Baseball: Old Potato Face

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It was a ritual to which he had become accustomed and which he accepted, unwillingly but gracefully. Grouped around the desk in the Baltimore clubhouse were half a dozen reporters for the usual postmortem. They watched Hank Bauer reduce an empty beer can to tin foil with one quick crunch of his hammy fist. "They gotta catch us," Bauer announced. "And if we keep winning, they can't, can they?" Silence. "But Hank," somebody wanted to know, "is the long summer beginning to get to your players?"

Bauer's mashed-potato face flushed crimson. Muscles rippled malevolently in his chest. Beer from a fresh, full can splattered on the desk. "What the hell kind of question is that?" he rasped. A longer silence. Finally, Bauer smiled and hoisted the dewy can. "Naaaah," he said. "The heat don't bother them, 'cause they drink this here good beer." And with that, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles marched off, stark naked, to the shower.

Haunting Melody. It started back in April, while the buds were still hard on the maple trees and the New York Yankees were losing four of their first five games—the first faint notes of a haunting melody. It grew steadily in volume through the summer, while the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox jockeyed back and forth for the lead. Last week it reached its shimmering, cymbalistic crescendo as all three teams entered the last, climactic month of the 1964 baseball season, locked in a death-or-derring-do battle for the American League pennant. Call it the year the American League made a game out of baseball again.

It is the year the Christians eat the lions, the year the worms grow teeth, the year the sharecroppers foreclose on the banks. The National League race, too, has provided its share of thrills—even if it is winding up as quietly as a Quaker meeting. For two weeks it has been clear to all but bitter-enders and Cincinnatians that Gene Mauch's amazing Philadelphia Phillies—the laughingstock of the league just three years ago—are too far ahead to be caught. But there are other mysteries to marvel at: the careless collapse of the San Francisco Giants, the frantic frustration of the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, the night the Japanese finally broke into the U.S. big leagues. If that is not enough, there is always the curious sale of the Yankees to CBS and the wondrous hitting of Minnesota's Tony Oliva, a champion in his rookie year.

But not since 1948, when the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Red Sox wound up deadlocked for the lead at season's end—with the Yankees a bare two games behind—has the American League had a pennant race to compare. In five months the lead has changed hands as often as an Indianhead penny. Yogi Berra's Yankees, crippled as they were by injuries, have been in first place seven times; Al Lopez' White Sox, the punchless wonders, have visited there on eleven separate occasions; and Hank Bauer's Baltimore Orioles have tried twelve times to build themselves a permanent nest on the slippery topmost branch. With just 27 games to play, it is still anybody's race—and the fans love it.