The Boys of Late Autumn

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Douglass Wallop's 1954 novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, reflects that innocent era before AstroTurf, designated hitters and utility infielders with multimillion-dollar contracts. But every middle-aged baseball fan can still appreciate the Faustian temptation at the core of both the novel and the hit Broadway musical it inspired, Damn Yankees. Joe Boyd is a paunchy real estate salesman condemned to root for his hapless hometown team, the now defunct Washington Senators. The devil, who prefers the moniker Applegate, offers to transform Joe into the greatest slugger in the history of the game. Applegate's price is the usual recompense: a paltry -- albeit eternal -- shift in allegiance. Since this is fiction, Joe resists more than most. But ultimately, how can an immortal soul compete with the gifts of youth, grace, coordination and tape-measure home runs?

At 41, I too have reached the Applegate of my years. Metaphorically, my bat speed has slowed, my reflexes have begun to dim and more than a stride has been lost going down the line to first. That may help explain why I follow with such fascination and dread the fortunes of the last four big league ballplayers who are older than I am. By daring to stop time for at least one more summer, these final four have become my personal antidotes to middle age, even as I chart their downward slide in the arithmetic of the box scores and the formulaic prose of the sporting pages.

There remains among them one cereal-box hero, one shining exception to the inevitability of decay: Nolan Ryan, the greatest strikeout pitcher in history, 16 days my senior and still blessed with the fearsome fast ball that brought him to the cusp of yet another no-hitter this spring. Ryan, I reckon, will be the last survivor in this private tontine, but that honor could also go to Tommy John, baseball's Old Man River. Lured out of retirement like a veteran CIA agent asked to perform a final mission, John, 45, has miraculously emerged as the anchor of the Yankee pitching staff. My other two survivors are probably in the final months -- or even days -- of their curtain calls. Don Sutton, 43, his blond curls flecked with gray, languishes on the disabled list as the Dodgers wonder what to do with a pitcher who needs a retinue of relievers to get him beyond the sixth inning. And Graig Nettles, 43, once a majestic third baseman, hangs on a major league roster by a thread as an occasional pinch hitter for the Montreal Expos.

These are the boys of late autumn, the last leaves on the tree of my youth. Not too many innings ago, there were others: Reggie Jackson; the knuckle-ball brothers, Phil and Joe Niekro; the great lefthanded pitcher Steve Carlton; and journeyman Outfielder Tom Paciorek, kept around last year by a manager who was an old teammate. A few like Paciorek glided gracefully and gratefully into a broadcasting booth. But most went out cursing the darkening of the light. At 43, Carlton, dropped by five different teams in the past two years, defiantly repeats the old ballplayer's mantra, "I know I can still pitch. I know I still have the ability to win."

How hard it must be to surrender, to never again put on spikes and smell the new-mown grass of an empty stadium. But how much harder it must be to walk out to the pitching mound or step into the batter's box knowing that you are expected to compete against striplings half your age. That is the bravery of Ryan, John, Sutton and Nettles as each game they pray that the mind can still command the muscles, that cunning can compensate for crumbling coordination. Men in their 40s are not meant to be gladiators; they are designed to be potbellied third-base coaches spitting tobacco juice, and gray-haired managers storming out of the dugout.

What is it about baseball that lends itself so naturally to metaphors of germ and birth, decline and death? Some might point to the statistical exactitude of the season, the precise accounting of hits and errors, the joyous regeneration of starting each spring with a clean slate and an unblemished record. On the playing level, baseball is the meritocracy to which the rest of America might aspire -- a pristine universe where performance matters more than pedigree and connections are what occur when a hurled spheroid encounters a swung hickory stick.

Even without the intervention of gifted chroniclers like Roger Angell and Thomas Boswell, each baseball career is a study in literature. An ironic short story might be apt for the rookie whose only appearance in a big league box score comes at the tag end of a lost season. A sonnet would be fitting commemoration for those human meteors who flash across the big league sky and then flame out, their promise unkept. My four graybeard survivors, of course, deserve nothing less than full-length novels, sprawling Victorian epics that carry them from apple-cheeked anticipation to adult acclaim to the agonies of aging abilities.

Such inner struggles are mostly beyond the ken of us middle-aged Walter Mittys, whose images are those of the grandstand and whose own diamond memories ended with youth-league ball more than a quarter-century ago. For all the cliches about baseball being a boy's game played by grown men, we watch and root with ardor because we sense the truth: what happens on the big league diamond is life magnified beyond mortal dimension. Who in his or her daily existence has an experience to equal the champagne-drenched euphoria of a championship team? How can the workaday world match that moment when the last out is recorded and the players embrace in bacchanalian frenzy out near the pitcher's mound, pummeling and tumbling, shouting and shrieking, reveling in the totality of triumph?

Sadly, this is a world that I will never enter. The last embers of my irrational fantasies will be extinguished as soon as Ryan, John, Sutton and Nettles hang up their spikes. Meanwhile, my own team, the baleful, basket-case Baltimore Orioles, those baseball bunglers who butchered 21 straight, have tumbled beyond human salvation. If perchance you are reading these words with devilish delight, Applegate, here is one middle-aged soul ready to deal.