Part 10 (2/2)

The next Sat.u.r.day-a cool, drizzly afternoon-I began a vigil in front of my television set, and tried to keep up with things. Less than a week of baseball remained. The Cardinals and the Cubs were scheduled for Channel 4 on the NBC Game of the Week, the Yankees were away for a double-header in Cleveland on Channel 11, and the Mets were entertaining the Pirates at Shea on Channel 9, so most of the contenders were available to me. The Yanks sprang away to a quick 20 lead over g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, on a homer by Ron Blomberg, and out in Chicago, on a gloomy day, the Cub and Cardinal pitchers worked two quick scoreless innings. Switching channels, I became aware of distractions. On Channel 7, Texas Tech was leading Texas in football-a possible upset there-and on Channel 5 W. C. Fields was suddenly visible at work in a grocery store. Could it be? It was: Channel 5 was running a super Fields movie, It's a Gift. On Channel 4, Cub pitcher Rick Reuschel knocked down Ken Reitz with a pitch, then fanned him. On 11, Pat Dobson put away the Indians one-two-three, throwing mostly sliders. On Channel 5, Fields wrapped up a five-cent order of chewing gum with paper and string while a customer shouted ”Where are my k.u.mquats?” On Channel 4, Reuschel walked Ted Simmons. It was beginning to rain out there in Chicago. On Channel 9, they were taking off the tarpaulin at Shea-a delayed start. On Channel 7, Texas Tech had gone up by 263. Back on Channel 5, W. C. Fields called out to a blind man, ”Sit still, Mr. Muckle, honey!” but Mr. Muckle blundered into an enormous display rack of light bulbs. I could not tarry. Back to Channel 11, where Elliott Maddox ripped a double down the left-field line. The Indians held a mound conference and decided to pitch to Ron Blomberg (”Which I like to see,” Phil Rizzuto announced), and Blomberg hit his second home run into the right-field upper deck, for a 50 Yankee lead. On Channel 5, Baby LeRoy hit Fields on the elbow with a can of clams. On Channel 9, the Pirates were leading, 10. On Channel 4, NBC had given up on the delayed Game of the Week and was offering a costume drama in its place: Tyrone Power, wearing tights, was in prison. Someone was asking him to sign a confession of heresy; Power smiled enigmatically. On Channel 9, Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh yelled at an umpire. On Channel 5, W. C. Fields groaned as he attempted to go back to sleep on a porch swing up on a third-floor balcony; a man on the ground was calling up to him asking for someone named Carl LaFong. ”Carl LaFong!” he shouted. ”Large 'C,' small 'a,' small 'r,' small 'l,' large 'L,' small 'a,' large 'F,' small 'o' ...” On Channel 7, Texas Tech kicked off to Texas, and the ball went right out of the end zone. I looked out my study window and saw that it had cleared up a little, and took my son out to the park for a quick snootful of air.

When we got back, Richie Zisk was in the act of hitting a homer for the Pirates off Tug McGraw on Channel 9, and the Pirates were leading the Mets by 61. The scoreboard at Shea showed that the Yankees had won their first game against the Indians, 93. The game in Chicago had resumed, with the Cubs ahead by 43 in the seventh; NBC had blown it. W. C. Fields had vanished from Channel 5. Apparently, Channel 11 was not going to telecast the second Yankee game; an Abbott and Costello program was on instead. The Orioles would not play until evening....

Three nights later, again encamped at the tube, I watched the Yankees lose to the Brewers, 32, in Milwaukee, thus delivering the divisional pennant to the Orioles. It was terrifically cold in Milwaukee, and the stands were almost deserted. In the bottom of the eighth, a long drive to right field was misplayed by Maddox and Piniella, and the Brewers tied the game at 22. The ball could have been caught by Bobby Murcer, the regular right fielder, but he was absent because of the injury he had suffered in that senseless hotel-lobby scuffle. None of the Yankee telecasters explained this; baseball announcers work for the club and are not encouraged to give out bad news. On this evening, however, their obligatory ebullience faded to whispers in the tenth inning, when the Brewers put the game and the Yankees away at last.

The playoffs were swift, tasty, light-a confection of baseball pleasures. I went first to Pittsburgh, and repeated a favorite autumn stroll of mine-over the Fort Duquesne Bridge to Three Rivers Stadium, with the water taxis churning up the sparkling Allegheny below, the sound of a band playing somewhere, the eager early arrivals filing along quietly together, and our expectation almost visible in the soft suns.h.i.+ne. Most of all, I looked forward to watching the Dodgers, a young and wonderfully talented club that had led its division all year and had fought off a scary challenge by the Cincinnati Reds that was a good deal too reminiscent of the late charge to which Los Angeles succ.u.mbed the summer before. This year, the Reds had closed to within a game and a half of the Dodgers on September 15, but a grand-slam homer by Dodger outfielder Jimmy Wynn beat them that day and, it turned out, broke them for the year. The Dodgers had pitching and speed and power-they led their league in homers and collective earned-run average-and absolute self-confidence. The Pirates' record, by contrast, was built on plain hitting-by warm young bats like Richie Zisk and Al Oliver, and heavy boppers like Willie Stargell and Richie Hebner. Their pitching, never much to admire, had been weakened by the loss of Dock Ellis. The Dodgers, however, had not won a game in Pittsburgh all year.

All such speculation dwindled away and became perfectly useless in the course of the next couple of hours, as the Dodgers' starter, Don Sutton, shut out the Pirates, 30, with four bare singles. It was a sight to remember-a fine pitcher working nine innings at a pinnacle of knowledge, strength, delicacy, and control, and so dominating the event that everything else that happened on the field became nearly superfluous. The Dodgers, for the record, scored once in the second, on a pair of singles and a pair of walks off Pirate starter Jerry Reuss, and twice in the ninth, on three hits and a stolen base. Sutton, a right-hander, was not overpowering; he gave up one walk and struck out six. Above all, perhaps, he was intelligent, adjusting every pitch to the precise situation and batter at hand, controlling the corners, throwing patterns-up and in, out and away, curve and fastball and slider-and reaffirming the enormous imbalance between hurler and hitter that makes baseball look so difficult when pitching is at its prime. Afterward, Sutton admitted that no more than four of his deliveries had disappointed him. ”I'd like to write this game down in a textbook and use it for the rest of my career,” he said. The performance could not have come as a total surprise to him, however, since it was his tenth victory in a row and his fourteenth in his last fifteen games. I had previously seen Sutton at Dodger Stadium in June, when he was suffering through a frustrating and depressing slump. Manager Walter Alston had left him alone, permitting him to work out his problem while he absorbed six consecutive losses. ”It's just some little mistake,” Alston told me at the time. ”Probably his body is not in exactly the right position over his leg when he delivers. It's puzzling, but you have to be patient. Pitching is a subtle thing.”

A few more Dodgers got into the act the next afternoon, when a 52 win for the visitors put the unhappy Pirates into a very deep hole. (Three losses in the Champions.h.i.+p Series means elimination, of course, and so far in the series' six-year history a two-game deficit has invariably proved fatal.) Andy Messersmith, the Dodgers' only twenty-game winner this year, continued the starvation of the Pirate sluggers, giving up nothing but singles. The golden Californians won in characteristic style, getting on the board in the first inning with a ringing single by their young first baseman, Steve Garvey (a picture-book hitter, who batted .312 this year, knocking out 200 hits and delivering 111 runs), and then breaking the game open in the eighth with three runs. Third baseman Ron Cey started things off with his second successive double (he was four for five on the day, with nine total bases), and then shortstop Bill Russell laid down a perfect, killing bunt to the left side, which catcher Manny Sanguillen threw hopelessly to third base. Then Crawford bonked a little handle-hit over the drawn-in infield, and Mota singled and Lopes singled, and Sanguillen added a wild pickoff throw-five successive hits and a little luck, too, but the Pirates had clearly been cracked apart by the pressure of speed and eager, winning baseball. Cey's outburst at the plate also looked lucky, until one noticed that he had driven in ninety-seven runs in the season-one more than Willie Stargell.

I now bade farewell to the two NL squads, who were off to Chavez Ravine for the rest of their exercises. (The Pirate bats, it will be recalled, came alive there one afternoon, for a 70 Pittsburgh victory, in which Stargell and Hebner homered. The following day, the Dodgers took the pennant with a gruesome 121 laugher.) My next engagement was the renewal of the A's-Orioles playoff rivalry in Baltimore-by now an autumn event nearly as heartwarming and as poorly attended as an Ivy League football game. The teams here were back from the West tied at one game apiece; the Orioles, finding Catfish Hunter uncharacteristically wild and high, had whacked him for three homers and a 63 victory, and had then been stopped cold by Ken Holtzman, 50.

The pitching matchup in game three looked unfair-Jim Palmer, whose Champions.h.i.+p Series record for the Orioles was four victories and no defeats, against Vida Blue, who had never won a playoff game or a World Series game, being 02 in each category. Everyone knew Vida's pattern-blinding heat for a time, then a slight lapse in concentration, a few walks, a reduction of speed in favor of control, then a couple of telling base hits, and, all too often, another game gone. Absolutely true, except that here in Baltimore it didn't happen. Instead, it was Vida nonstop; Vida burning with concentration and impatience; Vida overpowering everything and everyone, including himself; Vida wall-to-wall. He threw 101 pitches, all but six of them fastb.a.l.l.s, gave up two singles, struck out seven batters, walked none, and came in with a 10 victory in less than two hours. It was another nearly awesome performance, but one that bore almost no relation to Sutton's game; one felt that the two pitchers might have been engaged in different sports. For that matter, there was still a third splendid and courageous effort-Jim Palmer's losing four-hitter. Palmer has been afflicted with an injury to the ulnar nerve in his pitching arm this year, and he now throws very few fastb.a.l.l.s. All the same, he went the distance, too, facing only two more batters than Blue did, and the game eventually turned on a brief personal duel between him and Sal Bando in the fourth, when Bando fouled off several pitches and then lined a home run into the left-field stands. ”I should have walked him,” Palmer murmured afterward. Manager Weaver, summing up Blue's great game, said, ”Our best shot against him was ball four, and he never threw it all day.”

Pitching is very nearly the whole story in the playoffs, and so it was again on the final afternoon. A one-hitter must be a pitching story, even if that hit is accompanied by eleven walks, even if the other team wins, and even if everyone in the stands is driven absolutely bananas by the anxiety and emptiness and disappointment of it all. Mike Cuellar, the Oriole junk man, is a famously slow starter, so no one was much surprised when he walked the bases loaded in the first inning before recording the third out. On this day, however, he never did find his accustomed groove on the outer fringes of the strike zone. Hunching his shoulders and growling at the home-plate umpire, he threw an intolerable number of near-misses and full counts, until at last, with two out in the fifth, he walked Bando, walked Jackson, threw a wild pitch, walked Rudi on purpose, walked Tenace by mistake, and was gone, responsible for no hits and no satisfaction. The other Oakland run came in the seventh, on the team's only safety-a double by Jackson that scored Bando all the way from first. Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers kept the door closed on the Orioles until the ninth, when a walk and two singles brought in the first Baltimore counter in thirty innings. But, with the tying run on third base and the Oriole fans screaming and weeping and pleading, Fingers fanned Don Baylor, to win the game, 21, and wrap up the third straight Oakland pennant. California, here we came.

The series was called to order before the largest (and perhaps happiest) crowd in the history of Dodger Stadium, and in the midst of the liveliest kind of advance speculations. The Dodgers' team statistics for the year were the best in their league, overall, while the World Champions presented more clouded data: the finest pitching (by far) in the AL but a flaccid .247 team batting average (twenty-five points below the Dodgers'). The All-Cal final offered an even more vivid difference in personalities and living styles. The Dodgers-somehow personified by their s.h.i.+ning new star Steve Garvey-were young, modest, articulate, polite, intelligent, optimistic, brave, clean, reverent ... They very much suggested a UCLA or USC varsity baseball team, and the campus image was reinforced by their gentle, fatherly manager and by a front office (or dean's office) that liked to talk about an ineffable, enlightened, shared motivation pervading and guiding the entire organization-a spirit known as ”Dodger Blue.” The two-time-champion A's were something else-whiskery veterans, grown men, distinct and famously quarrelsome personalities, stars who were motivated by their own reputations and the team's fame and success but also, quite openly, by money. Their manager, Alvin Dark, had brought the team home in spite of the players' known fondness and respect for his predecessor, d.i.c.k Williams, and their bitterness over the meddling of owner Charles O. Finley, which had caused Williams to give up the reins. Dark, who is a devoutly religious Baptist, had not had an easy summer of it (”You couldn't manage a meat market!” team captain Sal Bando said to him one day), and there were other causes for contention, including Finley's latest coup de tte: the signing and use of an athlete who had never played a day in organized ball until he joined the A's. He was Herb Was.h.i.+ngton, a world-cla.s.s professional sprinter, whom Finley, via Dark, employed frequently as a pinch-runner. Finley, the inventor and promulgator of the designated hitter, is now campaigning to admit designated base runners to the game, and Was.h.i.+ngton was his showpiece, or puppet. Learning the rudiments of the game as he went along, Was.h.i.+ngton stole twenty-nine bases this summer, and was caught stealing sixteen times-not a useful percentage. The company line on Was.h.i.+ngton, repeated at frequent intervals by Alvin Dark, was ”He won eight games for us this year”-to which various old regulars responded with a muttered ”Yeah, and how many games did he take us out of?”

This dispute, however, barely quivered the needle on the Oakland seismic scale, and in spite of the North-Jackson imbroglio, there had been some late-summer whispers that the A's were growing more peaceable and cuddlesome. This horrid possibility was done away with, however, when it was revealed that ex-Oakland infielder Mike Andrews had just sued Finley for two and a half million dollars over his forced retirement during last year's Series, that Catfish Hunter had commenced legal steps to force his contract release by Finley for nonpayment of fifty thousand dollars in deferred salary, and that Oakland pitchers Rollie Fingers and Blue Moon Odom had engaged in a clubhouse battle on the very eve of the Series: five st.i.tches in Rollie's scalp and a sprained ankle for Odom. The Oakland AC was ready to play ball.

The opener, which the defending champions won by 32, was a busy and absorbing affair, crowded with events and mistakes and discussable baseball. There was Reggie Jackson taking up exactly where he left off in the seventh game of last year's Series-with a terrific near-line-drive home run muscled over the left-field fence in the second inning. There was Oakland pitcher Ken Holtzman, batting in his very first game of the year, rapping a double to left-his third two-bagger in his last four Series games; he proceeded to third on a wild pitch by Andy Messersmith, and was scored on a dandy suicide-squeeze bunt by Campaneris. Dodger dash brought in their first counter: Davey Lopes, on base after a Campaneris error, flew away to second as Bill Buckner bounced a single over first, and when Jackson bobbled the ball ever so briefly in right, Lopes steamed all the way around and easily beat the throw to the plate. The winning Oakland run, in the eighth, was pieced together out of a single, a sacrifice, and a terrible throwing error by Ron Cey. The young Dodgers, as flashy as they were fallible, scored again in the ninth, on a homer by Jimmy Wynn, and had the tying run aboard when Catfish Hunter, of all people, came in to relieve Fingers and fanned Ferguson for the final out. The Los Angeles fans went home stimulated and perhaps insufficiently troubled. In addition to the costly Dodger error and the costly wild pitch, there had been a mystifying failure of strategy after the Dodgers placed their first two batters on base in the second inning and again in the third; in neither case was there any attempt to bunt them along, and none of the four base runners scored.

Perhaps it didn't matter. It didn't seem to the next afternoon, when Don Sutton and Vida Blue faced each other before the same enormous, sun-drenched mult.i.tudes, and the home side reversed things, winning by 32, for a split on the weekend. It was a quiet, minimal sort of game for most of the distance, with Sutton, now in quest of his twelfth successive win, having a bit the better of things. Vida, down by a bare run, gave up a single to Garvey in the sixth and then tried to throw an inside fastball past Ferguson, who redirected it over the fence in dead center field, exactly between the two ”395” markers. Blue threw up his hands in despair. Oakland loaded the bases in the eighth after a fielding error by Dodger shortstop Russell, but Russell now took North's hopper behind second, sprinted over and stepped on the bag, and got off a straining, anxious heave toward first, which Garvey backhanded on a short hop, for an inning-ending, Little League DP. A livelier finale was still to come. In the ninth, Oakland scored twice, on a hit batsman, an accidental, checked-swing double to left by Jackson, and a solid single by Joe Rudi. Reliever Mike Marshall fanned Tenace, whereupon Mr. Finley, suddenly aware of a vivid opportunity to trot his new hobbyhorse, ordered Herb Was.h.i.+ngton to run for Rudi. Was.h.i.+ngton now represented the tying run, and Marshall, who is known as perhaps the fastest pick-off gun in the West, sourly eyed him over his shoulder, exactly like Bat Masterson registering the arrival in town of still another uppity gunsel from the prairies. He stepped off the mound three times as Was.h.i.+ngton, swinging his arms between his knees in a nervous, amateurish fas.h.i.+on, took up a minimal lead. Marshall then spun and fired, Garvey made the tag, umpire Doug Harvey threw up his arm, and Was.h.i.+ngton, figuratively shot between the eyes, lay twitching in the dust, as 55,989 Los Angelenos cried ”Ah-HAH!” in one single splendid shout.

Up in Oakland, two nights later, a pattern began to show itself-not just the third successive 32 score (this one in favor of the A's) but something woven more subtly into the texture of these games. Some miserable Dodger luck was part of it: two whistling Los Angeles line drives were hit directly at Oakland infielders and converted into instant double plays. Contrariwise, with two Oakland men on base and two out in the third inning, Reggie Jackson barely topped a pitch by Dodger starter Al Downing, nubbing it feebly but luckily up the first-base line; Jackson flung his bat away in disgust and raced for first, closely accompanied by Joe Ferguson (on this day the Dodger catcher), who lunged for the ball and saw it dribble off the end of his glove for an error. A run was in, and then Rudi hit a single up the middle that barely skipped under Lopes' glove, good for another run, and only the third Oakland run-a trifling walk-sacrifice-and-single affair-was earned. Catfish Hunter gave up two solid solo homers-to Buckner and Crawford (”I had some friends here from North Carolina,” Hunter said afterward, ”and they'd never seen a home run, so I gave 'em a couple”)-but somehow it was Oakland that was now ahead in the Series. It was almost unfair. Bad baseball luck, however, can usually be contained or nullified by perfect defense, but these careless young Dodgers were letting the genie out of the bottle.

Charles O. Finley, it must be added, did not fail to intrude himself into the proceedings. During that third game, we could all watch him leading the hometown hordes in banner-waving, or, up on his feet, joining in the fervent singing of ”G.o.d Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. Then, too, the public-address system announced that Mr. Finley himself could be observed in his box, next to the Oakland dugout, in the very act of placing a call to President Ford, in which he invited him to come and throw out the first ball at one of the remaining Series games. The President said sorry, he was busy, but thanks anyway, and moments later we watched Charlie calling up ex-President Nixon in San Clemente-with the same result. The crowd loved it. (Charles O. Finley, I have begun to think, may be the last of the true populists.) Then, the next day, Finley abruptly benched and enraged Gene Tenace just before game time, replacing him in the lineup with another protege and discovery of his, also named Was.h.i.+ngton-in this case, Claudell Was.h.i.+ngton, a twenty-year-old rookie outfielder, who, by the looks of him, may become one of the best left-handed hitters in baseball. (Charles O. Finley, I have concluded, is never boring.) Game No. 4, both managers had stated in advance, would be the core of the Series, and its core inning, it turned out, was the bottom of the sixth. The Dodgers were leading by then, 21, thanks to a triple by Bill Russell; Ken Holtzman had accounted for the Oakland score with another personal editorial on the subject of the designated hitter-this time, a home run. In Dodger retrospect, the Oakland sixth may have turned on a trifling mistake by Andy Messersmith, who made a bad pick-off throw that allowed North to move along to second base, with none out. Or perhaps it was Bando's lucky, blooped, wrong-field single to right (his first hit of the entire Series), or possibly the unfortunate walk to Jackson that came next. Nothing much could be done about the surprising but excellent sacrifice bunt that Joe Rudi now laid down (Rudi bunting?), which in turn, of course, required an intentional walk to the next man, and set up the only solid blow of the rally-a pinch single by Jim Holt. There was hardly anything to the whole business, then, except that four runs were in (Was that right-four?) and the game, now somehow at 52, was nearly gone. It vanished forever in the top of the ninth, on a fantastic sliding, lunging stop by Oakland second baseman d.i.c.k Green, who flipped to Campaneris from the dirt to begin a double play. These A's knew how to play this hard old game.

The pattern continued right to the end-a pattern of nearly forgivable little Dodger errors or youthful lapses in judgment, and deadly, coldly retributive play by the old and now doubly renewed champions. This was not in the end a distinguished World Series, because of the losers' multiple mistakes, but rarely has any of these October seminars offered so many plain lessons in winning baseball, or such an instructive moral drama about the uses of baseball luck and the precision with which experienced, opportunistic veterans can pry open a tough, gnarled, closed-up game and extract from it the stuff of victory. In that fifth and final game, Dodger catcher Steve Yeager committed a throwing error in the very first inning, allowing Bill North to move along to third, and to score, a moment later, on a sacrifice fly. Ray Fosse's homer off Don Sutton made it 20, but the Dodgers responded, bravely and necessarily, in the sixth-a pinch double by Tom Paciorek, a walk, a fine sacrifice bunt, a fly ball, and a single by Garvey (his eighth hit of the Series). The game was tied, 22.

The next bit of Dodger bad luck (or bad play) was not instantly recognizable, for it began with a brief flurry of violence-a small shower of debris and bottleware from the left-field stands directed at outfielder Bill Buckner, which delayed the game for perhaps six minutes. The Dodger pitcher was now Marshall again, and curiously he failed to continue warming with his catcher during the delay, which was his privilege-and, it turned out, his bounden duty. The tiny omission was observed by the leadoff Oakland hitter, Joe Rudi, who cogitated the matter and concluded that Marshall's first pitch to him would not be anything fine and delicate like a curve but probably a fastball. He guessed right, pulled the trigger, and deposited Marshall's delivery in the left-field seats, for the last run of the year, and the last and best baseball lesson, too: Thinking wins ball games. The last big play of the year came a moment later, in the eighth, when Dodger leadoff man Buckner whanged out a solid single and watched it slip away from center fielder Bill North. Not content with this free trip to second, he turned the bag and raced madly on toward third, as Reggie Jackson, backing up, swiftly scooped up the ball and fired to the relay man, d.i.c.k Green, who whirled-the runner was by now no more than five feet away from third base-and cleanly cut down Buckner with a low, perfect throw to Bando, while Jackson and North exchanged delighted double-slaps back out there at the beginning of it all. It was a play to remember (the throw from the outfield to third base is always one that sticks in memory), a play to carry us through the winter. Bill Buckner, I am sure, will remember it much longer than that, and so, too, will Walter Alston, and so will Sal and Reggie and Joe, and Rollie (who had been chosen as the most valuable player in the Series) and d.i.c.k and Campy and Catfish, and the other green-and-yellow champions, who now so clearly deserve our praise and grat.i.tude and whatever other rewards they can extract from their inventor and tormentor and unique leader, Charlie Finley. Nor will Alvin Dark forget. In the lathery, liquid Oakland dressing room, Bando grabbed Alvin by the arm and pulled him up on the interviewers' rostrum. ”Come on up here, Skip,” he said, grinning. ”You couldn't manage a meat market!”

Sunny Side of the Street

- April 1975 IT WAS RAINING IN New York-a miserable afternoon in mid-March. Perfect. Grabbed my coat and got my hat, left my worries on the doorstep. Flew to Miami, drove to Fort Lauderdale, saw the banks of lights gleaming in the gloaming, found the ballpark, parked, climbed to the press box, said h.e.l.lo, picked up stats and a scorecard, took the last empty seat, filled out my card (Mets vs. Yankees), rose for the anthem, regarded the emerald field below (the spotless base paths, the encircling palms, the waiting mult.i.tudes, the heroes capless and at attention), and took a peek at my watch: four hours and forty minutes to springtime, door to door.

The journey and the arrival and then a few innings of mild, meaningless baseball would have been more than enough for my first day of spring training, but this particular evening promised a treat. It was the middle meeting of a three-game set between the Yankees and the visiting Mets, and the starting pitchers were Catfish Hunter and Tom Seaver. The ball park was sold out, and there were rows of standees three or four deep along the fences in left and right field. Yankee manager Bill Virdon and Met manager Yogi Berra contributed to this sudden party by starting their first-stringers-two lineups that looked to be very close to the teams that would take the field four weeks later, on opening day. Both New York front offices had been avid partic.i.p.ants in an off-season of exceptionally complex trading activity, and as I studied the old names and the new names I had written on my scorecard, I sensed myself already awash in the kind of deep-water baseball speculation that usually becomes possible only in August or September. Among the new Mets were Del Unser (a useful if unbrilliant center fielder who had come over from the Phillies as part of a trade that had taken away Tug McGraw) and Joe Torre, who was with the Cardinals last year-a lifetime .300 hitter and a former Most Valuable Player, now thirty-four years old and well past his peak but perhaps still better than any previous Met third baseman. Starting in left field was Dave Kingman, a tall free-swinger and erstwhile (very recently erstwhile) Giant, who had just been picked up for $125,000 in a straight cash deal. Last of all, most of all, there was Tom Seaver, the Mets' champion, who would be trying out the sciatic hip that afflicted him all last summer-a disability now tentatively but anxiously regarded as cured by rest and osteopathy.

The Yankee alterations were even more noticeable. Gone was the familiar and overburdened Bobby Murcer, who had been dealt to the Giants for another outfielder-another kind of outfielder-Bobby Bonds, a swift, powerful, mercurial and not altogether reliable courser, who had never quite attained the superstar status expected of him. Thurman Munson, the Yankee catcher, would be making his first appearance of the year and would be testing the damaged forearm that limited his effectiveness last year. And best of all, there was Catfish Hunter, the ex-Oakland ace, a twenty-game winner over four consecutive seasons, last year's American League Cy Young Award winner (he was twenty-five and twelve, with an earned-run average of 2.49), undefeated in Seven World Series games, et cetera, et cetera, who was cut free from the A's last December by an arbitrator's decision, as a result of Oakland owner Charles O. Finley's failure to make payments on a deferred portion of his salary. Thus suddenly empowered to sell his fealty and right arm to the highest or most attractive bidder, Hunter settled upon the Yankees, after receiving unimaginable cajoleries (”You want Helen of Troy, Cat? Listen, we'll fix Helen up with a beautiful annuity and throw in a li'l old Dodge Charger for her, and ...”) from almost every other club, for a sum in the neighborhood of three and a half million dollars in salaries and deferrals and shelters and other considerations, to be paid over the next five years, and more. Inevitably, some sportswriters have begun to refer to him as Goldfish Hunter.

Beyond these individual athletic and fiscal histories was the interesting business of the two clubs themselves and their impending summer-long fight for the affections of the same enormous and demanding baseball audience-the battle of Shea Stadium, the war for New York. There has been nothing quite like this since the departure of the Giants and the Dodgers, for the swift decline of the once mighty Yankees in the past decade and the even more precipitous ascent of the darling Mets had seemed utterly independent of each other. Now a big-city baseball reversal may be in progress, with the young and star-enriched Yankees, who were a close second in their division last year, apparently the possessors of the best pitching and the best outfield in their half-league, on the rise; and with the aging Mets, pennant winners in 1973 but a fifth-place club last year, apparently in pitching difficulties and thus possibly in very bad trouble indeed. This spring meeting was part of a good subway summer to come.

The game began, and baseball replaced speculation. Hunter in pinstripes was about the same as Hunter in green and gold-the flowing hair, the flowing motion, the big, oversize cap resettled between each pitch. Seaver, too, restored memory-the cold, intelligent gaze; the unwasteful windup; the sudden forward, down-dropping stride off the rubber. He struck out two of the first three Yankee batters, without really trying his fastball. Now, with one out in the top of the second, Dave Kingman stood in for the Mets, occasioning a small hum of interest because of his height, which is six feet six inches, and his batting style, which is right-handed, tilted, and uppercutting. The hum was replaced by an explosion of sustained shouting as Kingman came around on a high Hunter change-up, caught all of the ball-every inch and ounce of it-with his bat, and drove it out of the park and out of the lights in a gigantic parabola, whose second, descendant half was not yet perceptible when the ball flew into the darkness, departing the premises about five feet inside the left-field foul line and about three palm trees high. I have never seen a longer home run anywhere.

There were further entertainments and events-two hits by Munson; the Mets winning the game, 30, on sterling shutout pitching by Seaver and his young successors, Craig Swan and Rick Baldwin; and another homer by Kingman, also off Hunter-this one a high, windblown fly just over the fence, giving him a total of four round-trippers in his first five games as a Met. He also fanned weakly on his last two times up. In the fourth inning, Joe Torre took a backward step near third base as Bobby Bonds came down the base path from second (there was no play on him), and somehow severely sprained his right ankle. It was an inexplicable, almost invisible little accident that nonetheless ruined Torre's spring, and the kind of pure bad luck that can sometimes darken a club's entire season.

Nothing, however, could touch or diminish Kingman's first shot. Catfish Hunter, after his stint, sat in the training room with his shoulder encased in an ice bag and his elbow in a bucket of ice water, and reminisced cheerfully about other epochal downtowners he had given up. There had been a preseason one by Willie McCovey and perhaps, years ago, a Mickey Mantle five-hundred-footer. Mantle, now a Yankee springtime coach, could not remember it. ”I know I never saw one longer than this,” he said. Bill Virdon guessed that the ball had flown an additional two hundred and fifty feet beyond the fence, into an adjacent diamond, which might qualify it as a simultaneous homer and double: a six-base blow. The Yankees were still talking about the home run the next day, when Hunter told Ron Blomberg he hoped he hadn't hurt his neck out there in left field watching the ball depart. Others took it up, rookies and writers and regulars, redescribing and amplifying it, already making it a legend, and it occurred to me that the real effect of the blast, except for the memory and joy of it, might be to speed Catfish Hunter's acceptance by his new teammates. There is nothing like a little public humiliation to make a three-and-a-half-million-dollar executive lovable.

That night, the press cl.u.s.tered thickly around Kingman in the visiting clubhouse. He is a shy, complicated young man, twenty-six years old, and he seemed embarra.s.sed by his feat, although he was noted for similar early-season tape-measure blows while with the Giants, as well as for his strikeouts. ”I'm just trying to win a job here,” he said. ”I'm putting home runs and strikeouts out of my mind. They're not in my vocabulary.” Well, yes. Every spring is a new beginning, especially for a ballplayer with a new team, but in his three and a half major-league seasons to date, Dave Kingman has. .h.i.t 77 home runs while striking out 422 times-once for every three trips to the plate-and his batting average is .224.

Rusty Staub, dressing in front of his locker, looked over at the tall newcomer and the eight or ten writers around him, and laughed. ”The trouble with you, Dave,” he called over, ”is you're just having a slow start. You'll get going once the season rolls along.”

Spring training is all hope. Hope is the essential, for every club and every player. Walt Williams, a black thirty-one-year-old journeyman outfielder, started for the Yankees in the Mets game the next afternoon, playing second base. He has had nine years in the majors, mostly with the White Sox; he hit .304 one season. Last year, however, his batting fell off to an abysmal .113, and he ended the season with the Yanks as a pinch-runner. He claims that he had an incorrect prescription in his eyegla.s.ses. This year, he thought about the incoming Yankee talent and decided that his chances as an outfielder were ”poor or none.” He received permission from Bill Virdon and general manager Gabe Paul to try to make the club as an extra infielder. The day before, he had played second in a B game against the Texas Rangers, and had made three hits, including a home run, and had been involved in a double play. Walt Williams is five feet six inches tall, with the shoulders and chest of a heavyweight prizefighter. At the plate, he stands with his arms and shoulders raised high, peering at the pitcher over his left biceps, and waggles the bat fiercely. While playing in Chicago, he was called No-Neck Williams-a name he does not like. He runs everywhere, runs out everything. He talks fast, in explosions of words, and smiles ceaselessly. It is impossible not to like him. Before the game, he said, ”Listen, I'm just like a rookie in the infield, only I've got better hands than the average infielder. I'm a lifetime .280 hitter. Forget about last year-just throw it out. Aren't too many guys going to outhit me. Truthfully, after last year I was going to go and play in j.a.pan. I planned on winning the batting champions.h.i.+p there. Then I got a little fan mail, letters that said 'Don't go,' so I came and talked to Gabe about being an extra infielder. Those letters made me feel good. Listen, I know I can play second, but can I show them in time? When did I last play second base? Before yesterday? Oh, my, I think it was when I was about seventeen.”

In the game (which the Yanks won, 76), Walt Williams. .h.i.t a single and a double, ran out everything, started one double play with a tag on the base path, and made an error when he dropped the ball in his eagerness to start another. In the clubhouse, panting and pouring sweat from the postgame squad sprints, he said, ”I made a mistake out there-changed my mind at the last minute. But I think I showed them something. I know I can play this game. I know it.”

There are two utility infielders, Eddie Leon and Fred Stanley, already on the Yankee roster, and reserve infielders are kept on mostly for their steady gloves and their experience. But Walt Williams is hopeful; he has no other choice.

POSTCARDS.

Saw Eddie Kranepool hit three singles today, against the Yanks. Eddie Kranepool always. .h.i.ts. Last year, he hit an even .300. Eddie will always be a Met. Mrs. Payson loves him, and, besides, why would you ever get rid of him? Eddie has it made. He has twelve years in as a major leaguer, twelve years on the pension. Eddie Kranepool is thirty years old. Good old Eddie.

Ron Blomberg came up the s

<script>