Part 21 (1/2)

Dave Stieb, Toronto's king of the hill, was scheduled to start the next Red Sox game, a Sat.u.r.day-afternoon affair, but manager c.o.x, having got word from the weatherman of the imminent arrival of heavy rainstorms, held back his ace at the last moment and sent out a young right-hander, Ron Musselman, to essay his very first major-league start. c.o.x, of course, did not want to waste an outing by Stieb-a hard-luck pitcher (and legendary moaner), whose record at the moment stood a bare 65, despite an earned-run average of 2.16-in a possible rainout, and he very nearly got away with his gamble. Musselman confined the scary Boston sluggers to a couple of runs during his stint; Tony Fernandez delivered the catch-up and go-ahead runs for the home side with a two-run round-tripper, to make for a 32 Blue Jay lead in the bottom of the fourth; and the spattering rains held off just long enough to force the dawdling, languis.h.i.+ng, heavenward-hoping Bostons to make their third out in the top of the fifth before the players were forced to take shelter-a legal victory, of course, if play were to stop there for the day. Then it rained-downward and side-blown sheets and skeins of water that streamed down the gla.s.s fronting of the press box, puddled and then ponded on the lumpy, too green AstroTurf playing field before us, and emptied the roofless grandstand around the diamond. Glum descendant clouds swept in, accompanied by a panoply of Lake Ontario ring-billed gulls (a celebrated and accursed local phenomenon), who took up late-comer places upon the long rows of backless aluminum benches in outer right field and then settled themselves thickly across the outfield swamplands as well, where they all stood facing to windward, ready for a fly ball, or perhaps for a visiting impressionist French film director (”Quai des Jays,” ”Toronto Mon Amour”) to start shooting. Rain delays are hard on writers, who cannot just go home-as most of the intelligent Toronto fans were now deciding to do-and are enjoined from visiting the clubhouses or asking the umpire in charge (it was Joe Brinkman) why he won't reconsult his bunions and call the d.a.m.ned thing once and for all. I had plenty of time (three hours and sixteen minutes, as it turned out) to work up my notes; to share in the tepid, on running press-box jokes (there had been a guest party of Ojibway Indians at the game, it was discovered, and we worked over the rain-dance variations at excruciating length); to catch up on local baseball history (Babe Ruth hit his very first home run as a professional into the waters of Lake Ontario in 1914, while playing for the visiting minor-league Providence Grays against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the long-defunct park at Hanlan's Point); and to memorize the unlikely configurations of the Blue Jays' Exhibition Stadium. The place is the home field of the Toronto Argonauts, of the Canadian Football League, and the baseball diamond has been tucked off into one corner of the rectangle, with an added-on, boomerang-shaped grandstand section adjacent to the diamond and a temporary curving outfield wall that cuts oddly across the long gridiron, forestalling rolling eight-hundred-foot home runs but imparting an unhappy, overnight-tent-show look to the place. General-admission seats are in the roofed football grandstand, which begins out by the left-field foul pole but then, since it adjoins the football sidelines, departs from the baseball premises at an ever-widening-and-disimproving angle. Fans do sit there, however, even in its farthest reaches-there were some there now, patiently waiting out the deluge under cover. I asked a resident writer how far it was from home plate to the top row of the outmost grandstand sector, and he said, ”That's Section 51. I don't think anybody's ever paced it off, but I tried using a little trigonometry once and I made it out to be around a thousand feet. The folks in the lower rows out there are even worse off, because they can't see over the outfield fence, but you see them down there, too, sometimes. I think they bring radios.”

The Toronto fans, I need hardly add, are fans. Even in the closer sectors of Exhibition Stadium, the seats are uncomfortable and sight lines abominable, but the rooters turn out in very large numbers (2,110,009 of them last year) to cram themselves into the intimately serried, knee-creasing grandstand rows and to cheer with more discriminating loyalty and sensible hope than they used to back in the early days of the franchise. Ontario fans-particularly those off to the west of Toronto, in sectors like Wingham and London-used to be Tiger rooters, but most of them have switched over in the last couple of seasons, and the Blue Jays have supplanted the hapless hockey Maple Leafs as the No. 1 team in town. The seventh-inning stretch (to return to the stadium) is a wholesome little session of sing-along calisthenics, directed by numerous Ken and Barbie look-alikes in sweatsuits, to a fight song called ”O.K., Blue Jays!,” and almost everyone joins in happily. Happily and for the most part soberly, if only because each row in the stands is forty-one seats wide, aisle to aisle, making beer vending an impossibility. A new stadium-a dome, perhaps with a retractable roof-has been promised by the province, but it sounds years away. A World Series played at Exhibition Stadium would hurry the project wonderfully.

Around suppertime, the rain lessened and then turned itself off, the fog banks began to show pinkish gleams (greeted by ”Here Comes the Sun” on the loudspeaker), the Zamboni-after a brief, embarra.s.sing breakdown-thrummed back and forth across the green carpet, sucking up water and spouting it off-field, the gulls flapped off to other engagements, and a handful of fans (kids, mostly) reappeared and filled up the good seats around home: not enough of them to make a Wave, for once. The game resumed, with new pitchers, and the Blue Jays lost, 53-almost a foregone conclusion, it seemed, although I wasn't quite sure why. Bobby c.o.x, who can't stand to lose, missed the second part of the odd little double header, having become embroiled during the delay in argument with Brinkman the Rain King, who gave him the heave-ho. None of it could have happened on gra.s.s.

The next afternoon, in the Sunday suns.h.i.+ne, Stieb had at the Red Sox at last, and whipped them, 81, impatiently setting down their hitters with his tough fastball, a biting slider, and some unsettling off-speed stuff as well; he didn't give up a hit until the sixth inning. Tony Fernandez hit a triple and a double-to date, he was sixteen for twenty-seven against the Boston pitchers for the year-and Ranee Mulliniks, who switches with Iorg at third base (they were both well over .300 so far), socked a home run. Fernandez, who is twenty-two years old, gets rid of the ball at short with an oiled swiftness that makes you catch your breath; he switch-hits, starting with his hands held high but then dipping at the last moment to a smooth, late, flat-bat stroke that meets the ball in cla.s.sic inside-out style and drives it, often to the opposite field, with power and elegance. There are others in the Blue Jays lineup whom I admire and enjoy, including the crisp Damo Garcia, at second, and the quick, strong young outfielders Bell and Moseby (they and the regular right fielder, Jesse Barfield, who didn't start on this day, will all turn twenty-six within two weeks of each other this fall), but, watching them here, I still could not envision them and their teammates holding on through the summer against the likes of the Tigers and the tough oncoming Yankees, and then playing in and perhaps winning a champions.h.i.+p elimination or a World Series. I had discussed this feeling just before the game with Tony Kubek, who handles the Jays' color commentary over the CTV television network (he also works the backup ”Game of the Week” shows on NBC), and then with Buck Martinez, the veteran Blue Jays catcher, who replaces Ernie Whitt against the lefties. In different ways, both of them echoed the same doubts.

”There's n.o.body on the club who scares you, which is what you see on so many other teams in this division,” Kubek said. ”Or, rather, two guys scare you-Parrish and Gibson with the Tigers, Murray and Ripken on the Orioles, Winfield and Baylor on the Yanks. Maybe it'll happen here, maybe somebody will come along, but I don't quite see it. You know, a lot of people picked us to win this year, and that changes how a club thinks about itself. Some of the guys have become a little defensive in their thinking. You can see that Gillick built this team to fit this ballpark. It's a hitter's park, with the carpet and the short fences, but I always feel we're a little light when we get into those bigger parks on the road.”

Martinez said, ”I cut that photograph out of the paper yesterday that showed Bill Buckner putting a flying block on Garcia in the Thursday game and showed it to some guys in the clubhouse. I said, 'This is the difference between winning and being a bunch of good guys, which is what we are so far.' I played five years on the Royals, with people like George Brett and Hal McRae, and I saw how they play this game. McRae always said, 'If you can't be good, you got to be rough.' You remember that slide he put on Willie Randolph in the playoffs, don't you? Now the game has changed a little, and the people take that sort of thing more personally, almost. But that's the kind of play that can get into an infielder's mind and maybe make for a moment of hesitation later on and win a game for you. Stieb is like that for us, but he's a pitcher and too often it's directed against himself. There were times on our last road trip when we could have used a little more of that McRae stuff, that Thurman Munson personality-somebody who'll get a leadoff double when you want it most, or knock somebody down at second. Maybe it'll come-you never know.”

Ah, yes. Yogi Berra has enunciated this same great principle (”In baseball, you don't know nothin”), and so, too, in his own field, did the late Fats Waller (”One never knows, do one?”). With one out in the bottom of the fourth, I lifted my gaze from my scorecard to see, on the instant, a fastball delivered by the Boston hurler, Bruce Kison, ricochet off the shoulder-high on the shoulder-of the Toronto batter, George Bell. A certain testiness had been evident all along in this series-going back to Doyle Alexander's very first pitch on Thursday evening, which had nailed leadoff man Steve Lyons right on the chest (or, more precisely, on the ”S” of his ”BOSTON” road-uniform logo)-but Bell's response, even under such duress, was surprising. Batless, he reached the mound in full sprint and aimed a sudden high, right-legged karate kick at Kison, which mostly missed its mark. Bell then spun quickly and landed a fairish one-two combination (fists, this time) to the chops of Rich Gedman, the pursuing Boston catcher. Now batting .666 for this one turn at bat (if we may agree that he had fouled out against Kison), Bell retreated toward third base in a wary backward-boogie style, apparently inviting other partic.i.p.ants, just emerging from their dugouts, to share the action, which they did, in typically earnest but inefficient fas.h.i.+on. When it was over, Bell was banished from the proceedings and Kison permitted to continue, though under admonishment. A tall, bony right-hander, now in his fifteenth season in the bigs, Kison knows the outs and ins of his profession, and earlier in the game he had somehow allowed a little off-speed pitch to sail behind the head of Ernie Whitt, who here stepped up to bag again-and walked, muttering. An end to the affair, one might have imagined, but writers of these summer operettas do like that last, excessive twist to the plot. Whitt, coming up to bat again, with one out in the sixth, found Kison still on hand, although tottering, for he had just walked the bases full. Whitt poled the first pitch over the right-field fence-it was the first grand slam of his entire baseball career-and circled the bases talkatively, taking time to direct the appropriate phrasings and rhetorical flourishes toward the mound as he went. The tableau looked like an eccentric windup toy from Bavaria, with the circling outer figure, in the white uniform, twitching his arms and waggling his jaw as he went from base to base, and the central inner player-the little man in gray-rotating more slowly but in perfect concentric rhythm, so as to keep his back turned to the other chap all the way around. I much preferred this baseball keepsake to the George Bell model, but of course it will take the rest of the summer to learn what it meant, if anything, to the Blue Jays.

As it turned out, an even more vivid exemplification of that McRae stuff, that Thurman Munson personality, was presented to the Blue Jays by the man who had enunciated the need for it in the first place, Buck Martinez. While behind the plate for the Jays in a game out in Seattle (I saw the moment on a television replay that night, a couple of weeks after my visit to Toronto), Martinez took a peg from the outfield and attempted to tag an onflying Mariner base runner, Phil Bradley, who collided violently with the catcher. Martinez, knocked onto his back, suffered a broken right fibula and dislocated ankle. Somehow, he held on to the ball and made the out, and then, half rising, threw toward third base, where another Seattle base runner, Gorman Thomas, was now swiftly approaching. The throw went wild, and Thomas turned third and headed for the plate. George Bell picked up the ball in left field and fired it home, where the dazed and badly injured Martinez, still down and writhing, caught it on the bounce and tagged the runner, thus accounting for both putouts in the double play-possibly the last but certainly the most extraordinary moment of his baseball career.

Hitting is the hovering central mystery of this sport, and continues to invite wonder. Tommy Herr, a decent singles-and doubles-hitting second baseman with the Cardinals, batted .276 last year and drove in forty-nine runs-almost exactly matching his career averages, compiled in the previous five summers. This year, batting third in a much altered lineup, he has led the league in hitting over most of the first half (he is at .330 at this writing) and has sent teammates already on base scurrying home in great numbers; his three home runs and seventy runs batted in to date have turned the writers to the Baseball Encyclopedia, where they have divined that he may well become the first National League to bat in a hundred runs or more while hitting fewer than ten home runs in the process since Dixie Walker did it (116, with nine) for the Dodgers in 1946. Some contributing reasons for Herr's sudden prosperity will be presented a little farther along, when we take a closer look at the Cardinals, but I love to think about the absolute unpredictability of this almost typical turnabout; every year, it seems to me, something of this sort comes along and is then made to look logical and almost inevitable by us scholars and explainers of the game-none of whom, of course, had any idea beforehand where and to whom it would happen. Baseball, to its credit, confirms continuity and revolution in equal parts, thus keeping its followers contented but attentive. Pedro Guerrero, unhappy all spring at third base with the Dodgers, was returned to his old position in the outfield on June 1st, and responded by whacking fifteen home runs in the month of June, a new National League record-a new record, of course. Carlton Fisk has. .h.i.t twenty-six homers for the White Sox so far this year, thereby tying his full-season best in a career stretching back over sixteen major-league summers; he leads both leagues in downtowners to date and seems a good bet to erase Lance Parrish's one-season total of thirty-two homers, the most by any American League catcher.* Sudden extraordinary performance at the plate is never truly explicable, then, and even the batters themselves aren't much help. ”I'm in a good groove,” ”I'm in that realm,” or ”I'm seeing the ball real good” is what you hear, and the words are accompanied with an almost apologetic little shrug.

It's all right, then, for the rest of us to feel the same way. The two hottest hitters of 1985 are Rickey Henderson and George Brett, and while I thought that I was seeing them real good during several turns at bat this year, I still don't know how they do it. Henderson, facing the Orioles' Mike Bodd.i.c.ker and Sammy Stewart one night up at the Stadium, rapped three singles and drove in three runs (he also stole a base) in the course of the Yankees' 74 victory, and somehow looked a bit off his form in the process. A week earlier, while the Yankees were administering a frightful three-game pasting to these same Orioles down in Baltimore (they had forty-four hits along the way), Henderson went eight for nine in the first two games, and ten for thirteen over the three, at one stretch getting to first base safely ten straight times. Like a perfectly cooked roast, his June statistics look wonderful no matter where you slice them: a three-for-four night against the Tigers, with two home runs; a one-for-three effort against the Orioles again, with four stolen bases again; and so forth. It is this almost unique combination of batting eye, power, and speed that makes him so dangerous, and when you see him approach the plate (with that preliminary little baton-twirler mannerism, during which he alternately taps the head and the heel of the bat with his gloved hand) and then fold himself down into his odd, knock-kneed, doubled-over posture as he awaits the pitch you suddenly perceive what a mean little knot of problems he presents to the pitcher. His scrunched-down strike zone means that he is almost always ahead on the count (Earl Weaver has said that Henderson draws walks as well as anyone he has ever seen in the majors), but the pitcher, uncomfortably aware of his devastating quickness on the base paths, is unwilling to settle for ball four and thus very often gives up a line drive instead. Again, these explanations look easy-except for the last part: the hitting. His stroke is at once so quick-almost an upward and outward jump at the ball-and yet so full and flas.h.i.+ng...Well, I give up. The Stadium throngs love him, of course, and he has been very much at the center of the Yankees' vivid drive to the fore (almost to the fore) in the past two months.

I saw Brett in a stretch of three games against the Angels in Kansas City, at a time when he had just returned to the Royals lineup after a spell on the bench with a hamstring pull. He has always been p.r.o.ne to injury, and almost always seems to return to action at full bore-this time with ten hits in his first twenty at-bats. Brett, who is thirty-two, took off twenty pounds over the winter, and looked younger and more cheerful than I had seen him in years. He was meeting the ball well (here we go again) when I saw him, showing that full, exuberant cut every time, and was. .h.i.tting a lot of long fouls, but he didn't do much, except for a three-for-three performance in one fourteen-inning game, finally captured by the Royals-almost an amazing day, at that, since he walked on his four other appearances, thus ending up on base seven times. A couple of days later, after I'd left town, Brett went three for three against the A's with two three-run homers; starting there, he ran off a .538 week, with three doubles, two homers, a triple, and eleven runs batted in. I have written so often about Brett's batting style-going back to his great .390 summer in 1980, and before-that I will not attempt another likeness here of that uniquely pausing, balanced, and then suddenly free and whirling grace. Observing him repeatedly at work there on his home field, though, it did seem to me that one part of his swing-the c.o.c.ked, attentive tilt of his head as he awaits the ball, and the abrupt downward tuck of his chin as he watches his bat drive through at the pitch-is especially satisfying to an onlooker. In some strange fas.h.i.+on, Brett always appears to be watching himself being a hitter. There is a considering, almost intellectual presence there, even during the most violent and difficult unleas.h.i.+ng of forces, and it suggests-it almost looks like-that waiting and expectant inner self, the critical watcher, who remains at rest within each of us and is spectator to all our movements and doings, however grand or trifling. Even crossing a street, we can find ourselves in that good groove sometimes, and take note of it with secret surprise.

By the time July came around, everyone was talking about the Cardinals-about their wonderful combination of fine pitching and good hitting (they have been leading the league both ways); about the rookie flier, Vince Coleman, who plays left field and has been stealing bases at such an amazing clip; about Tommy Herr and about the big cleanup hitter, Jack Clark, who came over from the Giants in a trade during the winter; and-oh, yes-about Willie McGee, in center, who bats second and has thus done a few things that help account for Coleman's success on the bases, just behind. This is the way ball teams should work, it suddenly seems.

I kept missing the Cardinals-their baseball schedule always had them going off in the opposite direction from mine. But then I saw my chance and jumped on a plane and went up to see them play the Expos in Montreal in an afternoon game-went up and came home again the same day, just for the game-and caught up on my studies. Vince Coleman, who is muscled like a cheetah, hit a single and stole a base; he is less flashy than Rickey Henderson on the bases, but the man can scamper. Tommy Herr hit a single and got a base three times; Ozzie Smith made a couple of lazily beautiful plays at short, easy as pie; and Willie McGee had a single and a double and a home run and a stolen base-the same silent, scrawny-necked, semi-apologetic Willie McGee who so pleased and surprised us all back in the World Series of 1982, just before we forgot him again. (The last time I looked-as this was written-McGee had pa.s.sed his teammate Tommy Herr, and was leading the National League in batting, at .339.) The day in Montreal went as promised, I mean, and I even found time to congratulate Whitey Herzog, an old favorite of mine, for the kind of team he had this time, and for the way he had put it together-even trading away an excellent, established left fielder, Lonnie Smith, the moment he was sure about Coleman. ”This team is all right, for my park,” Herzog admitted-his park, Busch Stadium, has the artificial carpet-”but if I was playing at Wrigley Field or Fenway I wouldn't want to go this way. Geography makes all the difference in baseball these days.”

It was a holiday in Montreal (Dominion Day-or Canada Day, as they now call it), and there was a nice medium-small crowd (everyone else was at the sh.o.r.e, I decided) cheering vociferously down below me in the deep, echoey circular strip mine of Olympic Stadium. A great blazing-white horseshoe of sunlight slid slowly across the billiard-table-green mat below, and I again recalled a remark once made by the long-gone, unforgotten d.i.c.k Allen: ”If a horse can't eat it, I don't want to play on it.”

There was the game, too, and in time-very quickly, in fact-that took over, and though I was glad to have Herr and Coleman and McGee and others in plain view at last (I almost felt like a scout, because of my trip), I also began to pay attention to the Montreal pitcher, a fledgling righty (he had just turned twenty-one) named Floyd Youmans, who was making his major-league debut. He, too, was there just for the day, having been called up from the club's Cla.s.s AA Jacksonville team to make an emergency appearance on the mound when the Expos had found themselves with an inordinate number of pitchers invalided to their liste des blesses, but he had been told before the game that his next stop would be back down at the Indianapolis AAA farm, no matter how well he did here today. Perhaps freed by this news, he resolutely worked his way once and then twice through the tough Cardinal batting order, giving up an occasional base on b.a.l.l.s or a longish fly-ball out, and here and there a base hit, but also fanning a Cardinal or two, including Jack Clark, whenever he most needed the out. He had the Cardinals shut out after six innings, by which time the Expos were ahead by 20. Then Coleman touched him up in the seventh with a single through the middle-his first time on first base. Vince took an enormous lead, paused, and then flew away on the hit-and-run-an awesome jump, as promised-and Willie McGee socked a high, sailing home run into the Montreal bullpen to tie it. Youmans departed, and the disappointed Expos fans saw him off with a grateful, stand-up round of applause and then sat down quietly and tried to regather hope. I was happy when their team hung in and won the game at last, 32, on a single off the third baseman's glove by the grand old Montreal favorite Andre Dawson, in the bottom of the tenth. It was only the Expos' fourth hit of the game-four hits ama.s.sed against six Cardinal pitchers: I'd never heard of such a thing. Whitey's bullpen is a Sarga.s.so for National League hitters this summer-no end to it and not much fun.

On my way home, I kept thinking about the Cards and their new look, and I recalled how Jim Frey, whose Cubs had lately dropped three games to the Cardinals at home, kept returning to the Redbirds in conversation one day. ”This Coleman reminds you of a lot of fast young guys in their first year up,” he said. ”He plays like Tim Raines did, or like Willie Wilson did in his first two years. You look around and he's up at bat and the other team has got the third baseman playing in, the second baseman is in by two full strides, and the first baseman's up on the gra.s.s. You got no choice. The way the man's going, he's going to steal a hundred and twenty bases in his very first year up. When the season started, everybody was sayin' they got seven leadoff men and Jack Clark, but you can throw that out the window now, because of Coleman and the way they're hitting. The whole club is always going from first to third. The one who's overlooked is McGee. He can run as good as anybody. He can bunt the ball, he can top the ball and get on base, he can hit the ball for distance, and he can run and catch the ball in the outfield. He's like No. 2 in everything on that club. You look over at Coleman, with McGee at bat, and he's got that big lead, and you can't make him back off an inch. He always gets that amazing jump. In a couple of years, they'll be calling him a great left fielder-you wait and see.”

Only self-a.s.sured veteran managers talk about rival teams and players in this fas.h.i.+on, and when you listen to a Jim Frey or a Whitey Herzog in midseason, you begin to sense that they are perpetually involved in two levels of baseball-the game at hand or just ahead, which they are trying to win, and the deeper difficulties and returns and surprises of the other game; baseball as a discourse or discipline, baseball as a way of thinking. Earl Weaver talks this side of baseball more gracefully than anyone I know; in his postgame chats he compliments the writers by including them in his inner excursions and musings, and by the time he's done you're convinced, at least for a glimmering instant or two, that you've seen how this game works. The little man was in splendid form up at Yankee Stadium during the Orioles-Yankees game I have mentioned, in spite of his team's failings. He had only just come back from his two-year self-retirement-brought back, it has been hinted, by a half-million-dollar salary and the offer of another chance to work in the Baltimore organization, where he has pa.s.sed the better part of his working life. (He said he had turned down several previous bids from other clubs.) His postgame seminars were a treat, as usual. Any day now, I expect to walk into Weaver's office after a game and find waiting ushers, with programs and flashlights. One night there at the Stadium, he was simultaneously stripping a chicken leg and himself as he fielded our questions, usually cutting them off before they were quite finished-he is quick-and then fitting his answers into the main discourse of the evening. Weaver is the only mid-size, middle-aged executive I know who can sit behind a desk with no clothes on, as naked as a trout, and never lose the thread of his thinking.

Here he reconsidered a brilliant peg by Dave Winfield that had cut down an Orioles base runner, Ripken, at the plate-the big play of the game, it turned out-and wondered along with his questioner, whether it had been right to send him home. ”Yes, it was an outstanding throw,” he said, ”but still...” He paused, considering, and then put the matter to rest: ”What the h.e.l.l-if he scores, it's a great play.” In the eighth inning of the game, with his club well behind, Weaver had unexpectedly employed an Oriole outfielder, John Shelby, at second base, where he filled in for the weak-hitting Dauer, who had departed for a pinch-hitter. (This was a few days before the Orioles signed Alan Wiggins, the talented former Padre second baseman, who had been permitted to leave that club after revealing his continuing difficulties with cocaine addiction.) Shelby had looked adequate on one chance out there, and more than a bit awkward on another, which went by him, or off him, for a base hit. ”On the second ball, he tried to get in front of it, though it's way off to his right.” Weaver said. ”That's what you're taught to do in high school, and maybe he's never had that play since he was in high school. I know about this because I used to manage in Cla.s.s C ball and D ball, where you have kids who come to you right out of high school. But up here if that ball's. .h.i.t over to your right”-he was suddenly on his feet, wearing only his shower clogs-”you just get over this far and backhand the ball, like this. You don't try to make a great play, or anything, but if you time it right you look real good. If you don't time it right you look silly. Oh, I love this stuff....”He resumed his seat, for the tactics. ”If we're losing, Shelby at second gives us an extra move, and I'll go with it. That way, I got his bat in there, and if we tie or go ahead then Lennie Sakata goes out to hold things down. But if I bat for Dauer the old way, then Lennie goes in right away. This is an extra move for me. If you're losing, go for offense. Look for that move.” His eyes were s.h.i.+ning.

*Fisk set the new record with thirty-seven homers, four of which came while he was in the lineup as a designated hitter-a record, that is, but just barely.

Quis

- Late Summer 1985 TROUBLE IN THE NINTH. The visiting team has just scored, to draw within a run of the home side, and there are base runners at first and third, with one out and the heavy part of the batting order just coming up. Even before the runner crossed the plate, the manager was on his way to the mound, and now he turns toward his bullpen and touched his right arm. The murmurous noises of anxiety in the park give way to applause and the fans' relis.h.i.+ng cries of an outcome now almost foreseen as the bullpen car arrives and yields up its famous pa.s.senger, the great reliever. He is whiskered and hulking, and his impatient right-handed warmup pitches-seven seeds and a final down-busting curveball-bring gasps and little bursts of laughter in the stands. The No. 3 batter stands in and takes an instantaneous called strike-a fastball under his fists. He lays off the next pitch-a breaking ball, away-then swings hard at the next fastball and ticks it foul to the screen. Another fastball arrives, and he swings late and raised a feeble little pop foul, which is devoured by the first baseman. Two out now. The cleanup hitter, a large left-handed slugger, digs in and takes a ball, takes a strike. He cuts violently at the next delivery, a letter-high fastball, and misses, swinging cleanly through the pitch and then half-stumbling in the box to keep his balance. The first-base and third-base coaches clap their hands rea.s.suringly-hang in there, big guy-but thirty thousand fans are on their feet now, screaming for the K. A slider here would break this batter in half, but the man on the mound has no such idea. Glowering, he leans in for the sign, stretches and stares, and delivers the inexorable heater-up and out of the strike zone, actually, but the bat has flashed and come around just the same, and the game is over. Ovations and euphoria. Handshakes and high fives in the infield, hugs in the stands. Aw right, we did it again!

Another ninth, in another city. The Kansas City Royals are leading the visiting Yankees, 52, and Royals manager d.i.c.k Howser has brought in his prime short reliever, Dan Quisenberry, to finish up. Quisenberry is a slim, angular right-hander, with sharp shoulders and a peaceable, almost apologetic mien. He has pinkish-red hair, a brushy ochre mustache, and round pale-blue eyes. Nothing about his looks is as surprising as his pitching delivery, however. He is a true submariner-a man ”from down under,” in baseball parlance-and every pitch of his is performed with a lurching downward thrust of his arm and body, which he must follow with a little bobbing hop off toward third base in order to recover his balance. At perigee, ball and hand descend to within five or six inches of the mound dirt, but then they rise abruptly; the hand-its fingers now spread apart-finished up by his left shoulder, while the ball, plateward-bound at a sensible, safe-driving-award clip, reverses its earlier pattern, rising for about three-quarters of its brief trip and then drooping downward and (much of the time) sidewise as it pa.s.ses the batter at knee level or below. One way or another, the pitch almost always finds part of the strike zone, but most people in the stands-even the home-town regulars in Royals Stadium-are so caught up in the pitcher's eccentricities that they don't always notice this. The oversight is forgivable, since Quisenberry is not a strikeout pitcher. But he doesn't walk batters, either; in his six hundred and thirty-five major-league innings (going into this season), he had surrendered a total of eighty-four bases on b.a.l.l.s-one for each seven and a half innings' work, which for him comes out at about one walk every fourth game-and had plunked only two batters with pitched b.a.l.l.s. Yet Quisenberry when pitching invites more similes than stats. His ball in flight suggests the kiddie-ride concession at a county fairgrounds-all swoops and swerves but nothing there to make a mother nervous; if you're standing close to it, your first response is a smile. At other times, the trajectory of the pitch looks like an expert trout fisherman's sidearm cast that is meant to slip the fly just under an overhanging clump of alders. The man himself-Quis in mid-delivery-brings visions of a Sunday-picnic hurler who has somehow stepped on his own shoelace while coming out of his windup, or perhaps an eager news photographer who has suddenly dropped to one knee to snap a celebrity debarking from a limousine.

In the Yankee game, Quisenberry dismisses his first batter, the towering Dave Winfield, on a harmless bouncer to short. The next hitter, Dan Pasqua, who bats left-handed, numbs a Quisenberry sinker down toward third base, where the spinning ball worms its way out of George Brett's glove for an infield single. Ron Ha.s.sey, another lefty swinger, takes a ball and then jumps on a high delivery-an up pitch: a mistake-and smashes the ball to deep center field, where Willie Wilson pulls it in with his back almost against the fence. Willie Randolph steps up to bat, swings and misses on a sinker, takes two b.a.l.l.s, and then whacks a sharp single to center, sending Pasqua scooting around to third. The tying run, in the person of Mike Pagliarulo, comes up to the plate, to the accompaniment of some nervous stirrings in the Kansas City stands. Batting left-handed, he fouls off the first pitch, swings at a sinkerball that slips away from him and off the outer edge of the plate, takes a ball, and then stands immobile while another sinker, again backing at the last instant, catches the inside corner, low, for a called third strike. End of game. The crowd, although happy about the win, does not exactly split the sky in honor of this pitching performance, but in most ways it has been a typical outing for Dan Quisenberry: a couple of hits-one of them a half-hit bouncer to the wrong side of the infield-two solid pokes, one of which went for an out; no walks; no runs (one run would have been almost more like it); and another game safely put away. Quisenberry experienced some uncharacteristic pitching difficulties in the first half of this season-the game just set forth was played on July 23rd-but the official save that went into the record books that evening was his twentieth of the year, which put him ahead of all other American League relief pitchers in that department. It was his third save in four days, in a little string that eventually added up to six saves in six consecutive appearances. Last year, Quisenberry had forty-four saves in all, the most in his league, and figured in sixty percent of the Royals' winning games; the year before that, he set an all-time record with forty-five saves, although a National League pitcher, Bruce Sutter-then with the Cardinals, now with the Braves-tied that figure in 1984.

Baseball's save rule (to get this out of the way, once and for all) has grown in significance in recent seasons, along with the rise of the short-relief specialist-that is, the man who comes in late in the game, sometimes only to nail down the last out or two (or not nail them down, as the case may be)-yet there are very few fans who can say for a certainty what const.i.tutes an official save. The ruling states that the pitcher who is granted an official save when the game is over-it appears as an ”(S)” next to his name in the box score-must be the finis.h.i.+ng pitcher but not the official winning pitcher. He must furthermore pa.s.s one of three additional qualifications: (a)He enters the game with a lead of no more than three runs and pitches at least one inning, or (b)he enters the game, regardless of the count on an inc.u.mbent batter, with the potential tying run on base or at bat or on deck, or (c)he pitches effectively for at least three innings.