Part 6 (2/2)

For me, the true mystery of the slider is not its flight path but the circ.u.mstances of its discovery. Professional baseball got under way in the eighteen-seventies, and during all the ensuing summers uncounted thousands of young would-be Mathewsons and Seavers spent their afternoons flinging the ball in every conceivable fas.h.i.+on as they searched for magic fadeaways and flutter b.a.l.l.s that would take them to Cooperstown. Why did eighty years pa.s.s before anybody noticed that a slight c.o.c.king of the wrist would be sufficient to usher in the pitchers' Golden Age? Where were Tom Swift and Frank Merriwell? What happened to American Know-How? This is almost a national disgrace. The mystery is deepened by the fact that-to my knowledge, at least-no particular pitcher or pitching coach is given credit for the discovery and propagation of the slider. Bob Lemon, who may be the first man to have pitched his way into the Hall of Fame with a slider, says he learned the pitch from Mel Harder, who was an elder mound statesman with the Indians when Lemon came up to that club, in 1946. I have also heard some old-timers say that George Blaeholder was throwing a pretty fair slider for the St. Louis Browns way back in the nineteen-twenties. But none of these worthies ever claimed to be the Johnny Appleseed of the pitch. The thing seemed to generate itself-a weed in the bullpen which overran the field.

The slider has made baseball more difficult for the fan as well as for the batter. Since its action is late and minimal, and since its delivery does not require the easily recognizable arm-snap by the pitcher that heralds the true curve, the slider can be spotted only by an attentive spectator seated very close to home plate. A curve thrown by famous old pretzel-benders like Tommy Bridges and Sal Maglie really used to curve; you could see the thing break even if you were way out in the top deck of Section 31. Most fans, however, do not admit the loss. The contemporary bleacher critic, having watched a doll-size distant slugger swing mightily and tap the ball down to second on four bounces, smiles and enters the out in his scorecard. ”Slider,” he announces, and everybody nods wisely in agreement.

The mystery of the knuckleball is ancient and honored. Its pract.i.tioners cheerfully admit that they do not understand why the pitch behaves the way it does; nor do they know, or care much, which particular lepidopteran path it will follow on its way past the batter's infuriated swipe. They merely prop the ball on their fingertips (not, in actual fact, on the knuckles) and launch it more or less in the fas.h.i.+on of a paper airplane, and then, most of the time, finish the delivery with a faceward motion of the glove, thus hiding a grin. Now science has confirmed the phenomenon. Writing in The American Journal of Physics, Eric Sawyer and Robert G. Watts, of Tulane University, recently reported that wind-tunnel tests showed that a slowly spinning baseball is subject to forces capable of making it swerve a foot or more between the pitcher's mound and the plate. The secret, they say, appears to be the raised seams of the ball, which cause a ”roughness pattern” and an uneven flow of air, resulting in a ”nonsymmetric lateral force distribution and ... a net force in one direction or another.”

Like many other backyard baseball stars, I have taught myself to throw a knuckleball that moves with so little rotation that one can almost pick out the signature of Charles S. Feeney in midair; the pitch, however, has shown disappointingly few symptoms of last-minute fluttering and has so far proved to be wonderfully catchable or hittable, mostly by my wife. Now, at last, I understand the problem. In their researches, Sawyer and Watts learned that an entirely spinless knuckler is not subject to varying forces, and thus does not dive or veer. The ideal knuckler, they say, completes about a quarter of a revolution on its way to the plate. The speed of the pitch, moreover, is not critical, because ”the magnitude of the lateral force increases approximately as the square of the velocity,” which means that the total lateral movement is ”independent of the speed of the pitch.”

All this has been perfectly understood (if less politely defined) by any catcher who has been the battery mate of a star knuckleballer, and has thus spent six or seven innings groveling in the dirt in imitation of a bulldog cornering a nest of field mice. Modern catchers have the a.s.sistance of outsized gloves (which lately have begun to approach the diameter of tea trays), and so enjoy a considerable advantage over some of their ancient predecessors in capturing the knuckler. In the middle nineteen-forties, the receivers for the Was.h.i.+ngton Senators had to deal with a pitching staff that included four knuckleball specialists-Dutch Leonard, Johnny Niggeling, Mickey Haefner, and Roger Wolff. Among the ill-equipped Was.h.i.+ngton catchers who tried to fend off almost daily mid-afternoon clouds of deranged b.u.t.terflies were Rick Ferrell and Jake Early, Early eventually was called up to serve in the armed forces-perhaps the most willing inductee of his day.

The spitball was once again officially outlawed from baseball in 1974, and maybe this time the prohibition will work. This was the third, and by far the most severe, edict directed at the unsanitary and extremely effective delivery, for it permits an umpire to call an instantaneous ball on any pitch that even looks like a spitter as it crosses the plate. No evidence is required; no appeal by the pitcher to higher powers is permissible. A subsequent spitball or imitation thereof results in the expulsion of the pitcher from the premises, instanter, and an ensuing fine. Harsh measures indeed, but surely sufficient, we may suppose, to keep this repellent and unfair practice out of baseball's s.h.i.+ning mansion forever. Surely, and yet ... Professional pitchers have an abiding fondness for any down-breaking delivery, legal or illegal, that will get the job done, and nothing, they tell me, does the job more effectively or more entertainingly than a dollop of saliva or slippery-elm juice, or a little bitty dab of lubricating jelly, applied to the pitching fingers. The ball, which is sent off half wet and half dry, like a dilatory schoolboy, hurries innocently toward the gate and its grim-faced guardians, and at the last second darts under the turnstile. Pitchers, moreover, have before them the inspiring recent example of g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, whose rumored but unverified f.a.ginesque machinations with K-Y Jelly won him a Cy Young Award in 1972 and led inevitably to the demand for harsher methods of law enforcement. Rumor has similarly indicted other highly successful performers, like Don Drysdale, Whitey Ford, and Bill Singer. Preacher Roe, upon retiring from the Dodgers, in 1954, after an extended useful tenure on the mound at Ebbets Field, published a splendidly unrepentant confession, in which he gave away a number of trade secrets. His favorite undryer, as I recall, was a full pack of Juicy Fruit gum, and he loaded up by straightening the bill of his cap between pitches and pa.s.sing his fingers momentarily in front of his face-now also illegal, alas.

It may be perceived that my sympathies, which lately seemed to lie so rightly on the side of the poor overmatched hitters, have unaccountably swung the other way. I admit this indefensible lapse simply because I find the spitter so enjoyable for its deviousness and skulking disrespect. I don't suppose we should again make it a fully legal pitch (it was first placed outside the pale in 1920), but I would enjoy a return to the era when the spitter was treated simply as a misdemeanor and we could all laugh ourselves silly at the sight of a large, outraged umpire suddenly calling in a suspected wetback for inspection (and the pitcher, of course, rolling the ball to him across the gra.s.s) and then glaring impotently out at the innocent (”Who-me?”) perpetrator on the mound. Baseball is a hard, rules-dominated game, and it should have more room in it for a little cheerful cheating.

All these speculations, and we have not yet taken the ball out of the hands of its first friend, the pitcher. And yet there is always something more. We might suddenly realize, for instance, that baseball is the only team sport in which the scoring is not done with the ball. In hockey, football, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, and the rest of them, the ball or its equivalent actually scores or is responsible for the points that determine the winner. In baseball, the score is made by the base runner-by the man down there, just crossing the plate-while the ball, in most cases, is a long way off, doing something quite different. It's a strange business, this unique double life going on in front of us, and it tells us a lot about this unique game. A few years ago, there was a suddenly popular thesis put forward in some sports columns and light-heavyweight editorial pages which proposed that the immense recent popularity of professional football could be explained by the fact that the computerlike complexity of its plays, the clotted and anonymous ma.s.ses of its players, and the intense violence of its action const.i.tuted a perfect Sunday parable of contemporary urban society. It is a pretty argument, and perhaps even true, especially since it is hard not to notice that so many professional football games, in spite of their noise and chaos, are deadeningly repet.i.tious, predictable, and ba.n.a.l. I prefer the emotions and suggestions to be found in the other sport. I don't think anyone can watch many baseball games without becoming aware of the fact that the ball, for all its immense energy and unpredictability, very rarely escapes the control of the players. It is released again and again-pitched and caught, struck along the ground or sent high in the air-but almost always, almost instantly, it is recaptured and returned to control and safety and harmlessness. Nothing is altered, nothing has been allowed to happen. This orderliness and constraint are among the prime attractions of the sport; a handful of men, we discover, can police a great green country, forestalling unimaginable disasters. A slovenly, error-filled game can sometimes be exciting, but it never seems serious, and is thus never truly satisfying, for the metaphor of safety-of danger subdued by skill and courage-has been lost. Too much civilization, however, is deadly-in this game, a deadly bore. A deeper need is stifled. The ball looks impetuous and dangerous, but we perceive that in fact it lives in a slow, guarded world of order, vigilance, and rules. Nothing can ever happen here. And then once again the ball is pitched-sent on its quick, planned errand. The bat flashes, there is a new, louder sound, and suddenly we see the ball streaking wild through the air and then bounding along distant and untouched in the sweet green gra.s.s. We leap up, thousands of us, and shout for its joyful flight-free, set free, free at last.

Starting to Belong.

- June 1972.

JUNE IS WHEN BASEBALL REALLY begins. Now partisans.h.i.+p deepens, and we come to the time when the good weather and the sights and sounds of the game are no longer quite enough. In June, even casual semi-fans begin to watch the standings, and true believers-adherents of free silver and the Expos and similar causes-secretly put aside some of their wild April hopes as they see that this season, like the others, will be mostly pain and misadventure, and that part of their attention must now be given to the leaders and the other princ.i.p.als in the long pennant drama. For me, at least, all this has been slow to happen this year. Part of that is attributable to the bitter, unprecedented strike called by the Players a.s.sociation at the end of March, which wiped out the first two weeks of the season and did away with most of the antic.i.p.ation and good cheer of baseball's spring. But I have begun to notice I am more hesitant than I once was to give my full attention to the games and adventures of the early season, and more inclined to linger on the one that is just past. This year, April and May seemed to deepen my recollection of last October, when the Pirates and Orioles played that brilliant and breathless turnabout seven-game World Series, which was won in the end by the hitting and throwing and the burning will of Pittsburgh's Roberto Clemente. It was a Series especially worth thinking about and putting to memory, but I suspect that many fans may suffer from a similar nostalgia every spring. We are afraid to commit ourselves too quickly or eagerly to the time at hand. We hold back a bit, remembering the pa.s.sions and rewards of the season just past, remembering how we cared, and wondering if this new season can matter as much to us. It's almost like being in school-being back in college again. Can this term be as good as the last one? Who will my friends be? Will I fall in love again? Will these new courses be any good? Waiting, we watch and take notes.

Scorecard: Early June. July and midseason creeping up, yet baseball year still at loose ends. Distracting sort of campaign, suggesting no-score ball game in which 15 base runners stranded in first 4 innings; eventful yet forgettable. To date: Hank Aaron wafts 1 doz. homers, pa.s.sing W. Mays and running maybe 1l/2 seasons short of the Babe's 714. Willie probably relieved. Willie also rejuvenated & rejoicing as new Met, out from under heavy 20-yr. burden as Giants' deity & leader, plays occasional 1B or OF for Metsies, signs autogs., runs bases like a 10-speed bike, wins games. Maysless Giants (also McCoveyless, thanks to broken McC. wing) plummet to NL West cellar. Similar early fatuity for a while afflicts Baltimore, perennial AL Ozymandias (now down to 1 Robinson, after winter trade of F. Robby to Dodgers), whose grizzled vets rarely hit ball beyond infield, let alone into stands. Total early Oriole departure from race prevented only by lack of consist. or zing among other AL East clubs. Cleveland like a mayfly-takes early wing, expires on same afternoon. Tigers like bullfrog escaping a well-jumps up three feet, slips back two. Yankees ... Yankees like nothing in nature. Most sedative BB team in memory, so uninspired as to suggest bestowal of new sobriquet: Bronx Sashweights? CBS Plastercasts? Red Sox, diminished by tradeoff of dissidents & gripers, lose injured Yastrzemski for early going; Yaz previously heavily booed at Fenway, has not hit much for almost 1 yr. Mystery.

Unhappy celebs also include Giants' Juan Marichal, in bed with aching back after early 1 win8 loss record, and Cards' Bob Gibson, now back on track after early zip5 mark. But prime addition this yr. to annals' human fatuity is to be seen in utter inability to retire major-league hitters (and later, in and around bushes of Birmingham, Ala., minor-league hitters) displ. by once colorful, now pathetic Denny McLain. Denny's extinguishment nearly accompanied by similar disapp. of Vida Blue, last year's Lochinvar & this year's toilet-fixture exec., who took new employment during long salary holdout vs. Oakland boss Charles O. Finley (chance here to use word ”ineffable”)-the ineffable Charles O. Finley, whose difficulties with help are legend. All BB owners' difficulties with help now legend. Owners mostly, almost wholly, respons. for players' strike. (Chance here to use other descript. adjectives. Resist impulse.) Strike wipes out 1st 2 weeks of play, gets season off to unstart that prob. still casts aforesaid sense of distraction & foolishness over entire BB scene.

(Historical note, proving game no longer hobbled by h.o.a.ry traditions, superst.i.tions: Phillies, in midst of terrible losing streak, refuse to fire manager. Fire general manager instead. Go on losing.) The strike: There will be no attempt here to recapitulate all the issues in that painful and tedious dispute, but it does seem essential to recall that the Players a.s.sociation from the beginning offered to compromise or submit to arbitration its ultimate point of difference with the owners-the use of acc.u.mulated funds in the players' pension plan to increase the benefits currently being paid out. The owners declared any accommodation to be an absolute impossibility until a total of eighty-six games and several million dollars in revenue had drained away, whereupon they compromised, exactly as they could have done before the deadlock set in. A last-minute modic.u.m of patience on both sides might have averted the whole thing, but not everyone wanted peace. It is clear that some of the more dedicated Cro-Magnons among the owners (including the Cardinals' Gussie Busch, the Reds' Frank Dale, the Mets' Donald Grant, and the Royals' Ewing Kauffman) saw the strike as a precious opportunity to strain, and perhaps crack, the labor union of their upstart, ungrateful young employees and, above all, to discredit its executive director, Marvin Miller. Most of the owners, to be sure, would deny such an intention, but the unchanging and apparently unchangeable characteristic of their fraternity is its total distaste for self-discipline-a flaw that anarchizes the entire body and repeatedly renders it victim to its loudest and least responsible minority. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who has been criticized for not playing a stronger hand in settling the strike, does not in fact have any power over the owners in such a crucial situation; these businessmen, in contrast to the players, chose to remain undirected and largely unadvised throughout the crisis.

The corporate masochism of baseball scarcely ranks as news, and neither labor relations nor the size of players' pensions is the end of the game's problems. Among the other hovering anxieties is the deepening disparity in quality and attendance between the two major leagues. Last year's record total attendance did not conceal the fact that the National League outdrew the American by nearly five and a half million customers-17,324,857 to 11,858,560. The gap is widening this year, with the NL running ahead of last season's comparable attendance figures, and the AL behind. The difference between the leagues in quality and attractiveness of play is harder to prove, but it can be suggested: so far this spring, National League batters have hit over one hundred more home runs than their American League counterparts. New ball parks attract new customers: the American League has four modern parks (counting the stadium to be opened next year in Kansas City), but with the exception of Wrigley Field, every park in the National League is less than fifteen years old. I am not attracted to this means of rebalancing, however, because I detest the appearance and flavor of most modern ball parks, which seem to have sprung from the same architectural tradition that brought us the shopping mall. I also believe that fans would respond with pleasure and alacrity to a more challenging but far less expensive solution to the American League's problems-better ball teams.*

One lively, long-range proposal to increase attendance is a suggested future realignment of all twenty-four major-league clubs into new leagues-possibly a regional lineup of three eight-team leagues: Eastern, Central, and Southern-Western. A further, accompanying alteration would be the introduction of a limited number of interleague games during the regular season, arranged so that every big-league ballplayer could be seen by fans in every big-league city within the span of two seasons. The plan is startling and perhaps imperfect, but it is surely worth hopeful scrutiny at the top levels of baseball. I am convinced, however, that traditionalists need have no fear that it will be adopted. Any amalgamation would require all the owners to subdue their differences, to delegate real authority, to accept change, and to admit that they share an equal responsibility for everything that happens to their game. And that, to judge by their past record and by their performance in the strike, is exactly what they will never do.

Most recently, the Supreme Court's refusal to consider the ant.i.trust implications of baseball's reserve clause, which was challenged in Curt Flood's suit, means without a doubt that this difficult and inflammatory issue will now be thrown down between the owners and the Players a.s.sociation. It will form a central area of contention when the overall players' agreement, governing every aspect of their profession, comes up for renegotiation this winter. Congress is holding a number of hearings on the monopolistic aspects of professional sports, but few congressmen in an election year are anxious to s.h.i.+ver the foundations of a national inst.i.tution like baseball. Next winter could be another long one, and coming seasons are already clouded with foreboding.

Home stand: Shea Stadium was instant compensation for the emptiness of early April. I first got there for an afternoon game with the Cubs that matched up Tom Seaver and a junior right-hander named Burt Hooton, who in his previous start had startled the nation's news-famished fans by pitching an opening-day no-hitter against the Phillies. Any statistical anxiety he may have brought with him because of this feat was dispersed by Bud Harrelson, who hit his third pitch of the game to left field for a double. Hooton throws an anomaly called the knuckle curve-a unique private invention that causes the pitched ball to drop into the catcher's glove like a coin into a pay telephone-and he now began retiring Mets in cl.u.s.ters. Seaver responded with plain but honest All-American fastb.a.l.l.s, and in one stretch twenty-one successive Mets and Cubs (both clubs, admittedly, devout pract.i.tioners of nonviolence at the plate) between them managed two outfield flies before Eddie Kranepool finally singled in the fifth and came around to score the first run in Seaver's 20, four-hit win. There were some new faces in the Mets' lineup, and one painfully missed figure in the dugout: Manager Gil Hodges, who had collapsed and died two days after the end of spring training. There must be very few of us who exulted through the Mets' triumphant campaign of 1969 who do not retain some common permanent portrait of Gil Hodges-enormous hands thrust inside the pockets of his blue windbreaker; his heavy, determinedly expressionless face under the long-billed cap; and his pale, intelligent gaze that presided over that turbulent summer and somehow made it come right for his young team and for us all.

Two stimulating comeback wins over the Dodgers and the Giants in the same week in May began to suggest to me the resourcefulness of this particular Met team, already surprisingly settled into first place in its division. On a frigid leftover-winter night, the Los Angelenos surprised the Mets' rookie starter, Jon Matlack, with eight hits and four runs in the first four innings, one score coming on a home run by Frank Robinson, the famous ex-Oriole. It was a Robby Special-a first-pitch line drive jerked to left with the loud and terminal ”whock!” that causes sensitive pitchers instantly to avert their gaze, as if from a grade-crossing accident. In the fourth, however, the Mets executed a dandy outfield peg and relay-Agee to Martinez to Grote-that wiped out a Dodger runner at the plate, and Matlack, thus heartened, pitched obdurately while his teammates caught up. The tying run came on Rusty Staub's homer in the eighth inning, and the winning run-deep in the stilly night, hours after the last hot coffee had run out at Shea-came in the fourteenth, on a tiny two-out infield poke by Teddy Martinez, who outran the peg to first while Harrelson scored from third.

Two nights later, with the Giants at Shea, everyone in the park took out his pencil and put a circle around Willie Mays' name on the left-hand, San Francisco side of the scorecard and then drew a long line and an arrow that moved it over to the right-hand roster. Willie had been signed up by the Mets the day before, and was on the field as a non-Giant for the first time in his life. It was a strange feeling; something fixed in our baseball universe had been taken down. He did not play that night, but the subtraction of Mays and the injured McCovey from the Giants' lineup gave that team an entirely new aspect; they were suddenly a young, fast, largely unknown club, far from contention now but full of new promise. The Mays deal, one sensed, had been right for them, too. Their next star was well in evidence. He is Dave Kingman, an angular, six-foot-six, uppercutting power hitter with a reputation for frequent bad strikeouts and occasional moon-shot home runs; showing us some speed on the bases as well, he rapped out a double and two singles.

The Mets, I could see, had been considerably altered by the addition of two names this season-Staub and Jim Fregosi, the latter a useful and experienced All-Star infielder acquired from the Angels.** For the first time in recent memory, the Mets' batting order seemed to have both a top and a bottom. Its middle-the No. 4 man-is Staub, late of the Montreal Expos, a large, marmalade-colored right fielder, who invariably plays bare-armed, catches fly b.a.l.l.s one-handed, and hits against left- and right-handed pitchers in the same fas.h.i.+on-that is, with consistency, adequate power, and a burning, almost exultant concentration. He should be a sporting deity in New York for years to come.

In that Giant game, the Mets were shy a run in the bottom of the eighth when the pitcher was due to bat, and enormous cries of ”We want Willie!” now rose in the night air. Manager Yogi Berra, however, resisted the invitation and sent up a left-handed hitter, John Milner, who walked and was duly moved up and neatly scored. In the ninth, the bottom of the order finished it off-walk to Jones, single by Fregosi, and the game-winning hit up the middle by Grote. The Mets, winning by 21, were on their way to what eventually became an eleven-game victory streak. Two days later, Willie Mays made his debut as a Met, playing against his old team. Displaying his customary sense of occasion, always as close to perfect as that of Mme. Perle Mesta, he smashed a fifth-inning home run that won the game.

(Miniquiz: Willie Mays had always worn No. 24 on his uniform. The same number was worn this spring by a reserve outfielder for the Mets named Jim Beauchamp. Q: When Willie became a Met, which of them was asked to change his uniform number? Answer next week.) On the road: I began my first road trip one day too late. The night before I arrived in Los Angeles, the Houston Astros had beaten the Dodgers with a three-run catch-up homer struck with two out in the ninth by Astro third baseman Doug Rader, and then a bases-loaded squeeze bunt by Tommy Helms in the eleventh. I saw the same teams in three taut, edgy pitchers' duels-the Dodgers winning the first two by 21 and 30, to recapture a fractional lead in their division, which they then lost right back to the visitors in the last game, 21. Excellent baseball, I had to admit, if a bit austere. And not all that austere, either, since Dodger manager Walt Alston was trying out an infield-third baseman Steve Garvey, shortstop Bill Russell, second baseman Bobby Valentine, and first baseman Bill Buckner-that averages twenty-two and a half years old and plays electrifying, in more than one sense of the word, ball. Buckner won the first game with a two-run double, making up for a run flung away by Garvey; Valentine and Garvey drove in two of the three runs the next day, atoning for an egregious bobble and an embarra.s.sing wild heave by Russell. The Dodger pitchers in those games, Claude Osteen and Al Downing, threw a lot of sinker b.a.l.l.s, which the Astro batters helpfully hammered into the dirt, thus giving the home-team kiddies plenty of infield practice.

That second game, on Sat.u.r.day, was actually settled on Houston hurler Dave Roberts' first pitch of the evening, which Bobby Valentine hit over the center-field fence. Everybody was swinging at first pitches, it turned out, and the game went by so quickly that there was scarcely time for a visiting Easterner to appreciate the soft, late suns.h.i.+ne gilding the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, or for the Dodger promotion corps to get all its messages up on the scoreboard: ”HAPPY ANNIVERSARY NO. 1 TO THE KEITH GUSTAVSONS.” ... ”HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BRUCE GERSON, SPENDING HIS 8TH STRAIGHT BIRTHDAY AT A DODGER GAME.” ... ”WELCOME TO DORITH ZACHAIM, SEEING THE DODGERS SHE READ ABOUT IN HAIFA, ISRAEL.” Downing whizzed through the Astro lineup, giving up but two singles, and the game was over in exactly ninety minutes, a new Dodger Stadium record (”I don't think we ought to get paid for that one,” Wes Parker said) and probably the quickest game of baseball that Bruce Gerson or any of the rest of us there will see in our lifetimes.

The Houston infield, though less winsome than the Los Angeles youth movement, is splendidly accomplished. It is half home-grown-Doug Rader and a redoubtable shortstop named Roger Metzger-and half imported-Tommy Helms at second and the dangerous Lee May at first, the latter two having arrived from Cincinnati last winter in a trade that has vivified the lackadaisical Houstons. Whatever the adventures of the Astros this summer, none of them will immediately forget the ending of the final Dodger game. Walter Alston, with his club down by a run in the bottom of the ninth, now began to make use of his varsity. Wes Parker (who had played the entire game at first) led off with a single-only the fifth hit off Astro starter Jerry Reuss. Maury Wills, pinch-hitting, sacrificed Parker to second. Jim Lefebvre, pinch-hitting, ripped a scorching grounder past Doug Rader at third base. It was past, between Rader and the bag, but Rader dived full-length to his right, flinging out his glove cross-handed as he skidded in the dirt, and came up with the ball. He sprang up, losing his cap, and managed a colliding tag of the astonished Wes Parker, who was on his way in from second with the sure tying run. The game ended a minute later, and afterward Walt Alston, now in his nineteenth year at the Dodger helm, said, ”That may be the greatest infield play I've ever seen.” Doug Rader, a sharp-faced young man, burnished with freckles, said, ”Ah, I made one just as good back with Durham in '65.” Joke. Rader had also hit that two-out homer in the first game of the series, and now he said, ”Everything is so d.a.m.ned different when you're with a club up on top. It's great, isn't it? Isn't it great? Oh, I hope it's like this all year.”*** I hung up the Rader catch in my gallery-in the small inner room, between an early Clete Boyer and a couple of Brooks Robinsons.

Motown: you never can tell. Approaching Detroit, my next stop, I told myself that a couple of upcoming mismatches between the Tigers and the cellar-dwelling Milwaukee Brewers, a club then batting .184, would at least offer a chance to watch such celebrated veteran Detroit sluggers as Al Kaline, Norm Cash, and Jim Northrup strut their stuff. The only stuff on view the first night, it turned out, was some marvelous pitching by the Brewers' Jim Lonborg, the erstwhile Boston ace, who entirely dominated the evening. It was a warm late-May night, summer having finally caught up with baseball, and the smallish crowd, having nothing much to cheer about, fell into a soft, languid murmuration. Tiger Stadium is an old-style city ball park, an ancient green chamber, and the sounds of baseball enclosed there seemed to come out of the past-the click of the news ticker in the rooftop press box, an infielder's whistle, a brief little burst of clapping from somewhere down the third-base line, and then some laughter in the stands following a mighty strike call (”Streuahh!”) by the home-plate ump. The baseball writers were eating ice cream. In time, a cool evening breeze sprang up, and the Brewers scored a pair of runs in the seventh, and Lonborg, with his sinking fastball reminding us of his great summer of 1967, wrapped up his four-hit shutout. Just another baseball evening, but in Detroit there is a dreadful hovering possibility that evenings like this may not continue. I heard much talk there that within three or four years the Tigers will give up their park (formerly known as Briggs Stadium, Navin Field, and-way back-Bennett Park), where they have always played ball, and move into a new enclosed stadium on Detroit's waterfront. A domed palace, however, may be almost beyond the city's economic reach, and we may hope, with the utmost selfishness and good sense, that a continuation of the current business recession and dollar inflation may ensure another decade or two of life for the Tigers' gra.s.sy old boathouse.

The Tigers won the next night, but not in style. In the sixth, their starter, Les Cain, was sailing along, still untouched, when he suddenly lost all poise and control, walked the bases full, and was yanked, shockingly, while still working on a no-hitter. There were other causes for dismay-errors by the Brewer infield and unfervent play by the Tiger outfield-before Detroit came from behind for a 53 win.

The quiet I observed in the stands during this two-game set was not wholly attributable to the torpid play. Now and then, an evening zephyr brought me unmistakable emanations of Acapulco and other sunny climes, and when I inquired about it, a Tiger front-office man smiled and said yes, the bleacher crowds did now include large numbers of young fans from Wayne State and other nearby centers of learning who seemed to be heightening their wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.d Kaline with certain holy substances. ”We leave 'em alone,” he told me. ”To tell you the truth, we have a lot more trouble with the beer-drinkers from the auto plants.”

Bal'more: one possible cure for the American League's attendance problems might be some form of ma.s.sive group therapy for baseball fans in Baltimore. Although the Orioles are the cla.s.s of t

<script>