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Orioles that day—Aparicio was batting .428 for the spring, Davis was at .417, the team average stood at .302, and Manager Stanky had not yet used up one of his aggravations. The most significant moment of preseason athletics for the Boston Red Sox took place not in Florida but on a mountain slope at Heavenly Valley, California, late in the afternoon of last December 24, when Jim Lonborg, taking a last run down an expert trail through heavy, crusty powder, crossed his right ski tip over his left while making an easy right-hand turn and fell slowly forward, snapping the anterior cruciate ligament of his left knee. The Knee, subsequently operated on and now slowly on the mend, was the object of intense daily ministrations, rituals, aspersions, invocations, and solemn preachments observed and participated in by the sixty-odd reporters at the Bosox camp in Winter Haven. Lonborg won twenty-four games last year, including the famous pennant-clincher and two World Series games, but his importance to the Sox may be even greater this year; most of his fellow staff members have shown only a minimum competence this spring, sometimes absorbing terrific pastings at the hands of such lightweights as the Senators and the Astros, and Lonborg’s value has seemed to rise every day, even though he has not yet thrown a pitch. When I saw him in March, he was lifting twenty-five pounds of weights strapped to a boot on his left foot, and had only slight flexibility of the leg. When he could lift forty pounds, he would be allowed to start throwing. He may be ready to pitch early in June, maybe later. Nobody knows, because baseball medicos have never had to study a skiing injury before, and ski-injury orthopedists rarely meet pitchers. The only person in Winter Haven who seemed interested in this sociomedical paradox (and the only one apparently able to look at the knee with something less than Trappist gloom) was Lonborg himself, a young man who is intensely interested in almost everything. He is even interested in skiing again. “You can understand the thrill of baseball,” he said, “but there’s something mysterious about skiing.” He told me that he could hardly wait to get back on skis, but added thoughtfully that there was an unspoken agreement between him and the Red Sox management that this moment should be postponed until after his baseball days were finished. This agreement is unspoken, I discovered, because Dick Williams, the Red Sox manager, can barely bring himself to say anything about Lonborg’s injury, the effect of Lonborg’s absence, the date of Lonborg’s return, or the permanence of Lonborg’s Killy-cure. Williams has spent his life in baseball, and the idea of a Cy Young Award winner’s risking his future for the mystery and joy to be found on a ski slope is beyond his experience. The generation gap is everywhere.
    Morning training sessions at Chain-O’-Lakes Stadium, in Winter Haven, were studied with a mixture of excessive optimism and unjustified despondency by the immense Boston press corps, which has traditionally been made uneasy by success. Soft breezes carried a festive, wedding-cake fragrance across the diamond from an orange grove beyond the outfield, and three large cardboard golden crowns, suspended by wires and marked “BA .326,” “HR 44,” and “RBI 121,” swayed in the bright air above the boxes behind home. Yastrzemski, the inspiration for this impermanent trophy, seemed unconcerned by the almost visible rays of speculation that fell on him wherever he went in the field. Mostly, he was glad that the winter of his celebrity was over. He had been to too many banquets and benefits, once making seventeen appearances in the span of two days, and he told me that he now felt grateful when strangers in a restaurant waited until he had finished eating before coming up to introduce themselves. In Florida, he took long extra turns in the batting cage, sometimes staying for another hour of batting after