The New York (20 page)

He was none too happy with me, either, and I hadn't even managed a single game. It seems the city building inspectors were now all over him about a swarm of roaches infesting the lower floors of his building and he'd found out about the sulphur bombs and threatened to sue the exterminating company for stirring the critters up. And he was withholding money from me for all the pizzas I'd sent up to the team, as though pizza was going to break his piggybank. It's bad enough to wet-nurse kids, but when you throw in an emotionally retarded owner, it's even worse.

I closed the locker room door after we'd taken our practice stabs and told the troops what to expect.

— There is resentment out there, boys. Comes from the crowd and from the other team. Now, Stotko is pitching today and he's about half-man and half-pit bull, which means he's totally insane. I expect what he's gonna do is try to scare you.

“Pit bull?” asked Orestes because I had rendered that term in English. It was the way I spoke Spanish. When my lingo didn't keep up with my thoughts, I just changed horses and blurted out English in the middle of the Spanish stream,

I made a face and a barking sound and Orestes was amused.

— So, boys. Just remember this. This is just baseball and we all play it the same way. But this is no game. Those boys over there on the Royals are mean and mad and they'll do anything to win. So we got to do the same thing.

— I hate royalty (Tio said).

— That's it, Tio. Think of them as kings and queens and grand dukes and such. Just knock their crowns off. And Ramon Suarez, when you go out there to pitch, I want you to knock the third son of a bitch on his ass. Number three. Aim for his head. His name is Tommy Tradup and he says that your mothers are all whores.

Tomas just blinked at me a moment. Raul said:

— He said that?

— To me personally one night in the Palm Aire Hotel bar in Fort Lauderdale.

— He doesn't even know us, nor we him.

— I told you, Raul, that's the way they are. They think they're royalty, that's why they call themselves the Royals. They think you're all a bunch of ignorant peasant scum.

— That's not right. 

“Fucking A, it's not right.”

—- I will knock his head off (Suarez said).

— Pitch right for his head, Suarez. Don't take no shit. That puzzled them a moment.

Then Tío said, in English: “Don't take no shit.”

“We don't take shit from anyone,” I said.

Yeah. “No shit from anyone!” Tio said.

“No shit!” they shouted in ragged chorus.

No shit. No shit. It was a mantra they repeated all the way down the tunnel to the dugout. No shit, indeed.

With those inspiring words to fire them, we waited through the opening ceremonies.

George screwed those up royally. Royals and royally. I don't know how these thoughts crawl into his little brain. They're like tapeworms or something.

The teams lined up on the foul lines and we were introduced over the loudspeakers and every time a Yankee name was mispronounced, half the crowd booed and half laughed. I didn't like that at all. But it got worse.

George played the fucking Cuban national anthem.

I didn't even know what it was at first, but I saw the players standing very stiff and I figured out what it was. The idiot was playing the Cuban anthem! What had he been thinking of? This was the worst thing since they'd hung the Canadian flag upside down when the Blue Jays got in the World Series that first time. But at least Canada was a friendly country.

The boos were roaring along now. But that wasn't all. It was more than just the music.

George had posted a Cuban flag in left field, I swear to God. I wanted to run right out there and tear it down, but I couldn't move. I decided I would never move again, in fact.

When the Cuban music ended, you could have cut through the boos with a butter knife, it was that thick.

A couple of guys — turned out they were from the Cuban community in Miami —- ran out on the field from the third base boxes carrying a Cuban flag as it used to be before Castro. This meant nothing to no one until it was explained the next day in the
Times
but when the security guards caught up with the guys, the crowd was now more pleasantly restless. After all, they had paid good money to see a ball game, not a political disturbance.

Finally, they played our anthem and the crowd let out a cheer. You would've thought it was a bunch of American Legionnaires cheering the troops as they headed off to Desert Storm. I am not a creature of excesses, and excess anything makes me on edge. Ditto for excesses of patriotism. The crowd was telling the boys that they weren't wanted here. I had a team full of Jackie Robinsons, and it was bad enough for Jackie Robinson when he was one guy out there, but a whole team. I stood with my hand over my heart just the way I was taught to say the Pledge of Allegiance in second grade. The rockets' red glare and the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. The thing is, I kept thinking- about the old joke about “Jose, Can You See?”

When it was over, I handed the lineup card to the other manager and the umpire at home plate while the kids went out on the field. The ump was Hugh Bailey, and he said, “You got-yourself a real handful, huh, Ry?”

“Semi,” I admitted.

“Man, I'm glad I'm not you,” Hugh said.

“My eyesight's too good,” I said.

“Starting off, is that it, Ryan?” Bailey said.

“You started it, Bailey. Not that I'm gonna sweat your balls and strikes because you never gave the Yankees a break in your life.”

“You call these spies Yankees?”

“You are a racist motherfucker,” I said.

“They're Communists, for Christ's sake.”

“Your mother probably fucked them,” I said,

“You son of a bitch.”

But what could he do? We hadn't even had our first fight.

Skip Patterson, manager of the Royals, sneered a little. “Well, when we get through, your boys will be on the bus back to where they came from.”

“Beats having to make a living in Kansas City,” I said to Skip in a friendly way,

“Okay, boys, let's let the players duke it out,” Hugh said after he'd started all this shit in the first place. “The Cuban anthem? George must really be losing it,” he added.

“I'll tell him you sent your best,” I said to Hugh. I turned and walked back to the dugout and descended. I had every intention of going right into the tunnel, back to the locker room, changing clothes, cab it to Fort Lee, pack my shit, and jump in the Park Avenue and not stop until I was halfway to Texas.

Of course, I didn't.

Ramon Suarez is a fastballer and Billy Bacon had taught him a few things in spring training, but I didn't know if he'd really caught on. This was a real game in a real stadium in a real big city and spring training is playing around in Florida for the senior citizens and every other loafer who doesn't have something to do in the afternoon. I had my toes crossed.

First Royal up smacked the first pitch into center. One bounce and caught and in. Welcome to the American League, Ramon.

The second batter grounded into a sure double play except the second baseman dropped the ball as though he was surprised by it. The crowd was booing when it wasn't laughing and we were only six minutes into the game. I looked at my watch. I looked out at the Cuban flag. Someone was trying to pull it down and there were security men all over the place. This was about as wonderful as I could have imagined it in my worst, wake-up-sweating, damn-that-tequila nightmare.

Tommy Tradup swaggered to the plate and I remembered then what I had told Ramon. This was not the time or the place to knock down the hitter, not with two men on. I signaled out to the third base coach, Billy Bacon doing double duty, but he was staring at the flag incident unfolding in left field. Didn't anybody pay attention to baseball anymore when they went to a game?

Ramon threw right for Tommy's head on the first pitch.

Bam. Tommy hit the dirt in a sprawl, the pitch missing his noggin by about two inches. Orestes was standing at the plate in his catcher's gear and shouting at the downed Tommy Tradup.

I may have overdone it in the locker room when I told Ramon to knock Tradup down.

Tommy got up and went for the pitcher on the mound.

Ramon stood there, watching him like a toreador. Maybe he had some inkling of what was going to happen next, because I didn't.

Orestes ran out behind Tradup and tackled him and began pounding him in the face.

This commenced what we call a “brawl.”

Both benches emptied and the outfielders came in at a gallop and everyone collided about ten feet short of the pitcher's mound. The object of a baseball brawl is to cram fifty players into a space the size of a phone booth so that no one can hit anyone very hard or seriously. I guess it was up to me to go out and restore order and that was my intention. Unfortunately, this time I abandoned my usual laconic stroll to a fight and it was still going on when I got there. The next thing I knew, I was in the pile of writhing humanity and someone caught me on the chin with his spikes.

The fight lasted fifteen minutes, which is a long time as baseball brawls go. The umpires in the league are all the size of your average New York City cop on a loving diet of jelly doughnuts. They bullied their way into the meltdown at the core of the fight and began flinging ball players off the center the way you tear the leaves off an artichoke.

Well, I was certainly ready to call it quits the minute my chin came in contact with someone's spike. I was bleeding, and I realized that if I'd gone back to Fort Lee instead of staying in the dugout at the beginning of the game, I would not have been nicked.

But there I was and Hugh Bailey was banishing me from the game even though I didn't get a lick in. Bailey did the same with Skip on the other side and the same with Tomas, the second baseman, and the same with Tommy Tradup and two or three others.

On my way down the tunnel, I grabbed Sam the equipment manager. I told him to quiet the boys down and not let anyone else get into a fight.

He didn't want to go in the dugout to act for me, but I made him. We were the only two that could tell the players what to do in Spanish and I was banished from the game.

Quite a game, as it turned out. I watched it on TV in the locker room, drinking a cold beer, sitting on the training table. Something about the fight seemed to have inspired the kids and they came out playing ball.

The Royals didn't do much after the fight for the next four innings. Ramon, who was not thrown out of the game, held them down while Raul and the boys pounded on them.

In the bottom of the fourth, we put two on with one out and then Raul came up to the plate. He has a funny stance, a little bit of a bend to his back leg, and he never waggles the bat, just lets it sit on his shoulder until the pitcher goes into his windup. Then he draws the bat back, nearly horizontal with the plate, as though he knows exactly where the ball will come.

Turns out he does.

He cracked it a good one and it went to dead center, which is located somewhere near Scarsdale. I have described Raul's line drive ability, haven't I? I swear the thing took off like a clothes line from his belt to the upper deck, without any loft to it at all. Just dead on.

I had to shake my head because Raul didn't have a doubt. He was trotting to first, watching the ball fly out of the park, and suddenly the restless boos and scattered cheers were united. George was right. Everyone loves a winner and Raul made the Yankees a winner with that one blow in the middle of the game. Not just for the game but for what this new-style Yankees team was going to mean.

“Hot damn!” I shouted to my TV set in the locker room and the set hollered back with a chorus of cheers. Even the announcers were excited. Raul went four for four, including the game-winning home run, and Ramon scattered five hits for no runs in a nine-inning performance I wouldn't have expected out of anyone less than Jack McDowell

They tumbled into the locker room after the victory exactly like the kids they were, yelling and laughing and slapping at each other and even high-fiving, something they had been learning in spring training. They even slapped me around in that good fellowship way in which men note happy occasions.

It was infectious, I have to say. The only damper was when George came in to deliver his postgame pep talk.

“Men! Men! Settle down! That was a great victory out there and we showed the City of New York what we were made of today!” George shouted above the din. Someone threw a wet towel at him and that provoked more laughter, but George was unstoppable. “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship!”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” I said.

“Translate, translate,” he shouted at me.

— Señor Owner wants to say the pizza and beer tonight are on him and he wishes you Merry Christmas.

That stopped them a little. Even George, who said,
“Navidad?
Did you say,
navidad?”

“It means reborn, I said the spirit of the Yankees is reborn.”

“Navidad”
George said again, turning the word over his tongue.

When the troops were bedded down with their TV sets and beer and pizza, Romero came through and did his count. He was wearing a leather coat he'd picked up from a discount house on lower Broadway and the seams hadn't started to tear yet. Then Romero left and it was my turn. I bid them all good night and went down in the elevator and back through the lobby of the East Side Hotel. It was a little past seven and the lobby was full of pregnant women and their babies toddling around in diapers. The place smelled of old age and fear and neglect and loss of hope, or maybe hope never found the front door. Two blind old men played checkers over a coffee table in one part of the lobby. It was terribly sad, all of it.