The Brothers K (44 page)

“That’s why I say ‘stupid situation,’” Papa argued. “If, in the kind of noodle-bodied, no-brain baseball farces I’m thinking of, I went out and practiced what I preached, my students would be nothing but grateful no matter what happened. If I won they’d get baseball relief. If I got shelled they’d get comic relief. Either way they’d get a rest, which was what they really needed.”

“I can’t
believe
this!” Hultz huffed. “You shouldn’t be asking me for
shit!”

“But shit,” Papa said, “is all I
am
asking for, John. I want to be the janitor who cleans up garbage games. And if you’re worried about professional jealousy, I thought of that too. We can make an announcement. We can tell my pitchers I’m not competing for the Pirate jobs. I need to
keep my family anchored in Camas the next couple years anyway, John. A pure, no-hope Tug is all I want to be.”

Hultz had resumed gaping. So Papa took advantage of it: “Remember that road trip last July where you played nineteen games in eleven days? Remember that young outfielder, Jimmy Krentz, who had the nervous breakdown when it was over? Or the young reliever, Kleiner I think it was, who worked five times in a week and tore his rotator cuff? Or the August home stand with four straight doubleheaders, where you pitched your utility man, Pat Snell, wasn’t it, and your left fielder too? And how ’bout that play-off game at Tucson with the basketball score, where you worked eight pitchers, including
all
your starters, and two of them had to—”

“All right!” Hultz barked. “Quit showin’ off. I see you study your goddamned sports page.”

“Listen, John,” Papa said, with passion now. “I not only study it. I make the goddamned paper it’s printed on. And I would take the lowest salary you give a player/coach to
stop
making it. So please don’t think I’m picky. I want to help every way I can. I want to coach—
and
to pitch stupid relief.”

“Chance,” Hultz said. “You’re a pain in the ass.”

“John,” Papa said. “I
love
playing baseball. And I’m still damned good at it.”

“Christ,” muttered Hultz.

T
wo days later we received this letter back home in Camas:

Dear Family,

Not sure if this is good news or bad, but I’ve been offered a couple odd jobs with the Tugs, and I’m going to accept. Immediate warning to all: not much money in it. $185 a month
less
than I was making at the mill! Second warning to Everett and other dreamers: no real ballplaying future in it either. But there’s some chance of a steady coaching future. And, getting back to the economic part, let me say something blunt. Though I still dearly love you, Laura, I don’t feel you’re up to much that’s good around the house these days. So what I’m thinking is, maybe you could get a job?

I’ll be in Portland, and home if it’s still standing, in two weeks. I know that’s longer than I said, but I didn’t expect to become the Tugs’
new peanut vendor, let alone the jack-of-two-trades I’ll explain about when I get home. I hope you’ll all forgive me the selfish side of this. If it doesn’t work out I’ll quit and become something lucrative, like a bank robber. But this is so unexpected I just had to give it a try.

Love,

Papa

A
s usual, G. Q. Durham said it worst. In a letter of congratulations in which he tried, after God knows how many beers, to make Papa’s feat relevant and even inspirational to Mama, he wrote:

… What’s a big toe weigh, Laura? Three ounces? Because if so I believe our own dear Hubert is about three-ounces Christ. Get my meaning? I’m saying the man’s toe died on the cross so a fallen thumb could bust up out its grave & live again? I’m saying we got nothing left now but to stand clear & see how high the blame thing rises!

The “blame thing” didn’t rise at all really. But starting in 1965, at the preposterous age of thirty-five, Papa proceeded to enjoy five and a third seasons as a coach and left-handed pitcher of “stupid relief” for the Triple A Portland Tugs. Which was resurrection enough for us.

Who isn’t suffering from aberration nowadays? You, I, all of us are in a state of aberration. There are ever so many examples of it: a man sits singing a song, suddenly something annoys him, he takes a pistol and shoots the first person he comes across …

—Madame Hohlakov,
The Brothers Karamazov

N
umbers, for all their vaunted accuracy, can be amazingly inaccurate little doodads. The era we think of as “the Sixties” is an example of this. According to arithmetic this improbable decade began on January 1, 1960, but those of us who snoozed through the years ’60 through ’62 for the most part agree that they took place during the so-called Fifties. The Sixties, as we know and love and hate them, didn’t begin in earnest till a subterranean nullity named Lee Harvey Oswald took it into his head to go hunting in downtown Dallas in the autumn of ’63. And they didn’t completely end till the year we call ’73, when another nullity, this one a penitent, secretly met with a journalist in a Washington, D.C., parking
lot and effectively did for Richard Outhaus Nixon what Oswald had done for J.F.K.

One of the great charms of professional baseball used to be that it provided us statistics-lovers with a kind of Mathematical Wildlife Refuge—a nationwide network of painstakingly calibrated and manicured playing fields wherein statistics could frolic about unmolested, appearing to those of us who admired them to possess accurate, consistent and at times even mythic meanings. True, the game had been marred off and on by absurdities and injustices, but like the nation that first invented then worshipped it, our National Pastime seemed to possess an ability to cough up new rules, definitions or heroes before a crisis ever quite stripped it of all credibility and appeal. Against its early lowbrow amateurism it pitted the two-league system and the “World” Series; against the tyranny of greed-crazed owners it hurled the Players Association; against the dull superiority of pitchers it threw the live ball and the shrunken strike zone; against discrimination it pitted Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays.

But in the mythoclastic climate of the Sixties it was the statistics themselves, the very scriptures of baseball, that were finally called into question. And once our faith in the stat was undermined—once the same irresolvable complexities that muddied our knowledge of the outside world invaded the pristine arithmetic of the Refuge—the game we’d once seen as the heroic enactment of a living American mythology seemed to devolve overnight into that branch of the Entertainment Industry catering to those unable to outgrow their grammar school fascinations with hitting, spitting and throwing.

Many factors contributed to the Sixties’ dissolution of statistical precision—platooning, relief pitching, night games, a longer schedule, artificial turf, indoor stadiums, designated hitters, divisional play-offs and rampant league expansion, to name a few. But without doubt, the most infamous contributions to baseball’s apocryphal new arithmetic were the sixty-one 299-foot pop-ups which a crewcutted New York outfielder managed to boink; in the year 1961, over Yankee Stadium’s 296-foot right-field fence. I am referring, of course, to Roger Maris’s breaking of the single-season home run record of the Homeric Babe Ruth.

In a peculiar attempt to stem the tide of numerical unmeaning, then Major League Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick conducted a one-man witch-trial against Maris that culminated in the public tattooing of an asterisk to the new record—a punctuation mark intended, I assume, to serve the same general purpose as Hester Prynne’s scarlet A. But this
method of restoring credibility to the stats deserves an asterisk or two of its own. Think about it. In Frick we had a man who apparently believed that at the sight of a little black snowflake, a mere *, the myriad fans of the future would never cease to remind themselves that Maris’s sixty-one-homer season had been eight games longer than Ruth’s sixty-homer year. Never mind that due to league expansion and owner greed
everybody’s
’61 season was eight games longer, and
all
post-Fifties’ baseball accomplishments have deserved the same asterisk; never mind that Maris not only played his home games in the same stadium as Ruth, but faced significantly better pitching due to the higher mound and the advent of relief specialists; never mind that he endured far greater media pressure, overcame the disadvantage of night games and artificial lighting, and, thanks to injuries and illness, had to doink his sixty-one dingers in three fewer at-bats than St. Babe needed to blast his sixty. Ford Frick was a man of faith in the power of the *.

The perfect justice of a Hereafter is seldom obtainable in the here, but in the Otherworldly world of baseball lore the Commissioner’s asterisk has in fact received an unusually just reward: question a crowd of baseball buffs today and you’ll find that Frick, if he is remembered at all, is remembered solely as the guy who branded Maris’s sixty-one homers with the*.

Whereas
everybody
remembers Roger Maris.

B
ut what exactly is it that we remember? Is it the home-run-hitting, the skinhead haircut, the greatness of his team, or even the flawed record? I don’t think so. I think it was a stranger sort of mark that Maris made on the minds of those who watched him closely that season. It was hard to articulate the disturbing aspect of his performance as it was occurring. But by season’s end there was a growing suspicion that his new record might be more a tragedy than a victory, and that the key to this tragedy might be the unsettling transformation of the record-breaker himself …

Because Roger Maris was, by natural gift and inclination, not a fencebasher at all. He was a stupendous all-around athlete. Blessed with good foot speed, great bat speed and a slingshot arm, he was more a high-average hitter in the Roberto Clemente/Stan Musial tradition than a slugger in the Jimmy Foxx/Harmon Killebrew mold. He won a Golden Glove and the American League MVP award in 1960, and was clearly the best all-around player on the Yankees’ pennant-winning team. But in 1961 a finger of fate seemed to reach down and diddle poor Number 9.
The proof of the fateful diddle was in his game: without knowing why he did it, Maris began to play ball like a different person. An obsessive person. A person who’d accidentally discovered and applied to baseball what the practitioners of countless modern military, industrial, economic and scientific disciplines had already learned: namely, that by jettisoning one’s diverse abilities in order to condense and intensify the will like a magnifying glass intensifies sunlight, by forgetting all about being a complete person and throwing one’s whole being into a single obsession, one stands a very good chance of achieving some narrow excellence. Such as an almost preternatural ability to boink 299-foot fly balls.

This brings us to a surprising definition. Insofar as the word “radical” implies a drastic departure from accepted thinking and practices, it is only accurate to say that this crewcutted all-American Midwest farm boy was in fact the first famous radical of the Sixties. Who but a radical would sacrifice all-around excellence to focus on a single, iconoclastic facet of his existence? Who but a radical could earn so much antipathy from the meat-and-potatoes populace for so little reason, but still go on choosing public misery for the sake of his cause? As this increasingly two-dimensional, nerve-powered, lifetime .260 hitter mounted his anxiety-ridden assault on the most famous feat of the three-dimensional, muscle-powered .342-hitting bon vivant whose bat built Yankee Stadium, even the most rabid New York fans began to feel that something odd was going on. Mickey Mantle also hit a lot of home runs in 1961—fifty-four of them, in fact. But the contrast between his and Maris’s homers was vast. The Mick was just a canonical hero on a roll—a contemporary legend in chivalrous competition with legends of the past. Maris was a new kind of creature altogether. If Ruth was the Sultan of Swat, Maris was the Technician of Boink. For the sake of these boinks he had virtually given up the game of baseball, or at least given up the all-around game he’d played better than anyone just a year before. And the trouble that resulted was, in a sense, the same trouble into which the entire industrial world has fallen:
obsession works
. Not beautifully, and not without tremendous costs. But for Roger E. Maris it worked sixty-one times.

Numbers, for all their vaunted accuracy, can be amazingly inaccurate little doodads. When Ruth’s record finally teetered and fell, Maris found that in the opinion of many he hadn’t scaled a height or conquered a legend at all: he’d become an object of dislike. Many people felt, and even behaved (*), as if he were more the assassin of a legend than a conquering hero. When the Holy Relic Manufacturers trotted out their “61 IN ’61” trinkets, the stuff wouldn’t sell; when the kids took to the
sandlots the following spring, they went right on pretending they were Mantle and Berra and Mays; when Maris himself began his ’62 season in a slump, the fans booed his game and emotions into a complete collapse; and when the Yankees traded him away to St. Louis, instead of retiring his number, they casually handed it to Graig Nettles a few years later.

M
aris was hardly the first technician to attain staggering fame through obsessive effort, only to later regret the cost. In his
Autobiography—
published a full century prior to Maris’s feat—Charles Darwin made a confession that reads like a manifesto of the One-Pointed Specialist’s inner condition: