The Boys of Summer (16 page)

During batting practice the next afternoon, Robinson cried shrilly, “Hey, Will. Why’d you hold the ball so long?”

Ramsdell glared and turned. “So you could get your goddamn picture in the paper.”

I was coming to understand how quickly moods and circumstances varied in baseball, where in early season each game is a new beginning, and I was teaching myself to listen with particular care to what players said and the tones they used, the bars of music that made the men. On May 21, the day John Garfield died, the Dodgers scored fifteen runs in the first inning against Cincinnati; the final was 19 to 0. That was a story to be handled lightly and understated. A game in Philadelphia three days later was more challenging. Roy Campanella chattered consistently before games, and this evening he put a strong square hand on my shoulder and indicated two vitamin pills in his other palm. “You’d be amazed,” he said, “at all the power that’s in them little eggs.”

“Who told you that?”

“I know it,” Campanella said.

Ridiculous, I thought. Campy went out and hit two home runs, one with bases full.

“Hey,” he cried in the clubhouse afterward, “maybe you oughta get them eggs yourself. Maybe they’re the onliest thing that could help you.”

Campanella stood five feet eight inches and weighed 205 pounds, and whenever Red Smith saw him, he liked to remark, “Baseball is a game for small boys and old colored gentlemen.” But the old gentleman’s roundness, like the outward geniality, was deceptive. When Campanella took off his uniform, there was no fat. His arms were short and huge up toward the shoulder. Fat housewives have arms like that, but Campy’s arms were sinew. His thighs bulged with muscle and his belly was swollen, but firm. He was a little sumo wrestler of a man, a giant scaled down rather than a midget fleshed out. He had grown up in a Philadelphia ghetto called Nicetown and he made you laugh with his stories of barnstorming through Venezuela with colored teams where (he said) you always had to play double-headers and meal money was fifty cents a day. But he would second-guess a manager and then deny what he had said. He accepted no criticism and his amiability was punctuated by brief combative outbursts. Still, it was difficult to resist him. “How’d you start catching?” I said in the clubhouse. “How’d an intelligent man like you end up with a dirty job like that?”

His broad brown face became very serious. “In high school in Nicetown, the onliest thing was to play for the baseball team. The coach drew circles in the gym, different circles for different positions. When I got there, the pitcher’s circle was filled and the circles for infielders and outfielders was pretty crowded. But the catcher’s circle. There wasn’t nobody there. So I got in that empty circle to have a better chance of making the team. I stayed in the catcher’s circle because I was the onliest one
there.” He pretended outrage at my grin.

Black-haired Carl Erskine, who never raised his voice, never cursed, seldom drank and was not stuffy, defended Campanella against all detractors. We were coming to know one another slowly; knowing Erskine was finding depths. “It’s the two faces, Carl,” I said. “If you want to be a happy-go-lucky guy, fine. But if you’re angry at society, which colored guys have every right to be, then let it show.”

“We probably all have a lot of faces,” Erskine said.

“Well, nobody ever told me to watch out on quoting you.”

The dark eyes grew bright. “Meaning?”

“That you stand behind what you say.”

“Well,” Erskine said, “with me and Campy there is a special closeness. You know. He’s my catcher.”

On the mound at Ebbets Field, Carl appeared to work harder than any other pitcher. Erskine was a well-built man of normal size—five feet ten and 165 pounds—but small for a professional athlete. When he pitched, one became aware, as he himself was, of Ebbets Field’s short fences, and Erskine seemed never to throw easily. He wound up, eyes always toward the plate, rocking back and then firing straight overhand. As his arm whipped into a follow-through, the sheer exertion moved him into a little forward hop. He invested all his strength in every pitch.

With Willie Ramsdell again cast as straight man, Erskine pitched a no-hitter against the Cubs on June 19. He might have pitched a perfect game, one in which no one reached base, except for an early threat of rain. In the third inning, with the Dodgers leading, 1 to 0, Dressen looked at the sky and scooted to the mound. Willie Ramsdell was the batter. “Hurry up,” Dressen ordered. “Get this guy. We got to win before it rains.” Erskine threw four fast balls in great haste and walked Ramsdell. Rain delayed the game for forty minutes anyway. Erskine retired everyone else.

At the conclusion of each home game, a rotund show-business
character called Happy Felton interviewed the “star of the day from each team.” Felton paid each star $50. In the ninth inning, Ramsdell, who had pitched passably and been the only Chicago base runner, waited in a little studio under the stands as Erskine got first one out, then another. The final Chicago batter was Eddie Miksis. This posed a hard ethical problem for Ramsdell. If Miksis singled and broke the no-hitter,
he
would become the Cubs star. The team would be spared the indignity of the nohitter. Conceivably they might even go on to win the game. Ramsdell, however, would be out $50. The decision-making process was instantaneous. “Come on, Ersk,” roared the Chicago starting pitcher. “You can get this bum.” Miksis bounced out, and that was how Carl Daniel Erskine got his no-hitter and Willie the Knuck Ramsdell got his $50.

An oracular baseball writer named Dan M. Daniel sometimes growled across generations, “The road’ll make a bum of the best of ‘em.” Then he added with slow malevolence, “And, kid, you ain’t the best.”

The road with the Dodgers was a lonely, thrilling chaos, at once seductive, free and wild. There were no telephone bills to pay, no relatives to meet, no office to visit and no planning to suffer when you were on the road. Your life was prearranged. The Dodgers reserved rooms, train space and airline tickets. The
Herald Tribune
paid for them. The clubhouse man looked after baggage. The men who devised the National League schedule planned your days. You had only to be:
be
in Chicago for the start of a three-game series Tuesday;
be
at Wrigley Field by noon;
be
outside the Players Gate at 5:15 Thursday, chartered bus leaves for Union Station. Being and writing. The road asked nothing more. But with time—with very little time—the sense of freedom ebbed. First, the wonders of transportation ceased. Packing and unpacking became a nuisance. Next, shuttling between time zones grew disconcerting. Then the apparent
independence of baseball travel revealed itself as a kind of tyranny. You
had
to be in Pittsburgh on September 8 because that was what the schedule-makers decreed, just as surely as you had to be in Cincinnati on September 9. Ultimately the road was like its women. In the dark bar the girl appeals with blonde hair, a soft face and a fresh mysterious voice. But in the morning glare the hair is straw, the face a wreck of lines, and open-mouthed the naked lady snores.

When the team played at night, you wrote eight hundred words for the first edition. This feature story would not last the evening. For middle editions you wrote so-called bunk leads and running accounts of the game. “Preacher Roe was seeking his fifth victory tonight when he took the mound for the Dodgers at Sportsman’s Park against Gerry Staley, 2 and 4, for the Cardinals.” With eight hundred words of that done you wrote your final and most important story at the conclusion of the game. The work was neither easy nor debilitating if you were young. Weariness vanished in an exhilaration of having subdued a third deadline, and now ardent hours of night awaited, if it wasn’t too late.

You covered a team better on the road. You lived with the ball players, and their lives mixed with yours almost naturally. As the second Western trip began on board the Twentieth Century Limited, I felt a sense of leaving behind all threats, all uncertainty, all danger.

Allan Roth, the team statistician, was a witty Canadian, with an astonishing arithmetical mind. Branch Rickey had found him in Montreal, where Roth invented statistical analyses for hockey, and convinced him to go south to baseball. Now Roth recorded each pitch of every game on a sheet of graph paper and tabulated his data in a cross complexity of techniques. He knew what George Shuba hit, what George hit against lefthanders, what George hit against lefthanders’ curves and what George hit against lefthanders’ curves on odd Tuesday nights in Cincinnati. He knew how often Clem Labine threw his curve
wide, how often he threw it for a strike, how often it was hit to right field by righthanded batters and, through another series of steps, how often it was lined to left by lefthanded batters on Sunday afternoons in St. Louis. Rickey had hired Roth to supply information to the manager. If Shuba never hit lefthanders’ curves, then sit him down against Ken Raffensberger.

Dressen regarded Roth and his bodies of facts as threats. “I got my own way of figurin’,” he said. Dressen soared on intuition and probably feared that figures might wither his expertise. By 1952, while Dressen followed whim and inspiration, Roth was flooding the working press with data.

Unlike many statisticians, who glow with all the warmth of Franklin Pangborn as bank examiner, Roth laughed at his own work when it was finished. Indeed, he invented the game of Silly Records.

The idea, he explained in his roomette, as the Limited rolled north of Peekskill, was to create real records that had no meaning. “For example, most one-handed catches of easy throws in one inning by a first baseman.”

“Three,” I said.

“Eh?” Roth said. “Three. Very good. Very good. But
who,
schlemiel?”

“Active player?”

“Active righthand fielder. Give up? Good. I’m invincible at this. Joe Adcock.”

“All right,” I said. “Most times touching knees righthanded pitcher, one game.”

“Robin Roberts. And by the way, he does that to slow down.”

There really was no beating Roth at Silly Records. When harassed, he moved Big Bertha into position. “Either league,” he roared. “Roommates with shortest names.”

“Dunno.”

“Roe and Cox. Six letters.” Then over a happy grin, Roth mimicked Dressen, “There’s tricks to knowin’ this game.”

In another roomette Bill Roeder and the man from the New
York
Post,
Sid Friedlander, were working the game of Barton MacLane. Here you mentioned the name of an established film actor who had never given a good performance. The participants made a jury. If you had seen Barton MacLane in a performance you honestly considered good, you spoke up, and both the actor and the man who nominated him could be disqualified. Economy was the beauty here. A single name evoked a dozen inept acting efforts recollected in high merriment.

“Adolph Menjou,” Friedlander said.

“Definitely,” Roeder said. “Hall of Famer. Bruce Cabot.”

“I don’t know,” Friedlander said. He was a gentle, white-haired man, who spoke softly. “I’m trying to remember
King Kong.”

“At the end,” I said, “Bruce Cabot says, “Twas beauty killed the beast.’”

“Objection withdrawn,” Friedlander said.

“Diana Lynn,” I said.

“Johnny Weissmuller,” Roeder said.

“As an entry,” Friedlander said, “with Buster Crabbe.”

“Don’t forget the goddamn monkey,” I said.

“Name,” Roeder said. “And no profanity.”

“Irving.”

“Five seconds,” Roeder said.

“Cheetah!”

“New man shows promise,” Roeder said.

“If Mr. Roeder will pardon the profanity,” Friedlander said, “let’s get the fucking ball club to stand for a fucking drink.”

In another roomette, Jack Lang of the
Long Island Press
was fleecing Roscoe McGowen at gin rummy. As Pee Wee Reese said, it was no trick to take McGowen as long as you didn’t drop your damn hand right on the table. McGowen lost angrily, always blaming luck, and now, $8 down, he was struggling for dignity by telling Dick Young that any writer could learn by reading Shakespeare.

“That right, Rocco?” Young said, politely.

“Listen,” McGowen said, and quoted:

“ ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her though I know she lies.’”

“Hey,” said Young, “that’s a kind of pun.”

“Shakespeare liked puns, Dick,” McGowen said.

Young’s eyes darted. “Say that thing again.” Lang tapped cards on the table and MeGowen repeated the quotation. “Sheez,” Young said, in unconditional approval, “that’s a helluva line.”

It was pleasant with the writers, but it was magic among the ball players. In the aisles, outside their roomettes, you could hear ball player talk that was alive and rich and angry and grim and funny.

“If that son of a bitch Maglie throws at my head again, I break my bat across his fucking dago head.” (Carl Furillo)

“So I says to Augie Guglielmi, the little ump, ‘Augie, I ain’t spoke to ya in two months, but I just want ya to know I still think you’re horseshit.’ “ (Preacher Roe)

“Couple years ago he’s in a jam and got Kiner up and he throws three of the wettest spitters you ever saw. And do you know what Kiner said after he fanned? He says good and loud, ‘Your curve gets better every year.’ Ol’ Ralph never even winked.” (Carl Erskine)

“Get me some money, gonna fix up my house. You know what I’m gonna put up? A goddamn fence. Fuckit.” (Billy Cox)

‘’When I was in Oakland,
there
was some ball players.…”

Someone started to sing. The voice was twanged but warm. In the car you heard it resound:

… From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay;

Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,

On the banks of the Waa-bash

   Far

       A

        Waaaay.

By one o’clock voices had grown weary, cards tiresome, eyes heavy. Soon all the ball club was asleep, rocketing at more than eighty miles an hour somewhere west of Albany and east of Buffalo.

Chicago was a favorite town; there were no lights at Wrigley Field. For day games, you only had to write one story and everyone was finished with work by dusk. Instead of the glaring bright lights of a ball park, the evening offered various bright lights downtown. “I know a good spot with real lookers that dance right on the bar,” Dick Williams said. He was single and a free spirit. “There’s one called Sharon’s supposed to be terrific.”