The Roger Angell Baseball Collection Part 5

THE BALTIMORE VERMEERS.

- October 1970 IT WAS NOT A year to treasure, nor yet one to forget too quickly. It was a baseball season of satisfactions rather than miracles, of reasonable rather than sudden successes, and a season of much loud foolishness. Attendance and litigation were up, the pennant races and the World Series fell a bit below the wonders of recent autumns, but still there was another long summer of immense noise and involving tension to remember, and hard disappointments, too, and some splendor in the AstroTurf. Most of all, perhaps, it was a year of baseball surprises, in which the bad news, as usual, was often more interesting than the good. The New York Yankees, for example, improved themselves admirably, finis.h.i.+ng a solid second to the all-conquering Orioles in their division and compiling a 9369 won-and-lost record that was bettered, in both leagues, only by the Orioles, the Reds, and the Twins. Their reward for this fine effort was to attract one and a half million fewer fans at home than the Mets drew at Shea Stadium in the course of winning ten fewer games and finis.h.i.+ng an abject third in the National League East: the Mets' gate of 2,697,479, in fact, was the second largest total in the history of baseball. Sharing a similarly curious fortune was a field general named Larry Shepard, who was fired a year ago as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates after his team had won eighty-eight games; his successor, Danny Murtaugh, brought the Pirates home this year with eighty-nine victories and was instantly named Manager of the Year. For Denny McLain, the now erstwhile Detroit ace pitcher who won a total of fifty-five games in the '68 and '69 seasons, there was scarcely any good fortune at all. Suspended three times (twice by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and once by the Tigers) for a variety of sins that ranged from a losing venture into illegal bookmaking to throwing ice water at two sportswriters, he appeared in fourteen games and won only three. At the end of the season, he was declared "not mentally ill" by the Commissioner and was then traded to the Was.h.i.+ngton Senators, against the wishes of that team's manager, Ted Williams; McLain's sole immediate consolation may be the thought that he is now the only right-hander in the American League who is officially sane. Commissioner Kuhn also found it necessary to reprimand another pitcher-flake, Jim Bouton, whose offense was the co-authors.h.i.+p of an absorbing and comical baseball book called Ball Four. The volume, which recounts Bouton's somewhat descendant career as a pitcher with the Yankees, Pilots, and Astros, also includes frank pa.s.sages about the pregame amphetamine-popping by his teammates, about their relaxed evening habits on the road, about race prejudice and minor cheating on the field, and about the habitual patronizing and financial bullying that most players come to expect from the front office. Commissioner Kuhn did not attack the veracity of anything in the book, but he indicated his extreme displeasure with this form of memoir-thus unerringly, if unconsciously, confirming much that Bouton had said about baseball's closed mind and nervous clubbishness. Despite, or perhaps because of, this warning and the shrill accompanying cries of a good many Establishmentarian sports columnists (one of them described Bouton and his collaborator, Leonard Shecter, as "social lepers"), Ball Four remained at the upper levels of the best-seller lists all summer, and is likely to become the most successful sports book in publis.h.i.+ng history. Thus variously rewarded, Bouton gave up his losing struggle to master the knuckleball, and is now a sportscaster with a local television station. The lepers are also at work on a new volume.

Commissioner Kuhn, it can be seen, had a difficult second year in office, and should probably be listed as another victim of the legendary soph.o.m.ore jinx. Some achievements and standoffs must be granted him. A players' strike was averted through the negotiation of a wide-ranging new three-year contract with the Players a.s.sociation; the agreement raises minimum salaries and playoff and World Series bonuses, protects players cut during spring training, and establishes new grievance procedures that considerably limit the powers of the Commissioner's office. Still in abeyance, however, is the biggest issue of all-the reserve clause, which was challenged head-on this year by Curt Flood's refusal to report to the Phillies after being traded away by the Cardinals, and his subsequent suit against organized baseball. The case was heard in Federal District Court by Judge Irving Ben Cooper, who listened to fifteen sessions of testimony from owners, executives, and players, and eventually found in favor of the defendants; it was agreed by both sides, however, that the real test of baseball's right to its ancient and unique exemption from the ant.i.trust laws will come during the pending appeal to the Supreme Court. Flood, who is thirty-two, missed a full year at his trade because of his belief that he and his fellow professionals should not be sold and s.h.i.+pped from city to city like crates of oranges, but his sacrifice is still not understood by many of the same megatheriums who were so scandalized by Ball Four. When asked about Flood, they shake their heads incredulously and mutter, "How do you like that for ingrat.i.tude? He was earning ninety thousand a year!"

Outdoors, the news was brighter. Rico Carty, the Braves' ebullient left fielder, won the National League batting t.i.tle with a mark of .366-the highest average since Ted Williams' .388 thirteen years ago. In all, thirty-one hitters finished the year at .300 or better, which suggests that the recent advantage that pitchers have enjoyed over batters has been almost rebalanced. The Yankees came up with an excellent young catcher named Thurman Munson, who hit .302 in his first year, and a new twenty-game winning pitcher in Fritz Peterson. Willie Mays, who will be forty next spring (Willie Mays forty?), had a splendid season, batting .291 and hitting twenty-eight homers for the Giants, thus running his lifetime total to 628. Hank Aaron, who will be thirty-seven this winter, batted .298 and hit thirty-eight homers for the Braves, running his lifetime total to 592. And Hank Morgenweck, who is thirty-eight, worked behind second base during the National League playoff game in Pittsburgh on October 3, thus running his lifetime total of major-league games umpired to one; this record, of course, is shared by George Grygiel, Fred Blandford, and John Grimsley.

Before we move on to those playoffs and the pleasures of the quick, loud World Series just concluded by the Reds and the Orioles, attention must be paid to the painful collapse of the World Champion Mets. It was a collapse, although it didn't look that way, because the defenders remained in contention with the Pirates and the Cubs until the very last weekend of the season. From June to October, these three clubs gasped and spluttered and thrashed together at or just below the surface of first place in the National League East; whenever one of them managed two or three strokes in succession and seemed on the point of drawing clear, a clutching hand would reach out and pull it down again. Mostly, it was the Pirates who stayed on top, but the inept.i.tude of all three teams permitted the Cubs to survive one submersion of twelve straight losses without undue damage, and sustained late pennant hopes that were, in every case, richly undeserved. The Pirates' final 8973 record was the lowest winning average in the history of the big leagues.

Why the Mets failed to survive even this flabby test, falling seventeen games below their record of last year, is easy to explain but hard to understand. The 1970 Mets encountered many of the accidents and disappointments that befall almost every team in the course of the long season, and their failure to survive them must remind us that last year's Amazin's were largely free of injuries and sore arms. They were also a team of extremely limited power and reserves, which kept winning because every man on the squad seemed to come through with a key hit or clutch pitching performance at the precise instant it was needed. This year, one kept seeing the opposite. Cleon Jones, who led the team with a .340 average last year, fell into an epochal early slump that kept him close to the .200 mark until past midseason; no one appeared, from the bench or the farms, to take up this slack. The bullpen, so obdurate last year, was unreliable until mid-September, when it was too late. Jerry Koosman hurt his arm and broke his jaw, and still wound up with a 127 record-an admirable performance but less good than last year's 179, when he also missed a month of the action. Gary Gentry and Nolan Ryan were consistently inconsistent. Explanations, excuses ... What remains invisible is the weight of success that these young, all-conquering Mets brought with them into this season. So little was expected of these players last year that they could plunge headlong into every key game and series, knowing that they would not be blamed if they fell on their faces. This year, the opposite was true. I doubt whether the Mets were surprised or troubled to find every other club taking dead aim at them in every game, but what must have been much more difficult was the discovery that a second success requires different private resources and reserves from the first. (This is a hard lesson that New York people understand well; it was what made the Mets' exuberant, astonis.h.i.+ng victory last autumn seem somehow heartbreaking, too.) This summer, the Mets suffered so many difficult, late defeats in close games that no one on the team, surely, could have escaped the chilling interior doubt-the doubt that kills-whispering that their courage and brilliance last summer had been an illusion all the time, had been nothing but luck.

Of all the defeats this summer, none was quite so shocking as the loss the team suffered to the Braves in Atlanta on the night of August 15. With Tom Seaver in excellent form on the mound, the Mets led, 21, when the Braves, thanks largely to a lucky infield hit by Carty, loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the ninth. With the count one and two on Bob Tillman, Seaver wound and threw a called strike three, but the pitch was a fast ball instead of the curve that Jerry Grote had signaled for, and it sailed right by the catcher and back to the screen. The runner scored from third, and when Grote pegged wildly past Seaver, covering at the plate, the runner from second also came in, and the game was suddenly and horribly gone. That one seemed to go on hurting. It dropped the Mets four games behind the Pirates and made Seaver's record 177; he was to win only one more game the rest of the year, finis.h.i.+ng up at 1812. Of all the Mets' mysteries, this is the most mysterious. Seaver was not injured or suffering from arm exhaustion, although he did pitch with insufficient rest in the late stages of the race. Throughout September, he made no excuses, except to say that the problem was technical-his left leg was getting too far ahead of his body in his delivery, subtly altering his timing. Yet he looked worse and worse as the season ran out, being hit by humpty-dumpty batters who had never touched him before, and even fielding his position poorly. Tom Seaver is a complicated young man who has enjoyed extraordinary success at his profession, and any tentative explanation of his sudden downfall must also be complicated, beginning with the instant reminder that it was a "downfall" only in comparison with his own past record; his 1812 mark was below last year's 257, but he still led the league this year with an earned-run average of 2.81 and two hundred and eighty-three strikeouts. And here, perhaps, is a clue. Last year, Seaver came within two outs of pitching a perfect game, that finest of all baseball feats, and during the early part of this season it sometimes looked as if his personal goal, in a career that had quickly brought him almost every other achievement, was to win that game back-to attain, if only once, perfection on the mound. Several times this spring, he came unscathed to the middle innings, only to see a scratchy infield hit trickle through or a bloop fly drop in against him and ruin things. He was visibly angry at such times, kicking the mound and glaring at the base-runner; later, he was curt and haughty with reporters. At about the same time, Seaver began striking out more hitters than ever before. He tied a record by fanning nineteen batters in a game against the Padres, during which he set another all-time mark by striking out ten batters in a row. This is impressive but just possibly fatal. As real fans know, a pitcher who strikes out a great many men in a game is often working at less than his best level; a blend of whiffs, grounders, and flies is more effective, and much easier on the arm. What suggests itself, then, is that, subtly and perhaps unconsciously, Seaver began relying too often on his hummer, his strikeout pitch, to get him out of difficulties in a hard season. This is what happened in Atlanta that night, and it may have gone on happening, even to the point where he imperceptibly altered the natural and beautiful rhythm that had made him almost indomitable. In trying for perfection, he may have suffered the first true defeat of his life.

And yet, and yet ... Even down to late September, a reprieve, a tarnished but acceptable second miracle, seemed quite possible for the Mets. The last fourteen days of the schedule offered seven games with Pittsburgh and four with Chicago. The Mets lost the first two games to the Pirates at Shea on September 18 and 19, each by an excruciating one-run margin, and slid into third place, two games behind the Cubs and three and a half back of the leaders. Then, on the twentieth, the largest home crowd of the year-54,806-turned out for the Sunday doubleheader. Long before game time, there were turned-away fans standing three-deep on the roofs of some parked buses behind the visiting-team bullpen in left field; they stood there, craning and hoping, all through the warm late-summer afternoon. They were rewarded with a superb performance by Jerry Koosman in the opener. Tendonitis has robbed Koosman of his old, sweeping fast ball, but he is perhaps more of a pitcher now than ever before. Working resolutely, always around the corners, he served up an a.s.sortment of down-breaking curves and changes that set down the first fifteen Pirate batters in order. Jose Pagan hit a home run to lead off the sixth, but by that time the home side had compiled a modest three runs, and Jerry gave the Pirates only one other hit, winning 41. Now! A sweep would put us back in the thick of things. Seaver was opposed by a young pitcher named Fred Cambria, who was in only his second year of organized ball, yet it was Seaver who was instantly in difficulties, giving up singles and loud outs in profusion. Some good luck and a costly Pirate error kept it tied at 22 until the sixth, when Tom departed amid a shower of hits and boos-a sound I never expected to hear directed at him-and the score went to 52 against the Mets. Stubbornly, almost sullenly, they rallied-a Boswell homer in the sixth, three hits in the seventh-to tie it once more at 55, to an enormous storm of shouting, but the effort clearly exhausted them. The visitors' Willie Stargell hit a homer off McGraw to open the tenth, and a moment or two later Tommy Agee and Rod Gaspar collided in right field, not far from the site of Agee's second famous catch in the World Series last year, and Gene Alley's liner rolled all the way to the wall. The Pirates won, 95, and the two-year age of wonders came to its end. Official extinction descended a week later, when the Mets dropped three more games in Pittsburgh, all of them by one-run margins. In the seven key games against the Pirates, they had batted into sixteen double plays and stranded no fewer than sixty-six base-runners, which is the mark of an old, old ball team.

The most riveting figures visible on the first day of the National League playoffs between the Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds at Pittsburgh's new Three Rivers Stadium were neither the home team's conglomeration of old and young hitters-Roberto Clemente and Manny Sanguillen, Willie Stargell and Rich Hebner, Bill Mazeroski and Bob Robertson-nor even such celebrated Red cannoneers as Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Lee May, and Pete Rose; they were the umpires, the aforementioned Messrs. Morgenweck, Grygiel, Blandford, and Grimsley, who had been hastily summoned up from the minors (and into the Trivia Hall of Fame) to replace the regular six-man National League crew, which had that day (O tempora! O Bill Klem!) gone on strike for higher playoff and World Series wages. The American League umps working the Orioles-Twins playoffs in Minnesota were also out. Negotiations between the Umpires a.s.sociation and the Commissioner's office had dragged on in a desultory fas.h.i.+on for some weeks, with no more than a couple of thousand dollars separating the two, and it seemed clear that no one had truly expected the issue to be drawn. Thus, it was not until just before game time that the strikers slipped their painted-cardboard sandwich signs ("Major League Umpires on Strike for Wages") over their uniforms and formed a ragged self-conscious picket line outside the stadium. One of them, Harry Wendelstedt, kept explaining to entering fans that he felt embarra.s.sed about the whole thing. "I'm a professional man," he said. "I belong out on that ballfield, not here looking like a clown." Whatever irresolution might have been indicated by this remark was probably dispersed when Warren Giles, the former president of the National League, shook hands with Wendelstedt on entering the park and then turned to a nearby special cop and said, "Move 'em away from here-about a mile and a half away." The umps stood fast, and during the afternoon their number increased as more of their colleagues arrived from around the country and joined the line.

Inside, and almost incidentally, the ball game went on-fortunately, without any especially difficult calls to challenge the bush-league bluecoats. The matchup brought together teams both known for their good hitters and their aching pitchers. Both had compiled a team average of .270; the Reds had led the league in homers, the Pirates in hits; throughout the season, both had been forced to rely heavily on bullpen veterans and newly called-up young fireballers to help out a corps of starting pitchers who sometimes seemed to be made of blown gla.s.s. Expecting a bombardment, we were given, of course, a pitching duel-a languid Indian-summer afternoon of pop fouls and infield outs, only occasionally vivified when the starters, Gary Nolan for the Reds and Dock Ellis for the Pirates, worked out of mild jams. I had plenty of time to study the new ballpark, which is situated just across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh's downtown Golden Triangle, and to wonder how ballplayers nowadays can remember which town they are playing in as they look up at the same tiered, brightly painted circles of seats that, rising above fields of fake gra.s.s, identically and anonymously surround them in so many big-league cities. More and more, these stadia remind one of motels or airports in their perfect and dreary usefulness; they are no longer parks but machines for sports. In time, though, I found the difference here-an immense gla.s.sed-in dining room and bar called the Allegheny Club, which occupies much of the third and fourth tiers beyond first base at Three Rivers Stadium, permitting affluent locals (who may also lease private boxes, at a price of $38,000 for five years) to take their baseball la carte. Pittsburgh has six chandeliers in right field. It also, on this particular day, had some twenty thousand bright orange empty seats in upper center field-an embarra.s.sing reminder that these Champions.h.i.+p Series, as the postseason playoffs are officially known, have not yet won the fealty of the fans. I was aroused from these reveries by the first loud, sharp noise of the day as Ty Cline, a Cincinnati pinch-hitter, led off the tenth inning with a triple past Clemente in right field; a moment or two later, he trotted in with the first run of the game, and then Lee May drove in two more with a double to left, and the Reds won it, 30.

I got to the stadium early the next day, but not as early as the striking umpires, who had set up their picket line at five in the morning and now had the place b.u.t.toned up like Fort Knox. Pittsburgh, of course, is a union town, and the various locals representing the stadium's ushers, ticket-takers, groundskeepers, electricians, and such enforced a total embargo in honor of the umps' grievance. It was a chill, blowy day, and we all milled around together cheerfully under the fortress walls-strikers, unioneers, fans, reporters, Baseball Annies, cops, photographers, and excited small boys. Negotiations, we were told, were in progress within. Umpires Doug Harvey and Paul Pryor gave out autographs and TV interviews like a couple of Musials, and once a cigar-smoking shop steward pushed forward through the crowd to rumble loud reminders of solidarity at the driver of an approaching cab, who, it turned out, was merely lost. Then, just an hour before game time, the word came: "It's over!" National League President Chub Feeney and Jack Reynolds, the lawyer for the Umpires a.s.sociation, announced together that negotiations would be resumed in good faith; later that week, the two sides settled on umpires' fees of $4000 per man for the playoffs and $7500 ($8000 after 1972) for the World Series-a fair sum, it might seem, for a handful of games, but one that each umpire will draw, in rotation with his fellows, only every five years or so. The whole impa.s.se, in retrospect, seemed faintly bush, but it had been a very near thing. That morning, one Pirates executive had approached another inside the empty park and said, "Look, if this strike isn't cleared up, do you think you could ask Clemente and some of the other players if they'd mind helping take up the tarpaulin?"

"Who," said his a.s.sociate, paling, "me?"

The victorious umpires received a fat round of boos from the fans as they came onto the field, but then lapsed into invisibility when the baseball began. Better baseball, too. Bobby Tolan, the quick young Cincinnati center fielder, gave us an edifying lesson in one o'cat, scoring the Reds' first run on a single, a stolen base, an error, and a wild pitch; their second run on a prodigious homer to right center; and their third and final run on another single and a dash around the bases on Tony Perez' double. The home team, having put up fourteen straight goose eggs on the board, sc.r.a.ped together a run in the sixth, but Sparky Anderson, the Reds' manager, called in a nineteen-year-old left-hander named Don Gullett, who retired Willie Stargell with two men on and blew down the Pirates the rest of the way. Gullett, who was pitching for his high school in Kentucky a year and a half ago, throws hard; afterward, his catcher, Johnny Bench, said, "He can throw the ball through a car wash and not get it wet."

The playoffs now moved along to Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, which is another 1970-model four-decker, but with different accessories: no chandeliers, AstroTurf instead of Tartan Turf underfoot, and no dirt on the base paths, which have utterly vanished except for a miniature sandbox around each base. (Ballplayers, it must be said, are almost unanimous in their praise of these new surfaces, which improve their fielding averages by eliminating the bad bounce. A thrown or batted ball jumps off the ungra.s.s with such alacrity that anything hit up the left- or right-field power alley almost invariably streaks through for extra bases, but outfielders who remember to keep their pegs down low-for the bounce-suddenly discover that they all have developed shotgun arms. All this, of course, has changed the game in ways that have yet to be measured-if anyone should ever care to conduct such useless, ex post facto researches.) Now facing deletion in the three-out-of-five series, the Pirates painstakingly worked the Reds' starter, Tony Cloninger, for a run in the first inning. In the bottom half, however, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench hit two b.a.l.l.s over the left-field fence in such quick proximity and succession that the second resembled an instant-replay shot of the first. The Pirates retied in at 22 in the fifth, but Anderson brought in another postp.u.b.escent from the bullpen, a twenty-year-old right-hander named Milt Wilc.o.x, who quickly restored order. The crowd, larger and much noisier than the Pittsburgh turnouts, now sensed whatever it is that can so often be sensed about the outcome of a tight, important game; they kept up a happy, expectant screeching, even though Bob Moose, the Pittsburgh starter, was now pitching almost indomitably, setting down nineteen of twenty Redleg batters in a row. Sure enough-with two out in the eighth, Moose walked Ty Cline, and then had to face Pete Rose, who is perhaps the world's most dangerous. .h.i.tter in such a situation. Rose singled. Thinking hard, Murtaugh now brought in a lefty, Joe Gibbon, to throw to left-handed Bob Tolan, but Tolan took two quick strikes and then poked a wrong-field single to left on the next pitch, bringing in Cline with what turned out to be the deciding run. The Orioles, the scoreboard announced, were champions again, having wiped out the Twins in three straight for the second year in a row. And here, minutes later, Don Gullett was in again to retire the last Pirate batter, and the Reds were champions too. Time for the champagne: champagne over everybody and everything, champagne all over the nice red rug on the clubhouse floor, and also-hoo, hoo! ho, ho!-all over the Reds' other rug, which is Lee May's hairpiece.

All of us, I think, had been waiting through the summer for this Series and for the collision of these two enormous teams. Both had utterly flattened the opposition in their divisions, holding first place unchallenged after April. The Reds' three sluggers, Perez, Bench, and May, had combined for a hundred and nineteen home runs-a total six entire teams failed to reach this year-and three hundred and seventy-one runs batted in. Bench, the Reds' leader and, at twenty-two, already one of the finest catchers in baseball history, had led both leagues with forty-five homers and a hundred and forty-eight RBIs. Against this, the Orioles could offer Boog Powell (thirty-five homers), the two famous Robinsons, three twenty-game-winning pitchers-Cuellar (248), McNally (249), and Palmer (2010)-and a hovering, almost visible smolder of resentment over the team's unexpected beating by the Mets last fall.

The opener, back at Riverfront Stadium, brought the expected early clang of armor-a Lee May homer and three quick Cincinnati runs, which were instantly won back on homers by Powell and Elrod Hendricks, the Baltimore catcher. It was still 33 in the bottom of the sixth, when Lee May, leading off, rifled a hard grounder to left; Brooks Robinson, the Orioles' thirty-three-year-old perennial third baseman, leaped to his right, speared the ball cross-handed just above the base, and, whirling and throwing in the same instant, let go a fallaway peg from foul ground that got to first on the bounce and still nipped the runner. This wonder (not an unexpected wonder for those of us who remembered Robinson's play in last year's Series) saved a double, and made possible the famous and disorderly scene that now began after Bernie Carbo walked and was singled to third. Ty Cline, pinch-hitting, chopped at a Jim Palmer pitch and bounced it high in the air, directly in front of the plate. Hendricks stepped forward, waiting for the ball to descend, and Carbo suddenly and foolishly set sail for the plate. Home-plate umpire Ken Burkhart, apparently forgetting all about the base-runner, stepped forward to see if the ball would come down fair or foul, and Jim Palmer, approaching from the mound, had an incomparable view of the ensuing carnage.

"I knew Carbo was coming," he said later. "I could hear him-clomp, clomp, clomp-on the AstroTurf, so I yelled to Hendricks, 'Tag him! Tag him!'" Carbo slid, Hendricks whirled and lunged for him, and Burkhart, now horribly resembling a dog on a highway, was struck simultaneously from two directions. He landed on the seat of his pants, facing the outfield, but bravely raised his fist in the air for the "out" sign. That settled the matter, of course, though dissenting views were delivered by Carbo, Sparky Anderson, and 51,531 other expert witnesses. The Reds lost the game in the next inning, 43, when Brooks Robinson lofted a high sailer into the alley behind the left-field fence. Detailed-sequence photographs in the papers the next day reminded one of the fatal business at Sarajevo. They clearly showed that all three partic.i.p.ants had failed in their missions: Carbo never touched the plate, Hendricks tagged the runner with his glove but not the ball, and Burkhart, trying to look down the small of his back, did not see the play.

The Reds briskly disposed of Cuellar in the second game, racking him for three runs in the first inning and a Tolan homer in the third; more damage impended, but Brooks Robinson jumped for a hard shot by Lee May and turned it into a double play, and Boog Powell, for the second day in a row, began the Orioles' catch-up with a fourth-inning homer. They did more than just catch up this time; in the fifth, five singles drove out the Reds' starter, Jim McGlothlin, and then Elrod Hendricks, who bats left-handed, barely clipped a pitch with the very tip of his flailing bat, banking it the wrong way, over third, and driving in the fifth and sixth Baltimore runs-a piece of pure bad baseball luck that cost the Reds the game. Bench hit a subsequent homer that brought it up to 65, but the home-towners could do nothing against the Orioles' relief pitcher, d.i.c.k Hall, who set down the last seven batters in order. d.i.c.k Hall is a Baltimore inst.i.tution, like crab cakes. He is six feet six and one-half inches tall and forty years old, and he pitches with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud. He throws a sneaky fast ball and never, or almost never, walks batters; he has given up exactly twenty unintentional bases on b.a.l.l.s in the past four hundred and eighteen innings, dating back to 1965. Hall is almost bald; he has ulcers, a degree in economics from Swarthmore, a Mexican wife, four children, and an off-season job as a certified public accountant; and he once startled his bullpen mates by trying to estimate mathematically how many drops of rain were falling on the playing field during a shower. After the game, I saw d.i.c.k Hall laughing and talking with teammates and reporters in the clubhouse, with a crust of dried Gelusil on his lower lip; his pitching opponent for the last two innings had been Don Gullett, the nineteen-year-old, and I suddenly wondered which of the two would remember this day longer.

On to Baltimore, then, to real (if rather scruffy) gra.s.s, and, for the next two games, to the awed further inspection of that other local monument, Brooks Robinson. Long ago, his teammates adopted a cool, unsurprised tone, which is part put-on, in discussing Robinson's feats. "Oh, that's nothing," they say to a sportswriter or rival player about some dusty new miracle behind third. "Brooks does that sort of thing all the time." In the third game-a 93 laugher that was settled in the sixth, when Oriole pitcher Dave McNally hit a grand-slam homer-Brooks Robinson hit two doubles and batted in two runs, snuffed out a Cincinnati threat in the first with a nifty double play, robbed Tommy Helms in the second by das.h.i.+ng in for a grab and flip of his slow bouncer, and broke Johnny Bench's heart in the sixth with a full-length portside dive to snare Bench's liner in the top of his glove webbing, some four inches above the ground. The Series had given us so many of these Brooksian masterpieces, in fact, that I found myself beginning to collect and compare them in memory, like Vermeers. After the game, Oriole manager Earl Weaver merely smiled and said, "Yes, I've enjoyed watching him," but the unhappy Reds' pilot, Sparky Anderson, kept shaking his head and muttering, "He's the whole Series so far." Pete Rose, glumly pointing a thumb upward, said, "Brooks Robinson belongs in a Higher League."

During the fourth game, the following afternoon, Brooks Robinson did nothing much in the field, but he put in a useful day at the plate, rapping a homer and three singles in four trips. It looked to be a quick and nearly monotheistic Series as Baltimore moved smoothly out to a 53 lead. Then, in the eighth, with the season running down and the Reds' power coming to the plate for perhaps the last time this year, Tony Perez worked Jim Palmer for a walk, and Johnny Bench singled solidly to left. Eddie Watt, a right-handed reliever, came in for the Orioles. He warmed, then got his sign, stretched and threw, and Lee May hammered the pitch into the deeper part of the deep-left-field bleachers; none of the Baltimore infielders even turned to watch the flight of the ball. The Reds' best reliever, Clay Carroll, set down the home side in the eighth and ninth, and the Reds won it, 65. It was the Orioles' first defeat in the past eighteen games, and even a few of the Baltimore rooters must have sensed that the Reds, who had reached the Orioles' pitchers for twenty-nine hits so far, had deserved at least this one evening of renewed hope and raised voices. Lee May, laughing, said, "I got hold of it! Had to keep it away from that Hoover Robinson, you know. He's been suckin' up everything I sent down his way." Johnny Bench, deadly serious, said, "We've really got a shot now. We win it tomorrow and it's back to our home park, and then let's see who takes it all."

Bench didn't quite convince me then, but he almost did in the first inning the next afternoon, when he singled and Pete Rose and Lee May and Hal McRae all doubled, to score three lightning-fast runs off Mike Cuellar. Earl Weaver convened a mound conference with his ace and, having seen something that was entirely invisible to everyone else in the park, left Cuellar in the game. This, of course, is what managers are paid for; Cuellar did not give up another hit until the seventh inning, by which time the game and the Series and the season were, in effect, over. The Other Robinson-Frank-had started things off with a two-run homer in the bottom of the first, and then there were two more Oriole runs in the second and still two more in the third, and it became clear that the Reds' pitching, which had never been in true health, was at last finished. With the Orioles leading by 73, Brooks Robinson came up to bat in the eighth, fanned, and returned to the dugout to the accompaniment of what may stand for some time as the longest and loudest standing ovation given to a ballplayer who has just struck out. And then, in the ninth, Brooks returned the compliment prettily-another airborne flight across third base, to grab Bench's lead-off liner. Afterward, after Baltimore had won the game by 93 and the Series by 41, Pete Rose sat in the quiet Reds' clubhouse and said, "That last shot? Oh, that was nothing for Brooks. That's nothing for him." Quite right, and so let us conclude by saying only that there were several of us who, along with Earl Weaver, enjoyed watching the Orioles' third baseman play baseball this autumn, when he and his teammates entirely destroyed what has sometimes (but never so late) been called the Big Red Machine.

PART OF A SEASON: BAY AND BACK BAY.

- June 1971.

BASEBALL, IT SEEMS, HAS declared an advance special dividend for 1971. The old mutual concern, barely a third of the way into its new business year, has rarely found itself in such splendid early fettle, and its supporters have already been enriched beyond their customary late-summer expectations. These are the latest market quotations on some of the firm's gilt-edge securities: Oliva, .371; W. Davis, .357; Brock, .352; Torre, .351; Mays, .323; Frank Robinson, .308; Kaline, .321; Brooks Robinson, .304, after a recent sell-off; and the junior Alou Freres, Ltd.-Jesus, .333, and Mateo, .316. Good performances have also been recorded by such comparatively recent issues as Kranepool (.309), Staub (.325), Murcer (a resounding .359), and a new high-flier called Garr of Atlanta (.349). Having thus bankrupted my supply of financial metaphors (even without mention of Bobby Bonds or a Blue Chip named Vida), I will go on to observe, more plainly, that the sluggers have been busily at work, too. The Pirates' Willie Stargell has twenty-one homers currently in hand, which represents something of a slump from his record opening burst of eleven in April; Hank Aaron has wafted nineteen, Johnny Bench sixteen, Bonds fifteen, and Billy Williams and Orlando Cepeda fourteen each. The American League long-ball hitters are a bit laggard, but it is unsafe to a.s.sume that Yastrzemski, Frank Howard, Harmon Killebrew, and the rest will not suddenly catch up in the course of some loud, hot summer week. And the pitching-well, the pitching, in both leagues, has been of such a quality that one cannot entirely understand who it is all these hitters have been swinging against. Vida Blue, the phenomenal young Oakland fireballer, has struck out a hundred and twenty-five batters in a hundred and thirty innings, and has a record of 13 wins and 2 losses. Mike Cuellar, of the Orioles, stands at 10 and 1; Larry Dierker, of the Astros, at 10 and 2; and the Cardinals' Steve Carlton at 10 and 3. At this rate, all of them have a crack at winning thirty games or more this year. Four pitchers with six or more decisions to their credit have earned-run averages of less than two runs per game-Cooperstown stuff.

Attendance, unsurprisingly is up-a jump of about 220,000 in the American League and better than 358,000 in the National League. The more modest AL mark is probably the more significant, since the NL totals include an artificial boost attributable to the opening of the Phillies' new ballpark, Veterans Stadium. But even the White Sox, still resident in ancient Comiskey Park and holding what has been recently considered an exhausted franchise, have almost doubled their attendance so far this year. Statistics bore everybody but the superfan (who already knows them anyway), but these are offered with a purpose: to me they suggest that in 1971 most of the baseball news is being made out on the playing field, instead of in the courts or in the front office, its habitat in recent years. And even the kind of baseball happening that is not easily encapsulated in a box score seems to have an unusual savor in this unusual season. There has been the brief retirement of Clete Boyer, the Atlanta third baseman, who almost talked himself out of baseball because he could not bear the character of his general manager, Paul Richards, and said so, repeatedly. Also the bemus.e.m.e.nt of Alex Johnson, the Angels' defending American League batting champion, who has walked himself into semi-permanent suspension because he cannot bear to run on the base paths. Also the self-exile of Carl Taylor, a Kansas City outfielder who, dissatisfied with his own professional performance, pushed at an umpire, punched a teammate, and set fire to his uniform in the clubhouse before departing the pastime for a period of time.

Baseball thrives on personality, but the cult of the team is even more essential to its well-being than the cult of the star. Two decades ago, the sixteen major-league clubs were entirely distinguishable; one knew them by heart and could recognize them as quickly and surely as one recognized the different flavors in a jar of sourb.a.l.l.s. Now there are twenty-four teams, split into four subdivisions, and, because of expansion and the s.h.i.+fting and scattering of franchises, there sometimes seem to be no more than half a dozen teams that are known to us-not just the names of their stars or managers but the way they play ball, the way they look on the field, the way they are remembered. Only sharper compet.i.tion, marked by the arrival of new challengers at the upper levels of contention, can alter this, and it is precisely that phenomenon which has brought such a sense of quickening and excitement to the young season. Who does not know the news? The Baltimore Orioles, who so admirably and drearily discouraged all opposition in their division for the past two years, took wing in rather leaden fas.h.i.+on this year, thus permitting hope in such unexpected places as Boston and Detroit; the world champions have only recently retaken their accustomed topmost perch, and there may be a good deal of teetering and flapping there before all is secure. Meanwhile, the American League West has been entirely dominated by the startling Oakland A's, a team heretofore notable only for its white baseball shoes and the Caligulan whims of its owner, Charles O. Finley, who has fired ten managers in ten years. The National League East is once again the scene of a two- or three-team fight that may not be resolved until the final days or hours of the season. The contenders-the Cardinals, Mets, and Pirates-have offered a sustained lesson in different styles of winning baseball; the best of the three may be the Cardinals, back from two years of utter despond, whose new style is. .h.i.tting. The Cincinnati Reds, last year's pennant winners, are in disarray, their pitching almost nonexistent and the other parts of the Big Red Machine sputtering badly or in the repair shop. Their demise was predicted even before the season started; their successors at the top of the National League West, everyone agreed, were to be the Dodgers-an excellent prediction entirely ignored by the San Francisco Giants, who almost ran away from the field in the first six weeks. Many of these clubs, it will be noticed, have honored, familiar names, but as 1971 contenders they are not at all the same good old clubs we thought we knew-as we may discover when we call on the good old (or, in most ways, much better and not so old) Giants in their airy seaside home.

Before that journey, though, a brief further look should be directed at the Mets, whose baseball personality has subtly altered. Last year, the memory of their brilliant, unforgettable success of the previous autumn seemed to hang on them like a sea anchor. They played somberly, warily, and, in the end, exhaustedly, as if they had forgotten how many games they had once captured on sheer exuberance. This season is much more like '69; the players are mature, but one sometimes catches glimpses on the field of that same mad young expectation-the conviction that the team just might win every single game from now to October. This is a hope still unreinforced by such baseball realities as the long ball. The team has won on hitting by gentle belters like Jerry Grote, Dave Marshall, and Bud Harrelson, and by the surprise of the year, if not the century, Eddie Kranepool, now in his tenth summer in a Mets uniform. The pitching has been excellent, of course-most especially the bullpen of McGraw, Taylor, and Frisella-and Nolan Ryan has succeeded Jerry Koosman as the stopper next to G.o.d, Tom Seaver. Watching Ryan work can be wearing; a typical Ryan inning (as confirmed by my scorecard of a recent game against Houston) consists of a walk, another walk, a swinging strikeout, another swinging strikeout, another walk, and a line drive straight into the glove of the right fielder. One way or another, he gets the job done-he has won six games so far, and has an earned-run average of 1.72. For that matter, watching the Mets in almost any game can be exhausting; things are often settled, along about the ninth or tenth or eleventh inning, by a piece of wild baseball luck-an enemy drive that just falls foul, or a Metsian screamer that suddenly becomes the game-closing DP. This kind of baseball requires a superior infield, enormous team courage, and strong-hearted, insatiable fans-exactly what the Mets have the most of.

Giant fans are famous front-runners. Made wary over the years by the Giants' obligatory June swoon and patented furious, insufficient September rush, which have kept the team habitually in second place, the fans have stayed away from Candlestick Park in notable numbers. It is in many ways an excellent place to avoid-a dour, wind-whipped gray concrete tureen that is currently being enlarged, of all things, so that it may similarly test the loyalties of pro football fans this autumn. When I arrived there on a Friday night in mid-May, I thought for a moment that I would be just in time for the Forty-Niners' opening kickoff, because the fans around me were accoutered in mackinaws, scarves, gloves, and watch caps, and carrying steamer rugs and Thermosed fortifiers. But they were baseball fans, in sensible Bay-side evening attire, who had finally appeared in real numbers to see the beginning of a three-game set against the Dodgers and warily to encourage their Giants, off to the greatest start in their history, with a lead of eight full games in their division. The Dodgers added to the wind-chill factor with two instantaneous runs on a long double by Willie Davis, but rea.s.surance was quickly supplied. The second home-sider to come to the plate was Chris Speier, a thin twenty-year-old shortstop, still only in his second year of organized baseball, who has nailed together the Giant infield for the first time in a decade and driven San Franciscans into an uncharacteristic tizzy of admiration; he lofted one of Al Downing's pitches up into the westerly gale, which carried it over the right-field fence. The next pitch was. .h.i.t somewhat more firmly by Willie Howard Mays and disappeared in the direction of San Leandro. It was Speier's first major-league homer (he waved his clenched fist in the air as he rounded the bases), and, with its successor, it raised the record for most combined home runs by a still active shortstop and center fielder on the same team to six hundred and thirty-seven.

The game was a brisk, noisy affair that kept us continuously, if not warmly, entertained. The Giants went ahead on the second of Willie McCovey's three hits, were pa.s.sed in the fourth on a two-run Dodger homer by Duke Sims, and then put the game away, 84, in the seventh on a long succession of singles, walks, sacrifices, and Dodger mistakes. Dodger manager Walter Alston made two defensive infield s.h.i.+fts in this inning, and each of his specialists committed an error-the kind of gift that streaking teams like the Giants accept without surprise.

The next afternoon, another big crowd, now rea.s.sured by the Giants' nine-game lead, saw an even better game-a vivid pitchers' battle between the Dodgers' Bill Singer and the perennial Juan Marichal, who has won more games for the Giants than anyone except Carl Hubbell and Christy Mathewson. The innings zipped along, and, washed in suns.h.i.+ne and a river of clean ocean air, I had plenty of time to admire the new Giants and sympathize with the new Dodgers. The Los Angelenos' Willie Davis, now resplendent in the largest Afro in baseball, is. .h.i.tting the ball and playing the outfield as never before in his life; his celebrated new teammate Richie Allen is also hitting the ball as never before-which is to say that he is hardly hitting it at all. The Giants, so far, have been entirely free of such mysteries and bad luck. Willie McCovey has sore knees, but they do not prevent him from batting with his old exciting, scythe-swinger's style. The pitching, recently no deeper than Marichal and g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, has been firmed up by admirable younger arms belonging to Ron Bryant and Steve Stone and a reliever named Jerry Johnson, whose ERA at this writing is 0.70. The outfielders-Mays, Ken Henderson, and Bobby Bonds-are wonderfully fast afoot, an essential attribute on Candlestick's slick AstroTurf, which now covers the whole infield except for dirt cutouts around the mound and the bases. (The all-chemical lawn is perhaps forgivable at Candlestick, for it has done away with the appalling dust storms that used to swirl among the cowering partic.i.p.ants.) Chris Speier, I suspect, is a model of baseball's infielder of the future, the AstroPlayer-wide-ranging, with extremely quick hands and the ability to get off deep, rifle-shot throws with almost no visible arm-c.o.c.king or windup. Old-time Giant front-office men think he may turn out to be the finest Giant shortstop since Travis Jackson, back in the early thirties. (Speier, by the way, is a local product, who still lives at home in Alameda, across the Bay. His fourteen-year-old brother, Bill, one may imagine, is grappling with something of a sibling problem this year. When a reporter recently asked Speier if Bill gave him much flak at the family's breakfast table, the new star shrugged and said, "Not much. I mean, what can he say?") Candlestick's cla.s.sic pastime-and the best entertainment in baseball this year-is watching Willie Mays. Now just turned forty, and beginning his twenty-first year in the majors, he is. .h.i.tting better than he has. .h.i.t at any time in the past six or seven seasons, and playing the game with enormous visible pleasure. Veteran curators in the press box like to expound upon various Maysian specialties-the defensive gem, the basket catch, the looped throw, the hitched swing, and so forth. My favorite is his base-running. He may have lost a half-second or so in getting down to first base, but I doubt whether Willie Davis or Ralph Garr or any of the other new flashes can beat Mays from first to third, or can accelerate just as he does, with his whole body suddenly seeming to sink lower when, taking his turn at first and intently following the distant ball and outfielder, he suddenly sees his chance. Watching him this year, seeing him drift across a base and then sink into full speed, I noticed all at once how much he resembles a marvelous skier in midturn down some steep pitch of fast powder. n.o.body like him.

No one knows how long Mays can sustain all this. He will sit out perhaps thirty or forty games this year, resting, but the only other concession to age is his habit, in a Giants' half when he is unlikely to come to bat, of sitting down with the pitchers out in the right-field bullpen, thus saving himself the trip to the dugout. His real race with his years is measured-in the mind of the public, at least-in that perpetual comparison with Babe Ruth's home-run record of 714. Willie is at 641 as this is written, and he will need three homer-productive years-say, twenty-five more this season, then thirty, then twenty-to make it. I doubt whether he will quite run the course-but I care much less about his breaking the record than I care that the last Mays homer, whenever it comes and whatever its number, be struck with joy.

The Singer-Marichal matchup sailed scorelessly along into the later innings, with the Dodgers seeming to have a little the better of it. Singer was striking out Giants in cl.u.s.ters, while Marichal-who throws like some enormous and dangerous farm implement-was putting men on but still managing to get through innings on no more than eight or ten pitches. Mays led off the seventh and took a huge cut at a Singer fast ball, kicking up a puff of dust in the batter's box as he missed. Singer now craftily essayed a curve (the strategy of pitchers is limited), which Willie leaped at and lined into deepest left field for a double. It was the Giants' first hit of the game, and a few moments later d.i.c.k Dietz, the excellent Giant catcher, delivered the second-a single that scored Mays with the only run of the afternoon. Afterward, in his clubhouse office, Giant manager Charlie Fox poured a little Galway Mist for a visiting reporter and said, "It's always useful to watch him play this game. You know he moves the players around out in the field? h.e.l.l, he's been in this game twenty years-he's picked up a couple of pointers. Yes, it's a nice feeling to come to the ballpark every day and know he's on your side. The leader is still leading."

Charlie Fox, who has been in the Giant organization for thirty years, ascending to the helm last May, gets along splendidly with Willie Mays. ("We're like brothers," Fox says, "only I'm the big brother.") The center fielder, who has a distaste for time-wasting, occasionally posed difficulties for some of Fox's less accomplished predecessors. A few seasons ago, when Willie was suffering through an epochal slump, striking out repeatedly or popping up in crucial situations, it occurred to the Giant management that their star might benefit from a checkup by an oculist. Somehow, neither the manager nor any of his coaches nor anyone in the front office felt any eagerness to make this suggestion to Mays, and eventually somebody approached a San Francisco sportswriter named Charles Einstein, who is a biographer and close friend of Willie's, and asked if he would undertake the mission. A little startled, Einstein agreed, and a few days later he greeted Mays near the batting cage. The exchange, Einstein says, went like this: EINSTEIN: Er-say, Buck [some of Mays' friends call him Buck], have you noticed how many players are wearing gla.s.ses this year?

MAYS: Like who?

EINSTEIN: Well, let's see.... Oh, yes-Howard. Frank Howard is wearing gla.s.ses now.

MAYS: He ain't hittin' either.

The subject was never reopened.

On Sunday, a sellout crowd confidently turned out to watch another Dodger-Giant pitching cla.s.sic-Claude Osteen vs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry-and a further extension of the home team's infinitely extensible lead. It was Cap Day at Candlestick, and the rows of kids in the top deck, each wearing a dark baseball cap with white central insignia, looked exactly like a congress of racc.o.o.ns. Noise and delight everywhere-except, it turned out, on the playing field. The ball kept coming loose in the infield; there were four errors in the first two innings and eight errors in all, and at one point t.i.to Fuentes, the Giants' second baseman, struck out on a wild pitch and eventually came around to score. That kind of baseball. Still, all seemed saved when the Giants pulled ahead on a three-run homer by Bobby Bonds in the sixth, but then Don McMahon, the Giants' elderly relief pitcher, found it impossible to get anybody out during his eight-hundred-and-forty-ninth (and perhaps his worst) lifetime mound appearance; Chris Speier, in an admirably eager and youthful but absolutely hopeless and mistaken attempt at a double play, threw a ball away that he should have held on to; the Dodgers scored six runs in the last two innings, beating their old rivals by 96; and the San Francisco fans went home with the anxiously renewed knowledge under their new caps that the season still had a few weeks to run after all.

Ten days later, I paid a visit to the American League side of San Francis...o...b..y, calling upon the other surprise of this baseball season-the Oakland A's, who, like the Giants, had opened a startling lead over their Western Division rivals. The two Bay-area teams have coexisted amicably since the A's migrated from Kansas City in 1968, competing only for the annual regional low-attendance crown, which the Giants carried off by a whisker last year, 740,220 to 778,355. The A's, in spite of their recent and discouraging success at winning ball games, have come back bravely this year, opening up a margin of over a hundred thousand fewer fans than the Giants in their first twenty home games; this time the issue may not be settled until after the World Series. My first view of the handsome new triple-decked Oakland Coliseum, just before game time on a cold Tuesday night, suggested that the tenants of Candlestick Park held an unfair advantage, but then I observed that almost every one of the fifty thousand s.h.i.+ny, brightly painted seats in the place was entirely visible, being empty. The umpires and the teams-the A's and the visiting California Angels-took the field; a serenade played by a strolling jazz combo echoed thinly among the few hundred patrons scattered between the two dugouts; the familiar icy Pacific winds whistled up my pant legs; and I sensed myself, as in a Terence Rattigan bad dream, exiled to a dying seaside resort in January.

n.o.body knows why northern California has taken so gingerly to big-league baseball. The population of the immediate area-perhaps three and a half million, if Sacramento is thrown in-is probably too meager to sustain two baseball teams, but this has not proved to be a difficulty for the two pro football teams, the two major college football teams, and the professional basketball team that also sell tickets in the region. The subject is endlessly speculated upon in local bars and pressrooms, and the only sensible theory I have heard put forward suggests that there are a good many other things to do outdoors in the summer in the environs of San Mateo and Marin and Contra Costa Counties. The owner of the A's, Charles O. Finley, has attacked the problem in characteristic style, with a numbing flood of promotions, but it is still possible that his talented and exciting ball team, with its incomparable new hero, Vida Blue, may eventually succeed in attracting more people into the Coliseum than have yet turned out for Hot Pants Day, cow-milking contests, or a gate prize of two free season tickets to the home games of Charles O. Finley's hockey team, the Golden Seals.

The game that first night went to the Finleyites, 75, in thirteen gelid innings; the next evening the Angels reversed matters by the same score in twelve. The two games, in fact, had a creepy, mirrorlike similarity. On Tuesday, the Angels jumped away to a 30 and then a 41 lead on home runs by Ken McMullen and Roger Repoz, but the bottom of the Oakland batting order kept bas.h.i.+ng the ball, too-a homer by catcher Dave Duncan, a three-run job by second baseman d.i.c.k Green. Duncan, a tall young receiver with a pleasingly mobile style behind the plate, hit a double in the seventh, but when he came up to bat with two out in the ninth, the A's were still one run shy. He ran the count to three and two and then lined another homer to left. I was startled. More accustomed to the sight of looped two-hundred-foot bingles in Shea Stadium, I had forgotten about this style of baseball. Bob Locker, a veteran relief man for the A's, now entirely m.u.f.fled the visitors with his sinker ball, and in the thirteenth Dagoberto Campaneris, the Oakland shortstop, got on via an error and then stole second-quite unnecessarily, it turned out, because his teammate Reggie Jackson hit one out into an uninhabited and perhaps unexplored section of the bleachers, to end matters. It was the fifteenth home run for the A's in seven games-fifteen homers. .h.i.t by nine different players.

The next evening (before an enormously increased audience of 4354), the Oakland starter, Catfish Hunter, in search of his ninth win in a row, was staked to an early five-run lead, which he slowly but obdurately threw away, surrendering twelve hits to the visitors, including, of course, a tying ninth-inning homer, by Jim Spencer. The winning round-tripper (the tenth of the two-game series) was struck in the twelfth by pinch-hitter Jim Fregosi, the Angels' All Star shortstop, who has been absent most of this season with an ailing foot. The visitors' lineup also included a stranger named Alex Johnson, who had been sprung that afternoon by manager Lefty Phillips from the most recent of his many suspensions for languid play; almost languidly, Johnson lined out three singles.

The Athletics (to give them their honored ancient name, which the front office is, for some reason, phasing out) are a poised, eager, and extremely dangerous equipage. Their speed and power (an unusual combination that also distinguishes the Giants) are personified in Bert Campaneris, who has won the AL t.i.tle for stolen bases in five out of the past six years, and Reggie Jackson, who hit forty-seven homers in 1969. Jackson had a miserable season last year, full of sulks and strikeouts, but he seems to have flowered under this year's manager, d.i.c.k Williams (who might even be next year's manager, too). Among the other regulars is Sal Bando, an experienced and hard-bitten third baseman. Only the pitching, surprisingly, may be a trifle below champions.h.i.+p caliber; the bullpen, for instance, is mostly untested, having rusticated through a span of weeks this spring when two starters, Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter, ran off a string of eighteen wins without defeat.

Vida Blue. The name (it is p.r.o.nounced "Vye-da") could have been invented by Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon-Lardner or Runyon on a good day. It can be sung with feeling (I have heard it) to the tune of "Lida Rose," the quartet from The Music Man. It suggests other baseball monickers-summertime names, now all but lost to memory: June Green, Jimmy Lavender, Lu Blue (a switch-hitting first baseman with the Tigers, long ago). It also suggests, to current American League batters, a quick and unrewarding day's work. Blue, still only twenty-one years old and playing his first full season in the majors, has struck out about three times as many batters as he has walked, which is phenomenal control for a young fireballer; his 13-and-2 record (at this writing) includes five shutouts. Last year, up from the minors for six late appearances, he threw a no-hitter and a one-hitter. I did not see Blue pitch in Oakland (I had a better plan), but I had no difficulty in picking him out in the clubhouse, or even on the field during batting practice, for he went everywhere with a small attendant cloud of out-of-town and local sportswriters. Their task was unenviable. Every one of them was there to ask what is, in effect the sportswriter's only question-the question that remains unanswerable, because it scratches at the mystery that will always separate the spectator from the athlete: "How does it feel to be you?" Vida, to give him credit, did his best. One day, pushed for the hundredth time to explain what he, a young black ballplayer from a small town in Louisiana (Mansfield, thirty-five miles south of Shreveport), thought when he heard himself favorably compared to Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and Bob Feller, Blue said, "I find it quite astounding."

Vida Blue, by the way, is not the most publicized member of the Oakland A's. That honor goes, by a wide margin, to Charles O. Finley, who must be the only baseball executive whose biography takes up more pages in the team's souvenir yearbook than the s.p.a.ce given to any of his stars or to his manager. He is the sole owner of the A's and, in effect, their stage manager. He designed the team's horrendous uniforms ("Kelly Green, Wedding Gown White, and California Gold") and put his ballplayers into white spikes, a combination that makes them look like members of a tavern-league bowling team. At each home game, his signature, spelled out in lighted script on the scoreboard, begins the announcement "Charles O. Finley presents his Million Dollar Baby.... I hope you find her very entertaining." He has pushed hard for multicolored bases and for the awarding of first base on three b.a.l.l.s instead of four. He is, in short, an embarra.s.sment to baseball and an infuriating goad. Only one thing can be said in his defense: The Oakland A's are his ball team. Through player development, through trades, through drafts, through planning and hiring and spending and firing-all with the absolute minimum of outside advice or delegated authority-he alone has fas.h.i.+oned the personnel and character of this excellent club. He is a baseball man.

My better plan about Vida Blue was to see him pitch in the proper surroundings-in front of a crowd. That happened just two nights later, on Friday, at baseball's prettiest diamond, the Bijou of the East, Fenway Park. The game promised wonders. It simultaneously matched up the league's two division-leading teams and two best pitchers. Blue was coming into the game after those ten straight wins, having lost only on the opening day of the season; five of his victories had been shutouts, and he had not permitted an earned run in his previous twenty innings. His opponent, the Red Sox' Sonny Siebert, stood at 8 and 0 for the year, and, going back to the middle of the 1970 season, had won seventeen of his last twenty decisions; he had surrendered a total of four runs in his last four games, and not a single home run this year. Vida, a southpaw, would be pitching for the first time in Fenway Park, whose hovering, over-adjacent green left-field wall is