The Roger Angell Baseball Collection Part 2

THIS AFTERNOON, IN THE top of the ninth inning of the final playoff game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, Walter Alston, the Dodger manager, and Leo Durocher, his third-base coach, stalked slowly back and forth in their dugout, staring at their shoe tops and exuding an almost visible purple cloud of yearning; they wanted to have the National League season extended by a few more innings or a few more games. This wish, like so many other att.i.tudes to be seen in this city, must be regarded as excessive. The teams on the field had already played more games in one season than any other two baseball teams in the history of mankind, and the quality of play demonstrated in the past three days by the twitchy, exhausted athletes on both squads was reminiscent of the action in the winter softball games played by septuagenarians in St. Petersburg, Florida. As everyone in this country must know by now, the newly elongated, hundred-and-sixty-two-game National League season proved insufficient to its purpose in its first year. The Dodgers, who led the Giants by four full games with a week to go, lost ten of their last thirteen games, including the last four in a row, and thus permitted their gasping pursuers to catch them on the final day. In the first playoff game, on Monday at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the Dodger team displayed the muscle, the frightfulness, and the total immobility of a woolly mammoth frozen in a glacier; the Giants, finding the beast inert, fell upon it with savage cries and chopped off steaks and rump roasts at will, winning 80. The feast continued here for a time yesterday, and after five and a half innings the Giants led, 50. At this point, the Dodgers scored their first run in thirty-six innings, and the Giants, aghast at this tiny evidence of life, stood transfixed, their stone axes dropping from their paws, while the monster heaved itself to its feet, scattering chunks of ice, and set about trampling its tormentors. The game, which the Dodgers eventually won, 87, is best described in metaphor and hyperbole, for there was no economy in it. It lasted four hours and eighteen minutes-a record for a nine-inning game. There were twenty hits, thirteen walks, three errors, two hit batsmen, and a total of forty-two ballplayers in action (also a record), and the only positive conviction among the spectators when it was over was that the Mets could have beaten both teams on the same afternoon.

Today was a little different. For one thing, there was a noisy, s.h.i.+rtsleeve crowd of 45,693 on hand, in contrast with the embarra.s.sing acres of empty seats yesterday, when the park was barely half full. Los Angeles calls itself the Sports Capital of the World, but its confidence is easily shaken. Its loyalists are made uneasy by a team that appears likely to lose. Today, with a final chance at the pennant restored, the Dodger rooters were back, and there was a hopeful violence in their cries. Fans here seem to require electronic rea.s.surance. One out of every three or four of them carries a transistor radio, in order to be told what he is seeing, and the din from these is so loud in the stands that every spectator can hear the voice of Vin Scully, the Dodger announcer, hovering about his ears throughout the game. There is also a huge, hexagonal electric sign in left field, on which boosterish messages appear from time to time. The fans respond to its instructions with alacrity, whether they are invited to sing "Baby Face" between innings or ordered to shout the Dodger battle cry of "CHARGE!" during a rally. Today the sign also carried news flashes about the orbital progress of Walter M. Schirra, Jr., thus enabling the crowd to enjoy both national pastimes-baseball and astronaut-watching-at the same time. This giant billboard, protruding above the left-field bleachers like a grocer's price placard, was one of several indications to me that the new and impressive Dodger Stadium, which opened this spring, was designed by an admirer of suburban supermarkets. It has the same bright, uneasy colors (turquoise exterior walls, pale green outfield fences, odd yellows and ochers on the grandstand seats); the same superfluous decorative touches, such as the narrow rickrack roofs over the top row of the bleachers; the same preoccupation with easy access and with total use of interior s.p.a.ce; and the same heaps of raw dirt around its vast parking lots. There is a special shelf for high-priced goods-a dugout behind home plate for movie and television stars, ballplayers' wives, and transient millionaires. Outside, a complex system of concentric automobile ramps and colored signs-yellow for field boxes, green for reserved seats, and so forth-is intended to deliver the carborne fan to the proper gate, but on my two visits to O'Malley's Safeway it was evident that the locals had not yet mastered their instructions, for a good many baseball shoppers wound up in the detergent aisle instead of in the cracker department, with a resultant loss of good feeling, and had to be ordered to go away and try again.

For a time today, it seemed that all the recent doubts and discomforts suffered by Dodger fans were finally to be rewarded, for their team, after handing the Giants two runs on three errors in the third inning, came back and took apparent command of the game, and in the happiest fas.h.i.+on imaginable. Duke Snider, the old demiG.o.d, led off the fourth with a double, and Tommy Davis, the young demiG.o.d and new National League batting champion, moved him to third with a single, from where he scored during an abortive double play. Then, in the sixth, Duke singled, and Davis, a batter who studies each pitch with the eye of a jewelry appraiser, hit a homer for the tying and the go-ahead runs. Duke jumped on home plate with both feet as he came across. It was then appropriate for Maury Wills, the new base-stealing champion and the ranking deity in Los Angeles this year, to score the insurance run. He managed this because the Giants forgot their newly discovered stratagem for getting Wills out; in yesterday's game, Wills stole second, and the Giants' catcher, in attempting to cut him down, relayed the ball to center field and to the possessor of the best arm on the club, Willie Mays, who then cut down Wills at third. In the seventh inning today, Wills singled and stole second, but the ball didn't get out to Mays. Wills then stole third, and Bailey, the Giants' catcher, angry at having flubbed baseball's newest trick play, threw the ball into left field, allowing Wills to score.

This was a movie ending, pat but satisfying. Unfortunately, the game had two more innings to go. Matty Alou led off the Giant ninth with a pinch single but was erased at second on Kuenn's grounder. Ed Roebuck then walked the next batters, and Alston and Durocher, sensing the onset of another ice age, suddenly foresaw that the season might be too short after all. The clatter of typewriters died away in the press box. Many of the sportswriters had already departed for the victory celebration in the Dodger clubhouse; those who remained fell silent, half hoping for more drama, half praying that they would not have to rewrite their leads so late in the day. The preposterous end came quickly. Willie Mays nearly tore Roebuck's glove arm off with a line single that scored one run. Stan Williams came in to pitch, and Cepeda delivered the tying run with a fly. With runners on second and third, Williams walked one batter intentionally and another unintentionally, and the game was untied. The final run scored on an error, and the press-box loudspeaker announced that United Airlines would have a special flight leaving at seven o'clock for San Francisco and the World Series. Billy Pierce came in to pitch for the Giants and set the Dodgers down in order, and the visitors went into the ritual autumnal dance of victory in front of their dugout, leaping into the air like Watusi.

When I returned to my hotel, the Statler Hilton, I noticed for the first time that there was an art exhibit in one corner of the lobby. Ranged in a great semicircle were a dozen or so life-size pastel portraits of Dodger players, elegantly framed and each bearing a gold identifying plate. The exhibit was encircled by a velvet rope, like the one that protects the new Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum, and there was a uniformed Pinkerton on guard. No one was looking at the pictures.

San Francisco, October 5.

On the evening of the day the Giants won the pennant, the circulation manager of the San Francisco Chronicle approached the news editor and said, "What's the headline?"

"It's 'WE WIN!'-white on black," the news editor said.

"How big?"

"Same size as 'FIDEL DEAD!'"

That evening, twenty-five thousand or perhaps five thousand celebrants tore down police barriers at the San Francisco airport and swarmed out onto the runways and taxiways, forcing several flights to delay their arrival or departure, and causing the team that they had come to greet to land at a distant maintenance runway. I arrived in San Francisco after eleven o'clock, but the jubilee was still in full swing. The gutters were awash with torn-up newspapers and office calendars, and Market Street, Geary Street, and Kearny Street were solid with automobiles crawling b.u.mper to b.u.mper, horns blasting. The faces inside all had the s.h.i.+ny-eyed, stunned, exhausted expression of a bride at her wedding reception. The police, who had planted red flares at intersections to guide the processions, were treating it all like cops in a college town after a big football victory-a little bored, a little amused, a little irritated. The San Francisco newspapers cannot get enough of the Giants. The team and the World Series cover the front pages, the sports pages (green and pink here), and most of the pages in between. There are human-interest stories about little boys who have run away from home with their piggy-bank savings in order to buy a Series ticket. In the papers, the name of the team is usually prefixed with the possessive p.r.o.noun-"our Giants."

The total identification of this attractive city with a baseball team is a sado-m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic tangle. The gala this week has offended a good many proud old-time locals, who think the city should be less nave. "Good G.o.d!" one of these said to me. "People will think we're like Milwaukee, or something!" One local sports columnist, Charles McCabe, of the Chronicle, has tried to stand against the river of heroic newspaper prose; he has characterized the Giants' style of play as "lovable incompetence" and has told San Franciscans that victory may be less cozy to live with than years of defeat. His warning will be considered, for this is a town fond of self-examination and afflicted with self-doubt. "We've had a lot of trouble in the past few years," a woman told me at a c.o.c.ktail party, and for a moment I thought she was talking about some scandal or sickness in her family. She meant the Giants, who have frequently been favored to win the pennant in their five-year residence here but have staged a series of exaggerated pratfalls, sometimes in the final week of the season. As an old Giant fan, I was tempted to tell the woman that persistent ill luck and heroic failure, interspersed with an occasional triumph, had been characteristic of her team ever since Merkle's b.o.n.e.r in 1908. I thought of the Snodgra.s.s m.u.f.f in 1912; of the 1917 Series that was lost when Heinie Zimmerman chased Eddie Collins across the plate with the winning run; of the Series of 1924, when Hank Gowdy stumbled over his catcher's mask and a grounder bounced over Freddy Lindstrom's head and allowed Was.h.i.+ngton to win the last game; and of the last two games of the 1934 season, when the Dodgers dropped the Giants out of first place after Bill Terry had asked if they were still in the league. But I said nothing, for I realized that her affair with the Giants was a true love match and that she had adopted her mate's flaws as her own. The Giants and San Francisco are a marriage made in Heaven.

Candlestick Park is no supermarket; with its raw concrete ramps and walkways and its high, curving grandstand barrier, it looks from the outside like an outbuilding of Alcatraz. But it was a festive prison yard during the first two Series games here. In order to beat the midafternoon Candlestick wind, which can blow pop fouls into triples and cause flags on adjacent outfield poles to flutter briskly in opposite directions, the games started at noon, and the fans arrived bearing picnic hampers and gin-and-tonic fixings. The crowd here is polite, cheerful, and gaily dressed; it has the look of a country horse-show audience. Some of the home-town exuberance wore off quickly yesterday afternoon, when the fans came in and found the Yankees waiting-Mantle and Berra, Ford and Howard and Maris, all instantly identifiable and suddenly menacing-on the field below. A few of the spectators gave up then and there. A man next to me in the lower stands watched Mickey Mantle hit four b.a.l.l.s over the fence in batting practice, applauded politely, and then turned to his wife and said, "Well, at least we won the pennant." The Yankees started off just as he had feared they would, scoring two runs in the top of the first on three solid hits. The big crowd was restless and nervous until Mays came up to bat against Ford in the second. Willie Mays against Whitey Ford-this was worth the five-year wait! Willie singled, and came around to score the Giants' first run. An inning later, he drove in the tying run with another hit, and the San Franciscans whooped and screamed with elation and relief; every one of them, I was convinced, had harbored the secret fear that his heroes would perform like Little Leaguers against the all-conquerors. The Giants kept reaching Ford-nine hits in the first six innings-but they couldn't ruffle him or quite put him away. Ford stands on the mound like a Fifth Avenue bank president. Tight-lipped, absolutely still between pitches, all business and concentration, he personifies the big-city, emotionless perfection of his team. This was his seventeenth World Series game, and he was giving the young Giants a lesson in metropolitan deportment. O'Dell, the Giants' pitcher, was pitching better than Ford, but showing the strain. He was working too fast, striking out too many men, giving up walks, and running up high counts. Apprehension m.u.f.fled the audience, and in the seventh Clete Boyer totally silenced the park with a home run over the left-center-field fence. It was all downhill from there. The champions got two more in the eighth and another in the ninth. With victory in his pocket, Ford retired the Giants on a handful of pitches and left the mound as if on his way to board the four-thirty to Larchmont.

The apparently inevitable outcome of yesterday's game seemed to afflict the home team and its fans deeply this afternoon. A man seated just in front of me was suffering from a severe case of the uh-ohs. "Uh-oh," he would murmur to his companion, "here comes Yogi Berra." ... "Uh-oh, Mantle comes up this inning." Meanwhile, the Giants were cl.u.s.tering under pop flies like firemen bracing to catch a baby dropped from a burning building (they m.u.f.fed one baby, right behind the mound), and wasting their substance in overexuberant base-running. In the seventh and eighth innings, they combined a home run by Willie McCovey, three singles, a walk, two successful sacrifices, and a Yankee error for the grand total of one run, which may be another Series record. Fortunately for everyone, Jack Sanford, a tough, hard-working right-hander, kept his courage and his presence of mind, and pitched a lovely, near-perfect game, shutting the Yankees out, 20, with three hits. After the last out, the ma.s.sed San Franciscans expelled their breath in a shout, and then trooped out into the afternoon wind with the same relieved, "Still alive!" expression on their faces that they had been wearing all summer.

New York, October 10.

This jet Subway Series moved three thousand miles east last Sat.u.r.day, but in watching the reactions of the local crowds to the first of the three marvelous games in Yankee Stadium this week I had the recurrent impression that the teams' planes had overshot their mark, and that the Series was being continued before a polite, uncomprehending audience of Lebanese or Yemenis. New York is full of cool, knowing baseball fans-a cabdriver the other day gave me an explicit, dispa.s.sionate account of the reasons for the Milwaukee Braves' collapse this year-but not many of them got their hands on Series tickets. Before the first game here, on Sunday, the northbound D trains were full of women weighted down with expensive coiffures and mink stoles, not one of whom, by the look of them, had ever ridden a subway as far as the Bronx before. There was no noise in the stands during batting practice, and the pregame excitement seemed to arise from the crowd's admiration for itself and its size (a sellout 71,431), rather than for the contest to come; ritual and occasion had displaced baseball. The only certifiable fans near me were among the standees packed three-deep behind the lower-grandstand seats. When Roger Maris came up to bat in the second, the box-holders gave him a dutiful spatter of applause, but the voice of the demanding, unforgiving Yankee fan came from behind me-a deep, rich "Boo!" and the cry, "C'mon, b.u.m!" During the long, austere pitchers' duel between Bill Stafford and Billy Pierce, which the Yankees finally pulled out, 32, the spectators near me who had radios were giving most of their attention to the football game between the New York Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. (There are no low-scoring pitchers' duels in pro football.) By the sixth inning, when the game was still scoreless, spectators had begun walking out in twos and threes, surrendering their ticket stubs to the persevering verticals; the departees had accomplished their purpose, which was to be able to tell their friends they had been to a Series game.

Ignorance and moneyed apathy became less evident during the second and third games at the Stadium. I suspect that a considerable number of corporation seat-holders went home to Dallas and St. Paul after the weekend, in order to begin earning the money to buy next year's trip to the Series, and thus freed their tickets for resale to more knowledgeable resident fans. At the same time, the gallant, inflammatory, instructive baseball being played by both teams began to make believers and partisans among those who had come only for the show. To judge by my private decibel meter, most of the neutrals became Giant rooters. The San Francisco equipe is a genetically pure descendant of its dichotomous, death-loving, strong-jawed forebears. It is capable of appalling human fallibility, which it attempts to counteract with insane pluck. When one sees troops with such qualities brought into battle against the ma.s.sed fieldpieces of the Yankees, one is filled with the same pride, foreboding, and strong desire to avert one's eyes that was felt by the late General Pickett. In yesterday's game, the Giants' pitcher, Juan Marichal, flattened a finger on his pitching hand while bunting in the fifth. Alvin Dark then called on Bob Bolin, an inexperienced twenty-three-year-old fast-baller, to hold the Giants' two-run lead. Bolin instantly pitched himself into and out of an appalling jam; apparently enjoying the tension, he tried the same thing in the sixth, walking Mantle and Maris in succession, but this time the bomb went off and the Yankees tied the game. Enemy scores are a tot of rum to this Giants team, however; in the past two weeks, they have usually responded to them with an instant retaliatory base hit. This time, Matty Alou hit a pinch double between two walks in the seventh, and the bases were loaded with two out when Chuck Hiller, the frail San Francisco second baseman, came up. Hiller had struck out in a similar situation in the fifth, but Dark merely told him to try harder this time, and Hiller hit a grand slam into the right-field stands for the ball game.

In today's encounter, the last Stadium game of the year, the same melodrama of error, reprisal, and retaliation was played, but with a different curtain. Jack Sanford, pitching powerfully again, held the Yankees to three hits through the seventh inning, but the score, instead of being 20 for the Giants, was 22, one Yankee run having scored on a wild pitch and the other on a pa.s.sed ball. It is a poor idea to give the unsentimental Yankees a helping hand up, to dust their jackets and to set their caps straight after they have fallen into a ditch. In the eighth, Kubek and Richardson singled, and Tom Tresh, the Yankees' elegant switch-hitting rookie, hit a three-run homer. Willie McCovey started the reflexive Giant rally in the ninth with a single and came around on Haller's double, but Ed Bailey, pinch-hitting, missed his bid for the tying two-run homer by about fifteen feet, and the two teams trooped off toward the more impressionable audiences of the opposite coast.

What these ballplayers left behind, with at least one spectator, was not just an appreciation of their individual skills, courage, and opportunism but a refreshed admiration for the sport they pursue. Unlike the playoffs, each of the five World Series games to date has been taut, wholly professional, wholly absorbing. Each has been won by the team that deserved to win. Each, in fact, has revealed in early-inning whispers-a key strike delivered, a double play just missed-which team was a fraction sharper or luckier that day and would eventually win. This year, baseball's two best teams rose to the beloved, foolish, exciting autumn occasion, and did honor to their great game.

New York, October 14

The violent West Coast storm that has postponed the completion of the Series has bred in me the odd conviction that this champions.h.i.+p can have no satisfactory conclusion. A victory by the Yankees will merely encourage smugness among their adherents, whose mouths are already perpetually stuffed with feathers, and will reinforce the San Francisco fans' conviction of their own fundamental insufficiency. (I can hear my friend from the c.o.c.ktail party triumphantly crying, "I told you we always have trouble here!") A seven-game comeback win for the Giants, on the other hand, will lead to another horn-blowing and paper-throwing orgy out there, to the pain of the resident non-rubes. It will also cause San Francisco to discover for themselves the gloomy truth in Charles McCabe's warning; total triumph is unsettling, for introverts can taste in it the thrilling, debilitating, and ultimately fatal virus of future defeat. Giant fans, like all neurotics, are unappeasable. I can see it now-the Dodgers should have won the playoff.*

*This account ended here, amputated by rain and deadline. As some dodderers may remember, the Series eventually resumed and went the full seven, the Giants winning the penultimate game, 52, after knocking out Whitey Ford, and losing the finale, 10, in a game whose gruesome denouement could have been foretold by every lifetime Giant fan. In the bottom of the ninth, Yankee pitcher Ralph Terry gave up a bunt single to Matty Alou and, with two out, a double to Mays; McCovey then struck a low screamer toward right-a sure champions.h.i.+p blow but for the fact that the ball flew directly into the glove of Bobby Richardson, at second. The ensuing speculation eventually hardened into the legend, "a foot either way, and the Giants win it," but I have recently re-examined the game film, which shows that "six feet either way" would be more like it; Richardson made the play without exertion. A.J. Liebling, who detested baseball, was in San Francisco at the time, waiting to see a prizefight that had been postponed in turn by the postponed Series, and he confessed himself dangerously bored by the endless public dissections of the play. "It may be noted," he wrote later, "that the Yankees are the least popular of all baseball clubs, because they win, which leaves nothing to 'if' about."

TAVERNS IN THE TOWN.

- October 1963 ALREADY, TWO WEEKS AFTER the event, it is difficult to remember that there was a World Series played this year. It is like trying to recall an economy display of back-yard fireworks. Four small, perfect showers of light in the sky, accompanied by faint plops, and it was over. The spectators, who had happily expected a protracted patriotic bombardment culminating in a grand crescendo of salutes, fireb.a.l.l.s, flowerpots, and stomach-jarring explosions, stood almost silent, cricking their necks and staring into the night sky with the image of the last brief rocket burst still pressed on their eyes, and then, realizing at last that there was to be no more, went slowly home, hus.h.i.+ng the children who asked, "Is that all?" The feeling of letdown, of puzzled astonishment, persists, particularly in this neighborhood, where we have come to expect a more lavish and satisfactory autumnal show from our hosts, the Yankees, the rich family up on the hill. There has been a good deal of unpleasant chatter ("I always knew they were really cheap," "What else can you expect from such stuckups?") about the affair ever since, thus proving again that prolonged success does not beget loyalty.

By choice, I witnessed the Los Angeles Dodgers' four-game sweep at a remove-over the television in four different bars here in the city. This notion came to me last year, during the Series games played in Yankee Stadium against the San Francisco Giants, when it became evident to me that my neighbors in the lower grandstand were not, for the most part, the same noisy, casually dressed, partisan, and knowing baseball fans who come to the park during the regular season. As I subsequently reported, a large proportion of the ticket-holders appeared to be well-to-do out-of-towners who came to the games only because they could afford the tickets, who seemed to have only a slipshod knowledge of baseball, and who frequently departed around the sixth or seventh inning, although all of last year's games were close and immensely exciting. This year, then, I decided to seek out the true Yankee fan in his October retreat-what the baseball beer commercials refer to as "your neighborhood tavern." I was especially happy about this plan after the Dodgers clinched the National League pennant, for I well remembered the exciting autumns here in the late forties and the mid-fifties, when the Dodgers and the Yanks, both home-town teams then, met in six different Series in what seemed to be a brilliant and unending war, and the sounds of baseball fell from every window and doorway in town. Those Series were a fever in the city. Secretaries typed only between innings, with their ears c.o.c.ked to the office radio down the hall, and if business drew you reluctantly into the street (fingering your pool slip, designating your half-inning, in your pocket), you followed the ribbon of news via elevator men's rumors, s.n.a.t.c.hes of broadcasts from pa.s.sing taxi radios, and the portable clutched to a delivery boy's ear, until a sudden burst of shouting and laughter sucked you into a bar you were pa.s.sing, where you learned that Campy or Duke had parked one, or that Vic Raschi had struck out Furillo with two on.

Even before Stan Musial had thrown out the honorary first ball to open the first game this year, I discovered that there would be no such attendant melodrama in the city. Just before game time, I walked west in the mid-Forties and turned up Eighth Avenue, searching for the properly athletic saloon in which I could, in Jimmy Durante's words, "mix wit' de hoi pollew" who had not felt inclined to plunk down thirty-two dollars for a block of four home-game tickets at the Stadium. I stuck my nose in three or four likely-looking bars, only to find no more than a handful of fans who had staked out bar stools and were watching Whitey Ford and Sandy Koufax complete their warmups. Finally, exactly at game time, I walked into O'Leary's Bar, on the northwest corner of Fifty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, and found an audience of sufficient size and expectancy to convince me that it was not about to watch an afternoon quiz program. There wasn't a woman in the place, and the bar stools and nearly all the standing slots along the bar were taken. It was mostly a young crowd-men in their twenties, in sports s.h.i.+rts and with carefully combed hair. There were some off-duty postmen in uniform up front, with their empty canvas mailbags under their feet. I ordered a beer and took up a stand beside the shuffle alley, near the front door, from where I could see the television screen just above the head of the bar. It was a color set, and I was appalled to discover that Whitey Ford had turned blue since I last saw him; he and all the other ballplayers were haloed in rabbit's-eye pink, like deities in early Biblical color films. There was a black-and-white set at the back of the bar, and from time to time during the afternoon I turned around and watched that, just to rea.s.sure myself that Victor Mature was not kneeling in the on-deck circle.

It was a Yankee crowd at O'Leary's. There were winks and happy nudges when Whitey struck out Maury Wills, the lead-off man, and silence when Koufax fanned the side in the first. Frank Howard's double off the center-field screen in the next inning won an astonished "Oooh!" and a moment later, when Skowron and then Tracewski singled, a man to my left shook his head and said, "Whitey ain't got it today." I wasn't sure yet, but I had to agree when Roseboro homered into the right-field stands, to make the score 40; left-handed hitters do not hit homers off Ford when he is pitching low and to the corners. Koufax stepped up to the plate, and several watchers suggested to Ford that he would do well to hit him in the pitching arm.

It was sound advice, though ignored. For a time, Koufax simply got better and better. He struck out Mantle and Maris in the second, and Pepitone in the third. With his long legs, his loose hips, his ropelike motion, and his lean, intelligent face, he looked his part elegantly-a magnificent young pitcher at an early and absolute peak of confidence, knowledge, and ability. In the fourth, facing the top of the order again, he struck out Kubek swinging, with a dipping curve that seemed to bounce on the ground in front of Roseboro, and got Richardson out on another big changeup curve; when he fanned Tresh, also for the second time, for his ninth strikeout, the men around me cried "Wow!" in unison. They had been converted; now they were pulling for Koufax. They knew their baseball-in the third, there had been expert admiring comment on a throw of Maris's that almost nailed Willie Davis at third base-and they knew they were watching something remarkable. What they had in mind, of course, was Carl Erskine's Series strikeout record of fourteen batters, which had been set exactly ten years before. Koufax, straining a bit now, struck out Mantle in the fifth, and then yielded three singles in a row before fanning Lopez, a pinch-hitter, for No. 11. In the sixth, he temporarily lost his poise; in spite of his 50 lead, he seemed edgy, and his motion had grown stiff and elbowish. He walked Richardson and Tresh in succession. There was a stirring under the TV set, a brief resurgence of Yankee hopes, but Koufax took a few deep breaths on the mound, went back to his fast ball, and got Mantle and Maris to pop up, ending the inning.

Two innings later, the strikeouts stood at thirteen, and there was much less interest in Kubek's single and Tresh's two-run homer than in Richardson's strikeout, which tied the old record. O'Leary's was jammed now; no one had left, and those who had wandered in stayed to watch Koufax. A middle-aged man came in and asked one of the men near the bar to order him a Fleischmann's whisky and a beer chaser. "I won't get in your way," he said apologetically. "I'm gonna drink it and then go right out." But he stayed, too.

Elston Howard led off the bottom of the ninth with a liner to Tracewski. Pepitone singled, and Boyer flied out to Willie Davis. Koufax's last chance-a pinch-hitter named Harry Bright-came up to the plate. The count went to two and two, and there was a ma.s.s expulsion of held breath when Bright hit a bouncer that went foul. Then Koufax stretched and threw, Bright swung and missed, and the young men in O'Leary's burst into sustained applause, like an audience at Lincoln Center. Up on the pink-and-blue stage, Koufax was being mobbed by his accompanists. The sporting crowd left O'Leary's, blinking in the pale, unreal late-afternoon suns.h.i.+ne on Eighth Avenue and chattering about what it had seen. Not one of them, I was certain, was worried about what had happened to his team.

Oblivion descended on the Yankees after ten minutes of the second game. Maury Wills, leading off, singled, and was instantly trapped off first by Al Downing, the Yankees' young left-hander. But Pepitone's throw to second was a hair wide, and Wills skidded safely in on his belly. Gilliam singled to right, Willie Davis lined to right, and Roger Maris fell while going for the ball (or so Vin Scully, the announcer, told us-the camera missed the play), and the Yankees were down, 20. These rapid events were received with overpowering ennui in my second observation post, a s.p.a.cious restaurant-bar called the Charles Cafe, just west of Vanderbilt Avenue on Forty-third Street. I had chosen the spot as a likely sporting headquarters because of the dozens of jumbo-size baseball and boxing photographs that hang above the mirrors on its walls, but the customers had nothing in common with the decor. These were youngish men too, but they were wearing dark suits and subdued neckties, and most of them were giving more attention to their hot-pastrami sandwiches and their business gossip than they were to the events on the television screens at either end of the long, s.h.i.+ny bar. One junior executive next to me at the bar ordered a Beefeater dry martini on the rocks-a drink that has perhaps never been served in O'Leary's. The only certifiable Yankee fan near me was a man who banged his palm on the bar when Maris tapped to the box in the second. His fealty was financially oriented. "Oh, G.o.d," he said. "For that they pay him seventy thousand a year." Subsequently, another railbird was unable to detect the considerable difference in appearance and batting style between two Yankee veterans. "Here's the man who took the catching job away from Yogi Berra," he said to me when Hector Lopez, an outfielder, came up in the fourth.

By the middle innings, shortly after two o'clock, these zealots were all back at their desks, the Yankees were down, 30, and I was lonely as a cloud in the Charles. Johnny Podres, the veteran Dodger lefty, was, unbelievably, pitching even better than Koufax had. He was less flashy but more efficient, working on the premise that it takes five or six pitches to strike a batter out but only two or three to get him to pop up or ground one to an infielder. This had become a nice, dull pitchers' Series. The TV announcers, Scully and then Mel Allen, tried to disguise the fact that the fall cla.s.sic was laying an egg by supplying me with a steady stream of boiler-plate news. A dandruff of exclamation points fell on my shoulders as I learned that d.i.c.k Tracewski and an umpire named Joe Paparella came from the same home town, that Tommy Davis was the youngest batter to win the National League batting champions.h.i.+p two years running, that Al Downing had been twelve years old when Jim Gilliam played in his first World Series, and that the Dodgers' Ron Perranoski and the Red Sox' d.i.c.k Radatz had both attended Michigan State! There was still another non-news flash from Mel Allen, but his peroration-"something that means nothing but is nonetheless interesting"-was so arrestingly metaphysical that I didn't catch the rest of the message.

Languis.h.i.+ng, I studied the pictures on the wall-shots of Ketchel fighting Billy Papke, Dempsey knocking out Jess Willard-and wished I were at ringside. Then I found a framed motto and studied that: Life is like a journey taken on a train With a pair of travelers at each window pane.

I may sit beside you all the journey through, Or I may sit elsewhere never knowing you.

But if fate should mark me to sit by your side Let's be pleasant travelers, it's so short a ride.

-A Thought I straightened my tie and looked about for someone to be pleasant to, but the nearest fellow-traveler was fourteen feet down the bar and totally occupied in making rings on the mahogany with his beer gla.s.s. I had to finish this particular part of life's journey, a longish one, alone with Mel Allen. Eventually, Podres ("The Witherbee, New York, Wonder!") won, 41, with a little help in the ninth from Perranoski, and the Series ("America's greatest sporting spectacle!") removed itself to California.

I was understandably anxious for company during the next game, and I found it at the Cameo, a Yorkville snuggery at Eighty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue. The U-shaped bar, which enclosed two bartenders, two islands of bottles, and the TV set, was almost full when I came in, and everyone there seemed to know everyone else. It was a good big-city gumbo-men and women, Irishmen and Negroes and Jews and Germans, most of them older than the spectators I had encountered downtown. This was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and the game, being played in Los Angeles, began at four o'clock, which is drinking time on Yorkville weekends. Boilermakers were the favorite, but there were interesting deviations, including one belt I had never seen before-a shot gla.s.s of gin with lemon juice squeezed into it. Everybody kept his drinking money out on the bar in front of him. With their club down two games, Yankee fans had grown reticent, but there was one brave holdout, a woman in her late forties named Millie, who was relying on voodoo. She had fas.h.i.+oned a tiny Dodger image out of rolled and folded paper napkins held together with elastic bands, and throughout the game she kept jabbing it viciously and hopefully with toothpicks. When Jim Gilliam came up in the bottom of the first, she stuck a toothpick in each of the doll's arms. "He's a switch-hitter," she explained, "so I gotta get him both ways."

The arrows failed to reach Los Angeles in time, though. Gilliam walked and then took second when Jim Bouton, the Yankees' soph.o.m.ore fast-baller, threw a bullet all the way to the foul screen behind home plate. Tommy Davis. .h.i.t a ball that bounced off the pitcher's mound and then off Bobby Richardson's s.h.i.+n, and Gilliam scored. The Yankees were again behind in the very first inning (as it turned out, they never led in a single game of the Series), and the Dodger glee club in the Cameo was in full voice. "None of that sweet sugar for the Yanks this year!" one man exclaimed.

In the next few innings, I evolved the theory that the Dodger pitching staff had made a large pre-Series bet on their comparative abilities, because Don Drysdale, the handsome home-team pitcher, was easily surpa.s.sing both Koufax and Podres. His fast ball and his astonis.h.i.+ng curves, pitched three-quarters overhand from the apparent vicinity of third base, had the Yankee batters bobbing and swaying like Little Leaguers. Even so, it was an exciting, lively afternoon, because Bouton, although in a lather of nerves, kept pitching his way out of one jam after another, and the game, if not the entire Series, now almost surely hung on that one run. In the seventh, the Dodgers seemed certain to widen the gap when they put Roseboro on third and Tracewski on second, with none out. The combination of tension and boilermakers proved too much for one fan at this juncture. "This Roseboro's gonna blast one," he announced loudly. "Just watch and see."

"What's the matter with you?" his companion said, embarra.s.sed. "Roseboro's standing on third. What are you-bagged or something?"

"That's what I said," the other insisted. "He's gonna hit a homer. Roseboro's gonna hit a homer."

What did happen was almost as unlikely. Drysdale hit a sharp grounder between second and first, which Richardson ran down with his back to the plate and pegged to Pepitone for the out at first. Pepitone then jogged happily across the infield, having found both Roseboro and Tracewski hopefully toeing third base. Roseboro had held up, Tracewski had run, and it was a double play. The man on the bar stool just to my right, who had told me that he once played semi-pro ball, was disgusted. "What's the matter with that Roseboro?" he said in disbelief. "No outs and the ball's. .h.i.t hard to right, you got to run. You don't even look-you just go! That's baseball. Everybody knows that."

As it turned out, the insurance run was unnecessary. With two out in the top of the ninth, Pepitone hit a high smash that seemed to be headed for the bleachers. The Cameo's Yankee fans gave their only yell of the afternoon, but Ron Fairly, with his back almost against the right-field wall, put up his hands and made the catch that ended the game. Millie shook her head slowly and then crumpled her doll into a wet ball on the bar.

The next afternoon, I witnessed the obsequies in the bar of the Croydon, a genteel residential hotel on Eighty-sixth Street just off Madison Avenue. Surrounded almost entirely by women, but joined from time to time by bellboys and doormen and waiters who dropped into the bar to catch the action, I saw Frank Howard, the Dodger monster, apparently swing with one hand as he hit a hyperbolic home run into the second tier in left field-a blow that Mickey Mantle almost matched with his tying poke in the seventh. Whitey Ford pitched perhaps the best of all his twenty-one World Series games, giving the Dodgers only two hits, but he was up against Koufax again, and the Yankee hitters remained hopelessly polite. In the seventh, Clete Boyer's throw to Pepitone went through the Yankee first baseman as if he had been made of ectoplasm, and Gilliam steamed all the way around to third on the error, immediately scoring on Willie Davis's fly. At this juncture, the talk in the bar, which had been pro-Dodger (when it was not concerned with haute couture, Madame Nhu, Elizabeth Taylor, and lower-abdominal surgery), took a sharp, shocked swerve toward disbelief and sadness. Even a lifelong Dodger fan who had come with me to the Croydon was affected. "I never thought the Yankees would go out like this, without winning one d.a.m.ned game," he said, shaking his head. He sounded like a tormented foretopman who had just learned that Captain Bligh was dying of seasickness. The demise came quickly. Richardson singled, but Tresh and then Mantle took third strikes with their bats resting comfortably on their shoulders. There was an error by Tracewski, but Lopez dribbled to Wills for the last out, and the Dodger squad galloped out and tried to tear souvenir chunks off their baby, Koufax.

As drama, the 1963 World Series was wanting in structure and development. This lack of catharsis was sensed, I am sure, even by Dodger supporters. This disappointment, the small, persistent resentment, about the outcome of the Series which is felt (or so I believe) by Yankee fans is at least partly a result of the fact that they had to wait through a long summer of vapid American League baseball, in which the Yankees walked over such feeble and acquiescent challengers as the Chicago White Sox, the Minnesota Twins, and the Baltimore Orioles. The only crucial series for the Yanks in 1963 was the last one, and they m.u.f.fed it shockingly.

Those millions of us who saw the Series on television were left with the emptiest balloon of all. There is a small paradox here, because these were pitchers' games, and the television camera, hovering over the home-plate empire's shoulder and peering down the back of the pitcher's neck, gives a far better view of each ball and strike than any spectator can get from the stands. But baseball is not just pitching. A low-scoring series of games is stirring only if one can sense the almost unbearable pressure it puts on base-running and defense, and this cannot be conveyed even by highly skilled cameramen. This World Series was lost by a handful of Yankee mistakes, most of which were either not visible or not really understandable to television-watchers. The cameras were on the hitter when Maris fell in the second game. The grounder that bounced off Richardson in the third game and Pepitone's astonis.h.i.+ng fluff in the final game caused everyone near me to ask "What happened?" On the same two-dimensional screen, it looked as if the throw to Pepitone had hit the dirt, instead of skidding off his wrist, as it did. It is the lack of the third dimension on TV that makes baseball seem less than half the game it is, that actually deprives it of its essential beauty, clarity, and excitement.

Yankee fans grew increasingly invisible as the Series progressed, and now they must nurse their winter puzzlement and disappointment with whatever grudging grace they can muster; to do otherwise would seem ungrateful in the face of their team's nine world champions.h.i.+ps and thirteen American League pennants in the past fifteen years. But it must be clear to them now that this Yankee team is not the brilliant, almost incomparable squad that many baseball writers claimed it was. No team can be judged entirely on one series, and the Yankees were not disgraced, for all the games were close; this was nothing like the dreary one-sided pasting that the Yankees gave the Cincinnati Reds in five games in 1961. And the Dodgers' pitching, opportunism, and nerve were magnificent. But fine pitching inevitably means bad batting; the terms are synonymous. Hard luck and injuries notwithstanding, the Yankees' best and most publicized athletes have not been of much help to them in recent Octobers. Mickey Mantle has batted .167, .120, and .133 in his last three Series; Roger Maris has. .h.i.t .105, .174, and .000 in the same span. Whitey Ford has failed to win one of the last four Series games he has pitched. There is something wrong here-too little day-to-day opposition, perhaps a tiny lack of pride, perhaps a trace of moneyed smugness. Whatever it is, it probably explains this year's collapse and makes it certain that this Yankee team cannot be compared to the Ruffing-Gehrig-d.i.c.key teams of the nineteen-thirties or the DiMaggio-Henrich-Rizzuto Yanks of the nineteen-forties and fifties. What made those Yankee teams so fearsome, so admirable, so hated was typified by the death-ray scowl that Allie Reynolds, their ace right-handed pitcher a decade ago, used to aim at an enemy slugger stepping into the box in a crucial game. I can think of no member of the current team capable of such emotion, such combative pride. I suspect that local Yankee fans sensed the absence of this ingredient almost unconsciously, even before the Series began. That would explain, most of all, why the deepest pa.s.sions and noisiest pleasures of baseball were so conspicuously absent in the bars and streets and offices of the city this autumn.

TWO STRIKES ON THE IMAGE.

- October 1964 AS WE ALL KNOW, when the typical American business executive turns out his bedside light he devotes his next-to-last thought of the day to his corporate image-that elusive and essential ideal vision of his company which s.h.i.+mmers, or should s.h.i.+mmer, in the minds of consumers. Do they like us, he wonders. Do we look respectable? Honest? Lovable? Hmm. He sighs, stretches out, and tries to find sleep by once again striking out the entire batting order of the New York Yankees. As he works the count to three and two on Tom Tresh, it may suddenly occur to this well-paid insomniac that baseball itself has the most enviable corporate image in the world. Its evocations, overtones, and loyalties, firmly planted in the mind of every American male during childhood and nurtured thereafter by millions of words of free newspaper publicity, appear to be una.s.sailable. It is the national pastime. It is youth, springtime, a trip to the country, part of our past. It is the roaring excitement of huge urban crowds and the sleepy green afternoon silences of midsummer. Without effort, it engenders and thrives on heroes, legends, self-identification, and home-town pride. For six months of the year, it intrudes cheerfully into every American home, then frequently rises to a point of nearly insupportable tension and absorption, and concludes in the happy explosion of the country's favorite sporting spectacle, the World Series. Given these ancient and self-sustaining attributes, it would seem impossible that the executives of such a business could injure it to any profound degree through their own carelessness and greed, yet this is exactly what has happened to baseball in the past ten years. The season that just ended in two improbably close pennant races and in the victory of the Cardinals over the Yankees in a memorable seven-game World Series was also the most shameful and destructive year the game has experienced since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

The fervent loyalties of baseball are almost, but not quite, indestructible. I know a New York lady, now in her seventies, whose heart slowly bleeds through the summer over the misadventures of the Boston Red Sox, a team representing the home town she left in 1915. With immense difficulty, I have sustained something of that affection for the San Francisco Giants, once my New York team, but I know that my attachment will not survive the eventual departure of Willie Mays. Since 1953, six teams have changed their names and four entirely new teams have been born, so exactly half of the twenty major-league teams must count on a loyalty that is less than a dozen years old. Further expansion of both leagues is already being discussed, and at this writing it seems entirely possible that faltering attendance will cause three more franchises-Cleveland, Kansas City, and Milwaukee-to s.h.i.+ft to new cities within the next two seasons. Another team, the Angels, will conclude its brief tenancy in Los Angeles at the end of next year; starting in 1966, it will represent Anaheim, California, which is the home of Disneyland.

The irritation and dismay that I share with most baseball fans over this queasy state of affairs is not caused entirely by the appearance in our ballparks of so many semi-anonymous ballplayers with unfamiliar insignia on their s.h.i.+rtfronts, or by the inept play of so many of the new teams, or even by the ridiculously expanded new schedules, which now require the majors to play 1620 games, as against the old 1232, before they can determine two winners. Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark. He was followed at once by Horace Stoneham, who took his Giants to San Francisco while piously denying that he had any understanding with O'Malley, although every schoolboy knew that National League schedules required the presence of two teams on the West Coast. Within a few days, the largest and most vociferously involved baseball audience in the country was deprived of its two oldest franchises and left with the new knowledge that baseball's executives cared only for the profits inherent in novelty and new audiences, and sensed no obligation whatever-not even the obligation of candor-to the fans who had built their business.

The subsequent operations of Mr. O'Malley, the other owners of big-league teams, the league presidents, and Commissioner Ford Frick have been watched by fans with growing cynicism. In 1961, O'Malley, supported by Frick, permitted the establishment of a rival team in Los Angeles only after imposing such punitive conditions and rental fees that the Angels could not possibly succeed. The result, of course, is Anaheim. In the 1962 draft creating two new teams, the National League owners, ignoring the much fairer system inaugurated by the American League the previous year, protected their player investment so carefully that the squads were manned entirely by a miserable collection of culls and aging castoffs, and the two teams-the Houston Colt .45s and the Mets-have been a disgrace to baseball. The perverse loyalty of the Met fans-the New Breed-is at least partly engendered by a hatred for the kind of cold-blooded success typified by Mr. O'Malley and by the owners of the New York Yankees.

In the past few years, baseball has staged such unedifying spectacles as the loud public wrangle carried on by Charles O. Finley, the owner of the Athletics, in his attempt to secure more favorable stadium-rental terms from the munic.i.p.al government of Kansas City. At various times, since he purchased the club in 1960, Mr. Finley has threatened to move to Oakland, to Atlanta, or to almost any other city or hamlet that promised him a ballfield and the kind of profits he considers his due. Last winter, his negotiations with Louisville reached the point where the American League had to threaten him with expulsion before he accepted terms and signed a new lease for the Kansas City park. Mr. Finley, it should be added, is the man who had to be restrained by the baseball Rules Committee from enlivening the national pastime with orange baseb.a.l.l.s and green-and-gold bats. His notion that baseball owes him a free, or almost free, munic.i.p.al ballpark and the right to move wherever and whenever he chooses is neither eccentric nor atypical. Consider, for example, the fact that the Braves, who have been established in Milwaukee only since 1953, are now casting hungry eyes on Atlanta. This team-pennant winners in 1957 and 1958, and formidable contenders from 1952 through 1960-enjoyed four consecutive years in which their attendance topped two million, and in 1957 they established a league gate record of 2,215,404, so there can be no doubt about Milwaukee's enthusiasm for the sport. But now that the team is old and attendance is down, the chance to move on to new audiences, in the pattern established by O'Malley, may prove to be more tempting than the hard work involved in staying put and rebuilding the club. There is a powerful rumor that Milwaukee will move to Atlanta next year,* and other s.h.i.+fts, involving cities such as Cleveland, Kansas City, Seattle, Oakland,** and Dallas, are in the wind. If these shuttlings ever do take place, several million more fans will understand at last that baseball's executives view them as dimwitted louts who will automatically attach their attention and loyalty to the most recent second-rate team that happens to wear the home uniform.

The most significant event of the 1964 baseball season was the news on August 13 that the Columbia Broadcasting Company had bought control (80 percent) of the New York Yankees for the sum of $11,200,000. The shabby and by now typical manner of the maneuver was as dismaying as its import. Charles Finley, of Kansas City, and Arthur Allyn, president of the Chicago White Sox, were both informed of the deal in telephone calls from the American League president, Joe Cronin, who in one breath told them that league rules required them to vote on the transaction and in the next that their votes were meaningless, since he already had the three-quarters majority necessary for it to pa.s.s. This call came only two days after the annual major-league executive meetings in Chicago, during which the deal was never mentioned to Finley, Allyn, or the public. Finley's and Allyn's subsequent shouts of rage and the astonished editorial protests of the press were so piercing that Cronin convened a league meeting in Boston to consider the possible ant.i.trust violations implicit in the sale. The meeting turned into a whitewash, in which various proposals for reconsideration were ruled out of order or brushed aside and a tentative change of heart by the Baltimore owners (which could have killed the sale) was ruthlessly muscled down. A few facts about the inner councils of baseball may explain how this was possible. Dan Topping and Del Webb, the former owners and continuing managing executives of the Yankees, are as powerful in their league as Walter O'Malley is in his. Topping and O'Malley are both members of the majors' Executive Council, along with the two league presidents and Commissioner Frick. American League President Cronin is a brother-in-law of Calvin R. Griffith, the president of the Minnesota Twins. The Cleveland Indians are anxious to move their franchise, and would need the approval of the Yankees and other clubs in order to make the s.h.i.+ft. Lee MacPhail, the president of the Baltimore Orioles, is the brother of Bill MacPhail, director of sports for CBS. Several American League executives own blocks of CBS stock; the owners of the Los Angeles Angels, who also needed league approval for their franchise move, operate CBS affiliates in California, and John Fetzer, president of the Detroit Tigers, operates CBS-affiliated stations in the Middle West.

Television now exerts the most intense pressure on all aspects of baseball. Since the war, its total exposure of major-league games has destroyed most of the minor leagues. The widely varying amounts of TV revenue enjoyed by the big-league clubs have made the rich teams richer and do much to explain why so many poorer clubs want to s.h.i.+ft franchises. The potentialities of pay television, first attempted in California this year, are as yet unknown, but this new device may vastly increase the revenue of baseball, while causing further financial disruption in less-populated baseball territories. The Yankees, of course, already derive considerable money from their own telecasts and broadcasts-$1,200,000 from local stations, plus an additional $600,000 from CBS itself for their part in the nationwide Game of the Week telecasts. To drop CBS into the middle of this rich, untidy gumbo as the owner of baseball's No. 1 attraction may look like an engraved invitation for Congressional ant.i.trust investigations, but it is an entirely appropriate symbol of television's enormous interest in the game.

The sports television business has never been happy with baseball, which so far includes only two big-revenue packages-the All Star Games and Series-each year.** Moreover, the old pastime does not produce tidy two-hour segments of marketable time; a nationally televised Sat.u.r.day game may creep along into the early evening, and it cannot be puffed by much advance billing, since the meaning of its outcome may not be known until late September. This is almost intolerable to the young men in blazers who run sports TV; their dream is fifty weekends of world champions.h.i.+ps-in football, in baseball, in surfing, in Senior Women's Marbles-that are not to be missed by the weekend watcher. Yet these sportsmen cannot be dismissed so easily, for they command an audience of millions and revenues that are almost immeasurable. It must be a.s.sumed that baseball executives will do almost anything to climb aboard this gaudy bandwagon, and that the ultimate shape of baseball in the next ten years or so-its size, its franchise locations, and even its rules-will be largely determined not by tradition or regard for the fans or regard for the delicate balances of the game, but by the demands of the little box.

These objections, I am certain, will cut no ice with most baseball magnates, whose instant response to criticism of this nature is to smile and say, "Well, I'm in this for the money, of course." Of course. Baseball is a commercial venture, but it is one of such perfect equipoise that millions of us every year can still unembarra.s.sedly surrender ourselves to its unique and absorbing joys. The ability to find beauty and involvement in artificial commercial constructions is essential to most of us in the modern world; it is the life-giving navete. But navete is not gullibility, and those who persistently alter baseball for their quick and selfish purposes will find, I believe, that they are the owners of teams without a following and of a sport devoid of pa.s.sion.

It is a breath of fresh air to emerge from those noisome back rooms and to report, if far too briefly, on the World Series just past. That Series and the two or three weeks of the season that preceded it const.i.tuted the happiest kind of surprise, for they demonstrated the vitality, unpredictability, and accomplishments of the game itself. This was the year in which a few dozen baseball players barely retrieved their sport from the indoor thinkers. As everyone but the most obdurate recluse must know by now, the Yankees, after stumbling futilely for most of the season, came on to win thirty out of their last forty games, making up a six-and-a-half-game deficit and climbing past the White Sox and the Orioles to win the American League pennant on the next-to-the-last day of the season. (This race, breathtaking as it was, would have been even more dramatic if the league had not drawn up a ridiculous schedule that left no games whatever between the Yankees and the two other contenders after the middle of August.) Meanwhile, in the other league, the Phillies, a young, underprivileged team of have-nots, had painstakingly compiled a six-and-a-half-game lead of their own that looked absolutely una.s.sailable with two weeks of the season remaining. They then fell apart like a dropped tray of dishes, losing ten straight, and first the Cincinnati Reds and then the St. Louis Cardinals drew even, with the Giants hanging on by their fingernails just behind. On the last Sat.u.r.day of the season, the first four-way tie in the history of baseball was entirely possible. That afternoon, though, the Giants lost and dropped out of it, leaving the Phillies-Reds and Cardinals-Mets games to settle matters on the last day. The Phils, loose and angry now, took the Reds apart, 100, leaving it all for the Cards, who had only to beat the most popular losers in history. For a few innings, a magnificent comic-opera ending seemed possible, for the Mets, who had won the two previous games from the Cards by scores of 10 and 155, were leading, 32, as late as the fifth inning, thus sustaining baseball's tradition of autumn embarra.s.sments inflicted by last-place clubs upon their betters. Cla.s.s finally told, however, when three three-run outbursts won the game, 115, and brought the Cards their first pennant since 1946. The deep "Whew!" emitted by the nation's fans sounded familiar; since 1946 the National League has staged four pennant races that ended in a dead tie, four that were determined on the final day, and six more that were settled only in the final week of the season.

That last afternoon, I discovered that I was being torn in three. Part of me wanted the Phillies to win, because of their long, teeth-gritting stand against superior forces. Part of me was pulling for the Reds, if only because their admirable manager, Freddie Hutchinson, is suffering from lung cancer and deserved the present of another pennant. In the end, however, I was delighted about the Cardinals, because St. Louis is perhaps the most dedicated baseball town in the country, and eighteen years is too long for such worthy fans to wait for their reward. I must confess, too, to another, less n.o.ble feeling of joy: the Cardinals' pennant-and now their champions.h.i.+p-is solid puck in the eye for contemporary baseball owners.h.i.+p and management. Over the years, the Cardinal organization has been a model of modest, intelligent planning and direction. Before the league expansion, theirs was the westernmost and southernmost franchise, and they drew swarms of players and fans from the vast stretches of baseball's heartland. Even in lean summers, their home attendance rarely fell below the million mark, although their park seats only thirty-odd thousand. Three or four years ago, Vaughn P. (Bing) Devine, the club's vice-president and general manager, began the moves that resulted in this year's flag. He installed Johnny Keane, a veteran member of the Cardinal chain, as manager; he put in Eddie Stanky as director of player development; and he negotiated a number of trades of such astuteness that he was named 1963's Major League Executive of the Year. Meanwhile, however, August A. Busch, Jr., the St. Louis brewer who purchased the Cards in 1953, was growing impatient. Two years ago, irritated by the club's sixth-place finish, Busch