SPINKED
Remarks on receiving the J. G. Taylor Spink Award at the American Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York
Thank you—and first thanks to the Baseball Writers of America, who went out of their way to select me, a non-member and a part-timer, for this shining prize Spink! Spink! J. G. Taylor Spink! This was one of that early flood of tingling baseball names that rushed over me when I was a boy and first began hearing about and reading about baseball. Ossie Bluege! Flint Rhem! Hod Lisenbee! Mel Ott—an Oh with two “T”s! Jimmie Foxx—a fox with two “X”es! Spink—not a ballplayer but a baseball publisher? The Sporting News—a paper with just sports in it? Why don’t we get that here at home? So this is a thrill for me as well as an honor. The roster of Spink honorees is stuffed with old heroes of mine like Red Smith and Toni Meany, and with baseball-writer friends who have also been models and heroes, folks like Jerry Holtzman and Peter Gammons and Bill Madden, who were so quick to put me at ease in the clubhouse and fill me in whenever I turned up again. A million thanks also from me to four extraordinary editors of The New Yorker—William Shawn, Bob Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick—who each granted me weeks of time and acres of space for my baseball stuff, a gift that only writers can appreciate.
My gratitude always goes back to baseball itself, which turned out to be so familiar and so startling, so spacious and exacting, so easy-looking and so heart-breakingly difficult that it filled up my notebooks and seasons in a rush. A pastime indeed. Fans know about this too. Nowadays we have all sports available, every sport all day long, but we’re hanging on to this game of ours, knowing how lucky we are.
I was a city kid and I grew up on New York baseball. At Yankee Stadium, in the spring of 1930, I saw Lefty Gomez win his first game in the major leagues. A long time later he told me, “I beat Red Faber and the White Sox, 4–1, and I’d never seen so many people in one place before in my life.” I was nine years old on the day of that game but had exactly the same impression. Lefty Gomez is here in the Hall, of course, still undefeated, 6 and 0 in the World Series.
In a game in 1933, I saw a pair of Yankee base-runners, Lou Gehrig and Dixie Walker, tagged out on opposite sides of home plate together—bang, bang—on a single swipe by the Senators catcher Luke Sewell. Washington, not the Yanks, took the A.L. pennant that fall. At Ebbets Field, eight years later—it’s Game Four of the World Series and now I’m a senior in college—I watched Mickey Owen, the Dodgers’ catcher, drop that third strike with two out in the ninth—and the Yankees rise from the dead to win. They won again the next day, too, for another championship.
Here’s an August afternoon, in 1951, and I’m sitting up behind first base at the Polo Grounds—still just a fan—when the rookie Willie Mays makes the first fabulous play of his career: a full-tilt running catch and a whirling, back-to-the-plate blind throw that sailed from right-center field on the fly to his catcher, to nail the Dodger baserunner, Billy Cox, at home. I can still see the Giants players on the field and the Dodgers now coming up out of their dugout all staring at each other and back out at Willie again—“What!…What!… Oh, my god, did you see that!”—in wonder. Well, yeah—get used to it, guys. I bring up this game again whenever I run into Willie—he doesn’t quite remember me but then he gets excited again, too. “You were there? You were there?” he cries. “Now you tell ’em. You tell ’em—nobody here believes me!”
What’s weird here and what you’re all thinking, is how ancient these games and plays are—decades old—and how clear they still seem to be in Angell’s mind. And anyway, can’t we Google old stuff like this or maybe find it on E.S.P.N., so who cares? You’re right, of course, and all I can say is yes, I care—I still do—even though this kind of caring has gotten so much tougher for us now. What we all have at our fingertips these days is instant replay and total recall: the exact moment and all of tonight’s other astounding moments from all the games and all the parks, and, with them—let’s admit it—a diminishment of that moment. Let’s cue Mays’s throw again: Wow! And one more time: Yes, that’s it. And again: Yep. Got it. I once asked Carlton Fisk if he still had any private memory of his Game Six twelfth-inning home run off the left-field foul pole at Fenway Park in the 1975 World Series—you know: Pudge dancing sideways up the line and waving at the ball, pushing it fair, then raising his arms in triumph. “It’s funny you ask,” he said. “I always go out of the room whenever I think that it’s coming up on the screen again, because I want to hold on to some piece of the moment, keep it fresh in my head.”
A nice quote—a line for a writer to circle in his notebook and maybe put aside as the closer to a long piece. I collected great lines and great baseball talkers—lifetime .300 talkers—like a billionaire hunting down Cézannes and Matisses. I stalked these guys and buttered them up and got their flow into my notebooks and onto my tapes, and, in rivers, into the magazine. Ted Williams. Ted Simmons. Linda Kittell. Keith Hernandez. Bill Rigney. Lou Brock. Dan Quisenberry. Roger Craig. Among others. I remember arriving at the ballpark in Scottsdale at the beginning of another spring training, and finding Craig, the Giants’ manager, standing with a writer out in left field—I think it was Dave Bush. “Roger has another book out,” David said to Craig after our greetings—meaning me, this Roger—“Have you read it?”
“Read it?” Craig said. “Hell, I wrote half of it.”
Funny works for me, too. The almost unbeatable Catfish Hunter, gruesomely hammered in some game or other, smiled afterward and said, “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every afternoon.” Another time, after he’d lost the second game of the 1977 World Series, coughing up three early dingers to distant parts of Dodger Stadium, he said, “Well, I had some folks here from North Carolina who’d never seen a major league home run, and I thought I’d give them a couple.”
But let’s go back for just a minute to Bob Gibson, and Game One of the 1968 World Series, when he’s just shut out the Detroit Tigers, 4–0, striking out seventeen batters, a new World Series record. The Tiger players have nothing to say. Asked to compare Gibson to other pitchers he’d faced, Dick McAuliffe said, “He doesn’t remind one of anybody. He’s all by himself.” In the clubhouse we writers gather around Gibson’s locker. We’re awed too. “Were you surprised by your performance today, Bob?” somebody offers at last. Gibson looks at him without smiling. “I’m never surprised by anything I do,” he says.
A little later I ask, uh, have you always been this competitive? “Oh, I think so,” Gibby says in his grave way. “I’ve played about a hundred games of tick-tack-toe with my six-year-old daughter and she hasn’t beat me yet.” He meant this.
Amazing men, extraordinary competitors, but there’s too much winning here. Baseball is mostly about losing. These all-time winners in the Hall of Fame are proud men—pride is what drives every player—but every one of them knows or knew the pain of loss, the days and weeks when you’re beat up and worn down, and another season is about to slip away. Nobody understood this better than Joe Torre, my friend and maybe my favorite baseball talker, who is part of this brilliant entering class that so honors the Hall on its 75th Anniversary. Joe Torre, the manager who never threw a player under the bus. “Oh, Paulie isn’t happy with his at-bats right now,” he’d say. Or: “Maybe David’s not as proud of his stuff as he’d like to be”—and we writers would shift our impatient and insatiable minds a little and think about the player instead of the story. Joe Torre batted .376 as a Cardinals catcher in 1971, winning a batting title, but as a manager, he always brought up the following season with his players, when his average went down ninety points. Then he’d mention July 21, 1975, the day he became the first National League player ever to bat into four double plays in one game. His guys loved him for this. “I’d play for him any time,” Mike Mussina said.
On one of his last days as the Yankees’ manager, Torre said, “I understand the requirements here, but the players are human beings, and it’s not machinery here. Even though they get paid a lot of money, it’s blood that runs through their veins.”
There was a little more like this but then he cheered up. “For a guy who never got to the postseason as a player, I’m having a whole lot of fun when you look at the whole thing.”
Me, too, Joe.
Thank you, baseball.
July, 2014