189. Baseball Pain (10) The Fiends Gather in Cincinnati

By September 28 the Reds are the story and their problem, you may remember from Baseball Pain (9), is to keep their dying manager from becoming the story.  The big story, the one fans like me want running in the players' minds, is the pennant story, which is a game-by-game and play-by-play story.  If Reds players see Hutchinson's image when they're making a play, if they see themselves making it for him, if they admit into their bodies any extra adrenalin, they'll screw it up.  That's baseball wisdom (which you should assure yourself of — as by rereading the aforementioned post — before going further into this Cincinnati excitement).

Oh the excitement.  The last time the fans had seen the Reds they were six and a half behind the Phils and were packing up to play three in the Phils own park.  The only reason they weren't seven and a half behind is that they had just pulled off a miracle at Crosley, coming back from six runs behind to beat the Cardinals 9-6.  From the low point in the fourth inning of that game they had gone on, after shaking Philadelphia with that 1-0 Chico Ruiz victory, to win the next two in that city and then win five in New York.  Now they were coming back to town one full game ahead of the Cardinals and a game and a half ahead of the Phils with five left to play.  It was a town where the leading radio station now (by my memory) identified itself as "WLW Cincinnati, home of the first-place Cincinnati Reds."

When the plane from New York landed in the small hours of the morning it couldn't get to the gate.  People were all over the ramp.  The mayor was there ready with a speech but he couldn't give it, the crowd (estimated at 10,000) was so boisterous.  And in the crowd, feeble as he was (he would be dead within six weeks), was Fred Hutchinson, bearing the long wait while they figured out how to deplane, then making his way to each player, congratulating him, giving him a hug.

This is the man the Reds' players, on the field, have to keep out of their minds.  You don't have to have followed my lectures on baseball wisdom in earlier posts (172, 173) to see how difficult that is going to be.  It's the difficulty of holding firm against distraction in any important operation where the force of distraction is uncommonly high. Reefing a sail in a storm, changing a diaper in a tantrum, tracking a torpedo boat in an attack, all demand the self-control the Reds are going to have to show in the next five games.  If they look at any ball coming toward them off the hitter's bat or out of the pitcher's hand as a ball they have to do something special to, for the sake of Fred Hutchinson, they will have failed.  If they succeed, if they look at the ball as they would look at it on any night, with any manager, in any season, from any position in the standings, they will have succeeded.  And we, if we measure success not by the achievement but by the force of the distraction, will be free to rank their power of self-control with that of any radarman in a naval battle.

All right, we close followers of the team knew this was going to be tough but we didn't know, from a player's point of view, just how tough.  I didn't know until I read Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati Reds, and was able to see Hutchinson through pitcher Jim O'Toole's eyes.  Hutchinson had come up to him in the crowd: "He looked terrible" O'Toole told Wilson.  "His eye was sagging, you could tell he was having a hard time just walking, he was in a lot of pain.  That's one sight I'll never forget.  Here it is two in the morning and this guy who can barely walk or see.  That's how much he loved the fact that this was his team."

Understand that the sight of a declining Fred Hutchinson was nothing new to Reds' players.  And that, apparently, they had mastered the sight.   The figure on the bench?  The changes, the gauntness?  "In the game let it say nothing at all to you.  Keep your eye on his signs."  Then, after he has gone into the clubhouse, or, finally, is just sitting in the stands in civilian clothes, they have seen to it that he is gone from their minds too.  Or so — on the evidence of their play, that nine-game winning streak — I imagine it.  They have silenced the voice that says, "Get this one for Hutch."

 But then, in Wilson's interview with O'Toole, the voice, the very voice, broke through, and I realized what a close-run thing it was going to be.  At the end of his recollections of Hutchinson at the airport, O'Toole said, "I thought, 'God, we've got to win this thing for Hutch.'"  Oh no, Jim, no.  Hang on just a little longer.

So that's the way we're going into the last five games.