Let Me Finish (7 page)

I liked it best when we came into the place from up top, rather than through the gates down at the foot of the lower-right-field stand. You reached the upper-deck turnstiles by walking down a steep, short ramp from the Speedway, the broad avenue that swept down from Coogan's Bluff and along the Harlem River, and once you got inside, the long field within the horseshoe of decked stands seemed to stretch away forever below you, toward the bleachers and the clubhouse pavilion in center. My father made me notice how often Terry, a terrific straightaway slugger, would launch an extra-base hit into that bottomless countryside ("a homer in any other park" was the accompanying refrain), and, sure enough, now and then Terry would reaffirm the parable by hammering still another triple into the pigeoned distance. Everything about the Polo Grounds was special, right down to the looped iron chains that separated each sector of box seats from its neighbor and could burn your bare arm on a summer afternoon if you weren't careful. Far along each outfield wall, a sloping mini-roof projected outward, imparting a thin wedge of shadow for the bullpen crews sitting there: they looked like cows sheltering beside a pasture shed in August.

Across the river, the view when you arrived was different but equally delectable: a panorama of svelte infield and steep, filigree-topped inner battlements that was offered and then snatched away as one's straw-seat I.R.T. train rumbled into the elevated station at 161st Street. If the Polo Grounds felt pastoral, Yankee Stadium was Metropole, the big city personified. For some reason, we always walked around it along the right-field side, never the other way,
and each time I would wonder about the oddly arrayed ticket kiosks (General Admission fifty-five cents; Reserved Grandstand a dollar ten) that stood off at such a distance from the gates. Something about security, I decided; one of these days, they'll demand to see passports there. Inside, up the pleasing ramps, I would stop and bend over, peering through the horizontal slot between the dark, overhanging mezzanine and the descending sweep of grandstand seats which led one's entranced eye to the sunlit green of the field and the players on it. Then I'd look for the Babe. The first Yankee manager I can remember in residence was Bob Shawkey, which means 1930. I was nine years old.

I can't seem to put my hand on any one particular game I went to with my father back then; it's strange. But I went often, and soon came to know the difference between intimate afternoon games at the Stadium (play started at 3:15 P.M.), when a handful of boys and night workers and layabouts and late arriving businessmen (with vests and straw hats) would cluster together in the stands close to home plate or down in the lower rows of the bleachers, and the sold-out, roaring, seventy-thousand-plus Sunday doubleheaders against the Tigers or the Indians or the Senators (the famous rivalry with the Bosox is missing in memory), when I would eat, cheer, and groan my way grandly toward the distant horizon of evening, while the Yankees, most of the time, would win and then win again. The handsome Wes Ferrell always started the first Sunday game for the Indians, and proved a tough nut to crack. But why, I wonder, do I think of Bill Dickey's ears? In any case, I know I was in the Stadium on Monday, May 5, 1930, when Lefty
Gomez, a twitchy rookie southpaw, pitched his very first game for the Yankees, and beat Red Faber and the White Sox, 4-1, striking out his first three batters in succession. I talked about the day and the game with Gomez many years later, and he told me that he had looked up in the stands before the first inning and realized that the ticket-holders there easily outnumbered the population of his home town, Rodeo, California, and perhaps his home county as well.

I attended the Gomez inaugural not with my father but with a pink-cheeked lady named Mrs. Baker, who was—well, she was my governess. Groans and derisive laughter are all very well, but Mrs. Baker (who had a very brief tenure, alas) was a companion any boy would cherish. She had proposed the trip to Yankee Stadium, and she was the one who first noticed a new name out on the mound that afternoon, and made me see how hard the kid was throwing and what he might mean for the Yanks in the future. "Remember the day," she said, and I did.

 

Baseball memories are seductive, tempting us always toward sweetness and undercomplexity. It should not be inferred ( I remind myself) that the game was a unique bond between my father and me, or always near the top of my own distracted interests. If forced to rank the preoccupying family passions in my home at that time, I would put reading at the top of the list, closely followed by conversation and opinions, politics, loneliness (my father had not yet remarried, and I missed my mother), friends, jokes, exercises and active sports, animals (see below), theatre and the movies, professional and college sports, museums, and
a very large Misc. Even before my teens, I thought of myself as a full participant, and my fair-minded old man did not patronize me at the dinner table or elsewhere

Baseball (to get back on track here) had the longest run each year, but other sports also got my full attention. September meant Forest Hills, with Tilden and Vines, Don Budge and Fred Perry. Ivy League football still mattered in those times, and I saw Harvard's immortal Barry Wood and Yale's ditto Albie Booth go at each other more than once; we also caught Chick Meehan's N.Y.U. Violets, and even some City College games, up at Lewisohn Stadium. Winter brought the thrilling Rangers ( Frank Boucher, Ching Johnson, and the Cook brothers) and the bespangled old Americans; there was wire netting atop the boards, instead of Plexiglas, and Madison Square Garden was blue with cigarette and cigar smoke above the painted ice. I went there on weekends, never on school nights, usually in company with my mother and stepfather, who were red-hot hockey fans. Twice a year, they took me to the six-day bicycle races at the Garden (Reggie McNamara, Alfred Letourner, Franco Georgetti, Torchy Peden), and, in midwinter, to track events there, with Glenn Cunningham and Gene Venzke trying and again failing to break the four-minute mile at the Millrose Games. Looking back, I wonder how I got through school at all. My mother, I should explain, had been a Red Sox fan while growing up in Boston, but her attachment to the game did not revive until the mid-nineteen-forties, when she fetched up at Presbyterian Hospital for a minor surgical procedure; a fellow patient across the hall at Harkness Pavilion was Walker Cooper, the incumbent Giants
catcher, drydocked for knee repairs, who kept in touch by listening to the Giants' game broadcasts every day. My mother turned her radio on, too, and was hooked.

Sports were different in my youth—a series of events to look forward to and then to turn over in memory, rather than a huge, omnipresent industry, with its own economics and politics and crushing public relations. How it felt to be a young baseball fan in the thirties can be appreciated only if I can bring back this lighter and fresher atmosphere. Attending a game meant a lot, to adults as well as to a boy, because it was the only way you could encounter athletes and watch what they did. There was no television, no instant replay, no evening highlights. We saw the players' faces in newspaper photographs, or in the pages of
Baseball,
an engrossing monthly with an invariable red cover, to which I subscribed, and here and there in an advertisement. (I think Lou Gehrig plugged Fleischmann's Yeast, a health remedy said to be good for the complexion.) We never heard athletes' voices or became aware of their "image." Pedro Martinez and Barry Bonds and Michael Jordan were light-years away. Baseball by radio was a rarity, confined for the most part to the World Series; the three New York teams in fact, banned radio coverage of their regular-season games between 1934 and 1938, on the theory that daily broadcasts would damage attendance. Following baseball always required a visit to the players' place of business, and, once there, you watched them with attention, undistracted by Diamond Vision or blasting rock music or game promotions. Seeing the players in action on the field, always at a little distance, gave them a heroic tinge. (The only player
I can remember encountering on the street, one day on the West Side, was the Babe, in retirement by then, swathed in his familiar camel-hair coat with matching cap.)

We kept up by reading baseball. Four daily newspapers arrived at my house every day—the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
by breakfast time, and the
Sun
and the
World-Telegram
folded under my father's arm when he got home from the office. The games were played by daylight, and, with all sixteen teams situated inside two time zones, we never went to bed without knowledge of that day's baseball. Line scores were on the front page of the afternoon dailies, scrupulously updated edition by edition, with black squares off to the right indicating latter innings, as yet unplayed, in Wrigley Field or Sportsman's Park. I soon came to know all the bylines—John Drebinger, James P. Dawson, and Roscoe McGowen in the
Times
(John Kieran was the columnist); Rud Rennie and Richards Vidmer in the
Trib;
Dan Daniel, Joe Williams, and Tom Meany in the
World-Telly
(along with Willard Mullin's vigorous sports cartoons); Frank Graham in the
Sun;
and, now and then, Bill Corum in the
Sunday American,
a paper I sometimes acquired for its terrific comics.

Richards Vidmer, if memory is to be trusted, was my favorite scribe, but before that, back when I was nine or ten years old, what I loved best in the sports pages were box scores and, above all, names. I knew the names of a few dozen friends and teachers at school, of course, and of family members and family friends, but only in baseball could I encounter anyone like Mel Ott. One of the Yankee pitchers was named George Pipgras, and Earle Combs played
center. Connie Mack, a skinny old gent, managed the Athletics and was in fact Cornelius McGillicuddy. Jimmy Foxx was his prime slugger. I had a double letter in my name, too, but it didn't match up to a Foxx or an Ott. Or to Joe Stripp. I read on, day after day, and found rafts of names that prickled or sang in one's mind. Eppa Rixey, Goose Goslin, Firpo Marberry, Jack Rothrock, Eldon Auker, Luke Appling, Mule Haas, Adolfo Luque (for years I thought it was pronounced "Lyoo-kyoo")—Dickens couldn't have done better. Paul Derringer was exciting: a man named for a pistol! I lingered over Heinie Manush (sort of like sitting on a cereal) and Van Lingle Mungo, the Dodger ace. When I exchanged baseball celebrities with pals at school, we used last names, to show a suave familiarity, but no one ever just said "Mungo," or even "Van Mungo." When he came up in conversation, it was obligatory to roll out the full name, as if it were a royal title, and everyone in the group would join in at the end, in chorus: "Van Lin-gle MUN-go!"

Heading for Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street each morning, where I picked up the No. 3 uptown bus to school, I sometimes encountered Colonel Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees, on the way to work at his brewery on Third Avenue. He had pink cheeks and shiny, shoe-button eyes, and wore an invariable bow tie. If our encounter came in the spring and if I was carrying my baseball glove back uptown after some weekend ball, I would give the mitt a whack with my fist as we passed, and shoot the Colonel a burning look. Nothing happened, but the next time, surely, he would stop me and ask my name, fish his calling card out of his vest pocket, and deliver the
awaited invitation: "My boy take this up to the Stadium and tell them I want you to have a tryout. Use my name. And good luck to you, young fellow."

By every measure, this was a bewitching time for a kid to discover baseball. The rabbit ball had got loose in both leagues in 1930 (I wasn't aware of it)—a season in which Bill Terry batted .401 and the Giants hit .319 as a team. I can't say for sure that I knew about Hack Wilson's astounding hundred and ninety R.B.I.s for the Cubs, but Babe Herman's .393 for the Dodgers must have made an impression. (The lowly Dodgers. As I should have said before, the Dodgers—or Robins, as they were called in tabloid headlines—were just another team in the National League to me back then; I don't think I set foot in Ebbets Field until the 1941 World Series. But they became the enemy in 1934, when they knocked the Giants out of a pennant in September.) The batters in both leagues were reined in a bit after 1930, but the game didn't exactly become dull. Lefty Grove had a 31-4 season for the A's in 1931, and Dizzy Dean's 30-7 helped win a pennant for the Gas House Gang Cardinals in 1934. That was Babe Ruth's last summer in the Bronx, but I think I was paying more attention to Gehrig just then, what with his triple-crown .363, forty-nine homers, and hundred and sixty-five runs batted in. I became more aware of other teams as the thirties (and my teens) wore along, and eventually came to think of them as personali-ties—sixteen different but familiar faces ranged around a large dinner table, as it were. To this day, I still feel a little stir of fear inside me when I think about the Tigers, because of the mighty Detroit teams of 1934 and 1935, which
early innings two years running shouldered the Yankees out of a pennant. I hated Charlie Gehringer's pale face and deadly stroke. One day in '34, I read that a Yankee bench player had taunted Gehringer, only to be silenced by Yankee manager Joe McCarthy. "Shut up," Marse Joe said. "He's hitting .360—get him mad and he'll bat .500." Gehringer played second in the same infield with Hank Greenberg, Billy Rogell, and Marv Owen; that summer, the four of them drove in four hundred and sixty-two runs.

I was living in the sports pages by 1932, when the mighty Yankees blew away the Cubs in a four-game series, blasting eight home runs. It troubled me in later years that I seemed to have no clear recollection of what came to be that Series' most famous moment, when Babe Ruth did or did not call his home run against Charlie Root in the fifth inning of the third game, out at Wrigley Field. What I remembered about that game was that Ruth and Gehrig had each smacked two homers. A recent investigation of the microfilm files of the
Times
seems to clear up the mystery, since John Drebinger's story for that date makes no mention of the Ruthian feat in its lead, or, indeed, until the thirty-fourth paragraph, when he hints that Ruth did gesture toward the bleachers ("in no mistaken motions the Babe notified the crowd that the nature of his retaliation would be a wallop right out the confines of the park"), after taking some guff from the hometown rooters as he stepped up to the plate, but then Drebinger seems to veer toward the other interpretation, which is that Ruth's gesture was simply to show that he knew the count ("Ruth signaled with his fingers after each pitch to let the spectators know
exactly how the situation stood. Then the mightiest blow of all fell"). The next-mightiest blow came on the ensuing pitch, by the way: a home run by Lou Gehrig.