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Just a few weeks ago, Gaylord Perry changed big-league uniforms for the eighth time without feeling too sentimental. The most elderly player in either league at nearly 45, he presumably could find work more appropriate to his gray hair and accumulating paunch. "For me, it's a pretty good job and it pays well—that's why I'm still playing. I love it, but everyone has to work." Although Perry's figures are in splendid order (312 victories, 3,506 strikeouts), some spitballing he did in his memoirs a few years ago could delay his processing. Sportswriters are wicked moralists. When Perry was apprehended making off with Teammate George Brett's slippery bat recently at Yankee Stadium, Gaylord was not exactly hustling it to the Hall of Fame.
Ferguson Jenkins, 39, the nearest Canadian to Cooperstown, 19 victories from 300, is sentimental about his baseball suit. "I am in love with this uniform," he says. "After being married to it for 21 years, the honeymoon is still there. I am in love with my wife and family, but I've also been in love with this game, with these bats, these gloves and my uniform. This uniform is like my wedding dress. Except I get to wear it every day."
Neither Jim Palmer, 37, nor Tom Seaver, 38, will likely scale 300 victories, but they were dominant pitchers in their leagues and have three Cy Young Awards apiece to show it. Each also possesses more than a touch of glamour. A section of Palmer's adolescence was spent residing in the Los Angeles movie community, Beverly Hills, where his habit was to rise early hoping to observe Janet Leigh picking up the paper in her pink peignoir. Now Palmer can be seen in his underwear on billboards, but seldom in uniform on a mound. Pestered by various miseries, Palmer was in the minor leagues last week tuning up for the stretch drive. Ballplayers are notoriously brave about one another's pain, but some Oriole players suspect that his pride and vanity require that Palmer be absolutely perfect now to pitch, and a few wonder if his uniform has been retired already—with him in it.
"There will always be great players," Seaver says, "but I don't know about the pitchers, though. I don't see the names on this list out there now. I just don't know." He has not thought of the Hall of Fame yet, because he cannot pitch there. "I misled myself from the time I was a small boy," he says, "that the celebrations in baseball were the thing. But when the Mets won the World Series in 1969, I realized that wasn't true. The competition is the thing."
Largely because minor-league grooming has been minimized in recent seasons, San Francisco Manager Frank Robinson, a Hall of Famer inducted just last summer, believes, "This current group may be the last of the lot who can be compared favorably to the oldtimers already in the Hall of Fame." Robinson is from the previous group, those "Ruthian black names" (Johnny Bench's perfect phrase) whose passing seemed to contain no renewal, just an end: Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Willie Stargell.
But maybe it always seems like an end until time passes and you pull back and say, "My God!"