As Good as Anyone Ever

By Tom Callahan

Reflections of twelve Hall of Famers still on temporary display

No matter how old a man happens to be, one thing is sure. The baseball players have deteriorated since his youth. Baseball is the last popular team sport played by people of normal size: every shape actually. The geometry of the game has held up for 114 years, and the rules are basically unchanged. So each generation is measured against the same rough marks on the barn. Though it seems unreasonable to hold that the spectacular athletic improvement calculable in other sports does not apply here, most baseball followers are statistical, not logical. Many are sure to mention that there are ten more major league teams now than in 1962, and therefore, in a way, 250 bush leaguers at large. Certainly baseball no longer enjoys first call on the country's best athletes. Today, Flatbush's Duke Snider, like Stanford's John Elway, might have been persuaded to toss a football.

For all this, the lament that ballplayers used to be better remains mostly just a feeling, influenced by modern irritants. Pharmaceutical reports in the sports section have grown longer than the box scores, and money has impinged on the game past the point of cynicism. We look back on impoverished players longingly and regard the present lightly. Awe is reserved for memories, and not always even our own, sometimes our fathers'.

When the Hall of Fame season collides with the dog days of a baseball August, the feeling is emphasized. Two weeks ago in Cooperstown, N.Y., a buckskin village celebrated as the leafy laboratory of Abner Doubleday, Baltimore and Detroit Third Basemen Brooks Robinson and George Kell, San Francisco Pitcher Juan Marichal and Dodger Manager Walter Alston went into the Hall. Just 149 players are enshrined, only 15 having been beckoned on the first wave of the Baseball Writers' Association. (Ballots are cast five years after a player retires and for up to 15 years after that until he receives 75% of some 400 votes or is trundled off to "the Oldtimers Committee.") A mere 65 have been elected by the writers.

Yet, at this instant, there are at least a dozen, and perhaps a couple more, active players with certifiable Hall of Fame credentials,* who will go in easily, almost automatically; not players just well on course like Kansas City's George Brett or San Diego's Steve Garvey; not players with evident Hall of Fame skills like Baltimore's Eddie Murray, Atlanta's Dale Murphy or Milwaukee's Robin Yount. But cinch Hall of Famers on temporary display outdoors: Cincinnati Catcher Johnny Bench, California Outfielder Reggie Jackson, California First Baseman Rod Carew, Philadelphia First Baseman Pete Rose, Philadelphia Second Baseman Joe Morgan, Boston First Baseman Carl Yastrzemski and six pitchers, Philadelphia's Steve Carlton, Houston's Nolan Ryan, Kansas City's Gaylord Perry, the New York Mets' Tom Seaver, Baltimore's Jim Palmer and the Chicago Cubs' Ferguson Jenkins.

"Baseball has been in a golden age without even realizing it," says the Washington Post's Tom Boswell. Roger Angell of The New Yorker says, "There are any number of players now who are as good as anyone has ever been." Roger Kahn, the baseball author (Boys of Summer) and now owner of the minor league Utica Blue Sox, agrees with them. (These three are the heart of the baseball writers' order.) Reacting not unlike the way he did to the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, Kahn says, "When you pull back, you say, 'My God!' "

In 1969, when Johnny Bench of Binger, Okla., was 21 and just coming forth as the wonder catcher of the Cincinnati Reds, Ted Williams autographed his baseball, "To a Hall of Famer for sure." Turning the ball over in his hand then, and in his heart later, Bench was afraid. "Of failure," he admits now, though he never showed it at the time. "I couldn't believe Ted Williams had even heard of me. Do you think that wasn't pressure?" Bench always seemed to be playing for fame. After hitting 45 home runs in 1970, he toured a war with Bob Hope. He was on This Is Your Life before he had a life. "When you're the MVP," says Bench, who was the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1970 and 1972, "you're it, you're everything. But when you win the World Series [1975 and 1976], it's a team thing, and you can pass a little of it around to teammates who didn't even play much."

One by one the teammates slipped away and, by and by, his skills did too, until abruptly this season, looking out a hotel window one day, Bench acknowledged his loneliness. "The thing is, it's over; there's not much more I can do," he says, so he is retiring. Orchestrating his own last victory lap around the league, Bench accepted a testimonial in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, and then hit a pinch homer to beat the Phillies. It made him feel glorious but not young. "What need does a ballplayer have for drugs and alcohol," sighs Bench, as perplexed about the present as an old man, "when he can have a high like a home run?" He is the alltime home run-hitting catcher. After more than 13 years in a crouch, Bench has been straightening up for a couple of seasons at third base, but he will assume his old position for a day of honor Sept. 17.

Ingeniously (Joe Garagiola, Bob Uecker) or ingenuously (Ernie Lombardi, Yogi), it seems catchers were always made figures of humor, reeling beneath popups, rattling like mimes balancing dishes. But Bench remade catchers glamorously. The way he pounced on a bunt; the way he threw to the base; the way runners piled up on his shinguard as he whapped them one across the beam. Bench lived up to the responsibility of his talent all right. "I pretty well did," he says proudly, but with a palpable sense of relief, and five years from now he will be a Hall of Famer for sure.

An assurance of fame is not the pressing problem of Reggie Jackson, having seen to that before anything else. Baseball's Muhammad Ali, Jackson announced his greatness during eight seasons in Oakland before achieving it over five years in New York. But as skilled as he is in public relations ("Need any words?" Jackson calls out to the writers), his main ability lies in melodrama and real drama. The most beguiling baseball statistic at the moment is that, since 1970, no American League team has won a World Series without the services of Jackson, though, technically, he missed the 1972 Series, when the A's beat the Reds.

That year, Jackson wrecked a hamstring scoring the run that tied the last playoff game and delivered the A's to the edge of three straight championships. He was on crutches. The World Series of his dreams--for all he knew, his last--was going on without him. His marriage was ruined too. Like the man who throws himself on a hand grenade for his fellows, he had earned the right to feel sorry for himself. "What good is it to make $100,000 a year," he said, "if there's no one to leave a ticket for?" By the next October, Jackson forgot he had said that. He always seemed to be saying pretty things and forgetting them. And he always , seemed to be talking in October, and hitting home runs three at a time.

Jackson has 478 home runs, and will have more than 500 before he is stuffed and mounted, though some voters might recall what an indifferent outfielder he was and how frequently, yet sensationally, he struck out (2,078). While Cooperstown was not meant to be a Hall of Celebrities or Controversies (if so, heaven forbid, George Steinbrenner would get in), it is strange to think of a baseball museum without Leo Durocher or Billy Martin, and impossible to exclude Reggie Jackson. "Am I one of the greatest?" he asks, not quite as sure as Ali at that. For the great occasions, he has been. The trouble now in California may be that there is no trouble. Angel Centerfielder Fred Lynn and Third Baseman Doug DeCinces do not need anyone to be the straw that stirs their hot tubs. Prematurely, at 37, Jackson could be dying of boredom.

To Rod Carew, 37, Anaheim may seem to be bustling. He did twelve years' hard time in Minnesota before joining the Angels in 1979. Geography retarded his celebrity, but looking back, seven batting titles later, Carew is grateful. "Minnesota gave me perspective, peace of mind, really," he says. "Tony Oliva taught me. Harmon Killebrew showed me. Here was this big mammoth guy--they called him 'Killer.' So gentle, though. Whether he hit two homers or struck out three times, he handled himself the same way afterward. The only time I think about the Hall of Fame is to think that Harmon Killebrew isn't in it." (With 573 homers, the most of any righthanded hitter in the history of the American League, Killebrew at last appears to be on deck.)

"I would like to be remembered for consistency," Carew says, "and for doing the little things, moving the runner along.

I never thought a home run was as beautiful as a ball in the gap and Is he going to make it to second?' " Carew is aware that some people think he is inordinately fascinated with his batting average. From his wallet he plucks a gold card that reads, "For those who know me, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't, none is possible." After a pause, Carew says, "I don't need to be in the Hall of Fame to know what I've done, but maybe the election gives you a final sense of belonging. I don't know."

For a lot of reasons, most of them delightful, Pete Rose, 42, is forgiven his own preoccupation with statistics and can even get away with saying, "I want to be the first one to go into the Hall unanimously." At the Phillies locker next door, Joe Morgan's eyebrows are dancing. "I hope you don't think you're as good as Willie Mays," he snaps, and Rose grins. Morgan is not the sort who will need to have his career notarized, but Rose takes these things seriously. "I disagree with waiting five years," he says, typically hurried. "You're a Hall of Famer or you're not. And I say the more Hall of Famers walking around, the better for baseball. Why did [the old Yankee pitcher] Waite Hoyt have to wait until he was 69? We could have used him at 49. The best pitcher I ever faced was Juan Marichal, who went in this year. Why not last year?"

Rose is hardly likely to win every vote, even should he have the most hits of anybody who ever played. Someone will disapprove of his hair style or of the way he flattened Cleveland Catcher Ray Fosse in an All-Star game. But Rose will go in on the fly, and Morgan fairly briskly.

At 39, Little Joe is winding down now, but for five seasons, not just the two years he was MVP of the National League, Morgan was the whirlwind in Cincinnati's Big Red Machine, and over his 21-year career he has been the most powerful and productive second baseman since Rogers Hornsby. Morgan meets the simplest Hall of Fame criterion. He was the best second baseman of his era. Even in his dotage, Morgan showed others how to win. Possibly 'his enthusiasm for canonizations is affected by a premonition that Morgan's and Rose's silent partner in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, Tony Perez, will be overlooked as usual. Perez has 1,571 RBis.

Since Rose always seemed to be from another generation anyway, his formula for measuring eras may be authoritative. "The best then would be the best now, and the best now would be the best then," he says. Athletes are fitter today, obliged by the high stakes to train in the offseason. Mike Schmidt, the Phillies' two-time MVP, only 33 but allowed to contemplate Cooperstown, questions "whether Babe Ruth could even play now." A bit insulted, Rose responds, "Whatever the standard of the day is, the greats meet it. If .330 is leading, that's where Ty Cobb would be--not .380, the level for his day and his equipment, but .330."

Carl Yastrzemski's batting average happens to be about .300 right now. While he was predisposed to quit the Boston Red Sox after this season, his 23rd, the thought of dawdling must be almost irresistible to a man nearly 44 who finds he can still hit. But Yastrzemski says, "I don't want to chance it any further." A particularly helpless May slump made him fret that he had stayed too long. His Hall of Fame folio (3,390 hits, 451 home runs) is complete. Yaz has been walked intentionally a record 187 times. As a leftfielder, he was as solid as the Fenway Wall. And still he worries about preserving memories, have played for one team, one area, and I hope I have represented it with class and am remembered as a winner," he says. It is just that he will miss playing baseball. "I love it, I absolutely love it. I love stepping into the batter's box." The day Yastrzemski steps out, museum curators will mark him for promptest delivery.

When today's senior pitchers began to muster 21 years ago, the 3,000-strikeout ledger consisted of Walter Johnson's name alone. Now he has the company of Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan, or Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, along with Gaylord Perry, Tom Seaver, Ferguson Jenkins, Don Sutton and Hall of Famer Bob Gibson. Whatever inference is drawn about the hitters, this list reads like a page from Burke's Peerage.

Lefty and Righty--Carlton, 38, and Ryan, 36--keep amending the record to and fro. Carlton nears the bench-mark 300 victories, but he avoids discussing his accomplishments, or anything else, and refuses delivery on Cy Young Awards. Four of them were starting to clutter Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium when Carlton's former catcher, Tim McCarver, almost his private backstop from St. Louis days, had them shipped to the Hall of Fame. Says McCarver: "The thing about Lefty is, he finds awards, compliments, even conversations, limiting. He's afraid of being satisfied." When Carlton goes to join his plaques, he'll have had exactly five years to think of something to say.

Ryan has taken 1,000 fewer innings gathering his strikeouts, but he also has won 80 fewer games, only 25 more than he has lost. New Yorkers in particular tend to denigrate Ryan's record, recalling the first four seasons with the Mets, his unfamiliarity with home plate. But no other major leaguer ever pitched five no-hitters. "I never anticipated a career as fulfilling as this," says Ryan. He is the opposite of his friend Don Sutton, who began counting toward 300 victories at No. 1 (35 shy of the mark after 18 seasons, Sutton expects he will need them all). Ryan says, "I never set any goals. I struggled to get four years in, then hoped for ten. It was frustrating, I wanted to quit lots of times. But I made it not only through all the criticism but past all the bitterness." Now Ryan describes the pleasure he derives from pitching as "pressure in perspective." And he says, "It's funny, but I'm glad it didn't come easy."

Just a few weeks ago, Gaylord Perry changed big-league uniforms for the eighth time without feeling too sentimental. The most elderly player in either league at nearly 45, he presumably could find work more appropriate to his gray hair and accumulating paunch. "For me, it's a pretty good job and it pays well--that's why I'm still playing. I love it, but everyone has to work." Although Perry's figures are in splendid order (312 victories, 3,506 strikeouts), some spitballing he did in his memoirs a few years ago could delay his processing. Sportswriters are wicked moralists. When Perry was apprehended making off with Teammate George Brett's slippery bat recently at Yankee Stadium, Gaylord was not exactly hustling it to the Hall of Fame.

Ferguson Jenkins, 39, the nearest Canadian to Cooperstown, 19 victories from 300, is sentimental about his baseball suit. "I am in love with this uniform," he says. "After being married to it for 21 years, the honeymoon is still there. I am in love with my wife and family, but I've also been in love with this game, with these bats, these gloves and my uniform. This uniform is like my wedding dress. Except I get to wear it every day."

Neither Jim Palmer, 37, nor Tom Seaver, 38, will likely scale 300 victories, but they were dominant pitchers in their leagues and have three Cy Young Awards apiece to show it. Each also possesses more than a touch of glamour. A section of Palmer's adolescence was spent residing in the Los Angeles movie community, Beverly Hills, where his habit was to rise early hoping to observe Janet Leigh picking up the paper in her pink peignoir. Now Palmer can be seen in his underwear on billboards, but seldom in uniform on a mound. Pestered by various miseries, Palmer was in the minor leagues last week tuning up for the stretch drive. Ballplayers are notoriously brave about one another's pain, but some Oriole players suspect that his pride and vanity require that Palmer be absolutely perfect now to pitch, and a few wonder if his uniform has been retired already--with him in it.

"There will always be great players," Seaver says, "but I don't know about the pitchers, though. I don't see the names on this list out there now. I just don't know." He has not thought of the Hall of Fame yet, because he cannot pitch there. "I misled myself from the time I was a small boy," he says, "that the celebrations in baseball were the thing. But when the Mets won the World Series in 1969, I realized that wasn't true. The competition is the thing."

Largely because minor-league grooming has been minimized in recent seasons, San Francisco Manager Frank Robinson, a Hall of Famer inducted just last summer, believes, "This current group may be the last of the lot who can be compared favorably to the oldtimers already in the Hall of Fame." Robinson is from the previous group, those "Ruthian black names" (Johnny Bench's perfect phrase) whose passing seemed to contain no renewal, just an end: Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Willie Stargell.

But maybe it always seems like an end until time passes and you pull back and say, "My God!"

Invariably, an inductee to the Hall of Fame calls it the greatest moment of his life. Since 1965, Jack Lang of the New York Daily News has had the happy duty of informing the chosen. "They all want to break down and cry when they hear the news," he says. "It's like somebody just put them in heaven."

Heaven better start work on a new wing. --By Tom Callahan.

Reported by Melissa Ludtke/ New York

*All figures calculated as of Aug. 9.

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.