Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion by Angell Roger

Author:Angell, Roger [Angell, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480401662
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

A group of big-league scouts—Dario Lodigiani, Al Hollingsworth, Haywood Sullivan, and some others—turned up at most of the games I saw. Apparently by agreement, they always seemed to come to the same games, and they always sat together, watching the play and writing notes in their notebooks. Reminded you of Second World War spies taking their apéritifs together at Estoril.

Spotted Alvin Dark’s car parked outside Rendezvous Park, in Mesa—a big, mocha-colored Imperial LeBaron, with Florida plates and two rear bumper stickers. “A’s, World Champions” was on the left side and “Jesus Is Coming Soon! Every Knee Shall Bow” on the right. Dark, the Oakland manager, is a direct man. Last winter, he mailed several revivalist tracts to Ron Bergman, who covers the team for the Oakland Tribune. Bergman is Jewish.

Rollie Fingers, watching the Padres take infield practice: “There’s that Hernandez, at short. I’ll never forget that year he had five hundred and something at-bats and drove in twelve runs.”

Ray Fosse: “What? That’s impossible.”

Fingers: “Look it up.”

I looked it up. The year was 1971. Enzo Hernandez drove in twelve runs in 549 trips to the plate.

Before an Indians-Brewers game at Sun City, Gaylord Perry, the Cleveland pitcher who is starting his fourteenth year in the majors, spotted Del Crandall, who put in sixteen years as a player and is starting his fourth year as the Brewers’ manager.

“Hey there, Big Del,” Perry said. “I see we made it to another year.”

“Yeah,” Crandall said. “Let’s hope it don’t run out on us.”

March was winding down, and my holiday was nearly over. The penultimate stop was a Giants-Brewers night game, which I witnessed from the stands in the company of seventy or eighty members of the Giants Boosters Club. Surrounded by orange-and-black caps and buttons and pennants, I yelled for every San Francisco grounder and fly ball, and felt a lively sense of accomplishment over the eventual 3–1 win by the Good Guys. As one might imagine, given their team’s recent record, the Boosters don’t know the meaning of quit. There are some four thousand of them in all, mostly season-ticket holders at Candlestick Park, and a lot of them sign up for road trips, too, accompanying their boys to Los Angeles or as far as the East Coast, and even once to Japan. The Boosters are middling-old, and not many of them, I noticed, keep score. This is not a sign of amateurish fandom, however; the Boosters are too busy simultaneously yelling and socializing to do any writing. All Giants are addressed, fortissimo, by their first names, but some criticism is permitted within the family, too. After Ontiveros threw out a Milwaukee base runner, a woman next to me leaned over and murmured, “Every time Steve throws the ball, I shudder.” At one point, I asked another lady near me what she thought about the recent news that Juan Marichal, the longtime Giants mound ace, had signed up with the Dodgers. She pondered the question, and then said, “Well, I’m sort of sorry for Juan.

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