The Big-League Point of View

Why Baseball?

Millions of us have wondered. How can baseball maintain such a resolute grasp upon us? My own affection for the game has held steady for decades, perhaps even grown with age. After 25 years, I have no sense of wanting to be weaned from this habit. What seems most strange is the way so many of us reserve a protected portion of our lives for a game that often seems like an interloper among first-rate passions. What is baseball doing there, tucked on the same high shelf as our most entrenched attachments?

If asked where baseball stood among such notions as country and family, love and honor, art and religion, we might say derisively, "Just a game." But under oath, I'd abandon some of those Big Six before I'd give up baseball. Clearly, a sport that becomes one of our basic fidelities is something more than just a game. Perhaps the proper analogy is to our other inexplicable, joyous addictions.

A thread runs through all these idle loves. Each, like baseball, brings us into a small and manageable universe full of intriguing detail; we are beckoned into unambiguous worlds where the areas of certainty are large, the regions of doubt pleasantly small. The cook must wrestle with tarragon and basil, the gardener with weeds and pruning. The baseball fan knows every batting average down to the thousandth of a point. What steady ground on which to stand, if only in one corner of our lives. Each pastime has its own unstated set of values. The part of us that is a fly-fisherman or a curer of hams or a habitué of the bleachers has fragments of a viewpoint common to others who share those tastes.

When we meet a bona fide fan--and baseball fanciers can be as snobbish as wine sippers or dog breeders--we start from an assumption of kinship. Implicit is the sense that we both endorse a whole range of civilized, moderate preferences. By and large, baseball fans tend to prefer pastoral, slyly anecdotal, proven if slightly dated things to those that are urban or pretentious or trendy. We choose the gentle grandstand conversations, beer in hand, on a soft spring night over the raucous 40-yard-line scream, whiskey in fist, on a brisk autumn afternoon. Our presumption of comradeship is considerable. Anyone who shares our range of wise opinion must do dastardly deeds to lose our good will.

In sum, what baseball provides is fact. Fact in a butter sauce of tone. Fact in the sense of concrete detail. Tone, as in style and spirit.

In contrast to the unwieldy world that we hold in common, baseball offers a kingdom built to human scale. Its problems and questions are exactly our size. Here we may come when we feel the need for a rooted point of reference. In much the same way, we take a long hike or look for hard work when we suspect that what's bothering us is either too foolish or too serious to permit a solution.

Baseball isn't necessarily an escape from reality, though it can be that, too; it's merely one of our many refuges within the real where we try to create order on our own terms. Born to an age in which horror has become commonplace, in which tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

In those moments when we have had our bellyful of abstractions, it is detail--the richness of the particular--that restores us to ourselves. There are oceans of consolation, seas of renewed appetite, in as humble a thing as a baseball season. This great therapeutic wash of fact and anecdote draws us back to ourselves when we catch ourselves, like Ishmael, water gazing too long.

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In part, our attachment to baseball stems from a persistent feeling that major-leaguers tend to give the best of themselves to their game, even at peril to other parts of their lives. One big-leaguer, known for his drinking as well as for his fear that the bottle might be mastering him, once told me, defiantly and proudly, that in his entire career he had "never had one drink from the time I woke up until the game was over." Of course, sometimes this future Hall of Famer didn't wake up until late afternoon.

His point, ambiguous as it may have been, was this: As long as he could function, the game would get his best. Not because he owed it to the sport but because he assumed that the baseball part of him was the best part, the piece he'd fight longest to hold. Many creative people see their talent in this light; whatever else must be pruned or neglected, their painting or writing or composing will be given a full chance to prosper. Part of the power of baseball is this sense that players tend to be obsessed with their work--an intense dedication that gives them added stature, as well as an intimation of potential tragedy. An air of danger and courage surrounds anyone who has burned the bridges back to conventional life and devoted himself to the long shot of art. In their uncompromising confidence, in their sometimes stunningly inaccurate appraisals of themselves, ballplayers are linked--though they might (continued on page 122)Big-League(continued from page 118) never recognize it--to others who live on the edge.

The notion that such internally driven people can become slipshod overnight, just because they're egregiously overpaid, is bogus. By the time a man is established in the majors, his personality has been in place for a long time. For every player who counts his money and "retires" while still playing, there are more who are doubly motivated by the promise of greater wealth or by fear of public embarrassment or simply by a feeling of responsibility to live up to those fleeting gifts that distinguish them from other men.

The career athlete who is perceived to have fulfilled his potential is, within the jock community, given a sort of lifetime pass, a character reference that can never be revoked by misfortune. And the athlete whose peers believe that he wasted his talent is, in a way, never forgiven, no matter how hale a fellow the rest of us think he may be.

In baseball today, the twin internal dynamics of competition and artistry are still much stronger than the degenerative effects of riches. Consequently, we can still truly enjoy baseball. As long as we feel that the performers care deeply, the game is worth watching. Craft is the surest proof of sincerity.

Once, I sat next to Gaylord Perry, 300-game winner and curmudgeon, at a winter banquet. Initially, he despised me, as I assumed he would, since I was one of those slimy reporters who nag him about his spitball, his feuds with teammates, his undermining of managers and his money lust. But the thing Perry really loves to talk about, besides his tobacco crop, is baseball, and that link soon erased our differences.

"During games, I'll sit alone down at one end of the dugout and talk baseball," said Perry, then 44 and an ancient Seattle Mariner. "Pretty soon, the young players kinda gather around me. If anybody brings up any other subject, I just say, 'We're talkin' baseball down here. These are working hours. You wanna talk about something else, go the hell down to the other end.'

"It was amazing what those kids didn't know, and I enjoyed watchin' their eyes get big. I can tell a hitter's weaknesses the first time I ever see him just by watchin' him take his stance. Like, if a hitter carries the bat high and wraps it back around his neck," said Perry, giving a casual demonstration of the cocked wrists, "well, then you know he can't hit the fast ball in on his hands. It takes him too long to get the bat started and clear his hips out of the way.

"And if the hitter holds the bat low or lays it out away from him, then he can't hit the outside pitch with authority, especially the breaking ball. You can get him to pull the trigger too soon.

"Also, you gotta watch their feet. The good hitters, like Rod Carew or Eddie Murray, they've got a half dozen different stances and they'll change 'em between pitches. That's how you tell what they're guessing."

"What if they change stances," I asked, "just as you're winding up?"

Perry raised one eyebrow.

"Oh," I muttered, "you drill them."

"I hope so," he said.

If one quality distinguishes baseball as seen from a distance from the game at point-blank range, it's just this mix of constant technical analysis and an equal amount of prickly agitating. My favorite clubhouse was that of the 1977--1978 New York Yankees. Those world champs were perhaps the most brazen, acid-tongued, thick-skinned team that ever spit tobacco juice on one another's new Gucci shoes. A perfect Yankee day came late in 1977, when George Steinbrenner decided the item he needed to complete his circus was reclusive Dave Kingman. "We already have Captain Moody [Thurman Munson], Lieutenant Moody [Mickey Rivers], Sergeant Moody [Ken Holtzman] and Private Moody [Willie Randolph]," said third baseman Graig Nettles. "Now Dave can be Commander Moody."

The heirs to that tradition were the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, led by Cy Young winner Pete Vuckovich. When it's time to form a new musical group called Down with People, they ought to start with Vuke. Catching sight one day of Gorman Thomas, with his great mane of shaggy hair, his menacing mustache, his chaw of baccy, his Third World teeth and dirty uniform, the glowering Vuckovich accosted his roommate: "You are the ugliest."

"No, you are the ugliest," said Thomas, running his eye over Vuckovich's pockmarked skin, his beer belly, his whole cultivated mass-murderer mien. "In fact, you are the absolute worst in every way."

Most people who are world-class ugly would take offense at such audacity. Not Vuke.

"Well," he said proudly, "somebody's got to be."

Men with personalities as flinty, minds as sharp and tongues as tart as Perry, Nettles, Vuckovich and Thomas are the sort who define what we might call the big-league point of view. When I covered my first major-league game, in 1972, I assumed I had a respectable knowledge of the subject. Now, after 1001 nights in the ball park, I may know half of what I thought I knew then. Since that time, I have sat in a cozy seat at the railing of the second deck in Detroit, where you can lean forward and hear the swish of the bat when the on-deck hitter swings. That is where I began to fully grasp the central aspect of a baseball game--the tense business being conducted between pitcher and hitter. [See box on page 172.] It was there that I suddenly said to myself, "So that's 'changing speeds.' " One night, the Tigers' Jack Morris made me feel Warren Spahn's dictum--that hitting is timing and pitching is destroying timing. From that seat, I finally realized that Morris' fork ball--if properly set up--simply could not be hit. No, not even if the hitter was looking for it. Human reflexes unconsciously synchronized to an excellent fast ball could not react to a slower pitch thrown with the same motion. Until then, I'd assumed change-ups were pitches that worked only if they took the hitter by surprise. I believed that all cutie-pie pitchers lived in a world of constant danger.

But from that spot in Tiger Stadium, I sensed the paradoxical physics of pitching. It's as physically difficult to hit a slow pitch after seeing a fast one thrown with the same delivery as it is to hit a laser-beam heater. That's why "junk ball" pitchers so seldom get their comeuppance; their success isn't predicated on their savvy but on the hitter's synapses. Changing speeds isn't a trick. Once mastered, it's a dependable basic. Whitey Ford used to say he had the hitter's front foot on a string and could jerk that lead foot off stride whenever he wanted. In Detroit, I realized exactly what he meant.

The game's only comparably close seats are in Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, which is where I learned the truth about big-league fast balls. In high school, where I was a nondescript player, I once lined a double off a kid named Tom Bradley, who later won 55 games in the majors. For years, I thought this meant that major-league pitchers didn't throw much faster than the best high school and college hurlers. Sure, big-leaguers had better control, better breaking balls; but I believed I'd seen respectable fast balls.

Then, from the Fenway boxes in 1978, I saw Goose Gossage pitch to Carl Yastrzemski with a pennant in the balance. (continued on page 168)Big-League(continued from page 122) What Gossage was throwing was not a baseball; it was something out of a different, smaller dimension. On my best day, I wouldn't play catch with Goose Gossage, not with all the world's equipment. Nor would I get in the on-deck circle. In fact, sitting in those box seats, I suspected I was already too close to him.

I've watched closely since those days when I first stepped into major-league dugouts with an outsider's approach to the sport. Over the years, I've gradually altered that angle of vision until, while still half outsider, I've had the inside view as well.

What is this big-league point of view?

In many ways, the pros watch a game or a season just as we fans do; when a fly ball is heading for the fence, they root exactly like the folks in the bleachers. However, more often than not, the ballplayer sees things much differently from the rest of us. If we truly want to taste the facts of the game, to get the flavors right, then we must add these insider's perceptions to our own. We can begin with a set of principles, commandments (if you will) of dugout perspective.

• Judge slowly.

No, even more slowly than that.

Never judge a player over a unit of time shorter than a month. A game or even a week is nothing; you must see a player hot, cold and in between before you can put the whole package together. Sometimes, in the case of a proven player, a whole season is not time enough to judge, especially if there are extenuating circumstances. In 1981, Fred Lynn was traded from Boston, where he'd consistently hit .300 with power, to California, where he batted .219 with five homers. The quick judgment was that Lynn was a Fenway Park hitter who would never be an All-Star away from it. In 1982, Lynn was healthy, made his technical adjustments at the plate and saw his stats return close to their Fenway levels.

The rush to judge is the most certain sign of a baseball outsider. In 1982, when Steinbrenner tried to run his Yankees as well as own them, he shot from the hip, like a guy in the cheap seats who's had one beer too many. The results were a disaster. Steinbrenner, with his football and business backgrounds, didn't have the patience to come to sound, fully digested decisions; why, he even made judgments of players on the basis of just one game--absolute proof that he lacked baseball sense. A baseball man is usually the last to work his way to a firm opinion and also the last to abandon it. Steinbrenner is always the first on the boat and the first off.

• Assume every player is trying reasonably hard.

Of all the factors at work in baseball, effort is the last to consider. In the majors, you seldom try your hardest; "giving 110 percent," as a general mode of operation, would be counterproductive for most players. The issue in baseball is finding the proper balance between effort and relaxation. Usually, something on the order of 80 percent effort is about right. Few players have trouble revving that high. Many can't get down that low. Physical sluggishness, called jaking, is relatively rare, except among heavy drug users, who are sometimes on call in another star system.

• Physical errors, even the most grotesque ones, should be forgiven.

On good teams, the physical limitations of players are nearly ignored. The short hop that eats an infielder alive, the ball in the dirt that goes to the screen, the hitter who is hopelessly overpowered by a pitcher--all those hideous phenomena are treated as if they never occurred. "Forget it," players say to one another reflexively. It's assumed that every player is physically capable of performing every duty asked of him. If he can't, it's never his fault. His mistake is simply regarded as part of a professional's natural human margin of error.

Even if a player consistently makes physical blunders, it's still not his fault and he's not blamed. It's the front office's fault for not coming up with a better player; the assumption is that stars are rare but there is always an abundance of competent professionals. Or it's the manager's fault for putting a player in a situation beyond his capacities. You don't ask Roy Howell to hit Ron Guidry. And if you do, his strikeout is your fault, not his.

• Mental errors are judged harshly, though physical errors are ignored.

The essential question is whether a mistake has been made "from the neck up or from the neck down"--and there's always an answer.

Mental errors, however, come in a wide variety. Failure in any fundamental--laying down a sacrifice bunt, hitting the cutoff man, covering or backing up bases, receiving or relaying a sign, even catching a wind-blown pop-up--is considered a quasi-mental error. Why? Because with the proper mental discipline, a player could have learned to master those basic skills.

As an extreme example, consider a pitcher who walks home the winning run: He is guilty of a grievous mental error, because a major-league pitcher is assumed to be able to throw a strike whenever the situation absolutely demands it. If he can't, the problem usually has more to do with poise or preparation or proper thinking on the mound than with the physical act of throwing the ball.

• Pay more attention to the mundane than to the spectacular.

Baseball is a game of huge samplings. The necessity for consistency usually outweighs the need for the rare inspired play. In judging any player, never measure him by his greatest catch, his longest home run, his best-pitched game. That is the exception; baseball is the game of the rule.

• Pay more attention to the general theory of baseball than to the outcome of a particular game.

Don't let your evaluations be swayed too greatly by the final score. The most common error of novice reporters is their tendency to watch what happens rather than study the principles underlying the action. You don't ask, "Did that pinch hitter get a hit?" In a sense, that's a matter of chance. The worst hitter will succeed one time in five, while the best will fail two times in three. Instead, ask, "Given all the factors in play at that moment, was he the correct man to use in that situation?"

Only then will you begin to sense the game as a team does. If a team loses a game but has used its resources properly--relieved its starting pitcher at a sensible juncture, used sound strategy during its rallies, minimized its mental and fundamental mistakes, had the right pinch hitters at the plate in the late innings, with the game on the line--then that team is often able to ignore defeat utterly. Players say, "We did everything right but win."

If you do everything right every day, you'll still lose 40 percent of your games--but you'll also end up in the world series. Nowhere is defeat as meaningless as in baseball. And nowhere are the theories and broad tactics that run under the game so important.

• Players are always the best judges of how they are playing.

At the technical level, major-leaguers seldom fool themselves--the stakes are far too high. Self-criticism is ingrained. If a player on a ten-game hitting streak says he's in a slump, then believe him; if a player who's one for 15 says that he's "on" every pitch but that he's hitting a lot of "atom balls" ("right at 'em"), then assume he's about to go on a tear.

There are exceptions. Jim Palmer, who always thought his arm was about to fall off, once alternately begged and cursed his manager in hope of being removed during the last three innings of a game in which he completed a one-hit shutout. Al Oliver, owner of baseball's best superiority complex and a lifetime .300 average, believes the only reason he didn't have a 100-R.B.I. year until his 12th season was that "I always seem to hit in bad luck."

• Stay ahead of the action, not behind it--or even neck and neck.

Remember, the immediate past is almost always prelude. Ask hurlers how they go about selecting their pitches and they invariably say, "By watching the previous pitch." The thrower, who relies on pure power or sharp stuff, plans his game in advance; the pitcher, who lives more by his wits and finesse, creates his plan as he goes along. A veteran pitcher usually doesn't know what he'll throw on his second pitch until he sees what happens to the first. "Don't judge your fast ball by those darn radar guns," says Perry. "Judge by how the hitters act."

"Was that batter taking or swinging?" a pitcher constantly asks himself--and so should a fan. Was he ahead of the curve ball or behind the fast ball? Was he trying to pull, to go to the opposite field, or simply to "go with the pitch"? Was he trying for power or contact? And, just as important, how has he reacted to these challenges from the pitcher in the past? Does he tend to adjust his intentions from pitch to pitch (which is unusual) or from at bat to at bat (which is more common)? Or is he so stubborn that he has a plan for the entire game and will "sit on the fast ball" or "wait for that change-up all night" in hope of seeing the one pitch he can poleax?

That's how baseball has been watched in every respectable dugout for as long as the oldest hands can remember. And the closer you come to those big-league viewing habits of reflective sifting and tendency spotting, the more enjoyable and open the game will become. Of all our major sports, baseball most richly rewards the spectator in proportion to his effort.

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Baseball offers us pleasure and insight at so many levels and in so many forms that when we try to grasp the whole sport in our two hands, we end up with nothing. The game, because it is no one thing but, rather, dozens of things, has slipped through our fingers again.

As each season begins, we feel the desire to capsulize and define the source of the sharp anticipation that we feel with the approach of opening day. We know that something fine is about to begin, but we can't quite say why baseball seems almost indispensable to us. The game, which remains one of our broadest sources of metaphor, changes with our mood, our angle of vision; there seems to be no end to our succession of lucky discoveries.

When opening day arrives, all our concentric baseball worlds begin revolving and countless questions come around once again: Will those staggering old peregrines, Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson, with their dignity endangered, find 4000 hits and 500 homers at their roads' end? Will Terry Felton--0--16 in his career and looking for work in the minors--ever win a major-league game? Each season starts with a universe of such questions.

Sure, opening day is baseball's band wagon. Pundits and politicians and every prose poet on the continent jump aboard for the first week in April. But they're gone soon, off in search of some other windy event worthy of their attention. Then, once more, all those long, slow months of baseball are left to us. And our time can begin again.

"What Gossage was throwing was not a baseball; it was something out of a different, smaller dimension."

"A baseball man is usually the last to work his way to a firm opinion and the last to abandon it."