— 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 mass 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 constitutes 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 encompasses 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 Association 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 Association 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’ association; 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 antitrust laws, yet its abolition would so surely destroy team identities 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 substitute 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 identities 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 bumbling 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 hit 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 assured, 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 reasons stated and also because the rewarding and frequently riveting nature of the baseball games I have seen around the leagues this summer.
Obeying a pre-season resolution to devote more attention to the young Yankees, whose late push had brought them to a surprising fifth-place finish last September, I paid dutiful calls to the Stadium on several chilly spring evenings. The Yankee attack this year consists largely of quickness on the bases and some opportunistic hitting by a youngster named Bobby Murcer. The team is managed by the estimable Ralph Houk, and Mike Burke, the president, is one of the most intelligent young executives now in baseball, but the players on the field often look less palpable than the stalking, pin-striped specters of a hundred departed Bombers. Lately, the management has tried to keep Stadium fans awake by offering to play any patron’s request on the organ. I did see Murcer, then the league’s runs-batted-in leader, win one early game, when manager Bill Rigney of the Angels mysteriously ordered his hurler, Rudy May, to pitch to him in the ninth with two on, two out, and first base open. Murcer obliged with a game-winning double, thus providing one of the few bright spots in a disastrous spring for the Bronx Bunnies. Murcer, though eager and talented, is not a true fence-buster, and the pressure on him to deliver in countless games in which the Yankees have been trailing has steadily pushed his average down—a sight too painful for me to keep watching.
My first visits to Shea Stadium were of the same dispiriting nature—an early, low-hit squeaker against the Reds, when the same old Mets came apart in the ninth (two hits, an error, and a wild pitch) and lost by 3–0, and a mid-May game against Atlanta, when three fast balls aimed by the Mets’ skinny, hardthrowing rookie, Gary Gentry, were redirected by Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, and Bob Tillman into the distant bullpens, thus providing all the runs necessary for a 4–3 Braves victory. I was not present the following night, when the Mets astonished themselves. Hitless through the sixth against Phil Niekro, they erupted for eight runs in the eighth inning, climaxed by Cleon Jones’s grand-slammer, to win over Atlanta 9–3. I hurried right back the next afternoon, and my subsequent delightful hours with the Mets this year are perhaps best summarized in a game diary I began keeping at that time:
Thursday, May 15: Beautiful afternoon, beautiful game. Senior Citizens’ Day at Shea, but place jam-packed with kids. Attendance: 32,130. National Pastime looks rosy, but what about schools? Hank Aaron, quickest wrists in West, wafts two (Nos. 516, 517 lifetime), and Metsies dead, down 6–2 in 7th. Metsies not dead. Four singles, wild pitch makes it 6–5 in 8th. Optimist fans screeching. Bud Harrelson singles, bottom 9th, Grote plunked by pitch, Agee sacrifices them along. Intentional pass loads hassocks. Everybody screeching. Harrelson forced at plate. Cleon Jones up, currently batting .390. (.390? Yep, .390.) Rips one—pow!—to right, but triumph denied as Millan, Braves’ 2B, climbs invisible ladder, turns midair, & gloves pill backhand. Sudden silence. Damn!
May 30–June 1: Mets sweep Giants 3 games while I waste Memorial Day weekend in country. Bad planning.
June 3, night: Mets’ 6th straight. Pass .500, take 2nd place, as Seaver 3-hits Dodgers, 5–2. First hit for good guys is Kranepool’s homer in 5th; frequent recent habit with Mets. Kranepool another HR in 6th. Must revise Kranepool estimate; good old Eddie! Curious impression: Mets resemble vets, while young Dodgers (Sudakis, Sizemore, Grabarkewitz, etc.) are kiddie corps. What’s going on here?
June 4, night: Exhausted. Mets win, 1–0, in dawn’s early light. 15 innings. Sweep of Giants and Dodgers, History made. DiLauro, elderly Met rookie hurler, lucky in early going, then implacable. Mets always look lucky these days; sign of good team. L.A. puts 12 runners on base in extra inns., scores none. Mets unflappable. Save game with incredible play in top of 15th—Al Weis, Mets’ 2B, reverses gears, grabs deflected drive off pitcher’s glove, throws same instant, and nails L.A. base-runner at plate. Still don’t believe it. Mets win on anticlimax: Dodgers’ W. Davis lopes in for Garrett’s easy single, gives it the old hotdog one-hand scoop—and misses. Ball rolls to CF fence & Agee scores easily all way from first. Hoo-haw. Davis looks for place to hide. Kind of game Mets used to lose.
June 15: Mets away, knocking ’em dead in West. Have just learned why Cleon Jones, Our Boy, throws left but bats right. As lad, played in Mobile sandlot with tiny right field; poke over RF wall counted as out, so Cleon switched to starboard side. Sensible. Cleon played baseball, football with T. Agee, also Our Boy, on same Mobile high-school team. Mobile High first Met farm.
June 22: Sunday doubleheader. Cards. Sunshine. Mets break own record for largest ’69 crowd: 55,862. (Leagues break own record for largest Sunday crowds ever: 394,008 paid.) Mets look cool, loose, rich—like old Yanks. Manager Hodges a genius. In opener, Gary Gentry shackles Cards as Mets romp, 5–1. (Gentry third straight excellent rookie hurler—Koosman last yr., Seaver yr. before. Wait till NL sees new phenom hurlers. J. Matlack, J. Bibby, now ripening on Met farms! They say Bibby looks exactly like Don Newcombe.)* Mets rooters show nouveau-riche side: wildly cheer poor Swoboda, hapless Met flychaser, as he fans 5 times. Second game very tight— Koosman vs. Cards’ Torrez in scoreless duel—but I am distracted by small boy, aged 10 maybe, in next box, who is intent on setting new two-game Eastern Flyweight stuffing record. Order of consumption: 1 pizza, 1 hot dog, 1 container popcorn, 1 Coke, 1/2 bg. peanuts, 1 Coke, 1 ice cream. No more hot dogs, so settles for 2nd pizza. Asks Pop for French fries. Mets’ Boswell doubles in 5th, after 17 straight Met singles today (new record?), but still no score. Boy’s dad, worn out by entreaties, leaves seat in search of French fries, thus misses Harrelson triple, Agee double that win game in 7th. Dad returns with Fr. frs., loses temper. Cries, “I knew it! The only G.-d. Fr. frs. were way the h. over behind third base!” Is placated when Rod Gaspar makes great peg in 8th to nail Brock at plate & save 1–0 nightcap. Brilliant baseball. Day to remember.
That same week, I flew north to visit the Expos, a newborn team that has found a happy home in Montreal and in the cellar of the National League East. (Proper baseball-watching now requires field trips, for the inflated schedule means that almost half the season has gone by before all the teams have paraded into one’s home park.) I arrived at Jarry Park, a handsome little field that much resembles a country fairground, just in time to watch the Cardinals bat around in the fifth, in the first game of a twi-nighter. Bob Gibson was pitching, so I was disheartened for the home crowd, until I noticed that it didn’t seem to mind much. The unroofed stands were packed, and the locals cheered politely for every Expo pop fly and booed every strike called against their team. Though slightly bush, these are real fans, for they have turned out through thick and (mostly) thin, and the whole town is talking baseball. Attendance actually went up during a recent twenty-game losing streak, because everybody wanted to be there the day it ended. Montreal is relentlessly bilingual, and as the Cards went on piling up runs that evening I began my first lesson, assisted by the announcer and the scoreboard, in baseball French. A long parade of lanceurs trudged to le monticule for the Expos before the first game of the doubleheader (le premier programme double disputé au crepuscule par les Expos) ended, with the Cards winning 8–1.
The second partie started just as dishearteningly, with the visitors scoring three points on three coups sûrs in the first, but matters improved electrifyingly in the second, when the Expos pulled off a triple play (line drive to Bob Bailey, au premier but, who stepped on the bag to double up an occupant Cardinal and then flipped to l’arrêt-court, Bobby Wine, who beat the other base-runner to second). It was the first triple play I had ever seen, in any language. The Expos tied it up in the third, on back-to-back (dos-à-dos?) homers (circuits) by Ron Fairly and Rusty Staub, as the scoreboard put up “VAS-Y!” and “IL NOUS FAUT UNE VICTOIRE!” Staub (a former Astro) and Mack Jones (a former Brave) are the resident gods in Montreal, the latter because he hit a homer and a triple during the Expos’ victory in their opening home game in April, still a burning date in these fans’ uncrowded memories. The nightcap was still tied in the seventh, and when the Expos put two men on base a tomblike silence descended on the crowd. Puzzled, I asked my neighbor what was going on, and he said, “They know that if we don’t score now, we’ll lose it.” I understood, suddenly remembering what it had been like to be a Mets fan in the lighthearted, hopeless old days at the Polo Grounds. He was right, too; the Expos didn’t score, and the Cards racked up five runs in the last two innings. When the gérant, Gene Mauch, came out to relieve his willing but exhausted young starter, Mike Wegener, he got the framboise from the fans. Mauch didn’t mind; he used to manage the Phillies, which is the perfect prep school for his current post.
There were fewer fans at Jarry Park the next afternoon, which was too bad, because the absentees missed an Expos win. The Cards scored five early runs, but then fell into the baffling torpor that has gripped them so often this year, and lost it on bad relief pitching. Staub and Ron Fairly, the old Dodger voltigeur, had three hits apiece, and reliever Dan McGinn, a gaucher, got the 8–6 win with seven innings of peerless sinker-ball (I give up) pitching, and I came away happy. La victoire, in Montreal, is rare but sweet.
That home-and-home series waged by the Cubs and Mets last month, and won by the Mets, four games to two, is too recent and vivid in memory to require much recapitulation here, except perhaps to recall the opener at Shea, which was in all respects the first truly crucial game of the Mets’ eight-year history. Five games back of the Cubs (three in the more significant “lost” column), they had to gain some ground while simultaneously answering for themselves the question that their old friends were asking: “Are the Mets for real?” If this means “Are the Mets real pennant threats?” the answer is probably still no. With Seaver on tap, there probably will be no long losing streaks, but Koosman, Gentry, and the bullpen were frightfully battered by the Astros in a doubleheader last week. Any further relapse to the Polo Grounds days, in view of the Mets’ continuing lack of true muscle at the plate, may still make the last weeks of their schedule painful. In other respects, this has been a season in which every good hope was realized. Bud Harrelson’s restored knee, Al Weis’s useful glove, rookie Wayne Garrett’s surprising bat have contributed to a respectable infield. The young pitching arms have matured, and Cleon Jones has been up among the league’s batting leaders all year. Best of all, perhaps, has been the dashing performance of Tommie Agee in center and as lead-off man—a renaissance that has finally justified the much criticized trade that brought him here last year. (I’ll bet that a lot of local Little Leaguers have begun imitating Agee’s odd batting mannerism—a tiny kick of the left leg that makes him look like a house guest secretly discouraging the family terrier.) The Mets even have a bench this year, at last permitting Manager Hodges to do some useful platooning. Hodges’ instruction has been subtle and superior; the Mets play fine baseball and are no longer surprised at anything they do.
What they did in that first Cubs game will be remembered for months, and maybe years, by all 55,096 of us who were there that afternoon. Jerry Koosman and Ferguson Jenkins, the towering Cubbie right-hander (and the only pitcher I have ever seen who runs to the mound to start his warmups each inning), had at each other in a flurry of early strikeouts, with the Cubs persistently threatening and just failing to score in the first five innings. The Mets’ first hit was a homer in the fifth—a high fly by Kranepool that barely slipped over the wall in right center. Ernie Banks hit an identical miniblast to the opposite side in the sixth, and the Cubs added one more run in each of the next two innings—the last on a real homer by Jim Hickman, an unsentimental ex-Met. (My own sentiments, hopelessly home-towny, did not entirely keep me from enjoying the Cubs—a vastly more experienced and dangerous-looking team than the Mets. They are worth watching for Ernie Banks alone, the nearly legendary, skinny-necked, and exuberant thirty-eight-year-old first baseman, who is so well loved in Chicago that an alderman there once proposed the erection of a gigantic statue of him to replace the city’s celebrated fifty-foot Picasso creature. If Manager Durocher can growl and connive these Cubs to a pennant, he will reward a mighty army of North Side bleacherites who are at least as vehement and deserving as the Mets’ “Go!” shouters.) So we came down to the bottom of the ninth, with the Mets behind 3–1 and still owning but one hit. No one, absolutely no one, made a move toward the exits. Here, at once, came the necessary piece of luck—a shallow pop by pinch-hitter Ken Boswell that Cub center fielder Don Young lost in the sun for an instant. It dropped in for a double. Agee fouled out, but Donn Clendenon, pinch-hitting, sent Young way back with a long, high drive; Young caught it but slammed into the center-field wall at the same instant, and the ball was banged loose. Cleon up; runners at second and third, and an enormous, pleading din from the stands. He cracked the second pitch to left field, for the third double of the inning, tying up the game. Durocher, thinking hard, ordered the next man walked, and both runners then moved up on an infield out. Reconferring with Jenkins on the mound, Leo ordered outside curves for Kranepool, the next hitter. Eddie took one for a ball, another for a strike, and swung and missed on the next. The last pitch was away, too, but Kranepool, going with it, flicked the ball in a little curving loop that landed it just beyond the shortstop—not much of a hit, but good enough.
The rest of those games—Tom Seaver’s beautiful near-no-hitter suddenly snipped off by that Qualls single in the ninth, the Cubs’ two successive wins, those raucous and admirable banner-wavers in the Wrigley field bleachers, Tommie Agee crashing so many first pitches, and Al Weis’s unexpected homers in the last two Mets victories—were equally notable for the sight of so many men on the streets here making their afternoon rounds with transistor radios against their ears. No one had seen that kind of midsummer fever in the city since the old Giants-Dodgers bloodlettings, fifteen or twenty years back. One of those afternoons, hurrying back to my office TV set, I suddenly wondered what Mr. Harris’s poll-takers were doing just then.
I got away for two more grandmothers’ funerals—the first at Fenway Park, the Taj Mahal of New England, to watch the Red Sox and the Tigers. The Sox this year have been bashing a lot of homers, but they have also had injury trouble, pitching trouble, catching trouble, fielding trouble, and Baltimore trouble. They stayed close to the Orioles until the weekend of June 13, when the Athletics destroyed them, racking up thirty-eight runs and forty-eight hits in three games, during which Reggie Jackson hit four homers and batted in fifteen runs. Despite all, the Beantown fans are flocking into the little green ballyard at a rate that may equal last year’s record Boston attendance of 1,940,788. My visit was on a weekday afternoon, but even standing room was sold out half an hour before game time. On this day, the park most resembled a huge pet shop—a place of endless squeakings, flutterings, yelpings, hoppings, feedings, and scatterings as hundreds upon hundreds of kids shrieked and piped during their long afternoon sociable. The average age of the fans looked to be about twelve, and the Red Sox and the Tigers, successive pennant-winners the past two years, responded by playing a hilariously bad game that looked like a matchup between two day-camp nines. There were five throwing errors, two of them by Boston center fielder Reggie Smith, whose arm is as powerful and just about as random as a MIRV missile. Eventually, the Tigers took it, 6–5, and both teams trooped embarrassedly into the clubhouses for late classes with their managers.
Baltimore, my last stop, has the opposite kind of trouble—a ball team that can do no wrong this year, and a shortage of ticket-buyers. Attendance at Memorial Stadium is running at about the same pace as last year, when the club wound up with a $186,460 deficit; the park has a capacity of fifty-two thousand, but it has never once been filled in a regular-season game. Baltimoreans do care about the Orioles, but their curious affair is mostly conducted at long distance, by radio and television; whenever Manager Earl Weaver yanks a pitcher or decides to rest Frank Robinson for a day, the stadium switchboard is flooded with inquiries, complaints, and counter-advice. I heard a lot of baseball talk downtown, but most of it was centered on the autumn playoffs, which everyone thinks the Orioles will lose. Two other local champs, the football Colts and the basketball Bullets, fell on their faces in postseason tournaments this year, and the Orioles’ success fills their townsmen’s hearts with despair.
The Orioles have it all—the two Robinsons, Paul Blair, Boog Powell, a solid infield, and a pitching staff good enough to hold the fort until the artillery is unlimbered; Dave McNally’s pitching record is now 15–0, but he has been taken off the hook seven times by late rallies. Powell, Blair, and Frank Robinson have seventy-three homers to date. I turned up to watch this formidable equipage in a twi-night doubleheader against the Red Sox, then trailing by thirteen and a half games. The promised mismatch turned out just the other way around, as so often happens in this most unpredictable of all sports; the Bosox swept the bill, 7–4 and 12–3, banging out a record (against Baltimore pitching) twenty-two hits in the nightcap. Yastrzemski, who is swinging only for the fences this year, had a pair of homers; Mike Andrews, the dandy Boston second baseman, had five hits and a walk in the second game; and Reggie Smith, enjoying the longest hot streak of any American League batter this year, managed two walks, four singles, two doubles, and one home run in eleven trips to the plate. Sitting there in the stands, a happy neutralist surrounded by unhappy locals, I tried to decide which kind of baseball I like best—the anxious involvement of those taut miracles at Shea Stadium; the gentle, comical back-country beginnings in Montreal; or this long banging of bats and the satisfying humiliation of a better team. Then I remembered that I didn’t have to choose, for all these are parts of the feast that the old game can still bring us. I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ball game: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.
*Quite a wait. Matlack and Bibby have yet to attain the majors.