The Boys of Summer (37 page)

The telephone rang. Reese answered it and said softly that the figures seemed good. They seemed fine. But he wanted to think them over. He’d call back.

“Selling some shares in the bank,” he said. “Where were we? To the Duke? I think he was an only child. They didn’t call this guy ‘Duke’ for nothing. A big man in high school. Good basketball player. Could th’ow a football seventy yards. And he was hitting forty home runs. He could be tough to handle.

“Duke was the greatest going against the wall and catching the ball, but ground balls gave this guy a fit. With a man on first and a ball hit to center on the ground, Duke would not charge. The runners didn’t even hesitate at second; they’d just go into third and all the time I’d say, ‘Duke, goddamnit. Charge the ball. Sure you’re going to make some errors, but you’ll make the runners stop at second.’ Duke would say, ‘Pee Wee, I used to be an infielder. The reason I moved out here is that I hate those damn ground balls.’

“ ‘All right,’ I’d holler in a game. ‘Move in.’

“He’d yell back, ‘Ah, the hell with it.’

“ ‘Goddamnit, Duke. Come in a couple steps.’

“ ‘What kinda steps, Pee Wee? Giant steps or little steps?’ In the middle of a damn major league game.”

Reese laughed. “There was a day I heard him telling newspapermen, ‘The fans right here in Ebbets Field are the worst fans in the world.’ They’d been on him or attendance was off or something.

“Well, you know you can’t win
that
one, and I said to one
writer, Jack Lang, ‘He’s just hot. Don’t use this.’ Lang said he had to use it to protect himself. The way Duke shouted, ten writers heard and some of
them
were going to use it. So I hollered, ‘Hey, Duke. You don’t mean any of this.’ He hollers right back, ‘The hell I don’t. The Brooklyn fans are the worst in the world and I want everyone to print it.’

“I said, ‘Duke, you’re gonna crucify yourself.’

“The Duke said, ‘Fuck ‘em.’

“The papers came out rough. Next game, we’re playing Cincinnati and of all things a lefthander named Don Gross goes against us. Duke didn’t care for lefthanders and he knew he was in for it from the fans. He didn’t feel so mighty then. He wouldn’t go out to warm up. Hell, they had signs: ‘Snider, Go Back to California.’ Finally I went out with him and started a catch. Man, they’re booing like hell. Duke got mad and bore down hard and for as long as that lefthander was in there, he got base hits. And then they cheered him.

“I hated to be booed. I never read the papers when we lost or when I had a bad day. The guys may write tough things. You’re better off not reading them. That helped with the writers, but you can’t do anything about being booed. I didn’t mind so much on the road or the Polo Grounds, but being booed in Brooklyn used to
kill
me. Maybe I’d booted a ground ball the night before. Then I’d tell my wife, ‘Dottie, stay home from the next one. I
have
to do this, but I don’t want you there if I’m being booed.’

“Once she said, ‘Look, honey, they never boo
you.’

“I said, ‘You must not listen sometimes then.’

“When I read a ball player saying he doesn’t hear the boos, I think one thing: ‘
The hell you don ‘ti’”

“Preacher said after the first pitch he heard nothing.”

“Pitchers are different,” Reese said. “But did Preach try to tell you he didn’t worry? In ‘49 we lost the first game of the World Series, 1 to 0, when Tommy Henrich hit one off Don
Newcombe in the ninth. The next day we’re ahead by 1 to 0, and it’s a late inning and here comes Henrich and Preacher calls me in. You know how he used to take his cap off and play with his hair and mumble. It took him three hours to pitch a low-run game. I wanted to keep moving. I asked what the hell he wanted.

“ ‘Man,’ Preacher said. ‘I see this Henrich up here and it sort of bothers me. I want you to talk to me awhile.’

“I said, ‘What the hell we gonna talk about, Preach?’

“He says, ‘Fishin’ and huntin’ are the only things I know enough to talk about.’

“I say, ‘All right, Preach. How many hunting dogs you have?’

“I stood there talking for a bit. Then he says, ‘Okay, I’m all right.’ I go back to shortstop. He gets Henrich. We win, 1 to 0.”

Reese remembered Erskine’s reluctance to throw at batters, Labine’s breaking stuff, Black’s big year and how that season, 1952, he himself had lost his poise on a ball field. “I started slow,” Reese said, “and one night Dressen sent George Shuba to hit for me. When Dressen whistled and here came Shuba, I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t hit for me much, not that I was such a great hitter. They just didn’t. I saw George and I took my bat and heaved it against that little rack next to the dugout. Those damn bats in there ricocheted for five minutes. The people booed like hell. They were booing Dressen. To make things worse, George struck out.

“The next day in the clubhouse meeting, Dressen walked up and down kind of slow. In my own mind, I’m apologizing like crazy. Dressen said, ‘I’m managing this club and if I feel I want someone out of the line-up, that’s my decision and don’t try to show me up. When you don’t get a base hit, I don’t raise hell with you. So I don’t want you showing me up, but that’s what you did to me last night, Reese. You showed me up.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I did show you up and I showed George up and I’m sorry for it and I’ll never do it again.’ “

The remembrance troubled him. He sipped his coffee and thought and said, “It’s funny. When you start talking about the team, I realize how great a ball club this was but how after we left the ball park we were not over all real close. Once you got in the clubhouse, you played bridge. Then boom. The game is over with and, as Furillo says, ‘We all went off in our little cliques.’

“And now the guys and I—what is it, ten years, fifteen?—we almost never see each other any more.”

He was born July 23, 1918, during the last summer of World War I, on a farm, between the Kentucky villages of Ekron and Brandenburg, forty miles downriver from Louisville. People were leaving farms, and three years later Carl Reese moved his family into the city and went to work for the Louisville and Nashville. As Pee Wee remembers him, his father had racial attitudes characteristic of his time and station. A railroad detective cleared bums out of the yards. Black bums were niggers.

Pee Wee grew, a slight, well-coordinated boy who won marbles tournaments but seemed a questionable baseball prospect. In his senior year at Du Pont Manual High School, he weighed slightly over 110. “I was strong,” he says, “for a 110-pounder.” He played second base for Manual that season and graduated and found a job with the Kentucky Telephone Company, splicing cables. The pay was $18 a week.

Baseball was for Saturday and Sunday. He had wanted to be a ball player, but his size kept him from taking his own prospects seriously. He spent two years with the phone company as cable splicer, and weekend shortstop, and ballooned to 140. Then, to his surprise, the Louisville Colonels signed him out of a Presbyterian Church League. He had a good year for the Colonels, batting .277. He moved well. His hands were fast. He ran bases brilliantly. Then the Boston Red Sox bought the Louisville franchise for $195,000, and someone suggested that “five
thousand was for the franchise. The rest went for the kid at short.”

The next year, 1939, Reese blossomed. He led the American Association in triples and he led with thirty-five stolen bases. He stole the thirty-five in thirty-six attempts. But, in a move of minor, enduring mystery, the Red Sox sold him to the Dodgers for $150,000. Tom Yawkey, the president of the Red Sox, ran the franchise as a hobby. He hungered to have his team defeat the Yankees and spent millions in search of a winner. Why, then, would he countenance the sale of Reese?

At the time Larry MacPhail bought Reese’s contract, Joe Cronin, the manager of the Sox, was also the shortstop. Cronin was thirty-four. A suspicion persists that Cronin looked south and saw a rival of such talent as to drive him from the field. Cronin says no. Whatever, it is a matter of record that while Reese reigned in Brooklyn, seven men moved into and out of the shortstop’s job at Fenway Park, Boston.

Leo Durocher became Reese’s champion. He invited Reese to share his Brooklyn apartment and blanketed the rookie with advice and gifts. “Leo was a sharp dresser,” Reese says. “I was a kid in polo shirts. If I liked one of his sweaters, he’d give it to me. Year or so ago, he’s managing the Cubs and I saw him in Cincinnati. He wore a nice orange sweater and I said I liked it. Damn if the same thing didn’t happen. I’m getting to be fifty years old and he’s still giving me sweaters and I can’t tell him no without hurting him.”

Over two seasons, Reese acquired a toughness, somewhat like Durocher’s, without developing the older man’s abrasiveness. Reese’s first year went badly. He broke a bone sliding and later a pitcher named Jake Mooty beaned him. The next season, 1941, his batting average sank to .229, and he made forty-seven errors, more than any other shortstop in the league. Durocher believes that Reese was asking out. “One day in August,” Durocher says, “he kicked one in a spot and we got beat. I jumped
him hard. He was down, and hoping that I’d take him out and play myself. But errors don’t mean that much by themselves. The kid had everything, and the errors were just mistakes. I mean I couldn’t field with him by then. So I said, ‘Pee Wee. If you think I’m going in there to bail you out, you’re nuts. You’re playing even if you make twelve errors a day.’ “ Durocher pauses, milking the moment. “You know what happened then? Pee Wee didn’t just play a good game. He played the game of the century. That’s right. The kid played the fucking game of the century. And we won the pennant.” The next season his batting recovered and he picked up more ground balls than any infielder in baseball. He married a sleek, black-haired Louisville girl named Dorothy Walton in 1942. He was maturing, everyone said, when he went off to war.

In the end his first concern about Jackie Robinson proved groundless. Robinson spent his prime at second base, complementing rather than challenging Reese at shortstop. Indeed, Reese found then that he had to fight for Robinson’s job, rather than his own.

In 1947, Rickey delayed promoting Robinson from the International League. The Dodgers and Montreal trained together in the Dominican Republic, and Rickey hoped that the Dodger veterans, seeing Robinson’s skill, hungering for a pennant, would demand that Jackie join the team. Never was anyone more deaf to the tenor of his team.

On an exhibition series in Panama, Robinson batted .515. A half dozen Dodgers responded with a petition demanding that he not be allowed to play for Brooklyn. If Robinson was promoted, the petition read, the undersigned would refuse to play.

Reese, not captain then, was respected as a sensible young man. Dixie Walker of Villa Rica, Georgia, presented the petition and Reese shook his head. “I can’t sign this thing. I don’t know about you guys, but this is my living. I got a wife and a
child. I
have
to play ball.” Others, like Ralph Branca, a sensitive man from Mount Vernon, New York, and New York University, also declined to sign. But it was Reese’s decision that shocked the petitioners. He was a Southerner and confidant of many. The petition was not presented to him again. It failed, and later Walker was traded and Robinson stayed.

After snacks, under the latticework, Reese began to talk about his old friend. His tones had warmth when he mentioned other teammates, but only Robinson moved him to intensity.

“Listen,” he said. “This fella was a helluvan athlete. Tennis. Golf. Ping-Pong. You name it. And making that double play, they didn’t move him. He’d get over that damn bag. He didn’t care how big you were, how hard you slid. He challenged you and he had those big legs and, playing alongside him seven, eight years, I don’t remember seeing this guy knocked down. He didn’t fear
anything.

“Al Gionfriddo had a hearts game going in 1947 and Jackie was in it and they asked and I said, ‘Yeah. I’ll play.’ Somebody-said to me, ‘Damn. How can you sit and play cards with
that
guy?’ I said, ‘What the hell’s wrong with playing with a guy on your own team?’

“I don’t know how he took it, to be frank. Mr. Rickey made me captain, maybe for the team but maybe to make me come out a little more, to come on stronger. I remember guys from other teams kidding Jackie. ‘Hey, you have your watermelon today?’ Or somebody trying to stick the baseball in his ear. Or yelling, ‘You black bastard.’ And the fans as we came north. Terrible. He didn’t let on, but he musta heard.

“One time in Fort Worth, Texas, this guy was really on Jack. I said, ‘Hey, Jackie. Don’t pay any attention to that son of a bitch. I’ll take care of it.’ I gave the guy a pretty good blast. He completely forgot Jackie and took off after me. ‘You ol’ bastard, Reese. You shouldn’t even be playin’. You’re too damn old!’ I laughed at him. He left Jackie alone.

“Jackie showed me letters he got. In Atlanta the Klan said they would shoot him if he played. During warm-up I said, ‘Jack. Don’t stand so close to me today. Move away, will ya?’ It made him smile.

“There were times when I went over to talk to him on the field thinking that people would see this and figure we were friends and this might help Jack. And there were times when he was on his own. In Tampa, Florida, Ben Chapman had been cutting Jack strong. I wasn’t aware how bad it was. Maybe Jack heard things I didn’t; naturally I wasn’t listening for them like he would be. Chapman was coaching third for the Reds in this exhibition game and we throw the ball around the infield and my throw goes to Jack pretty hard and he looks at me and makes a little motion shaking his hand. Ben Chapman hollered, ‘Hey, Pee Wee. Don’t throw it too hard to little Jackie now. You’re liable to hurt his little hand.’Jack came across from second base, walked right in front of me, almost to third and said, ‘Look, Chapman, you son of a bitch. You got on me for two years and I couldn’t say a word. Now you open your mouth to me one more time during this game, I’m gonna catch you and I’m gonna kick the shit out of you.’ Jack just turned around and walked back to second and Chapman did not say another word. Chapman was rugged, but you better believe Robinson would have been something in a fight. A guy that agile—and I’ve seen him kidding around with his fists. Well, you could see from the way he moved that he’d be something.”