Season in the Sun

They come early enough to watch fielding practice and stay to see the last out.

From coast to coast, fans are flocking to see every minute of the most exciting baseball season in years. In San Francisco, stockbrokers, merchants and plain workers are getting away from their offices early to go out to Seals Stadium and cheer home the National League-leading Giants. In Chicago, when the American League-leading White Sox get a man aboard, the rhythmical clapping swells into waves, and a chant rolls out of the stands: "Go -- go -- go!" Much more than two pennant races is fascinating the fans this summer. Teams far down in the standings have somehow taken on a new glamour. In Washington, the Senators are in their customary place at the bottom of the league, but fans are filling seats that have stood empty for years, on the chance that one of the new murderers' row of strong, silent sluggers may send a ball soaring toward the Capitol dome. Even lowly Kansas City won eleven in a row for the season's longest string, had the fans overflowing Municipal Stadium (capacity: 30,611) and sitting on the grass in leftfield. And when a slight, cold-eyed relief pitcher named Elroy Face (15-0) begins to throw his forkball, Pittsburgh can beat the world.

In the American League the White Sox have already drawn 76,000 more than they did in all of 1958, and in Cleveland, attendance has doubled, is a whopping 346,000 ahead of last year's final figure of 663,805. In the National League, the San Francisco Giants have been playing Seals Stadium (cap. 23,000) to an average of 18,000 all year long, and the Los Angeles Dodgers drew 120,000 in two big games with the Milwaukee Braves during their last home stand.

Yankee Dolor. In part, the new life in the American League can be laid to New York's Yankees, for this is the year the Yankees seem certain to lose the pennant. With the Yanks floundering, the new hit-less-wonder White Sox and the rebuilt Indians are playing like champions, and up and down the league the old also-rans are hustling with new life. Similarly, the National League's vigor can be traced in part to the troubles of the Milwaukee Braves, the league's soundest team at season's start, whose attack of midseason bumbling let the Dodgers and the Giants shake down into solid contenders.

But pennant form alone cannot account for baseball's new life. This is the year that fans scanning box scores and studying statistics are suddenly realizing that grand old names are nearly all gone, have gradually been replaced by a whole set of new faces. This is the year Ted Williams (.239) is 40, and seems ready to quit. This is the year Stan Musial (.260) is 38, and riding the bench. A new generation of stars is coming of age. Significantly, the

Yankees and the Braves banked on established players, and stumbled badly. Significantly, the Giants, Dodgers, Indians, and even the balanced White Sox, are getting a big lift from the kids.

The Power Man. In Cleveland, the new star is a tall, trim (6 ft. 3 in., 190 Ibs.), swarthily handsome rightfielder, who makes the bobby-soxers squeal, pulls seasoned fans into Cleveland Stadium two hours early to watch him take his cuts in the batting cage. When he comes to the plate during a game, the stands fall silent and candy butchers ignore customers to steal a look. Rocco Domenico Colavito, just turned 26, stirs excitement every time he picks up his medium (33 oz.) bat, paws with his right foot in the box until he is rooted like an oak, flexes his shoulder muscles by whipping the bat horizontally up and behind his head, crouches slightly, and fixes the pitcher with a steady stare from his dark brown eyes.

With his long, righthanded swing, Rocky Colavito is the power man behind the Indians, a long-ball hitter in the tradition of Ruth and Foxx and DiMaggio, a player who can hold the crowd enthralled because every time he goes to bat he sets the scene for baseball's most dramatic moment: the home run.

For two erratic seasons Rocky had been little more than a glamour boy with muscles for the Indians. Last year he caught hold, ended the season second only to the Yankees' Mickey Mantle in home runs (42 v. 41) and to Boston's Jackie Jensen in runs batted in (122 v. 113). This year Rocky is hitting better than ever. Like any good slugger, he can come alive at any moment, and last week, swinging with power and precision, he came alive. Fighting his way out Of a 25-game slump, Rocky drove in five runs to raise his total to 88, second in the league to the 91 of Washington's Harmon ("The Killer") Killebrew, hit two home runs to boost his figure to 34, just two short of Killebrew's total. It hardly mattered that Rocky's batting average at week's end was only .272. He was paid for the long ball and he was delivering it.

Big Little Leaguer. Not even the dedicated Ted Williams approaches the game with more diligence--or more confidence --than Rocky Colavito. a man who lives baseball with the intensity of a Little Leaguer. He mumbles over box scores like a scholar spelling out Sanskrit; he shuns movies on the day of a game for fear that they will dull his batting eye; he murmurs a quiet prayer every time he goes to the plate. He can hardly wait to get out to rightfield, where his throwing arm is baseball's strongest; he can hardly wait to get back to the dugout to get his cut at the ball.

Rocky's feats dazzle no one more than Rocky. After hitting a home run, he roams the Indians' bench, bellowing with glee, hunting down teammates, who feign terror as they try to preserve their hands from his numbing clasp of self-congratulation. Every locker room in the league has echoed to his rallying cry: "Don't knock the Rock!"

Obverse Recognition. Few do. Even boos that sometimes drift down out of the stands when he comes to bat are compliments, an obverse brand of recognition that the leather-lunged reserve for the good ones. "The booing is not very nice, but it doesn't upset me," says Rocky, whose sincerity still startles his teammates. "I never booed anyone in my life, but as long as they pay, they're entitled to do it. I'm trying to do the best I can."

Whatever his record this year, the best seems yet to come for Rocky. His happy combination of mental zeal and physical weal long ago caught the approving eye of Boston's great Ted Williams, who has tried to get the young muscleman to curb his passion for bashing the ball--any ball --and to wait for a good pitch. Says Williams: "Some day Rocky is going to take the league apart."

But Rocky is only one of a whole galaxy of bright new stars that have set off a cheery din compounded of the click of turnstiles and the clack of sportswriters' typewriters. Others:

P:At 25, Luis Aparicio of the Chicago White Sox has become the finest shortstop in the majors, an agile acrobat with a rifle arm, who can make gaudy plays on balls hit from within 20 ft. of third base clear over to second. The son of a Venezuelan shortstop, Aparicio made the White Sox in 1956, and with tobacco-chawing little Second Baseman Nellie Fox now forms the nucleus of the White Sox defense. At bat, Aparicio is hitting only .260, but his speed makes him the most dangerous man in the league, once he gets on base. He leads the majors with stolen bases (36), gets such a jump on the pitcher in his first few pumping strides that Manager Al Lopez generally leaves it to him to go whenever he sees the chance. "I don't worry about hitting the long ball/' says Aparicio, "just about getting to first. After that, I know I am going to steal.''

P:Kansas City's Roger Maris, 24. a grim, solid (6 ft., 197 Ibs.) rightfielder, has trailed off recently in his hitting from a league-leading .344 to .292, but Acting Manager Bob Swift insists, "He's going to be one of the great ballplayers." Close friends lay Maris' poker-faced concentration to a desire to make good for his brother Rudy, whose career as a player back home in Fargo, N. Dak. was stopped by polio in 1951. With speed on the base paths and wall-climbing tenacity in the outfield to back up his hitting, Maris is the main reason the Athletics soared as high as third place last month.

P:San Francisco's Willie Lee McCovey, 21, a big, leggy (6 ft. 4 in., 200 Ibs.) Negro first baseman, was so excited last month when he was called up from Phoenix that he stayed up all night to make sure he made his plane, never did get around to packing all his clothes. But at the plate for San Francisco, Willie is as cool as his bat is hot: in his first seven games, he hit three home runs, scored nine runs, drove in nine more, and batted .467, as the Giants won six to stay in first place. To get Willie's smooth, uncoiling swing into the lineup. Manager Bill Rigney willingly put him on first base in place of another 21-year-old slugger: Orlando Cepeda, the Giants' leading hitter (.315), the National League's first baseman for both All-Star Games, and the team's most popular player with San Francisco fans. Puerto Rican-born Cepeda is roaming the daisies in leftfield, where he manages to hustle under fly balls despite a pair of feet so flat that they seem shod in wooden Dutch shoes.

P:Cincinnati's Negro Centerfielder Vada Edward Pinson, 21, and Negro First Baseman Frank Robinson, 23 are the two bright spots in a disappointing season for the Redlegs. An all-star high school pitcher in Oakland, Calif., Pinson has a sprinter's speed going to first (3.3 sec.), enough power to hit his share of home runs despite his lithe build (15 ft. 11 in., 170 Ibs.). Playing his first full season in the majors, Pinson leads the team in hitting (.328) and stolen bases (17), simply outruns deep fly balls. Says Manager Freddy Hutchinson: "He's already got Willie Mays' range." Robinson is so painfully shy that he has little to say even around his Redleg teammates. But at bat Robinson is a power swinger who leans his head perilously close to the plate to get a good view of the pitch, last week hit a grand-slam home run as his team beat Milwaukee 9-8. In 1956, at the age of 20, Robinson broke into the Redlegs' lineup, promptly hit 38 home runs to tie the majors' record for first-year men, and made rookie of the year. This season, as of week's end, Robinson stood second in the majors in runs batted in with 102 (the leader: Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs with 1101), fourth in the league in homers, with 27.

P:Cleveland's easygoing Tito Francona, 25, is the late-bloomer of the season, a player who was shunted in three years' time from the Orioles to the White Sox to the Tigers to the Indians, where he began the year on the bench. In Cleveland, Francona was soon coaxing players to pitch to him by the hour in the empty stadium, gradually improved a swing that had always been basically sound. Manager Joe Gordon took a hand. "He got me to swing down on the ball--what he calls 'tomahawk' it--so I'd level out my swing," says Francona. In June, Francona broke into the starting line-up (at first or center-field), last week was hitting .389, with 14 home runs and 60 runs batted in.

P:Washington's bright young (23) bruiser Harmon Killebrew is a sensation of the season in his first full playing year in the majors. No mere flash in the spring, Killebrew is hitting with such power that he leads the league in both home runs and runs batted in, despite an anemic batting average of .249. With Rookie Bob Allison. 25. third in the league at week's end in home runs (27), Killebrew is the mainstay of Washington's new string of sluggers (TIME, July 20) that drew 12,198 to Griffith Stadium even as the team was dropping the final game of its 18-game losing streak. In other years, Griffith Stadium would go for months without such a crowd.

P:St. Louis' Joe Cunningham, 27, holds an apprentice card in the steam fitters' union, and until this year it seemed likely that he would need it some day. A gay bachelor and deadpan needler, Cunningham still plays baseball as though he were fitting pipes: at the plate he is a lunger, and in the field he will play a ball off his chest, if necessary. Admits Manager Solly Hemus: "He's herky-jerky in everything he does." But this year Cunningham's batting average is second in the league (.345), and somehow he is making the plays in rightfield. The reason behind his success: an overpowering drive to succeed that turns him into one of the game's toughest competitors. Says Cardinals General Manager Bing Divine: "Joe shows no particular regard for life or limb." St. Louis also has First Baseman Bill White, 25, a superbly coordinated Negro who was smart enough to finish second in his high school class of 127 in Warren, Ohio. White came up with the Giants in 1956. but never did settle down, was traded this year to St. Louis for Pitcher Sad Sam ("Toothpick") Jones, and settled down for fair. Afield, he ranks just behind the Dodgers' Veteran Gil Hodges. At the plate, he is hitting a solid .311, "just meeting the ball."

P:Boston's Frank Malzone, 29, is the best third baseman in the majors, a stocky (5 ft. 10 in., 180 Ibs.), bowlegged perfectionist who is agile enough to force his man at second on a sacrifice bunt, strong enough to drive in 76 runs, hit 17 homers so far this year. Son of an Italian immigrant, Malzone grew up in The Bronx, was recommended to the Red Sox by a local grocer, signed willingly in 1948 for no bonus. Thereafter, hampered by a badly broken ankle and a siege of depression after the death of his 1 1/2-year-old daughter, he needed nine years to make the Red Sox for good. A dedicated, silent man ("I don't have anything to say"), Malzone sets rivals to babbling. Says Yankee Manager Casey Stengel: "Never seen anything like the fella since I seen that other fella Pie Traynor."

P:The Dodgers' Don Drysdale is the National League's most formidable pitcher this season (15-7), a 23-year-old pinup boy with the muscular frame (6 ft. 6 in., 220 Ibs.) and dark good looks of a horse opera hero. On the rubber at Los Angeles' Memorial Coliseum, Righthander Drysdale towers over the batter like an oil derrick, makes his fast ball even harder to hit by delivering it side arm from so far out that it seems to whistle in from leftfield. Raised in nearby Van Nuys, Drysdale learned the game from his father, a onetime minor-league pitcher, who stuck him on second, did not let him pitch until he was 16 and his gangling frame had begun to fill out. Last season Drysdale was so unsettled by the stadium's leftfield screen (251 ft. from home plate) that he wound up with a 12-13 record. But this season Drysdale has forgotten about the screen ("I told myself to hell with it"), leads the league in strike-outs (185). At bat, Drysdale tied the league record for pitchers by hitting seven homers last year, this year has already hit four.

Even without the help of these new stars the 1959 season would be one to remember. In both leagues the old champions were in trouble, and upstarts, emerging from their long shadow, were elbowing one another for a place in the sun.

Three for the Money. The West Coast, which responded to the arrival of major-league baseball in the form of the Giants and the Dodgers with an enthusiasm all out of proportion to the teams' records, has been rewarded beyond any fan's wildest hopes--this year they have not just one, but two pennant contenders. The Giants, who went to San Francisco a disheveled team of weary veterans and untried rookies, have settled down into a hustling ball club that last week led the Braves by three games and the Dodgers by 2 1/2. The Giants have solid pitching anchored by Sad Sam Jones (15-11), a morose-faced Negro with a crackling curve, and slick Johnny Antonelli (16-6), the pop-off lefty whose feud with newsmen is so bitter that he issues statements only through Manager Bill Rigney (dubbed by the press "John's other voice"). To hit, the Giants have the bull-necked Cepeda and the wondrous McCovey. Out in centerfield, Willie Mays, 28, is beginning to make the awesome plays in Seals Stadium that he used to pull off in the Polo Grounds. Most important of all perhaps, the Giants have a grim determination to win. After a defeat, the team's locker room bristles with fury.

Last year the Dodgers finished seventh, 21 full games from the top. But this year the Dodger veterans and kids have meshed to produce a balanced ball club. The Dodger pitching staff, founded on the cross-fired fast balls of young Don Drysdale, has become one of the best in the league. But the Dodgers will rise or fall in the stretch on the play of three old pros, who are hustling like sandlotters. On third, Junior Gilliam, 30, is having the best season of his seven-year major-league career (.312), has been on base in more than 95% of the games he has started. At 32, Outfielder Duke Sniders hair is grey, but his steel-blue eyes are as sharp as ever, his gimpy knee is responding to cortisone treatments, and his average is up to .323. At 35, ham-handed Gil Hodges had hit 19 homers and driven in 62 runs when he was forced out of the line-up last month with a wrenched ankle. But Hodges is expected back in time to help the Dodgers as the three-way pennant fight swirls to a finish.

They will need it, for Milwaukee's Braves are far from dead. After five players had failed to fill the hole left at second by Red Schoendienst, out with tuberculosis, Manager Fred Haney is finally getting some help from Bobby Avila, 33, the old Cleveland Indian, who knows what to do with the ball, even though he cannot go far to get it. Schoendienst may be back by September, but in the meantime Haney can more than make do with the men who won for him in 1957 and 1958: husky Third Baseman Ed Mathews is still hitting home runs (33), lean Rightfielder Hank Aaron is still leading the league with his bat (.367), and on the pitching staff 38-year-old Lefty Warren Spahn (15-11) and 32-year-old Righty Lew Burdette (16-12) have lost none of their guile.

Solid up the Middle. In the American League, 1959 was the year the Yankee haters had never dared dream would come. The World Champion Yankees, winners of ten pennants in the last twelve years, butchered games like bushers and sprawled into the cellar. Injuries hurt badly (First Baseman Bill Skowron was out with a broken wrist, Third Baseman Andy Carey with infectious mononucleosis), but the Yankees as a whole had lost their famed talent for winning the big ones. During a six-game winning streak that ended last week, the Yanks did show flashes of old-time power. But it was almost certainly too late. In third place last week, eleven games from the top, they will have to play better than .750 ball for the rest of the season even to have a chance for the pennant. One thing is certain: they will get no help from the Yankee haters, who are swarming out to see them lose; e.g., on their last road trip the Yanks drew an average per game of 37,500.

Nor will the Yanks get any help from the White Sox, a collection of glint-eyed opportunists who have won 28 of 34 games by a one-run margin, last week led Cleveland by four games despite the fact that not one regular can hit for distance. Snorts Cleveland General Manager Frank Lane: "Leprechauns in uniform!" Wiliest leprechaun of them all is little (5 ft. 9 in., 162 Ibs.) Second Baseman Nellie Fox, the best man in baseball for popping a hit over the infield (.325). With Aparicio at short, fleet Jim Landis in center and Veteran Sherm Lollar behind the plate, Fox makes the Sox solid up the middle, bosses the best ball-hawking defense in baseball. Says Casey Stengel: "Those fellers got little bats and big gloves." The Sox pitching is good enough--burly Early Wynn, 39, is having one of his best years (16-7). All in all, Manager Lopez just tries to keep his team relaxed, religiously plays the percentages ("They usually work out for you"), and worries not a whit about the club's lack of power: "I'll settle for a team that can splatter the ball around."

The team Chicago must beat has the power to powder the ball, and color to match. When General Manager Frank Lane set to work in 1957, the Cleveland Indians had a tradition of drab respectability and a habit of finishing a discreet second to the Yankees. Acting as big as he talked, Wheeler-Dealer Lane blithely peddled such Cleveland old faithfuls as Pitcher Early Wynn and First Baseman Vic Wertz, after 55 deals ended up with such hustlers as Francona, Centerrielder Jimmy (Fear Strikes Out) Piersall, Second Baseman Billy Martin, the ex-Yankee holler guy, husky First Baseman Vic Power and Leftfielder Minnie Minoso. "We have 85% new faces," says Lane proudly.

But the man who made Lane's new players fizz instead of fizzle was Manager Joe Gordon, the old Yankee second baseman, who had helped Cleveland win the world championship in 1948. Gordon has his high-spirited Indians playing a confident, aggressive brand of ball that is packing the fans into Cleveland Stadium* after years of declining attendance since the 1954 pennant. Backed by a long-ball attack, this whirlwind play has so far made up for mediocre pitching. (FastBaller Herb Score has never recovered his coordination since being hit in the eye with a batted ball in 1957, has a 9-10 record.) "I just turn them loose on the field and let them play," says Gordon. "If a guy gets brave and decides to steal and gets thrown out, I don't make a fuss about it. I want my players to play the way they did when they were kids--for the fun of it."

Paved Playing Field. For the fun of it is the only way Cleveland's Rocky Colavito has ever played baseball since he discovered the game existed as a toddler back home in The Bronx. Rocky was the youngest of five children born to Rocco Colavito, a sturdy, hard-working iceman, and Angelina Spodafino. Rocco and Angelina came separately to the U.S. in the early '20s from Bari, Italy, met and married in New York City. Rocky's boyhood heroes were his big brothers, Dominick and Vito, who taught him to throw and hit on the paved playing field of Public School 4.

The neighborhood, mainly immigrant Italian and Jewish families, had its tough side. "Dutch Schultz ran his rackets there," recalls Rocky. "But none of my real friends ever went to prison." The farthest Rocky ever strayed from the diamond was to the corner pool parlor, where he learned to shoot a sharp game. Rocky was too busy getting ready for the big leagues, squeezing rubber balls to build up his hand and arm muscles (he still does), hoarding his dimes to buy a good glove. His throwing arm was soon strong enough to win bets from the unwary, and there are those in The Bronx who still claim that the 14-year-old lad once cleared the Claremont Parkway elevated station from a block away.

Yankee Error. By the time he was 16, Rocky was a star for the semipro Mohawks playing out of Crotona Park, and major-league scouts were nosing about. Rocky quit high school ("baseball was the only thing I really cared about") and waited to be courted. Yankee Stadium was just a couple of miles away, and Colavito idolized Joe DiMaggio. But the Yankee scouts fretted so long about his slow running (he has inverted arches) that Cleveland got him for a cut-rate $3,000 bonus.

Rocky was only 17 in 1951 when he started riding the buses with Daytona Beach in the Class D Florida State League. After that the road led only upward: Spartanburg (11 homers), Reading (28), two years in Indianapolis (38, 30). In 1956, after a one-month stint with San Diego, Rocky made the Indians for good, as a rookie hit a respectable .276, knocked out 21 home runs.

But last season Rocky did not get on with Manager Bobby Bragan, who stuck slavishly to the book and used his right-handed power only against left-handed pitching. Rocky sought out Bragan and blurted: "If you let me play regular, I'll hit 35 home runs and knock in 100 runs." Bragan promptly tipped off the sportswriters, stuck Rocky in the line-up to let him put up or shut up. "The minute I said it I knew I made a mistake," says Rocky. "But with God's help I hit 41 homers and I drove in 113 runs." The boy from The Bronx had become a star.

Rocky Upstairs? So far. success has not spoiled Rocky Colavito. Painstakingly polite, he will sign autographs for kids by the hour, admonishing the unruly to say thank you. During the season, he lives quietly in a furnished home on Cleveland's west side with his pretty, dark-haired wife Carmen, 23. and their two children, Rocco, 3, and Marisa, 15 months. In the winter they move back to their home in Temple, Pa., where Rocky met Carmen in 1953 while playing with nearby Reading. There they keep a jewelry box full of religious medals that fans have sent to Rocky, a Roman Catholic, during his periodic slumps.

This year Rocky tied a major-league record by hitting four consecutive home runs in a single game, and, what was more impressive, did it in the toughest stadium in the league--Baltimore's massive Memorial Stadium. Even so. Rocky is far from being a polished ballplayer. His powerful throwing arm--he has one measured throw of 436 ft.--can be wildly inaccurate. At the plate Rocky will murder a baseball between his belt and knees, but still has trouble solving fast balls tight and high and sliders that break away, still tries to kill the ball instead of just meeting it for base hits. "You might as well talk to a wall as to Rocky," complains Lane. "He'll 'yes' you like crazy, and go right on trying for home runs." Cracks a Yankee coach: "They don't call him Rocky for nothing."

"Ooh." Strike-out or home run, Rocky Colavito earns his $30,000 by playing with a flair that stirs delight up in the stands. After one of his flat-trajectory throws from rightfield, the "ooh!" lingers for drawn-out seconds. And when Rocky hits the long one and starts his languorous lope around the bases ("Rocky runs around after hitting a homer like he was still tasting it," says a sportscaster), the cheers follow him into the dugout.

With new stars like Rocky Colavito coming of age this season, the game is stronger than it has been in years. Attendance is creeping up even in the minors, after a decade of hurtling down. This season, in fact, the fans are too busy following the action on the diamond to engage in the old lament of what's-wrong-with-baseball. This summer, nothing is.

*And thereby lining the jacket of General Manager Lane, who gets a bonus of 5-c-a head for every customer the Indians draw at home over 800,000. Through week's end, the Indians had played to 1,009,362, giving Lane $10,478.10 in nickels in addition to his salary of some $60,000.

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