Fathers & Sons & Sports (24 page)

And Pee Wee Reese played shortstop. I was stunned by Pee Wee because I had known him the longest, from the summer of 1940, when he came up to Brooklyn, until he quit in Los Angeles in 1958. Now he stood at shortstop, again fifty-four years old, leaning all his weight on one slim leg, in a gesture almost effete and certainly graceful.

Suddenly I remembered a scene in grave detail from the beginning of my baseball time. It is a Sunday afternoon, 1940 probably, or possibly 1941, when the Dodgers will win the pennant and meet the Yankees in the series and I will see the first game. My father and my mother and I are riding in the
Studebaker, listening to Red Barber broadcast a crucial game between the Dodgers and the Giants. The Giants are ahead. Now the Dodgers begin to come close—maybe they tie the game; I don’t remember the details—and the Giants stop, pause, confer. Then they summon Carl Hubbell from the bullpen.

My father explains how momentous it is that Carl Hubbell should pitch relief. Things have not gone well for him lately. But King Carl is the greatest left-hander of all time, who, in the 1934 All Star game, struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin, all in a row; he’s an old screwballer who walks always with his left elbow turned into his ribs, his arm permanently twisted by his best pitch. The great man seldom pitched relief, and now he walked from the bullpen to the pitcher’s mound and took his tosses; old man who had pitched since 1928, who couldn’t have more than three or four dwindling years left in his arm; old man come in to save the game for his faltering team.

My father’s face is tense. He loves the Dodgers and not the Giants, but he loves Carl Hubbell even more. My father is thirty-seven years old in 1940. So is Carl Hubbell.

Then the Dodgers send up a pinch hitter. It is Harold Reese, the baby shortstop, former marbles (“pee-wees”) champion of Louisville, Kentucky, fresh from the minor leagues, and fifteen years younger than Hubbell. I sit in the front seat cheering the Dodgers on, hoping against hope, though I realize that the rookie shortstop is “good field no hit.”

Pee Wee hits a home run off Carl Hubbell and the Dodgers win.

Sitting there in the front seat, eleven years old, I clap and cheer. Then I hear my father’s strange voice. I look across my mother to see his knuckles white on the wheel, his face white, and I hear him saying, “The punk! The punk!” With astonishment and horror, I see that my father is crying.

My father and I played catch as I grew up. Like so much else between fathers and sons, playing catch was tender and tense at the same time. He wanted to play with me. He wanted me to be good. He seemed to demand that I be good. I threw the ball into his catcher’s mitt. Atta boy. Put her right there. I threw straight. Then I tried to put something on it; it flew twenty feet over his head. Or it banged into the sidewalk in front of him, breaking stitches and ricocheting off a pebble into the gutter of Greenway Street. Or it went wide to his right and lost itself in Mrs. Davis’s bushes. Or it went wide to his left and rolled across the street while drivers swerved their cars.

I was wild. I was wild. I had to be wild for my father. What else could I be? Would you have wanted me to have control?

But I was, myself, the control on him. He had wanted to teach school, to coach and teach history at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and he had done it for two years before he was married. The salary was minuscule and in the twenties people didn’t get married until they had the money to
live on. Since he wanted to marry my mother, he made the only decision he could make: he quit Cushing and went into the family business, and he hated business, and he wept when he fired people, and he wept when he was criticized, and his head shook at night, and he coughed from all the cigarettes, and he couldn’t sleep, and he almost died when an ulcer hemorrhaged when he was forty-two, and ten years later, at fifty-two, he died of lung cancer.

But the scene I remember happened when he was twenty-five and I was almost one year old. So I do not “remember” it at all. It simply rolls itself before my eyes with the intensity of a lost memory suddenly found again, more intense than the moment itself ever is.

It is 1929, July, a hot Saturday afternoon. At the ballpark near East Rock, in New Haven, Connecticut, just over the Hamden line, my father is playing semipro baseball. I don’t know the names of the teams. My mother has brought me in a basket, and she sits under a tree, in the shade, and lets me crawl when I wake up.

My father is very young, very skinny. When he takes off his cap—the uniform is gray, the bill of the cap blue—his fine hair is parted in the middle. His face is very smooth. Though he is twenty-five, he could pass for twenty. He plays shortstop, and he is paid twenty-five dollars a game. I don’t know where the money comes from. Do they pass the hat? They would never raise so much money. Do they charge admission? They must
charge admission, or I am wrong that it was semipro and that he was paid. Or the whole thing is wrong, a memory I concocted. But of course the reality of 1929—and my mother and the basket and the shade and the heat—does not matter, not to the memory of the living nor to the bones of the dead nor even to the fragmentary images of broken light from that day which wander light-years away in unrecoverable space. What matters is the clear and fine knowledge of this day as it happens now, permanently and repeatedly, on a deep layer of the personal Troy.

There, where this Saturday afternoon of July in 1929 rehearses itself, my slim father performs brilliantly at shortstop. He dives for a low line drive and catches it backhand, somersaults, and stands up holding the ball. Sprinting into left field with his back to the plate, he catches a fly ball that almost drops for a Texas leaguer. He knocks down a ground ball, deep in the hole and nearly to third base, picks it up, and throws the man out at first with a peg as flat as the tape a runner breaks. When he comes up to bat, he feels lucky. The opposing pitcher is a side-armer. He always hits side-armers. So he hits two doubles and a triple, drives in two runs and scores two runs, and his team wins four to three. After the game a man approaches him, while he stands, sweating and tired, with my mother and me in the shade of the elm tree at the rising side of the field.

The man is a baseball scout. He offers my father a contract to play baseball with the Baltimore Orioles, at that time a double-A minor league team. My father is grateful and gratified; he is proud
to be offered the job, but he must refuse. After all, he has just started working at the dairy for his father. It wouldn’t be possible to leave the job that had been such a decision to take. And besides, he adds, there is the baby.

My father didn’t tell me he turned it down because of me. All he told me, or that I think he told me: he was playing semi-pro at twenty-five dollars a game; he had a good day in the field, catching a ball over his shoulder running away from the plate; he had a good day hitting, too, because he could always hit a side-armer. But he turned down the Baltimore Oriole offer. He couldn’t leave the dairy then, and besides, he knew that he had just been lucky that day. He wasn’t really that good.

But maybe he didn’t even tell me that. My mother remembers nothing of this. Or rather she remembers that he played on the team for the dairy, against other businesses, and that she took me to the games when I was a baby. But she remembers nothing of semi-pro, of the afternoon with the side-armer, of the offered contract. Did I make it up? Did my father exaggerate? Men tell stories to their sons, loving and being loved.

I don’t care.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard, violent and superficial. Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders, and the games the Iroquois played in Connecticut before the English came.
Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age, and death. This diamond encloses what we are.

ighttime in Los Angeles, on a quiet street off Melrose Avenue. An otherwise normal evening is marked by an oddly whimsical celestial disturbance: Baseballs are falling out of the sky.

They are coming from the roof of a gray apartment building. One ball pocks an adjacent apartment. Another bounces to the street. A third flies off into the night, a mighty shot.

This is West Hollywood in the early eighties, where anything is not only possible but likely—West Hollywood shakes its head and drives on by.

But if a passerby’s curiosity had been piqued and he’d climbed to the roof of a neighboring building to divine the source of the show, he would have been rewarded by a most unusual sight: a man of striking looks, with long blond hair, startlingly and wincingly thin, hitting the ball with a practiced swing—a flat, smooth, even stroke developed during a youth spent in minor-league towns from Pocatello to Albuquerque.

This is not Tommy Lasorda Jr’s routine nighttime activity. A routine night is spent in the clubs, the bright ones and dark ones alike.

Still, on occasion, here he’d be, on the roof, clubbing baseballs into the night. Because there were times when the pull was just too strong. Of the game. Of the father. He could never be what his father was—Tommy Lasorda’s own inner orientation made that impossible—but he could fantasize, couldn’t he? That he was ten, taking batting practice in Ogden, Utah, with his dad, and Garvey, and the rest of them?