The Boys of Summer (28 page)

“We like to keep things the way they were,” Shuba said. He parked on Fernwood, in a dead-end block. All the houses rose two stories. “Here’s where I first played,” he said. “In this street. Day after day. Three on a side, when I was little. That’s good baseball, three on a side. Each kid gets a chance.” Tall maples made borders at the sidewalks. “We played so hard, when we were kids, you’d have thought we were playing for money.

“It was a big family. My brother John is a steel worker in a mill. Ed is a photographer for the Youngstown
Vindicator.
You know about my brother Joe. He’s doing very good in the Church as a monsignor, in Toronto, Canada. I’m proud of him. Counting the ones born in Czechoslovakia there were eleven of us. I was the last. Some died over there. I had one brother died here. He got the flu. They didn’t have fancy medicines. My mother gave him a lot of soup. Soup was good for the flu, but that brother died.”

We were walking down Fernwood toward ball fields. “This is Borts Park,” Shuba said. “Mrs. Borts gave it to the city. When I got older, instead of playing in the street, I played in Borts Park. I was a second baseman.”

“Your father must have been proud of you.”

We continued under the tall maples. “You don’t understand the way it was. My father was forty-five years old when I was born. He never saw me play. Old country people. What did they care for baseball? He thought I should go and work in the mills like him and I didn’t want to. I wanted to play.”

The nearest diamond at Borts Field was bare; patches of grass had been worn off. “Boy, did I play here,” Shuba said. “I had that quick bat. One year there was a Dodger tryout. It was 1943. I was seventeen, not in the mills. I was working in a grocery store. And at the cemetery on Sundays I’d pack black earth to fill around the graves. They could plant flowers in it. I’d get ten cents a box for the black dirt.

“The Dodgers didn’t come to sign me. They wanted a pitcher. Alex Maceyko. They had me playing third. I had the quick bat, but Wid Mathews, who Rickey liked, was the scout and he signed somebody, Alex I guess, who never did much, and I went home, and forgot about it. Then it was February. I remember all the snow. Somebody come to the house on Fernwood and said, ‘George, my name is Harold Roettger. I’m with the Brooklyn Dodgers. I want to see you about a contract.’

“I let him in and we sat down and he said he was going to offer me a bonus of $150 to sign. But I’d only collect if I was good enough to stay in baseball through July 1. I thought, hell, wouldn’t it be better, a big outfit like the Dodgers to give $150, no strings or nothing? But that was the offer and I took it.”

Night had come. Borts Field was quiet. “Well, George,” I said, “your mother must have been proud.”

“Ah,” Shuba said. “You know what she told me. ‘Get a job in the mills like Papa. There’s lots of better ball players than you up there.’”

The night was warm and very still. “All right. I’ll drive you to another part of the neighborhood,” George said. It was so dark that all I could see were house lights and a bar with argon and neon signs advertising beer. George angled the car toward
a corner grocery. “Dolak’s,” he said. “Where I worked. I loaded potatoes, fifty pounds to the bag, down in the basement, and carried them up. Years in the minors, they didn’t pay me much. I was a ball player, but I still had to come back winters and load bags of potatoes for Dolak.”

The signs in the store window were hand-lettered. “
SPECIAL
,” one read, “
HALUSKI
.”

“Like ravioli,” Shuba said. “I delivered for Dolak, too, while I was in the bush leagues. Three miles from here is the cemetery where I packed the black dirt. I worked here and I walked to the other work and in the cold it was a long way. A long way a long time ago.”

When we returned to the split-level on Bent Willow, Katherine was studying a text on the psychology of preschool children. She is a full-faced woman and she looked up with tired eyes, but cheerful to see people, and closed the book.

“We’re going downstairs to talk,” George said.

“Can I bring you anything?”

“Bring the V.O.”

George loped downstairs. The large cellar was partly finished. A table and two chairs stood in one corner. Files had been pressed against a wall nearby. Farther along the same wall old uniforms hung from a clothing rack. Across the room was a toilet, which George had not yet gotten around to enclosing. The floor was linoleum, patterned in green and white squares.

I walked to the rack; all the uniforms were Dodger blue and white. Across one shirt letters read “
BEARS
,” for the Mobile farm team; across another “
ROYALS
,” for Montreal. The old Brooklyn uniform bore a large blue Number 8 on the back.

“Let me show you some things.” Shuba opened a file and took out scrapbooks. He turned the pages slowly without emotion.

“They started me at New Orleans, but I wasn’t ready for that, and I came back to Olean and led the league in home runs that first year.”

“So you kept the $150.”

“Yeah, but they shoulda risked it.”

Katherine came with the drinks. “Then to Mobile,” George said, “and they moved me to the outfield. They were thinking of me for the major leagues and I didn’t have, you know, that major league infielder’s glove. But I knew about my bat and one day in Montreal a year or two later, the manager says to me in batting practice, where everyone was supposed to take four swings, ‘Hey, Shuba. How come you’re taking five?’ I told him, ‘Look, let somebody else shag flies. I’m a hitter.’”

I laughed, but George was serious. Nothing about hitting amused him. I told him Arthur Daley’s story of a catcher chattering at Charlie Gehringer at bat. Finally Gehringer turned and said, “Shut up. I’m working.”

“I’m in Mobile,” Shuba said. “It’s ‘47. I hit twenty-one homers. Knock in 110 runs. Next spring at Vero Rickey says, ‘George, we’re sending you back to Mobile. Fine power but not enough average. We can’t promote you till you’re a .300 hitter.’ I shorten up. It’s ‘48. I bat .389. The spring after that he sends me to Mobile
again.
‘Nice batting,’ Rickey says, ‘but your power fell off. We need someone who can hit them over that short right-field wall in Ebbets Field.’

“What could I say? As long as he could option me, you know, send me down but keep me Dodger property, Rickey would do that so’s he could keep some other guy whose option ran out. Property, that’s what we were. But how many guys you know ever hit .389 and never got promoted?”

“There’s no justice in the baseball business, George,” I said.

The high-cheeked, Slavonic face turned hard. “The Saints want justice,” he said. “The rest of us want mercy.”

“I thought you had some fun,” I said.

“It wasn’t fun. I was struggling so much I couldn’t enjoy it. Snider, Pafko, Furillo, they weren’t humpties. I was fighting to stay alive. To play with guys that good was humbling. And I was kidded a lot about my fielding. In 1953 I went out to left field
in Yankee Stadium for the second game of the Series. They’re bad shadows out there in the fall. You remember I took you out and walked you around to show you the shadows and the haze from cigarette smoke.

“I went out and in the first inning someone hit a line drive and I didn’t see it good and kind of grabbed. The ball rolled up my arms, but I held on to it. With two out, somebody else hit a long one into left center and maybe I started a little late, but I just got a glove on it and held it. When I came back to the dugout, Bobby Morgan said, very loud, ‘Hey. I think they’re going for our weak spot.’”

I laughed again. “Hey,” Shuba said. “That’s not funny. What he should have said was ‘Nice catch.’

“Now something
funny,
that came from an usher. I wasn’t going good, and by this time all the bosses, O’Malley, Bavasi and Thompson, are Catholics, and my brother gets promoted to monsignor and word gets around. It’s real early and I’m not hitting at all. Some usher hollers down, ‘Hey, George. It’s a good thing your brother’s a bishop.’”

George smiled and sipped.

“When did it really end?” I said.

“All the time Rickey’s keeping me in the minors doesn’t do me any good and one year in Montreal I rip up my knee ligaments. That’s where it started to end. When I made the club to stay in ‘52 that knee was gone already. It just kept getting worse and worse. Around 1955,1 was only thirty-one, but the knee was so bad I couldn’t do much. So I quit. That’s all there was.

“I tried the sporting goods business. Up and down. So I went to work for the Post Office, steady and safe.”

“Does all the excitement and the rest seem real to you now?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s real.” George was drumming his fingers on the wooden table.

“What do you think of it?”

“Doesn’t mean much. When somebody would come up and
ask for an autograph, I’d say, ‘Is this for a kid?’ And if it was, I’d give it to him. But if he said no, if it was for a man, I’d say, ‘Ah. Don’t be foolish. What does a grown man want something like that for?’ I had my laughs. One day against the Cubs, Hank Sauer was on first and Ralph Kiner was on third and neither one could run. I hollered, ‘Look for the double steal.’ But what does it mean? Ruth died. Gehrig died.”

The glasses were empty. He called and Katherine came downstairs and looked hopefully at George, wanting to be invited into the conversation, but Shuba has a European sense of a woman’s place. “Why don’t you come upstairs and sit with me?” she said.

“Because we’re talking,” Shuba said. “Men’s talk.”

“There was this time,” he said after fresh drinks had come, “in the World Series when I pinch-hit the home run.”

“Sure—1953. Off Allie Reynolds.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Shuba said. “It was the first game of that Series and Reynolds was fast and the fellers were having trouble seeing the ball and he’s got a shutout. I come up in the fifth and he throws that first pitch. I never saw it. It was a strike. If it had been inside, it would have killed me. Reynolds was in sun and I was in shadow. I never saw the ball. The next pitch he curved me. I only saw a little better. I was swinging, but I went down on one knee.” Shuba was a formful batter, always in control; slipping to a knee was as humiliating as falling flat. “Now the next pitch. I still wasn’t seeing the ball good, but I took my swing. My good swing. I hit it and it went to right field and I knew it would be long but maybe the right fielder could jump and as I trotted to first base I was saying, ‘Hail Mary, get it up higher. Hail Mary.’

“Only the second time in history anybody pinch-hit a home run in the World Series,” Shuba said, his face aglow. “But it wasn’t me. There was something else guiding the
bat. I couldn’t see the ball, and you can think what you want, but another hand was guiding my bat.”

“I don’t know, George. Birdie Tebbetts was catching once when a batter crossed himself. Birdie called time, and crossed
himself.
And he told the hitter, ‘Now it’s all even with God. Let’s see who’s the better man.’”

“I don’t care what Tebbetts did. Another hand was guiding my bat.”

“Do you remember Ebbets Field, George? Now, if you close your eyes, can you see it?”

“Ah. That don’t mean nothing.”

“What means something?”

“The Church.”

“I mean in this life.”

He sprang up, reaching into a top drawer in the nearest file. “Marks in school,” he said. “Look at Marlene’s.” He put one of the girl’s report cards in front of me, then opened a notebook in which he had recorded her marks from term to term. “She had some trouble with arithmetic here in the second grade, but my wife talked to the Sister and worked with Marlene at home. Then Mary Kay …” He talked for another ten minutes about the way his children fared in school and how he, and his wife, kept notebook entries of their progress. He was still talking about the children when Katherine came downstairs again and without being asked refilled our glasses. “All that baseball was a preparation,” Shuba said. “You have certain phases in your life. Baseball prepared me for this. Raising my family.”

“Which is more important?”

“This is the real part of my life.”

“So all the rest was nothing?”

“Not nothing. Just not important. You do something important. Write. But playing ball.” He jerked his head and looked at the beams in the cellar ceiling. “What the hell is that?”

“You might not understand this, or believe me, but I would
have given anything to have had your natural swing.”

“You could have,” George said.

“What?” I said. “What do you mean I could have?” And I saw, again, George standing in to hit as I first saw him, in 1948, when I was twenty and a copyboy and he was twenty-four and trying to become a major leaguer. It was a very clear, bright picture in my mind, and I could not see the pitcher or the crowd or even whether it was day or night. But I still saw Shuba. It was late in the year, when they bring up the good youngsters for a few games. He balanced on the balls of the feet as he waited for the pitch, holding the bat far back, and there was confidence and, more than that, a beauty to his stance. My father said, “What’s this Shuba’s first name? Franz?” But I was trying to understand how one could stand that beautifully against a pitcher and I did not answer and Shuba hit a long drive to right center field on a rising line. At a point 390 feet from home plate the ball struck the wire screen above the fence. It was still moving fast, thirty feet up. “Pretty good shot for Franz,” I said, but now my father, impressed, had fallen serious.

In the basement, Shuba said, “What did you swing?”

“Thirty-one, thirty-two ounces. Depends on the speed and the shape I was in.”

“Here’s what you do,” Shuba said. “Bore a hole in the top of the bat. Pour lead in it. Ten ounces. Now you got a bat forty-one or forty-two ounces. That’s what you want, to practice swinging. Builds up your shoulders and your chest and upper arms.”

“I couldn’t swing a bat that heavy.” I sipped the V.O. The cellar had become uncomfortably hot.

George was standing. “You take a ball of string and you make knots in it,” he said. “You make a lot of knots and it hangs in a clump.” He walked from the table and reached up toward a beam. A string coiled down and suspended, the base multiknotted into a clump. It was waist-high. “That’s the ball,” George said. His eyes were shining.