The New York Yanquis. Papers everywhere were calling es that.
George didn’t like that part of it, but he liked the publicity just fine. For a club with twenty-four rookies and one over-the-hiller (me), he was getting more ink than the Bulls in Michael Jordan days.
Sparky Hershberg was back as manager, still without a clue in Spanish, and Sam Ortiz, the clubhouse manager, was now promoted to sit in the dugout with him or stand by the sidelines and interpret for him.
The young warriors from Havana treated Sam with mild contempt for a few days until they found out that getting along with the clubhouse man is more important than getting along with the owner.
Sam worked it by first showering them with the luxuries of the Bigs. Big, fluffy, clean towels by the dozen. Locker space. Soap and shampoo for showers. Taking care of their bags, getting them to the right rooms at the hotel, making sure the icebox was stocked with mineral water and Coke and beer.
Then he started punishing the guys who patronized him. Orestes learned first when Sam stranded him at the practice field and Orestes had to walk back to the hotel, asking directions most humbly of anyone who looked like he might know Spanish. There are not a lot of people in Fort Lauderdale who look like they might know Spanish, and those who do are generally the hired help. Orestes was pulling his Spanish grandee on them and they resented it; they might have to take that kind of shit from Anglos who paid their paycheck but be damned if they were going to take it from another greaser.
Orestes got the idea.
Protestors were there from Miami from the git-go, but the cops handled it because there were plenty of FBI guys around, too. The FBI guys walked around in suits with white shirts and ties and talked into their lapels a lot and wore hearing aids. It was all very distracting between that and no one speaking English and the curious but unfriendly national media coming down every day to see the monkeys in the zoo.
I was working on Ryan Shawn’s problems, which were several. Raul had been right. Something was wrong with my slider. I stayed on the field longer than anyone else just to play catch with Billy Bacon, the pitching coach.
At night, after a couple of beers and a steak and salad, I went back to my room and immersed myself in television English. All that Spanish I was using day after day was taking a toll on me.
We did an exhibition with the White Sox.
The Chicagos were mean about everything. The pitcher threw so many inside that the umpire — it was Flaherty — had to go out to the mound and explain it was only a fucking exhibition game.
The Sox gave us the dog. No reason to slap someone twice with the ball on a steal of second. They had beat Tio, but when Tio stood up to dust off his togs, the second baseman slapped him with the gloved ball again for good luck. This pissed off Tío and he said something in Spanish and the next thing you knew, everyone was out of the dugout.
Major league fighting is not like hockey in that no one ever gets hurt, unless it’s by accident. Flaherty threw out Tio and the Sox second baseman and me. That left it for Sam to interpret for Sparky. I don’t know what Sam said to Sparky, but it wasn’t much good. We came out on the losing end, but the Sox wouldn’t let it go, they were yelling insults at us all the way off the field. Orestes wanted to go back and fight, but I shoved him hard into the tunnel and told him no one paid extra for a fight, this wasn’t hockey. They were teaching the Cubanos a thing or two, the fucking Sox sons of bitches. Nothing personal except it was all personal. Even the Panamanian shortstop on the Sox joined in on dogging the Cubans.
The Cubans got their dander up at last and took it out on the Indians, who came over to play us a friendly one in the afternoon.
The Cleveland tribe was just its usual lackadaisical self with it being so early in spring training and them thinking that in a few short weeks they would be freezing their cookies off up in northern Ohio,
Raul came up in the first inning because I had him batting number three. I say “I” because I was working through Sparky, who deeply resented ending up his career as chief cook and bottle washer to a bench of Communist foreigners. He got himself in such a funk that he refused to talk to anyone except me. And he only talked to me to complain about what George had done to him. Sparky was becoming even more of a pain in the ass than he usually was.
Raul took a strike and looked insulted and complained to the umpire. The ump didn’t speak Spanish and Raul didn’t speak English but the ump got the gist of it and warned him. He said it loud, the way you have to talk to foreigners.
“You wanna get thrown outta this game, Commie?”
Now that was unfair. I said to Sparky, “You gotta go out and bitch for Raul”
“Raul?”
“The kid at the plate.”
“I thought that one was Orestes.”
“Orestes bats eighth.”
“I can’t keep these assholes straight.”
Strike two. Raul just glared at the umpire this time.
The next one was high and dry. Raul reared back and whipped his wrists and the bat came around faster than a chopper blade. Splat. I told you about that sound a home run makes when it’s clean? It made that sound.
The ball tore a line through the middle of the infield and the pitcher saved his own life by hugging the dirt. Ever see a sweet liner about six feet off the ground just blazing ahead? The ball just soared from there, like it was launched from a catapult. Just kept climbing into that lazy, hazy Florida sunshine sky. The center fielder ran back to the fence for exercise because everyone in the place knew where that ball was going.
Raul, the crazy son of a bitch, dogged the Cleveland pitcher, barely trotting around the bases, practically walking. And he wasn’t looking at the ball, just staring at the pitcher, putting the sign on him.
I want to skip ahead now to the next time Raul came up. Same pitcher, same game. This time he took a tumble in the dirt, which is normal for a first pitch after giving up a home run the last time. Just routine meanness. Then Raul spit — first time I seen him spit — and waited. Didn’t take a practice swing or nothing. Just waited. The pitcher — it was Sanderson — did a big windup, all arms and legs, and laid it down a little too low. Raul swung and popped a line down the first base side. He rounded first when any fool could see he only had a blazing single. But he didn’t stop and didn’t listen and the right fielder grabbed the ball on the second hop and flung it into second where the second baseman was waiting.
He shouldn’t have been.
Raul slid into second about the time the ball got there and about the same moment that Raul’s spikes tore a chunk out of the second baseman’s calf. He went down with a yowl and dropped the ball and then all hell broke loose.
The shortstop for Cleveland was offended by the slide and told Raul he was a dirty Communist cocksucker but, again, he wasted it because it was in English.
Raul grinned at him, and at the second baseman writhing around the vicinity of the bag, and that was the end of that.
The shortstop charged him and the umpire backed off so that he could more clearly assess the carnage to come. As is the rule of baseball, any fight must immediately be joined by everyone on both teams. I looked out and it seemed a long way to second. I try never to be the first guy to pile on because punches are still being thrown at that point. I like to jog to a fight in a nonchalant way and find someone easy at the outside of the fray to jump on.
I turned and saw Sparky just sitting there and I said something like “Hey, Sparky, let’s go fight.”
Sparky just looked at me. “Fuck those greasers, I ain’t fighting for them.”
Well, the old rah-rah spirit had to be upheld so I upheld it myself by trotting out to the infield just as Raul and the shortstop had disappeared under a pile of bodies.
The ugly thing was that the Cubans didn’t seem to understand the rules of combat. They thought a fight was really a fight.
They were kicking, gouging, and biting up a storm, and the home plate ump, Bill Donnelly, shouted to me, “Somebody is gonna get seriously hurt out of this.”
So I started shouting in Spanish.
— Stop fighting, stop it!
Nada.
— The police have machine guns!
That started slowing it.
— They are going to kill everyone!
It was still rolling but calming a bit.
— Heads down, they’re getting ready to shoot!
Well, sanity more or less got the upper hand and when the bodies were cleared up, nobody was really that badly hurt except the Cleveland backup catcher, who got a finger in his eye. Everyone got thrown out of the game, of course, and letters were sent to the league office and the newspapers made too much of a fuss about it. But the reaction, I saw, was already setting in. Say what you want bad about Americans, they hate being seen as unfair and the way the other teams were dogging the Cuban kids, well, it just wasn’t baseball. There was even an editorial about this in the Miami Herald and ! thought it augured good for us. After all, the Cuban kids couldn’t help it if Doctor Castro and George Bremenhaven were cooking up secret deals —- they were just kids who wanted to play ball, and what was more American than that?
The whole time, George pulled his disappearing act. Never made a show.
Spring training was not pleasant the way it usually is. The crowd was big at games, but it was a quiet crowd, full of curious people who had never seen a Cuban play baseball before. The park holds seven, eight thousand and they must have been uncomfortable, sitting on their hands for nine innings at a stretch. The other teams had at least stopped putting this thing on a nuclear threat basis. We were all in Florida just to play ball and get tan and not overexert ourselves. Every team had a hothead or two, and some of the Cuban kids got regular baseball slurs, but the other players saw that this thing was not the missile crisis. They resented the Cubans as scabs, but they had come to play ball.
The quiet crowds, though, that got to me. The people paid their money and bought tickets and went through the metal detectors — the FBI guys insisted on that — but then they just sat on their hands. I hoped it wasn’t going to be that way all year,
I told all this to Charlene when I called her at night. She was still in the habit of being out some nights, but I was learning that Charlene was not going to be anybody’s little housewife and was coming and going as she pleased. But when we talked, it was real pleasant. I didn’t tell her what Castro said to me, but I did tell her he smelled like Old Spice. That made her get the giggles. She has a nice, deep-in-the-throat giggle that has appreciation for your wit written all over it, I counted myself a lucky man in that, at least.
The cops arrested a half-dozen Miami Cuban exiles one night when they staged a demonstration in the lobby of our hotel, but I didn’t pay any attention to that and neither did anyone else. The Cubans on the Yankees were getting to be old hat. The only one who was clearly destined to get ink in the future was Raul.
Damn. Arrogant son of a bitch though he was, he could hit a ball. Not just home runs but singles and doubles and triples and liners and towering drives. The man seemed determined never to let an appearance at the plate pass that he didn’t whack into the ball. Throw outside the zone and he’d reach across the plate with those long arms and just flick that ball over the second baseman’s head into center, bouncing fifty feet in front of the outfielder. Whack, whack, whack. I hate to say it was a pleasure to watch him hit, but it was.
The real thorn in my side was Romero, Castro’s spy and the designated chaperone. He counted all the time. He counted the kids on the bus to the park and counted them on the bus on the way back. He counted them in their rooms. He had a room at the end of the hall and his light was always on and his door was always open. Little fucking bean counter. I tried to talk to him one time and it was no go. Then, when the agent for the player’s association came by, I tried to explain to the players they had to join the union. They said OK. The rep said OK, Romero didn’t get it.
“You call yourself a Communist and you ain’t gonna let them join the union? What kind of a Communist are you?” I said in plain English.
Romero just glared at me with lazy, bad eyes.
The players’ rep was Bill Ofmeyer from headquarters. He said, “Whaddaya mean, Communists? We aren’t Communists.”
“I know you ain’t Communists, I was just making a point with Castro’s toady here. Hey, Romero, you want Castro to get the dog for sending in scabs to break the union?”
Romero didn’t understand this at all so I tried again in more formal Spanish.
— Señor, I was told nothing about this (Romero said).
— Fine, fine, I’ll handle it.
I turned to Ofmeyer and said, “Whadda they gotta do?”
“Sign up,” he said.
I personally took the papers around to the boys and made them sign. I said they had to sign to play. Señor Romero watched this and made out that he was reading the form, but he couldn’t read English any better than I could read Spanish. He said he would have to call El Supremo. I said he could call his Aunt Tillie, they’d still had to sign with the union. In the end, they did.
I did get together one night with Tommy Tradup and we became semi-hilarious in the bar at my hotel. The team stays at the Palm Aire Hotel, which is nice digs and has a nice little bar. More important, the Cuban kids didn’t drink there because it cost too much. Instead, they bought six-packs and drank in their rooms and watched the Spanish station out of Miami.
I was never close to Tommy when we were teammates, but we did hoist a few from time to time because when you’re on a long road trip, even teammates can substitute for friends. This night was one of those times, and Tommy didn’t tern mean on me until he’d had his sixth stinger.
“Your new friend, Raul, he’s an uppity spic bastard, isn’t he?” Tommy said.
“No more than you, hoss. All you hitters got the disease. All the great ones,” I added, stroking him down the way you do a horse.
“That cunt is gonna find out that we play the game different here,” Tommy said. He sneered. He was a mean drunk. I had forgotten that. I should have been counting his stingers for him.
“Well, I’m sure hell learn. He’s just a rook, Tommy.”
“You, you fuckin’ traitor, I expect you to say that,”
“Now, hold on, Tommy. You ask me to have a beer with you and then you insult me. You don’t wanna do that.” I said this calm, looking down the dark bar at the bartender, wishing I was back in my room. I didn’t need this shit.
“You fuckin’ rummy pitcher, you suck George’s cock and whatcha do now, the same for that cunt?”
See, when a drunk gets mean, he swears and the words seem to lose their impact through the alcoholic haze, so they just pile them on, one after another, much like a baseball brawl. After a while, words fail them and that’s when the bottles start flying. I wasn’t in a flying mood myself and I started to look at my watch as though time meant something to me.
“I gotta run, Tommy,” I said.
“Fuck that, stay for another drink,” he said.
“Can’t. Got to call my girl.”
“Aw, you ain’t got a girl, you just sucking cock these days.”
“Tommy, don’t be saying things you don’t mean.”
“I do mean them,” he said.
“Then don’t say them anyway.”
“Oh, yeah, You wanna stop me saying things I don’t mean?”
This is the moment when Glint Eastwood gets that squinty tic in his eye or John Wayne hauls back and the fight commences. Except I am not in a movie and I am neither of those guys.
“Grow up,” I said and turned.
He conked me on the back of my head with my own empty beer bottle. The bottle did not break, thank goodness. But it hurt like hell so I turned around, as though he had tapped me on the shoulder.
He still held the bottle by the neck.
“Put the bottle down, Tommy.”
He dropped it on the bar and it broke, This got the bartender’s attention and he edged down toward our end. (Where was he a couple of minutes earlier?)
“You got trouble, take it out of here,” he said.
Tommy said, “Go fuck yourself, monkeyface.”
I didn’t say a thing. I just turned and started out of the lounge. Tommy held on to the bar for the good reason that he needed to, but I could hear him all the way into the lobby.
“You lie down with Cubans, you wake up with fleas. Remember that, you son of a bitch!”
It made about as much sense as anything did.