The Red Smith Reader Page 16

  Had he given it any thought he would have realized that there was no need for Kuhn to worry about the Cincinnati batting order because nobody in the Reds’ organization was playing tricks for box-office purposes. Kuhn knew he could rely on Sparky Anderson to start the team he considered most likely to win. If he could have placed the same reliance in the Braves’ brass, he would never have set a precedent by pre-empting the manager’s responsibility.

  As it turned out, there was nothing contrived about the locale or the timing of the event. It happened in the first inning on Henry’s first time at bat and the hit produced the first runs of the season.

  It was witnessed by a standing-room-only crowd of 52,154 who weren’t lured in by Aaron but rather by the local tradition that dictates that every ambulatory citizen of Cincinnati must attend the opening game even if he doesn’t show up again all summer. It wasn’t even postponed till tomorrow, when the box office could use a special attraction and the game will be on national television.

  The way Henry did it removed all taint of commercialism. For this day, at least, the business of baseball made way for sport.

  MIRACLE OF COOGAN’S BLUFF

  1951

  Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.

  Down on the green and white and earth-brown geometry of the playing field, a drunk tries to break through the ranks of ushers marshaled along the foul lines to keep profane feet off the diamond. The ushers thrust him back and he lunges at them, struggling in the clutch of two or three men. He breaks free, and four or five tackle him. He shakes them off, bursts through the line, runs head-on into a special park cop, who brings him down with a flying tackle.

  Here comes a whole platoon of ushers. They lift the man and haul him, twisting and kicking, back across the first-base line. Again he shakes loose and crashes the line. He is through. He is away, weaving out toward center field, where cheering thousands are jammed beneath the windows of the Giants’ clubhouse.

  At heart, our man is a Giant, too. He never gave up.

  From center field comes burst upon burst of cheering, Pennants are waving, uplifted fists are brandished, hats are flying. Again and again the dark clubhouse windows blaze with the light of photographers’ flash bulbs. Here comes that same drunk out of the mob, back across the green turf to the infield. Coattails flying, he runs the bases, slides into third. Nobody bothers him now.

  And the story remains to be told, the story of how the Giants won the 1951 pennant in the National League. The tale of their barreling run through August and September and into October. . . . Of the final day of the season, when they won the championship and started home with it from Boston, to hear on the train how the dead, defeated Dodgers had risen from the ashes in the Philadelphia twilight. . . . Of the three-game playoff in which they won, and lost, and were losing again with one out in the ninth inning yesterday when—Oh, why bother?

  Maybe this is the way to tell it: Bobby Thomson, a young Scot from Staten Island, delivered a timely hit yesterday in the ninth inning of an enjoyable game of baseball before 34,320 witnesses in the Polo Grounds. . . . Or perhaps this is better:

  “Well!” said Whitey Lockman, standing on second base in the second inning of yesterday’s playoff game between the Giants and Dodgers.

  “Ah, there,” said Bobby Thomson, pulling into the same station after hitting a ball to left field. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fancy,” Lockman said, “meeting you here!”

  “Ooops!” Thomson said. “Sorry.”

  And the Giants’ first chance for a big inning against Don Newcombe disappeared as they tagged Thomson out. Up in the press section, the voice of Willie Goodrich came over the amplifiers announcing a macabre statistic: “Thomson has now hit safely in fifteen consecutive games.” Just then the floodlights were turned on, enabling the Giants to see and count their runners on each base.

  It wasn’t funny, though, because it seemed for so long that the Giants weren’t going to get another chance like the one Thomson squandered by trying to take second base with a playmate already there. They couldn’t hit Newcombe, and the Dodgers couldn’t do anything wrong. Sal Maglie’s most splendrous pitching would avail nothing unless New York could match the run Brooklyn had scored in the first inning.

  The story was winding up, and it wasn’t the happy ending that such a tale demands. Poetic justice was a phrase without meaning.

  Now it was the seventh inning and Thomson was up, with runners on first and third base, none out. Pitching a shutout in Philadelphia last Saturday night, pitching again in Philadelphia on Sunday, holding the Giants scoreless this far, Newcombe had now gone twenty-one innings without allowing a run.

  He threw four strikes to Thomson. Two were fouled off out of play. Then he threw a fifth. Thomson’s fly scored Monte Irvin. The score was tied. It was a new ball game.

  Wait a moment, though. Here’s Pee Wee Reese hitting safely in the eighth. Here’s Duke Snider singling Reese to third. Here’s Maglie wild-pitching a run home. Here’s Andy Pafko slashing a hit through Thomson for another score. Here’s Billy Cox batting still another home. Where does his hit go? Where else? Through Thomson at third.

  So it was the Dodgers’ ball game, 4 to 1, and the Dodgers’ pennant. So all right. Better get started and beat the crowd home. That stuff in the ninth inning? That didn’t mean anything.

  A single by Al Dark. A single by Don Mueller. Irvin’s pop-up, Lockman’s one-run double. Now the corniest possible sort of Hollywood schmaltz—stretcher-bearers plodding away with an injured Mueller between them, symbolic of the Giants themselves.

  There went Newcombe and here came Ralph Branca. Who’s at bat? Thomson again? He beat Branca with a home run the other day. Would Charley Dressen order him walked, putting the winning run on base, to pitch to the dead-end kids at the bottom of the batting order? No, Branca’s first pitch was a called strike.

  The second pitch—well, when Thomson reached first base he turned and looked toward the left-field stands. Then he started jumping straight up in the air, again and again. Then he trotted around the bases, taking his time.

  Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.

  THE WINTER PASTIME

  MONTREAL, 1981

  When Bowie Kuhn surrendered authority to schedule postseason baseball games to his television masters eleven years ago, he sowed the seeds that ripened yesterday in this popular ski resort.

  With the National League pennant race down to its last match, winter hit the summer game with an icy fist. Montreal awoke to sullen gray skies, bitter rain and a temperature of 37 degrees, 5 above freezing. The baseball commissioner was not responsible for the Sunday weather and only indirectly to blame for Montreal’s presence in the pennant playoff. (If he hadn’t dissected the season with a Bowie knife, these games would be in St. Louis, where Indian summer is often aglow at this time of year. The Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds had the best won-lost figures over the whole summer, but the Expos and Dodgers qualified for the playoffs by winning the second half.) Anyway, the playoffs are a league matter; only the World Series is the commissioner’s baby.

  However, this is the sort of thing Bowie has been warned about ever since he let TV switch World Series play from 1 P.M. to prime time.

  This game was scheduled for 4 P.M. because NBC, which was doing the television, had contractual commitments to professional football, and baseball is afraid to compete with that game for Nielsen ratings. However, shortly after that hour with the pitchers and their playmates already warming up, the rain that had abated for half an hour started falling again, the infield was again covered with a tarpaulin, and customers in unroofed seats in Stade Olympique either fled or broke out umbrellas.

  TV monitors announced “rain delay,” but there was no official statement and rumo
rs spread that Don Ohlmeyer of NBC had ordered an hour’s postponement to get football off the tube.

  A call was made to Freddie Aronson at the Montreal weather information office. He said showers would continue, possibly as late as 7:30 P.M., but the temperature had warmed to 50 degrees. A fierce wind blew in from the outfield with gusts of 20 to 25 miles an hour.

  Today would be worse, Aronson said. Snow was forecast, but nothing that would stay on the ground. The wind would reach 33 miles an hour and temperatures would hang in the 30’s.

  At 4:52, the rain slowed, groundskeepers in long raincoats folded the infield tarp, spectators applauded and a few players emerged from the dugouts. Men with long-handled squeegees worked on a puddle around the shortstop’s position, aided by the Zamboni machines that had been prowling unprotected areas.

  Almost immediately, rain poured down and the tarp was replaced. At 5:20 the organ struck up and those customers still in the stands actually sang, chorusing their favorite, “The Happy Wanderer”: “Fol-daree, fol-darah!”

  At 6:35, after one more abortive attempt to uncover the field, it was announced that the game was “still on hold” and that Chub Feeney, the National League president, would have a further announcement at 7.15.

  About the same time, television monitors carried an announcement that the game had been postponed until 1 P.M. today. Reporters scuttled for telephones but the announcement had been a phony. The network had been practicing. It was a dry run on a wet, wet day.

  It had been an afternoon of unrelieved discomfort, not to say misery. Not even Bowie Kuhn, all-wise, all-merciful, all-powerful, could have controlled the weather, but the miserable conditions revived complaints about the way baseball is run.

  “These people,” a man was saying, “have no pride and no confidence in their sport. Wouldn’t you think that just once one of them would say, This is the national game, and the playoffs and World Series are the jewels in our crown. Because it is great entertainment, television would want to buy it and we will be happy to sell the rights on our terms.’

  “TV would buy it, baseball wouldn’t have to fear football and wouldn’t be subservient to the space cadets.”

  As seven o’clock drew near, shouts and whistles rose from the stands. Cowbells jangled. Rain came pelting down while Zambonis tried to mop up lakes just beyond the infield. Four of the Expos, who have come to regard this weather as normal, played pitch-catch briefly and retired. The clock passed 7:20 without the promised announcement.

  Finally at 7:30 the public-address system spoke the unwelcome words: The game was postponed until 1:05 today.

  There were scattered boos. Terry Francona, a spare outfielder with the Expos, did a swan dive in the pond behind first base. He was cheered.

  JOE DIMAGGIO

  1947

  After the Yankees chewed up the Dodgers in the second game of the World Series, Joe DiMaggio relaxed in the home club’s gleaming tile boudoir and deposed at length in defense of Pete Reiser, the Brooklyn center fielder, who had narrowly escaped being smitten upon the isthmus rhombencephali that day by sundry fly balls.

  The moving, mottled background of faces and shirt collars and orchids, Joe said, made a fly almost invisible until it had cleared the top deck. The tricky, slanting shadows of an October afternoon created a problem involving calculus, metaphysics, and social hygiene when it came to judging a line drive. The roar of the crowd disguised the crack of bat against ball. And so on.

  Our Mr. Robert Cooke, listening respectfully as one should to the greatest living authority on the subject, nevertheless stared curiously at DiMaggio. He was thinking that not only Reiser but also J. DiMaggio had played that same center field on that same afternoon, and there were no knots on Joe’s slick coiffure.

  “How about you, Joe?” Bob asked. “Do those same factors handicap you out there?”

  DiMaggio permitted himself one of his shy, toothy smiles.

  “Don’t start worrying about the old boy after all these years,” he said.

  He didn’t say “the old master.” That’s a phrase for others to use. But it would be difficult to define more aptly than Joe did the difference between this unmitigated pro and all the others, good, bad, and ordinary, who also play in major-league outfields.

  There is a line that has been quoted so often the name of its originator has been lost. But whoever said it first was merely reacting impulsively to a particular play and not trying to coin a mot when he ejaculated: “The sonofagun! Ten years I’ve been watching him, and he hasn’t had a hard chance yet!”

  It may be that Joe is not, ranked on his defensive skill alone, the finest center fielder of his time. Possibly Terry Moore was his equal playing the hitter, getting the jump on the ball, judging a fly, covering ground, and squeezing the ball once he touched it.

  Joe himself has declared that his kid brother, Dominic, is a better fielder than he. Which always recalls the occasion when the Red Sox were playing the Yanks and Dom fled across the county line to grab a drive by Joe that no one but a DiMaggio could have reached. And the late Sid Mercer, shading his thoughtful eyes under a hard straw hat, remarked to the press box at large: “Joe should sue his old man on that one.”

  Joe hasn’t been the greatest hitter that baseball has known, either. He’ll not match Ty Cobb’s lifetime average, he’ll never threaten Babe Ruth’s home-run record, nor will he ever grip the imagination of the crowds as the Babe did. Or even as Babe Herman did. That explains why the contract that he signed the other day calls for an estimated $65,000 instead of the $80,000 that Ruth got. If he were not such a matchless craftsman he might be a more spectacular player. And so, perhaps, more colorful. And so more highly rewarded.

  But you don’t rate a great ballplayer according to his separate, special talents. You must rank him off the sum total of his component parts, and on this basis there has not been, during Joe’s big-league existence, a rival close to him. None other in his time has combined such savvy and fielding and hitting and throwing—Tom Laird, who was writing sports in San Francisco when Joe was growing up, always insisted that a sore arm “ruined” DiMaggio’s throwing in his first season with the Yankees—and such temperament and such base running.

  Because he does so many other things so well and makes no specialty of stealing, DiMaggio rarely has received full credit for his work on the bases. But travel with a second-division club in the league for a few seasons and count the times when DiMaggio, representing the tying or winning run, whips you by coming home on the unforeseen gamble and either beats the play or knocks the catcher into the dugout.

  Ask American League catchers about him, or National Leaguers like Ernie Lombardi. Big Lom will remember who it was who ran home from first base in the last game of the 1939 World Series while Ernie lay threshing in the dust behind the plate and Bucky Walters stood bemused on the mound.

  These are the reasons why DiMaggio, excelled by Ted Williams in all offensive statistics and reputedly Ted’s inferior in crowd appeal and financial standing, still won the writers’ accolade as the American League’s most valuable in 1947.

  It wasn’t the first time Williams earned this award with his bat and lost it with his disposition. As a matter of fact, if all other factors were equal save only the question of character, Joe never would lose out to any player. The guy who came out of San Francisco as a shy lone wolf, suspicious of Easterners and of Eastern writers, today is the top guy in any sports gathering in any town. The real champ.

  CURT FLOOD’S THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

  1969

  Curt Flood was nineteen years old and had made one hit in the major leagues (a home run) when his telephone rang on December 5 of 1957. The call was from the Cincinnati Reds advising him that he had been traded to the St. Louis Cardinals.

  “I knew ballplayers got traded like horses,” he said years later, “but I can’t tell you how I felt when it happened to me. I was only nineteen, but I made up my mind then it wouldn’t ever happen again.”

 
It happened again last October. The Cardinals traded Flood to Philadelphia. “Maybe I won’t go,” Curt said. Baseball men laughed. Curt makes something like $90,000 a year playing center field, and less than that painting portraits in his studio in Clayton, Missouri. “Unless he’s better than Rembrandt,” one baseball man said, “hell play.”

  It was a beautiful comment, superlatively typical of the executive mind, a pluperfect example of baseball’s reaction to unrest down in the slave cabins. “You mean,” baseball demands incredulously, “that at these prices they want human rights, too?”

  Curtis Charles Flood is a man of character and self-respect. Being black, he is more sensitive than most white players about the institution of slavery as it exists in professional baseball. After the trade he went abroad, and when he returned his mind was made up. He confided his decision to the twenty-four club representatives in the Major League Players Association at their convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

  He told them it was high time somebody in baseball made a stand for human freedom. He said he was determined to make the stand and he asked their support. The players questioned him closely to make sure this was not merely a ploy to squeeze money out of the Phillies. Then, convinced, they voted unanimously to back him up.

  Realizing that if Flood lost his case through poor handling they would all be losers, the players arranged—through their executive director, Marvin Miller—to retain Arthur J. Goldberg, former Secretary of Labor, former Justice of the Supreme Court, former United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the country’s most distinguished authority on labor-management relations.

  Baseball’s so-called reserve clause, which binds the player to his employer through his professional life, had been under fire before. Never has it been attacked by a team like this.

  The system is in deep trouble, and yesterday’s action by the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, did nothing to help it out. Because the news was out that Flood was going to take baseball to court, Kuhn released to the press the following correspondence: