Free Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell Page B

third. (Extraordinarily, most of this game seemed to be played at the foot of that center-field fence, 404 feet away.) Gene Tenace, now batting cleanup, pulled a sharp grounder to left that struck the edge of the AstroTurf carpet at the back of the third-base dirt patch and suddenly bounded over Menke’s head; and the Yellowlegs, not exactly on merit, had the first run.
    Blue Moon Odom, the Oakland starter, has a splendid motion to first base (a gift he has evidently never tried to pass along to his co-workers), and he had stated the night before that no Cincinnati runners would steal on him. Now, in the fourth, Pete Rose led off with an enormous smash to center that Mangual one-handed just at the fence. A little startled, Odom walked the swift Morgan, and the crowd began a breathless nonstop shouting: “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Odom would have none of it. Fixing Morgan with a sidewise, over-the-shoulder stare (friends who saw the game on television told me later that the closeups of Odom’s face were remarkable), pausing, waiting almost interminably, he whirled and threw to his first baseman five times in succession, twice nearly erasing Morgan. He delivered a ball to Tolan, then made two more pick-off throws, then threw another pitch—a ball—as Morgan flew away to second, where he was cut down, narrowly but plainly, by Duncan’s peg. The game, I was suddenly certain, had been won right there.
    The Reds were far from done. Tony Perez led off the fifth with a double to the left-field corner, and two successive walks then loaded the bases with only one out. Hal McRae, pinch-hitting, struck the first delivery to him all the way (need it be added?) to the center-field wall, where Mangual made the catch. The score: 1–1. Rose, who had singled in the first, unloaded another rocket to precisely the same spot, and again to no avail. He had now struck two successive clouts, good for a total of more than eight hundred feet, producing two outs. Some baseball games do not yield themselves, even to a Rose.
    Billingham had been given up for the pinch-hitter, and Campaneris greeted his successor, Pedro Borbon, with a single. He was sacrificed to second, and Tenace scored him with a double to deep left—and was taken out of the game, to his surprise, for a pinch-runner. (He had won the sports car, clearly, as the top player of the Series, and also became the recipient of a hug and a retroactive raise from the All-father, Charlie Finley.) The next batter, Sal Bando, hit another enormous shot to the battered center-field salient, and this ball landed untouched when Tolan fell at the warning track. The score was 3–1, and Cincinnati’s luck had run out.
    Pete Rose, leading off for the Reds perhaps for the last time this season, began the eighth with a single off Catfish Hunter, and the despairing Reds rooters hoarsely roused themselves once again. Holtzman, a lefty, came in to pitch to Joe Morgan, a lefty, and the last touch of baseball misfortune now descended on the Reds. Morgan cracked the ball on a low line to right—pulling it so violently, in fact, that Rose had to dodge back to avoid being struck, and then was forced to leap over Mike Hegan, the Oakland first baseman, sprawled in the dirt after his dive for the ball. The ball was in the right-field corner—a sure triple, a certain run, except for that infinitesimal accident at first; Rose came churning around third, with Morgan not far behind, but the ball was on the way in now, and third-base coach Alex Grammas threw up his hands at the last instant, stopping Rose so abruptly that his helmet came flying off. The runners retreated. (Second-guessing, I thought Grammas had made a mistake, but we would never know.) Fingers came in to pitch, and Rose eventually scored on Perez’ fly, to bring it to 3–2, but that was all, and a few minutes later the exhausting, searching season was over.
    One of the wearers of the green-and-gold in the happy Oakland clubhouse was Rick