The Boys of Summer (31 page)

By February he came to a decision. He had to use his new curve in a game. He had to throw it in the first inning and every inning. It had to be his only curve. Otherwise, he would never rely on it and never become the pitcher he should be. Against a team called Almendares, Erskine mixed the new pitch with fast balls and pitched eight shutout innings. Then Dee Fondy, who later hit .300 in the major leagues, opened the ninth inning with a triple.

Erskine paused. A shutout meant a $25 bonus and he was earning only $325 a month. He was ahead by two runs. His infield would play back for the out, rather than close, to prevent Fondy from scoring. The old curve still seemed harder and better than the new one. Erskine set his teeth and considered in the open privacy of the pitching mound. The question he decided was truth versus $25. He would
not
go back to the old curve. He threw five of the new curves in the next ten pitches and got his shutout, his $25 and the ball game. He never threw the old curve again.

Wooden shutters stand open behind Erskine’s chair. Memories have poured, but night claws at the window. “Old Campy,” Erskine says. Nine hundred miles away, Roy Campanella is sitting in a motorized wheelchair, with shriveled arms and withered stumps for legs.

“The worst thing I can imagine is what happened to Campy,”
Erskine said. He gazed at the ceiling. “Real intimacy develops between catcher and pitcher. You work 120 pitches together every few days, after a while you think like one man.

“All right. Campy is hurt over the winter of 1957–58. That’s the same winter the team moves to California. We start out playing in a football field, the Coliseum, with left real close, a China wall. You know how Campy used to hit high flies to left; as soon as I see the China wall, I think, ‘Son of a buck, if Campy was well, he’d break Ruth’s record, popping flies over that dinky screen.’

“We start badly. We get to Philadelphia. I’m supposed to pitch. It rains. Campy was born in Philadelphia. Whatever, I start thinking about him with his broken spine and I don’t tell anybody anything, but I go to the station in the rain and take a train to New York. I find a cab and go to University Hospital. They say I can’t see him. I persist. At last, okay.

“Now I’m the first person not family to visit, the first man who’s come from the team.

“I get to his room. I’m still thinking of the short fence and Ruth’s record. I open the door and there’s a shrunken body strapped to a frame. I stand a long time staring. He looks back. He doesn’t see just me. He sees the team. He starts to cry. I cry myself. He cries for ten minutes, but he’s the one who recovers first. ‘Ersk,’ Campy says, ‘you’re player representative. Get better major medical for the guys. This cost me. Eight thousand dollars for just the first two days.’

“I say, ‘Sure, Campy.’

“ ‘Ersk,’ he says, ‘you know what I’m going to do tomorrow? I’m working with weights and I’m going to lift five pounds.’

“I go there thinking of him breaking Babe Ruth’s record, he’s thinking of lifting five pounds. But he’s enthusiastic. He starts to sound like the old Campy. He wants to know when I’m going to pitch. He’s got some kind of setup where they turn the frame and he can watch TV. I’m going the next day in Philly if it
doesn’t rain, and he gets real excited. They’ll be televising that one back to New York. ‘I’ll be watching you, Ersk,’ he says. ‘Make it a good one.’

“I get out of there. By this time I’m pitchin’ with a broken arm, but this one I got to win. I got to win it—I don’t care if it sounds like a corny movie—for Roy.

“The next day I go out with my broken wing. I pitch a nohitter for five innings. I end up with a two-hitter. I win it for Campy. That was the last complete game I ever pitched in the major leagues.

“I could look back and say I should have pitched a few more years. My arm doesn’t hurt now. The game looks easy on television. But in 1959 I walked into the office of Buzzy Bavasi and told him I’d had enough. I was thirty-two years old and my arm was 110. It ached every day. Some of the time I could barely reach the plate. Buzzy said he’d put me on the voluntary retired list, and he went out to get his secretary to draw up the papers.

“I thought,
‘This is it.’
And all of a sudden in Buzzy’s office in Los Angeles I’m seeing myself in the Kenmore Hotel room with Branch Rickey thirteen years before. I can see it clear as my hand. I can see my Navy bell-bottoms. I see Rickey puffing smoke. I see the way Dad looked. I hear the sound of Rickey’s voice. That’s the beginning. And here, I think, in Buzzy’s office is the end.

“I say to myself, ‘
Wait!
I don’t want this to end. Shouldn’t I go for one more start?’ And then I say, ‘No. I don’t want one more start. I’ve given myself every opportunity. At thirty-two, after 335 games, I’m worn-out.’

“I say to myself, ‘Remember the way you feel. Burn this in your mind.
Strong!
Five years from now when you’re back in Indiana and you start saying, the way all old ball players start saying, I could play another year, conjure up this feeling you have now.’”

“Have you had to do that, Carl?” I said.

“Only about five hundred times.”

Erskine turned out the lights. He went upstairs and looked into Jimmy’s room. The little boy breathed noisily in sleep.

On the telephone, Andy Pafko said that it would be nice to get together, but that he didn’t belong in a book about the team. “I wasn’t in Brooklyn long enough,” he said. “I don’t rate being with Snider and Furillo. I wasn’t in that class.”

Across seventeen major league seasons, Andy Pafko batted .285, hit 213 home runs and fired every throw and ran out each pop fly with the full measure of his strength. Certain athletes who grew up in the Great Depression played that way, the mongrels of poverty tearing at their calves.

Pafko is proud to have been a good, hard-working ball player, but he regards his year and a half with the Dodgers as a failure. The season in which he came to Brooklyn as pennant insurance reached its climax with Pafko positioned at the left-field wall of the Polo Grounds, shoulders pressed against cement, wanting to run deeper, but helpless, a spectator in uniform as Bobby Thomson’s home run carried the pennant to the New York Giants.

The roads north from Anderson run straight and flat. State Route 32, and Federal Highway 41, among trees, farms and near Noblesville, Indiana, a town of 8,500, pass the anomaly of a Rolls-Royce dealer on the plain. Two Dodgers, Pafko and Joe Black, have settled in Chicago. Like Shuba, Pafko descends from Middle Europeans who made their way in the American Middle West. “But we’re Lutherans,” he said, “not Catholic, and we were farm people. I still get out in the country. I scout for the Montreal Expos. Look”—the thick voice lightens—“put me in, but don’t make it a big thing. I never felt I was a Dodger star.”

Before lunch, he waited in the parking lot of a Skokie steak house called Henrici’s, standing straight and rather stiffly, his hair still thick and black.

I told the captain, “Reservation for two.” He stared at Pafko and said, “Don’t I know you?”

“Andy Pafko.”

“Milwaukee Braves,” the captain cried. He seated us in a booth and sent for drinks.

“You see,” Pafko said. “They don’t really know me any more and if they do, they think I was a Milwaukee player. Nobody remembers I was a Dodger.”

I remember how he hit Dodger pitching. He was one of those few ball players—Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were others—who made the playing area of Ebbets Field seem too small. He hit line drives against or over all the walls and with Chicago in 1950, when he hit thirty-six home runs, he was always beating the Dodgers out of games they should have won. A year later, Buzzy Bavasi sent the Cubs Joe Hatten, an outfielder, an infielder and Bruce Edwards, a catcher who couldn’t throw, for the contracts of Johnny Schmitz, Rube Walker, the catcher, Wayne Terwilliger and Pafko. Terwilliger, a skinny second baseman, played thirty-seven games for the Dodgers, but had his moment. In Philadelphia a frog-voiced fan called out
Dodger names from his scorecard, with a pointed basso comment for each one. “Aaargh,” he roared, “I can see it now. Yer name in lights. A lotta lights. Wayne Terwilliger.” The deal was for Pafko, an all-star outfielder who could play third.

“This is gonna sound crazy,” Pafko said, “but even though it looked like the Dodgers was gonna win the pennant, I was disappointed to be traded. My home was here. Chicago. I had five years with the Cubs. I could hit .300. That wasn’t bad for a kid from the farms up north.

“Funny about the Cubs. I got in a World Series with ‘em in 1945, but after that they didn’t win. Hell, they got Durocher and they still don’t win. But I belonged. The day before the trade, Don Newcombe beat us at Wrigley Field. I went home and at six o’clock the phone rang and Wid Matthews, the general manager, said, ‘Andy, I am sorry to have to inform you that we have traded you to the Dodgers.’ I didn’t have a winter to adjust. Next day it was the same ride, only to the other side of Wrigley Field.

“I got my belongings and moved them over to the visiting clubhouse. Preacher Roe came over and said, ‘Andy, we’re glad to have ya.’ Still I was a stranger. All right. You bounce around in baseball and that day I hit a home run, but they beat us, 4 to 3.”

“Who’s us?”

“The Dodgers.”

“The ‘us’ changes that quickly.”

“Your team is who you’re playing for. The Dodgers get thirteen games ahead, but we started to lose the lead. The trade made it a bad year. I have this feeling something worse is going to happen. In the first game of the play-off I hit a home run first time up. But Jim Hearn won for the Giants. The next day I’m noticing Labine. I’m
really
noticing. He’s got a great curve. Thomson couldn’t hit it with a fan. My wife Ellen is staying back in Chicago.

“Last game we’re ahead in the ninth. They get some hits. A run in. They tell me Sukeforth said Branca was throwing good. But I was wondering. Why not Labine? Branca walked by me in left field. I hit him in the back. ‘Go get ‘em, Ralph.’ But I was doubting. Branca threw a ball. Then came this shot. I started back. In Ebbets Field I might have gotten it. In the Polo Grounds it was gone. Give him credit. It was my biggest letdown ever.

“Back in Chicago, Ellen has a taxi waiting to take her to the station. She hears the hit on the radio and calls out the door, ‘I’m not going.’

“The cabbie says, ‘What do you mean?’

“Ellen says, ‘Just forget it.’

“Then she cried. Forget it? That’s one year I’ll never forget. I have to leave the Cubs. I lose the play-off. Ellen loses the trip.

“The three biggest disappointments of my life. Well, that was the worst. Ever since things have been getting better.”

During 1919, the Pafkos came from Bratislava, peasant farmers, and settled with relatives in Minneapolis. By the time Andy was born in 1921, Michael and Susan Pafko had borrowed money, bought a dairy farm near Boyceville, close to a fork of the Hay River in northwestern Wisconsin. They kept chickens, and hogs, and grew alfalfa and oats. Andy, called Pruschka, was the third of six brothers. As late as 1942, his third season in professional baseball, he was still helping pay off the family farm.

“Ol’ Handy Andy Pafko,” Red Barber used to say. “Pow’ful wrists. He strengthened them as a boy milking cows on his daddy’s farm.”

“Sure,” Pafko said over a club sandwich, “I milked the cows. And not only that. I chopped wood. I fetched well water. You had to be strong, and you had to take discomfort, too, if you know what I mean.”

“What?”

“No plumbing. In the winters it hit thirty below. Some fun going to the outhouse.” The large, square face split in a smile.

“Ted Williams was my idol. He played for the Minneapolis Millers. It was 1938. He was skinny, but he must have hit forty homers. They called him ‘The Splendid Splinter.’ Later Joe D. was my idol, but then it was Ted. Some coaches encouraged me and my brother John encouraged me and I heard there was gonna be a tryout down in Eau Claire and I went, but my mother didn’t want me to. She wanted all of us to stay together. My mother said she would be happy if when we grew up, all of us lived within fifty miles of Boyceville.

“I went to the camp anyway. They signed me and a while later sent me home. It was cut-down time and they had no place for me. I asked Ivy Griffin, the man who signed me, ‘Hey, what should I do?’

“ ‘When you go home,’ he said, ‘play as much ball as you can.’

“I went back to the farm and did what Ivy told me. I played Softball once a week. But I was twenty years old then and I was thinking it had been some crazy dream, Pruschka Pafko playing with Ted Williams and Joe D.

“Now there was only a month left in the season. It was harvest time. A shiny car pulls up. My mother thinks it must be someone selling tractors. But the man says, ‘Where’s Andy?’

“ ‘He’s workin’ in the field.’

“ ‘I want to talk to him.’

“Someone at Eau Claire had gotten hurt. It was Ivy Griffin in the car. They needed me. The hell with the harvest. I got signed for seventy-five dollars a month. Four years later in the major leagues, I was able to buy a car myself.”

Pafko sipped beer and shook his head. “Baseball was a tough life. I didn’t hit much in Eau Claire but then a good year at Green Bay. Then down in the Sally League, I tied Enos Slaughter’s record with eighteen triples. Then to the Pacific Coast
League. I won the batting championship with .356. Then, in ‘44, I had my first year with the Cubs.

“Telling it here doesn’t make it sound hard, but it was hard. I never
had
played baseball, only softball, but there wasn’t a guy, not one, who helped me. Nobody helped anybody. The minors was a jungle. Other guys were jealous. I had to figure everything out for myself. I started standing way back from the plate and stepping in. As I moved up, I had to crowd the plate. The higher you get, the better outside curves you see.

“After the Cubs won in ‘45, they started downhill, but now my life
was
getting easier. I liked Chicago. They knew me everywhere. I played the outfield, third. I was liked. I was crowding the plate, getting my hits.

“Wham. Over to Brooklyn. Now every time I come up, somebody’s throwing at my ear. Day after day, those pitchers flattened me. I’d been brushed, but I never knew what it meant
really
being thrown. You know what Durocher says. ‘Don’t stir up weak teams.’ Nobody bothered me with the Cubs. But Brooklyn had this murderers’ row. Hodges. Campanella. Snider. Furillo. Someone ahead of me hits a homer. The next pitch comes at
my
head. That wasn’t fun. Those Dodger-Giant games weren’t baseball. They were civil war.”

He had downed the sandwich. He said he didn’t want more beer. “Ginger ale,” he told the waitress.

“You remember when Robinson was signed?”

“It didn’t bother me none. There was a great pitcher on the Cubs, Claude Passeau. He came from Mississippi. He’d get on Robinson. Throw at him. So would some other guys. Now it’s 1948, and I’m new at third and Robinson hits a triple and bowls me over. I always had a good glove, but I was feeling my way as an infielder. He really crashed me. I thought, ‘Next time—there’ll be a next time—I’ll get even.’

“Sure enough that same game he hits another line drive and here he comes again. I get the relay and tag him pretty good.
I give him the ball and some fist and the left elbow. He gets up and looks. He starts walking off, looking back, challenging. I don’t want to fight, but I’m ready. I look higher. All I saw in the stands was black. I thought, ‘Uh-oh. I don’t want to start a race riot.’ But I
admired
him, you know what I mean?

“To do what he did, the way they threw at him, I had to admire him. But that doesn’t mean he had any right to bowl me over. I had to stand up for myself and for my fans.

“I loved associating with the fans. That was the best part of the time with Brooklyn. Ebbets Field was so close you could hear ‘em all. One day: ‘Andy, you’re a bum.’ Next day: ‘Andy, you’re my boy.’ In Ebbets Field I heard ‘em talking all the time. Say, you must be in a hurry?”

“Hell, no.”

“That catch I made for Erskine in the World Series. Gene Woodling hit the ball. I put my hand on the right-field barrier in Yankee Stadium and pushed off and jumped as high as I could. It was a line drive. A shot. I got it near the webbing and it knocked me backwards into the stands, and when I’m falling over, I hear ‘em shouting, even though it’s Yankee Stadium, ‘Hold the ball.’”

“You did.”

“And that January, the Dodgers sent me to Boston. Walter O’Malley wrote a letter and said someday he’d explain why. I was starting to wonder. Two trades in three years. I don’t know. Is something funny here? I ended up better off. Boston moved to Milwaukee, back in Wisconsin. I was going home.

“I was through in ‘59. The Braves had me coach three years. Then I went down to manage at Binghamton, New York, and West Palm in Florida and Kinston, North Carolina. That’s farm country, but not like where I grew up. There were hills near our farm and lakes. Kinston is flat country; they grow tobacco. We won a pennant in Kinston in ‘67. I worked out while I was managing. I pitched batting practice five times a week. I was
traveling secretary and the part-time trainer, and their adviser. Some made it. Ron Reed, the pitcher, from La Porte, Indiana. Mike Lum, an outfielder from Hawaii. Handsome kid. I tried to help them all, remembering how nobody ever helped me.”

Pafko’s gnarled hand drummed on the table. “It was like I was a substitute father, but I don’t get the way everything’s changed. The boys are different from the way I was.

“I call a workout at ten
a.m.
At ten they start putting on their uniforms. When I began, it was
Don’t wait.
If he says ten, be there at nine. In uniform. Ah.” He brushed hair back from his forehead. “Do you get it?”

“Well, there aren’t so many growing up any more on farms without plumbing in cold corners of the country.”

“The kids from Southern California were the worst, most spoiled. I had the hardest time working with them,” Pafko said."Did you ever think of this? Baseball is losing young people to football. Boys with good bodies. And to industry. Baseball, the greatest game there is.

“I put in nineteen years, sixteen as a player, three as a coach. God’s let me live; my pension, $780 a month, began on February 25, 1971. And it was fun. We sold the farm. My mother’s dream didn’t work out. We’re all living in the cities. I’ve got security because I was a ball player. That anyone can understand, but I can’t put in words how much I loved it, playing in the major leagues.”

Three waitresses had approached silently, listening to the halting, passionate summation. When Pafko paused, one, no more than twenty-five, said, “Sir?”

“Yes.”

“The captain says you’re Andy Pafko, who used to play for the Milwaukee Braves.”

“And the Dodgers,” I said, “and the Cubs. He was the best ball player in Chicago.”

“We wondered,” the girl said, “if we could have your autograph.”

Pafko smiled and asked each girl her name and signed for them all.

“Now for me,” I said.

“Don’t kid me,” Pafko said. “It’s just nice being remembered.”

“I’m not kidding.” I had been traveling with a glove, a Wilson A-2000, huge, $50 retail, more elaborate than any glove that had been designed when Pafko played in Brooklyn. “I’m asking everybody on the team to sign it, for a souvenir.”