Game Over 
Sports
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
College baseball just isn’t the same game you see on TV; at Clark Field it never tried to be.
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The cliff produced a rare type of home run several years ago. A ball hit over the center fielder’s head appeared destined for higher ground. The left fielder charged up the path to the plateau, intent on holding the batter to a triple. The center fielder went back to the base of the cliff and leaped for the ball. The shortstop raced into center awaiting a relay, and the third baseman covered his base hopefully. They all guessed wrong. The ball hit the top of the bluff, evading the desperate leap of the center fielder, and ricocheted into left field. The closest person to the ball was the runner as he rounded second.
Just as the Boston Red Sox have filled their lineup with right handed power hitters to take advantage of the short left field wall at Fenway Park, Texas baseball teams have been shaped by the character of Clark Field. The short right field fence means that left-handed batters who can pull the ball are always in demand. Right-handed batters must not only overcome the handicap of a deep left field, but also face a fence that is abnormally high because of the cliff—so Texas right-handed batters are usually line-drive hitters. A promising catcher named Bill Berryhill completed three good years at Texas in 1973 but had the misfortune to be right-handed; he had a talent for hitting solid blows that were caught just short of the cliff. If the dimensions of the field had been reversed, he’d hold every Texas home run record.
Clark Field has been a good home for the Longhorns. They have won nine straight Southwest Conference championships, and have won or tied for the SWC title 48 times in 58 years. The cliff has helped, of course, but so have the players: through the years Texas has sent numerous players to the major leagues, including Pinky Higgins, Grady Hatton, Randy Jackson, Murray Wall, and most recently, Chicago Cub pitcher Burt Hooten. Bobby Layne led Texas to four straight conference championships but chose pro football. The next Texas player to reach the major leagues will probably be David Chalk, who has a chance to win the starting shortstop job for the California Angels this spring.
Future Texas major league prospects will play in a $2 million stadium under construction in East Austin more than a mile from the main campus. It will have a seating capacity of more than 5000, plus an artificial playing surface, lights for night baseball, and an electric scoreboard. The field will be one of the premier college baseball stadiums in the nation, comparable to new parks at Southern California and Arizona State, the schools Texas annually contests for the College World Series championship in Omaha, Nebraska. Like all the new ball parks, it strives for symmetry: 400 feet to deep center, 375 down the power alleys, 340 to left, 325 to right (to compensate for prevailing winds blowing in from right field). But it will not have a cliff.
To those who love Clark Field and the game that is played there, the new field is a giant antiseptic mistake. College baseball is an imperfect game; that is its beauty and the key to its enjoyment. Place it in a major league setting and it becomes an awkward parody. In the major leagues, a ground ball to the shortstop is an out, but in college ball, even a pop-up carries an element of doubt. The appeal of college baseball is that the players have talent but not perfection. They are capable of astounding accomplishment and unbelievable mistakes; they are, in short, just like ourselves. It is a game all of us can understand.
The major league game is different. It is beyond our ability to play. We can appreciate it as an art form, but as a sport it can be unbearably dull and predictable. Even the gap between the best player and the worst appears minuscule until it is viewed over the whole season.
Baseball is a marvelously conceived sport, and the college game takes advantage of its best aspects. Baseball is the only team sport played without a clock; no lead is ever completely safe and no game utterly lost. Relief pitching specialists have all but obliterated the late inning rally in the major leagues, but skills aren’t so specialized on the college level. Last year the pivotal game of the College World Series saw Minnesota’s all-American pitcher holding a one-hit, fifteen-strikeout, seven run lead over Southern California in the ninth inning only to lose 8-7. Nothing like that has happened in the professional World Series since 1929.
Baseball also isolates its participants better than any other sport. It is impossible to assess the individual performances of football players without sophisticated motion picture equipment, but baseball strips the contestants of their anonymity, putting their skills on display on both offense and defense for all to see. College baseball adds the element of intimacy: because the ball parks are smaller than major league stadiums and spectators sit much closer to the playing field, the onlooker is part of the game to an extent not possible at a major league park. You can spot the third baseman’s fatal mistake as he takes his eye off the ball, and you know before he does that the ball is past him. You can watch Burt Hooten in complete control, baffling opposing batters with an unusual pitch called a knuckle curve, but you’re close enough to know that the dreaded pitch is not a strike, and that major league hitters wouldn’t be swinging at pitches that college hitters are missing by a foot. And if you watch closely, you may begin to understand what a wide range of skills the game of baseball demands of those who would play it, and how difficult and subtle this game really is.
This is what college baseball is all about: relaxing in the awakening spring, watching a great sport being played by real people. Somehow the cliff seems an appropriate, even necessary part of the scene. It tells us, more eloquently than his 600 foot home run did, that Lou Gehrig was out of place here. It is something that could never be part of a professional stadium, something that reminds us that even at a school which has won the championship 48 times in 58 years, what is going on is only a game.
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