HIS FULL NAME was Stan T. Paige, no relation to Satchel, and he was from Tippytoe, Louisiana. He’d been orphaned at six and raised by an aunt, the madam of a local house of ill repute for whom he was, variously, an errand boy, general nuisance, and surrogate son. The aunt, retired now, was quite wealthy and entirely respectable. Louisianne, whose mother had run off with a voodoo band when her daughter was three, lived with her great-aunt during the winter and traveled with her father in the summer.
When Teddy met Cajun Stan, the Baseball Man was enjoying a three-to-five all-expenses-paid scholarship, courtesy of the state of Texas, for swindling the First National Bank of San Antonio out of $100,000. The money had been designated for a new American Legion baseball stadium. But Stan, in Las Vegas, had plunked it all down on a bet that San Antonio’s double-A baseball team, for which he was pitching at the time, would win their league title. The fact that they did win was of little consolation to him when he was banned from the game for life and sent to prison for extortion.
Over the next several days, Stan showed E.A. a craftier pickoff move to first. He taught him how to push harder off the rubber with his right foot and demonstrated several different arm angles to come at the batter with. How to conceal the ball in his glove until the last possible moment, how to “cut” his fastball by positioning his top two fingers slightly off center on the outside of the ball so that the pitch ran away from righties and into lefties, how to surprise left-handed batters by throwing a back-door breaking pitch that started half a foot off the plate and then dived in to nip the outside corner at the last moment.
“How fast?” E.A. asked Stan, who was holding the radar gun, a week after his training started.
“Ninety-four,” Stan said. “Second time around the league—second time around the lineup maybe—they gone jump all over that heat.” Stan set down the gun and held out his hand for the ball. “Son,” he said, “fetch you hitting bat.”
“What?”
“You a hitter, ain’t you? Fetch you bat.”
E.A. got his bat. Cajun Stan took off his white hat and set it on the Packard seat. Louisianne helped him out of his jacket.
The Baseball Man walked out to the mound. “Stand in,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to warm up?”
“I been warm up forty year. Step into that batter’s box, you.”
As E.A. stepped up to the plate, Teddy squatted down behind him.
“Where’s your gear?” E.A. asked him.
“Don’t swing,” Teddy said. “Just watch.”
As delicate as a ballet dancer, Stan lifted his hands high over his head three times and pitched the ball. “Ninety-six,” Teddy said.
“No,” E.A. said.
“It’s coming again,” Teddy said. “Same place, right over the heart of the plate. Swing.”
E.A. swung when the ball was in Teddy’s glove.
“Swing again,” Teddy said. “Now that you’ve seen it.”
Again, Stan’s hands rose over his head three times. His right arm came snapping down like a cobra striking. E.A. stepped out onto his front foot and started to swing, tried to hold back and couldn’t. For the first time in his life he fell down in the batter’s box.
Clap, clap, clap.
From the stoop, over slow, sarcastic applause, Gran said, “He’s ready at last. That’s a stunt the Sox’ll pay millions for. Look out, Boston. Here comes Ethan Allen.”
Worse yet, Louisianne was making her palms-up stage gesture toward him, sitting on his ass in the batter’s box, and Gypsy was laughing.
E.A. looked out toward the mound. “What in hell was that pitch?” he said.
“That,” Teddy said, “was a straight change. That’s your ticket to the top, son. If you can learn it.”