Part 11 (1/2)

Harry Walker is a tall, deep-bellied man who has at various times managed the Cardinals, the Pirates, and, most recently, the Houston Astros. As a player, three decades ago, he was known as Harry the Hat; he won the National League batting t.i.tle in 1947, with an average of .363. He is Dixie Walker's brother. Harry Walker is reputed to be one of the finest theoreticians of hitting in baseball, and several players who have come under his tutelage have given him credit for an increase of twenty or thirty points in their batting averages-astounding figures, for batting is considered the most difficult of all athletic techniques to learn or to teach. Some other players, however, have admitted that they found it impossible to take advantage of Walker's wisdom, simply because they could not force themselves to stay within earshot of him-to go on listening to the hundreds of thousands of words that pour from Harry Walker every day. Harry Walker talks like a river. He is easily capable of as many words per hour as Hubert Humphrey or Buckminster Fuller-which is to say that he is in the Talkers' Hall of Fame. A few summers back, one of the Houston infielders is reported to have said to a teammate, ”I'm worried about Harry. He's a natural .400 talker, and these last few days he ain't talked more than about .280.”

Three years ago, before an Astros-Dodgers game in Los Angeles, I casually asked Harry Walker why his young pitchers and catchers seemed to be giving up so many stolen bases to enemy runners. Harry Walker has no casual answers, and his reply, which took the better part of twenty minutes, encompa.s.sed the American public-school system, permissiveness in the American home, Dr. Spock, our policies in Vietnam, great pick-off deliveries of various right-thinking pitchers of the past, the high rate of divorce in America, umpiring then and now, the inflated American economy, the exorbitant current bonuses paid to young baseball prospects, taxation, growing up in the Great Depression, how to protect home plate with your bat during the run-and-hit, and various other topics. At one point I recall his crying, ”Whah, h.e.l.l-fahr, when Ah was goin' after mah battin' t.i.tle in '47 and Ah got the sign to lay down the bunt 'cause we was down a run late in the game and needed to move that runner up, Ah didn't come stormin' and hollerin' back to the dugout to tell the old man how much Ah wanted mah at-bats in order to qualify for that t.i.tle and whah Ah'd ruther have hit away, and Ah didn't slam mah battin' helmet down on the ground like those kids do here today. No, sir! Whah, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, we din' even have any battin' helmets back then!”

Here, in time, the Mets and the umpires and the fans appeared, and the batting cage and Harry Walker were taken off the field, and the game began, and the visitors demolished the Mets, in a somnolent, sun-filled time-killer, by 104. Jerry Koosman pitched three good innings, and Randy Tate pitched, too, and gave up five runs and six hits; I am not a camera, but it seemed to me that Tate was still not driving off the rubber. Between these two hurlers, there was an appearance by a good-looking Mets sprout named Jeff Grose, who is only two years out of high school. Grose, a southpaw, showed us a live fastball and a smooth, high-kicking motion, and he hid the ball behind his hip while on the mound, like Sandy Koufax. He seemed poised, but he was working a little too quickly, and he gave up three hits and a run in his first inning of work. In the next inning, his fastball began missing the corners. He kept falling behind the hitters, and then forcing things and overthrowing to make up for it. He gave it a battle, though. With two out and a run in, he went to three and two, saw the next pitch barely tipped foul, then threw the fourth ball way inside, to load the bases, then swiftly walked in another run and gave up a single, and was lucky when Rusty Staub threw out a base runner at the plate. It was painful to add up his totals: four runs, six hits, and four walks in two innings. Spring training is good young pitchers falling behind on the count and then disappearing until next year.

POSTCARDS.

Saw the Phillies beat the Cards at Al Lang Field by 10, in a game illuminated by wind, sun, and young baseball stars. The newcomers include twenty-three-year-old Alan Bannister, a swift Phillie outfielder, and twenty-one-year-old Keith Hernandez, the new Cardinal first baseman, who batted .351 last year in the American a.s.sociation. Before the game, I saw the Cards' Reggie Smith and the Phillies' Dave Cash in earnest conversation near the batting cage. As I walked by, Reggie was saying, ”And the rest I got in tax-exempts.”

Al Lang Field is to be demolished next fall, and a more modern ball park will be built on the same site. It seems a pity, since the stands, which look like a leftover segment of Ebbets Field, perfectly match the style and antiquity of the fans. And what will happen to the ushers? When an Al Lang usher escorts an elderly female fan to her seat, it is impossible to tell who is holding up whom.

”Pick it” is this year's ”in” baseball phrase. It means playing the infield well. Ken Reitz, the Cardinal third baseman, can really pick it.

Talked to John Curtis, the tall, intelligent left-handed pitcher who came over to the Cardinals from the Red Sox two years ago. I told him I had a vivid recollection of a night game at Yankee Stadium two years ago, in July, in which he had shut out the Yankees by 10, and had retired the last batter on a pop-up with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. He remembered it, too, of course. ”That one-and-two change-up I threw to Felipe Alou in that spot was the best pitch of my life,” he said.

Curtis had an off year last season, and this campaign will be an important one for him. I have heard it said that he may be too gentle a man to become a big winner in the majors.

VETERAN.

The speaker is Ray Sadecki, thirty-four, who is beginning his fifteenth year as a major-league pitcher. His lifetime totals are 129 victories and 127 losses, and an earned-run average of 3.77. His best year was 1964, when he won twenty games for the Cardinals and also won a World Series start. The next year, he slipped to six and fifteen. He has also pitched for the Giants and, in the last five years, for the Mets. He was sent back to the Cards last winter, as part of the Joe Torre trade. He sat in the dugout at Al Lang Field one afternoon, wearing a bright-red warm-up jacket, and talked about baseball. He has a quizzical, amused expression and an easy manner. He is left-handed.

”It seems to take me every single day of the spring season to get ready now,” he said. ”I make all the same moves, but I come up a little short. Then, of course, when the season starts, a man like me who isn't a front-line pitcher anymore has to do all his training all over again, throwing on the sidelines. You get caught in those rainouts and before you know it you've only pitched two or three innings in three weeks. The most starts I had with the Mets was twenty, and the least was two. You get to know all the conditions, all the possibilities. You know about that year when I lost fifteen games, right after my best year? Well, a man has to be pitching pretty well to get the chance to lose fifteen.

”Every time I'm traded, I figure the other club wants me. I went once for a pretty fair player named Orlando Cepeda. This trade from the Mets-you know they had to make it. Getting a chance at Torre doesn't mean they dumped me. The thing about trades is it's an opportunity for most players. An awful lot of trades end up helping the people involved. Look at Nolan Ryan. Look at Dave Cash. Torre came over to this club from Atlanta and won an MVP. Too many people get it wrong and think, 'Boy, what a rotten thing to do.' Fans don't understand trades.

”The only tough part about being traded-the worst part-is when it happens during the season. Seventy-two hours to report. Your family is all upset, your wife has to do all the moving. You walk into your new dugout and they're playing the anthem. h.e.l.l, when I went over to the Giants I walked out onto the mound, and Tom Haller and I had to get together on our signs. A pitcher and a catcher need a lot of time to get used to each other.

”I'm a completely different kind of pitcher than I was when I was with this club the last time. But I don't figure I'm down here to let them see what I can do. They're looking at the young pitchers. I got together with Red [Schoendienst, the Cardinal manager] and Barney [Schultz, the pitching coach], and said I'll get ready in my own time. I pitched two and two-thirds yesterday. They weren't the best ever, but they were just right for me. I'm just where I want to be. That's what spring training is for. Anyway, we all know about a pitcher who gets hammered all spring and then walks out there on opening day and n.o.body can touch him. Another one has it the other way around-once the bell rings, he can't get anybody out. It's awful hard to make a decision about people in the spring. I've been out there at times in March and couldn't do anything. I embarra.s.sed myself. But you can't start throwing harder and mess yourself up. That's what a kid will do. It's the last week or so of training that counts. That's when you'll see a pitcher try things he hasn't done all spring. He's getting ready for that first start. You can't pay much attention to what happens down here. Putting on these games has always seemed to me sort of a distraction. I think that most of the players are less cooperative with the press in spring training because of this-because you can't go telling the writers, 'Look, don't pay any attention to what I did.'

”It's the young players I'm sorry for. It's awful hard for a rookie to make a ball club in the spring. If you're a pitcher, you've pretty well got to throw all scoreless innings. If you're a batter, you've got to hit about .400. Even so, they'll all say, 'h.e.l.l, it's only spring training.' Spring is hard on people.”

The Cactus League consists of four small ball parks attached to a ribbon of motels, moccasin shops, trailer sales lots, and Big-Boy burger stands in and around Phoenix, Arizona-plus outlying baseball stockades in Tucson, Yuma, and Palm Springs, California. (The air service to Palm Springs, where the Angels train, is sketchy, and when one of the Phoenix-area clubs-the Cubs, say-plays there, the visitors can count on a good twelve hours, round-trip, in which to study the desert from the windows of their bus.) The motels are functional to the spring baseball scene. Generally, they feature an enclosed central swimming pool and lawn and patio, plus restaurant and bar and dance floor and shuffle courts and lobby and coin-operated electronic Ping-Pong games, all of them variously patronized by players, managers, league executives, front-office people, writers, scouts, and fans, and attendant wives, children, babies, parents, in-laws, girl friends, hookers, and Baseball Annies. (Lounging at poolside one morning, I noticed a nearby gathering of cheerfully forward, heavily tanned ladies, of indeterminate age and affiliation. I asked a fellow writer about them. ”Groupies,” he said. ”They've been coming here for years and years. They used to hang out with the players, then with the coaches. Now I think they're umpire groupies.”) The Giants' park, Phoenix Munic.i.p.al Stadium, is an agreeable, half-sunken field, with a concrete grandstand offering a prospect of distant mountains, a nearby highway, and, in between, several weirdly twisted, b.u.t.telike rock formations suggesting dinosaurs or Boschian d.a.m.ned souls or Horace Stoneham's baseball hopes. The Giants, by general consensus, in recent years have led their league in finding and developing the greatest talent and then employing it to the smallest possible ends. This year, they have come up with another one of their nearly irresistible Spring Specials-a new (almost) manager, a lineup stripped of last year's disappointing stars, and a stimulating catalogue of young arms and great wheels. Gone is the charming, moody skipper, Charlie Fox, who plainly lost control of things last summer and was replaced in midcampaign by the calm and approachable Wes Westrum. Gone are the high-strung, well-paid Bobby Bonds and Dave Kingman. A veteran hot-dog second baseman, t.i.to Fuentes, was sent to the Padres in return for a new hot dog, Derrel Thomas. The pitching staff is young and strong but without a true stopper-with the possible exception of a second-year fireballer named John D'Acquisto. The holdover regulars afield, including Chris Speier and Garry Maddox and Gary Matthews, have dash but not much power, and there is a terrific catching prospect named Marc Hill.

I watched this bright-eyed entering cla.s.s in action against the World Champion A's, whom they defeated by 72, thus pleasing an underflow crowd of 2,802 and persuading me that another summer of high, dashed hopes was in the making at Candlestick Park. Steve Ontiveros, a former outfielder, does not exactly pick it at third base for the Giants; in the fourth inning, he played a one-hopper by Joe Rudi off his shoulder, and he later threw the ball away while attempting an easy double play. (The Giants have had forty-six third bas.e.m.e.n since they came to the Coast in 1958.) The A's, for their part, seemed to be suffering from similar tinkering. Joe Rudi, the best defensive left fielder in the American League, has been moved to first base in order to make room for Claudell Was.h.i.+ngton, who is a fine hitter but cannot field much. He played a fly ball by Matthews into a double and later threw behind a runner. The best poke of the day was a triple in the fifth by Bobby Murcer-a Murcer Special into the deepest right-field corner. A week or two earlier, Bobby had delivered himself of a bad-tempered public blast against the Yankees for s.h.i.+pping him off to San Francisco in the Bonds trade, but now, after the game, he appeared to be in splendid humor, as befits a man currently batting .500. I asked him if the trade might not in fact be one of those that ended up helping both princ.i.p.als. ”Don't know,” he said. ”Ask me in September.”

The most heavily reported news at the Indians' camp in Tucson this spring was fundamentally unreportable-the fact that Frank Robinson, the new Cleveland manager, is black. Like several dozen visiting scribes before me this year, I sought him out in his office at Hi Corbett Field (where he was lunching on two c.o.kes and some saltines crumbled into a cup of soup), shook hands, asked him some questions, and concluded that he was going about his duties in a responsible if inescapably predictable fas.h.i.+on. He admitted to some innovations-no team curfew, the appointment of two team captains (one white, one black; or, rather, as Robinson put it, one an outfielder and one an infielder)-and said he had turned over a great deal of detail work to his coaches, so that he might have more time to watch and get to know his players. ”I want things done right,” he said. ”That is, I want them done my way.”

He hadn't had time to do much batting himself, and thus prepare himself for his additional duties as a designated hitter. Robinson spoke with alternate gravity and humor, exuding the same sense of weight and presence I have always observed in him. We chatted a little, and then I said goodbye and wished him luck, and made room for three more out-of-town reporters, who had come for the same unspoken and unspeakable purpose: How does a black manager manage? What is black managing? How does it, uh, feel to be the first black manager?

It was nice and hot in Tucson, and I sat in the stands that afternoon and caught some rays. There was a grove of trees out beyond center field, and the distant outfield fences were covered with old-style billboards-Jim Click Ford, Coors Beer, Ralph Hays Roofing, Patio Pools. (Arizona outfields are s.p.a.cious, to make room for the great distances that fly b.a.l.l.s carry through the dry, desert air; a few years ago, in Mesa, Curt Blefary ducked away from an inside pitch, and the ball struck his bat and flew over the right-field fence for a homer.) Two veteran flingers, the Indians' Fritz Peterson and the Angels' Chuck Dobson, had at each other, with the visitors enjoying all the best of things. The Angels have only speed and pitching, and their left fielder, Mickey Rivers, a skinny blur on the base paths, stretched two routine singles into doubles. In the California fourth, Cleveland center fielder George Hendrick fielded a single and threw the ball over the cutoff man's head. The Indians, who have insufficient pitching, may have a long summer of it.

There was a good mix taking the sun in the stands that day: high-school girls with long, clean hair; a lot of young men-probably students at the University of Arizona-with beards and tanned bare chests and cutoff jeans and silver bracelets; and, of course, old folks. At one point, somebody behind me said, ”I understand they gave Homer a pacemaker, but it was sort of out of pace with his heart.” A pause, and then ”Oh, well, Homer has more money than Carter has little pills.”

Just before I left, in the seventh, I recorded a personal baseball first: Most Fans Seen Wheeling a Bicycle up Aisle of Grandstand-1.

Friends have told me that they find the Oakland A's insufferable. I find this a mystery. The three-time World Champions have not only more talent but more interesting troubles and more lively conversationalists than anybody else around. This year, their problems may be sufficient to keep them from their customary October rendezvous, for Charlie Finley's fiscal irresiliency has cost them not only Catfish Hunter but the services of their second baseman, d.i.c.k Green, a twelve-year veteran who retired rather than accept Finley's kind of emolument for another year.

I had heard about the infamous conditions at the home park of the A's, in Mesa, but I was still not quite ready for the dim, cluttered, corridorlike room there that serves as the champions' clubhouse. Team trunks were stacked everywhere, and sweats.h.i.+rts hung from the overhead pipes and rafters. There was one fan, and the place suggested nothing so much as a migrant-labor-camp barracks. Joe Rudi must have seen my expression, because he laughed and said, ”You know how it is with Charlie-first-cla.s.s all the way.” (Finley, it should be added, was not on hand; he rarely comes to Arizona-or, for that matter, to Oakland.) In the past, the captain of the A's, Sal Bando, has been more gentle about his employer than most of his teammates, but this spring he emerged the loser in a vituperative salary arbitration, and he has joined the bad-mouth majority. Finley won four of six arbitration cases this year; whatever the issues, the effect of this was to deny real raises, after a third world champions.h.i.+p, to Bando, Ken Holtzman, Ray Fosse, and Reggie Jackson.

”Until this year,” Bando said to me, ”I found it hard to understand how low and upset he could make a player feel. Now I understand. The big thing is his lack of respect for other people, and the lack of communication in the whole organization. I said last winter that the front office was a one-man show, and he used this as an excuse to call in the press and demean me. [Finley stated, among other things, that his team captain was the eleventh-best third baseman in the league.] To me, this is like a car dealer buying time on TV and saying he has the worst cars in town. No wonder people don't come to see us play. We win on this team only because each of us has a sense of pride-which is exactly what he wants to take away from us. Winning is what holds this team together.”

Winning and, he might have added, great baseball and, inexplicably, great good cheer. In spite of their celebrated squabbles, the A's have always struck me as having the most ebullient dugout in the game. On this afternoon, Bando finished his Finleyan discourse by suddenly leaping off the bench and tipping Pat Bourque's cap over his eyes and grabbing the ball he was about to catch in warm-up. Then young Phil Garner, the rookie who will replace Green at second base this year, came down the steps and said, ”My luck's really runnin' good. My wife went to the doc this morning, and he said the baby isn't coming until July. And ... well, he said it sounds like there's more than one heartbeat in there.”

Bourque and Ray Fosse and Rollie Fingers took up the topic with alacrity.

”Uh-oh! You better get Charlie on the phone right now. Tell him you're holding out for more. Play on his sympathy.”

”'More than one'? Listen, that doesn't mean two, does it? Think about that a little, Phil.”

”Yes, if your wife's been messin' with those fertility pills, you'd better get out there and hit about .310 this year and a hundred and fifty runs batted in. At least!”

In the game that day, against the Padres, Phil Garner made three errors. The A's had other troubles, too-including Reggie Jackson running his spring average to one for fifteen, or .066-but Gene Tenace hit a homer and a double, and Bando and Claudell Was.h.i.+ngton and Ted Kubiak doubled, too, and the miserable A's cheerfully won the game, 42.

POSTCARDS.

A group of big-league scouts-Dario Lodigiani, Al Hollingsworth, Haywood Sullivan, and some others-turned up at most of the games I saw. Apparently by agreement, they always seemed to come to the same games, and they always sat together, watching the play and writing notes in their notebooks. Reminded you of Second World War spies taking their aperitifs together at Estoril.

Spotted Alvin Dark's car parked outside Rendezvous Park, in Mesa-a big, mocha-colored Imperial LeBaron, with Florida plates and two rear b.u.mper stickers. ”A's, World Champions” was on the left side and ”Jesus Is Coming Soon! Every Knee Shall Bow” on the right. Dark, the Oakland manager, is a direct man. Last winter, he mailed several revivalist tracts to Ron Bergman, who covers the team for the Oakland Tribune. Bergman is Jewish.

Rollie Fingers, watching the Padres take infield practice: ”There's that Hernandez, at short. I'll never forget that year he had five hundred and something at-bats and drove in twelve runs.”

Ray Fosse: ”What? That's impossible.”

Fingers: ”Look it up.”

I looked it up. The year was 1971. Enzo Hernandez drove in twelve runs in 549 trips to the plate.

Before an Indians-Brewers game at Sun City, g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, the Cleveland pitcher who is starting his fourteenth year in the majors, spotted Del Crandall, who put in sixteen years as a player and is starting his fourth year as the Brewers' manager.

”Hey there, Big Del,” Perry said. ”I see we made it to another year.”

”Yeah,” Crandall said. ”Let's hope it don't run out on us.”

March was winding down, and my holiday was nearly over. The penultimate stop was a Giants-Brewers night game, which I witnessed from the stands in the company of seventy or eighty members of the Giants Boosters Club. Surrounded by orange-and-black caps and b.u.t.tons and pennants, I yelled for every San Francisco grounder and fly ball, and felt a lively sense of accomplishment over the eventual 31 win by the Good Guys. As one might imagine, given their team's recent record, the Boosters don't know the meaning of quit. There are some four thousand of them in all, mostly season-ticket holders at Candlestick Park, and a lot of them sign up for road trips, too, accompanying their boys to Los Angeles or as far as the East Coast, and even once to j.a.pan. The Boosters are middling-old, and not many of them, I noticed, keep score. This is not a sign of amateurish fandom, however; the Boosters are too busy simultaneously yelling and socializing to do any writing. All Giants are addressed, fortissimo, by their first names, but some criticism is permitted within the family, too. After Ontiveros threw out a Milwaukee base runner, a woman next to me leaned over and murmured, ”Every time Steve throws the ball, I shudder.” At one point, I asked another lady near me what she thought about the recent news that Juan Marichal, the longtime Giants mound ace, had signed up with the Dodgers. She pondered the question, and then said, ”Well, I'm sort of sorry for Juan. You can't tell me he liked doing that.”

The winning two-run Giants rally, sparked by a Derrel Thomas double, interrupted a lengthy discussion of home states (”You're from Montana? Why, I was born in b.u.t.te....”), and then we all anxiously discussed the Giants' relief pitcher David Heaverlo, who was summoned in to protect the lead. Heaverlo, a young nonroster flinger, was so delighted at being invited to camp this year that he shaved all the hair off his head. Tonight, it turned out, he was throwing nothing but BBs out there. ”Heave her low, Heaverlo!” we shouted, and he did, and we went home hoa.r.s.e but happy.

On, then, the next afternoon, for the Indians and the Brewers, at Sun City. This is a retirement community, a vast walled city of low, white bungalows, which, viewed from the non-vantage point of the ceaseless desert plain, looks as big as Benares. The ball park appears to have been dug out of one end of a parking lot-an arrangement I finally understood when I realized that it allowed all the fans to walk down to their seats; a number of them spared themselves even this minimal strain by watching the proceedings from parked golf carts. On this particular day, however, there were a good many younger adults and children mixed in with the geezers-Easter-vacation visitors, perhaps. Hank Aaron, baseball's most celebrated active codger, started for the home team as the designated hitter, and began a six-run Milwaukee outburst in the fourth with a single off g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry. Aaron batting and Perry pitching would make a terrific energy-conservation poster.

The afternoon had begun with wind and threatening low clouds. As the game wore on, the clouds began to break up, but the wind blew and blew. The clear desert air became dusty-red, and later that afternoon there were reports of forty- and fifty-mile-an-hour gusts nearby. The wind began to blow away the ball game. Three fly b.a.l.l.s got up into the river of air above us and sailed out beyond the fence for homers; one of them was a grand slam. The sun came out at last, and the sun and the wind made me restless, and I got up and walked out to the deepest part of the stands along the right-field foul line and sat down. There was a flagpole on an embankment above me, and the great wind had nailed the two flags in the air up there-the Arizona state flag under the Stars and Stripes-making them stand out like planks. There was no one near me but a couple of county cops in brown uniforms, and three boys and one girl in jeans and T-s.h.i.+rts and sneakers-they looked about ten or twelve years old-and, just down below us, a young Cleveland pitcher and bullpen catcher, sitting motionless on folding chairs in their warm-up jackets.