Bottom of the Ninth

THREE CAREERS best exemplify the painful transformation baseball has experienced in the past decade. The first is that of Fernando Valenzuela. This young pitcher rose quickly in the major leagues, making the All Star Team and capturing the Cy Young Award in 1981. The following year, he held out for a month, demanding an incredibly lucrative salary. Lost was a certain care-free, play-for-the-fun-of-it innocence.

The second is that of Tom Seaver. Ten years a New York Met, he had been with the team through thick and thin, through two World Series and countless miserable finishes. In 1977, he was traded in mid-season to the Cincinnati Reds. The team unloaded their one superstar for a handful of unknowns because Seaver was demanding a fattened contract. Institutional loyalty was becoming increasingly old-fashioned. The ugly truth was out: Baseball's labor and management were perfectly willing to have money play the major determining factor in the once-pristine sport.

"Tom Seaver is gone--no longer a Met, no longer a sunlit prominence in this flattened city of New York... The feelings we are left with seem much deeper than disappointment or aggrieved sporting loyalty." Roger Angell '42 wrote at the time Angell's is the third bellweather career.

Twenty years a baseball writer for The New Yorker, Angell first focused on the memorable pitching, hitting and fielding that took place in the park. These joyous narratives--compiled in two previous books. The Summer Game and Five Seasons--were darkened only by the anguish of a slumping player or a pennant-hungry fan.

Late Innings, a collection of 16 pieces written between the 1977 season and the strike-shortened 1981 season reveals a new and gloomier view of baseball. In a 1977 essay. Angell writes of a malaise he feels toward baseball, blaming it in part on "the distraction of the price tags and business squabbles and owners statements and press releases that are now attached...to so many stars and teams, and even to the simplest and most cheerful scraps of early baseball news." This growing disenchantment is the one recurrent theme in this collection of articles on a range of baseball subjects.

In two separate pre-season accounts, he and a fellow sportswriter compile inter-league All-Star teams, based not on athletic ability but on bargaining room performance. Logging the routine of spring training, Angell gloomily notes that over-the-hill hurler Mike Kekich, struggling for a spot on the lowly Seattle Mariners "was the only ballplayer I talked to this spring who never mentioned money." Angell's altered view on the Summer Game becomes acutely clear in the pages and pages of harangues against the owners. By no means a visionary, Angell merely joins a growing chorus when he diagnoses greed as the sickness plaguing the game.

But Late Innings adds a new and eloquently presented explanation of the deterioration of baseball's pure and reassuring innocence which has occurred in recent years. The motivation behind the owners ungentlemanly actions comes in part out of a desire for revenge. Burned when an official arbiter declared Andy Messersmith a free agent--an act which ultimately opened the free agent floodgates--these millionaires felt a need to save face. And they were willing to try and restore control even if it damaged the game.

Particularly telling is Angell's explanation of why these executives acted with such vengeance--why personal values, even when jeopardizing long-term economic self-interest were allowed to prevail. M. Donald Grant, general manager of the Mets, when the team lost Seaver, told the 33-year-old ace pitcher that too much money at this age was bad for him. George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, said when firing manager Gene Michaels, that he felt like "a father scorned." During the strike, Angell explains that "what is going on here...is the same old psychodrama about American fathers and sons, work and play, money and sex and sports which is always being enacted deep within our national unconscious."

THE WORST VICTIM of this national psycho-saga has been the fan. Angell, who through his writing has established himself as the spectator's spokesman, eloquently mourns the major fallout from the contract and compensation wars." ...(T)he new salaries have vastly increased the distance between the players and the fans." Destroyed was the admittedly silly belief that the guy in the bleachers could be the guy in the bullpen. "The players are [now] businessmen too--businessmen with a vengeance, it seems--and the space between the fan and the player is the same light years span that divides the television star or the famous nightclub singer from his patronized and wholly anonymous audience."

The true value of Late Innings, however, lies in its preservation of the grand Angell tradition of following the game itself. The season summaries are hot meant to be comprehensive and fact-filled. Instead, they present the peaks and valleys in a unique, artistic light. His account of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees playoff is a gem of breath-taking narrative. Each year's write-up offers a sort of verbal scrap-book, pleasantly recounting some incidents and gently evoking other memories.

Because he writes for The New Yorker--a weekly magazine with a most selective and elite readership--Angell's style is more poetic, more intellectual. In "barroom Comparative Literature seminars," the professors of baseball spend countless hours discussing their relics. The hard-fought 1980s Astros-Phillies championship series included four extra innings games which were "Lovre pieces" highlighted by the seesaw Game Four--"baseball of the High Baroque, surely." A leading object de studie is Ron Guidry, who "is not a thrower...his every pitch, including the slider, contributes to an eloquent major theme built around the keynote, which is the fastball." A most cherished possession is the recollection of "Brooks Robinson's extended doctoral thesis on third-base play, which he presented in the otherwise unnotable World Series of 1970."

Angell's grace carries over into in-depth pieces on specific aspects of the national tradition--a thorough examination of the art of hitting, a lengthy profile on retired great Bob Gibson. Sometimes these ramble excessively, damaged by extensive use of the first person and long, unbroken quotes. Usually, however, they provide lively, informative insights on one of infinite facets of the sport.

The most meaningful section of this rather lengthy book is the final three chapters. The 1981 season summary contains no recap of the season or the World Series--only a bitter diatribe against the strike. Another recounts an afternoon spent watching a Yale-St. Johns contest beside pre-World War I pitching hero Smokey Joe Wood. The final article covers the ups and downs of a once-great college pitcher bouncing around the minor leagues. These pieces, each moving by itself, make a strong statement together. The true fan, infected with an inherent love for baseball, has not abandoned the game. But the squabblings and the infighting may have permanently damaged support for the major leagues.