Hunting a Detroit Tiger (2 page)

“
I
asked you to meet him, not
kill
him.” For a long-distance call, the connection was unusually clear—not a desirable quality when the voice being transmitted was the nasal whine of my old muckraker friend Karl Landfors.

Gripping the base of the candlestick telephone, I said loudly into the mouthpiece, “I didn’t kill him.” I was already weary of making that statement and dejected by the fact that it seemed to have so little effect.

“
Tribune
says you did. So does the
Herald-Examiner.
”

Damn! The story wasn’t limited to the
Journal,
or even to Detroit. Landfors was referring to Chicago newspapers. Struggling to prevent my voice from betraying my apprehension, I said, “Karl, you’ve been a reporter long enough to know that just because something appears in print doesn’t mean it’s true.” I then allowed him a few moments to debate with himself whether to defend the integrity of his profession or concede my point.

He came down on the side of reality. “Yes, you’re quite right.” After a long breath, high-pitched enough to summon dogs, he said, “Tell me what happened. Did you go to the lecture?”

“Yeah, I did.” Juggling the phone and trying to avoid strangling myself on the cord, I slipped out of my overcoat while continuing to speak. “It was more than a lecture, by the way. You didn’t mention the place was an IWW meeting hall.”

“What did you think Fraternity Hall would be—a college dormitory?”

I actually hadn’t given any thought to the name of the hall, but I hadn’t expected it to house the local headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. “Dunno,” I admitted. “Anyway, when I got inside and heard the guys talking, it was pretty clear that the place was full of Wobblies. And some of them weren’t exactly shy about admitting they were anarchists or communists.”

“Why should they be shy about it?”

I decided to pass on the opportunity to debate politics. Landfors was a long-standing member of the Socialist Party and I was—Well, I was more interested in reading
The Sporting News or Motion Picture Magazine
than
The Masses
.

Silence lasted until Landfors realized I wasn’t going to take the bait. “Okay,” he said. “Give me the story. You went to the hall ...”

“Right. I got there early. Thought I might talk to Siever before it started, but he wasn’t around. So I killed time reading pamphlets until the meeting was called to order. First thing we did was sing songs, if you can believe it. Lots of ‘em. The Wobblies must be the most musical bunch of radicals anywhere.”

Landfors coughed a noise that for him was a laugh. “Then what?”

I switched hands, moving the base of the phone to my left hand and the earpiece to my right. “Speeches. One after another, and most of ‘em boring. Then Emmett Siever came out. When the guy who introduced him said Siever was involved in the old Players League, it really brought the house down.”

“Why?”

“It was a
players
league. Organized and run by the ballplayers themselves.”

“I never knew there was a league like that.”

“Only lasted one year—1890. Anyway, Siever’s speech was pretty good. Told a few stories about his playing days, then got on to union talk. His said the men who own the baseball teams are the same ‘robber barons’ who run industry, and that ballplayers are no more special than ‘bindlestiffs’ —whatever those are.”

“Itinerant workers,” Landfors explained. “‘Bindle’ is the bundle they tie to a stick when they travel; it usually contains all their possessions.”

“Uh, ‘itinerant’?”

A burst of static in the line made his next words fuzzier. “Migrant. Like farm workers who travel from job to job.” With a cackling chuckle, he added, “Or like your baseball career.”

“Funny, Karl.” I wasn’t
that
much of a vagabond; I did have a three-year stretch with the New York Giants once, and nearly three full years with the Cubs. “Back to Emmett Siever: he said baseball players are workers the same as everybody else, and they should organize with other workers to protect their rights. Said they should join the one big union—everybody kept using that phrase ‘one big union.’ Anyway, he got a standing ovation from the crowd when he finished.”

“So ... How did he end up getting shot?”

I turned around to sit against the spot on the parlor stand where the telephone had rested. “Not exactly sure. After his speech, Siever went out a back door to where the offices are. Everyone else started singing again. I wasn’t sure if Siever was coming out again, so I got up and walked to the back, too. Figured it might be the only chance I had to meet him. Just as I was about to knock on the door, I heard a ‘bang’—sounded like a gunshot, but I wasn’t completely sure. It wasn’t real loud, and everyone else kept singing. I waited half a minute or so, then I went in to see what happened.” After a deep breath, I continued, “I found Emmett Siever in the kitchen. On the floor, shot in the chest, dead. I wasn’t with him long when a cop came in, a detective. He asked a couple questions, then he let me go.

“I went back into the main hall. The singing had stopped, and everybody was running around shouting that Siever had been assassinated. Then cops started storming in and it got crazy: the Wobblies yelling ‘Raid!’ and trying to push the cops out; the cops swinging their billy clubs at anybody who got in their way—it looked like they were cracking heads just for the fun of it. I left and came home as soon as I could.”

Landfors sighed. “And that’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Hmm. You’re
sure
you didn’t kill him?”

What was Landfors suggesting? That I was lying to him, or that it had slipped my mind? I didn’t like either implication, but I gave him the benefit of doubt. After all, a friend of his had just been murdered. “I would know, wouldn’t I?” was my answer. After a moment, I tried to lighten the conversation, “But enough about me. How are things in Chicago?”

Ignoring the gallows humor, he said, “Let me think about this.” The next thing I heard was a click and the hum of a disconnected line. Karl Landfors generally didn’t bother with social graces like saying good-bye.

As I hung up, I muttered to myself, “Go ahead and think about it. I’ll try not to.”

What I tried to concentrate on instead was my batting grip. Specifically, on how to increase the number of hands I could use to two.

I unwound the bandages from my right wrist and flexed it gingerly. There was no sharp pain and it appeared only slightly swollen. It felt good enough that I decided to ignore doctor’s orders and try swinging a bat.

Determining when to come back from an injury is tricky for a player. Coddle it too long, you can weaken the muscles; exercise it too soon, you can cause additional damage. As a utility infielder, the decision was a little easier for me because time was a luxury I didn’t have. A regular player could be out of the lineup for weeks or months with a substitute filling in for him. But there were no substitutes for utility men. If I couldn’t play, I’d be off the team. So, no matter what the instructions from doctors, I always followed one simple regimen for recovery from injury: work it out.

Even if it did my wrist no good, I hoped that focusing on baseball for a while would clear my head.

After retrieving one of my Louisville Sluggers from the umbrella stand near the door, I went to the middle of the parlor and assumed a relaxed batting stance. The room was large enough and the furniture sparse enough that there was little danger of me hitting anything.

I’d rented the cheap, three-room flat “furnished,” which my landlady interpreted to mean a bed in the bedroom and a sofa in the parlor. What passed for a sofa was a sagging bed lounge that had shed most of its burgundy mohair. Like the other pieces in the room—an arthritic cane-backed rocker, a lumpish hassock made of carpet remnants, a wooden folding table held together with gobs of glue—it was from the previous century and of no discernible style. Harsh sunlight revealed the furniture’s every scar and tear, for there were no curtains on the window—“If you’re doing something you don’t want people to see, you shouldn’t be doing it anyway,” she’d explained.

I took a cautious half swing and a flash of pain shot up my arm. The sensation sent me back two weeks in time, to Greensboro, North Carolina. It was while batting in a spring-training game against the Boston Braves that a fastball from Joe Oeschger sailed inside and smashed my wrist. I’d barely noticed the impact at first because of the umpire, who claimed the ball hit my bat and called it a foul tip. With great vigor and no discretion, I pointed out that he was not only blind, but deaf, unable to tell the difference in sound between bone and wood. It wasn’t until after my ejection from the game that I noticed my wrist ballooning up to the size of a grapefruit. Manager Hughie Jennings had me see a local doctor, who determined it to be “prob‘ly busted or somethin’,” and I was sent on to Detroit to let it heal.

As I continued to swing the bat loosely, the pain subsided to a dull throb. I smiled as I recalled that some of my teammates envied me the chance to go home early. The Tigers and Braves had decided to cap off their spring-training seasons by barnstorming together in the Southeast. The tour turned out to be a fiasco in every respect. Endless rains kept fans away from the games and turned the playing fields of the ramshackle ballparks into treacherous swamps. Errors were rampant, partly due to poor field conditions and partly because fielders were watching the ground for copperheads and water moccasins instead of paying attention to the ball. More than one pitcher developed arm trouble after hurling sodden, heavy baseballs that were better suited for shot-putting.

My escape from the misery of spring training had afforded me little relief. The swelling and soreness didn’t subside for days, and I started to have my first inkling of baseball mortality. Whenever I’d been hurt in the past, I’d never even considered the possibility that I wouldn’t recover. But I was older now, twenty-eight, prime age for a ballplayer. Old enough to realize what happens after you reach your peak: you go downhill. If my wrist didn’t heal properly, the downhill slide to involuntary retirement would be steep and rapid.

As I took my cuts in the parlor, I found it hurt most when I tried to snap the bat around. It was my top hand—the power hand—that Oeschger had hit, and I couldn’t follow through properly. If only I was left-handed like my new teammate Ty Cobb ... Hey, why not?

I’d tried switch-hitting before, back when I played semipro ball for industrial teams, but had given it up when I realized that I needed to concentrate my efforts on hitting from just one side of the plate. No reason not to try it again, though. I reversed my hands on the bat handle and crouched in a left-handed stance. It felt awkward at first, but I feigned a few bunts, then some half swings, and it started to seem a little smoother.

Grinning at my own childishness, I then pretended I was Cobb, spreading my fists apart to mimic his split grip and leaning over from the waist in imitation of his stance. I knew I didn’t look anything like the powerful center fielder. I was strictly from the infielder mold: five-seven in my shoes, about 150 pounds when holding a bat, and with just enough muscle to loop a base hit one out of every four at bats.

Cobb and I did have one thing in common: we were the only two Tigers who didn’t complete spring training. Although the barnstorming tour started in his home state of Georgia, Cobb elected not to participate. His vacation did nothing to endear himself to the rest of the team, but since Ty Cobb had spent the last fifteen years antagonizing his teammates—as well as opponents, fans, and anyone else he came in contact with—neither did it make him more despised than he already was.

The decrepit cuckoo clock on the wall made a grinding noise, and a small bird limped out to emit five groans. Five o’clock. Exactly twenty-four hours ago, I’d left for Fraternity Hall to meet Emmett Siever.

It had come about so innocently. I was new to Detroit, with no friends yet and my teammates still on the road. Karl Landfors phoned and suggested I meet a friend of his who used to be a ballplayer. That’s all there was to it. The result:
WAR HERO KILLS BOLSHEVIK.

Switching back to my natural right-handed stance, I focused on an imaginary fastball knee-high down the middle and took a cut. I swung again, and again, harder and harder, oblivious to the pulsing ache in my wrist. Then I lifted my eyes, looking up to where the pitcher would be and imagining infielders behind him. I wanted to be on a baseball diamond. To forget about the police and the newspapers and the sight of Emmett Siever’s dead body. If I could just step onto a ballfield again, everything would be okay.

Laying the bat on the sofa, I went to the phone and made a call to Hughie Jennings at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago. A bellboy tracked him down and the manager got on the line. I asked him if I could come and join the team.