Read Online Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell - Free Book Online

outlandish green-and-gold-and-white costumes, with a patronizing curiosity that was perhaps shared by the great majority of baseball fans everywhere. Oakland, to be sure, was the best the AL had, but the National, by every comparable measurement, was by far the stronger of the two leagues. The Oakland pitching was good—perhaps even first-class—but Reggie Jackson, the team’s only certified slugger, was over there uncomfortably balancing on crutches, and, anyway, who had ever heard of a major-league team wearing mustaches? (Charlie Finley’s ugly little scheme of paying each of his players to grow a mustache as part of a promotion stunt last June had a cheerful, unexpected result. The players—most of them, at least—liked their new and wildly variegated whiskers and long locks, and remained unshorn through the summer, and in time this eighteen-nineties look became a proud attribute of the squad. During the Series, the young and exuberant and showy A’s sometimes suggested a troupe of actors in a road company of Cyrano de Bergerac, laughing backstage in their doublets or swaggering a little on the streets after the show. The Reds, by front-office decree, were as clean and barefaced as Kiwanians.) In spite of the imbalance of styles, and the imbalance of talent in the lineups which seemed so strongly to favor the Reds, both teams were equally avid for the reputation and honors that would accrue to the new champion. Over the past two decades, the fall classic has usually offered a match between a famous champion and a new challenger—the Orioles against the Pirates, Reds, and Mets; the Cardinals against the Tigers and Red Sox; the Yankees against almost everybody. Now, relieved of this allegory, we looked at the two clubs with total surmise, wondering not only which would win but whether one of them might not also represent the game’s next dynasty.
    The sense of mild anticlimax persisted in Cincinnati right through the first game, which the Buttercups (or Bushwhackers, or Pale Feet) won by 3–2. Gene Tenace, the Oakland catcher and, on his record, a rather minor member of the A’s entourage, struck a two-run homer off Gary Nolan his first time at bat. The Cincinnati rooters near my seat behind third base smiled at this accident in a rather indulgent manner: these things happen sometimes in baseball, and their catcher-slugger, of course, was named Bench. Tenace came up next in the fifth and hit another one out, thus accounting for all the Oakland runs, and this time the hometowners sprang up and cried “Aw, come onn!” in unison. Tenace was the first man in history to hit home runs on his first two World Series at-bats. Still, the fans went home in the end only a bit cast down, and the tone of the afternoon was somehow struck by two banners that had been towed over Riverfront Stadium by circling airplanes— “OAKLAND HAS WEIRD UNIFORMS” and “WOMEN’S LIB WILL DESTROY THE FAMILY.” The Oakland pitchers, I noticed, had allowed only two walks and a single to those first three Red batters.
    The next day (a brilliant, sun-drenched Sunday afternoon), Johnny Bench had more unwanted practice as a leadoff man, as Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers confined the Top Three to a lone single and one free trip to first via an error, and the Goldenrods won again, 2–1. Catfish Hunter, a somewhat unappreciated star (he won twenty-one games in each of the past two seasons, and is one of the few players never to have played a single game in the minor leagues), is a control pitcher of the very first rank, and must usually be scored on in the first couple of innings if he is to be scored on at all. He settled this particular game in the second inning when he struck out the side with two (and eventually three) Reds on base, and in the A’s third, left fielder Joe Rudi hit the game-winning solo homer. The hometown crowd, their white-and-scarlet banners drooping, waited in polite but deepening silence for something to cheer