Last Sunday’s old-timers’ game at Wrigley Field took place under a freshly scrubbed bright blue sky. The old pros cavorted in the sunlight with the carefree attitude of puppies at play, so that the inevitable questions–Is that Walt “No-Neck” Williams or Carlos May in right field? What’s Bob Gibson doing at third base? Did Don Kessinger commit that error?–were, for the most part, rhetorical. We were feeling unusually charitable toward these old-timers, perhaps because the presence of Bill Buckner, Gary Matthews, and Oscar Gamble in such a game humbles any local baseball fan of a decent age who harbors delusions of immortality, but for the most part because I felt akin to the old stars, who were struggling to do something they used to do almost by rote.
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We’re long past testing our maturity–or lack thereof. The idea of attending a Doubleday just to do it for old times’ sake wasn’t appealing. The Cubs’ scheduled starter, Greg Maddux, was a major selling point, however. The Cubs’ season has been a disappointment, but Maddux–in the free-agent year of his contract–has been an inspiration. In 25 games going into Sunday, he had amassed 23 decisions, going 14-9, leading the National League in innings and opponents’ batting average and in the top three in wins and earned run average. He had pitched poorly only once all season; in his nine losses, the Cubs had scored a total of six runs, getting shut out in six of his starts. Always professional and sometimes spectacular, he labored, as Henry James once wrote lovingly about one of his characters, in that country of the blue. We had taken to seeing Maddux every chance we could, and had seen, most recently, his ten-strikeout game against the New York Mets (in which he fanned the last man to reach double digits) and another, more routine, eight-strikeout 5-2 affair against the same New Yorkers.
This could easily have become a somnolent game. The Astros, like the Cubs, are struggling this year, and were in the midst of a 28-day road trip, brought on by their owner’s leasing the Astrodome to the Republicans for this week’s convention (they needed three weeks just to set up). The Astros should have looked ragged, but they rose up behind their rookie starter, Brian Williams, after he worked out of a bases-loaded, one-out jam in the first inning, allowing only one run.
The Veeck is filled with immense guys with macrame mustaches and zits on the back of their necks; big-hair babes with satin warm-up jackets; blue-eyed, blank-stare guys wearing Walkman headsets no doubt tuned to the game; men with sparse beards and their caps on backward; bleary-eyed dads; and–last but not least–stumbledown teens talking about being arrested in Milwaukee for underage drinking. In short, it’s hoi polloi, and I loved it–aside from the loudness of that chain saw, that is, and the airline advertisements whenever anyone caught a foul fly and (and this was especially annoying) the blatant advertisement for a Hollywood movie during one of the breaks between the middle innings.
Roberto Hernandez
and the like. It was getting late. Twenty-one innings of baseball will do that to the brain.
