Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (5 page)

I
n 1927, when my father turned twelve, Al Jolson inaugurated the era of sound movies with
The Jazz Singer
, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s
Show Boat
opened on Broadway, Charles Lindbergh flew the
Spirit of St. Louis
across the Atlantic nonstop to Paris, the state of Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti, and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season.

Roger Maris bested the Babe with 61 in 1961, the summer of my nineteenth birthday, with teammate Mickey Mantle batting just afterward and reaching 54 in one of the two greatest home run derbies in baseball history. This summer, Mark McGwire has already broken 61, and may even reach 70—with Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs just behind, or perhaps in front, in the other greatest derby ever. My two sons, both fans in their different ways, will turn twenty-nine and twenty-five.

First published as “How the New Sultan of Swat Measures Up” in the
Wall Street Journal
, September 10, 1998.

This magic number, this greatest record in American sports, obsesses us for at least three good reasons. First, baseball has changed no major rule in a century, and we can therefore look and compare, in genuine continuity, across the generations. The seasons of our lives move inexorably forward. As my father saw Ruth, I followed Maris, and my sons watch McGwire. But the game also cycles in glorious sameness, as each winter of our discontent yields to another spring of opening day.

Second, baseball records are unmistakably personal accomplishments, while marks in most other team sports can only be judged as peculiar amalgams. Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a single basketball game, but only because his teammates elected the odd strategy of feeding him on essentially every play. Home runs emerge from a two-man duel,
mano a mano
, batter against pitcher.

Third, and how else can I say this, baseball is just one helluva terrific game, long paramount in American sporting myths and athletic traditions. Babe Ruth put it best when he said, in his famous and moving speech at Yankee Stadium in 1947, that “the only real game in the world, I think, is baseball…You’ve got to start from way down…when you’re six or seven…. You’ve gotto let it grow up with you.”

As a veteran and close student of the 1961 Mantle-Maris derby, I thrill to the detailed similarity of McGwire vs. Sosa. The two Yankees of 1961 embodied different primal myths about great accomplishments: Mantle, the deserving hero, working all his life toward his year of destiny; Maris, the talented journeyman, enjoying that one sweet interval in each man’s life when everything comes together in some oddly miraculous way. (Maris never hit more than 39 home runs in any other season.) That year, the miracle man won—and more power to him (and shame on his detractors). Fluke or destiny doesn’t matter; Roger Maris did the deed.

Sammy Sosa is this year’s Maris, rising from who-knows-where to challenge the man of destiny. Mark McGwire is this year’s Mantle. Few other players have been so destined, and no one has ever worked harder and more single-mindedly, to harness and fulfill his gifts of brawn. He is the real item, and this is his year. No one, even Ruth, ever hit more than 50 homers in three successive seasons as McGwire has now done. (But will anyone ever break Ruth’s feat of hitting more than 40 in all but two years between 1920 and 1932? Hank Aaron was a marvel of consistency over twenty-three seasons, but he never hit more than 47 in a single year, and only once did he hit more than 40 in two successive seasons.)

The Cardinals’ Mark McGwire rounds the bases after hitting his 70th home run, the last of his record-breaking season, in a game against the Montreal Expos in St. Louis on September 27, 1998. Sammy Sosa ended the season with 66 home runs for the Chicago Cubs.
Credit: AP/Wide World Photos

Though we cheer both Sosa and McGwire—may they each hit at least 70—we nonetheless rightly focus on McGwire for the eerie and awesome quality of his particular excellence. Most great records descend in small and even increments from the leader, and no single figure stands leagues ahead of all the other mere mortals. The home run record used to follow this conventional pattern: Maris with 61; Ruth with 60 and again with 59; Jimmy Foxx, Hank Greenberg, and McGwire (last season) with 58; Hack Wilson and Ken Griffey Jr. (also last season) with 56.

However, a few champions stand so far above the second-place finisher that they seem to belong to another category altogether. Consider DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 (regarded by most sports statisticians, myself included, as the most improbable figure in the history of American athletics), compared with second place Willie Keeler and Pete Rose, both far away at forty-four. Or Jim Thorpe’s lopsided victories in both the pentathlon and decathlon of the 1912 Olympics. Or, marking a single man’s invention of the art of home run hitting, Babe Ruth’s first high figure of 54 in 1920, a number exceeding the sum total for any other entire team in the American League!

McGwire belongs to this most select company of superhuman achievers. He may well hit 70, thus creating the same sweep of empty space that separates DiMaggio and Thorpe from their closest competitors. Moreover, the character of his blasts almost defies belief. Four hundred feet is a long home run; the vast majority of major league dingers fall between 300 and 400. Well, only 19 of McGwire’s first 62 failed to reach 400 feet (including number 62, which was a mere 341 feet), and several have exceeded 500, a figure previously achieved only once every few years.

When faced with such an exceptional accomplishment, we long to discover particular reasons. But no special cause need be sought beyond the good fortune of many effectively random moments grafted upon the guaranteed achievements of the greatest home run hitter in the history of baseball.

I don’t care if the thin air of Colorado encourages home runs. I don’t care if expansion has diluted pitching. I don’t care if the ball is livelier and the strike zone smaller. And I especially don’t care if McGwire helps himself train by taking an over-the-counter substance regarded as legal by major league baseball. (What cruel nonsense to hold McGwire in any way accountable, simply because we fear that kids may ape him as a role model for an issue entirely outside his call, and within the province of baseball’s rule makers.)

Mark McGwire has prevailed by creating, in his own person, an ultimate combination of the two great natural forces of luck and effort: the gift of an extraordinary body, with the steadfast dedication to training and study that can only inspire wonderment in us all.

I
have spent a paleontological career studying the fickleness of fate and the myriad might-have-beens of evolution.

The Earth would feature no life at all if any of several past ice ages had ever been intense enough to freeze the entire planetary surface, and no humans would grace this world if an extraterrestrial impact had not driven dinosaurs to extinction 65 million years ago and given mammals a lucky opportunity.

This ultimate chanciness, this power of unpredictable events to alter global histories, applies at all scales, from each person’s daily dreams to the destiny of our planet. Only an iota of pure circumstance—an inch up or down, a microsecond sooner or later—separates the permanent genius from the eternal goat, the victorious hero engraved in eternal memory from the answer to a future trivia question.

First published as “Fickle Fate Rules Sox Destiny” in the
Boston Herald
, October 8,1998. Reprinted with permission of the
Boston Herald.

In the most famous successful hunch of postseason baseball history, Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack started the 1929 World Series (against the Chicago Cubs, believe it or not) with Howard Ehmke, an aged and forgotten hurler who had not pitched for a month—and not with his stars Lefty Grove (who ended his stellar career with the Sox) or George Earnshaw. Ehmke won the game, giving up just three hits and whiffing a record-breaking (for them) thirteen Cubbies. The Athletics won the Series, Mack became a genius, and everyone forgot Ehmke’s terrible final-game outing, saved by good relief pitching and timely hitting.

Last Saturday, in a comparable situation (with Pete Schourek playing Ehmke and Pedro Martinez as Lefty Grove on the bench), Sox skipper Jimy Williams missed Mack’s immortality by a whisker of chance. With the Sox down two games to one in a must-win fourth contest against Cleveland, Schourek surrendered only two hits and no runs in a gut-wrenching, not particularly pretty, but completely effective five and one-third innings. In the eighth, with the Sox leading 1–0, our masterful closer Tom Gordon on the mound, and Boston just five outs away from a decisive game five (and an almost guaranteed victory by Martinez), three quick hits, starting with a lucky broken-bat single and ending with a double dose of rough (David) Justice, scored two runs for the Indians and spelled oblivion once again for the Sox.

And so, for no particular reason, by fate’s fickle finger (the true and only source for the Bambino’s nonexistent curse), Schourek, who did more than anyone had a right to ask, becomes a poignant moment of transient memory, rather than a permanent New England hero.

The fans in Fenway’s brimming bandbox rocked with hope until the very end, saluted their brave team with a final cheer, and then filed out once again into an early night (literally and figuratively). I hugged my seatmates Jenny, Ruth, and Jeff, partners in expectation and agony for so many seasons. We will return, by habit and with hope, in 1999. The forces of fate are indifferent to human feeling, and some year our time must come.

But for now, there will be no first-time-ever, most-wonderful-of-all-to-contemplate, full postseason series between the Yanks and the Sox. As a Yankee fan, new to Boston, I saw the only previous postseason encounter of these two archrivals—the Bucky Dent fiasco (and my joy) of 1978. My son Ethan, then four years old, watched with me, and now knows the bliss of being too young to remember.

Last Saturday, Ethan sat beside me, a young man bearing a lifetime of Red Sox pain and devotion. I too have learned to love this crazy, maddening team. How I would have relished the chance to step once again into the breach of my ambivalent rooting in next week’s might-have-been! Instead, Ethan and I walked out of Fenway Park and down Yawkey Way in the full understanding of complete silence.

M
y grandmother, a proud immigrant with a heavy accent, taught me to sing “The Sidewalks of New York.” But my four-year-old mind could not comprehend the description of what folks do on those sidewalks: “we’ll trip the light fantastic.”

I should have asked (not that she would have known), but my nascent stubborn self decided to go it alone. I concluded that the line must refer to changing traffic signals. (At that age, I was not troubled about the difference between adjectives and adverbs.)

I grew up in far distant Queens and attended only one ticker-tape parade in my youth: the welcome for Gen. Douglas MacArthur after President Harry Truman dismissed him for his refusal to wage a limited war in Korea. School wasn’t officially canceled, but teachers hinted in no uncertain terms that they’d look the other way if we traded grammar for grandeur that day—when Mrs. Ponti undoubtedly taught the class about adjectives and adverbs.

First published as “At Last, I Love a Parade” in the
New York Times
, October 24,1998. Reprinted with permission of the
New York Times
.

In any case, I loved the crowds and confetti, but my pleasure was seriously tainted, and I’ve felt just a tad guilty ever since, for my entire family stood with Truman against any extension of war into China.

Sometimes, most of life passes by before childhood confusions get resolved. The New York Yankees have brought me enormous pleasure in exactly fifty seasons of rooting. My first baseball memories extend to the 1949 pennant, when the Yanks faced the Red Sox, one game behind Boston with two games to go in the season—and, obviously, had to win both. And did.

In another misapprehension, my father called these two final games “the crucial series.” Only as a young adult did I discover that “crucial” was an ordinary English word and not a proper noun for those two particular contests. But I must also thank the Yankees for two little alleviations of childhood misconceptions.

I now live downtown (after a thirty-year Boston hiatus, with unswerving Yankee devotion, even in Fenway Park). I have just returned from my second ticker-tape parade, this time to honor our transcendent team of 1998. And I finally understand the meaning of such wonderfully traditional celebrations as MacArthur received in 1951, when I was too young and too ambivalent to understand. Long, crowded subway rides from Queens to honor a man you regard as wrong (if not dangerous) cannot convey the meaning or the emotion.

This time, on a crisp and sunny day, I walked to the parade—and immediately recognized why these celebrations must be held at the very southern end of Broadway, on an ordinary working day when kids can miss school (and not on the more convenient weekend for televisors and traffic controllers).

This rule of time and place must be observed because ticker-tape parades stand out (and move along) as one of the few unaltered joys of our past, still vibrant enough to face the present and future in uncompromised form. “See, the conquering hero comes”—and the entire city may watch and celebrate as the procession moves up the full length of main street, and everyone walks to the event from home. The surrounding buildings must be alive with workaday activity, so that shredded computer paper (substituting for the genuine ticker tape of yore) can cascade from all the windows, propelled by real human hands.

New York Yankees World Series victory parade, October 23, 1998.
Credit: AP/Wide World Photos

I was still in Boston during the 1996 victory and celebration. I even missed the final game of the World Series because, during those very hours, I was singing in a performance of Handel’s oratorio on Milton’s text “L’Allegro ed il Penseroso.” At one point in the performance, no doubt as the Yankees scored the winning run, the tenor soloist intoned Milton’s lines about vibrant and visceral joy:

Another childhood misconception, finally resolved: “light” and “fantastic” are both adjectives!

Yes, Joe, Scott, David, Derek, Mariano, Paul, Tino, Andy, Chuck, Bernie (please stay, you’ll never find a better team), El Duque, and all you others down to the very last and entirely essential man. Yes, especially, Darryl. And yes, even George. We’ll trip the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.