Men at Work Read online

  As an introduction to such excellence, this book is, of course, no substitute for standing in a batters box, sixty feet six inches from Tim Lincecum. Still, if this book has enhanced some fans’ enjoyment of the great game, it has served a purpose beyond the original one, of enhancing the author’s enjoyment. It certainly has found a large readership: It was on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-seven weeks, nineteen at the top of the list. It has been in print ever since and now may be the best-selling baseball book ever. But the writing of Men at Work was not done by a man at work. Nothing that was so much fun should count as work.

  I am often asked which four players I would choose as my subjects were I going to write Men at Work today. My answers are as follows:

  Hitter: Albert Pujols. He gets on base so many ways and then further distinguishes himself from almost everyone else by running the bases with a rare brilliance. Because he is willing to walk to first base, he needs only to swing at the one hittable pitch—at most—he sees in an at bat. And he usually hits it hard. A ferocious competitor, even in early spring intrasquad games, he is a study in fidelity to baseball’s uniquely demanding ethic of maintaining intensity for six months.

  Pitcher: the Giants’ Tim Lincecum. He stands five foot eleven and weighs 170 pounds. Which is to say, he is about the size of Whitey Ford, the Yankee Hall of Famer (five foot ten). Before Lincecum came along, it had become conventional baseball wisdom that, were Ford a high school senior today, no team would draft him because he would be considered too small. Lincecum vindicates Bill Veeck’s judgment that baseball’s appeal is bound up with the fact that it is a game you can play even if you are not seven feet tall or seven feet wide.

  Fielder: Phillies’ second baseman Chase Utley. Like Cal Ripken, he is such a potent hitter that his defense does not get the attention it deserves. But as was the case with Ripken, when you combine the runs Utley’s defense prevents with the runs his offense produces, you have a remarkable baseball force.

  Manager: the Angels’ Mike Scioscia. As a catcher during his playing days, he had the game in front of him. He still does. It was another catcher, Branch Rickey, who, long after he stopped catching, said that “luck is the residue of design.” Scioscia, like all good managers, understands that, and this truth: the harder you work, the luckier you become. Turn to page 158 for a glimpse of Scioscia as a Dodger and as a manager in waiting.

  There is so much talent on the field and in the dugouts these days that knowledgeable people could reasonably pick four or more other players or managers for a Men at Work 2.0. And it is a wonderful certainty that twenty years from now, in 2030, when I am in the bleachers resting my eighty-nine-year-old chin on the crook of my cane and watching players who in 2010 were in grade school, some of those players will be worthy of the kind of admiring attention I was privileged to give to the four subjects of this book.

  Answer to the triple-play puzzle: With runners on first and second and no one out, the batter hit an infield pop-up. The umpires invoked the infield-fly rule, so the batter was out. The oblivious runner on first roared past the runner who had been on second and was called out. The falling pop-up hit the runner who had been on second, so he was out. You see? It was as simple as one, two, three. Baseball often is that simple. But not always.

  GEORGE F. WILL

  December 2009

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 1990 EDITION

  The Hard Blue Glow

  A few years ago, in the Speaker’s Dining Room in the U.S. Capitol, a balding, hawk-nosed Oklahoma cattleman rose from the luncheon table and addressed his host, Tip O’Neill. The man who rose was Warren Spahn, the winningest left-hander in the history of baseball. Spahn was one of a group of former All-Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timers’ game. Spahn said: “Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today [Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses] lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.”

  The fellows in Congress don’t, and they know it. There are no .400 hitters in Washington. And players in the game of government are spared the sort of remorselessly objective measurement of their performance that ball players see in box scores every day. But Washington does have lots of baseball fans. In October, 1973, Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and avid Cincinnati Reds fan, was scheduled to hear oral arguments at the time of the Reds-Mets play-off game. He asked his clerks to pass him batter-by-batter bulletins. One read: “Kranepool flies to right. Agnew resigns.” (Baseball also holds the attention of people at the other end of the system of justice. When Richard T. Cooper, a murderer, was on the threshold of California’s death chamber, his final remarks included: “I’m very unhappy about the Giants.”)

  Because baseball is a game of failure, and hence a constantly humbling experience, it is good that the national government is well stocked with students of the national pastime. There also is a civic interest served by having the population at large leavened by millions of fans. They are spectators of a game that rewards, and thus elicits, a remarkable level of intelligence from those who compete. To be an intelligent fan is to participate in something. It is an activity, a form of appreciating that is good for the individual’s soul, and hence for society.

  Proof of the genius of ancient Greece is that it understood baseball’s future importance. Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic—in a word, moral—undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.

  Being a serious baseball fan, meaning an informed and attentive and observant fan, is more like carving than whittling. It is doing something that makes demands on the mind of the doer. Is there any other sport in which the fans say they “take in” a game? As in, “Let’s take in a game tomorrow night.” I think not. That is a baseball locution because there is a lot to ingest and there is time—although by no means too much time—to take it in.

  Of all the silly and sentimental things said about baseball, none is sillier than the description of the game as “unhurried” or “leisurely.” Or (this from folks at the serious quarterlies) that baseball has “the pace of America’s pastoral past.” This is nonsense on stilts. Any late-twentieth-century academic who thinks that a nineteenth-century farmer’s day was a leisurely, unhurried stroll from sunup to sundown needs a reality transplant. And the reality of baseball is that the action involves blazing speeds and fractions of seconds. Furthermore, baseball is as much a mental contest as a physical one. The pace of the action is relentless: There is barely enough time between pitches for all the thinking that is required, and that the best players do, in processing the changing information about the crucial variables.

  In a sense, sports are not complicated. Even the infield fly rule can be mastered, in time, without a master’s degree from MIT. The object of a sport can be put simply. You put a ball in an end zone or through a hoop, or you put a puck in a net, and prevent the other fellows from doing so. Sports are not complicated in their objectives, but in execution they have layers of complexities and nuances. There is a lot of thought involved, however much many players deny or disguise that fact. When Dizzy Dean heard, before the 1934 World Series, that the Tigers’ manager, Mickey Cochrane, was conducting a series of team meetings, Dean said, “If them guys are thinking, they’re as good as licked right now.” (The Cardinals beat the Tigers in seven games.) But even in his era Dean was one of baseball’s cartoon characters, a caricature sent up from central casting, a Ring Lardner creation come to life. And certainly Dean bore no resemblance to most of the men who rise to the top of today’s baseball and stay there for a while.


  It has been said that the problem with many modern athletes is that they take themselves seriously and their sport lightly. That can not be said of the men discussed in this book. This book treats the elements of the game by examining four men in terms of functions dictated by the order of the game. A manager assembles a team, trains it, devises a lineup for a particular game and controls his team’s conduct during the game. A pitcher throws the ball, a batter hits it, a fielder handles it. During the time I was writing this book I attended games and conducted interviews in 11 major league cities, from Canada to Southern California. I liken the experience to being guided through an art gallery by a group of patient docents who were fine painters and critics. Such tutors teach the skill of seeing. To see, to really see what a painter has put on canvas requires learning to think the way the painter thought. My baseball guides have been players, managers, coaches, front office personnel, writers, broadcasters and others of the small community of baseball.

  Many players do not practice what they preach. They preach a simplicity sharply at odds with their real attention to the fine points. A pitcher will say, “I just try to move the ball around and throw strikes.” A hitter will describe himself as of the “see ball, hit ball” school. But when players are prompted to talk about what they do, the complexity emerges. Baseball is an exacting profession with a technical vocabulary and a distinctive mode of reasoning. It involves constant attention to the law of cumulation, which is: A lot of little things add up, through 162 games, 1,458 innings, to big differences. A 162-game season is, like life, an exercise in cumulation.

  It was an architect who said that God is in the details. It could have been a professional athlete, particularly a baseball player, most likely a catcher. Catchers, who have the game arrayed in front of them and are in on every pitch, not only work harder than other everyday players, they are required to think more. Ten of the 26 major league managers on Opening Day, 1989, had done some catching in their playing careers. It was, naturally, a catcher (Wes Westrum of the New York Giants) who said that baseball is like church: “Many attend but few understand.”

  Rick Dempsey, a catcher, is the sort of player whose natural skills were never such that he looked like a candidate for longevity in the major leagues. Yet 1989 was his twenty-first season. He is the sort of player often called a journeyman, and he certainly has journeyed, from Minnesota to the Yankees to the Orioles to the Indians, and in the spring of 1988 he talked his way into a tryout with the Dodgers. In the autumn he was in the World Series. It was his third Series. He played in all seven games of the Orioles’ loss to the Pirates in 1979 and was the MVP of the 1983 Series in which the Orioles beat the Phillies in five games. Talking to Roger Angell of The New Yorker at the 1988 Series, Dempsey made clear the mental makeup that makes for survival in baseball:

  You have to play this game right. You have to think right. You’re not trying to pull the ball all the time. You’re not thinking, Hey, we’re going to kill them tomorrow—because that may not happen. You’re not looking to do something all on your own. You’ve got to take it one game at a time, one hitter-at a time. You’ve got to go on doing the things you’ve talked about and agreed about beforehand. You can’t get three outs at a time or five runs at a time. You’ve got to concentrate on each play, each hitter, each pitch. All this makes the game much slower and much clearer. It breaks it down to its smallest part. If you take the game like that—one pitch, one hitter, one inning at a time, and then one game at a time—the next thing you know, you look up and you’ve won.

  Winning is not everything. Baseball—its beauty, its craftsmanship, its exactingness—is an activity to be loved, as much as ballet or fishing or politics, and loving it is a form of participation. But this book is not about romance. Indeed, it is an antiromantic look at a game that brings out the romantic in the best of its fans.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti was to the Commissioner’s office what Sandy Koufax was to the pitcher’s mound: Giamatti’s career had the highest ratio of excellence to longevity. If his heart had been as healthy as his soul—if his heart had been as strong as it was warm—Giamatti would one day have been ranked among commissioners the way Walter Johnson is ranked (by correct thinkers) among pitchers: as the best, period. Baseball’s seventh commissioner, who was the first to have taught Renaissance literature at Yale, was fond of noting the etymological fact that the root of the word “paradise” is an ancient Persian word meaning “enclosed park or green.” Ballparks exist, he said, because there is in humanity “a vestigial memory of an enclosed green space as a place of freedom or play.” Perhaps. Certainly ballparks are pleasant places for the multitudes. But for the men who work there, ballparks are for hard, sometimes dangerous, invariably exacting business. Physically strong and fiercely competitive men make their living in those arenas. Most of these men have achieved, at least intermittently, the happy condition of the fusion of work and play. They get physical pleasure and emotional release and fulfillment from their vocation. However, Roy Campanella’s celebrated aphorism—that there has to be a lot of little boy in a man who plays baseball—needs a corollary. There has to be a lot of hardness in a man who plays—who works at—this boys’ game.

  Success in life has been described as the maintained ecstasy of burning with a hard, gemlike flame. The image recurs. In his famous essay on Ted Williams’s final game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike wrote of Williams radiating “the hard blue glow of high purpose.” Updike said, “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.” Baseball, played on a field thinly populated with men rhythmically shifting from languor to tension, is, to Updike’s eyes, an essentially lonely game. The cool mathematics of individual performances are the pigments coloring the long season of averaging out. Baseball heroism comes not from flashes of brilliance but rather, Updike says, from “the players who always care,” about themselves and their craft.

  The connection between character and achievement is one of the fundamental fascinations of sport. Some say that sport builds character. Others say that sport reveals character. But baseball at its best puts good character on display in a context of cheerfulness. Willie Stargell, the heart of the order during the Pirates’ salad days in the 1970s, insisted that baseball is, or at any rate ought to be, fun. Walking wearily through the Montreal airport after a night game, he said, “I ain’t complaining. I asked to be a ball player.” Indeed, it is likely that a higher percentage of ball players than of plumbers or lawyers or dentists or almost any other group are doing what they passionately enjoy doing. On another occasion Stargell said, “The umpire says ‘Play ball,’ not ‘Work ball.’” (Actually, the rule book requires the umpire to call out only the word “play.”) But professional baseball is work.

  Happiness has been called “the sweet exaltation of work.” What follows are the stories of four men who are happy in their work. From an appreciation of that work, many millions of people derive a happiness worth pursuing. This book is intended to help that pursuit. It also is a deep bow, not just to the particular players about whom I have written, but to all the baseball people who transmit the game, remarkably intact, through the whirl of American change. This book is a thank-you note. There is a book with the wonderful title Baseball, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life. What do we spectators give baseball besides the price of a seat and the respect implicit in paying attention? Baseball’s best practitioners give in return the gift of virtues made vivid. This gift is a thing of beauty and joy forever, or at least until the next game, which is much the same thing as forever because the seasons stretch into forever. Yes, I know, I know. Even the continents drift. Nothing lasts. But baseball does renew itself constantly as youth comes knocking at the door, and in renewal it becomes better. To see why this is so, come along and see some baseball men at work.

  1

  THE MANAGER

>   Tony La Russa, On Edge

  On August 13, 1910, there was a baseball game of perfect symmetry. The Pirates and Dodgers played to an 8–8 tie. Each team had 38 at bats. Each had 13 hits. Each had 12 assists. Each had 5 strikeouts, 3 walks, 2 errors, 1 hit batsman and 1 passed ball.

  Still, dissect any game, even that one, deeply enough and you will reveal layers of asymmetries. In most games these asymmetries cancel each other out. In most games victory is within reach of each team in the middle innings. Most games are won by small things executed in a professional manner.

  It is a manager’s job to prepare his team to play in such a manner. He is responsible for wringing the last drop of advantage from the situations that will occur in each game. To do this he must know the abilities his players have revealed in their past performances and he must have similar knowledge of the players in the opposite dugout. Every player has a past that reveals his skills, limitations, tendencies. You can look it up, especially if you have been disciplined about writing it down. And teams, too, have tendencies.

  Ray Miller, whom we shall meet again, is the Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitching coach. He is also a philosopher and scientist, or philosophical scientist. He says that baseball managers today are “very tendency-prone.” Right, Ray. The most important and recurring word in the language of thoughtful baseball people is “tendency.” In the sport of the long season, of thousands of innings and scores of thousands of pitches, tendencies tell. There is ample scope for the useful calculation of probabilities. As Bill James, the baseball writer from Winchester, Kansas, notes, you don’t see anyone keeping score at a football game. Baseball fans filling out a scorecard are not really noting the score. Rather, they are recording everything that produces or fails to produce a score. They can do this because, as James says, baseball is the game in which the players take turns. The action stops as players pause at particular points. This is the exacting orderliness that makes possible baseball’s rich, thick statistical data base. And the data base must be constantly kept up to date by contemporary observation. Many years ago a baseball writer, puzzled by the positioning of a Mets infielder when Henry Aaron was at bat, asked Mets manager Wes Westrum, “Doesn’t Aaron hit to right and right-center?” Westrum tersely replied, “Not this year.”