201. What Baseball Does for Americans

What's the main thing baseball teaches us?  To be ready for a test at any time.  You never know when, dreaming, you get picked off second base, that the run you represented will be the one needed for the ballgame that will be needed to keep from losing the pennant.  As, on a warship, a lookout doesn't know that the sighting he missed (because maybe he was dreaming) will lead to the loss of four cruisers — as, the story went, happened at the battle of Savo Island.  Baseball teaches us war.

But baseball teaches us far more than this.  Insofar as life, or great achievement in it, is war, baseball teaches us life.  I realize, though, that I can't convey that now as well as I once did.  So here's what I wrote in the late seventies to explain what baseball does for us.

Baseball's Appeal to America

To appreciate baseball think first of what the other sports have to offer.  The solo sports, like golf, offer beauty of form and cause-effect clarity.  But they lack reciprocal action, the forced replies of offense and defense.  Duel sports, like tennis, offer clear reciprocal action as well as beauty of form, but they lack complication and brotherhood.  Team sports like football offer complication and brotherhood but the reciprocal action is often muddled and beauty of form is often interrupted.

Ah, but baseball.  Baseball, by some miracle of design, offers all the advantages of the team sport without losing any of the advantages of the solo or duel sport.  And that, I want to argue, is why it will be eternally appealing to a civilized audience, and to America, if America remains civilized.

Consider baseball's design.  First, notice how the offense and the defense are kept so cleanly separate.  After bat meets ball, in perfect reciprocity, the defensive players move in unhampered flow, handling the ball, each fully observable, each performing alone, in sequence.  What clarity, and beauty, and individual responsibility.

Think, though, what we'd have if the designers of soccer or hockey, those messy gestalts, had inserted their kind of play into baseball.  Think what it would be like to have three players from the at-bat team roaming the field, throwing blocks on the fielders.  Picture Dave Concepcion fielding a ground ball while some Met is kicking him in the shins.

I don't mean to say, now, that there is no beauty of form in those mixed offense-defense games.  It's just that those games are designed so that somebody is always breaking up the form, sticking his own form in somebody else's eye.

And in baseball the form is, of course, all the more beautiful because the bodies are normal, graceful, human bodies.  The game gives no advantage to height-freaks or weight-freaks, as it does in basketball and football.  Nor does it reduce the human body, taking away its arms, as soccer does.  The full creature, with all his God-given parts, is in play.  Think what a soccer game would look like to the designer of baseball.  Some kind of exercise in a hospital therapy-yard.  Armless trunks showing their exasperation.

But clarity, rather than beauty, is what really makes a game civilized.  The civilized man, I take it, is one in whom the reason and the passions are fully employed, mutually supporting, and fruitfully balanced.  A civilized game will nourish both the reason and the passions.  It will, that is, lead to knowledge and love, which promote each other.  The greater the knowledge the more intense the love, and vice versa.

Here is where baseball's clarity raises it above all other team sports.  At the end of a baseball game we know what happened, what produced the outcome, what blew the game, what saved it.  Everything significant has passed before us, and before the other players, in sequence, and at a pace that lets us take it all in.  The action is a string of pearls, offered to the undistracted eyepiece.  And oh, the blessing of that pace!  What tensions it lets build up in us, what slow-swelling anxieties.  That is the way to savor human complication, and understand it.  That is civilized pleasure.

(Please do not identify my civilized pleasure here with wholesome pleasure.  The sight of seven acres of Russians doing calisthenics may be more wholesome than the sight of Will McEnaney throwing at Greg Luzinsky's head, but it is not necessarily more civilized.)

So clarity brings knowledge, and knowledge explains why we can love baseball players, and baseball players can love each other, more than is possible in any other sport.  We know just what Luis Tiant did, what he went through, in that second World Series start.  We can identify with him and feel all the pressures on him and be grateful.

Can we be as grateful to the football lineman who must have been doing a good job while our eyes were on the end downfield?  Can the other players be as grateful?  I think not.  Only after the play is over will the running back notice that the guard's face is, off on the other side of the field, perhaps significantly in the mud.

Here is where America comes in.  Consider how this team sport which is a succession a glaringly exposed individual performances puts a man on the spot.  It is terrifying.  But we in America are drawn to this kind of terror.  We were gripped by the man on the spot in the TV isolation-booth, sweating out those terribly hard $64,000 questions.  Well, in baseball each player takes his turn in an isolation booth.  And that touches our nightmare, which is also our glory-dream.

Does this focus on the individual diminish love and brotherhood, the thing we look for in a team sport?  No.  What it substitutes for shoulder-to-shoulder teamwork is sympathy, a brotherhood of the spirit that acknowledges essential human isolation.  We see this in the way baseball players call to each other across the spaces.  No sport's terms of encouragement are more tender.  "You're the one, Ron, you're the one.  Go get it, babee!"  It's an expression, I think, of what Stephen Spender called "all love's aidlessness."  They can't help each other so they make it up in rooting for each other.  When Gionfriddo goes back into the shadows of left-center field for DiMaggio's impossible drive there's nothing the eight other Dodgers can do but root for him.  But for a team, or a city, or a nation full of essential individualists, that is a great thing to do.

195. Humane Feelings and the Collapse of the Cincinnati Reds.

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Oh how well we clear thinkers understand games.  We know (preceding post) that they are pure tests of ability, that humane feelings gum them up, and that if you don't get rid of them you'll look as foolish as those who let Oscar Pritorius run with a metal foot, Renée Richards play women's tennis with men's muscles, and thousands of handicapped people think they have really won something when they come in first at the Special Olympics.

And where might this superior thinking lead us?  I think the experience of Cincinnati and the players on its baseball team, much of it detailed in my posts on Baseball Pain (#179 through #192), gives us a good idea.

For the players I think right thinking would lead to their shutting out, on the field, every thought of the dying Fred Hutchinson.  That means, distant analyst, that in every at-bat during those thirty-three innings when all they needed (to bring home the runner who would give them victory) was to lay the bat firmly on just one ball, they would be saying to themselves, as each ball came out of the pitcher's hand (see it, analyst, get up close), "Here comes a ball, like any other, that I am going to swing at, or not, according to its position (high, low, out, in) and appearance (spin, little spin, no spin), judged by my experience with other balls leaving pitchers' hands."  That would follow from their knowledge of the game, and indeed from their coaches' instruction.  To win you keep your poise; you don't heighten your determination.  You do not say, it would be fatal to say, "Here comes a ball I'm by God going to hit for Hutch."

And what are you saying if you are a clear-thinking fan?  "Way to go.  Keep it up.  No Hutch."  And if you are a clear-thinking analyst you're saying, "Yes, that's the right thing, for player and fan."

Us now.  What do we say?  We know the full story.  We know what a great job these players have done maintaining their poise.  It's almost unbelievable.  For months they have watched Hutchinson lose weight and sag, and walk more and more slowly out to relieve his pitcher.   They have followed him as he went out of uniform and into the stands.  They have seen him up there as a spectator, and they have managed, apparently, to put that and all those other pictures of him out of their minds as they made their plays and swung their bats and climbed in the standings.  And then, during a road trip that removed the pictures, when there remained only the temptation to think of him at home, listening on the radio, they had continued to keep their balance, on and on, through now nine straight victories. 

Sure, in the last six of those wins, in these days when the visible finish line tightens the tension in every pennant race, the schedule had blessed them with the advantage of playing out of sight (and, often, radio range) of Hutchinson, in distant cities, and that must have made it easier.  But now they are in their home town, with Hutch's hospital close by, and his picture in the papers.  We know that the fans know that.  They know that the preceding tests are small compared to what the players are going to face in the coming games.

What most of them don't know, and won't learn until later (as I did, from Doug Wilson's book, Fred Hutchinson and the 1964 Cincinnati Reds), is that Hutchinson, within six weeks of his grave, was in the midnight crowd at the airport waiting to greet the returning team, and that he would make his way to them, and hug each of them.

That's a test we have to imagine, before we face our own test.  Say you're Deron Johnson, clean-up man, counted on to bat runs in.  You know you have the best chance of being up at bat with the game on the line, maybe the season on the line.  You know that you have the best chance of coming through if your mind is empty.  And you, by this time, know how much effort it takes to keep Hutchinson's image out of it.  You know the odds, and what your emotions will do to them.  OK.  You see Hutchinson coming down the line giving hugs.  Do you bail out?  Sneak off, go home, try to forget him?  Or do you risk the hug? 

That's Johnson's problem, and we, forgetting what we know about the actual outcome (that Johnson, with one out in the fourteenth inning of the crucial game, with the winning run on third, struck out), have to imagine what Johnson faced at that time, feeling what he knows he would feel in that hug — the looser grip, the closer face, the bone in the sagging shoulder.  Our problem, our test, is whether or not we want him to do it.  Wanting is what makes the spectator complicit with the actor. Don't object that the test of the fan here, wanting or not wanting a hug, is microscopic.  Trace elements are good enough.  One small slide and there it will be: character!

What we will have a trace of may be small but there will be no mistaking it.  One kind of character says, "No!  No!  No hugs!  Go the other way.  Ignore him.  Forget Hutchinson.  Do anything, callous or not, to win.""  The other says, "Forget winning, forget the game, forget logic.  Feeling for a suffering human being comes first."

It's a small test and we baseball fans are, culturally, small people, but it's a test to be taken seriously.  Here is our chance to share in the decision-making of the great — Ulysses Grant counting the number he will have to sacrifice at Antietam, a scientist like Gottlieb (in Arrowsmith) anticipating the deaths in his control group, Tennessee Williams foreseeing the suffering of the sister he will abandon, Doris Lessing seeing the same in the children she will leave in Africa, all great generals and scientists and artists, really, all who have to be ruthless to succeed.  We can share in their decision-making by reading about it but that doesn't really test us, not like getting into a baseball season (or a novel, or a play) and being forced to decide, up close: do I really want this ruthlessness?  There's so much supporting either answer, whatever the grandeur of the outcome. Say No and in our culture you've got Christ behind you.  Say Yes and you've got the Greeks, the Romans, and Machiavelli. 

And there's so much to lose, either way.  Yes and you lose your humanity (in older terms, your soul).  No and you lose your reason, the faculty that told you what a game was, and distinguished it from parties and treatments, and made your words fit into a logic — in short, put things in conceptual order.

Try to go both ways, want both success and humanity, and you lose your reputation with analysts. You get called a "coward," one unwilling to pay the necessary price, or a "dullard," one unable to see the connection between success and price, or, both together, a "sentimentalist," one who wants "every idea without its sequence and every pleasure without its consequence."

These are the hazards once you throw yourself into spectating or reading, and quit just filling a seat.  Do that, become a fan in the old full, sense ("fanatic"), follow your passion one way or the other, and, by the experience of the fanatics in Cincinnati, I think your imagination will carry you well beyond the season — or the novel, or the play.  Did I make the right decision?  Do I have the right character?  We all want to be justified.

So some of us will have Johnson, after he has avoided the hug, meeting Hutchinson in Heaven.  "Hell, Hutch," he says, "my mind was on the next game."  We are seeing Hutchinson's character tested.  If he is the good manager we think he is he will understand perfectly. He'll forgive Johnson as Billy Budd forgave Captain Vere.  You do what you have to do to win. Superior ballplayers, superior beings, don't make a big deal out of hugs.

And some of us will have Johnson, after he has hugged, meeting Socrates, who will understand and sympathize, but who yet will say, "Yes, you have seen the injury you might have done to a man, but do you see the injury you have done to the laws, the laws of thought?  Logic.  The ordering of our concepts."  And he will go into the consequences of that for later generations, including his own children and grandchildren, who will look to his example.

Since those who give in to their hearts can track consequences in the same way, though, and we don't know how it will come out, we are left pretty much in the air.  It looks like a lady-or-the-tiger kind of choice.  I myself choose the hug-avoiders, but I'd be interested in hearing from others.  My email: hswardson@yahoo.com

192. Baseball Pain (13). On the Rack.

 

 

You want to know pain, Philadelphia fans?  Here's pain.  It's extra innings at home, so all your team has to do is score one run.  One run, the game's over, and the pressure is on the other contending teams.  Your team has seven innings in which to do this.  They don't need a big hit.  They don't even need a hit.  All they need to get that run in, most of the time, is to avoid striking out or popping up.  Just put the bat decently on the ball.  And they can't do it.

While they seem to be able to do everything else.  The Reds' pitchers, Maloney, Ellis, and Tsitouris, hold the Pirates scoreless for fifteen innings.  The fielders back them up beautifully.  League-leaders, as both pitchers and fielders, playing their expected game.  But what is it when they bat?

Here's our catcher, Don Pavletich, up in the bottom of the eleventh.  Two singles and a perfect sacrifice bunt have put men on second and third.  He strikes out.  Here's our shortstop, Leo Cardenas, up in the bottom of the thirteenth with the bases loaded and one out.  He pops up.  Finally here's Deron Johnson, our cleanup hitter, our RBI leader, up in the last of the fourteenth with the bags loaded again with one out.   He strikes out.

And we wouldn't even have been in this position if we had taken advantage of so many good chances in the regulation nine innings.  Fourth inning.  Chico Ruiz leads off with a single.  Bunted over to second.  Steals third!  That Chico.  Here we go.  Maloney's in his groove — and oh man when Maloney is in his groove you are not going to touch him.  Not on that night.  (Five one-hitters and two no-hitters he's going to pitch in his career.)  All he's going to need is a run.  One run.  Our Musial, our Mays, our Ruth, Frank Robinson, is at the plate.  He pops up.  Now it will take a hit, not too unlikely with Deron Johnson stepping in.  He strikes out.

That is the way it's going to go.  Eighteen men are going to be stranded on the bases, fourteen of them in scoring position.  By the end of the game, after midnight, we will, counting the preceding day's shutout and the last eight innings of the last game against the Mets, have gone 33 straight innings without scoring a run.  In the last 25 of those innings we will leave 29 men on base, 25 of whom will have been in scoring position. 

That gives you an idea of the pain in Cincinnati.  For the pain in the surrounding area, out beyond a hundred miles, add in the pain of waiting — while the static clears, while Hoyt pulls himself together, while the over-ride for station identification runs its course. Then, after the wait, in how many living rooms: "God Almighty, that runner didn't score!"  Twenty-five different times in two nights you would hear that. 

Pain is unreliably recorded, as physicians who try to get their patients to self-report their pain on a 1-10 scale well know.  But provocations to pain, like pressure on a nerve, being measurable, are reliably recorded.  Here our latter-day statisticians tell us, through their Leverage Index (how much pressure is on the player at bat — which reads out as anxiety in the fan, and his eventual pain), that in the bottom of the ninth, the Reds' first chance to end the game, the LI number for each successive batter went 2.22, 3.22, 2.88, 4.32.  When Don Pavletich came up with two outs and men still on first and third it went to 4.90.  In the eleventh it went from 3.34 to 6.38, the runners dying at second and third.  Pretty much the same in the thirteenth and fourteenth innings, with a 5.80 in there.

The graph of Philadelphia pain shows no single game at all comparable to this.  The closest one, the 1-0 game where Ruiz stole home, did have a higher LI in it (7.02 when Ruben Amaro came to bat in the ninth) but nothing like the repetition here, the pounding on the sore spot.  Amaro struck out and their game was over; our man struck out and we had to go through it three more times.

Maybe it's not until you add in the season pressure that you'll see Cincinnati pulling away.  The Reds are given a second chance.  St. Louis miraculously loses two to the Mets while we win one.  Tie again.  Only now there are only two games left.  Each game is so crucial.  Our ∆POFF number, showing the difference the game will make in our season — is 44.6.  Way beyond anything Philadelphia has seen. 

You've got pain possibility of the highest magnitude here, only now it's going to be pain with irony.  We're playing Philadelphia.  The great losers.  They're out of it now, mangled, on their way from the emergency room to their beds.  The last guys in the world you'd expect to put up a fight.

Well, it's still living drama for us, and here we go, a run in the first and two more in the sixth and, with Jim O'Toole in his groove it looks like we've got it.  We enter the eighth with a win expectation (WE, see http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/) of 94%. 

What we Cincinnati fans need is a pain gauge on our arms.  Like a blood pressure cuff.  Something the pain umpire could see.  Thomas, single.  Rojas, walk.  Taylor, single.  Callison comes up and the LI is up to 3.42.  Add that to our game anxiety, the base for every batter, and you get 47.88.  Off the charts.  Acting manager Sisler brings in Billy McCool, our Billy, our savior down the stretch.  He strikes out Callison!  Billy McCool.  Billy McCool.  We roll the name with love.  One more out now, Billy.  Richie Allen.  FAI still up there, at 47.33.

Well, why drag it out.  Allen triples, Johnson doubles, and Philadelphia, that mangled snake, leads 4-3.

Our ninth inning was made for those whose universe has a place for malice.  There could not have been arranged, in the rotation of batsmen, a combination of names more likely to raise our hopes than "Pinson," "Robinson," and "Johnson."  Or set us up for three deeper jabs of pain.  Pinson grounds out, Robinson grounds out, and Johnson strikes out.  Just when we thought we had had all the downers we could bear the fates — gods, the universe — lift us up so we can be dashed to the ground again.

Where this leaves us in the pain competition I frankly am not sure.  I don't want to claim too much.  I admit that Philadelphia suffered longer.  But I think that Cincinnati suffered so intensely in those last few days that the total, the area under the curve, must be close. 

Try picturing the graph.  Remember that Joe Morgan, in the eyes of Bill James (the father of the new baseball statistics), beat out all the other second basemen by having just two years, 1975 and 1976, way beyond anybody else's years.  The Reds' 1964 graph will look like Morgan's graph.  Two tremendous peaks put him on top.

191. Baseball Pain (12). Doubts in the Torture Antechamber.

Now a look at baseball torture.  Or will it be a look at baseball nuts, torturing themselves? 

If that's what it is I shouldn't be rolling the drums, I should be chuckling, as Mike Schmidt did (in the one conversation I've ever had with a ballplayer) over this radio fan of his in Philadelphia who went into the bathroom every time he came to bat — because that's where she was when he got a hit in an earlier game of this series she oh so wanted to win.

"She was in a lot worse shape than we were," Schmidt said, admitting that yes, there was player tension but going on to point out that on the field you weren't ever hanging on the outcome.  It was right in front of you, whether you had or had not made the play.  This poor lady with the transistor in her ear had a space in which she could imagine all kinds of horrors.

That's the way it was with the nuts who lived right in their team's city.  If you lived 150 miles away, as I and a high proportion of Reds' fans did, you had the additional strain of uncertain reception.  If your town station weren't carrying the game, as happened often, you had to pick it up from WSAZ Cincinnati, which came and went — meaning that in every crucial situation it went.  And opened, thereby, a larger space for horrors to rush into.

I don't know what the proportion of nuts to normals was on the Burger Beer Baseball Network but, by its size (it stretched well into West Virginia and all the way down to Alabama), I think we can say we're looking at plenty of them.  We're clearly talking major, Philadelphia-level strain and pain here.

And I don't think we have to concede any points for intensity.  The towns carrying the broadcast were for the most part towns on rail lines leading not just to Cincinnati but to a terminal only a few blocks from Crosley Field.   Fans could, with a bargain excursion ticket, ride in on the B&O from West Virginia, walk over, see a doubleheader, and be back by bedtime.  They could do the same, I'm sure, from Tennessee, or southern Indiana, or eastern Kentucky.  (Remember, there was no major league team in Atlanta then.) Do that a few times and (I'd say from my experience among them) you were as nutty as any fan in Price Hill, Cincinnati's baseball-nuttiest suburb.  (Pete Rose grew up there.)

All right, for a nut moments of uncertainty fill with heightening strain.  On this night coming up (or in the chamber we are about to enter) there are going to be x number of nuts in x number of towns along those rail lines glued to transistors (television? then? ha!) that are failing, moment after moment, to give them certain news of what is happening.  I can tell you what they are getting in those moments.  Like after they hear, "Rose leads from third.  Here's the pitch," they will get, "SHU-SHU-shu-shu, SHU-SHU-shu-shu."

And if that isn't enough, add this: the voice they are waiting for, the voice that will end the uncertainty, is that of an old ballplayer.  He's learned his trade, he's as impartial as he can be, he's trained himself to stay cool behind the mike, but at moments of high tension he's back on the bench.  Three words you'll get, a grunt, and then, "Oh no, he dropped it!"  A worse uncertainty.

And if that still isn't enough, add this.  Out beyond a hundred miles, and depending on the sky wave, there may be nothing but SHU-SHU-shu-shu, SHU-SHU-shu-shu for a whole minute.  Those out at that range have learned to read through the shu-shu.  If there is loud cheering, and they listen closely, they can pick it up.  It goes ye-AY, ye-AY and comes through at a different rhythm, discernible as the shu-shu dwindles.  When it does this after they've learned that they have a man on third they know that he has scored and, if it's the ninth inning or after, they know that they have won.  The strain ends, anxiety turns into relief and pain turns into pleasure.

When the ye-AY, ye-AY does not come through they feel pain and look forward to continued anxiety.  The pain may be the greatest of the game or, if it's a pennant-decider, the greatest of the season, but its moments won't be those of the greatest strain.  Those will be the moments when the poor nut can't tell whether a cheer is coming through or not.

The thing is, the nut knows all this when he turns on the radio.  What he's in for.  Can you see how that will increase his pain, like an exponent or kicker?  It cinches the pathology.  He's deliberately doing this to himself.  He's crazy, he knows it, he knows everybody knows it, and if they don't he's now going to demonstrate it by submitting himself, publicly, to a play-by-play of this absolutely crucial game with the Pirates.

190. Baseball Pain (11). Pain by the Number.

 

Who will have bragging rights to suffering in 1964?  It's a race.  At the moment, the morning of September 28, Philadelphia fans are way ahead.  They have lost seven straight and each loss, each failing batter, each weakening pitcher, viewed against a scoreboard showing the unfailing advance of the Reds (nine straight) and Cardinals (five straight), has stabbed them with increasing pain.  It has gone on for a week — ever since Chico Ruiz stole home.

They, in 1964, felt it; we, in 2013, can put numbers to it.  The pain any failure — in the field, on the mound, or at the plate — gives a fan depends on how much it can do to his team's chances of winning the pennant.  We now know (from http://www.coolstandings.com/baseball_standings.asp) that Philadelphia's chances (POFF) have dropped from 96.3% to 19.0% in the course of seven games.  We can see exactly how much difference each game makes.  We can also see (www.baseball-reference.com/) exactly how much difference each play makes in the game.  We are ready to put a gauge on the poor fellow sitting in Veteran's Stadium.

Say it's September 26.  He has just seen second baseman Tony Taylor drop the throw that would have gotten one out and maybe two.  The play dial (LI) shows 5.63 units of pain.  The game dial (∆POFF) shows 17.1 units.  We have a number, 22.73, that we can use to compare the pain he feels at this moment with the pain his brother in Cincinnati will feel at his moments of suffering.  On a graph of the whole week we can see his maximum pain and, in the area under the curve, we can see his total pain.  We can see how both compare with the pain in Cincinnati — or in any major league park since 1903.  Whatever hell our subjects are in, mathematically we are in a paradise.

And today we are looking down on a first-place team that, after a day to rest following its late-night celebration at the airport, is about to begin a three-game series with a so-so team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, facing Bob Friend (won 12, lost 18) in the opener.  The game will change their probability of winning the pennant by 21.5 percent.  Game anxiety is a lot higher than it was (1.8) when the fans settled down to watch them start the season against the Colt .45's.  And the pain felt after a play or misplay then?  Never higher than 4.23'

OK, here we go, first inning, Rose singles.  Count on Pete.  Go right at 'em.  (Rose will go 3 for 5 in this game.)  Ruiz bunts him to second.  Pinson singles and we've got Robinson, our big man, coming up with two on and one out.  Here we go.  Get to Friend early.   Robinson grounds into a double play.  Oh, pain.  How much?  Gauge shows 23.4. 

Robinson comes up again with two on and one out in the third.  He'll do it this time.  He flies to right.  Pain a little greater.  (23.7 — it's later in the game.)

Then in the sixth inning, for the first time, anxiety on the defensive side.  A brute force pitching performance, that's what it looked like we had.  Billy McCool, no brute, no Bob Gibson, just our Billy, had stepped in and shut out the Pirates.  One hit they had, over five.  Now an opening single.  Followed by a single.   A test for our rookie.  He throws a wild pitch!  Men on second and third with nobody out in a nothing to nothing game that clearly was going to be a squeaker.  Can't imagine a tougher test for a twenty-year-old.

OK, the infield draws in. (So, at the price of bad coverage, they can hold the runner at third.)  I imagine that Deron Johnson, the only English-fluent veteran in the infield, has come over from first base to talk to him, to steady him.  He goes back and McCool is alone.

All a fan can see, with his anxiety near 24, is two straight batters grounding to the shortstop, with the runners forced to hold at third while he gets the out at first.  All he knows, of the important things, is that McCool didn't pitch wild or walk anybody.  (Hits?  Good hitting can get them, whatever the pitcher does.)  But the fan saw enough to see character.  "Guts!  Billy's got 'em.  Our Billy."

So the fan goes into his half of the sixth feeling the pleasure of relieved anxiety.   And a glow of anticipation.  A run now and the Pirates, defenders of the whole pack of pursuers, have just nine more outs.  Mr. Guts gets 'em and those guys are in big trouble.

But no soap.  We produce a fly ball, a strikeout, and a popup.  In the seventh we get one two-out single.  Off Bob Friend.  He's good but he's not this good.  While Billy is back blowing the Pirates away.  Then in the last of the eighth Robinson opens with a double and the glow lights the park.  Deron Johnson, our clean-up man (who would knock in 130 runs the next year), flies to center.  A downer but here's Johnny Edwards.  Line drive to left with a ticket on it: "single."  Robinson takes off for home, carrying the winner but Bob Bailey races in, makes a shoestring catch, and fires the ball to second, doubling Robinson.  Ah jeez.

In the ninth Roberto Clemente and Bill Mazeroski break into McCool for two runs.  You could feel it coming.  And you knew we weren't going to be able to do anything about it.  Which we weren't. 

Meanwhile, over in Philadelphia, the fans were listening to the Cardinals push the Phils further and further away from the now necessary counter miracle.  Entering the game with a 9.5% POFF their ∆ was only 5.9 (there's not much room down here) and their anxiety index during the game got no higher than 8.86.  Since that is also an index of subsequent pain (when the anxiety is realized — i.e., when your worries come true) we can see that Cincinnati is gaining very rapidly on the suffering front.

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.

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?

187. Removed

 

185. Baseball Pain (6). Games of September 25, 1964.

 

Here's the closest a committed baseball fan comes to peace: early lead, ace on the mound, enough batters retired to show that he's in form, manager sitting back in the dugout, game official, sun shining.  The win you get that way is a win by brute force.  In the tense final days of a race it's about as relaxing a win as you can have.

For us the next games after the Cards had joined us were like that.  Jim Maloney gets a couple of runs in the first and then mows down Mets for nine straight innings, winding up with a one-hitter.  You might say the Mets are easy harvesting, but yeah, this is what it means to have the talent.  Here it is, exerting its force.  Brutality to them but peace for us.  A Reds fan can work on his car and barely listen to the game.

And then Bob Purkey does pretty much the same to the Mets in the second game of the doubleheader.  Three hits they get.  While over in Pittsburgh the Pirates aren't doing much better against the Cardinals, who get three runs in the first and then coast as we did.  We know in both Cincinnati and St. Louis that the peace can't last but we're enjoying it.

As I enjoy now looking at the graph of my peace.  The probability-of-win line for the Maloney game (as you can see at http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN196409251.shtml) jumps up to 72% and then slopes smoothly higher until the win is salted away in the ninth.  Not a single wrench-dropping point.  Nearly the same for the Purkey game.   And it must be the same in St. Louis.

How different things must be in Philadelphia!  I never saw such a graph.  The Phils take a 1-0 lead into the seventh.  Win Expectation 71%.  The line has been sloping their way ever since the fourth, when Callison scored their run.  Looks a lot like Maloney's line.  But Chris Short, this day, is not a Maloney.  A mistake by the catcher (interference) puts a man on first and then (is Short upset?) bang, bang, bang the score is 2-1 Milwaukee.  The probability line is way up in Brave territory, at 68%.

Then, just as in the Maloney game, it starts, behind Chi Chi Olivo, its slow climb to a Milwaukee victory, the 100% line.  Hank Aaron and Joe Torre add a run to the lead in the eighth and bring it 88%.  Then, with two outs in the Phillies' eighth and the probability of a Milwaukee win at 90%, Johnny Callison refuses to be a Met.  He hits one over the fence, Allen scores ahead of him, and they're all even.

Is that dull to you, all those numbers and lines?  If you're not a Philly fan (much less a baseball fan) no matter.  You're not in this.  Fine, go your way.  If you are a Philly fan, though, then you are answering a question other Philly fans (and other baseball fans) are curious about: what's inside you?  Something inside a certain kind of Philly fan will glom onto those lines and numbers.  "Yes!  That's exactly the way it was.  My heart was that low.  Ten percent chance of coming back.  I had forgotten."

I'm not saying that that fan is the true fan.  I'm just saying that he's a fan who needs to know how to relate to you.  Relations here are complicated, there are freaks and there are normals, but, whatever, he will be very satisfied to see that, despite the pain in those numbers and that geometry, you too look at them and say with satisfaction, "Yes, that measures the amount of pain there was, and that shows the direction it took."  He hardly has to know anything more about you.  Human understanding.

On the 25th Philly joy alternated with Philly pain, and was the greater for it.  Twice a Braves victory was more than 90% assured and twice the Phils fought back, jerking the line back to 50%.  Expand your screen and look at it, those cliffs in the 8th and 10th innings.

Imagine yourself in Veterans Stadium in the 10th inning, down two and no room left to wiggle.  Briggs starts you off by striking out.  Only 4% of teams come back from what you have now: one out, two runs down, extra inning.  Ah, but Rojas singles.  Something?  Forget it, Gonzalez strikes out.  Worse than 4% now.  Then Richie Allen (we called Dick "Richie" then) whacks one into center that goes to the wall and while it's bouncing around decides to keep going.  That moment when the crowd realizes that the runner is taking his triple all the way ("He's going to try for the plate!") is exciting enough, but when he carries the run that will save the game or lose it once and for all, my!  If you were there you must have been going crazy.

Well, he makes it, and life is good.  Briefly.  The Braves score two in the twelfth and this time the Phils can't match them.  Five straight losses.  The feeling of helplessness.  Awful.

Think what chance and perspective do to that game on the 25th.  Here we are looking at it in 2012 as one in a string of losses in a distant city.  It's the string, losing so many in a row, that has brought it to our attention.  After we look at the box score (our older habit) it's the string we'll go back to and talk about.  "What a streak!  What losers!"

Yet two of those losers, Johnny Callison and Richie Allen, stepped to the plate that night and, under very intense pressure, performed as heroically as any winner has ever performed.  In one at-bat they saved their team from a loss.  By doing the one thing that had to be done to save it. 

Just imagine how that would look to us (much less to Philly fans!) if we were looking back on it from a point of final victory.    Suppose the Phils had squeaked home a run in the eleventh, giving them the W that would squeak them into the World Series.  Can't you hear it?  "Remember the night ole Richie came carrying the mail around third?  After ole Johnny hit that ball into the seats?  Man, that was the night!"  It would be bigger than the Chico Ruiz night.  Hell, we wouldn't even remember the Chico Ruiz night.

Well, in the actual eleventh inning we didn't know that Callison and Allen hadn't done that.  Outcome of game and season were still in the air.  We just looked at their performance and heard it tell us this essential fact: they had inside them the stuff of heroes.  Character.  Now that's all changed and we look at them differently, or indifferently.  Anxiety is lost.  Pressure is lost. 

Ah, but the numbers.  Would you like to know just how much pressure was on Richie Allen?  Take the pressure put on him by his ability to change the outcome of the game as he came to bat in the tenth, the LI (see preceding post).  Add to it the pressure put on all Philadelphia players by their ability to change the outcome of the season by winning the game, the POFF difference.  (It's more than 14 times what it was on his first bat on opening day; see note below.)  You've got the Pressure Index, which for fans is the Anxiety Index.

Those numbers aren't affected by chance and they don't change with perspective.  And they don't give us the human experience, at the plate or in the stands.  What they give us is a better chance (if we have the imagination) to reproduce that experience than we've ever had before.  They give us a better chance of understanding character, and speaking of heroism.

Note: To obtain the Pressure Index (PI) multiply the LI indicator (the measure of the difference the at-bat can make in the game) by the change in POFF (the measure of the change the game will make in the probability of the team's qualifying for the playoffs).   The PI for Richie Allen's first AB of the 1964 season on April 14 was 1.67.  For the AB in the 10th inning on September 25 it was 23.7.  There was 14.19 times more pressure on him in the September AB than in the April AB.  And, since PI also measure fan anxiety, there was 14.19 times more anxiety in the fan.