between 1960 and 1968, during which time the number of games played per season increased 32 per cent, is up exactly 32 per cent over the ten-year average of the nineteen-fifties, and up 55 per cent over the nineteen-forties. As for the poll, it scarcely came as news to me that pro football has a corner on the young, well-heeled, with-it crowd; this is the same audience, to judge by my own eyeball survey, that snaps up all the available tickets to another status event of short duration, the World Series. The old, the poor, and the black might even prefer football, too, if they could afford a pair of season tickets, which is now the only sure way of getting in. It"s hard to see how any of this const.i.tutes a menace to the sunshine game. It"s even more difficult to understand why Mr. Harris asked his questions in the first place. Football"s regular season encompa.s.ses fourteen weekends-from mid-September to Christmas-whereas baseball starts in April and winds up, a hundred and sixty-two games later, with the new playoffs and the World Series in October. Being forced to pick between them seems exactly like being forced into a choice between a martini and a steak dinner. Most fans, I suspect, enjoy different sports precisely because they are different, and if it"s all right with Mr. Harris I"ll take both-pro football (preferably via television, because of the instant replay) for its violence and marvelously convoluted machinery, and baseball (preferably from a seat behind first base) for its clarity, variety, slowly tightening tension, and acute pressure on the individual athlete.

Those who gave up on baseball last winter may have only been watching the carryings-on of the next of kin outside the sickroom door, who went through a screeching, months-long family wrangle sufficient to do in a less hardy patient. In December, the owners suddenly fired the Baseball Commissioner, General William D. Eckert, in what for them has become typical fashion-forcing him to commit executive hara-kiri at a press conference. General Eckert was hired in 1965, apparently because he knew absolutely nothing about baseball and thus would be certain to keep his hand off the tiller; he was fired for the same reason, when it was noticed that the unskippered vessel had drifted toward a bank of nasty-looking reefs. The closest of these, just off the bow, was a threatened players" strike over the renewal of their pension fund, centering on the allocation of funds from a new fifty-million-dollar television package. The owners" first offer was rejected by the Players a.s.sociation by a vote of 491 to 7, and the subsequent delay of any real negotiations made it clear that some owners and executives were preparing for a test of strength when spring training opened and would risk a full strike, and even a season of baseball played by bush-league replacements, on the chance that they could break the a.s.sociation and discredit its director, Marvin Miller, a professional labor leader, whose name causes some veteran front-office men to sway and clutch their desks. (This fondness for the Carnegie-Gompers era of labor relations is not unusual in the halls of baseball. Last September, American League President Joe Cronin abruptly fired two veteran umpires-Al Salerno and Bill Valentine-who had been trying to form an umpires" a.s.sociation; Cronin"s move instantly fused the new union and very nearly precipitated an umpires" strike at the World Series. Disclaiming union-busting, Cronin explained that Salerno and Valentine were "just bad umpires, that"s all." This case is now in the courts.) Meanwhile, the owners went through an unedifying two-month squabble over the selection of a new Commissioner, finally settling, out of sheer exhaustion, on a compromise temporary choice, Bowie Kuhn, who had been the National League"s attorney.

Mr. Kuhn, a tall, Princeton-educated Wall Street lawyer who has been a devout fan and student of the game, set to work instantly, advising all parties to cool it and forcing a sensible compromise that was signed just as the spring-training camps were opening. His subsequent operations have shown more sure-handedness, intelligence, and courage than have been customarily visible in the Commissioner"s office in recent decades, and it is expected that he will soon be signed to a full four-year contract. As the season began, he stood up to Judge Roy Hofheinz, the Astros" panjandrum, over a Houston-Montreal player trade that had gone sour when one of the players, Donn Clendenon, refused to play for Houston. Kuhn not only persuaded Hofheinz to accept an alternative, and inferior, player swap but extracted from him a public apology for a bad-tempered attack he had made on the Commissioner"s office. Some weeks later, Kuhn called in Ken Harrelson, the Red Sox" outfielder and bead-wearer, who had refused to be traded to the Indians, and taught him to love Cleveland. In both of these curious and difficult negotiations, Kuhn was steering away from a major test of the reserve clause-the system that requires a player to deal for his services only with the club that owns his contract. Owners, players, Congress, and the Supreme Court all know that the reserve clause is probably a violation of the ant.i.trust laws, yet its abolition would so surely destroy team ident.i.ties and year-to-year play (one can imagine two leagues of pickup teams signed up by entrepreneurs, and a David Merrick-Sol Hurok World Series) that all parties maintain an unspoken pact not to push the matter over the brink. Mr. Kuhn will have to work out an acceptable new plan to ease this persistent anomaly-probably some form of fixed recompense to all traded players. His other large problems include the financial losses suffered by the owners of losing teams and exhausted franchises-losses now far too large to be cured, as in the old days, with one swoop of a millionaire"s check-signing arm. This may even require (oxygen to the directors" room!) a partial profit-sharing among all clubs. Ahead, too, may be an enforced shortening of the present hundred-and-sixty-two-game season-plus playoffs, plus World Series-which is clearly too much for the pitchers" arms and the fans" patience. On his record to date, Mr. Kuhn looks to be the kind of Commissioner who will support baseball"s younger executives and thus at last force the game"s Cro-Magnons into common-sense planning and a grudging contemporaneity.

This is baseball"s hundredth anniversary, a centennial marking the Cincinnati Red Stockings" first professional season, and no innovation in that century has so severely tested its fans as the majors" latest expansion to twenty-four teams and four six-team divisions. Many veteran followers of the game have told me that they still have difficulty remembering the names of the new clubs or the composition of the madly named "East" and "West" divisions. (For a start, I recommend throwing away one"s Rand McNally and noting that Chicago is in the West in the American League but is officially East in the National.) What these traditionalists mourn will never come again-the time, a decade ago, when we all knew all sixteen big-league teams as well as we knew the faces and tones of voice of those sitting around the family dinner table at Thanksgiving. That began to go when four new chairs had to be squeezed in, and when several sudden divorces and remarriages added a lot of unfamiliar names to the party. Like everyone else, I was at first unhappy about the new divisional setup, but I must confess now that I have entirely changed my mind. The six-team sub-leagues, whose members play against each other eighteen times and against the teams of the other division twelve times, seem to me a perfect subst.i.tute for the departed smaller leagues, and I think that in time most fans will become specialists in the players and the standings within their own chosen division. Already the four families have taken on separate ident.i.ties and interests. The best of them this year, surely, is the National League West, where four famous old teams-the Braves, the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Reds-are locked in a dusty nonstop scrimmage that will probably go right down to the playoffs. The American League East, which includes the World Champion Tigers, the Red Sox, and the Orioles, promised equally well, but the Orioles, whose pitching and hitting have both come around simultaneously, have played the best ball in either league and now own an apparently insurmountable fourteen-game edge. The National League East, which looked to be a private hunting preserve for the Cardinals, has been saved by the Cards" early b.u.mbling and by the electrifying apotheosis of the Cubs and the Mets. Only in the American League West, where Oakland and the Minnesota Twins are conducting their rather stately maneuvers, does the luck of the draw run thin, bunching two expansion teams, the Seattle Pilots and the Kansas City Royals, with the White Sox and the Angels in a miserable heap of losers, and reminding us that this year"s shallower cellars can be just as dank and gloomy as the old abolished dungeons of eighth place.

The highest anxiety about this season centered on the hitters, whose combined efforts last year added up to a batting average of .236 (the worst in history), three hundred and forty shutout games, and a winter of rich reminiscences for most pitchers. Early this spring, Jim Maloney, of the Reds, and Don Wilson, of the Astros, pitched back-to-back no-hitters at Crosley Field, thus repeating a similarly comatose miracle of last summer, but this fearful omen vanished in the cannonade of base hits that has lately been audible on all fronts. At this writing, the averages show nineteen National League and ten American League fulltime players batting over .300, led by Rod Carew"s .370. Six of the Cincinnati Reds" regulars have a combined average of .326. The leagues" combined batting averages are up to .249, runs per game stand at 8.29 (the highest since 1962), and so many home runs (1.59 per game, or the best since 1960) are flying out of so many parks that any of a dozen sluggers may wind up with at least forty homers this year. First among the bombardiers is Reggie Jackson, a twenty-three-year-old outfielder with the Oakland Athletics. Jackson is the genuine article-a superior natural left-handed hitter with enormously powerful wrists and shoulders. His startling production of downtowners (forty to date) may bring him within range of Roger Maris"s record by mid-September. It is not quite a coincidence that Maris. .h.i.t his sixty-one homers in another expansion year, 1961; all pitching staffs have been diluted by the draft that manned the four new clubs, and the batters are happily profiting. The sudden jump in averages is equally attributable to an off-season decision to diminish the size of the strike zone and to pare down the pitcher"s mound from fifteen to ten inches. One must also ask, in a whisper, whether the ball has not been discreetly juiced. The hitting boom this season is somewhat synthetic, then, but baseball has often made such adjustments in the past; the new rulings that handicap the pitchers are an answer to previous changes in the game that helped to tip the balance their way-larger ballparks, larger pitchers, larger infielders" gloves, night ball, and the slider. No one knows yet whether the balance between hitting and pitching has been truly restored, but the joyful sound of bat on ball is once again loud in the land, and only the most obdurate purist will complain.

The flowering of Reggie Jackson is an especially happy sign, for baseball is in acute need of new superstars. A decade or two ago, the majors" lineup included such all-timers as Musial, DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, Mays, Feller, and Koufax, but now, with the retirement of the Mick, the list of one-man gate attractions is reduced to Willie Mays (now thirty-eight), Bob Gibson, and perhaps Carl Yastrzemski. Just behind them, to be sure, is a long list of remarkable ballplayers-Aaron, McCovey, McLain, Banks, Frank Robinson, Marichal, Richie Allen, Killebrew, Frank Howard, etc.-but none of them quite has the flamboyance that makes national household names. For some years now, baseball has not been signing many of the country"s finest young athletes, who have chosen instead to accept the enormous bonuses available in pro football and basketball. But this problem will end shortly, when these rival sports reach the saturation point in salaries and when a new All-American halfback or center will be unable to draw one more ticket-buyer into a sold-out stadium. From then on, there is no reason to suppose baseball will not attract its full share of future Alcindors and O.J. Simpsons. Their presence may offer some solution to the game"s most nagging current affliction-the half-dozen or so tired franchises where shabby, badly situated ballparks or vapid teams mean perpetually low attendance. Baseball"s upward path is not yet a.s.sured, and total attendance this season, though currently up by two and a half million, will still require the customary tonic of some September pennant scrambles to show us that the game is truly healthy and still keeping pace with its own expansion. I am optimistic about this, for the reas

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