Part 18 (2/2)

Stable organizations run deep, and the calm Baltimore way of winning that Palmer was talking about seems to have grown out of a pattern of sound management that began with its first general manager, Paul Richards, who was steering things when the club came to Baltimore, in 1954. (It had been the hapless St. Louis Browns franchise.) He was succeeded by a near-Plantagenet line of brilliant executives: Lee MacPhail, Harry Dalton, Frank Cashen, and the inc.u.mbent (since 1975) G.M., Hank Peters. (Dalton is now the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, who won the A.L. pennant last year, and Cashen holds the same post with the up-and-coming Mets.) Above them, in the owner's office, were Jerold C. Hoffberger and then (since 1979) Edward Bennett Williams-each an exception to the twin mold of drearily conservative or flamboyantly egocentric owners-and around them, so to speak, in various farm and coaching and scouting posts, was a pa.s.sel of sound, much-admired field men: Jim McLaughlin, Lou Gorman, George Bamberger, Ray Poitevint, Ray Scarborough, and the present-day super-scout, Jim Russo. Some of these worthies have retired or moved along to higher posts with other clubs (Ray Scarborough died last year), but each of them, I think, must have felt a proprietary glow over the Orioles' home-grown grand success this autumn.

In the Series, Eddie Murray and Mike Schmidt each ran into oppressive difficulties in trying to do what he had been doing all year, which was to hit the ball to distant parts and win ballgames. Schmidt talked at length with the writers about his failures (he was batting .063 after four games), and said that the Orioles pitchers were making him chase a lot of pitches that were up and out of the strike zone, and that he was making adjustments in his swing; Murray, for his part, said nothing and made no adjustments (he had had two singles so far, for .125), as is his custom, but it seemed certain that he was unhappily thinking back to the World Series of 1979, when he failed repeatedly at the plate while the O's dropped the last three games in a row and lost to the Pirates. Now he came up in the second inning of the fifth game and whacked a monstrous homer into the upper tiers in right field-”It would have been a homer in Grand Canyon,” Pete Rose said later-and followed up in the fourth with an even longer, two-run job that bounced off the center-field scoreboard, where the ball just missed hitting the ”M” of his own name up there at a moment when the message screen was listing the American League RBI leaders. Rick Dempsey hit a home run and also a double, and scored the last run, and the O's, behind McGregor's 50 shutout, were World Champions. Dempsey was voted the Most Valuable Player-a lovely choice. He is a first-rate catcher, durable and energetic, with a powerful arm and great agility behind the plate, but with few of the offensive abilities that usually go with the job. This summer, he batted .231, with four home runs-about average for him. Dempsey's att.i.tude toward the game has always been summed up for me by the way he wears his cap in the field-turned backward, because of the mask, but with the brim bent up in a c.o.c.ky little flourish. Like most of his teammates, he seems to have an unquenchably high regard for himself. ”I've got a lot of good hits for this club down the years,” he remarked early in the Series. ”I get pinch-hit for a lot late in the game, so I've gone plenty of weeks when I was oh-for-two and then came out of the game. I figure if I'm hitting .250 here it's the same as .280 someplace else. We just have a different way of doing things here.”

*Righetti was moved to the bullpen the following year, where, as expected, he became the Yanks' prime late-innings stopper.

Easy Lessons

- Spring 1984 THERE'S NOTHING LIKE AN all-expense-paid late-winter vacation under the palms and within sight and sound of batted baseb.a.l.l.s to give a sensitive man a deeper appreciation of the nature of guilt. Each year in March, I journey to Arizona and then to Florida, or vice versa, to watch a sampling of the current and future major-league ballplayers do their morning stretching exercises on dew-dappled outfield lawns (lately these workouts are being done to bouncy aerobic-rock sounds and are led by a young woman in shorts and leg-warmers who is clearly in better shape than anyone else on the field) and then test and disport themselves in batting cages and on practice mounds-engaging in B.P. and Infield and s.h.a.gging and Flip-and eventually play a few innings of morning B-Squad ball or an afternoon exhibition game, and each year this excursion brings me such freshets of pleasure that I must find new excuses within myself to justify such dulcet bystanding. Duty, for instance. I am there at the camps as a reporter, to be sure, having been dispatched sunward to search out the news and the special sense of the coming season, and there is no sterner or more a.s.siduous newshawk to be found on the demanding Scottsdale-to-Sarasota beat than yours truly. Even the most casual morning invitation to take a dip in my motel pool or to make a fourth at middle-aged doubles finds me puritanically glum. ”Not a chance!” I cry. ”I'm working today.” And work I do, carefully noting in my notebook the uniform number and the unremarkable batting mannerisms of some hulking young stranger now taking his hacks in the cage, and checking his thin line of stats (.266 and eight home runs in Danville in 1981) in my team press guide, and then eliciting clubhouse quotes from a grizzled bullpen millionaire about the current state of his damaged wing (”Hurts like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d....”), and, later in the day, raising my mid-game gaze from the diamond to observe the gauzy look of departing rain clouds lifting from the jagged rim of some distant desert peak, and then entering that in my notebook (with the pen slipping a little in my fingers, because of the dab of Sea & Ski I have just rubbed on my nose, now that the sun is out again and cooking us gently in the steep little grandstand behind third base). I watch and listen and write, filling up almost as much s.p.a.ce in my copybooks as I do in October at the World Series, and entering on my score-card the names of third-string non-roster subst.i.tutes who filter into the game so late in the day that even the geezer fans and their geezerettes have begun to gather up their backrests and seat cus.h.i.+ons and head off home for beer and naps. Guilt, as I have said, is the spur, for it is my secret Calvinist fear that baseball will run out on me someday and I will find nothing fresh at the morning camps, despite my notes and numberings, or go news-less on some sun-filled afternoon, and so at last lose this sweet franchise. Baseball saves me every time-not the news of it, perhaps, so much as its elegant and arduous complexity, its layered substrata of nuance and lesson and acc.u.mulated experience, which are the true substance of these sleepy, overfamiliar practice rituals, and which, if we know how and where to look for them, can later be seen to tip the scales of the closest, most wanted games of the summer. Almost everything in baseball looks easy and evident, but really learning the game, it turns out, can take a lifetime, even if you keep notes.

Let's face it: spring training is a misnomer. Thanks to aerobics, racquetball, high-tech physical-fitness centers, California-chic wives, and a sensible wish to extend their very high salaries through as many years as possible, most major-league ballplayers stay in terrific shape all year round now. Back in the straw-suitcase days, it took a month to six weeks to work off winter beer bellies and firm up poolroom-pale bodies, but contemporary players have told me that a single week of batting practice and rundown drills would make them absolutely ready for Opening Day. What with performance records, autumn visits to the Instructional Leagues, and almost daily reports from the winter-ball leagues in Latin America, most managers have a pretty good notion of the capabilities of the rising minor leaguers in their organizations, and are not likely to be badly startled (or much convinced) by a .485 spring average put together by some anonymous rookie outfielder during the exhibitions. The pitchers, to be sure, do require all of March and a little bit more in order to get their arms in shape, and the process-early stretching and tossing, the first three-innings stints, then harder stuff and longer outings-cannot be hurried or shortened, since there must be days of recuperation after each game or batting-practice workout. Spring training is really for the pitchers, then-and for the writers, who need this slow, sleepy time in which to sweeten their characters and enlarge their perceptions of what truly matters in our old game. I offer as example an apothegm uttered by a friend from the Chronicle, a budding Solomon whose views have already been heard in these pages. It was in a week of dazzling weather in Arizona, and this time we were sitting side by side in the narrow press box of Scottsdale Stadium, watching the Giants vs. (I think) the Brewers. Late in the sixth inning, he looked irritably at his watch and said, ”d.a.m.n. Yesterday's game was already over by this time.”

”Right,” said I, arising and gathering up my notebook, media guides, pencils, and scorecard. (My deadline was weeks away.) ”And thanks, Dave. See you at the pool.”

In Winter Haven, on the very first day of this spring jaunt, I found Ted Williams out in right-field foul ground teaching batting to Von Hayes-a curious business, since the Splendid Splinter, of course, is a spring batting instructor for the Red Sox, and Hayes is the inc.u.mbent center fielder of the Phillies. Hayes was accompanied by Deron Johnson, the Philadelphia batting coach, and the visit, I decided, was in the nature of medical referral-a courtesy second opinion extended by a great specialist to a colleague from a different hospital (or league). Von Hayes is a stringbean-six feet five, with elongated arms and legs-and his work at the plate this year will be the focus of anxious attention from the defending National League Champion Phillies, who are in the process of turning themselves from an old club into a young one in the shortest possible time. Since last fall, they have parted with (among others) Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, and veteran reliever Ron Reed, and later this spring they traded away Gary Matthews, their established left fielder (Matthews, in fact, was intently listening in on Ted Williams' talk to his teammate Hayes), to the Cubs. Two years ago, in his first full year in the majors, Von Hayes. .h.i.t fourteen homers and batted in eighty-two runs for the Cleveland Indians-sufficient promise to encourage the Phillies to give up five of their own players (including the wonderful old Manny Trillo and the wonderful young Julio Franco) for him. Last year, Hayes, troubled with injuries (and perhaps unsettled by the nickname Five-for-One, bestowed on him by Pete Rose), batted a middling-poor .265, with six homers-reason enough for a call to Dr. Ted.

”Lemme see that,” Ted Williams was saying, and he took Hayes' bat and then hefted it lightly, like a man testing a new tennis racquet. ”Well, all right, if you're really strong enough,” he said, giving it back. ”But you don't need a great big bat, you know. Stan Musial always used a little bitty drugstore model. So what do you want? You know what Rogers Hornsby told me forty-five years ago? It was the best batting advice I ever got. 'Get a good ball to hit!' What does that mean? It means a ball that does not fool you, a ball that is not in a tough spot for you. So then when you are in a tough spot, concede a little to that pitcher when he's got two strikes on you. Think of trying to hit it back up the middle. Try not to pull it every time. Harry Heilmann told me that he never became a great hitter until he learned to hit inside out. I used to have a lot of trouble in here”-he showed us an awkward inside dip at the ball with his own bat-”until I moved back in the box and got a little more time for myself. Try to get the bat reasonably inside as you swing, because it's a h.e.l.l of a lot harder to go from the outside in than it is to go the other way around.”

Hayes, who looked pale with concentration, essayed a couple of left-handed swings, and Willams said, ”Keep a little movement going. Keep your a.s.s loose. Try to keep in a quick position to swing. When your hands get out like that, you're just making a bigger arc.”

Hayes swung again-harder this time-and Williams said, ”That looks down to me. You're swingin' down on the ball.”

Hayes looked startled. ”I thought it was straight up,” he said. He swung again, and then again.

”Well, it's still down,” Ted said quietly. ”And see where you're looking when you swing. You're looking at the ground about out here.” He touched the turf off to Hayes's left with the tip of his bat. ”Look out at that pitcher-don't take your eyes off him. That and-” Williams c.o.c.ked his hips and his right knee and swung at a couple of imaginary pitches, with his long, heavy body unc.o.c.king suddenly and thrillingly and then rotating with the smooth release of his hips. His hands, I saw now, were inside, close to his body, while Hayes' hands had started much higher and could not come back for a low, inside pitch with anything like Ted's ease and elegance. Nothing to it. Hayes, who has a long face, looked sepulchral now, and no wonder, for no major leaguer wants to retinker his swing-not in the springtime, not ever-and Williams, sensing something, changed his tone. ”Just keep going,” he said gently to the young man. ”Everybody gets better if they keep at it.”

Hayes kept at it, standing in and looking out at an imaginary pitcher, and then c.o.c.king and striding, while Williams stood and watched with Deron Johnson, now and then murmuring something to the other coach and touching his own hip or lifting his chin or c.o.c.king his fists by way of ill.u.s.tration-a sixty-five-year-old encyclopedia of hitting, in mint condition: the book.

When I left, he was in deep converse with Gary Matthews, who had asked about the best response to a pitcher's backup slider after two fastb.a.l.l.s up and in. ”Why, take that pitch, then!” led cried. ”Just let it go by. Don't be so critical of yourself. Don't try to be a .600 hitter all the time. Don't you know how hard this all is?”

I accompanied the Red Sox down to Sarasota to watch Tom Seaver work against them the following afternoon-his first American League innings ever. Seaver, as most of the Northern Hemisphere must know by now, was s.n.a.t.c.hed away from the Mets over the winter when that club carelessly failed to place him on its protected twenty-six-man roster prior to a ”compensation draft”-a process that permits a team (in this case, the White Sox) that has lost a so-called Type A player to a free agency to select as recompense a player from a pool of players with other teams that have signed up for the plan. This misshapen schema is a monster child sp.a.w.ned by the owners as a part of the settlement of the player strike of 1981, and there is considerable evidence that its headstrong fathers may now wish to disinherit it. Shortly after the Mets' humiliation, the Yankees experienced a similar shock (the circ.u.mstances were a little different) when they lost a freshly signed top pitching prospect, Tim Belcher, to the Oakland A's in another compensation kidnapping. The Mets, in any case, suffered a horrendous double embarra.s.sment: first, for the forfeit of their old hero figure-an Odin brought back to the fold last year, amid many trumpetings, to finish his days in Shea-Valhalla as the steadfast elder leader of a corps of s.h.i.+ning young Baldurflingers-and, second, for the clear evidence that it somehow did not occur to them that the pennant-hungry and publicity-hungry White Sox might find some use for a highly motivated and splendidly conditioned veteran star pitcher (Seaver is thirty-nine) with a lifetime earned-run average of 2.73. The Mets people, to their credit, have rent asunder their blazers and strewn dust upon their razor-cut pates in public penance for their gaffe, and no further criticism of them will be put forward here.

The first glimpse of Tom in Chisox motley-neon pants-stripes, the famous No. 41 adorning his left groin-was a shock, though, and so was the sight of him in pre-game conversation with his new batterymate, Carlton Fisk. I took a mental snapshot of the two famous Handsome Harrys and affixed to it the caption ”Q: What's wrong with this picture?” (A: Both men are out of uniform.) Then the game started, and Seaver's pitching put an end to all such distractions. It was a prime early-spring outing-three swift, harm-free innings that included a couple of bases on b.a.l.l.s and four strikeouts. There was a good pop to his fastb.a.l.l.s, and he wheeled in some thoughtfully located sliders and curveb.a.l.l.s as well, and once it was clear that he was going to be all right out there I sat back and took pleasure in all the old looks and ways of him-the thick, strong legs and droopy shoulders, the grave gaze catcherward for the sign, the audible ”Hunk!” that sometimes accompanied the in-driving thrust of his big body in mid-delivery (Ted Williams had said that he doesn't hear enough grunts from the mound nowadays), and then the mitt flipped up vertically to take the catcher's return peg.

In the clubhouse after his stint, Seaver declared himself satisfied with his work-perhaps more than satisfied. There had been some small technical problems-his release point was a little flat at times-but that wasn't surprising, because he'd been nervous about this outing. ”I wanted to prove to the guys that I can help this ball club,” he said. ”They don't care who you are. They want to know if you can still pitch-especially at the age of thirty-nine. This is a team that wants to win. They've had a taste of it, and they want more. What our game is all about is proving things to your own team.”

He went over the three innings almost pitch by pitch, making sure that the writers had their stories, and they thanked him and went off. A couple of us stayed on while Tom unwrapped the big icepack from his shoulder and started to take off his uniform. I think we wanted reminiscence or philosophy from him now-something about motivation or the shocks of unexpected trades or the wearing down of an athlete's will with the years-but what we got was much better: mechanics. He talked about tempos of early throwing in the first few days of spring-a murmured ”one, two, three-four...one, two, three-four” beat with the windup as his body relearned rhythm and timing. He went on to the proper breaking point of the hands-where the pitching hand comes out of the glove-which for him is just above and opposite his face. Half undressed, he was on his feet again and pitching for us in slow motion, in front of his locker.

”What you don't want is a lateral movement that will bring your elbow down and make your arm drop out, because what happens then is that your hand either goes underneath the ball or out to the side of the ball,” he said. ”To throw an effective pitch of any kind, your fingers have to stay on top of the ball. So you go back and make sure that this stays closed and this stays closed”-he touched his left shoulder and his left hip-”and this hand comes up here.” The pitching hand was back and above his head. ”It's so easy to get to here, in the middle of the windup, and then slide off horizontally with your left side. What you're trying to do instead-what's right-is to drive this lead shoulder down during the delivery of the ball. That way, the pitching shoulder comes up-it has to go up. You've increased the arc, and your fingers are on top of the ball, where they belong.”

I said I'd heard pitching coaches urging their pupils to drive the lead shoulder toward the catcher during the delivery.

”Sure, but that's earlier,” Tom said. He was all concentration, caught up in his craft. ”That's staying closed on your forward motion, before you drive down. No-with almost every pitcher, the fundamentals are the same. Look at

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