Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (12 page)

The nightcap was a game of Still Pond No More Moving, featuring some impressive pitching by the Yanks’ Doc Medich and the Red Sox’ Roger Moret, and a lone score in the fifth, a mini-run fashioned out of a walk to Rick Miller, a stolen base, and a little single by Yastrzemski. The Yanks’ hitting, so boisterous in recent weeks, had fallen away to a mutter—six scattered and unferocious blows—and the run-famished crowd stared out at some of the out-of-town scores now going up on the board: St. Louis 11, Pittsburgh 3; Baltimore 6, Milwaukee 4; Baltimore 10, Milwaukee 7. Those two Oriole wins could move them up to within two games of the Yankees.

Firecrackers were banging and popping all over the park now, and there were some boos for the Yankee hitters. Empty seats were beginning to show up. I got up and wandered around, in search of some action and a breeze. From the back of the lower deck, I watched that old and wonderful New York baseball panorama—the Stadium playing field viewed as a narrow, skyless slot of intense green, framed between the black of the overhanging mezzanine above and the black of the seated crowd below: a game-vista that an auto mechanic might have from under a stalled DeSoto. I kept going, and sat down at last in an empty seat way out in Section 34, beyond the foul pole. From here, I looked out across the immense distances of deep left field—Gionfriddoland—and on to the distant, tiny figures of the players. From this vantage, the infielders’ throws over to first swooped and dipped at odd angles, and whenever a batter hit a ball there was a pause long enough to measure—
one
…
two
—before the high, thin sound reached us. The crowd out here was quieter—mostly older men sitting alone, with a space of a few seats and rows between each of them. One of them was holding a radio to his ear. Then a man down in front of me stood up and came slowly up the aisle, folding his
News
under his arm. “Ah, well,” he said as he came by. He was quite right; we could forget this particular day. There was a lot of this season still to come, still plenty of baseball for us to watch and care about in the weeks ahead. It was time to head home.

*
All absolutely true, and the fact that the Mets later in 1973 won their divisional title and then the National League pennant and very nearly won the World Series should not detract from the brilliance of this appraisal.

September 1973

M
AX. IT IS LUNCHTIME
at Gene & Georgetti’s Restaurant, on North Franklin Street in downtown Chicago. It is the middle of the week, and the place is pretty full. A lot of businessmen eat here: Bloody Marys, chopped sirloin or the veal scallopini, salad, coffee, shoptalk. At one table—a party of three—somebody mentions the St. Louis Browns, the old American League baseball club that moved to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles. A man rises from a nearby table, approaches the threesome, and bows. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he says. They look up. He is a sandy-haired, bright-eyed man—still a bit below middle age, one would guess—with a small cigar in his hand; his eyeglasses are in the new aviator-goggle style. “Excuse me,” he says again, smiling cheerfully. “I just overheard one of you mention the old St. Louis Browns, and I’m sure you would all like to be reminded of the lineup of the 1944 Brownies, which, as you will recall, was the only Browns team ever to win the AL pennant, and which lost that World Series, of course, to their hometown rivals, the Cardinals, in six games. It was one of the two World Series, in fact, in which both participating teams came from west of the Mississippi River. The Browns’ regular lineup in 1944 went: catcher, Frank Mancuso; first base, George McQuinn; second base, Don Gutteridge; third base, Mark Christman …” He runs through the eight names (one of the least celebrated lineups in the history of the game), adds starting pitchers Jack Kramer, Sig Jakucki, Bob Muncrief, and Denny Galehouse and, for good measure, throws in a second-string catcher named Red Hayworth. “You probably remember,” he says, still smiling, “that Red Hayworth and the regular catcher, Frank Mancuso, both had brothers who were also major-league catchers and, in both cases,
better
catchers. Thank you.” He bows and departs.

The three men at the table look at one another, and then one of them calls after their informant. “Hey!” he says. “Do you come from St. Louis?”

“No,” says the stranger. “Detroit.”

He sits down at his table again, but he has stopped smiling. He has just remembered that he lives in Chicago now—away from Detroit, away from the Tigers.

Bert. A little after nine-thirty on a Monday morning in June, Bert walks into his ground-floor office in Oak Park, Michigan, which is a suburb on the north side of Detroit. His name is on the door: “Bert Gordon, Realty.” He says good morning to his secretary and to his assistant, Barbara Rosenthal, and goes on into his own office, which looks out on a parking strip and, beyond that, onto Greenfield Road. He sits down at his desk, leans forward and takes off his shoes, and slides his feet into a pair of faded blue espadrilles. Then he swings his swivel chair to the right, so that he is facing a desk-model calculator on a side table, and punches out on it the numbers “2922” and “1596.” The first figure is the total number of days of President Nixon’s two terms in the White House; the second is the number of days the President has served to date. He hits another button, and the answer slot at the top of the machine offers up “54.62” in illuminated green numbers. Bert is a member of the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee, and he has just figured (as he figures every weekday morning) the expired percentage of President Nixon’s two terms of office. Now Bert clears the machine and punches out the numbers “9345” and “2806.” (Since Friday morning, the first number has gone up by seven and the second by one: Al Kaline, the veteran star outfielder for the Detroit Tigers, hit one single in seven official times at bat against the Minnesota Twins over the weekend.) The machine silently presents another set of green numbers; today Kaline’s lifetime major-league batting average stands at .3000267. Bert sighs, erases the figure, and picks up his telephone. He is ready to start his day.

Don. Don and his wife, Susan, are attending a performance of
The Marriage of Figaro
by the touring Metropolitan Opera company at the Masonic Temple Auditorium in Detroit. They are both very fond of the theater, and they go to a play or an opera whenever they can manage it. As usual, Don has bought seats near the back of the balcony, where he knows the radio reception is better. The two of them are following the opera attentively, but Don is also holding a small transistor radio up to his left ear. (He is left-eared all the way.) Through long training, he is able to hear both the opera and (because of the good reception) the voice of Ernie Harwell, the sports broadcaster for Station WJR, who is at this moment describing the action at Tiger Stadium, where the Brewers are leading the Tigers 1–0 in the top of the fourth. A woman sitting directly behind Don and Susan is unable to restrain her curiosity, and during a recitative she leans forward and taps Don on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she whispers. “I was just wondering what you’re listening to on that little radio.”

Don half turns in his seat. “Simultaneous translation,” he whispers.

In this country’s long love affair with professional sports, the athlete has more and more come to resemble the inamorata—an object of unceasing scrutiny, rapturous adoration, and expensive adornment—while the suitor, or fan, remains forever loyal, shabby, and unknown. Sports fans are thought of as a mass—statistics that are noticed only when they do not fall within their predicted norms—but the individual fan (except for a few self-made celebrities, like Hilda Chester, the Ebbets Field bell ringer, or the Knicks’ Dancing Harry, or the Mets’ folding-sign man) is a loner, a transient cipher, whose streaks and slumps go unrecorded in the annals of his game. Every sport, however, has its great fans as well as its great athletes—classic performers whose exceptional powers set them apart from the journeyman spectator. They are veterans who deserve notice if only for the fact that their record of attachment and service to their game and their club often exceeds that of any player down on the field. The home team, in their belief, belongs to them more than to this passing manager or to that arriviste owner, and they are often cranky possessors, trembling with memory and pride and frustration, as ridiculous and touching as any lovers. These rare ones make up a fraction of every sporting audience, but they seem to cluster more thickly in the homes of the older, well-entrenched franchises. The three Detroit nonpareils are a vivid constellation of contemporary baseball fandom: Maxwell H. Lapides, a businessman who went to work last spring as a vice-president of a national collection agency in Chicago, thus painfully exiling himself from his friends and his ball team; Bertram Gordon, whose real-estate agency specializes in finding and leasing business and shopping-center locations in the areas of thickening population outside the central city; and Dr. Donald N. Shapiro, a distinguished oral surgeon. They are intimate friends, united by their ages (middle to upper forties), their similar backgrounds and styles of life, their neighboring families, their Jewishness, and their wit and intelligence, but most of all by their consuming passion for the Detroit Tigers. None of the three is willing to accept the cheerfully patronizing tone that nonsporting friends and relatives usually direct toward the baseball-bitten; none of the three, for that matter, regards himself as a baseball fan at all. “Right from the beginning, I have been a Tiger fan and nothing else,” Max Lapides said this summer. “Other men can happily go to ball games wherever they happen to find themselves—not me. My interest is the Tigers. They are the sun, and all the twenty-three other teams are satellites. You can’t begin to understand or appreciate this game unless you have an intense involvement.”

Dr. Donald Shapiro, in spite of the demands imposed by his successful and extensive practice, by his family (he is married and has three children), by his writing for medical and dental journals, by his sideline in theatricals (he played a small part in a Hollywood gangster film shot in Detroit last winter), by his weekend career as a highly competitive Class A tennis player, and by his voluminous, wide-ranging reading, manages to keep abreast of the Tigers’ news almost inning by inning throughout their 162-game season. Evenings, friends at his house or at their own have taught themselves to ignore the fact that his left ear, like van Gogh’s, is of no immediate social use; in the spring, when a good many ball games are played in the afternoon, Shapiro tries to schedule his surgical appointments in hospital operating rooms that he knows to have an acceptable interior Harwell-level. (Sinai Hospital has the worst reception in Detroit.) When all else fails, he calls his baseball friends, and Bert Gordon has come to recognize the sound of Don’s telephone voice, blurred with haste and a surgical mask, asking, “How’re we doing?” One afternoon in 1970, Bert answered his phone and heard Don whisper, “This is probably a violation of every professional canon, but I can’t help it. Guess who I’ve got in the chair!”

“Who?” said Bert.

“Chet Laabs!”

“Chet Laabs!”

“Chet Laabs!”

They hung up. (Chet Laabs, a chunky, unremarkable outfielder, played for the Tigers from 1937 to 1939.)

This kind of belonging brooks no alternatives. “When I’m listening to a game, there is nothing that annoys me as much as somebody who clearly doesn’t care coming up to me and smiling and saying ‘How’s it going?’” Don says,
“How’s it going!
Why, don’t they understand that for a real fan it’s always a matter of suffering and ecstasy? What we’re involved with here is exaltation!”

Bert Gordon, in turn, detected a crucial slight in the midst of a recent bridge-table conversation, and demanded, “How come you’re a bridge authority and your partner’s an art aficionado but I’m a baseball nut?”

Bert and Don are lifelong friends who grew up in the near-northwest section of Detroit and graduated from Central High together in the class of 1942. Max Lapides, who is forty-five years old—three and a half years younger than the others—did not live in the same neighborhood, and thus the triumvirate was not completed until early in the nineteen sixties, although they have subsequently established the fact that they were fellow witnesses, usually in person, of innumerable famous moments in Tiger history: Goose Goslin’s championship-winning single in the ninth inning of the sixth game in the 1935 Series; an unknown thirty-year-old rookie named Floyd Giebell outpitching Bob Feller in Cleveland on the second-to-last day of the 1940 season to nail down the pennant for Detroit; Rudy York and Pinky Higgins hitting two-run homers in the same inning against the Reds in the Series that fall; Earl Torgeson stealing home in the bottom of the tenth inning to defeat the hated Yanks in 1955; Joe DiMaggio hammering a grounder that broke George Kell’s jaw—and Kell picking up the ball and stepping on the bag to force the runner from second before collapsing in front of third base. Don and Max met at last in 1960, when a friend in common brought them together at a dinner party, having assured each one beforehand that the other was a Tiger fan of surpassing tenacity and knowledge. Both of them, of course, utterly ignored the proffered
bona fides,
and the marriage very nearly expired on the spot. Late in the evening, however, the two chanced to arrive at the drinks table together. Don Shapiro, regarding Max with evident distrust, ventured a minute opening. “R.L.,” he said.

“R.L.?” returned Max.

Don nodded, watching his man.

“Why, Roxie Lawson,” said Max. (Roxie Lawson was a right-handed pitcher for the Tigers in the mid-thirties.) “Of course.”

They fell into each other’s arms.

In recent years, the three-way entente has deepened in complexity, ritual, and affection. Max Lapides, who has regularly attended about thirty or thirty-five Tiger home games every year, often to the extent of going to the park alone (“He even likes a night game against the Texas Rangers in the last week of September,” says Bert Gordon), has been an energizing catalyst for the three, organizing baseball dates and tickets, nudging baseball memories, berating the Tiger management, comparing active and erstwhile ballplayers, inventing bets and interior games, finding causes for contention and laughter. Since each of the three friends sustains an almost permanent state of transcendental baseball meditation, they are forever making and sharing new discoveries. Last year, for instance, Bert startled Max with the sudden announcement that Aurelio Rodriguez, the present Tiger third baseman, is the only major-league infielder with all five vowels in his first name.