Spring training-pure oxygen for a fan’s fires that have been banked all winter-is scrumptious everywhere, but is best in Phoenix. Florida’s sunshine is fine, but Arizona’s seems tactile, drenching the diamond. Tactile and audible, filling the dry air with a hum of energy. In or around audacious Phoenix-a sprawling city making itself at home in a desert-six teams (the A’s, Cubs, Giants, Angels, Mariners and Brewers) train, and two others visit (the Rockies from Tucson and the Padres from Yuma). Baseball’s annual family reunion, with Rigney presiding as everyone’s favorite uncle, is in full swing around Arizona batting cages, and in steak joints like the Pink Pony and Don and Charlie’s in Scottsdale.
At that table yonder, the ample man doing vigorous justice to a plateful of red meat is Hank Sauer. Today he scouts for the Giants. In 1952 he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award playing for the Cubs. (In the eight seasons 1952 through 1959, Cubs players won three MVP awards-Ernie Banks won in 1958 and 1959-but the team lost 139 more games than it won and never finished higher than fifth. Go figure.) And that slab of a man across the room, who looks like he wandered away from Stonehenge, is the Bull, Greg Luzinski, retired slugger, currently the A’s hitting coach. He is also the father of Ryan, a Dodger minor leaguer whose substantial architecture and talent are both tributes to the diligence of DNA. And speaking of family values, the Mariners’ second baseman, Bret Boone, 24, is the major leagues’ first thirdgeneration player. His father is Bob, the catcher, and his grandfather is Ray, the infielder.
If you remember Ray-he played until 1960-you have been around for a while, but probably not as long as that guy wearing the big black-rimmed glasses: It might be … it could be … it is-Harry Caray, the Cubs’ broadcaster. Forty-nine spring trainings ago he started in St. Louis on “The Griesedieck Brothers [a brewery] baseball network.” Back then St. Louis was baseball’s western frontier and Caray’s voice, crackling over the Ozarks and across the prairies, poured out of Philco and Emerson radios in living rooms in Oklahoma and Nebraska. Caray was for many fans their only link with major league baseball.
Rigney probably heard Caray when Rigney was playing for the Topeka Owls, which he did before he made it to the Oakland Oaks, and after he had played for the Spokane Hawks, the Vancouver Capilanos and the Bellingham (Wash.) Chinooks. Today Rigney is the reservoir of all-purpose wisdom for the A’s. But 55 springs ago he was in Brawley, Calif., an 18-year-old trying to get a grip on the slippery first rung of what then was baseball’s long ladder to the big leagues. In 1938 most teams had 16 or more farm clubs. Even at the end of the second world war there were still 51 minor leagues. It was quite a climb from the bushes to the Show.
Rigney is hardly the senior camper in Arizona. The Angels’ Jimmy Reese, a coach, in fact the conditioning coach, still suits up and hits fungoes–sometimes several hundred in a day-at 91. Now in his 76th year in organized baseball, he once roomed on the road with Babe Ruth. Or, as Reese puts it, he roomed with Ruth’s luggage. The great man kept vampire’s hours when he was on what Satchel Paige called “the social ramble.” But I digress, as baseball people are wont to do.
When Rigney was a Giants rookie in 1946, the. Giants and Indians settled into Pullman sleepers and played their way north from spring training, stopping in places like Danville, Va. Baseball was hard work but handsomely rewarded. Rigney earned $8,500 in 1946. On opening day that year, in New York, he played in the first major league game he ever saw. He had never seen New York before. Early on game day, he walked into the stillness of the vast Polo Grounds, where he would play shortstop on ground hallowed by the spikes of Christy Mathewson and Babe Ruth. He said to himself. “If there’s a God in Heaven, let someone quickly hit a ball to me and get it over with.” The Phillies’ leadoff man, Skeeter Newsome (Rigney forgets nothing), hit the first pitch of the game through the box. “I sucked it up,” Rigney says, still savoring the 47-year-old feeling. (It was going to be that kind of season-a .232 season-for Skeeter.)
What does Rigney remember about his first at bat? I’m telling you, baseball people remember everything. He struck out swinging on a 3-2 screwball from Oscar Judd. He is still muttering about it: “Can you believe he threw a screwball, 3-2?” Never mind, the Giants beat “the Philadelphias.” (Rigney occasionally lapses into such pleasing archaisms as, “Back in ‘50, when we were playing the Bostons . . .”) The score was 8-2. The Giants’ pitcher was Bill Voiselle, from the hamlet of Ninety Six, S.C. Guess what number he wore.
Baseball players play as long as they can, then they take up talking about it. The late Bart Giamatti, watching baseball talk boil up in a St. Louis hotel lobby (a lobby, said Giamatti, is “the park of talk … baseball’s second favorite venue”), marveled at “all the crosscutting, overlapping, salty, blunt, nostalgic, sweet conversation.” He concluded that baseball is a narrative, an unending one, and that explains the game’s seamless, cumulative character. As a conversationalist, Rigney rounds into midseason form early in spring training.
His nicknames, he says, were Specs (he wore glasses even then and Cricket. This last was because fans could hear his chatter in the stands. Cricket is a middle infielder sort of name. When Rigney was playing shortstop in New York City, so were Pee Wee and Scooter. But Rigney roomed on the road with a future Hall of Famer, Johnny Mize, whose muscles had muscles. “Our room hit 69 home runs that year,” says Rigney. Mize hit 51 of them.
Rigney has done well for a fellow who did not make his high school team, and who played in only 654 games over eight major league seasons. (One game was a beaut. In the final game of the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff, Rigney was one of the three victims when Don Newcombe struck out the side in the eighth inning. In the ninth the Dodgers’ Ralph Branca pitched to Bobby Thomson … ) Rigney had an 18-year career managing several teams. He spent many years on the field and in the dugout with a guy who, baseball people say, they “would pay to see.” Rigney remembers what a Giants scout said about a young man in Birmingham, Ala.: “What I’ve seen today I can’t believe!” He had seen Willie Mays.
Like a lot of players not long on talent, Rigney honed a sharp baseball mind. “Baseball people,” said Giamatti, “have the keenest eyes for the telling detail I have ever known.” That from a former professor of poetry. Today Rigney, his eyes crinkled against the desert glare that makes the red dirt of the infield glow, is at work for the A’s, who are playing the Cubs. As he chats and comments and greets old friends and answers questions, he doesn’t miss a nuance, and after the game he will be able to tell A’s officials how each pitcher did, Ditch by pitch, and if he is asked (which he is apt to be) whether a player was positioned too far off the foul line in the late innings, he will know, and without having taken a single note.
Rigney is a pleasant face of a sport that too often turns to the public only the flinty face of avarice. Consider this: Of the four teams with the highest payrolls last year, only the world champion Blue Jays had success. The Red Sox, Dodgers and Mets finished last, last and next to last, respectively. Rigney is a reminder that mind as well as money matters in a game chock-full of telling details.
In an era of constant rumbles between players and owners, Rigney is an incarnation of the game’s continuity, its organic life and capacity for renewal. He worries that today’s players, fiercely focused on careers that are lucrative beyond the dreams of Rigney’s contemporaries, will aggravate baseball’s loss of institutional memory. Many of them will, indeed, pass through baseball without pausing to appreciate the privilege of their passage. Baseball suffers, as the larger society does, from cultural amnesia, but Rigney is a keeper of the flame. He understands this paradox: Each player’s dignity is enlarged because each player is a small part of a long and lengthening tradition of craftsmanship and companionship across the generations.
And surely in late winter 50 years from now, a few of the men who were young and lithe in 1993 will come south again, bringing their autumnal memories of baseball’s many springtimes.
