Part 23 (1/2)

*Less than a year after this was written, Dwight Gooden failed a voluntary urine test and then missed two months of the 1987 season while he underwent treatment for cocaine abuse. He had been a sometime user of the drug, it turned out, going back to his high-school days. Some fans and writers and front-office people instantly claimed that Gooden's difficulties could have been headed off if compulsory testing had been adopted. Mets general manager Frank Cashen pointed out that if the old Joint Drug Agreement had still been in force, the club might have approached Gooden months before his use of the drug came to light.

**My optimism was misplaced. The ruling on the grievance-procedure case (it was the Joel Youngblood dispute, previously described) came in July, and it upheld the Players a.s.sociation's contention that since compulsory drug testing had never been subject to collective bargaining, it was a violation of the 1985 Basic Agreement between the player and the owners. Since the ruling, no progress has been made by the two sides toward the reestablishment of the Joint Drug Agreement, or something of its kind, which means that baseball has no over-all drug plan whatsoever. The whole matter will form part of the prodigiously difficult negotiations that will precede the signing (or non-signing) of the next Basic Agreement before the 1989 season.

Fortuity

- Midsummer 1986 THE PRESS BOX AT Wrigley Field, in Chicago, is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park's second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion, and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate. Seen from this vantage point, the preoccupied fans below sometimes suggest a huddled, uncomplaining horde of immigrants stuffed into steerage on some endless voyage toward better luck-not an inappropriate image if we remind ourselves that this famous rustbucket, the good s.h.i.+p Cubbie, last dropped anchor in the s.h.i.+ning harbor of the World Series in 1945. The outward view from the catwalk is felicitous and hopeful: the converging faraway left-field and left-bleacher sections complete the lines of the ancient vessel that plows forever dead ahead into Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, while the bleachers in center rise bravely toward the prow of the great green scoreboard, topped by a single lofty mast, its rigging aflutter with signal pennants (the current standings, top to bottom, of the teams in the two National League divisions), which customarily tell of happier news in other places. I visited the Friendly Confines on a Friday afternoon last July, just three days after the All-Star Game, which traditionally marks the equator of the baseball season; I was there not just to take in some daytime ball (there are no lights at the park) or to watch the Cubs engage the visiting San Francisco Giants over a midsummer weekend but also in search of a better understanding of some central processes of the game: luck or momentum or confidence, and their opposites-whatever it is that can unexpectedly make winning a habit for one club and losing such a curse for the other. I had chosen these two teams with care, as will shortly be seen, but the park was a break for me, too, because Wrigley Field always offers a fresh perspective on baseball: it is the specialite de la maison.

I had skipped the All-Star Game itself (it was played at the Houston Astrodome this year, and won by the American League by a score of 32), but I did not grieve over my loss any more than I would have fretted about not getting a seat at the Emmy Awards or missing a Jerry Lewis telethon, which are also television promotions rather than sporting events. Like many other fans, I imagine, I employed the three-day All-Star break in the schedules to study the 1986 standings to date and to wonder about their strange configurations. In the National League East, the New York Mets, established before the season as solid favorites to win their division, had surpa.s.sed all expectations, bowling over their opponents in runaway-train fas.h.i.+on, and dominating both the standings and the National League team statistics. As a team, they led all comers in runs, home runs, runs batted in, and batting average, and had yet to be shut out in any game. This was a team effort, for once, since none of their players stood at the top of the list in any batting category, and their best-known sluggers-Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, and Darryl Strawberry-were, in fact, experiencing slightly sub-par years. The Mets also had the best pitching in the league, with a team earned-run average of 3.06; their four prime starters-Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and Bob Ojeda (a left-hander picked up in a trade with the Red Sox over the winter)-had a combined record of 4110, with twenty-one complete games. The Mets led the Montreal Expos, their nearest opponent in the National League East, by thirteen games; within a couple of weeks, they would widen the margin to sixteen games-a bigger lead than any of the three other first-place teams had established over the last-place clubs in their divisions. In the National League West, the Houston Astros (good pitching and good defense; feeble batting and few fans) had been taking turns at the top with the surprising Giants, last-place finishers a year ago, while the Dodgers, sorely afflicted with injuries, floundered along in the cellar, eight games back. The American League West, habitually a rest home for most of the league's losing teams, showed the California Angels holding a slim game-and-a-half lead over the young Texas Rangers, with none of the five other teams so far able to get its chin over the .500 bar. The real news was the Red Sox, who were leading the second-place Yankees in the mighty A.L. East by seven full games, mostly on the strength of their pitching: a startling turn of events for a club that has always specialized in winning by cannonade-the four-hour, four-homer, 107 Fenway Park Special, with both starting pitchers back in their street clothes by the middle of the fifth. Roger Clemens, a powerful twenty-three-year-old righthander who sat out most of the 1985 season after a shoulder operation, had accounted for this turnabout almost on his own, winning his first fourteen decisions without a defeat; here at the All-Star break, he stood at 152, with a league's-best ERA of 2.48 and a hundred and forty-six strikeouts in his hundred and forty-five innings pitched. On April 29th, he had fanned twenty Seattle batters in a single game-the highest one-game total in the history of the major leagues.

There were other happy surprises tucked in among the midterm postings (including the wholly unexpected prosperity of the Cleveland Indians, who were more than holding their own in the savage campaigning in the American League East), but the bad news seemed far more absorbing. Just recently, the World Champion Kansas City Royals had somehow lost eleven games in a row, with their vastly admired corps of starting pitchers compiling an earned-run average of 7.32 during that spell. Bret Saberhagen, the Cy Young Award winner in his circuit last summer, had a 410 and 4.39 record, and was pitching so poorly that there was talk of sending him to the bullpen for rest and cogitation.

If the Royals looked bad (fourth place and eight games below .500), their World Series opponents, the Cardinals, were abysmal. Their 3650 at the All-Star break had them a half game out of the cellar and twenty-four games behind the Mets, and they were batting .228 as a team. No one could explain what had happened to the spirited and combative club that came so close to winning the cla.s.sic last fall, but their manager, Whitey Herzog, was blunt about their season to date. ”We're just a bad club,” he said late in May. ”We're not deep in any department. We're supposed to have a great defense, and we haven't played worth a d.a.m.n.” Asked if there was some remedy for his club's dismal showing, he said, ”Better players.” When the schedule at last brought the Cards a day off at a point when they had lost eleven out of their last fourteen games, Herzog said the occasion called for a victory party.

The downside news was up in other places as well. Toronto's ace starter, Dave Stieb, was at 29 and 5.80 so far, and forty-one-year-old Steve Carlton, a lifetime three-hundred-and-eighteen-game winner, was given his unconditional release by the Phillies after surrendering twenty-five runs in twenty innings. (He was picked up by the Giants a few days later.) The Yankees lost a record ten straight games at Yankee Stadium, and the Oakland A's, who were believed to have a fair shot at a pennant this year in the American League West, set a team mark with fifteen consecutive losses on the road. Both Chicago managers lost their jobs, as did the Oakland and Seattle skippers; the deposed White Sox manager, Tony LaRussa, was instantly hired to manage the A's.

Midseason performances don't mean much by September, to be sure, but all this instability at the center of the sport was something to think about. The Mets are a pretty fair team on all counts, but the pace of their success so far seemed almost out of control: they weren't just good, they were imperious. What had happened to so many competent teams this year, I wondered, to make them go so flat? I recalled the pride and self-a.s.surance and sense of accomplishment that only last October permeated the clubhouses of the Cards and the Royals and was equally apparent in the demeanor and conversation of their front-office people. Their teams had attained the heights on merit, these men seemed to be saying, and proved the corporate wisdom and foresight of the organizations that had produced them; success so plainly established almost looked like a guarantee of further success, even in the chancy world of compet.i.tive sports. The fatuity of such hopes, in the light of the 1986 season to date, suggested the anxiety and puzzlement and sense of quaky footing that must now infect every team in baseball.

Sports teams live on confidence; it is the air they must breathe if they are to survive at all. Each of the twenty-six major-league clubs spends millions of dollars every year on player development and on the signing of young talent; sizable further funds and thousands of hours of hard work go into scouting and planning trades and into long-range projections, all with the aim of putting a team on the field that will prove resolute in the face of adversity and opportunistic and aggressive when the chance to win presents itself. Quality, however, cannot be guaranteed, which is why the threats and petulant outbursts that George Steinbrenner directs at his Yankee players in times of trouble are so disliked by executives with a better sense of the game. ”Maybe we'll surprise some folks” and ”At least we'll be respectable” are what you hear from managers of potential fifth-place clubs, but when the season begins it always becomes plain that no one is ever quite ready for the heaven-sent pink glow of success that can suddenly envelop any team when everything-the starting pitching, the bullpen, timely hitting, sound defense, freedom from injury, and the breaks-is going your way, or contrariwise, ready for how bad a club, even a strong or famous one, can turn in the s.p.a.ce of ten days. And no team, it seems, can even be sure of its own respectability when it is faced with more than its share of the vicissitudes of baseball: injuries, bad hops, bad calls, suddenly vapid pitching or hitting, trembly defense, and the unexpected and then unstoppable cascade of lost ballgames. Sandy Alderson, the able general manager of the Oakland A's, recently said to me, ”If there's one thing I've learned in this game, it's that you can very seldom afford to smile. That's a sad statement, but the truth is that you never know which game may be your last win in a long while, or which day may turn out to be the high point of your season. If you've been going bad, you don't know if the game you've just lost is not yet your nadir or if it's going to be the last loss in a week. That old baseball saying about never letting yourself get too high or too low is a matter of self-preservation. You just never know.”

I had never thought much about winning and losing as freestanding and presumably discussable elements of baseball, but now the idea came to me to travel about the leagues a little, here at mid-season, and talk to some players and managers and front-office people about good baseball luck and bad, watching some teams that had enjoyed the best of things in recent weeks take on opponents who had met with very little luck so far this year, and trying to learn from both sides how it felt to be hot or not, how much difference the manager makes, and how different crowds and owners and writers seemed to respond to hard times and high times. In the end, I might even have a better sense of what proportion of the game actually rests in the hands of the men who play it.

Luck always matters in baseball, and here I at once found some luck of my own in the schedules-the upcoming games at Wrigley Field, where the ebullient and onrus.h.i.+ng Giants (they had just climbed into first place in the West again, and their nine-game margin over the .500 level represented their best grades in almost four years) would meet the better-established Cubs, who had been winners of the National League East a bare two years ago but were not skating in stately circles in the lower reaches of their division. Injuries did in the entire Cubs pitching rotation last year, but this year the Chicago pitching was the worst in the league. ”Last year was an excuse year,” a grizzled Cubs writer said to me later in the week. ”This year-” He shrugged. ”Well, Chicago is a Cubs town.” A new manager, Gene Michael, had replaced Jim Frey in June, and Dallas Green, the Cubs' president and general manager, blamed his players for the ritual execution. ”I'm not very happy about it,” he told a reporter. ”I told them in no uncertain terms that they had contributed in great part to it.”

Directly after my weekend at Wrigley Field, I also discovered, I could repair to California in time to see the brilliant Red Sox, now at 5631 for the year and seven games ahead of the pack, do battle with the miserable, last-place Oakland A's, whose season had gone down the drain during a stretch in which most of their pitchers were on the disabled list and they had dropped twenty-five out of thirty-one games; the club had likewise dispensed with a manager, the agreeable Jackie Moore, and had lately replaced him with the aforementioned Tony LaRussa. Looking at my plans, I felt a twinge of compa.s.sion for the battered losers of my planned mismatches, but baseball, I reminded myself, is not for the fainthearted.

Wrigley Field lay becalmed in furnace-like doldrums as the Giants and the Cubs took the field on Friday, but the natives, I noticed, were unaffected. With the temperature in the mid-nineties, the customary thirty thousand-plus Cubs fans threw themselves into the ancient environs for our uncrucial tilt, and the ma.s.sed descamisados in the bleachers further tanned their pelts toward the prized North Side Gurkhatones of August. Drops of sweat from my brow formed paisley patterns on my scorecard, and between innings home-plate ump Jerry Crawford tottered back to a minuscule strip of shadow next to the backstop, where a ball girl tended him with elixirs and cold cloths. Perhaps sensing our need for a swift distraction from the weather, the Chicago starting pitcher, the tall right-hander Scott Sanderson, absolutely subdued the visitors in the course of his seven innings, striking out nine of the San Franciscos and giving up one hit, a double by Jeff Leonard, and a lone unearned run; his successor, the enormous flamethrower Lee Smith, was perfect, fanning three more Giants and preserving the 21 beauty. Sanderson's breaking ball, which an inordinate number of Giants took for called third strikes, bowing politely at the waist as it dipped across the corners, was the talk of both clubhouses. There wasn't much else to say, for great pitching is a silencer. The Giants, like all losing players in such circs, summed things up with a shrug and a wan smile: What are you going to do?

I had seen the Giants suffer an infinitely more painful loss earlier in the season, I now recalled. Back on May 30th, at Shea Stadium, the club had stood on the verge of a hard-earned one-run victory over the Mets in the bottom of the tenth inning. Then, with two out and two Mets aboard, Giants shortstop Jose Uribe and second baseman Rob Thompson somehow collided under a harmless infield fly; the ball popped loose and the winning run came in. A killing defeat, one felt, since it dropped the Giants three games behind the Astros and suddenly ran their string of losses to four straight, all on the road; last year, the Giants lost fifty-seven on the road, on the way to their last-place, worst-ever 62100 finish. ”Same old Giants,” a San Francisco writer muttered as we waited for the Shea press-box elevator down to the clubhouses.

Only they weren't. That night, the Giants manager, Roger Craig, closed his clubhouse to exhort his young troops. That game was gone, he told them, and mourning or anger wouldn't bring it back or turn the score around. The team's young second-base combination had already won at least six games for the team with their gloves, so what had just happened only meant that they were 61 for the year. Tomorrow's game was the one that mattered now. And so forth. It worked-something worked. The Giants won the next day, knocking off Bob Ojeda; Rob Thompson was involved in four double plays for the afternoon and singled three times, and Uribe came through with a two-run double. The Giants won again the day after that, handing Ron Darling his first defeat of the year. The team then moved along to Montreal, swept two games there, and headed home with a suddenly satisfying 44 record for the road swing.

In Chicago, I talked to Giants catcher Bob Brenly about the turnaround. ”That game in New York was the one that did it,” he said. ”You know, for any team there can come a day when you decide that this is going to be just another year, just like it was before. Losing can happen so fast. You lose a game, and you think, OK, we're stuck all right. You lose the next day, and you think, Well, that was a tough one-no way we could have gone against the breaks there. Then you get blown out, say, and the day after that maybe you get beat 21, and before you know it it's five or six in a row and you've slid down a couple of places in the standings. But Roger prepared us for that sort of thing this year. We know we're a better team. We know we have that resiliency. Roger has done it-give him the credit. He's got guys bunting, doing the hit-and-run, guys. .h.i.tting the ball to the right side of the infield who never bothered to learn that kind of ball. He's got me running, and I'm a catcher. n.o.body's exempt, n.o.body's ahead on the ball club, and it's all from Roger. Call him a guru, call him a positive guy, call him a man-a grown-up human being. You know, almost every professional athlete has had one great coach in high school or college that he remembers and thinks of most highly. I had a high-school basketball coach back at Coshocton High named Bill Bowman, who always seemed like he could pull about ten percent more out of you than you thought you had. Well, that's the way Roger is for everybody in this room. We've talked about it. He reminds you of somebody important in your life. He makes you think winning is something you can be personally responsible for. The biggest difference is we're having fun. You can hear it in the air around here. I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and come to the ballpark. Last year was mostly just a personal thing, and I think that down feeling, that first bad day, came almost on Opening Day. Baseball is a team game, and once you lose that you've lost all concept. Some of our guys had a pretty good year in 1985, but I don't think they were enjoying it any. It all got washed away by the team. Roger wants it the other way now. I've never learned so much from one person.”

The one great coach that Roger Craig reminds me of is himself-a tall, engaging, n.o.ble-nosed North Carolinian who when last seen by me was accepting congratulations in the champagne-soaked Detroit Tigers clubhouse for his part in the making of that 1984 World Champion team. As pitching coach, he had brought the Detroit staff along from eleventh-best to best in the league in the s.p.a.ce of two years, in considerable part through his teaching of the split-fingered fastball, a deadly little down-diver that he perfected some years ago while running a baseball school for teenagers. Craig retired from baseball after the Tigers' triumph and went home to his horse ranch and his family in Southern California, but came back to take over as Giants manager in mid-September of last year, as part of a fresh regime headed by an incoming general manager, Al Rosen. Craig also had a previous two-year tenure as manager of the Padres, in 1978 and '79. This summer, he has been teaching the split-finger to anyone on the Giants staff who is interested-to Roger Mason and Mike Krukow and Mark Davis and Vida Blue (who has had trouble with it, because his fingers aren't very long), and even to Steve Carlton.

Whatever ballpark he is in, Craig is implored by the local writers to talk about his defeats as well as his successes-in particular, about the forty-six games he lost in two years while pitching for the newborn and disastrous New York Mets, near the close of his career. ”Aw, I don't want to dwell on that story all the time,” he said in the casbah of the Wrigley Field dugout early one afternoon. But then, because he's an obliging fellow, he talked about it just the same. He confirmed his most famous statistic, registered in 1963-eighteen consecutive mound losses, which tied an ancient mark. ”I think the record still stands,” he said now, ”but maybe I'll pitch tomorrow and break it.” He lost five games by the score of 10 in that stretch-also a record. ”I kept telling the guys to go out and get me one run and we'd win,” he told us. ”Then, one time, I remember, it got to be about the fifth or sixth inning and I said, 'All right, just get me half a run!' You know, I always felt I pitched well those years. I got a raise at the end of both years, and I deserved it. I had twenty-seven complete games over those two seasons, and every game I started I expected to win.”

Craig said he thought the Mets trauma had helped him as a manager. ”I know all about the things that can make you lose, and all about the things that can help you win. A lot of my coaching is from that. If a guy gets on a losing streak on the mound or goes oh-for-four up at bat a few days, I can identify with that. He knows I've been there before him. But he also knows that I've been in five World Series and I got four winning World Series rings to show for it. At first, the guys on this club thought I was crazy when I said I could show them how to win, but now they've got the idea. If you've got some talent, you can win. Sure, we've lost some games, but I'm happier right now than I've ever been before in baseball.” He paused, squinting in the sun. ”Well, maybe you always say that. The first year I was with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a major-league pitcher, I didn't feel I could be any happier than that. But as an old man-I'm fifty-six-as an old man, right now I'm very happy. I've got outstanding coaches and a fine young ball club, and that's all you can ask for.”

This summer in San Francisco, I've been told, you can sometimes spot five or six Giants caps at the same time among the noonday crowds waiting for the lights to change on the corner of Kearny and Post Streets. Attendance at Candlestick Park (which will not be torn down or domed over in the near future, as had been much rumored in recent years) is up by a hundred and thirteen percent, and people at c.o.c.ktail parties in Mill Valley or at dinner downtown at the Was.h.i.+ngton Square Bar & Grill sometimes refer to the Giants as ”the lads” now, just as the sports columns do. Now and then, on the courts at the Berkeley Tennis Club, you can hear somebody out there yell ”Humm baby!” when his partner pulls off a winning backhand shot down the alley. The expression comes from Roger Craig, and it means ”Great play!” or ”Wow!” or perhaps, as a noun, a pretty young woman across the street. Back in June, somebody took down the office-door sign at Candlestick that said ”NO. 33-CRAIG.” Now it says ”HUMM BABY.”

The Cubs were less talkative, and no wonder. Dallas Green had recently suggested that he was prepared to dispense with almost anyone on his roster of well-paid underachievers (anyone but all-league second baseman Ryne Sandberg, one must a.s.sume, or the brilliant young shortstop Shawon Dunston, or perhaps Lee Smith), although there are cynics who claim he wouldn't find many takers, because of the lavish contracts that were given to the stars of '84. In any case, I had very little relish at the prospect of worming out losers' confessions in the Chicago clubhouse. Ron Cey, who had been riding the bench in recent weeks, probably because of his Rodinesque responses to hard-hit ground b.a.l.l.s around third base, was polite but distant. Now thirty-eight years old, he had played nineteen hundred and fifty-three games at third base and hit three hundred and six home runs over ten full seasons with the Dodgers and three-plus with the Cubs, and he was not prepared to be forthcoming about unsuccess. ”You'd have to ask players who have been on teams that have been out of it a lot of years,” he said stiffly. ”It's not a situation I'm familiar with-I don't qualify. I'm used to being up there in the midst of things. When you're in contention, you contest. It's what you're here for-why you exist as a professional. Now-well, not playing much and being with a team that's out of it, the way we ate, is not an enviable position. I'm in a different place than I'm used to.”*

Forehandedly, I had arranged for further testimony about the Cubs from the best source possible-a fan. Cubs fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer, and hope, in exquisite proportions. The Cubs sold a million and a half tickets before Opening Day this year, and the sellout Sat.u.r.day crowd on this second day of my trip would put them over the million mark in admissions on the second-earliest date in their long history. My companion at the game was a baseball pen pal of mine named Tim Shanahan, a young and friendly (it turned out) professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He grew up in Detroit and still sustains an ancient pa.s.sion for the Tigers (”It's very, very unlikely that they'll ever end up playing the Cubs in the World Series,” he said when I asked about his ultimate loyalty), and followed the Phillies closely when attending graduate school in Delaware. His attachment to the Cubs is of only six years' duration, which barely puts him on the waiting list for admission to the True Cubs Sodality, but he clearly belongs nevertheless. A few weeks earlier, he and his wife and two young daughters had turned up at Wrigley for a Sunday game, to find that the remaining tickets were only for standing room. ”My older daughter Erin is six, and she said that was fine with her,” Shanahan said. ”She's been coming to games with us for years. But Meagan is three, and after my wife and I and the girls stood around outside the gate for about an hour we finally decided that it might be a little hard on her to be held in our arms for three hours at her very first game. I wouldn't have minded, of course, but-” He was still thinking it over.

Shanahan and I had good seats in the deep stands just behind home, and, with the temperature back in the nineties, I did not respond when he suggested that we probably should have sat in the bleachers if I was in search of some real Cubs fans. We drank some beer, and he brought me up to date on the franchise gossip. The White Sox, who have been traditionally seen as drawing most of their fans from within the city, were probably moving out of Comiskey Park at last, he said; they were negotiating a move to the western suburb of Addison, if the financing could be worked out for a new ballpark there. ”The strange thing is that most of the Cubs fans are from the suburbs, even though Wrigley Field is a city ballpark,” he said. ”Most of the White Sox fans cheer for the Cubs when the Cubs are in first place, but Cubs fans never, never cheer for the White Sox. They sort of don't notice them.”

Wrigley Field seemed to have survived the great lights crisis, Tim told me. After the winning 1984 season, the club had threatened to move the team elsewhere, so that it could conform with the league's network-television contracts, which called for night games in post-season play. The city and state ordinances forbidding lights at Wrigley held firm under court testing, but now Dallas Green was talking about adding twenty thousand new seats to the park (which now holds thirty-eight thousand)-a move that seemed certain to destroy its airy vistas and rural ambience. It is reported that Green also wants the club to buy up some of the cozy, tree-shaded blocks of ancient houses that surround the field and convert them into parking lots. Shanahan thought the lights controversy would be settled by compromise: the lights would go in, but would be turned on for only fifteen or twenty games during the regular season. ”n.o.body likes the idea,” he said, ”but it may be the only way to keep Wrigley Field. People care about this place.”

The game began-the Giants' veteran ace Mike Krukow taking on the Cubs' left-handed Steve Trout-and what Shanahan noticed almost instantly was an innocuous fly ball out to left field struck by the second Giant batter of the day, Rob Thompson. ”Bad,” he announced. ”Anything hit in the air like that against Trout means he's going to get killed. And look at those flags.” I looked, and saw the pennants on the scoreboard and up on top of the upper deck in right field beginning to stir and lift. They were pointing away from us: local storm warnings for lakeside pitchers. Shanahan was wrong in one way, it turned out: the Giants didn't exactly kill Trout as much as discourage him to death, finally dispatching him in the third, when he got n.o.body out while giving up a pa.s.sel of singles, a walk, and a terminal double by the young power-hitting third baseman, Chris Brown, which ran the score to 51, San Francisco. But nothing is forever on windy days at Wrigley, and the Cubs responded at once with four safe knocks, including a home run by Gary Matthews that sailed five or six rows beyond the ivy at left-center. ”It's Sandberg that's the difference,” Shanahan said, referring to Matthews' immediate predecessor in the lineup. ”They've finally got him back where he belongs. He's got to bat second like this if we're going to score runs. It's vital to the whole thing.”

This, I realized, was the long view-the experienced Cubs-person's caution-but there was no cynicism or artificiality in it that I could see. Tim nodded happily when Dunston and then Dave Martinez whacked windblown back-to-back homers in the fifth, with the Cubs scoring four more times and going ahead for good in the game, but when we sat down again he said, ”I think all these pop-fly home runs in this park hurt the Cubs in the end. It's the reason we never seem to have any speed on the team, or any real defense. It's the same kind of team the Red Sox have always been, because of that wall at Fenway. Those big innings distract you from building a real ball team. I think we may have the best defensive stats in the league right now, but that's only because we're so slow in the infield that we never even get to the hard chances. It's an illusion.”

Sandberg homered in the eighth, and Leon Durham bombed a triple into the ivy a moment or two later, and the Cubs won the thing by 116. I was happy for my new friend, but what I had discovered about him was that he was a baseball fan first and a Cubs fan-and a dedicated one-well after that. Maybe that was part of the secret about winning and losing-the fan's part. ”What I love about Roger Craig is the way he's always in the game,” Tim had said at one point. ”He calls all the Giant pitchouts and pick-offs, you know. You remember how he used to do that when he was with the Tigers, I'm sure.” I did remember, because he had reminded me. Then, a little later-an instant later-the Giant pitcher Krukow picked Sandberg off first on a move (I checked it later) signalled by Craig from the dugout. It took the Cubs out of an inning, but I noticed that Shanahan clapped for the slick move just the same. He was in the game, too.

Now I began to worry about the Giants. Their division lead was gone-Houston had won again-and after the game Craig spoke urgently about the necessity of getting out of town with a split in the series. Matters looked even graver the next afternoon-a beautiful day, a bit cooler, with a noisy family crowd on hand for a Sunday picnic of baseball-when the Cubs went up by 41 in the third inning; two pitches by Giants starter Roger Mason bounced by Bob Brenly for pa.s.sed b.a.l.l.s in the three-run second (both split-finger specials, by the look of them), and further damage was avoided only by a nifty pitchout, wigwagged by Craig, which allowed Brenly to cut down a base stealer with two Cubs on and no outs. Craig, in fact, was managing up a storm, at one point sending up a pinch-hitter for a batter in mid at-bat, with the count 31 (it didn't work); the day before, he had relieved one of his relievers in the middle of the count. What did work on this day for the Giants was a brilliant turn at the plate in the fourth by first baseman Harry Spilman, who ran the count to 32 against the Cubs' Dennis Eckersley and then fought off four outstanding sliders for fouls before Eckersley made a mistake, a fastball up, which Spilman hit into the right-field stands for a two-run homer. Spilman, an early-season pickup by the Giants after he was dropped by the Tigers, had been filling in elegantly for the injured and slumping rookie first baseman Will Clark, who had been sent down to Phoenix for rehabilitation. After the game, Spilman said, ”That was probably the best at-bat I've ever had in the big leagues.”

The Cubs were still up by a run when another Giants sub, Randy Kutcher, led off the eighth with a rocket to short, which Chicago shortstop Dunston fielded brilliantly and then horribly threw away, to put the tying run aboard. The Cubs infield defended in cla.s.sic fas.h.i.+on against the inevitable upcoming bunt, but the batter, Robbie Thompson, pushed the ball beautifully to right, fast enough to get it past the pitcher and the onrus.h.i.+ng first baseman, Durham, and short enough to allow the covering second baseman, Sandberg, no chance in the world to make a play. The bunt-a pearl of great price-went untouched, and a moment or two farther along Thompson outdid himself, pausing for an instant on the base path in order to hinder Durham's view of Leonard's weakly nubbed, lucky wrong-field infield bouncer to right. Durham lunged for the ball and barely missed it as it wobbled off into short right, and the game was tied, with Thompson on third; his run-he scored on a sacrifice fly by Brown, to put the Giants ahead-held up because Scott Garrelts, in from the pen, set down the six remaining Chicago batters in order, on fastb.a.l.l.s that all measured in the mid-ninety-m.p.h. range. The Giants wound up with a 54 win and the split they had to have.