Splendor in the AstroTurf

By Paul Gray

FIVE SEASONS: A BASEBALL COMPANION

by ROGER ANGELL

413 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

Despite all the televised hoopla, there are still sports fans who find the Super Bowl an irritant or a snore. This same group is unmoved by the spectacle of professional basketball: ten tall millionaires in their underwear, jumping into the air every 24 seconds. Hockey? Hooliganism on the rocks. Left cold by winter sports, these fans survive the icy months with summer memories and seasoned expectations. Baseball is their game, of course -- the only game. If winter comes, can spring training be far behind?

That was once what Baseball Fan and Author Roger Angell (The Summer Game; 1972) calls one of the "sunlit verities of the game." Not any more. Disputes between owners and players have delayed spring training twice in the past five years -- precisely the troubled period recaptured in Five Seasons. This bittersweet collection of baseball reporting recounts the fading of other summer truths. Many clubs have ripped up the grass in the ballparks and installed artificial surfaces ("the cheaper spread"). Pitchers in the American League no longer take their cuts at the plate; some thing called a designated hitter does that for them. Thanks to the delay of league play-offs and the lure of prime-time TV ratings, World Series games are regularly played on frigid October evenings. Last fall in Cincinnati, Angell notes, "the wretched, blanket-wrapped, huddled masses in the stands flumped their mittened paws together in feeble supplication, pleading now for almost any result that would send them home."

An editor at The New Yorker (where most of the 16 pieces originally appeared), Angell is a formidable humorist. Yet he sees all the current tinkering with baseball as no laughing matter. He imagines a time when the World Series will be totally surrendered to television, transported to some domed stadium, and made the excuse for a week of canned spectaculars. If network and baseball moguls have not already dreamed up this plan, they will now. Angell protests: "We are trying to conserve something that seems as intricate and lovely to us as any river valley."

Horn Blowing. True fans need no convincing. They can read Five Seasons for remembrances of games, pennant races and World Series past, for another chance to think about their beloved sport under the tutelage of an expert. Yet Angell's passion for baseball is enough to convert the heathen. Millions of casual TV viewers saw Red Sox Catcher Carlton Fisk's extra-inning home run in the sixth game of the 1975 World Series. Angell's account goes beyond the heroics on the field. He imagines people all over New England receiving the news--"jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on backcountry roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night) ..." The moment passes, but not before it is inducted into the Hall of Fame of the mind.

Angell's style neatly complements the balance, pace and mathematical exactitudes of the game he celebrates. He does not throw many high, hard ones; he favors the change-of-pace, the roundhouse curve. He describes how pitchers deliver the fiendishly unpredictable knuckle ball: "They merely prop the ball on their fingertips (not, in actual fact, on the knuckles) and launch it more or less in the fashion of a paper airplane, and then, most of the time, finish the delivery with a faceward motion of the glove, thus hiding a grin." What does the hapless catcher do in trying to snare the knuckle ball? An "imitation of a bulldog cornering a nest of field mice."

Five Seasons contains leisurely off-the-diamond reporting: Angell travels through the hinterlands with a major league scout, a species of rugged individualist now threatened by cooperative head-hunting and centralized data banks. He visits three hyper-fans of the Detroit Tigers and comes up with a deft report on the joys of obsession. He spends time with Steve Blass, a top pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates until, during the winter of 1972, he inexplicably lost the knack of getting batters out. Angell quotes one of Blass's coaches: "You know, old men don't dream much, but just the other night I had this dream that Steve Blass was all over his troubles and could pitch again."

Is not such poignancy wasted on a game? Angell thinks not, for several reasons. Baseball's vivid intensity, the demands it makes on players and knowing spectators, is the very stuff of dreams. The freebooting expansion and big-money dealing have also made it a model of reality, "no longer a release from the harsh everyday American business world but its continuation and apotheosis." Angell admits the foolishness of rooting for a professional sports team. a constantly revolving roster of athletes playing for money. Except for one thing. "What is left out of this calculation," he writes, "is the business of caring--caring deeply and passionately, really caring--which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives." Five Seasons radiates this capacity--and nurtures it. Paul Gray

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