188. Baseball Pain (9). September 27, 1964.

 

All right, those three teams coming down the stretch in 1964.   Drama in everything they do.  Has to be.  Every move they make now is going to make a difference.  Everybody following them is anxious, but in different ways.  Here's what we've got on September 27.

The Phillies.  Losers for eighty years, over-achieving this year but having a hard time keeping it up.  The pitching is in terrible shape.  Starter Ray Culp has hurt his elbow and is in the bullpen.  Starter Dennis Bennett's tendinitis won't clear up.  Starter Art Mahaffey is in a slump.  The close fans know this, know that their team has no stars to match the Cards' Ken Boyer or the Reds' Frank Robinson, and know that they've had a lot of luck in those early games.  But they, judging by the way they talk to reporters, have a good idea of what makes up for all that: their team has grit.  How else do you explain the fact that they just keep winning?  Six times so far in September they have squeaked out one-run victories.  Count on it: now that we're down to a six-game crunch their grit will show.  They'll gut it out.

The Cardinals.  Haven't contended since 1949.  Trying to get along without Stan Musial, who had retired the previous year.  They monkey around in the middle of the league, get a spark when Lou Brock is brought over from Chicago in June, but fall back to 9 1/2 behind in July.  For a while fans see what looks like chaos at the top.  The owner, Gussie Busch, fires the general manager, Bing Devine, and gives signs of firing others.  Now in the stretch they've got their manager, having heard that Busch had talked to Leo Durocher about managing in '65, not knowing whether or not, even if he survives this year, he's going to have a job next year. 

The Reds.  Here the struggle is to keep the back story from becoming the story, which is supposed to be about winning the pennant.  Their manager, Fred Hutchinson, is dying.  Knowing he has had lung cancer since December he has continued to manage through the early summer and on into July, showing reporters (in his thinning figure, his slowing walks to the mound) the makings of the "great story," the Hollywood-familiar story, the George Gipp story, that they can't let themselves write.  Courageous death as inspiration.  Rising to the heights in memory of the heroic leader.  You might play those strings later, maybe, but you can't touch them now.

Taste restrains the reporters.  What restrains the players, who, if they can help it, aren't even thinking that way?  Wisdom.  About baseball.  Poise, self-control, concentration, that's what's required in this game.  They know that a surge of adrenalin can wreck it.  "Win one for the Gipper" is the last thing you want to hear, or say to yourself, when that grounder is coming toward you.

So, fans in the stands above these stands, do you see the Reds' problem, how severe it is?  They get on the field they've got to put Hutchinson entirely out of their minds.  They can't let the gauntness of his figure on the bench say anything at all to them.  "Just listen to what he's telling you."  After he has gone from there (going early into the clubhouse, or, finally, just sitting in the stands in civilian clothes) they have to arrange their minds so that he is gone from there too. 

Maybe this is still hard to understand.  I'm thinking of those foreign to the game.  For them maybe turning back to Posts 172 and 173, the discussion of the 2012 disaster, would help.   You had the game-deciding grounder bounding toward Scott Rolen there.  If you've been able to put yourself in his place, trying to resist all the pressures on him as the ball approaches, maybe you can estimate the resistance each Reds player, as he prepares to field each ball in the coming series, is going to have to find in himself.  Say you're already able, in crucial situations, to silence the voice that says, "Do it right, do it right for the ballgame, do it right for your teammates, do it right for the town."  Will you be able to silence the voice that says, "Do it right for Hutch"?  Can you see the pressure that will add?

By the end of play on the 27th it looks like every Redleg is doing everything right.  The team has completed a five-game sweep of the Mets with a double-header win in New York that couldn't have been more convincing.  No errors in either game, hits when they were needed, good tight baseball.  Only one error the whole series, every attempt to sacrifice successful, and never, in any game, more than eight runners left on base, total.  They have won nine straight games and will return home in first place.

Meanwhile, over in Pittsburgh, the Cardinals have just finished their own five-game sweep with a shutout.  They can't have been doing much wrong either.  And the Phils, oh the Phils.  They are doing the right things, yes, just the right things to set up the three-team drama.  Gene Mauch pitches Jim Bunning again on short rest and he gets clobbered, seven runs in three innings.  By the time they come to bat in the fifth, at home, they are behind 12-3, and will clearly lose their seventh straight game.

What do you think we get if we put the anxiety meter on one of those fans there in Veterans Stadium in the bottom of the fifth?  We asked earlier whether you could "see the pressure."  Let's try to see it on a gauge. At nine runs down the LI (Leverage Index, how much difference the at-bat can make in the game) in successive at-bats goes .06 to .03 to .01 in this inning.  Considering the importance of the game (measured by POFF differential) this fan's anxiety (9.5 on the Index) is pretty low. 

The baseball-curious from overseas may wonder what a fan does during these low-pressure spells.  What's the attraction?  The game is lost, there's nothing to root for.  What a contrast with soccer, where you're nearly always within one or two goals of tying it.

The question arises from over-attention to the big drama, which now has lost its attraction.  There remain the little dramas.  The close fan will know which rookies are struggling to make it, which slugger has to learn to hang in there against a left-hander's curveball, which speedster has to gain the savvy to add base-stealing to his attractions, which flame-thrower has to add a change-up.  He (or she — there are plenty of women among the close fans) will also know the problems of the veterans those rookies are trying to replace, the sluggers whose bats are slowing, the speedsters whose jumps are dragging, the pitchers whose change-ups are getting hit.  Even when, in the great struggle, his team is thirty games and nine runs behind, the close fan will find enough in these small struggles to keep him in his seat.

If that's not enough there's this left: the beauty of the fielders' motions.  I don't know how it actually works but somehow the need to move efficiently (to retire or hold the runner) just seems to make ballplayers' bodies move gracefully.  I recommend watching a shortstop.  Going into the hole he's got a long distance to go and a long throw to make.  And he's got a runner who's going make his success a matter of milli-seconds.  Can anybody less afford waste motion?  Self-interference?  The need for the throw shapes the grab and the need for the grab shapes the steps and anything less than harmony loses the out.  Harmony is beauty, as it is in any sport, but here it's a special beauty, an isolated beauty, one you can see all of.  Because baseball, almost uniquely among team sports, separates offense and defense, there's no interruption in the performance, and nobody obscuring it.  Furthermore, it's a performance by a normal body, not a special body, not one given advantage by abnormal weight or height.  A body like ours.

I can hear the Philly fan now: "Oh great.  I'm watching my guys throw away the pennant and you see me admiring their beautiful bodies.  What am I supposed to be, a Buddha contemplating the art of baseball?  Get real.  That's Jim Bunning those Milwaukee bastards are clobbering."

OK, all the little dramas have been overwhelmed by the big drama, the tragedy he's wrapped up in.  But what will we find in him after Bunning is thoroughly clobbered?  Ache, yes, the ache of the loser.  But here's Richie Allen coming up, leading off the fifth.  Hitting .348.  What a rookie season!  Can he keep it up?  I am going to claim that this Philly fan is not going to take this moment to go back behind the stands for his consoling beer.  He's going to stay, and think about Allen, and his drama, and how it might work into next year's drama, and think about whether maybe, just maybe, the denouement might be, ho ho, a pennant. 

Since my claim is based on assumptions about the nature of baseball, and how it works on human nature, that I can't argue for (certainly not here), and I don't want to give it up, I think I will just have to appeal to fellow fans.  Is this the way it is?  Is this what you do, over there in Philadelphia, when guys like Bunning get clobbered in a big game?  Sit back and enjoy guys like Allen?