Part 17 (2/2)

There was an infield bouncer to deep short, and Mercado trailed the play, sprinting down behind first base to back up the peg from short. Haller nodded in satisfaction. ”It's hard on you physically behind the plate,” he said. ”All that bending and kneeling. One way to help yourself is to get on down to first base on that play and do it every single time. You let yourself out a little, so you're not cramped up all day.”

A bit later, he said, ”Mainly, you have to be a student of the game. There are so many little things to the job. You have to look the same when you're setting up for the fastball and the breaking ball, so you don't tip the pitch. A batter steps up, and he may have moved his feet in the box since the last time you saw him play, and that might completely change the way you and your pitcher've decided to pitch to him. You can't stop everything and call a conference to discuss what to do. You have to decide.”

Then: ”What you do can get sort of subtle sometimes. If you're ahead by a few runs or way behind in a game, you might decide to give a real good hitter the pitch that he's waiting forms favorite pitch. Say he's a great, great breaking-ball hitter. Normally, you'd absolutely stay away from that pitch with anything over the plate, but in that special situation you might think, Let's let him have it, this once-let him hit it. That way, you put it in his head that he might get it again from you, later on in the game or the next time he faces that same pitcher. He'll be looking for it and waiting for it, and he'll never see it again. You've got a little edge on him.”

In the game, the Giants had base runners on second and third, with one out, and the Mariners chose to pitch to the next batter, outfielder Chili Davis, who instantly whacked a double to right, for two runs. ”If you've got an open base, you should try to remember to use it,” Haller observed. ”So often, you have the intention of putting a good hitter on, rather than letting him hurt you. You go to work on his weakness-let's say, something outside and away-and you get lucky and get two strikes on him, and men the pitcher decides, Hey, I can strike this bozo out. So you come in with the fastball and, bam, he kills you. You got greedy and forgot.

”Sometimes the little breaks of the game begin to go against your pitcher, and you can see him start to come apart out there. You have to watch for that and try to say something to him right off, because you can't do much to settle down a pitcher once he really gets upset. If he's sore, it means he's lost his concentration and so he's already in big trouble. You go out and try to get him to think about the next pitch, but you know he's probably not going to be around much longer.”

The game flowed along quietly-nothing much, but not without its startlers. Orlando Mercado, batting against a Giants righthander named Segelke, in the fifth, spun away from a sailing fastball, but too late-the pitch caught him on the back of his batting helmet and he sagged to the ground. It looked bad for a minute-we'd all heard the ugly sound of the ball as it struck and ricocheted away-but in time Mercado got up, albeit a little groggily, and walked with a Mariner trainer back to his dugout, holding a towel to his ear, which had been cut by the edge of the helmet.

In another part of the game, the Seattle second baseman, Danny Tartabull, cued a high, twisting foul up over the Giants dugout. Milt May came back for it, but it was in the stands, close to the front rows somewhere, and as I peered up, squinting in the sun, I realized at last that it was very close to the good seats. I cringed away, holding my notebook over my dome, and Tom Haller stood up beside me and easily made the bare-handed catch. Sensation. The Giants dugout emptied as the San Francisco minions gave their boss a standing O and Haller's friends in the stands-hundreds of them, by the sound of it-cheered noisily, and then a couple of former Giant managers, Wes Westrum and Charlie Fox (they are both scouts now), waved and called over to him from their seats nearby to express raucous awe. Haller flipped the ball to Bob Lurie, the Giants' owner, who was in an adjoining box. ”I think I just saved you three bucks,” he said. He was blus.h.i.+ng with pleasure.

It had been a good five years since anything hit into the stands had come anywhere near that close to me-and, of course, it was the most immediate lesson in catching I was to get all year. Then I realized I'd missed the play again. ”How did you take that ball, Tom?” I said. ”I-”

He made a basket of his hands. ”I was taught this way,” he said. ”Then if you bobble it you can still bring it in to your chest.”

Haller's paws are thick and gnarled, and there seems to be an extra angle in the little finger of his right hand. He saw me looking at it now, and held out the hand. ”Richie Allen hit a foul and tore up that part,” he said. ”I had a few dislocations and broken fingers along the line, and this split here needed seven st.i.tches. Usually, you looked for blood, and if there wasn't any that meant you were all right. You could pop a dislocation back in and stay in the game. We were trained to tuck your right thumb inside your fingers and curve the fingers around, so if there was a foul tip the ball would bend them back in the right direction. Nowadays, catchers can just hide that hand behind their leg, because of the new glove. So it has its advantages.”

Late in the game, the third Mariner catcher of the afternoon-a rookie named Bud Bulling-was struck by a foul that caromed into the dirt and up into his crotch. He remained on his knees in the dirt for a minute or two, waiting for that part of the day to be over, while the Giants players called to him in falsetto voices. ”I got hit like that in the spring of my very first year up with the Giants,” Haller said. ”I tried not to say anything, and when I got back to the clubhouse I took the cup out of my jock all in pieces. Each spring, you wait for that first shot between the legs and you think, All right, now I'm ready to start the season.”

The game ended (the Giants won it, and Chili Davis had racked up a homer, two doubles, and a single for the day), and as we stood up for the last time Haller called to a Mariner coach out on the gra.s.s. ”I see some of us get old and gray!” Tom said.

”Yeah, I saw you,” the coach said. ”Your hands still look pretty good!” He waved cheerfully.

”That's Frank Funk,” Haller said to me. ”Frank was my first roommate in organized ball. We were in spring training together in the Giants' minor-league complex in Sanford, Florida, in 1958. He was a pitcher and I was a catcher, and they put us together to see if we could learn something.”

He'd had a great afternoon-you could see that. He was tickled.

No catcher of our time looks more imperious than Carlton Fisk, and none, I think, has so impressed his style and mannerisms on our sporting consciousness: his cutoff, bib-sized chest protector above those elegant Doric legs; his ritual pause in the batter's box to inspect the label on his upright bat before he steps in for good; the tipped back mask balanced on top of his head as he stalks to the mound to consult his pitcher; the glove held akimbo on his left hip during a pause in the game. He is six-three, with a long back, and when he comes straight up out of the chute to make a throw to second base, you sometimes have the notion that you're watching an aluminum extension ladder stretching for the house eaves; Bill d.i.c.key, another straightback-he was the eminent receiver for the imperious Yankee teams of the thirties and forties-had that same household-contraption look to him when getting ready to throw. Fisk's longitudinal New England face is eroded by reflection. He is a Vermonter, and although it has been three years now since he went over to the White Sox, he still looks out of the uniform to me without his Fenway habiliments. Pride is what he wears most visibly, though, and it's also what you hear from him.

”I really resent that old phrase about 'the tools of ignorance,'” he said to me in the White Sox dugout in Sarasota. ”No catcher is ignorant. I've caught for pitchers who thought that if they won it's because they did such a great job, and if they lost it's because you called the wrong pitch. A lot of pitchers need to be led-taken to the point where they're told what pitch to throw, where to throw it, when to throw it, and what to do after they've thrown it. The good pitcher knows that if you put down the fastball”-the catcher's flashed signal: traditionally one finger for the fastball, two for a breaking ball, three for a changeup, and four for variants and specials-”it's also meant to be down and in or down and away, and if you put down a breaking ball then it's up to him to get that into some low-percentage area of the strike zone. The other kind just glance at the sign and fire the ball over the plate. That's where you get that proverbial high hanger-and it's your fault for calling it. But you know who the best pitchers are, and they know you. I worked with Luis Tiant as well as with anybody, and if he threw a fastball waist-high down the middle-well, it was n.o.body's fault but his own, and he was the first to say so. Not many fans know the stats about catchers, but smart pitchers notice after a while that they'll have a certain earned-run average with one catcher, and that it'll be a point and a half higher with another catcher on the same club. Then they've begun to see that it isn't just their talent that's carrying them out there.”

There are some figures that even fans can understand, however: in 1980, Fisk's last year in Boston, the Red Sox won sixty-eight games and lost forty-four when he was behind the plate but were fifteen and thirty-three when he was not. His bat helped, then and always (he is a lifetime .281 hitter, with two hundred and nine career homers, and of course he is the man whose twelfth-inning home run won the sixth game of the 1975 World Series-still a high-water mark of the October cla.s.sic), but Fisk, in conversation, showed a splendid ambivalence about the two sides of his profession. Hitting mattered, but perhaps not as much as the quieter parts of the job.

”Catchers are involved every day,” he said, ”and that's one of the reasons why, over the years, they've been inconsistent in their productiveness. You can go a month and make a great offensive contribution, and then maybe a month and a half where there's little or none. But because of the ongoing mental involvement in the pitcher-batter struggle you don't have the luxury of being able to worry about your offensive problems. You just haven't got time. I think catchers are better athletes than they used to be. They run better and they throw better, and more of them hit better than catchers once did. I'm not taking anything away from the Yogi Berras and the Elston Howards and the rest, but there never were too many of them. With the turn of the seventies, you began to get catchers like myself and Bench and Munson, and then Parrish and Sundberg and Carter, and then Pena-you go down the rosters and they're all fine athletes. Bench started hitting home runs and Munson started hitting .300, and that old model of the slow, dumb catcher with low production numbers started to go out of date.”

Then there was the s.h.i.+ft: ”It always bothered me that catchers seemed defined by their offensive statistics-as if a catcher had no other value. Famous guys who hit twenty-five or thirty home runs or bat in a hundred runs may not have as much value as somebody hitting .250 or less-a Jerry Grote, say-but his pitchers and his teammates sure know. Look at Bill Preehan, with that good Detroit team back in the sixties and early seventies. He was a very average sort of runner, with an average, quick-release sort of arm, and nothing very startling offensively. But you just can't measure what he did for that Tiger pitching staff-people like McLain and Lolich and Joe Coleman.”

He had brought up a side issue that has sometimes troubled me. There have been a hundred and seven Most Valuable Player awards since the annual honor was inst.i.tuted by the Baseball Writers a.s.sociation of America, in 1931, and thirteen of them have gone to catchers-very close to a one-in-nine proportion, which looks equitable. Catchers who are named MVPs tend to get named again-Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra won the award three times apiece, and Johnny Bench twice-but it is hard not to notice that almost every MVP catcher posted startling offensive figures in his award-winning summers: Gabby Hartnett batted .344 in 1935, Ernie Lombardi batted .342 in 1938, Bench had a hundred and forty-eight runs batted in in 1970. And so forth. Only one MVP catcher-Elston Howard, in 1963-had offensive statistics (.287 and eighty-five RBIs) that suggest that his work behind the plate had also been given full value by the voting scribes. The BBWAA is engaged in an interesting ongoing debate about whether pitchers should be eligible for the MVP award (as they are now), given the very special nature of their work. I think we should look at the other end of the battery and consider the possibility that, year in and year out, each of the well-established veteran catchers is almost surely the most valuable player on his club, for the reasons we have been looking at here.

Fisk cheered up a little after his musings. He tucked a nip of Skoal under his lower lip, and told me that catching left-handed pitchers had been the biggest adjustment he'd had to make when he went over to the White Sox. ”Except for Bill Lee, we didn't have that many left-handers my twelve years in Boston,” he said. ”Because of the Wall. But there are good left-handers on this club, and that's taken me a little time. When you're calling a game with a left-handed pitcher against a lot of right-handed batters, you have to do it a little differently. A left-hander's breaking ball always goes to my glove side, and his fastball and sinkerball run the other way. That fastball up over here, from a lefty pitcher, is a little harder for me to handle, for some reason. I'm still conscious of it, but I'm beginning to have a better time of it now.”

I thought about Fisk often and with great pleasure last summer, while his White Sox streaked away with the American League West divisional t.i.tle. He batted .289, with twenty-six homers, for the year, and the Chicago pitchers (including LaMarr Hoyt, whose 2410 and 3.66 record won him the Cy Young Award) outdid themselves. Fisk's season ended in the White Sox' excruciating 30 loss to the Orioles in the fourth game of the American League champions.h.i.+p series, at Comiskey Park, in a game in which Britt Burns, the young left-handed Chicago starter, threw nine innings of shutout ball before succ.u.mbing in the tenth. Fisk had but one single in five at-bats in that game, but I think he found some rewards just the same. There in Sarasota, he'd said, ”When things are working well and the pitcher stays with you the whole way and you're getting guys out and keeping in the game-well, there's just no more satisfying feeling. You want to win it and you want to get some hits, but if your pitcher is doing his best, inning after inning, then you know you've done your job. It doesn't matter if I don't get any hits, but if I was an outfielder in that same game and all I'd done was catch a couple of routine fly b.a.l.l.s-why, men I wouldn't have anything to hang my hat on that day.”

Tim McCarver also spoke of this sense of deeper involvement. Like many useful long-termers, he was moved to easier positions when the demands of the job began to wear him down, but he didn't like it much not catching. ”Joe Torre had been through that same s.h.i.+ft,” he said to me, ”and he told me that when I changed position I'd be amazed how much my mind would begin to wander. When I moved out to first base-I played more than seventy games there in 1973-I couldn't believe it. I had to keep kicking myself to pay attention.”

Calling a game, of course, is the heart of it, and what that requires of a catcher, I came to understand at last, is not just a perfect memory for the batting strengths and weaknesses of every hitter on every other club-some hundred and sixty-five to a hundred and ninety-five batters, that is-but a sure knowledge of the capabilities of each pitcher on his staff. The latter is probably more important. Milt May said, ”If I had a chance to play against a team I'd never seen before but with a pitcher I'd caught fifty times, I'd much rather have that than play against a team I'd played fifty times but with a pitcher I didn't know at all.”

The other desideratum is a pitcher with good control-far rarer, even at the major-league level, than one might suppose. ”There are very few guys who can really pitch to a hitter's weakness,” May said. ”Most of 'em just want to pitch their own strength. Young pitchers usually have good stuff-a good moving fastball-and they pitch to hitters in the same pattern. Most of their breaking b.a.l.l.s are out of the strike zone, so they go back to the fastball when they're behind, and of course if you're up at bat you notice something like that.”

Here is Bob Boone again: ”It's much more fun catching a guy with excellent control, because then you feel you're part of the whole jockeying experience. Here's a ball that's just inside-fine. Now go back outside and put the ball on the corner this time. You're orchestrating that. Catching somebody like Tommy John is more work mentally, but it's much more pleasurable, and after it's over you'll both think, Hey, we had a great game. There's no doubt that a catcher can help a pitcher, but he can't be a dictator out there. When you've established that rapport with a pitcher you know, what you put down in a situation is almost always just about what he's thinking. When that happens, it gives the pitcher the confidence to throw a good pitch. You adjust as you go along-to the hitters and to your pitcher's abilities on that given day. If you can do it, you want to save something to use late in the game, because there are always a few batters you can't get out the same way more than once. If you've got through the order the first time without using your pitcher's whole repertoire, you're a little ahead. But pitchers change as a game goes along, of course, and then you have to adjust to that. Say your pitcher's best pitch is his slider, but then by the way he warms up for the next inning you think Uh-oh, because suddenly it isn't anymore-not at that moment. But then four pitches later it may be back again. It's a feel you have, and that's what you really can't teach to young catchers.

”Sometimes you get a sudden notion for an exotic call-something that's really strange in a certain situation that you somehow know is the right thing. You're jamming the man-throwing the ball right by him-and suddenly you call for a changeup. Ordinarily, you don't do that, but even if I'm watching a game from the bench I can sometimes feel when the moment comes: Now throw him the changeup. It's strange and it's strictly feel, but when it happens and you have the closeness with the pitcher he'll come in after the inning and say, 'You know, I had exactly the same idea back there!' But in the end, of course, it's how he throws those pitches that matters.”

Pitchers can always shake off a catcher's sign, to be sure-some shakeoffs are only meant to set up doubt in the batter's mind-and catcher-pitcher negotiations go on between innings or during a mound conference. These last are not always diplomatic murmurings. ”There almost has to be a lot of screaming and yelling between pitchers and catchers if they're going to get along,” Tim McCarver told me. ”With Gibby”-Bob Gibson, that is-”it sometimes happened right out on the mound. I remember a game against the Pirates when Clemente hit one of his patented shots to right field, and when Gibby came past me to back up the throw in he yelled, 'G.o.ddam it, you've got to put down something more than one ringer back there!' ”

Ted Simmons said, ”Sometimes you have to persuade your pitcher out of a certain pitch in the middle of the game. It's hard for him to remain objective in the heat of battle. If he's had some success, I might go out there and ask what he's thinking, and if he says, 'Over the years, I've gotten this guy out with this pitch in this situation, even though it's dangerous-let's say there are two on and he's getting ready to throw a changeup-then I say, 'Fine. Let's go.' But if I go out there and he says, 'Well, I just got a feel, man,' and he's lookin' at me with cloudy eyes, I say, 'Look, we'll do that next time-OK?' It's a matter of being convincing.” Ted Simmons, I should add, is one of the most convincing men in baseball. He is a sixteen-year man in the majors-the last three with the Brewers, the rest with the Cardinals-and is one of the prime switch hitters in the game: in 1975 he batted .332 for the Cards and drove in a hundred runs. He is known for his intelligence and knowledge of the game-splendid a.s.sets, but what I most enjoy about Simba is his pa.s.sionate way of talking baseball. He talks the way Catfish Hunter used to pitch-feeling for the corners early on and then with a widening flow of ideas and confidence and variation in the late going: Cooperstown stuff. When we sat down together at Sun City last spring, I asked him about the difference between National League pitching-almost an idle question, I thought, since I was pretty sure I knew the answer: a lower strike zone in the National League, and more breaking b.a.l.l.s in the A.L.

”I don't know how it began, but it's there, all right,” Simmons said. ”It's a difference of approach. The National League, in my mind, throws the slow stuff early in the count and then throws the fastball late, with two strikes on the batter. To me, that makes more sense, because you're forcing the batter to hit the ball-that's the objective-and the odds are always against a base bit, even with the best hitters. The American League approach, from what I've seen of it in two years, is to throw hard early-to get two strikes and no b.a.l.l.s, or 21 or 22-and then go to the slow stuff. So if you're 21 in the A.L., you're apt to go to 32 every time, because they'll throw a curveball and you'll foul it. Then a curve or a slider, and you'll take it, for 32. Then another slider or curve, and you'll foul it, then another curve-ball, and you'll swing and miss it for a strikeout or hit a fly ball for the out. So there are three or four extra pitches on almost every batter, and that's one reason why the American League has such long games. The A.L. philosophy is to get two strikes and then don't let him hit, and the N.L. thinks, Get two strikes and make him hit it.”

I asked him which league had the better pitchers, and he thought about it for a while. ”I think the American League pitchers are probably better, on balance,” he said at last, ”because they have to be refined when the count is against them-to throw that breaking ball and get it over the plate, throw it in a way to get the man out. The very best of them may be more subtle and refined and tough than the N.L. pitchers. I'm talking about guys like Dave Stieb, of the Toronto Blue Jays, and Pete Vuckovich here. Vukey was with me on the Cardinals, you know, but he made the adjustment very fast when he came over to this league. But there are always exceptions. Somebody like Steve Rogers”-of the National League Montreal Expos-”could pitch very well in this league.”

Bob Boone and Milt May have also had experience in both leagues, but they both gave a slight edge to National League pitching. May said that the N.L.'s preference for the slider-the faster breaking ball-as against the American League's prejudice for the curve, might make the crucial difference. Boone said, ”I think the real difference between the leagues is about six National League pitchers. Soto, Seaver, Carlton, Rogers, maybe Reuss, and any one of three or four others. Put 'em over in the American League, and they're even.” (Tom Seaver, who came to the Chicago White Sox over this winter, has already made the switch.) ”I would guess there are deeper counts in the A.L., but I wouldn't know for sure. I know there's more confidence in control in the A.L. In either league, it's hard as h.e.l.l to get a base hit, most days.”

Simmons wanted to be sure that I understood the extent of the catcher's involvement with other aspects of the game-with his manager, for instance, and with the deployment of the defense on the field. ”With some managers,” he said, ”you can come to them in the dugout in the middle of the game and say, ”This pitcher has had it. I a.s.sume you know that. But I want you to know I'm having to struggle with every pitch in every inning. I can't set up a program with this man, because he's faltering. Now I want some notion about your objectives. Do you intend to pitch him one more inning, or three more? Then if the manager says, 'Wow, let's get somebody up out there,' I can say, 'Well, OK, I can get him through one more inning,' and you work that inning like it's the ninth, with nothing held back. But there are some managers who can't respond to that a.s.sertive approach, because of their personalities-I can think of a half dozen of them that I've been involved with-and with those, well, you have to find some other way to get the message across.”

We moved along to defensive alignments, and I noticed that sometimes the intensity of his message made Simmons lift his hands to either side of his face as he talked, as if he were peering out of his mask at the game.

”You have to move your people around,” he said. ”It's part of your job, and part knowing how your manager wants things done. You've got a left-handed pull hitter up there, and you decide you're going to do one of two things. You're going to throw him low fastb.a.l.l.s away and hopes he tries to pull it, or slow stuff inside and make him pull it. So you set up your defense accordingly. Your second baseman plays in the hole, your shortstop is back of second base, and everyone in the outfield moves over two steps toward right. But if your second baseman is still playing at double-play depth, then you've got to stop and move him over. You can do that with a little gesture, just before you put down the sign-and I never put down anything until I know I have the second baseman and the shortstop's attention anyway. I just look them right in the eye and go-” He waggled his glove hand imperceptibly. ”If he still has a question, when you get back to the bench you can say, 'Hey, don't you see how we're pitchin' that guy?' This happens a lot, but people don't always appreciate it. Sometimes you'll see catchers with large reputations who'll stop and turn to the umpire and call time out and turn to the world and walk out a few steps and gesture to the man they want to move over, and everyone in the stands will say, 'Ah, yes, there's a man who knows what he's doing.' But it just isn't essential. It isn't done.”

The ultimate responsibility-for the game itself, Simmons suggested-is more difficult. ”The catcher is the man who has to be able to think, and he has to make the decisions-and to face the consequences when he's wrong,” he went on. ”Whether it's fun for you or a burden, that's where it's at, and the real satisfaction in catching is making that decision for everyone-for your pitcher, your team, your manager, and the home crowd. It's all in your lap. Think of a situation. Think of something that happens all the time. The count is two b.a.l.l.s and one strike, they have a man on first base, and you're ahead by one run. There's a pretty good hitter up-he doesn't strike out much. Now, you're the catcher and you've got to decide if they're going to hit-and-run. And with that you've got to decide if you're going to pitch out and negate all that, and what the consequences will be if you're wrong.

”Now we've got to where the fun is-where you know your allies, the capabilities of your pitcher and your team, and you also know the opposition, to the point where you're playin' with their heads. Because you know their manager and their way of playing, you know already what they're going to do. You have a gut feeling about it: G.o.d, he's going to run. You know. But instead-it's so easy to do this-you think, Well, I'd better play it safe, because I'm not sure, and we don't want 31 on this good hitter. So you call a fastball away to that right-handed batter, and he does. .h.i.t the ball to right on the hit-and-run-the runner's gone-and now you've got first and third, which is much, much worse. And you say to yourself, G.o.d almighty, I knew they were going to run! Why didn't I pitch out? Well, what you learn later on, when you've grown up as a catcher, is not to fight that urge, because you understand that if you were in their dugout and you were that manager you'd run. So you learn to stop being just a catcher, and to be them as well as yourself. Until you can get to that point, accept that burden, you're not in control. Once you do, you're a successful catcher-the man everyone relies on and looks to for leaders.h.i.+p, whether they know it or not.”

Ted Simmons had a good season last year, in spite of the sudden late-summer collapse of the defending-champion Brewers, who wound up in fifth place in their division, eleven games behind the Orioles. He kept his stroke when all about him were losing theirs, and wound up with a .308 average and a hundred and eight runs batted in. For all that, it was probably Simmons' last year of regular work behind the plate. During the off-season, Milwaukee traded for Jim Sundberg, and it is expected that he will now take over the day-to-day catching ch.o.r.es for the Brewers. Simmons, who has suffered from a chronic problem in his right shoulder, looked slow and work-worn behind the plate in most of the games in which I watched him last year, and he is at an age when many full-service catchers begin to wear down physically. I think he will find surcease in his new role as a designated hitter-if his pride allows him to accept this limited service. But I still felt bad when I heard the news of the trade, since it seemed to mean that Simmons' pa.s.sionate involvement in the flow of things would now become distanced and muted. The game is no longer in his lap. His change of fortune made me recall a remark of Dave Duncan's last spring: ”By the time you've learned it all, by the time you're really proficient, you're almost too old to go on catching.”

I cheered up pretty quickly, however, when I recalled one more little talk I'd had with Ted Simmons, which had made me realize that his special feeling for the subtleties and rewards of catching will never be entirely lost to his teammates. On another day in Arizona last spring, I watched a few innings of a morning B-squad game betwe

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