Going Out to the Ballgame

IF there were ever any doubts that baseball writer Roger Angell has a unique talent as an observer extraordinaire of our national pasttime, Season Ticket should quickly dispel them.

Angell is no newcomer to the task of writing about baseball: he's done it for years, and is responsible for such books as The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Late Innings, all of which convey his love of the game. He shares technical secrets with other diehard baseball fans--those who don't have the opportunity to sit down and discuss the finer points of the game with the likes of Reggie Jackson, Pete Rose, and Dan Quisenberry, as he does. Season Ticket, a collection of Angell's reminiscences on the 1983 through 1986 baseball seasons, is one of the books that can't be read by skimming a few pages.

One asset Angell has going for him is his job. Unlike most other baseball writers, who have to cover a certain team game-by-game and are constantly writing for a newspaper or magazine deadline, Angell is not constrained by such daily pressures. As the "senior fiction writer" for the New Yorker, he isn't preoccupied with reporting the details of any single, meaningless midsummer game.

From here, Angell can see the less tangible but more meaningful, subtle, and lasting aspects of the game. Instead of grilling Bob Boone or Jim Sundberg on why they called a certain pitch at a certain point in the game, Angell asks them about their craft. What ensues is a wonderful chapter, a round-table conversation with some of the game's best catchers, including Boone, Carlton Fisk, Terry Kennedy, and Ted Simmons, on how they go about their job. You find out how catchers call a game, settle down high-strung pitchers, seize up-and-in, rising 95-m.p.h. fastballs so as to turn the umpire's call to their advantage, and align the infield against great hitters, like George Brett or Wade Boggs, who can hit all types of pitches to all fields.

A fascinating observation Angell gleans from Joe Garagiola, a former catcher himself, in this chapter is that Johnny Bench, without a doubt the greatest catcher of his time, probably set back the art of catching, on account of his own great skills. Only Bench, with his extraordinarily quick release and balance, Angell's argument goes, could get away with catching the pitch one-handed, which normally catchers are taught not to do so that their throwing hand is on the ball if a Rickey Henderson or Vince Coleman tries for second base.

THERE are many other similar great moments captured by Angell in this book. Although Red Sox fans like myself cringe at the thought of reading about the 1986 World Series, Angell, a fellow Red Sox supporter, makes his "Not So, Boston" chapter bearable with a detailed recall of Dave Henderson's clutch homer in the American League Championship Series against the Angels and "Rocket" Roger Clemens' glorious summer.

Another chapter gives a refreshing insight into Roy Eisenhardt, the progressive president of the Oakland A's--one of the few baseball executives who cares more about their players and the state of the game than about making money from it. Angell shows that Eisenhardt considers baseball not as merely another tidy, profitable investment, but rather as an activity that can bring joy to thousands and provide a badly needed diversion from our daily lives.

Perhaps the finest part of the book, however, is Angell's thoughtful and probing discussion of the relationship between highly-publicized drug use in baseball and the improbably high pedestals upon which America places all its professional athletes. Angell blasts Commissioner Peter Ueberroth's drug-testing policy as a mere public relations campaign designed to give the appearance that the sport is drug-free, while lamenting Ueberroth's failure to implement a comprehensive program for the treatment and rehabilitation of players who abuse drugs.

Angell argues, quite cogently, that combination of large salaries paid to major-leaguers, along with their youth, sudden fame, and the pressure of demands to produce, is almost a guarantee of high levels of drug and alcohol abuse, and argues convincingly against the unchecked adulation we bestow upon our favorite players.

At times, Angell goes overboard, romanticizing all facets of the game--even the drunk fans in the bleachers--as larger than life. Angell seems to claim baseball as the wonder cure for all of society's larger problems. Baseball, he writes, "opens our eyes." Fans of the game, he argues, "are baffled but still learning, and we still keep coming back for more."

Yet, all in all, Season Ticket, like Angell's other books, is as much a pleasure as the game itself. But Angell's closing remarks say it best:

"Most of us fans fall in love with baseball when we are children... These infatuations are ferociously battered and eroded by various forces...the failure of many players to live up to our expectations for them, both on the field and off the field; and...by the wearisome heartbreaking difficulty of the sports which inexorably throws down last year's champions, exposes rookie marvels as disappointing journeymen, and turns lithe young stars into straining old men...Baseball is absorbing and sometimes thrilling, but it is also unrelenting; it is rarely pure fun for any of us, players or fans, for very long. Except at Cooperstown."