Hairs vs. Squares Read online

  Still a dynamic group of stars became identifiable within the carpeted confines of these new stadiums. You can’t think of Mike Schmidt and Greg Luzinski without thinking of Veterans Stadium. The same goes for the Big Red Machine and Riverfront Stadium, the Battling Bucs and Three Rivers Stadium, and the Glasshouse Gang and Houston Astrodome.

  “Veterans Stadium was a jewel when they built it,” said Larry Shenk, the Phillies’ public relations director in 1972 and a member of the club’s front office for more than five decades. “We were so glad to get out of Connie Mack Stadium, it was unbelievable. It was small, dirty, and smelly. There was very limited [fan] parking, the food was pretty much hot dogs and hamburgers, and the offices were antiquated and spread out. We needed a change, and when we got to the Vet, it was awesome.”

  The 1970s saw an outbreak of synthetic surfaces and cookie-cutter stadiums. “Artificial turf changed the game, made teams play differently,” says Cash. “The game became very fast.”

  Several ballparks maintained their iconic identities. In the east there was Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. The big ballpark in the Bronx was still “the House That Ruth Built.” Known for its history—Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man Alive” speech, Roger Maris’s record-setting sixty-first home run in 1961, etc.—Yankee Stadium was also known for its deep dimensions (463 feet to center field) and iconic features (the three stately monuments in center field, the dignified copper façade on the third deck).

  While Yankee Stadium was majestic in size and grandeur, Fenway Park is often referred to as a large minor league stadium. Its seating capacity in 1972 was 33,379, but one of Fenway’s charms has always been its coziness. There’s the Green Monster in left, Pesky Pole in right, and in deep center the “Triangle,” an area where an outfielder must be part pinball wizard to play the many ways the ball bounces off the walls.

  In the Midwest there stood the hallowed grounds of Tiger Stadium and Wrigley Field. Tiger Stadium was Ty Cobb, a trademark overhanging upper deck that turned deep fly balls into round-trippers, and Ernie Harwell; Wrigley was Ernie Banks, ivy-covered brick walls, and, later, Harry Caray. Both parks had an early twentieth-century America feel few other venues could match. In the golden west the Oakland Coliseum and San Francisco’s Candlestick Park were awash in sun and scented with a salty sea air.

  Pull up to the stadium and you could park your car for twenty-five cents and buy a seat in the bleachers for fifty cents. Inside the ballpark you could get a hot dog and cold drink for ninety-five cents, a large soft drink and popcorn for sixty cents.

  The game was changing, but some constants remained. Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek, and Jim Simpson were fixtures on NBC-TV’s Saturday afternoon Game of the Week and provided a soundtrack for summer. Doubleheaders ruled the day. The A’s played sixteen twin bills in ’72, and there was an East Coast swing in late July that led to Oakland’s playing thirteen road games, including four doubleheaders, in ten days. In New York the annual Mayor’s Trophy Game between the Yankees and Mets presaged interleague contests.

  In this era games were played faster. An MLB game in the 1970s averaged two and a half hours, as opposed to three-plus hours in 2014. Pitchers worked quickly—it was a point of pride for starting pitchers to go the distance—and hitters tended to stay in the batter’s box for the entire at-bat. They didn’t engage in rabbit’s foot rituals, tightening and retightening their batting gloves between each pitch while the minutes piled up like student loans.

  Players also choked up on the bat far more frequently. It was as common for the powerful Bando, whom Gowdy described as being built like a blocking back, to choke up on the bat and shorten his swing to protect the plate as it was for light-hitting infielders like Felix Millan, Gene Michael, Eddie Brinkman, Bud Harrelson, and Larry Bowa. Millan may have choked up on the bat higher than it was thought humanly possible, but Brinkman was close. He had a wide-handled bat that had a knob on it to remind him not to place his hands any lower.

  It was also common to see a pitcher reach base and button up a nylon jacket even on the most sweltering summer afternoons. Hitters often followed their at-bats by removing their batting helmets and pulling out their cloth caps from their back pockets. Some wore their caps beneath their batting helmets. “A player like me can appreciate the differences in those kinds of little things in the years I played and before I played and today’s game,” says Mike Schmidt, who made his major league debut in 1972. “[The players are] bigger, stronger, physical specimens. Hitting technique is probably better across the board. But the little baseball skill things have gone the other way.”

  Depending on where you lived in ’72, you could tune your transistor radio or local TV channel to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett, Ernie Harwell, Harry Caray, Chuck Thompson, Bob Prince and Nellie King, or Ken Coleman and Johnny Pesky. Philadelphia fans could listen to Byrum Saam, Harry Kalas, and Richie “Whitey” Ashburn. In the New York–New Jersey metro area we had Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto, Frank Messer, and Bill White broadcasting Yankee games; Ralph Kiner, Lindsey Nelson, and Bob Murphy were on the Mets’ network.

  Sportscasters in the 1960s and ’70 were extensions of the team itself. In Chicago Harry Caray became as identifiable with the White Sox as Lloyd Pettit was with the Blackhawks of Tony Esposito and Bobby Hull and the excitable Jack Brickhouse was with the Ernie Banks–Billy Williams Cubs and the Dick Butkus-led Bears. The same could be said for Los Angeles, which featured Scully with the Dodgers, Chick Hearn with the Lakers, and Dick Enberg with UCLA basketball; and Detroit, where Harwell broadcast the Tigers and Van Patrick, the “Ol’ Announcer,” the Lions.

  New Yorkers were similarly blessed with iconic sportscasters. Along with Scooter Rizzuto and Kiner’s Korner, there was Marty Glickman calling Giants games, Merle Harmon the Joe Namath-led Jets, and Marv Albert the Knicks (“Frazier cuts to his left, stops and jumps. . . . Yes!”) and Rangers (“Giacomin kick save and a beauty!”). The Red Sox’s Ned Martin’s elegant erudition and signature phrase (“Mercy!”) made him as beloved an orator in Back Bay as the Celtics’ gritty, gravelly voiced Johnny Most (“Havlicek stole the ball!”).

  These men were masters of their craft, many of them having grown up listening to sportscasting giants Red Barber and Mel Allen, who were in turn following in the footsteps of baseball broadcast pioneers like Graham McNamee, a man blessed with a rich baritone and the first “star” sportscaster. They knew how to let a broadcast breathe. Their commentaries and observations were tempered; their quiet pauses allowed listeners to soak in the sounds of the stadium. Longtime listeners of the leathery-voiced Kalas learned to lean in a bit toward the radio during dead air to hear their beloved Harry clicking his cigarette lighter to light up a Parliament. They could hear the soft scraping of his metal lighter on the microphone, a small nuance fans loved.

  The glory years of these great voices coincided with the rise in popularity of transistor radios. They were the iPods of their era, pocket-sized devices propelling a change in popular culture. The hand-held radio was perfect for a post–World War II public with disposable income. This period of prosperity changed people’s habits. They could listen to a ballgame anywhere, and children fell asleep on summer nights to the muffled voices of favorite announcers beneath their pillows. The voices were distinctive, and we formed a connection to Lindsey Nelson’s elegant Tennessee tones and the excited cries of Scooter Rizzuto, his signature “Holy cow!” and “What a huckleberry!” dripping with his native Brooklyn. These storytellers made us feel like part of the game, and our younger days remain forever linked to the sounds of their voices.

  We read the newspapers every day—my boyhood days usually began by reading the Newark Star-Ledger or New York Daily News—and listened to live broadcasts with a transistor radio pressed to our ears. Every October in the late ’60s and early ’70s we hid a radio in our pockets and snaked the cord under our shirts and up to our ears as we sat in grade school listening to that afternoon’s World Series game.

  It’s difficult to e
xplain to younger fans since the last time a Series game saw the sun was 1984, but Fall Classic contests in the daytime led to a holiday-like mood as you looked forward to that early-afternoon opening pitch. As kids we ran home from grade school in October 1970 to catch NBC’s broadcast of the Orioles’ domination of the Reds on Channel 4 from New York. One October later I was with my parents, John and Roberta, in Jersey City listening on the car radio to the Pirates-Orioles Series.

  The friendly and familiar voices of your favorite broadcasters accompanied you to the ballparks, where their calls mingled with the voices of the public address announcers. In classic venues like Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field it meant Bob Sheppard, Sherm Feller and Pat Pieper respectively. In newer stadiums like the Vet it meant Dan Baker, who in 1972 was in the first year of his more than five decades with the Phillies. Unlike today, when trips to a major league game mean a three-hour audio assault, in the early 1970s the PA announcer and stadium organists like Eddie Layton and then Toby Wright in Yankee Stadium, Jane Jarvis in Shea, and Helen Dell in Dodger Stadium worked in low-key concert with one another.

  There were other sights and sounds to capture our attention: the rumble of the elevated IRT trains outside Yankee Stadium, the deafening roar at Shea Stadium by the procession of planes from nearby LaGuardia, the scenic stroll into Three Rivers Stadium across bridges spanning the sparkling waters of the Monongahela.

  It was an era of revered umpires: skillful arbiters Augie Donatelli, Shag Crawford, and Nestor Chylak; showboats in blue like Ron Luciano and Emmett Ashford; and umps who earned national notoriety for being pitchmen—Bill Haller hawking El Producto cigars and Jim Honochick on Miller Lite Beer commercials with a famous Baltimore slugger (“Hey, you’re Boog Powell!”).

  The umpires themselves were at the center of a seemingly annual debate every October about the differences between the leagues. American League umps had the reputation of giving pitchers the high strike—good news in the early ’70s for hurlers like Oakland’s Vida Blue, who had a rising fastball. AL and NL umps also positioned themselves differently behind home plate. In the American League the plate umpire worked directly behind the catcher; National League umpires worked inside the hitter. For a right-handed batter NL umps were positioned behind the catcher’s left shoulder; for a left-handed hitter, the ump would be just off the catcher’s right shoulder. One other difference was that American League umps wore outside chest protectors, and even a devoted Mets’ fan like New York City poet Joel Oppenheimer thought there was something wonderful about the sight of an umpire shifting his chest protector around, a sight that was sadly lacking in National League games.

  One other difference between the leagues was also sartorial. In the National League it was common to see hitters reach base and discard their batting helmets in favor of their caps. Their American League counterparts had no such option; they were required by rule to wear their batting helmets on the base paths. Certain hitters did, however, have the option of wearing batting helmets or cloth caps at home plate. The rule requiring the wearing of batting helmets was passed in December 1970, but veteran hitters were grandfathered in, giving them an option. Some chose not to wear helmets or wore them only in certain situations. Detroit left-handed hitter Norm Cash wore a batting helmet when facing southpaws but a cloth cap when facing right-handers.

  The ’72 season was the first for the fledgling Texas Rangers, formerly the Washington Senators. The franchise went from the AL East to West, while Milwaukee moved West to East. The season also marked the final summer the Kansas City Royals would spend in Municipal Stadium. The following spring they would take up residence in the sparkling new Truman Sports Complex in suburban Kansas City.

  The overlapping of eras was exemplified in various and vivid ways—Reggie Jackson digging in against Bob Gibson in the 1972 All-Star Game; aging legends Willie Mays and Juan Marichal sharing the same fields with young stars Carlton Fisk and Cesar Cedeno. There were familiar faces in unfamiliar places: Mays, Rusty Staub, and Jim Fregosi in New York; Nolan Ryan in California; Dick Allen in Chicago; Frank Robinson in Los Angeles; Denny McLain in Oakland; Sam McDowell in San Francisco; Gaylord Perry and Alex Johnson in Cleveland; Lee May in Houston; Joe Morgan in Cincinnati.

  New, form-fitting double-knit uniforms were in style, having been inaugurated by the Pirates in 1970. In the blue and white of the Atlanta Braves, Hank Aaron continued his relentless pursuit of Babe Ruth’s career home run record.

  Still some reassuring constants remained—Brooks Robinson and his magic mitt were in Baltimore, and in Pittsburgh Roberto Clemente was still lord of the flies in right field.

  There are other vignettes from the unforgettable summer of ’72:

  Clemente, swinging as usual off his front foot, strokes a double off Mets lefty Jon Matlack for his three thousandth hit. The historic hit comes in Clemente’s final regular-season game. Two months later on New Year’s Eve Clemente boarded a DC-7 for a humanitarian mission bringing supplies to stricken earthquake victims in Managua, Nicaragua. The plane crashed a mile off the coast of Puerto Rico and within sight of several of his Pirate teammates at a party. There were no survivors of the crash, and Clemente’s body was never found. “Dock Ellis and I cried when we heard the news. We broke,” Pirates slugger Al Oliver remembers;

  Dick Allen, waving what appeared to be a tree trunk at home plate, having an MVP summer for a White Sox squad revered for saving Chicago’s South Side franchise;

  Steve Carlton, so twitchy on the mound he could make coffee nervous, staring in for the sign and then snapping off his sharp-breaking slider. He wins 27 games in ’72 for a Phillies squad that claims just 59 victories;

  Sparky Lyle stepping from the pinstripe-painted Datsun as Wright pounds out “Pomp and Circumstance” on the Yankee Stadium organ and the crowd chants, “Dee-fense!” Chomping down on a wad of Red Man tobacco, Lyle retires hitters with his wicked slider;

  Willie Mays, traded by San Francisco back to New York, where the Say Hey Kid’s career started in 1951, makes a triumphant return to Gotham and thrills a Shea Stadium crowd with a game-winning homer against his former mates;

  Joe Morgan furiously pumping his left elbow while he awaits a pitch;

  Willie Stargell windmilling his bat as the hurler goes into his windup;

  Bob Gibson’s fallaway delivery;

  The NBC peacock (“The following is brought to you—IN LIVING COLOR—on NBC!”) and the network’s familiar theme music that heralded its Game of the Week.

  The summer of ’72 saw the birth of the brilliant Dodger infield of Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey, and their union would last longer than many marriages; on the opposite coast was the equally iconic twisting, twirling windup of Luis Tiant, a.k.a. El Tiante. Other ornaments included the clipped, burnt-orange bill of Brooks Robinson’s batting helmet and the matte finish on Manny Sanguillen’s; Horace Clarke wearing his helmet in the field; the smear of dirt on the right leg of Tom Seaver’s uniform pants, courtesy of a delivery that has his knee scraping the mound.

  Teams had style and personality—the Mustache Gang, Big Red Machine, Glasshouse Gang, A-Mays-in’ Mets, Battling Bucs, Bronx Bombers, Sesame Street Gang, and South Siders. Powerhouse clubs of the past were driven by a sense of the years descending—the Baltimore Orioles, fronted by the elegant pitching corps of Palmer, Dave McNally, and Mike Cuellar; the Tigers of Cash, Al Kaline, and Mickey Lolich; the Cardinals of Bob Gibson and Lou Brock.

  The ’72 season saw much needed attention brought to former Negro League players. In February Commissioner Bowie Kuhn announced that Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard would be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. At the World Series, Jackie Robinson, who had broken the major league color barrier in 1947, threw out the ceremonial first ball prior to Game Two.

  Worn down in part by the strain of being the first black ballplayer in the major leagues, Robinson’s eyesight was failing and his health deteriorating due to diabetes. He thanked baseball for the
“tremendous opportunity” presented to him twenty-five years earlier. He was pleased and proud, he told the sun-streaked crowd, and said he would be “tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third-base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.” He didn’t live to see the day. Three weeks later, Jackie Roosevelt Robinson died at age fifty-three on October 24. It was seventeen years and a day after Branch Rickey had announced Robinson’s historic signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Along with Robinson and Clemente, a third giant of the game passed away. Gil Hodges, Robinson’s teammate on Brooklyn’s “Boys of Summer” squads and the man who guided the Mets to their 1969 world title, died April 2 of a sudden heart attack following a round of golf at a West Palm Beach course. Hodges’s untimely death—he was two days shy of his forty-eighth birthday—and the Mets’ December 1971 trade of Ryan to the Angels for Fregosi haunted the franchise.

  Dickens wrote in The Battle of Life that there were victories gained every day in struggling hearts to which “fields of battle were as nothing.” In the summer of ’72 such victories were won in the hearts of Bench, Tiant, and Bobby Tolan, among others. Such a victory was also won in the heart of Tigers hurler John Hiller, who on July 8, 1972, took the mound for the first time since suffering three heart attacks on January 11, 1971, at the age of twenty-seven. Having undergone the experimental procedure of intestinal bypass surgery to lose weight, Hiller shed the pounds that had pushed his weight from 185 in 1968 to 220 in January 1971.

  On his comeback afternoon Hiller worked the middle three innings against the White Sox. He went on to make 24 appearances and post a 2.03 ERA for playoff-bound Detroit. Over the next two seasons he would win a combined 27 games in relief, and in 1973 he led the league with 38 saves, a major league record until 1983. He was named Comeback Player of the Year and Fireman of the Year. Along with contemporaries like Lyle, Fingers, Cincinnati’s Clay Carroll and the Mets’ Tug McGraw, Hiller helped define the role of the modern reliever.