Arguably, This Is What Makes Baseball Great

It pleases me to report that baseball, once the sick man of sport, is alive and well and living in high cotton. It is dealing in what it does best. It is putting its best foot forward.

Oh, not because of its .350 hitters, 20-game winners, 100-base stealers and Gold Glove fielders.

That’s not baseball’s strength. Baseball’s strength is flakes and controversy. And it is, as usual, hip-deep in these.

In baseball, it’s not whether you won or lost, it’s whom you can blame.

Baseball is not really the national pastime, arguing is.

The romance of baseball is not only how Pie Traynor got his name and, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” It’s also, “Who blew it this time?”

The just-completed playoffs may have been, in the words of Roger Angell, the eminent scholar-historian of the game, “the greatest week of baseball ever.” But it was not because of the slick plays, the superb pitching. It was because of the why-dint-he’s? the now-whaddid-he-do-that-fers?

Those are the real life blood of baseball, what Reggie Jackson calls the “shouldas, couldas and wouldas.” The why-dint-he’s? As in: Why dint he bunt? Why dint he swing away? Why dint he bring in a pinch-hitter? Why dint he walk him? Why dint he take him out? Why did he take him out? Why’d he leave him in there? Why dint he leave him in there? Why dint they put him on? Why did they put him on?

It’s as American as the cowboy hat, as Anglo-Saxon as the Magna Charta.

They used to call it the Hot Stove League. The Spit-and-Argue Society. It’s what made the game great. Beloved. Where’s the fun of a cut-and-dried result? That’s like no-fault insurance, no-fault divorce. Takes the spice out of life.

Never mind this year’s playoffs, take last year’s. Remember the scores of the playoff games, do you? Real sure who won which game? Remember the outstanding plays, the gem pitching, the hit-and-run plays?

Or do you remember Tom Niedenfuer pitching to Jack Clark--against your better judgment, no doubt--with a base open and the pennant on the line? Do you remember the Cardinals doing a fine job--or the Dodgers doing a not-so-fine job by not walking Jack Clark to get at Andy Van Slyke? The point is, Jack Clark’s home run that won the pennant was preventable--by January.

The playoffs that put the Red Sox and the Mets into the World Series are marvelously barnacled with the crusts of controversy.

Take that grand opera of a game played Sunday at Anaheim. The Angels are one out away from the American League pennant. The score is 5-4 in their favor; their ace pitcher, Mike Witt, has just retired Dwight Evans for out No. 2 after giving up a home run to Don Baylor, who has hit lots of ninth-inning homers.

The manager, Gene Mauch, mindful that the catcher at bat has hit Mike Witt hard this afternoon, decides to tap a lesser pitcher for the final out. The new pitcher does not get the final out. Neither does the next pitcher he brings in. When the dust clears, the Red Sox have taken the lead, and the 1986 pennant has gone--for good, as it turned out.

Now, is that good for five years of barroom arguments? Is that what made baseball our national pastime? Is there any greater pleasure for the true baseball fan than hashing over the old bones of bygone games?

Take the Met-Astro series. The Mets won. But would they have won if a decision in the second inning of Game 5 had been different?

Here’s the situation: Houston has runners on first and third, one out, score tied, 0-0. The batter, Craig Reynolds, hits a perfect double-play ball to the second baseman. Only, the second baseman has trouble getting it out of his glove. The relay appears to have gotten to first a split-second too late. Reynolds is safe. Or is he?

In the view of 40 million ABC viewers, he is. In the view of Umpire Fred Brocklander, he isn’t.

One against 40 million? Pretty poor odds? Not if you know baseball. The 40 million are overmatched.

That out could have cost Houston the tournament. Because a run crossed the plate and would have counted had Reynolds been called safe. And that run would have won Houston that game.

And thus, the pennant because it would have been Houston’s third victory, and it was well established that all Houston had to do to win was get the tournament to seven games, where its invincible pitcher, Mike Scott, would have taken over.

But umpires prevail in baseball. The incident calls to mind the attitude taken by another longtime, colorful umpire, Beans Reardon, in a similar play where the second baseman similarly bobbled and the relay to first was apparently too late.

Beans called the guy out anyway, and when Leo Durocher, then the Dodger manager, ran out to protest, Beans was ready. “Listen!” Beans said. “The guy hit a double-play ball, didn’t he? He deserves a double play!”

Even the aggrieved Durocher had to admit there was a perverse logic behind that.

You want controversy? Does Houston pitcher Mike Scott illegally scuff or pit the surface of a ball to make it unhittable?

The umpires are characteristically unsympathetic. Perhaps, they remember a day when the grand old game was not so flush with money and baseball owners were not so quick to throw a baseball out of a game just because it got a speck of dust on it.

I remember the late Ernie Lombardi once telling me that in the old days, to save money, they kept a ball in the game till it fell apart. “By the seventh inning, the ball was so scuffed and dirty and loosened in the stitches, you couldn’t help throwing a curve with it,” he said. “Also, you couldn’t see it.”

The umpires today may figure the modern batters have it too good and should have to put up with a ball every now and then that is not round and perfect and as visible as new snow.

The game is safe as long as the arguments rage. It is a measure of the health of any sport that its patrons quarrel over its conduct.

It’s probably not only what made baseball great, it’s what made America great. Just remember, it’s not whether you won or lost, it’s who screwed up the game.