Part 4 (2/2)

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

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

At this point, with four one-sided games gone and the Tigers facing imminent deletion, the strongest memories this Series had brought forth were of last year's long rouser between the Cards and the Red Sox. The Sock It to 'Ems filing into their seats for the fifth game looked distraught, for the papers that morning had informed them that only two clubs had ever recovered from a one-three Series deficit. Surprisingly, the Tigers themselves, gathered around the cage during batting practice, seemed in remarkable fettle for a group apparently awaiting only the executioner's blindfold. Norm Cash was telling George Kell, a retired Tiger demiG.o.d, that he had just figured out how to hit Gibson. ”It's like duck-shooting,” he said. ”You gotta lead the G.o.ddam bird. When he's up here [he imitated Gibson at the top of his windup], you gotta start swinging. Pow!” Northrup, in the cage, laced a long fly to right, and several Tigers, watching the ball, cried, ”Get out of here!” Northrup then broke two bats on two swings and was urged to open a lumberyard. There was some giggling over Vice-President Humphrey's visit to the Tiger clubhouse after the previous game. ”He kept congratulating everybody,” d.i.c.k Tracewski said. ”'Congratulations! We're proud of you.' I mean, didn't he see the game? Didn't he see us get pasted?” ”Maybe he thought he was in the other clubhouse,” someone suggested.

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

Brock doubled again in the fifth, going with an outside pitch and flicking the ball to left, exactly as he had in the first. Javier singled to left, and when Brock, in full stride, was within six feet of the plate it looked as if he had w.i.l.l.y Horton's throw beaten by yards. He must have thought so, too, for he failed to slide. The ball came in on the fly, chest-high to Freehan, he and Brock collided, and umpire Doug Harvey's fist came around in a right hook: Out! Brock, storming, thought Harvey had missed the call, and so, I must confess, did I. Later, photographs proved us wrong (though nothing would have been altered, of course, if they'd proved us right). The pictures show Brock's left heel planted and his toes descending on the plate; an instant later he has. .h.i.t Freehan's right arm and left leg, and his foot, banged away, twists and descends on dirt instead of rubber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- August 1969 I FIRST HEARD ABOUT the death of baseball one night last December. A friend of mine, a syndicated sports columnist, called me after eleven o'clock and broke the news. ”Hey,” he said, ”have you seen the crowds at the Jets' games lately? Unbelievable! It's exactly like the old days at Ebbets Field. Pro football is the thing, from now on. Baseball is finished in this country. Dead.” He sounded so sure of himself that I almost looked for the obituary in the Times the next morning. (”Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness. Remains on view at Cooperstown, N.Y.”) Though somewhat exaggerated, my friend's prediction proved to be a highly popular one. In the next three or four months, the negative prognosis was confirmed by resident diagnosticians representing most of the daily press, the magazines, and the networks, and even by some foreign specialists from clinics like the New Republic and the Wall Street Journal. All visited the bedside and came away shaking their heads. Baseball was sinking. Even if the old gent made it through until April and the warmer weather, his expectations were minimal-lonely wheelchair afternoons on the back porch, gruel and antibiotics, and the sad little overexcitement of his one-hundredth birthday in July. I haven't run into my dour friend at any ball games this summer, but I doubt whether the heavy crowds and noisy excitement of the current season, which is now well into its second half, would change his mind. The idea of the imminent demise of baseball has caught on, and those who cling to it (and they are numerous) seem to have their eyes on the runes instead of that leaping corpse. This new folk belief centers on the new folk word ”image.” Baseball, the argument goes, has a bad image. The game is too slow and too private, and offers too little action for a society increasingly attached to violence, suddenness, and ma.s.s movement. Baseball is cerebral and unemotional; the other, fast-growing professional sports, most notably pro football, are dense, quick, complex, dangerous, and perpetually stimulating. Statistics are then cited, pointing out the two-year decline in baseball attendance, as against the permanent hot-ticket status now enjoyed by football. (Last year, the National Football League played to 87 per cent of capacity in its regular season.) A recent Harris poll is quoted, which showed football supplanting baseball for the first time as the favorite American sport. The poll, which was taken last winter, indicated that football appeals most to high-income groups and to those between thirty-five and forty-nine years old, while baseball still comes first with old people, low-income groups, and Negroes. Bad, bad image.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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