A Stillness in Centerfield

Autumn, I discovered in September 1978, does not take New England by surprise. Summer lingers during the daytime of September and even into October, but when the sun goes down, a cutting wind signals winter's preeminence in this part of the country. Summer is but an annual interruption of the status quo.

The best place to learn this and other regional truths is the bleachers at Fenway Park, where I attended my first lesson in the year of the great pennant race. Detroit--hopeless, out of it, grungy--was in town, and the game, like every game that fall, meant everything.

Mike Torrez was pitching for the Sox and through six innings had managed an untidy shutout. He had thrown hundreds of pitches, it seemed, and baserunners were much in evidence. None, however, had scored. An epochal Jim Rice home run with no one on in the fourth provided the only score.

Attack

But the Tigers had the makings of a rally in the seventh. The typical nascent rally of a bad team: out, single, sacrifice bunt. Man on second with two out and pray for another hit, then maybe a long ball later.

Detroit did get the hit, and Fenway sagged as the ball rolled slowly out to centerfield. The centerfielder charged the ball, put down his right hand, scooped up the ball, rocked it back into his left hand and threw, all without breaking stride.

From the bleachers out beyond center, you see a throw from a considerably different perspective from that offered by television. You can see the whole trajectory, watch the ball go all the way to its destination, without the distraction of a change of cameras for a close-up of the play at the plate. So Fred Lynn's throw sailed home, seemed to hesitate at its apogee, and landed in Carlton Fisk's fat glove about a foot above the plate. The Detroit baserunner--whoever he was--never had a chance.

When the umpire called the play at home, Lynn jumped in the air with an exuberant wave of his arm, not so much in triumph as in pure joy. Fred Lynn was having fun, and so was I.

Lynn was obviously never taught to play baseball the way he does, because he lives by an ethereal instinct on the field. In center, he moves with the ball, not simply to it or at it. At the plate, his swing has nothing unnatural about it; the stroke is so patently correct, that others are no doubt compelled to try to copy it: the high left elbow, the perfect isoceles triangle of arms and chest at the moment of contact, and the long and level follow-through. But no one could imitate it, at least not exactly, because for all its simplicity, it is destined to be unique.

He belonged in Fenway's centerfield. Those of us who grew up outside commuting distance from Boston, didn't hear much about centerfield in that ballpark. Leftfield, with its little wall, gets all the press. It's called the "Green Monster," which is a terrible misnomer; every batter who has looked north from home plate at Fenways views the "Monster" as the best friend he could ever have, a good buddy who turns pop ups into runs batted in. The Green Monster is a tourist trap.

The real adventures are to be had in center, a remnant of the days when ball parks didn't all come from the Riverfront-Three River cookie cutter. Compared to left field, center in Fenway is the Wild West, a vast (almost 430 ft. to straight away center) and mysterious (a high wall that tapers down to the tiny bullpen barrier) piece of real estate. But Lynn studied it and had become its master. (If you're unimpressed, think about how many great centerfielders the Sox have had over the years. Not many.) After completing his fifth year in centerfield, his great catches--those no-one-else-but-Lynn-could-have-made catches--began to be greeted with sighs, rather than amazement. How many times can one be amazed?

But Lynn will make only occasional appearances in Fenway's centerfield from now on, after having signed a four-year contract with the California Angels. No is suprised at the deal. He was either a free agent or about to become one, and the Red Sox seemed unable or unwilling to sign him. The free agent system makes perfect legal and moral sense; no business enterprise, a team or a plantation, should ever own a man.

Yet baseball, as its many detractors have noted, never pretended to live by rules of sense, common or otherwise. It does not make sense to worry and cry and celebrate and rejoice over the doings of men whose lives cannot possibly affect our own. But millions of us do all those things and we love it. Baseball, indeed all sport, gives us the chance to wring out our emotions, emotions that are often left embalmed by the rest of our lives.

Offensive

So it is all the more offensive when the experience of sports is so rudely corrupted as it was in the Lynn trade. Of course it made sense, but that doesn't matter at all. Maybe the generation that grows up reading sports pages full of free-agency, reserve clauses and deferred payments will have the same attitude toward sports as older fans. Maybe they will be orphans from the exhilaration of watching other people play sports; the ten-year-olds, after all, may decide that these are matters of little interest to ten-year-olds. The ballplayers and the owners, in their retracing search after missing children, will find only orphans. They will not be found in the cold autumn of Fenway Park.