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"Baseball has been in a golden age without even realizing it," says the Washington Post's Tom Boswell. Roger Angell of The New Yorker says, "There are any number of players now who are as good as anyone has ever been." Roger Kahn, the baseball author (Boys of Summer) and now owner of the minor league Utica Blue Sox, agrees with them. (These three are the heart of the baseball writers' order.) Reacting not unlike the way he did to the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, Kahn says, "When you pull back, you say, 'My God!' "
In 1969, when Johnny Bench of Binger, Okla., was 21 and just coming forth as the wonder catcher of the Cincinnati Reds, Ted Williams autographed his baseball, "To a Hall of Famer for sure." Turning the ball over in his hand then, and in his heart later, Bench was afraid. "Of failure," he admits now, though he never showed it at the time. "I couldn't believe Ted Williams had even heard of me. Do you think that wasn't pressure?" Bench always seemed to be playing for fame. After hitting 45 home runs in 1970, he toured a war with Bob Hope. He was on This Is Your Life before he had a life. "When you're the MVP," says Bench, who was the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1970 and 1972, "you're it, you're everything. But when you win the World Series [1975 and 1976], it's a team thing, and you can pass a little of it around to teammates who didn't even play much."
One by one the teammates slipped away and, by and by, his skills did too, until abruptly this season, looking out a hotel window one day, Bench acknowledged his loneliness. "The thing is, it's over; there's not much more I can do," he says, so he is retiring. Orchestrating his own last victory lap around the league, Bench accepted a testimonial in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, and then hit a pinch homer to beat the Phillies. It made him feel glorious but not young. "What need does a ballplayer have for drugs and alcohol," sighs Bench, as perplexed about the present as an old man, "when he can have a high like a home run?" He is the alltime home run-hitting catcher. After more than 13 years in a crouch, Bench has been straightening up for a couple of seasons at third base, but he will assume his old position for a day of honor Sept. 17.
Ingeniously (Joe Garagiola, Bob Uecker) or ingenuously (Ernie Lombardi, Yogi), it seems catchers were always made figures of humor, reeling beneath popups, rattling like mimes balancing dishes. But Bench remade catchers glamorously. The way he pounced on a bunt; the way he threw to the base; the way runners piled up on his shinguard as he whapped them one across the beam. Bench lived up to the responsibility of his talent all right. "I pretty well did," he says proudly, but with a palpable sense of relief, and five years from now he will be a Hall of Famer for sure.