Read Online The Roger Angell Baseball Collection by Roger Angell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Roger Angell
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other’s style is all that seems needed. The pair may not last long enough to acquire this polish, however, because Moran has not yet shown that he can hit big-league pitching. Hunt, by contrast, has kept his average close to .300. He reminds me of Pee Wee Reese at the plate—an unassuming, intelligent swinger who chokes up on the bat and slaps singles to all fields.
The remaining Met assets are harder to define. The disparity between bright-eyed youth and leathery age among the team’s regulars seems, for reasons I cannot entirely fathom, a source of interest this season, where it was only grotesque in 1962. The contrast can be startling, though. In a game at Cincinnati in April, Duke Snider banged his two-thousandth major-league hit in the first inning; when he came up again in the fourth, looking for No. 2001, Ron Hunt was standing on first base, having just rapped his first major-league hit. And the big right fielder/first baseman who frequently bats right after Snider in the Met lineup is Ed Kranepool, who is eighteen years old and was playing baseball for James Monroe High School at this time last year. Collectively, the Mets are still both too young and too old to afford any but the most modest ambitions, but I think the time has arrived when they can look at each other with something other than pure embarrassment. They can at least admire their own hardiness, for they have survived. No fewer than thirty-two other Mets have vanished from the team in the past year—a legion of ghosts, celebrated and obscure: Richie Ashburn and Solly Drake, Gene Woodling and Herb Moford, Marv Throneberry and Rick Herrscher, R. L. Miller and R. G. Miller. That time of hopeless experiment and attrition is, in all likelihood, finished, and the Mets of the future—the squad that eventually erases the memory of these famous losers—will almost surely include some of the twenty-five men who now wear the uniform. * That is progress.
I am so aware of the attractiveness of this year’s Met team, and I share so much of the raucous, unquenchable happiness of its fans, that I cannot achieve an outsider’s understanding of this much-publicized love affair. I made a try at it during the long Sunday doubleheader against the Giants, when the biggest crowd of the baseball year imperiled its arteries with more than six hours of nonstop roaring, sat through a small rainstorm, threw enough paper and debris to make the outfield look like the floor of the Stock Exchange after a panic, and went home, at last, absolutely delighted with a split of the two games. Met fans now come to the park equipped with hortatory placards as well as trumpets and bass drums, and during the afternoon one group unfurled a homemade banner that read:
M is for Mighty
E is for Exciting
T is for Terrific
S is for So Lovable
Reason told me that the first three adjectives had been chosen only for their opening letters; it was the Giants who looked mightily, excitingly terrific. The day before, they had ripped off six homers, a triple, and eight singles, good for seventeen runs, and now Willie Mays settled the outcome of the Sunday opener in the very first inning, when he hit a three-run homer that disappeared over the roof of the Polo Grounds in deep left center—approximately the distance of six normal Met base hits laid end to end. The Mets’ boosters were unsilenced by this poke, or by Jack Sanford’s almost total mastery of the locals. In the fourth inning, when Choo Choo Coleman struck out with the bases empty, amid deafening pleas of “Let’s go, Mets! ” I suddenly understood why Met fans have fallen into the habit of permanent shouting. It was simple, really: Supporters of a team that is batting .215 have no heroes, no mighty sluggers, to save their hopes for. The Mets’ rallies fall from heaven, often upon the bottom of the batting order, and must be prayed for at all times.
Another revelation came to me by degrees, from various Giant fans who were sitting
The remaining Met assets are harder to define. The disparity between bright-eyed youth and leathery age among the team’s regulars seems, for reasons I cannot entirely fathom, a source of interest this season, where it was only grotesque in 1962. The contrast can be startling, though. In a game at Cincinnati in April, Duke Snider banged his two-thousandth major-league hit in the first inning; when he came up again in the fourth, looking for No. 2001, Ron Hunt was standing on first base, having just rapped his first major-league hit. And the big right fielder/first baseman who frequently bats right after Snider in the Met lineup is Ed Kranepool, who is eighteen years old and was playing baseball for James Monroe High School at this time last year. Collectively, the Mets are still both too young and too old to afford any but the most modest ambitions, but I think the time has arrived when they can look at each other with something other than pure embarrassment. They can at least admire their own hardiness, for they have survived. No fewer than thirty-two other Mets have vanished from the team in the past year—a legion of ghosts, celebrated and obscure: Richie Ashburn and Solly Drake, Gene Woodling and Herb Moford, Marv Throneberry and Rick Herrscher, R. L. Miller and R. G. Miller. That time of hopeless experiment and attrition is, in all likelihood, finished, and the Mets of the future—the squad that eventually erases the memory of these famous losers—will almost surely include some of the twenty-five men who now wear the uniform. * That is progress.
I am so aware of the attractiveness of this year’s Met team, and I share so much of the raucous, unquenchable happiness of its fans, that I cannot achieve an outsider’s understanding of this much-publicized love affair. I made a try at it during the long Sunday doubleheader against the Giants, when the biggest crowd of the baseball year imperiled its arteries with more than six hours of nonstop roaring, sat through a small rainstorm, threw enough paper and debris to make the outfield look like the floor of the Stock Exchange after a panic, and went home, at last, absolutely delighted with a split of the two games. Met fans now come to the park equipped with hortatory placards as well as trumpets and bass drums, and during the afternoon one group unfurled a homemade banner that read:
M is for Mighty
E is for Exciting
T is for Terrific
S is for So Lovable
Reason told me that the first three adjectives had been chosen only for their opening letters; it was the Giants who looked mightily, excitingly terrific. The day before, they had ripped off six homers, a triple, and eight singles, good for seventeen runs, and now Willie Mays settled the outcome of the Sunday opener in the very first inning, when he hit a three-run homer that disappeared over the roof of the Polo Grounds in deep left center—approximately the distance of six normal Met base hits laid end to end. The Mets’ boosters were unsilenced by this poke, or by Jack Sanford’s almost total mastery of the locals. In the fourth inning, when Choo Choo Coleman struck out with the bases empty, amid deafening pleas of “Let’s go, Mets! ” I suddenly understood why Met fans have fallen into the habit of permanent shouting. It was simple, really: Supporters of a team that is batting .215 have no heroes, no mighty sluggers, to save their hopes for. The Mets’ rallies fall from heaven, often upon the bottom of the batting order, and must be prayed for at all times.
Another revelation came to me by degrees, from various Giant fans who were sitting
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