[Nick Soulis]

THE OLD GAME PLAYED AT ITS OLDEST AND FINEST: NEWHOUSER'S ARM WRITES A VERDICT THAT HISTORY COULD NOT
By Grantland Rice — Filed from Detroit, Michigan, October 1945

There are moments in the long history of this game when the argument being made on the field is larger than the game itself, when the innings accumulate not merely as a record of runs scored and outs recorded but as evidence in a case that has been building for years and has finally found its courtroom. The Field of Dreams Tournament provided one of those moments across six October games at Briggs Stadium and Metropolitan Stadium, and when the last out was recorded on a Monday afternoon in Detroit with the temperature sitting at forty-nine degrees and the crowd at Briggs Stadium making the kind of noise that crowds make when they understand they have witnessed something they will not soon replace, the verdict was delivered cleanly and without appeal.

The 1945 Detroit Tigers defeated the 1971 Minnesota Twins, four games to two. Hal Newhouser was the reason. That is the complete sentence, and everything else that follows is annotation.

But the annotation is worth making, because this series was more than one magnificent left arm throwing strikes in October. It was a tournament of pitching craft played at the highest level this game can produce — six games in which the combined offenses of two genuinely dangerous American League lineups were held to fewer runs per game than the most pessimistic pregame analyst would have predicted with any confidence. Tom Hall threw nine shutout innings in game two and the baseball world said — how extraordinary. Jim Kaat threw nine shutout innings in game three and the baseball world said — how extraordinary again. Les Mueller threw eight shutout innings in game four and Al Benton threw eight and two-thirds in game six, and by the end of it the word extraordinary had been used so many times in connection with this series that it had lost its power to surprise and retained only its power to describe. This was an extraordinary series. All six games of it.

And at the center of it, standing on the mound at Briggs Stadium with the composure of a man who has never once in his life doubted the outcome of the argument he was making, was Hal Newhouser. Twenty-four years old. From the city of Detroit itself. Pitching in his home park before his home crowd against a Minnesota lineup that included Tony Oliva, who hit three hundred and thirty-seven and twenty-two home runs during the regular season, and Harmon Killebrew, who drove in a hundred and nineteen runs on twenty-eight home runs and a hundred and fourteen walks, and Rod Carew, who is becoming something that the language of scouting reports has not yet fully developed the vocabulary to describe.
Against these men, across two starts separated by five days of October rest,

Hal Newhouser pitched eighteen innings and allowed one earned run. One. The number sits on the page with the blunt authority of a fact that requires no elaboration and admits no argument. One earned run in eighteen innings against a lineup of that quality is not a product of fortune or circumstance or the particular alignment of the October wind. It is the product of a pitcher who understands, at a depth that very few men who have ever held a baseball have understood, how to prevent runs from scoring. Not how to prevent hits — Minnesota accumulated fifteen hits against him across two starts. Not how to prevent baserunners — eleven men reached base against him in game five alone. But how to prevent the damage that hits and baserunners imply, how to manage the consequences of contact with the precision of a man who has done the arithmetic before the pitch is thrown and knows exactly where the ball needs to go and exactly what the hitter needs to be thinking when it gets there.

The young man from Minnesota who stood across from him in game one and game five deserves a paragraph of his own, because the story of Bert Blyleven in this series is not a story of failure but a story of education delivered at the highest possible cost. Twenty years old. A curveball that breaks with the casual cruelty of something that has never heard of the concept of fairness. One hundred and forty-seven pitches in game one — nine and a third innings, two earned runs, a loss that the arithmetic did not justify and the baseball did not permit him to avoid. One hundred and thirteen pitches in game five — seven and a third innings, six earned runs, a loss that arrived in the seventh inning when the adjustments Detroit had accumulated across two games of facing him found the patterns in his delivery and exploited them with the two-out efficiency that has characterized this Tigers lineup across its finest moments.

He will be back. The tournament will draw him again, in a year or a decade or whenever the random machinery of this extraordinary competition sees fit to put his name in the bracket, and the pitcher who emerges from the Iowa corn on that occasion will be the finished article that game one of this series showed him becoming. The education that this series provided — the precise and painful knowledge of where his limits currently sit and what it will require to move them — is the kind that cannot be purchased in a spring training camp or a regular season start. It can only be earned in October, against Hal Newhouser, on a mound where everything is on the line and the margin between extraordinary and insufficient is thinner than the seam on the baseball itself.

César Tovar hit .321 and played every inning with the tireless, uncelebrated excellence that is the private signature of all great leadoff men. Eddie Mayo hit .500 for Detroit and turned double plays and delivered two-out hits in the moments when the series most required them — quiet, efficient, and indispensable in the way that great second basemen have always been quiet and efficient and indispensable. Roy Cullenbine drew his walks and was stranded. Hank Greenberg dressed in his uniform and sat in the dugout and watched, as men who have given years to their country sometimes must, while others played the game he spent his prime years mastering. Rudy York hit a three-run home run in the third inning of game six that settled the series with the finality of a judge's gavel. Doc Cramer tripled in the eighth inning of game five with a runner on base and sent the game to a place from which Minnesota could not retrieve it.

These are the details that make up the fabric of a series. They are worth recording because they happened, because the men who produced them deserve to have their names in the account alongside the larger story, because baseball at its finest is always a collective enterprise even when one man's performance towers above the rest.

But the towers above the rest is where this accounting must end, because it is where this series always returns regardless of which direction the telling begins. Eighteen innings. One earned run. A series ERA of one point zero zero. Two wins. A unanimous Series MVP award announced in a jubilant Detroit clubhouse while the crowd outside was still making its noise on Michigan Avenue.

The question that has followed Hal Newhouser across the decades — the question about the war years, about the competition, about whether the numbers meant what numbers are supposed to mean — has been answered in the only forum where such questions can be honestly settled. Not in a newspaper column. Not in a Hall of Fame debate. Not in the careful reconstruction of historical record that serious men apply to the careers of serious players. But on a baseball diamond, against a genuine 1971 American League lineup, in October, with everything on the line and nothing to hide behind and nowhere to go except straight at the hitter with the best stuff available and the full confidence that it would be enough.
It was enough.

It was more than enough.

It was, in the plainest and most honest reckoning this old game allows, one of the finest individual pitching performances that the Field of Dreams Tournament has yet produced — and this tournament has now completed two hundred and sixty-eight series across a hundred and twenty years of baseball history, which means the company in which that statement places Hal Newhouser is company worth being placed in.
Briggs Stadium is quiet now. The grounds crew has cleared the field. The lights have been extinguished and the old concrete stands hold the particular silence of a place where something significant has just concluded. Somewhere in the Iowa night the corn is moving in the wind and the diamond is waiting for the next two clubs to emerge and make their own argument in their own October.

The game goes on.
It always goes on.
That is what makes it worth watching.