Everything They Had (11 page)

Image is something that baseball is particularly sensitive about these days because there is more than reason to suspect that its hold as a national pastime has slipped. Its largest crowds during most of the season these days are huckstered crowds, drawn by promotions. Like all American boys of my age I like baseball and played it, and I retain a love-hate relationship with it, willing even to bear with, Holy Cow! Phil Rizzuto as he broadcasts Yankee games (“… Just like a ball player, he booted that one.... They have their good days and bad days.... After all they are human.... What a job Ralph Houk has done with this Yankee club.... This year and every year. If you can't play for Ralph Houk you can't play for anyone.... Michael's second error of the game. Those are the kind you boot.... They look too easy. You nonchalant them and boot them. But then you make a great play …”).

It is a sport with its own rhythms and graces, its skills are more often than not highly specialized; what makes a great natural athlete does not necessarily make a baseball player. By and large it is the American sport that a foreigner is least likely to take to. You have to grow up playing it, you have to accept the lore of the bubble-gum card, and believe that if the answer to the Mays-Snider-Mantle question is found then the universe will be a simpler and more ordered place. It is in trouble these days for a variety of reasons, ball parks in racially decaying areas, the difficulty of television, but most of all I think because it has not kept up with the velocity of American life, the jet age, instant gratification, instant action, the way other sports have. Football televises particularly well (I once lectured in Miami the day the Jets played the Colts in the Super Bowl, and flew back to New York because I couldn't watch the action as well with my naked eye). Similarly professional basketball has become a superb sport, now nationally televised, attracting, I suspect, the most brilliant athletes in the nation, and putting them to the most severe physical test. Baseball seems to suffer sharply by contrast with both; there is nothing more striking than watching an NBA game at the tail end of the season, and then during the time out switching over to baseball, the contrast in velocity and quality of action is extraordinary: basketball, three scores, one brilliant defensive block, one steal; baseball, three chaws of tobacco, one genital scratch by the pitcher, one reminder by the announcer that the game isn't over yet. In addition, I think the coming of the Negro athlete into American sports has made a marked difference for football and basketball because these are sports which are designed above all for
athletes
, whereas the coming of Negroes to baseball has simply shown that a very high percentage of them can play very well. That is to say: Willie Mays is a superb baseball player, and a rare superb athlete in baseball, perhaps the best single athlete in baseball of the last fifteen years. In a given game, when he plays well he may make one spectacular catch and swing the bat well once. You get perhaps eight seconds of watching a great athlete perform. Compare this with watching Gus Johnson of Baltimore in an average game, or, better still, Johnson against Dave DeBusschere for a good forty minutes. Superb athletes going up against other brilliant athletes, each move unpredictable, one is always amazed and surprised. If you have seen someone like Johnson or Bill Russell or some of the professional football players play and you still go to a baseball game, then I think you are making what is essentially a journey into nostalgia, and I think this is why baseball owners have to work so hard to get kids into the parks these days.

Baseball is, I think, the sport in which illusion and reality are furthest apart. Its dependence upon statistics proves its need for mythology; the performance is not fulfilling enough; it must be shown in quantified heroics, records to be set and broken, new myths and heroes to replace the old. (In this, I think, it is sharply different from pro football and pro basketball, where statistics are kept but are quite secondary to performance; most hep basketball fans know the Chamberlain Syndrome—that it is extremely difficult to show the statistical value of a player and his effect upon the team.) The height of the mound is to be tampered with if the records slip and there aren't enough .300 hitters around. A team with two .300 hitters is a team with heroes, but what myths can spring up about a .275 hitter? This, I think, was the dilemma for Roger Maris in 1961 and his remarkable unpopularity. He was breaking the record of one great mythological figure, the cripple-loving Babe, which was bad enough, but what was worse, he was doing it when the fans, led by the New York sportswriters and media, had been carefully indoctrinated to think that if the record fell it should go to Mantle, who if not orphan-loving was at least game-but-injury-prone, whereas Maris was still regarded as a Kansas City exile, openly sullen, lacking the requisite boyish grin. When Maris, alas, broke the record with sixty-one home runs and an asterisk, it was a dilemma which neither the fans nor Maris could resolve until finally and mercifully he left New York for St. Louis and the two final happy years of his career where the fans would cheer him for bunting for singles.

Now James Allen Bouton, of World Publishing, New York City, Cleveland, Seattle, Vancouver, Houston (earned run average 5.99, as this is written) has done it. He has written the best sports book
^*
in years, a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.

It is a fine and funny book, done in collaboration with Leonard Shecter, written with rare intelligence, wit, joy, and warmth; and a comparable insider's book about, say, the Congress of the United States, the Ford Motor Company, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be equally welcome. What is particularly pleasant about the Bouton book is that it is written from the heartland of mythology. What is important about the book, and about the critics of Bouton (most sportswriters and announcers), the anti-mythologists and the mythologists, is that they are in essential agreement about a basic point: baseball is America, the great American game, a reflection of what we are and who we are. If you look up and find baseball virtuous you are apt to find the country virtuous as well. Bouton's point is that yes, indeed, it is America, and more often than not run by selfish, stupid owners, men who deal with their ballplayers in a somewhat sophisticated form of slavery, that despite the reputation of melting pot, baseball dugouts reek of the same racial and social tensions and divisions that scar the rest of the country, that the underlying social common denominator is fairly crude and reminiscent of nothing so much as one's high-school locker room. It is now part of the mythology that baseball can do what the society as a whole did not do, which was to bring black and white together; white boy meets black boy, doesn't like him; black boy doubles in white boy with two out in the bottom ninth; lasting friendship forged. It is now clear, reading Bouton and others, such as William F. Russell and Jack Olsen, both of
Sports Illustrated
, that white and black getting along is the exception, that which plagues us nationally plagues us in the dugout and locker room, that if a team is winning, racial tension ebbs, that if it is losing, the mistakes then become racial. Reading Bouton, the baseball players become what they are, not larger than life, but perhaps, if anything, a little smaller. One is not tempted to say: “Son, I'd like you to grow up to be like Joe Pepitone.” Significantly, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who censured Bouton for having written the book, is now compromised as the nation's top Gillette razor-blade salesman, having allowed Gillette to take over the polling for the all-star game, then lending his and baseball's names to Gillette's promotion (“Pick up an official all-star ballot where Gillette products are sold or at any major- or minor-league ball park”). Good for you, Bowie Kuhn, as fine a decision as the one you made earlier in the year, suspending Denny McLain for
half
a season, but then there are few white super-stars left in the game and it wouldn't do to keep a thirty-game white winner out of the September pennant race.

It is not surprising that Bouton's book has incurred the greatest wrath for what he has written about Mantle (essentially that though Mantle could occasionally be joyous, he could also be rude and sullen, that he was, to use the vernacular, a great beaver-watcher and perhaps he would have endured less pain if he had gotten more sleep at night. The kid from Commerce, heh heh, liked the big evil city). The cry against Bouton on this point is intense. To attack Mickey after all he did for the team, for the league, for baseball, for the country, say it ain't so, Jim. (Typically, Mr. Pepitone: “I've seen Mickey break down and cry because he thought he wasn't doing enough for the team. He gives eight hundred per cent. He had an image and I don't think Jim should have torn it down like that. It wasn't necessary to say all those things. The kids will read all that about the guy they looked up to. What will they think? I just don't think it was necessary.”)

Thus the myths. The outcry of course is not so much from the other ballplayers, but from the sportswriters and house announcers. They are, after all, the creators of the myths; heroes should be found with darker sides washed out, lighter sides filled in (Yogi Berra was to my sportswriting friends a crude and dull man, as apt as not to yell something foul from the Yankee bus at teen-age girls; but in print he was the cuddly Yogi, full of quips, one awaited the Bill Adler book,
The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra
). The Bouton book naturally enraged sportswriters, personified in New York by Dick Young, the
Daily News
guardian of morals and behavior. Young has waged a one-man campaign against Bouton (in a recent column he had an exclusive interview with an unnamed Chicago bellboy who put Bouton down for failing to tip). To Young, Bouton and Shecter are “social lepers,” and indeed he sounds astonishingly Spiroistic: “People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.” Again as the book is deeply in the American vein, so is the reaction against it. The sportswriters are not judging the accuracy of the book, but Bouton's right to tell (that is, your right to read), which is, again, as American as apple pie or the White House press corps. A reporter covers an institution, becomes associated with it, protective of it, and, most important, the arbiter of what is right to tell. He knows what's good for you to hear, what should remain at the press-club bar. When someone goes beyond that, stakes out a new dimension of what is proper and significant, then it is not the ballplayers who yell the most, nor in Washington the public-information officers, but indeed the sportswriters or the Washington bureau chiefs, because having played the game, having been tamed, when someone outflanks them, they must of necessity attack his intentions, his accuracy. Thus Bouton has become a social leper to many sportswriters and thus Sy Hersh, when he broke the My Lai story, became a “peddler” to some of Washington's most famous journalists.

He came down the clubhouse ramp at Korakuen Stadium, limping slightly, his knee already bothering him, though the season was still young. Once of the Boston Red Sox, then the St. Louis Cardinals, the Los Angeles Dodgers and finally the San Francisco Giants, a veteran of seven all-star games and four World Series, now the highest-paid baseball player in the history of Japanese baseball, Reggie Smith managed to look more than a little out of place. A burly, powerful man in any setting, he seemed immense here alongside his Japanese teammates, as if he were not just a bigger ballplayer but of an entirely different species.

The prevailing hair style of his teammates, befitting the most somber and most establishment baseball team in Japan, was a Marine Corps crewcut worthy of the early Pete Rose or the middle Haldeman. Smith's was early Afro (circa 1967), though thinning at the top. He wore a mustache, which was not unusual for a ballplayer on most American teams, but this was the first mustache ever sprouted by a member of the Yomiuri Giants. When Smith was about to sign with Yomiuri, the mustache became the subject of a great deal of discussion in the Japanese press. His contract, after all, was the largest ever signed in Japan by any player, American or Japanese (between $800,000 and $1,000,000); Sadaharu Oh, the great home-run hitter, had made only $400,000 and only at the tail end of his career, and that had been the previous top salary. But the Giants had never permitted facial hair in the past. In a country like this and on a team like this, which was the pride of Japanese baseball, rules were important; minor rules were the same as major rules; there was no difference. Otherwise, all the discipline of a team might unravel and the Yomiuri tradition would be despoiled; and, worse, all Japan might soon follow. But Smith had made it clear that the mustache stayed; it was a part of his personal statement as a man, and that was important. (Besides, during the 1978 World Series, when his old friend and nemesis Tom Seaver was announcing the games for ABC, he said on the air one day that he'd been trying to figure out why Reggie Smith seemed less intimidating in this series and had finally decided it was because he had shaved off his mustache. That act alone, Seaver said, had made him seem more benign. Since the last thing Smith wanted was to lose any element of intimidation, he had immediately gone back to the mustache.) He had let the Yomiuri executives know this: Facial hair was nonnegotiable.

The Giants had wanted him badly. They had not made the Japanese World Series in the previous year, and even more than the old New York Yankees, they were supposed to win. In the truest sense, they were Japan's team. Indeed, partisans of the other teams in Japanese baseball sometimes thought that the entire sport existed so that their teams could lose to the Giants. Once, in fact, when the Hiroshima Carp had won the Japanese championship, they were cautioned the following spring by their owner not to try quite so hard; the owner, it turned out, was a Giants fan at heart. So in the miraculous way that the Japanese do business, the subject of hair had come up but had also never come up, and Smith had been able to keep both the money and the hair.