Season Ticket by Angell Roger

Author:Angell, Roger [Angell, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 0345358147
Google: lPRJrzHvS9MC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1199774
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1988-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

TEN

To Missouri

FALL 1985

BASEBALL HAS HAD THE shutters up for more than a month now, but its devotees still hang around outside the old saloon in the evenings, out of habit, recalling the lights and the talk and the smoky laughter, and hoping to hold in memory the way so many of us—old regulars and excited newcomers, families and friends and kids—were swept up in what came to feel like a summer-long party. It went on too long, of course, and some parts of it weren’t much fun at all, come to think of it, but never mind—it was a fine baseball summer, and I miss it. Good parties come back to us in a blur of names and shouts and too close faces and overlapped talk, and it would be wrong somehow to try to get every part of that in order later on, even if it could be done. This was the summer when Pedro Guerrero hit all those homers (fifteen of them) in the month of June, and Gary Carter hit all those homers (five in two days and eight in a week) in September; it was the summer when nobody caught up with the Blue Jays, and the autumn when the Royals caught up with everybody; it was the beginning of Vince Coleman and Bret Saberhagen, but also the time of Ron Guidry and Dave Parker, once again, and of Wade Boggs and George Brett and Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly and Willie McGee some more. It was the time of John Tudor vs. Dwight Gooden—two rows of zeros up in lights. It was the year of Tom Herr yet again coming up to bat with Coleman or McGee already on base, and the pitcher out there running the count to 3–1 and then going to the rosin bag….Nineteen eighty-five was when three of the four pennant races were settled on the final Saturday of the season, and when the Giants lost one hundred games, for the first time ever—the last of the proud old flagships to suffer that indignity. It was the summer in which catchers Carlton Fisk and Buck Martinez each separately accounted for two outs on one play at the plate, and in which Tom Seaver, Rod Carew, Nolan Ryan, and Pete Rose made us aware of some larger numbers. It was the year of another players’ strike, which came on miserably and unstoppably, continued for two days, and then was settled and instantly forgotten. It was the year when the Cubs lost all their starting pitchers to injury, and when a creeping mechanical tarpaulin caught the fastest man in the National League and probably cost the Cardinals a World Championship. Baseball was in court in Pittsburgh, where cocaine was the topic, and in Chicago, where state and city edicts banning night baseball at Wrigley Field were at issue and were upheld, thereby almost assuring the eventual abandonment of that grand old garden by the restless, neo-Yuppie Cubs. There was no Subway Series in

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