Part 8 (1/2)

Three for the Tigers

- September 1973 MAX. IT IS LUNCHTIME at Gene & Georgetti's Restaurant, on North Franklin Street in downtown Chicago. It is the middle of the week, and the place is pretty full. A lot of businessmen eat here: b.l.o.o.d.y Marys, chopped sirloin or the veal scallopini, salad, coffee, shoptalk. At one table-a party of three-somebody mentions the St. Louis Browns, the old American League baseball club that moved to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles. A man rises from a nearby table, approaches the threesome, and bows. ”Excuse me, gentlemen,” he says. They look up. He is a sandy-haired, bright-eyed man-still a bit below middle age, one would guess-with a small cigar in his hand; his eyegla.s.ses are in the new aviator-goggle style. ”Excuse me,” he says again, smiling cheerfully. ”I just overheard one of you mention the old St. Louis Browns, and I'm sure you would all like to be reminded of the lineup of the 1944 Brownies, which, as you will recall, was the only Browns team ever to win the AL pennant, and which lost that World Series, of course, to their hometown rivals, the Cardinals, in six games. It was one of the two World Series, in fact, in which both partic.i.p.ating teams came from west of the Mississippi River. The Browns' regular lineup in 1944 went: catcher, Frank Mancuso; first base, George McQuinn; second base, Don Gutteridge; third base, Mark Christman ...” He runs through the eight names (one of the least celebrated lineups in the history of the game), adds starting pitchers Jack Kramer, Sig Jakucki, Bob Muncrief, and Denny Galehouse and, for good measure, throws in a second-string catcher named Red Hayworth. ”You probably remember,” he says, still smiling, ”that Red Hayworth and the regular catcher, Frank Mancuso, both had brothers who were also major-league catchers and, in both cases, better catchers. Thank you.” He bows and departs.

The three men at the table look at one another, and then one of them calls after their informant. ”Hey!” he says. ”Do you come from St. Louis?”

”No,” says the stranger. ”Detroit.”

He sits down at his table again, but he has stopped smiling. He has just remembered that he lives in Chicago now-away from Detroit, away from the Tigers.

Bert. A little after nine-thirty on a Monday morning in June, Bert walks into his ground-floor office in Oak Park, Michigan, which is a suburb on the north side of Detroit. His name is on the door: ”Bert Gordon, Realty.” He says good morning to his secretary and to his a.s.sistant, Barbara Rosenthal, and goes on into his own office, which looks out on a parking strip and, beyond that, onto Greenfield Road. He sits down at his desk, leans forward and takes off his shoes, and slides his feet into a pair of faded blue espadrilles. Then he swings his swivel chair to the right, so that he is facing a desk-model calculator on a side table, and punches out on it the numbers ”2922” and ”1596.” The first figure is the total number of days of President Nixon's two terms in the White House; the second is the number of days the President has served to date. He hits another b.u.t.ton, and the answer slot at the top of the machine offers up ”54.62” in illuminated green numbers. Bert is a member of the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee, and he has just figured (as he figures every weekday morning) the expired percentage of President Nixon's two terms of office. Now Bert clears the machine and punches out the numbers ”9345” and ”2806.” (Since Friday morning, the first number has gone up by seven and the second by one: Al Kaline, the veteran star outfielder for the Detroit Tigers, hit one single in seven official times at bat against the Minnesota Twins over the weekend.) The machine silently presents another set of green numbers; today Kaline's lifetime major-league batting average stands at .3000267. Bert sighs, erases the figure, and picks up his telephone. He is ready to start his day.

Don. Don and his wife, Susan, are attending a performance of The Marriage of Figaro by the touring Metropolitan Opera company at the Masonic Temple Auditorium in Detroit. They are both very fond of the theater, and they go to a play or an opera whenever they can manage it. As usual, Don has bought seats near the back of the balcony, where he knows the radio reception is better. The two of them are following the opera attentively, but Don is also holding a small transistor radio up to his left ear. (He is left-eared all the way.) Through long training, he is able to hear both the opera and (because of the good reception) the voice of Ernie Harwell, the sports broadcaster for Station WJR, who is at this moment describing the action at Tiger Stadium, where the Brewers are leading the Tigers 10 in the top of the fourth. A woman sitting directly behind Don and Susan is unable to restrain her curiosity, and during a recitative she leans forward and taps Don on the shoulder.

”Excuse me,” she whispers. ”I was just wondering what you're listening to on that little radio.”

Don half turns in his seat. ”Simultaneous translation,” he whispers.

In this country's long love affair with professional sports, the athlete has more and more come to resemble the inamorata-an object of unceasing scrutiny, rapturous adoration, and expensive adornment-while the suitor, or fan, remains forever loyal, shabby, and unknown. Sports fans are thought of as a ma.s.s-statistics that are noticed only when they do not fall within their predicted norms-but the individual fan (except for a few self-made celebrities, like Hilda Chester, the Ebbets Field bell ringer, or the Knicks' Dancing Harry, or the Mets' folding-sign man) is a loner, a transient cipher, whose streaks and slumps go unrecorded in the annals of his game. Every sport, however, has its great fans as well as its great athletes-cla.s.sic performers whose exceptional powers set them apart from the journeyman spectator. They are veterans who deserve notice if only for the fact that their record of attachment and service to their game and their club often exceeds that of any player down on the field. The home team, in their belief, belongs to them more than to this pa.s.sing manager or to that arriviste owner, and they are often cranky possessors, trembling with memory and pride and frustration, as ridiculous and touching as any lovers. These rare ones make up a fraction of every sporting audience, but they seem to cl.u.s.ter more thickly in the homes of the older, well-entrenched franchises. The three Detroit nonpareils are a vivid constellation of contemporary baseball fandom: Maxwell H. Lapides, a businessman who went to work last spring as a vice-president of a national collection agency in Chicago, thus painfully exiling himself from his friends and his ball team; Bertram Gordon, whose real-estate agency specializes in finding and leasing business and shopping-center locations in the areas of thickening population outside the central city; and Dr. Donald N. Shapiro, a distinguished oral surgeon. They are intimate friends, united by their ages (middle to upper forties), their similar backgrounds and styles of life, their neighboring families, their Jewishness, and their wit and intelligence, but most of all by their consuming pa.s.sion for the Detroit Tigers. None of the three is willing to accept the cheerfully patronizing tone that nonsporting friends and relatives usually direct toward the baseball-bitten; none of the three, for that matter, regards himself as a baseball fan at all. ”Right from the beginning, I have been a Tiger fan and nothing else,” Max Lapides said this summer. ”Other men can happily go to ball games wherever they happen to find themselves-not me. My interest is the Tigers. They are the sun, and all the twenty-three other teams are satellites. You can't begin to understand or appreciate this game unless you have an intense involvement.”

Dr. Donald Shapiro, in spite of the demands imposed by his successful and extensive practice, by his family (he is married and has three children), by his writing for medical and dental journals, by his sideline in theatricals (he played a small part in a Hollywood gangster film shot in Detroit last winter), by his weekend career as a highly compet.i.tive Cla.s.s A tennis player, and by his voluminous, wide-ranging reading, manages to keep abreast of the Tigers' news almost inning by inning throughout their 162-game season. Evenings, friends at his house or at their own have taught themselves to ignore the fact that his left ear, like van Gogh's, is of no immediate social use; in the spring, when a good many ball games are played in the afternoon, Shapiro tries to schedule his surgical appointments in hospital operating rooms that he knows to have an acceptable interior Harwell-level. (Sinai Hospital has the worst reception in Detroit.) When all else fails, he calls his baseball friends, and Bert Gordon has come to recognize the sound of Don's telephone voice, blurred with haste and a surgical mask, asking, ”How're we doing?” One afternoon in 1970, Bert answered his phone and heard Don whisper, ”This is probably a violation of every professional canon, but I can't help it. Guess who I've got in the chair!”

”Who?” said Bert.

”Chet Laabs!”

”Chet Laabs!”

”Chet Laabs!”

They hung up. (Chet Laabs, a chunky, unremarkable outfielder, played for the Tigers from 1937 to 1939.) This kind of belonging brooks no alternatives. ”When I'm listening to a game, there is nothing that annoys me as much as somebody who clearly doesn't care coming up to me and smiling and saying 'How's it going?'” Don says, ”How's it going! Why, don't they understand that for a real fan it's always a matter of suffering and ecstasy? What we're involved with here is exaltation!”

Bert Gordon, in turn, detected a crucial slight in the midst of a recent bridge-table conversation, and demanded, ”How come you're a bridge authority and your partner's an art aficionado but I'm a baseball nut?”

Bert and Don are lifelong friends who grew up in the near-northwest section of Detroit and graduated from Central High together in the cla.s.s of 1942. Max Lapides, who is forty-five years old-three and a half years younger than the others-did not live in the same neighborhood, and thus the triumvirate was not completed until early in the nineteen sixties, although they have subsequently established the fact that they were fellow witnesses, usually in person, of innumerable famous moments in Tiger history: Goose Goslin's champions.h.i.+p-winning single in the ninth inning of the sixth game in the 1935 Series; an unknown thirty-year-old rookie named Floyd Giebell outpitching Bob Feller in Cleveland on the second-to-last day of the 1940 season to nail down the pennant for Detroit; Rudy York and Pinky Higgins. .h.i.tting two-run homers in the same inning against the Reds in the Series that fall; Earl Torgeson stealing home in the bottom of the tenth inning to defeat the hated Yanks in 1955; Joe DiMaggio hammering a grounder that broke George Kell's jaw-and Kell picking up the ball and stepping on the bag to force the runner from second before collapsing in front of third base. Don and Max met at last in 1960, when a friend in common brought them together at a dinner party, having a.s.sured each one beforehand that the other was a Tiger fan of surpa.s.sing tenacity and knowledge. Both of them, of course, utterly ignored the proffered bona fides, and the marriage very nearly expired on the spot. Late in the evening, however, the two chanced to arrive at the drinks table together. Don Shapiro, regarding Max with evident distrust, ventured a minute opening. ”R.L.,” he said.

”R.L.?” returned Max.

Don nodded, watching his man.

”Why, Roxie Lawson,” said Max. (Roxie Lawson was a right-handed pitcher for the Tigers in the mid-thirties.) ”Of course.”

They fell into each other's arms.

In recent years, the three-way entente has deepened in complexity, ritual, and affection. Max Lapides, who has regularly attended about thirty or thirty-five Tiger home games every year, often to the extent of going to the park alone (”He even likes a night game against the Texas Rangers in the last week of September,” says Bert Gordon), has been an energizing catalyst for the three, organizing baseball dates and tickets, nudging baseball memories, berating the Tiger management, comparing active and erstwhile ballplayers, inventing bets and interior games, finding causes for contention and laughter. Since each of the three friends sustains an almost permanent state of transcendental baseball meditation, they are forever making and sharing new discoveries. Last year, for instance, Bert startled Max with the sudden announcement that Aurelio Rodriguez, the present Tiger third baseman, is the only major-league infielder with all five vowels in his first name.

Max and Bert are telephone addicts, and have made several thousand calls to each other in the past four or five years (Bert: ”Think how many if we liked each other!”), mostly to exchange baseball talk. In a recent call, Max baited Bert for having inexplicably forgotten that Don Heffner had played in six games for the Tigers in 1944, long before beginning his tenure as a Detroit coach. ”Now we're even for Milt Boiling, right?” he said. ”It must be a year you haven't let me up because I forgot Milt and Frank Boiling played together that once for us in the fifties.” In time, they went on to bubble-gum cards. ”I never saw the Waners, because they were in the wrong league, but I know how they each looked up at the plate,” Max said. ”Both were lefty hitters, of course, but Lloyd held the bat sort of out in front of him when he was up, and Paul's bat was tipped sideways and back. That's the way it was on my cards, anyway. Listen, what were the worst baseball cards you used to have-you know, the ones you always had so many of you couldn't get rid of them? ... Harlond Clift? Oh, yes, my G.o.d, you're right, Bert! I'd absolutely forgotten. But with me it was always too many Hudlins. Willis Hudlin, the old Cleveland twirler-right? I think I had a hundred Willis Hudlins.... What were the best baseball cards? You mean like the Gehringers and ... Oh, the rarest ones. Let me see.... I guess they were so rare I never got one. I mean, I can't remember. Probably some good ballplayer on a terrible team. Somebody on the old Athletics who'd get overlooked there. Like-oh, like Bob Johnson. You remember him-Indian Bob. He used to kill us.... I think we talked about this once already, but let's talk about it some more, OK?”

By agreement among the three, Max holds the post of official historian, Don is entrusted with tactics, and Bert is the statistician, though none of them is reticent about intruding upon another's turf of expertise. Like most long-term fans, they are absolutely opposed to the American League's new designated-hitter rule, but Bert Gordon may be the first cla.s.sicist to point out that the addition of the tenth man means that the pregame public announcement of the team lineups now takes 11.1 percent longer to complete than it did last year. His avidity for figures seems to remove him a little from the day-to-day adventures of his team, but he keeps his Kaline statistics warm, and this summer he spent a good many hours extrapolating the day on which Kaline would pa.s.s Charlie Gehringer as the player with the third-highest number of base hits (behind Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford) in Tiger history. Early in June, Bert settled on August 17 as the likely date for the event, but later revised it to August 9; the epochal Kaline hit actually came on August 8-a single against Oakland that was probably appreciated more quickly and more deeply by Bert Gordon than by the man who struck it. Bert polishes such Tiger events and figures in his mind-the unmatched Ty Cobb records; Harry Heilmann's odd-year batting champions.h.i.+ps, in 1921, '23, '25, and '27; Denny McLain's startling 316 year in 1968-but the one Tiger record he believes to be absolutely una.s.sailable was made in an afternoon game on June 21, 1970, when a modestly talented Tiger infielder named Cesar Gutierrez hit safely in seven consecutive times at bat. ”For one thing, you have to send fifty-five men to the plate in the game before the thing even becomes statistically possible,” Bert said recently. ”Why, only two men in the entire history of this game, out of all the thousands and thousands that have played big-league ball, have ever gone seven for seven. Just think about that for a minute.” He lit a Lucky Strike and thought about it for a minute, humming happily under his breath. ”You know something about that Gutierrez?” he said, and an enormous laugh convulsed him. ”Oh, boy, was he ever lucky!” *

Max Lapides, by his own careful, historian's estimate, has attended at least twelve hundred Tiger games. Looking back from this Everest over a baseball landscape of almost forty years, he still has no difficulty in selecting the greatest Tiger games of his time; in the spring of 1967, acting out of a pure, Thucydidean sense of duty, he wrote a considerable monograph on the two-or, in strict fact, three-battles that remained brightest in his memory. (Today, he has said, he might have to add either the fifth or the seventh game of the 1968 World Series, when the Tigers came back from an almost hopeless disadvantage to defeat the Cardinals for the World Champions.h.i.+p.) On the night of June 23, 1950, playing at home, the Tigers gave up four home runs to the Yankees in the first four innings, to fall behind by 60; in their half of the fourth they hit four home runs of their own, including a grand slam by pitcher Dizzy Trout, altogether good for eight runs. Homers by Joe DiMaggio and Tommy Henrich again put the visitors ahead, by 98, but Hoot Evers won the thing with a two-run inside-the-park homer in the bottom of the ninth. This Waterloo-eleven homers, sixty-two total bases, all nineteen runs the result of home runs-still holds a number of all-time baseball records (perhaps including ”Frightened Pitchers, Most”), but Max's true fanly preference falls upon quite a different game, a two-part event of almost total austerity that began on July 21, 1945, when the Tigers and the Athletics played a twenty-four-inning, 11 standoff in Philadelphia. (Max Lapides happened to see this afternoon of mime because he had just begun his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. He also happened to see every game played by the Tigers at s.h.i.+be Park during his undergraduate years. Later in the summer of 1945, he and a college friend took a train to Was.h.i.+ngton to see a significant series between the Tigers and the Senators, who were then neck and neck in the pennant race; the students slept on park benches, subsisted on hot dogs and cornflakes, and saw five games in three days.) That 11 game was rescheduled for September 12, 1945, and again the Tigers and Athletics froze at 11 after nine innings, and then at 22 after eleven. The A's won at last, in the sixteenth inning, and Max's precise and admirable account-his prose style may owe something to a press-box t.i.tan of his boyhood, H. G. Salsinger, of the Detroit News-concludes ringingly: It was a fatal move. The exhausted Dazzler [Dizzy Trout] had nothing left-even in the dark shadows of s.h.i.+be Park.... Next came the troublesome Estalella, always a thorn in the Tiger paw.... Roberto and Diz battled to a full count and then, swinging late in the murky dusk, the Cuban sliced a sharp line drive to the right-field corner. Cullenbine, shading center field for the righthanded batter, never had a chance as Smith raced around to score the winning run and wrap up the ”longest game” in baseball history after forty innings of play.

Two days later, whatever justice there was for the Tigers came when Leslie Mueller defeated the Athletics 10 in a five-inning game, while allowing only two hits.

On a Sat.u.r.day morning late last May, Bert Gordon and Don Shapiro drove to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport to meet Max Lapides, who was returning from Chicago to attend his first Tiger game of the year with his old friends. Max's wife and their two young daughters were staying in their Detroit home, in the suburban Birmingham section, until the end of the school year, so Max's exile was still leavened by weekend paroles. On the way to the airport, Bert and Don considered the awful possibility that Max might someday be converted to the White Sox, but the subject died of unlikelihood, and in time the two began comparing some Tiger managers. Red Rolfe (194952), it was agreed, had been decent; Fred Hutchinson (195254) had been sound but touched with temper; Charlie Dressen (196366) had been deep in knowledge but past his prime. Surprisingly, the vote for the best manager since Mickey Cochrane (193438) went to the inc.u.mbent, Billy Martin, who had taken an aged Tiger team into the playoffs the previous fall, and who had the same seniors currently, if barely, at the top of their division again. ”He's winning ball games,” said Don, ”and that's absolutely all that counts.”

”Plus he's exciting,” said Bert. ”This is the first time since I was eleven years old that you see a Tiger base runner go from second to third on a fly ball.”

Another pa.s.senger inquired about Mayo Smith, the pilot who brought the Tigers to within one game of a pennant in 1967, and who won it all the following year. There was a painful pause, and then Don Shapiro, the resident strategist, said, ”Listen, there were times when Mayo Smith was managing, and he would call in somebody from the bullpen, and I would know who he had chosen and I knew that he was going to be wrong. I knew the game was down the drain, and so did everybody else in the ball park. Why, that sense of impending disaster was so strong you could almost chart it. It was palpable. And then the disaster would happen. Mayo Smith absolutely lacked that mystical foreknowledge of baseball events, and as a manager you have to have that. Oh, this man was a monkey on my back for so long, and the worst part of it was that everybody loved Mayo Smith, because he was such a nice guy and such a charming guy. Mayo the nice poker companion, Mayo the great drinking companion-n.o.body had anything bad to say about him, and it was all absolutely true except for one thing: the man was overwhelmingly inept. Oh, boy, I hated that man, and I hated myself for hating him. I probably would have killed him if I'd run into him in '67 after he blew the pennant for us.” The Tigers lost a famous three-way race on the last day of the 1967 season, when the Red Sox won the pennant by beating the Minnesota Twins while the Tigers lost the second game of a doubleheader to the California Angels at home. ”That last game, he did everything wrong,” Don went on. ”He let our pitcher stay in, and I was standing up on my seat screaming, 'Take him out! Take him out!' I was blind with rage. I can still see what happened next-that pitch coming in to the Angels' Fregosi, and Fregosi getting ready to hit it-and I can see the ball going through the hole between short and third, and I can see the man coming around third to put them ahead. And then, like everybody else in this town, I can still see d.i.c.k McAuliffe, in the ninth, hitting into only his second double play of the entire season, to end it all. Listen, I'm like a dying man; I can see that whole game flas.h.i.+ng before my eyes. It was like a scene out of Fellini, because right in back of me this guy is sitting there and listening to a football game-it was a Sunday, and football was on-and his radio is blaring football as the runner is rounding third base, and Mayo Smith is standing there, riveted to that post of his, holding up the dugout.” He shook his head and laughed hollowly. ”That was the day I came home and went down in the bas.e.m.e.nt and broke all our flowerpots.”

Bert, from the front seat, said, ”Think about something happier. Think about 1968.”

”The trouble with you is you don't suffer enough,” Don said.

”I don't suffer enough!” said Bert, shouting with laughter. ”I'm Jewish, I'm short, I'm fat, I'm poor, I'm ugly-what else do you want me to suffer?”

”That's all true,” Don said, looking at his friend affectionately. ”A man like you probably can't bear the necessary onus of suffering. After all, this isn't just a game of ours. It isn't just a preoccupation. It isn't an obsession. It's a-well, it's a-”

They said it together: ”It's an obsession.”

At the airport, Max was met and hugged, and the car aimed back toward the ball park. Suddenly, it was a party.

”Everything is fine, I guess,” Max said. ”Only, I miss my friends, now I'm with them again. I like this so much I may do it every week. But things are not fine back there, really. Listen, the other night when we beat the Yanks I turned on the TV in Chicago and the guy forgot to give the Tigers' score. He absolutely forgot. I couldn't get to sleep until four in the morning. n.o.body knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, 'N.Y. at Detroit (n.).' I mean, doesn't a man have a Const.i.tutional right to the box scores?” He said that he was sometimes able to pick up Ernie Harwell on his car radio. ”It only happens a little bit outside the city, on the north side,” he added. ”Sometimes it's only a s.n.a.t.c.h of the game broadcast, with a lot of static, but I can always tell from Ernie's voice how we're doing. Anyway, that's how come we bought the new house in Highland Park-so I can get the broadcasts and be closer to drive to all the Tiger games in Milwaukee. Fortunately, my wife likes the area.”

At the ball park, the three friends sat in their accustomed place, in Section 24, between first and home; Tiger Stadium is an ancient, squared-off green pleasance, and the view was splendid. None of the three bought scorecards. (”The thing to do,” Bert said, ”is remember.”) The World Champion Oakland A's, who had barely beaten out the Tigers in a violent five-game playoff the previous fall, were the opposition, and a modest but enthusiastic audience was filling up the nearby seats. Don Shapiro has a dark, vivid face-a downturned mustache, some lines of pain, some lines of hope-and he now looked about with satisfaction and clapped his hands. ”Well!” he said. ”Well, well. What could be nicer than this? I mean that. I really mean it. I'm supremely happy. I like this park even better than my Eames chair.” He caught sight of the Oakland starting pitcher, Ken Holtzman, warming up, and his face fell. ”Uh-oh,” he said. ”A very tough man, and now I've got some ethnic problems, too. A Jewish pitcher against our guys.”

The game was a quiet, almost eventless affair for the first few innings, but Don was a restless spectator, twisting and bending in his seat, grimacing, groaning occasionally, leaping up for almost every enemy out. In the fifth, Gene Tenace, the Oakland first baseman, hit a home run into the left-field stands, and Shapiro fell back into his seat. He stared at the concrete floor in silence. ”G.o.d d.a.m.n it,” he muttered at last. ”This is serious.” The A's added two more runs off the Detroit starter, Woodie Fryman, but in the bottom half the Tigers put together two singles, a walk, and a third single, by Bill Freehan, the Detroit catcher, to tie it up, and the party was delighted.

”That was a good little rally,” Max said. ”Just right. Lots of running, and we have a tie.”

”Yes, I don't like that one big blow,” Bert said.

Don, watching the game and his emotions simultaneously, announced, ”I'm elated. I'm back to my original state of anxiety. But listen, Max, we're lucky they decided to pitch to Freehan.”

”Yes,” Max said. ”First of all, I would walk him. But then I absolutely don't throw him any kind of up pitch like that.”

Jim Northrup, the Tiger right fielder, came up to the plate in the sixth, and Bert said, ”I still don't see why this guy doesn't hit about .380.”

”We've been saying that for ten years,” Don said.

Northrup flied out, and Rodriguez stood in. Bert cried, ”Au-reeli-oh!”

”See, here's another one,” Max said. ”This guy hit nineteen homers one year, and everybody called him a home-run hitter. They've been waiting ever since.”