The Only Game in Town Page 3
In the home half of the sixth, Yale put its lead-off batter aboard with a single but could not bunt him along. Joe Wood was distressed. “I could teach these fellows to bunt in one minute,” he said. “Nobody can’t hardly bunt anymore. You’ve got to get your weight more forward than he did, so you’re not reaching for the ball. And he should have his right hand higher up on the bat.”
The inning ended, and we reversed directions once again. “Ty Cobb was the greatest bat handler you ever saw,” Wood said. “He used to go out to the ballpark early in the morning with a pitcher and work on hitting the ball to all fields, over and over. He batted that strange way, with his fists apart, you know, but he could have hit just as well no matter how he held it. He just knew what to do with a bat in hand. And baserunning—why, I saw him get on base and steal second, steal third, and then steal home. The best. A lot of fellows in my time shortened up on the bat when they had to—that’s what the St. John’s boys should try against this good pitcher. Next to Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best left-handed hitter I ever saw, and he was always down at the end of the bat until there were two strikes on him. Then he’d shorten up a little, to give himself a better chance.”
Dick Lee said, “That’s what you’ve been telling Charlie Polka, isn’t it, Joe?”
“Yes, sir, and it’s helped him,” Wood said. “He’s tried it, and now he knows that all you have to do is make contact and the ball will fly a long way.”
Both men saw my look of bewilderment, and they laughed together.
“Charlie Polka is a Little League player,” Dick Lee explained. “He’s about eleven years old.”
“He lives right across the street from me,” Wood said. “He plays for the 500 Blake team—that’s named for a restaurant here in town. I’ve got him shortened up on the bat, and now he’s a hitter. Charlie Polka is a natural.”
“Is that how you batted?” I asked.
“Not at first,” he said. “But after I went over to Cleveland in 1917 to join my old roommate, Tris Speaker, I started to play the outfield, and I began to take up on the bat, because I knew I’d have to hit a little better if I was going to make the team. I never was any wonder at the plate, but I was good enough to last six more years, playing with Spoke.”
Tris Speaker (Wood had called him by his old nickname, Spoke) was the Joe DiMaggio or Willie Mays of the first two decades of this century—the nonpareil center fielder of his day. “He had a beautiful left-handed arm,” Joe Wood said. “He always played very shallow in center—you could do that in those days, because of the dead ball. I saw him make a lot of plays to second base from there—pick up what looked like a clean single and fire the ball to second in time to force the base runner coming down from first. Or he could throw the ball behind a runner and pick him off that way. And just as fine a man as he was a ballplayer. He was a southern gentleman—well, he was from Hubbard, Texas. Back in the early days, when we were living together on the beach at Winthrop during the season, out beyond Revere, Spoke would sometimes cook up a mess of fried chicken in the evening. He’d cook, and then I’d do the dishes.”
Listening to this, I sensed the web of baseball about me. Tris Speaker had driven in the tying run in the tenth inning of the last game of the 1912 World Series, at Fenway Park, after Fred Merkle and Chief Meyers, of the Giants, had let his easy foul pop fall untouched between them. A moment or two later, Joe Wood had won his third game of the Series and the Red Sox were champions. My father saw that game—he was at Harvard Law School at the time, and got a ticket somehow—and he told me about it many times. He was terrifically excited to be there, but I think my mother must have relished the famous victory even more. She grew up in Boston and was a true Red Sox fan, even though young women didn’t go to many games then. My father grew up in Cleveland, so he was an Indians rooter, of course. In 1915, my parents got married and went to live in Cleveland, where my father began to practice law. Tris Speaker was traded to the Indians in 1916—a terrible shock to Red Sox fans—and Joe Wood came out of his brief retirement to join him on the club a year later. My parents’ first child, my older sister, was born in Cleveland late in 1916, and the next year my father went off to Europe—off to the war. My mother once told me that in the summer afternoons of 1917 she would often push a baby carriage past League Park, the Indians’ home field, out on Linwood Avenue, which was a block or two away from my parents’ house. Sometimes there was a game going on, and if she heard a roar of pleasure from the fans inside she would tell herself that probably Tris Speaker had just done something special. She was lonely in Cleveland, she told me, and it made her feel good to know that Tris Speaker was there in the same town with her. “Tris Speaker and I were traded to Cleveland in the same year,” she said.
A yell and an explosion of cheering brought me back to Yale Field. We were in the top of the seventh, and the Yale second baseman and captain, Gerry Harrington, had just leaped high to snatch down a burning line drive—the force of it almost knocked him over backward in midair. Then he flipped the ball to second to double off a St. John’s base runner and end the inning. “These fellows came to play!” Dick Lee said.
Most no-hitters produce at least one such heaven-sent gift somewhere along the line, and I began to believe that Ron Darling, who was still untouched on the mound, might be pitching the game of his young life. I turned to ask Mr. Wood how many no-hitters he recalled—he had seen Mathewson and Marquard and Babe Ruth (Ruth, the pitcher, that is) and Coveleski and the rest of them, after all—but he seemed transfixed by something on the field. “Look at that!” he said, in a harsh, disbelieving way. “This Yale coach has his own coaches out there on the lines, by God! They’re professionals—not just players, the way I always had it when I was here. The coach has his own coaches…I never knew that.”
“Did you have special coaches when you were coming up with the Red Sox?” I said, hoping to change his mood. “A pitching coach, I mean, or a batting coach?”
He didn’t catch the question, and I repeated it.
“No, no,” he said, a little impatiently. “We talked about the other players and the pitchers among ourselves in those days. We players. We didn’t need anybody to help us.”
He was staring straight ahead at the field. I thought he looked a bit chilly. It was well past five o’clock now, and a skim of clouds had covered the sun.
Dick Lee stole a glance at him, too. “Hey, Joe, doesn’t this Darling remind you a little of Carl Hubbell on the mound?” he said in a cheerful, distracting sort of voice. “The way he picks up his front leg, I mean. You remember how Hubbell would go way up on the stretch and then drop his hands down by his ankles before he threw the ball?”
“Hubbell?” Joe Wood said. He shook his head, making an effort. “Well, to me this pitcher’s a little like that fellow Eckersley,” he said slowly. “The way he moves forward there.”
He was right. Ron Darling had exactly the same float and glide that the Red Sox’ Dennis Eckersley conveys when he is pitching well.
“How do today’s players compare with the men you played with, Mr. Wood?” I asked.
“I’d rather not answer that question,” he said. He had taken out his watch again. He studied it and then tucked it away carefully, and then he glanced over at me, perhaps wondering if he had been impolite. “That Pete Rose plays hard,” he added. “Him and a few more. I don’t like Pete Rose, exactly, but he looks like he plays the game the way we did. He’d play for the fun of it if he had to.”
He resumed his study of the field, and now and then I saw him stare again at the heavyset Yale third-base coach on our side of the diamond. Scoreless games make for a long day at the ballpark, and Joe Wood’s day had probably been longer than ours. More than once, I had seen him struggle to his feet to catch some exciting play or moment on the field, only to have it end before he was quite up. Then he would sit down again, leaning on his cane while he lowered himself. I had more questions for Mr. Wood, but now I tried to put them out of my mind.
Earlier in the afternoon, he had remarked that several old Yale players had dropped in at his house before the game to say hello and to talk about the old days. “People come by and see me all the time,” he had said. “People I don’t even know, from as far away as Colorado. Why, I had a fellow come in all the way from Canada the other day, who just wanted to talk about the old days. They all want that, somehow. It’s gone on too long.”
It had gone on for him, I realized, for as long as most lifetimes. He had played ball for fourteen years, all told, and people had been asking him to talk about it for nearly sixty years. For him, the last juice and sweetness must have been squeezed out of these ancient games years ago, but he was still expected to respond to our amateur expertise, our insatiable vicariousness. Old men are patronized in much the same fashion as athletes; because we take pride in them, we expect their intimacy in return. I had intruded after all.
We were in the eighth now…and then in the ninth. Still no score, and each new batter, each pitch was greeted with clappings and deepening cries of encouragement and anxiety from the stands and the players alike. The close-packed rows hummed with ceaseless, nervous sounds of conversation and speculation—an impatience for the dénouement, and a fear of it, too. All around me in our section I could see the same look of resignation and boredom and pleasure that now showed on my own face, I knew—the look of longtime fans who understand that one can never leave a very long close game, no matter how much inconvenience and exasperation it imposes on us. The difficulty of baseball is imperious.
“Yay! Yay!” Dick Lee cried when Yale left fielder Joe Dufek led off the eighth with a single. “Now come on, you guys! I gotta get home for dinner.” But the next Yale batter bunted into a force play at second, and the chance was gone. “Well, all right—for breakfast!” Lee said, slumping back in his seat.
The two pitchers held us—each as intent and calm and purposeful as the other. Ron Darling, never deviating from the purity of his stylish body-lean and leg-crook and his riding, down-thrusting delivery, poured fastballs through the diminishing daylight. He looked as fast as ever now, or faster, and in both the ninth and the tenth he dismissed the side in order and with four more strikeouts. Viola was dominant in his own fashion, also setting down the Yale hitters one, two, three in the ninth and tenth, with a handful of pitches. His rhythm—the constant variety of speeds and location on his pitches—had the enemy batters leaning and swaying with his motion, and, as antistrophe, was almost as exciting to watch as Darling’s flair and flame. With two out in the top of the eleventh, a St. John’s batter nudged a soft little roller up the first-base line—such an easy, waiting, schoolboy sort of chance that the Yale first baseman, O’Connor, allowed the ball to carom off his mitt: a miserable little butchery, except that the second baseman, seeing his pitcher sprinting for the bag, now snatched up the ball and flipped it toward him almost despairingly. Darling took the toss while diving full-length at the bag and, rolling in the dirt, beat the runner by a hair.
“Oh, my!” said Joe Wood. “Oh, my, oh, my!”
Then in the bottom of the inning Yale suddenly loaded the bases—a hit, a walk, another walk (Viola was just missing the corners now)—and we all came to our feet, yelling and pleading. The tilted stands and the low roof deepened the cheers and sent them rolling across the field. There were two out, and the Yale batter, Dan Costello, swung at the first pitch and bounced it gently to short, for a force that ended the rally. Somehow, I think, we knew that we had seen Yale’s last chance.
“I would have taken that pitch,” I said, entering the out in my scorecard. “To keep the pressure on him.”
“I don’t know,” Joe Wood said at once. “He’s just walked two. You might get the cripple on the first pitch and then see nothing but hooks. Hit away.”
He was back in the game.
Steve Scafa, leading off the twelfth, got a little piece of Darling’s first pitch on the handle of his bat, and the ball looped softly over the shortstop’s head and into left: a hit. The loudspeakers told us that Ron Darling’s eleven innings of no-hit pitching had set a new NCAA tournament record. Everyone at Yale Field stood up—the St. John’s players, too, coming off their bench and out onto the field—and applauded Darling’s masterpiece. We were scarcely seated again before Scafa stole second as the Yale catcher, Paterno, bobbled the pitch. Scafa, who is blurrily quick, had stolen thirty-five bases during the season. Now he stole third as well. With one out and runners at the corners (the other St. John’s man had reached first on an error), Darling ran the count to three and two and fanned the next batter—his fifteenth strikeout of the game. Two out. Darling sighed and stared in, and then stepped off the mound while the St. John’s coach put in a pinch-runner at first—who took off for second on the very next pitch. Paterno fired the ball quickly this time, and Darling, staggering off the mound with his follow-through, did not cut it off. Scafa came ten feet down the third-base line and stopped there, while the pinch-runner suddenly jammed on the brakes, stranding himself between first and second: a play, clearly—an inserted crisis. The Yale second baseman glanced twice at Scafa, freezing him, and then made a little run at the hung-up base runner to his left and threw to first. With that, Scafa instantly broke for the plate. Lured by the vision of the third out just a few feet away from him on the base path, the Yale first baseman hesitated, fractionally and fatally, before he spun and threw home, where Scafa slid past the tag and came up, leaping and clapping, into the arms of his teammates. That was the game. Darling struck out his last man, but a new St. John’s pitcher, a right-handed fireballer named Eric Stampfl, walked on and blew the Elis away in their half.
“Well, that’s a shame,” Joe Wood said, getting up for the last time. It was close to six-thirty, but he looked fine now. “If that man scores before the third out, it counts, you know,” he said. “That’s why it worked. I never saw a better-played game anyplace—college or big league. That’s a swell ballgame.”
Several things happened afterward. Neither Yale nor St. John’s qualified for the college World Series, it turned out; the University of Maine defeated St. John’s in the final game of the playoffs at New Haven (neither Viola nor Darling was sufficiently recovered from his ordeal to pitch again) and made the trip to Omaha, where it, too, was eliminated. Arizona State won the national title. On June 9, Ron Darling was selected by the Texas Rangers at the major-league amateur-player draft in New York. He was the ninth player in the country to be chosen. Frank Viola, the thirty-seventh pick, went to the Minnesota Twins. (The Seattle Mariners, who had the first pick this year, had been ready to take Darling, which would have made him the coveted No. 1 selection in the draft, but the club backed off at the last moment because of Darling’s considerable salary demands. As it was, he signed with the Rangers for a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus.) On June 12, the major-league players unanimously struck the twenty-six big-league teams. The strike has brought major-league ball to a halt, and no one can predict when play will resume. Because of this sudden silence, the St. John’s–Yale struggle has become the best and most vivid game of the year for me, so far. It may stay that way even after the strike ends. “I think that game will always be on my mind,” Ron Darling said after it was over. I feel the same way. I think I will remember it all my life. So will Joe Wood. Somebody will probably tell Ron Darling that Smokey Joe Wood was at the game that afternoon and saw him pitch eleven scoreless no-hit innings against St. John’s, and someday—perhaps years from now, when he, too, may possibly be a celebrated major-league strikeout artist—it may occur to him that his heartbreaking 0–1 loss in May 1981 and Walter Johnson’s 0–1 loss at Fenway Park in September 1912 are now woven together into the fabric of baseball. Pitch by pitch, inning by inning, Ron Darling had made that happen. He stitched us together.
1981
“All right, all right, try it that way! Go ahead and try it that way!”
AHAB AND NEMESIS
A. J. LIEBLING
Back in 1922, the late Heywood B
roun, who is not remembered primarily as a boxing writer, wrote a durable account of a combat between the late Benny Leonard and the late Rocky Kansas for the lightweight championship of the world. Leonard was the greatest practitioner of the era, Kansas just a rough, optimistic fellow. In the early rounds, Kansas messed Leonard about, and Broun was profoundly disturbed. A radical in politics, he was a conservative in the arts, and Kansas made him think of Gertrude Stein, Les Six, and nonrepresentational painting, all of them novelties that irritated him.
“With the opening gong, Rocky Kansas tore into Leonard,” he wrote. “He was gauche and inaccurate, but terribly persistent.” The classic verities prevailed, however. After a few rounds, during which Broun continued to yearn for a return to a culture with fixed values, he was enabled to record: “The young child of nature who was challenging for the championship dropped his guard, and Leonard hooked a powerful and entirely orthodox blow to the conventional point of the jaw. Down went Rocky Kansas. His past life flashed before him during the nine seconds in which he remained on the floor, and he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.”
I have often thought of Broun’s words in the three years since Rocky Marciano, the reigning heavyweight champion, scaled the fistic summits, as they say in Journal-American-ese, by beating a sly, powerful quadragenarian colored man named Jersey Joe Walcott. The current Rocky is gauche and inaccurate, but besides being persistent he is a dreadfully severe hitter with either hand. The predominative nature of this asset has been well stated by Pierce Egan, the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring, who was less preoccupied than Broun with ultimate implications. Writing in 1821 of a “milling cove” named Bill Neat, the Bristol Butcher, Egan said, “He possesses a requisite above all the art that teaching can achieve for any boxer; namely, one hit from his right hand, given in proper distance, can gain a victory; but three of them are positively enough to dispose of a giant.” This is true not only of Marciano’s right hand but of his left hand, too—provided he doesn’t miss the giant entirely. Egan doubted the advisability of changing Neat’s style, and he would have approved of Marciano’s. The champion has an apparently unlimited absorptive capacity for percussion (Egan would have called him an “insatiable glutton”) and inexhaustible energy (“a prime bottom fighter”). “Shifting,” or moving to the side, and “milling in retreat,” or moving back, are innovations of the late eighteenth century that Rocky’s advisers have carefully kept from his knowledge, lest they spoil his natural prehistoric style. Egan excused these tactics only in boxers of feeble constitution. I imagine Broun would have had a hard time fitting Marciano anywhere into his frame of reference.