October 22, 1956

One by one and seven

by William Saroyan

The way we felt was....Let it go anyway it must, but let it be a good drama.

Let it be worthy of its devoted follower.

Let it offer gifts to every person in the multitude of witnesses.

Let it work wonders.

Let it inform, instruct, fulfill, declare, redeem, restore, impel, provide, assure, prove, repudiate, console, demonstrate and establish.

Let it do all things: things other drama, in other terms, by use of other devices, another order of language, another form of action, other involvement's, in other arenas, street or office or store or factory or school or home anywhere else unmeasured and uncharted in terrain and time—let it do the rare things other drama cannot do.

Let it speak of all things through the event, isolated, alone but related in a hundred potential ways to a thousand potential progressions and to a whole end.

Let it create new heroes and new myths.

Let it be a play, so that the witnesses may be enabled to give it true meaning other experience resists, refuses, rejects, the meaning which must be given (once in a while) to something.

Let it be everybody's, true, and seven. Astonishing and seven. Unbelievable and seven. Magnificent and seven. Ridiculous and seven. One by one and seven.

Pitcher Don Larsen of the New York Yankees photograph by AP

At the beginning you stand and listen to the playing and singing of the National Anthem. This is an important part of the game, since the game is always about more things than the elements of the game alone. It is also about the nation itself, land and city and place—the people, and how they live, and think and feel, and hope. Nowhere else does the singing of the anthem seem so right and appropriate.

The umpires and the players stand in the field and listen. This is it. This is the time. This is when we try again and find out.

There is something of the pride and humility of prayer in the pause and performance of the hymn. Whoever you are, on this field, in this stadium, the event that is about to begin is both yours alone, to value and measure and use as you will or must, and everybody's, if not in fact nobody's—time's own, history's own. This event is abstract, impersonal and altogether for itself, but as it is engaged in by men from all over the nation, men not unlike anybody else, it is also personal and entirely for you—small boy with hot dog and mustard on sleeve, priest with program and pencil, stenographer with aging father, bartender with small son and need of space and light and air opportunity to shout, old widow with neighbor's daughter who knows what it's all about, professor of philosophy at Columbia, office worker with much work undone and buzzer ignored, the boys from the corner where the candy store is, the President, the Secretary of State, anybody, everybody. The singing is on behalf of the best of which human nature is capable or may one day be: physical to begin with, of course, since it is an athletic game, but of the spirit, too. A man's a man when he's abroad in the world, but on this field, in this game, he has been known to be more, to achieve instantly things known to be over the edge of his limits everywhere else, which for a fleeting moment carry him into a dimension of immortality. The hush of expectancy under the sky transforms the stadium into a cathedral made out of light and love of right—the heroic, the true, the difficult, the very nearly impossible, the wonderful.

After the anthem, you are entitled to watch and shout as you see fit. Now, when 30,000 or more at Ebbets Field watch and shout, it comes to a roar happy or unhappy—for the achievement of one man is the frustration or failure of another. Some of the roar is for the achievement, some of it against the failure. If you don't take sides, you cheer because anybody has achieved, you groan because anybody has failed. This is a contest, a play, and all of the players together are yourself, and the play is about your life. If you must, you boo. You have the right to do that, however tactless it may be, or in bad taste. The booing can be therapeutic—sometimes to prod a child to sudden speedy growth at the age of 31. The crowd can be crude, rude, ill-tempered, offensive one minute, courteous and gallant the next, but never rude or courteous in relation to a player or a team entirely but in relation to itself, the crowd. And the identity of a crowd varies in accordance with what it witnesses.

A pitcher on the hill at the center of a small circle, a matador's ring, with an even tougher and more terrible opponent than a bull bred to believe in the unstoppable power of its eye and brawn, with no such useful implement as cape or sword, with an even greater enemy—the next man's skill itself, his wit, his cunning, his control but, most dangerous of all, unaccountable, unpredictable but always possible good luck. A man alone there facing another man alone, a man whose skill and wit and luck he knows and respects and fears but must cancel—now. It cannot be put off until he has had time to think a little more. The pitcher must face all of the hazards of throwing to his man, and then he must rear back and fire. He must deceive the enemy into swinging at something impossible to hit, or into hitting it in a manner that is harmless. Three times a pitcher must trick his man into not hitting in order to have him out of the way, but if he goes too far four times he has only tricked himself, and the batter's on first. Still, he must take his chance—strike him out, walk him, force him to hit harmlessly, or hear the crack and see the flight of a true hit, and watch and wait. And start all over again.

As it is with the pitcher, so it is with the batter. The next event may be good, it may be bad. If it's good, it could be the game—the winning of it: a little event among the many that made the difference.

Nobody who saw the fifth game will forget the grand identity of the crowd at Yankee Stadium, nobody will forget the possibly religious anxiety, hopefulness and quietude of that crowd—a crowd created by the unseen but deeply felt presence in the stadium: the presence of the mortal spirit in proud and patient combat with flaw—error, wrong, spiritual pain, perhaps even death.

Something in the crowd took wing when Don Larsen pitched The Perfect Game. He did it. Of all the players, of all the people who might have done it, he did it. Nobody expected him to do it, but he went out there and started to pitch, and then little by little, inning by inning, he began to do it, and the very breathing of the crowd changed. Would he make it, or would somebody?—something?—himself?—anything? stop him cold? End it? Reduce it to just another game to put down on the books alongside of thousands of others?

Would he do it?

He did.

There was no rudeness in the crowd. There was reverence, respect, admiration, patriotism—for man's life, for his small but sometimes great and immortal soul.

The Series had everything, or very nearly everything. First, it went the distance, and it certainly might not have—but saying that is nonsense. Nothing is swifter than time gone, or more final than fact established.

Sal Maglie pitched and won the first game for the Dodgers. He worked, as he always does, with intense concentration and control. The plate umpire examined the ball frequently for spit and tossed back a new ball, and Maglie pitched the new ball, and the same thing happened again, and he pitched it again and, if he spit, Casey Stengel himself said he couldn't say, and in any case his "fellas"" (as he put it) didn't hit. It was a good game. It had form. Mickey Mantle homered early in the game, but it didn't stop Maglie. The form continued, and it was Maglie's. The Dodgers looked good behind him, and were. Jackie Robinson felt good nearby, and Roy Campanella catching, Pee Wee Reese, Jim Gilliam, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider and all the others. He was a kind of shepherd of the hill, so to say. He scowled and worked and didn't blow up when they hit his best stuff, and the players around him had to feel all right, and hit, and win, and they did.

A lot of things happened after the first game. A lot did, and there's no more guessing. What happened happened.

When Casey Stengel went out to the pitcher's mound four times during the second game, few were able not to feel that what he had for so long wasn't working for him any more. Few were able not to feel that he might just lose this one, too, and then two more—and all of his great gains over the years. The Dodgers were hitting everything. They weren't letting him have his kind of game: a game with form. They were giving him a game in which past performances and percentages meant nothing. They were playing as if there had never been any such thing as statistics and all that had ever mattered in the game was high spirits, luck, enthusiasm, confidence, laughter, genius—give it any name you like. Who can take a game away from a team like that? What good are traditional tactics if they don't work? What good is knowing what you are doing and why, if nobody else does? Or if they know something better and are doing it, perhaps for new reasons, perhaps better reasons, and everything is a shambles? How can the champions of the American League lose a six-run lead in one inning? What happened? Was it really all the consequences of a bobbled ball at first?

Two for the Dodgers, now, the big two, and two to go out of a possible five. Having started as they had, how could the Dodgers fail to take two more? How could the Yankees possibly take four out of five?

How? The way they did.

Whitey Ford came home to Yankee Stadium and pitched his team to their first win on Saturday, but it was still 2-1. And then on Sunday Tom Sturdivant went out there for Casey and did a good job and got into no real trouble until the ninth. Casey went out to the embattled hill to think with his pitcher and catcher, and Yogi Berra told him Tom still had his stuff, so Casey let him stay in there and fight it out. And Tom Sturdivant went the distance and won the game. And so it was tied, 2-2.

Then came the game of the Series, the game of the year, the game of the past 30 or 35 years, the game everybody had been hoping for, not just this year or last, and not just for the Yanks but for any team, for any pitcher, and it was Don Larsen. Three for the Yanks, two for the Dodgers, but by now even their friends were beginning to call then The Bums again. But they hadn't done anything truly bad so far. Late in The Perfect Game Sandy Amoros had homered foul by a distance of half a foot. Duke Snider, slicing to left field, had sent one a little foul into the stands. The Yanks had done a lot of magnificent fielding behind Larsen. It was still anybody's Series.

You don't begrudge a win that comes out of a Perfect Game. Even Maglie, pitching a great game, hoped in the last innings that Larsen would get it, and why not? There is a larger thing than winning, sometimes. It is sometimes nobler to lose a great achievement than to win against magnificence shattered into smithereens, even by lucky accident. The Perfect Game was won by both pitchers, both teams, by baseball itself, by the nation, but especially by the hushed and reverent crowd at Yankee Stadium. Everybody there was somebody named Don Larsen, and Don Larsen was just a little more than anybody else in the whole world, a little more than any man is permitted very often to be.

Now the play returned to Ebbets Field, Clem Labine for the Dodgers, Bob Turley for the Yanks, and they dueled at 0-0 through nine innings. If anything, the Yanks played better ball than the Dodgers. Turley pitched a game he was entitled to win, but didn't. In the 10th with two on, two outs, Jackie Robinson sent one out to Enos Slaughter who didn't touch it, that's all. Dodgers 1, Yanks 0, the Series tied at 3-3. But nobody should forget Turley's great pitching, without taking the edge off Labine's fine win.

Up to and including the sixth game the Series had enough variety, enough freedom and enough form for two or three Series (on account of The Perfect Game). One thing was lacking to give the Series everything—period: a game in which one team played out-and-out badly, in which it was inept, hypnotized, chloroformed, helpless, apathetic, sick, sorrowful, dead on its feet, tied in knots, twisted, tortured, confounded. And that team was the Dodgers in the seventh. 9-0. Young Johnny Kucks pitched low the whole game, and nobody could beat him. No excuses. No explanation. The Dodgers lost, and the next day took off by airplane for Japan, by way of the Hawaiian Islands.

What happened?

A baseball game happened. It might have happened to the Yankees, as many of sound judgment thought it would, but it happened to the Dodgers. Let the great psychiatrist try to explain how or why. There is art, for instance: great, ordinary and bad. But even bad art, even the worst, is better than no art at all, because the fact that here is such a thing at all is the important thing, and if it is almost always bad, at least now and then, once in along while it is great, and just a little of the great goes a long way. Forever, you might say. And in this Series there was quite a lot of art.

Baseball tells a nation's story. Among the reporters who regularly cover baseball are those who have become writers of style, wit and humor, and it may be that they are turning out the best folk writing of our nation.

May be?

What other folk writing is there?