Part 16 (2/2)

For me, Arizona baseball is personified by a young woman vender at Phoenix Stadium I came to recognize, after several springs, by her call. She would slowly make her way down an aisle carrying her basket and then sing out a gentle, musical ”Hot dog!...Hot dog!”-a half note and then down four steps to a whole note. She'd go away, and later you heard the same pausing, repeated cry at a different distance, like the cry of a single bird working the edge of a meadow on a warm summer afternoon. ”Hot dog!”

Old fans and senior scribes want the spring camps to remain exactly the same; they should be like our vacation cottages at the lake or the sh.o.r.e-a fusty and familiar vicinity in which we discover, every year, the sparkle and renewing freshness of another summer. The wish is doomed, of course. Each succeeding March, the small ballparks are visibly more crowded and the audiences younger and more upscale, with affluent, Hertz-borne suburban families on the kids' spring break lately beginning to outnumber the cus.h.i.+on-carrying retirees in the stands. Authors and television crews cram the sidelines at the morning workouts, and by game time the venders at the souvenir stands look like Bloomingdale's salesgirls during Christmas week. Spring training is ”in,” worse luck, and even the most remote baseball bivouacs are incipient Nantuckets. Out in Mesa, descending hordes of Cubs fans absolutely swamp little HoHoKam Park every game day, lining up at breakfast time to buy up the twenty-three hundred unreserved seats that go on sale at ten o'clock; the park put in new bleacher seats in 1985, enlarging its capacity to eight thousand, but this was insufficient to handle the numbers of the new faithful. A friend of mine-a retired Chicago baseball writer who lives in Arizona now-told me that he drove over to the Cubs training complex on the very first day of spring training that same year, when only the pitchers and catchers had reported, and counted license plates from twenty-six states in the parking lot. ”There were maybe a thousand fans at the workout,” he said. ”A thousand, easy, just watching the pitchers doing sit-ups.”

Chain O'Lakes Park, the Red Sox training site in Winter Haven, is less frantic, but it has changed, too. It was an inning or two into my first game there in 1985 when I saw the difference: the old, fragrant orange grove out beyond the right-field and center-field fences was gone, replaced by a cl.u.s.ter of low, not quite finished white buildings, with a drooping banner out front that said ”LAKEFRONT CONDOMINIUMS.” I gestured miserably at this phenomenon, and my seatmate, a Boston writer, said, ”Yes, I know. Remember when we used to write 'and Yaz hit it into the orchard'? Now what do we say?”

Trying to perk me up, he pointed out that the two nesting ospreys I had seen here on prior spring trips were still in residence in their big, slovenly nest on top of the light pole in short right-field foul ground; just the day before, he said, a batter with the visiting Reds had skied a foul ball that had landed in the nest-landed and stayed there, that is-but the birds did not seem discomposed. I kept an eye out, and over the next few innings I saw one or perhaps both of them depart and return to their perch, coming in with a last flutter of their great wings and then settling down on whatever they were keeping there above the field. Someday soon, I decided, we would hear about the first confirmed sighting of a young red-st.i.tched osprey (Pandion ueberrothiensis) here, hard by the banks of Lake Lulu. I cheered up. A little later in that game, we had a brief shower-the first rain in weeks, I was told-and some of the older fans got up from their unprotected seats along the left- and right-field lines and came and stood in the aisles of the roofed grandstand, out of the wet. The game went on, with the sitting and standing fans quietly taking it in, and I had a sudden, oddly familiar impression (this has. .h.i.t me before, in this park at this time of year) that I had found my way into a large henhouse somewhere and was surrounded by elderly farmyard fowls. We perched there together, smelling the aroma of mixed dust and rain, and waited for the sun to come out again.

The life-baseball as a side order, so to speak-is not necessarily slow or reflective. What I remember about an October now seven years gone isn't an unmemorable World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees (the Dodgers won it) but the crowds at the Stade Olympique, up in Montreal, during the stirring Dodgers-Expos playoff games there. All that is still clean the middle innings of Game Three, say (the clubs had come back from Los Angeles with the series tied), with the Dodgers' Jerry Reuss and the Expos' Steve Rogers locked in hard combat, and the Dodgers up a run-the only run of the game so far-and the encircling, in-leaning rows upon rows of avid, baseball-mad Canadians, seeming to sway and shudder and groan and cry in the chilly northern night air with every pitch and movement of the fray. And to sing. When I wrote about this, several days later, I still half heard in the dusty back chambers of my head the vapid, endlessly repeated chorus of that d.a.m.nable Expo marching song-”Val-de-ri! Val-de-rah!”-that the locals bellowed together, in enormous and echoing cacophony, at every imaginable st.i.tch and wrinkle of the games' fabric. The song is not some famous indigenous voyageurs' chantey, as one might suppose, but only the old, implacably jolly ”Happy Wanderer” hiking ditty that generations of sub-adolescents across the continent have had to warble through (”Val-de-ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) during mosquitoey marshmallow roasts at Camp Pineaway. But the Montrealers sang it with a will-sang it because they wanted to, of all things-and they won my heart. I didn't even mind the weather, which was unsuitable, if never quite unbearable, or the appalling ballpark. The round, thick-lipped, inward-tilted concrete upper wall of the Stade Olympique appears to hang over the stands and the glum, Astro-Turfed field in a glowering, almost threatening way, shutting out the sky, and fastb.a.l.l.s and hard-hit grounders are so hard to see from above, for some reason, that the accompanying noise from the crowd is always an instant or two out of sync. This time I didn't care, because the teams and the players and the quality of play were all so good that every part of the games mattered and made you glad you were there and no place else in the world just then.

In the sixth inning of that third game, the Expos tied things up with a single and a walk and a little roller by Larry Parrish, just through between Cey and Russell at third and short. Reuss, perhaps ever so slightly distracted by the blizzards of torn-up journeaux, and the layered explosions of noise, and the illuminated ”PLUS FORT!” up on the scoreboard, and the back-and- forth billowings of an enormous white Quebecois flag, and the hundredth or perhaps thousandth bellowed cascade of ”Val-de-ri!'s” and ”Val-de-rah!'s”-now got a fastball a millimeter or two higher than he wanted to against the next batter, outfielder Jerry White, who socked the ball up and out into the left-field stands for a homer and three more runs and, it turned out, the game.

I imagine everyone who thinks of himself or herself as an Expo fan still clings to that moment, for the team lost the next two games-lost them late, under grindingly painful circ.u.mstances-to miss out on the World Series, and sank into a long baseball torpor. Sometimes it's wiser to remember the byplay of big games-the songs and the rest of it-instead of their outcome, because losing hurts so much. Players understand this all too well. A day or two before the end, Steve Rogers, talking about all the singing and happiness in the Montreal stands, shook his head a little and said, ”Yes, it's beautiful, but-well, euphoria is not always the name of the game.”

People who don't follow baseball very closely a.s.sume that fans care only about their own club. I don't agree. Whenever I happen upon a Little League game or a high-school game or a Sunday game in Central Park between a couple of East Harlem amateur nines, it only takes me an inning or so before I find myself privately rooting for one of the teams out there. I have no idea how this choice is arrived at, but the process is more fun if the two sides offer a visible, almost moral, clash of styles and purpose, and-even better-if each seems to be personified by one of its players. At that 1982 Cardinals-Brewers World Series, York and Lancaster were brilliantly depicted by the rival center fielders; the frail, popeyed, apologetic-looking Cardinal rookie, Willie McGee; and the hulking, raggedy-a.s.s veteran Brewer slugger, Gorman Thomas. McGee had a great series, it turned out, both at the plate and in the field; in the third game, which the Cardinals won, 62, he smacked home runs in two successive at-bats, and in the ninth he pulled down a mighty poke by Gorman Thomas (of course) after running at full tilt from mid-center field into deep left center and then to the top of the wall there all in one flowing, waterlike motion-a cat up a tree-with no pause or accelerations near the end to adjust for the catch; at the top of his leap, with his back to the field, he put his glove up and bit to his left, and the ball, in the same instant, arrived. The play almost broke my heart, for I had already somehow chosen the Brewers and Gorman Thomas as my own. Thomas, as it happened, did nothing much in the Series-three little singles, and this after a summer in which he had hit a league-leading thirty-nine home runs-so I certainly wasn't front-running. The frowsy Thomas was a walking strip mine; he had worn the same pair of uniform stockings, now as threadbare as the Shroud of Turin, since opening day of 1978. I recall a moment in the Brewer clubhouse during the Series when a group of us were chatting with Thomas's father-he was the retired postmaster of Charleston, South Carolina-and some genius reporter asked what Gorman's room had looked like back when he was a teen-ager. ”Tumble!” Thomas pere said, wincing at the thought. ”Why, I could hahdly make myself look in theah!”

Events on the field qualify in the life, as well; they only have to be a little special. In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 66. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 32, and then sailed a ma.s.sive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly's accountbook for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driven in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, ”This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone.” I wasn't at Candlestick that day, but I don't care; I have this one by heart.

Or consider an earlier concatenation that began when Phil Garner, a stalwart Pirate outfielder, struck a grand slam home run against the Cardinals at Three Rivers Stadium one evening in 1978. Every professional player can recall each grand slam in his career, but this one was a blue-plate special, because Garner, who is not overmuscled, had never hit a bases-loaded home run before-not in Little League play; not in Legion or high-school ball; not in four years with the University of Tennessee nine; not in five years in the minors; not in six hundred and fifty-one prior major-league games, over two leagues and five summers. Never.

We must now try to envisage-perhaps in playlet form-the events at the Garner place when Phil came home that evening: P.G. (enters left, with a certain swing in his step): Hi, honey.

Mrs. P.G.-or C.G. (her name is Carol): Hi. How'd it go?

P.G.: O.K. (pause) Well?

C.G.: Well, what?

P.G.: What! You mean...

C.G.: (alarmed): What what? What's going on?

P.G.: I can't believe it. You missed it....

Yes, she had missed it, although Carol was and is a baseball fan and a fan of Phil's, as well as his wife, and was in the custom of attending most of the Pirates' home games and following the others by radio or television. When he told her the news, she was delighted but appalled.

C.G.: I can't get over not seeing it. You can't imagine how bad I feel.

P.G.: (grandly): Oh, that's O.K., honey. I'll hit another one for you tomorrow.

And so he did.

Attention must be paid. In March, 1984, I watched a talented left-handed Blue Jay rookie pitcher named John Cerutti work three middle innings against the Red Sox at Winter Haven; at one point he struck out Jim Rice with a dandy little slider in under his fists. I talked to Cerutti after the game and learned that he was four credits away from his B.A. degree in economics at Amherst (he has since graduated) and that his senior thesis had to do with the role of agents in major-league player salaries. I also discovered that he had a baseball hero: Ron Guidry.

”I don't have many fond memories of baseball until I was about eighteen and pitching for the Christian Brothers Academy, in Albany,” he said. ”Then I got the notion that I might make it in the game someday. I had a real good year that year-it was 1978-and, of course, that was the same time that Guidry had his great year. I was a Yankee fan-always had been-so naturally I followed him and pulled for him, and that spring I began to notice that something weird was happening to us. I mean, I won seven games in a row, and he won his first seven. Then I was 90 when he was exactly the same-we were winning together, me and Ron Guidry! School ended and I graduated, but I went on pitching in American Legion ball. I was 130 when I lost my first game, and I thought, Uh-oh, that's the end of it, but that very same night Guidry lost, too, for the first time-I was watching on TV-so we were still the same. Well, I guess you know he finished up the year with a 253 record, and was the Cy Young winner and all, and I ended at 252. So you could say we both had pretty good years. That affinity began.”

Cerutti said all this a little offhandedly-with a trace of college-cool irony, perhaps-but his face was alight with humor and good cheer.

”So do you want to know my dream now?” he went on. ”My dream is that first I make this club some day, and then I end up pitching a game against Ron Guidry. It's a big, big game-a Sat.u.r.day afternoon at the Stadium, one of those big crowds, with a lot riding on it-and I beat him, 10. It could just happen.”

”I know,” I said.

”Keep watching,” he said.

”I'll be there,” I said.

Making the Blue Jays took a little longer than Cerutti had expected, but when he was called up from Syracuse in the spring of 1986, it was noticed that he had his stuff together at last; he went 94 for the season, with a shutout along the way, and took up his place in the Toronto starting rotation. I was happy about the promotion (I had renewed acquaintance with him briefly a couple of times in the interim, mostly in Florida), and in June this summer I watched him work a game against the Yankees in New York one evening-watched him over the tube, I mean. It was a significant game for both clubs, since the Blue Jays were a half game up on the Yankees at the top of the American League East. There I was, with my dinner and a drink before me and with John Cerutti, big as life, up there on the screen, when several rusty synapses clicked on at last. ”My G.o.d!” I cried. ”It's Guidry, too. It's happened.”

I had blown our date, but Cerutti kept his, all right, beating the Yankees by 72, it turned out, to solidify his teams's hold on first place. Not Cerutti's plan exactly, but close enough. I considered rus.h.i.+ng up to the stadium to catch the later innings, but I didn't. I got there early the next evening, however, and at batting practice a couple of writer friends said, ”You see John Cerutti? He was looking for you last night.”

He came in from the field at last-he had been doing his sprints out there-and found me in the dugout. ”Hey,” he said cheerfully. ”Where were you?”

”I blew it,” I said. ”I'm sorry, John-I stood you up. I feel bad about it. Only you said it would be a Sat.u.r.day.”

”Well, I looked for you,” he said. ”Everyone else was here. I heard a couple of days ago that it might be me and the Gator, so I called my mom and she came down for it. In the end, I had to leave sixteen tickets for people from home. They knew how long I'd been waiting. It was all just the way I'd dreamed about it. In the first couple of innings, I kept thinking, Here I am, with my spikes on the same pitching rubber where Ron Guidry's spikes were a minute ago. It was a thrill.”

”I know-I saw it at home,” I said miserably. ”There's no excuse, only well, you know...I didn't believe it. Life isn't like this.”

”I know,” he said. ”But this is different.”

”This is baseball, you mean.”

”That's right,” he said. ”In baseball-well, stuff can happen.

*Quite right, and the job, it turned out, was managing the Orioles. Earl took up the reins again in midseason of 1985, and helped steer his old club to a second-place finish. The next year, however, everything went sour-most of all, the pitching-as the team slipped into the cellar of the American League East, and when it was over Earl stepped down for good. In retrospect, I think I should have known that the first retirement wouldn't work. Earlier in 1982, I recall, I asked him in a casual sort of way if he was truly ready to leave-and in particular if he'd be able to stick to his promise to stay out of baseball altogether. Wasn't it possible that he'd end up coaching a college team or even a high-school team somewhere, the way so many other retired skippers had done? ”I hate kids and I hate f.u.c.king kid baseball!” he barked, startling us both into laughter. He wanted the real thing, nothing less.

In the Fire.

- Winter 1984.

CONSIDER THE CATCHER. BULKY, thought-burdened, unclean, he retrieves his cap and mask from the ground (where he has flung them, moments ago, in mid-crisis) and moves slowly again to his workplace. He whacks the cap against his leg, producing a puff of dust, and settles it in place, its bill astern, with an oddly feminine gesture and then, reversing the movement, pulls on the mask and firms it with a soldierly downward tug. Armored, he sinks into his squat, punches his mitt, and becomes wary, balanced, and ominous; his bare right hand rests casually on his thigh while he regards, through the portcullis, the field and deployed fielders, the batter, the base runner, his pitcher, and the state of the world, which he now, for a waiting instant, holds in sway. The hand dips between his thighs, semaphoring a plan, and all of us-players and umpires and we in the stands-lean imperceptibly closer, zoom-lensing to a focus, as the pitcher begins his motion and the catcher half rises and puts up his thick little target, tensing himself to deal with whatever comes next, to end what he has begun. These motions-or most of them, anyway-are repeated a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty times by each of the catchers in the course of a single game, and are the most familiar and the least noticed gestures in the myriad patterns of baseball. The catcher has more equipment and more attributes than players at the other positions. He must be large, brave, intelligent, alert, stolid, foresighted, resilient, fatherly, quick, efficient, intuitive, and impregnable. These scoutmaster traits are counterbalanced, however, by one additional entry-catching's bottom line. Most of all, the catcher is invisible. He does more things and (except for the batter) more difficult things than anyone else on the field, yet our eyes and our full attention rest upon him only at the moment when he must stand alone, upright and unmoving, on the third-base side of home and prepare to deal simultaneously with the urgently flung or relayed incoming peg and the onthundering base runner-to handle the one with delicate precision and then, at once, the other violently and stubbornly, at whatever risk to himself. But that big play at home is relatively rare. Sometimes three or four games go by without its ever coming up, or coming to completion: the whole thing, the street accident-the slide and the catch, the crash and the tag and the flying bodies, with the peering ump holding back his signal until he determines that the ball has been held or knocked loose there in the dust, and then the wordless exchanged glances (”That all you got?”...”You think that hurt, man?”) between the slowly arising survivors. Even when the catcher has a play on the foul fly-whipping around from the plate and staring up until he locates the ball and then, with the mask flipped carefully behind him, out of harm's way, following its ampersand rise and fall and poising himself for that crazy last little swerve-our eyes inevitably go to the ball at the final instant and thus mostly miss catch and catcher.

But this slight is as nothing compared to the anonymity we have carelessly given to our receiver in the other, and far more lengthy, interludes of the game. Because he faces outward-I think: none of this seems certain-and because all our antic.i.p.ation of the events to come (in this most antic.i.p.atory of sports) centers on the wide green-sward before us and on its swift, distant defenders, our awareness of the catcher is glancing and distracted; it is as if he were another spectator, bent low in order not to spoil our view, and although at times he, too, must cover ground quickly, he is more often waiting and seemingly out of it, like the rest of us. We fear or dote upon the batter, depending on which side is up; we laugh at pitchers a little, because of their contortions, but gasp at their speed and stuff; we think of infielders as kids or terriers, and outfielders are gazelles or bombardiers or demiG.o.ds; but catchers are not so easy to place in our imagination. Without quite intending it, we have probably always patronized them a little. How many of us, I wonder, have entirely forgotten ”the tools of ignorance,” that old sports-page epithet for the catcher's impedimenta (it was coined in the nineteen-twenties by Muddy Ruel, a catcher with the Senators, who practiced law in the off-season). And think for a moment of the way the umpire watches the catcher as he goes about his housekeeping there behind the

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