We Are Still Married

THE FIRST WOMAN TO REACH the big leagues said she wanted to be treated like any other rookie, but she didn’t have to worry about that. The Sparrows nicknamed her Chesty and then Big Numbers the first week of spring training, and loaded her bed at the Ramada with butterscotch pudding. Only the writers made a big thing about her being the First Woman. The Sparrows treated her like dirt.

Annie Szemanski arrived in camp fresh from the Federales League of Bolivia, the fourth second baseman on the Sparrows roster, and when Drayton stepped in a hole and broke his ankle Hemmie put her in the lineup, hoping she would break hers. “This was the front office’s bright idea,” he told the writers. “Off the record, I think it stinks.” But when she got in she looked so good that by the third week of March she was a foregone conclusion. Even Hemmie had to admit it. A .346 average tells no lies. He disliked her purely because she was a woman—there was nothing personal about it. Because she was a woman, she was given the manager’s dressing room, and Hemmie had to dress with the team. He was sixty-one, a heavyweight, and he had a possum tattooed on his belly alongside the name “Georgene,” so he was shy about taking his shirt off in front of people. He hated her for making it necessary. Other than that, he thought she was a tremendous addition to the team.

Asked how she felt being the first woman to make a major-league team, she said, “Like a pig in mud,” or words to that effect, and then turned and released a squirt of tobacco juice from the wad of rum-soaked plug in her right cheek. She chewed a rare brand of plug called Stuff It, which she learned to chew when she was playing Nicaraguan summer ball. She told the writers, “They were so mean to me down there you couldn’t write it in your newspaper. I took a gun everywhere I went, even to bed. Especially to bed. Guys were after me like you can’t believe. That’s when I discovered that life is essentially without meaning. That’s when I started chewing tobacco—because, no matter how bad anybody treats you, it’s not as bad as this. This is the worst chew in the world. After this, everything else is peaches and cream.” The writers elected Gentleman Jim, the Sparrows’ PR guy, to bite off a chunk and tell them how it tasted, and as he sat and chewed it tears ran down his old sunburned cheeks and he couldn’t talk for a while. Then he whispered, “You’ve been chewing this for two years? I had no idea it was so hard to be a woman.”

When thirty-two thousand fans came to Cold Spring Stadium on April 4 for Opening Day and saw the scrappy little freckle-faced woman with tousled black hair who they’d been reading about for almost two months, they were dizzy with devotion. They chanted her name and waved Annie flags and Annie caps ($8.95 and $4.95) and held up hand-painted bedsheets (“EVERY DAY IS LADIES’ DAY,” “A WOMAN’S PLACE—AT SECOND BASE,” “ERA & RBI,” “THE GAME AIN’T OVER TILL THE BIG LADY BATS”), but when they saw No. 18 trot out to second with a load of chew as big as if she had mumps it was a surprise. Then, bottom of the second, when she leaned over in the on-deck circle and dropped a stream of brown juice in the sod, the stadium experienced a moment of thoughtful silence.

And yet. Nobody wanted to say this, but the plain truth was that No. 18 was not handling her chew well at all. Juice ran down her chin and dripped onto her shirt. She’s bit off more than she can chew, some people thought to themselves, but they didn’t want to say that.

Arnie (The Old Gardener) Brixius mentioned it ever so gently in his “Hot Box” column the next day:

It’s only this scribe’s opinion, but isn’t it about time baseball cleaned up its act and left the tobacco in the locker? Surely big leaguers can go two hours without nicotine. Many a fan has turned away in disgust at the sight of grown men (and now a member of the fair sex) with a faceful, spitting gobs of the stuff in full view of paying customers. Would Frank Sinatra do this onstage? Or Anne Murray? Nuff said.

End of April, Annie was batting 278, with twelve RBIs, which for the miserable Sparrows was stupendous, and at second base she was surprising a number of people, including base runners who thought she’d be a pushover on the double play. A runner heading for second quickly found out that Annie had knees like ball-peen hammers and if he tried to eliminate her from the play she might eliminate him from the rest of the week. One night, up at bat against the Orioles, she took a step toward the mound after an inside pitch and yelled some things, and when the dugouts emptied she was in the thick of it with men who had never been walloped by a woman before. The home-plate ump hauled her off a guy she was pounding the cookies out of, and a moment later he threw her out of the game for saying things to him, he said, that he had never heard in his nineteen years of umping. (“Like what, for example?” writers asked. “Just tell us one thing.” But he couldn’t; he was too upset.)

The next week, the United Baseball Office Workers local passed a resolution in support of Annie, as did the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Softball Caucus, which stated, “Szemanski is a model for all women who are made to suffer guilt for their aggressiveness, and we declare our solidarity with her heads-up approach to the game. While we feel she is holding the bat too high and should bring her hips into her swing more, we’re behind her one hundred percent. ”

Then, May 4, at home against Oakland—seventh inning, two outs, bases loaded—she dropped an easy pop-up and three runs came across home plate. The fans sent a few light boos her way to let her know they were paying attention, nothing serious or overtly political, just some folks grumbling, but she took a few steps toward the box seats and yelled something at them that sounded like—well, like something she shouldn’t have said—and after the game she said some more things to the writers that Gentleman Jim pleaded with them not to print. One of them was Monica Lamarr, of the Press, who just laughed. She said, “Look. I spent two years in the Lifestyles section writing about motherhood vs. career and the biological clock. Sports is my way out of the gynecology ghetto, so don’t ask me to eat this story. It’s a hanging curve and I’m going for it. I’m never going to write about day care again.” And she wrote it:

SZEMANSKI RAPS FANS AS “SMALL PEOPLE”
AFTER DUMB ERROR GIVES GAME TO A’S

FIRST WOMAN ATTRIBUTES BOOS
To SEXUAL INADEQUACY IN STANDS

Jim made some phone calls and the story was yanked and only one truckload of papers went out with it, but word got around, and the next night, though Annie went three for four, the crowd was depressed, and even when she did great the rest of the home stand and became the first woman to hit a major-league triple, the atmosphere at the ballpark was one of moodiness and hurt. Jim went to the men’s room one night and found guys standing in line there, looking thoughtful and sad. One of them said, “She’s a helluva ballplayer,” and other guys murmured that yes, she was, and they wouldn’t take anything away from her, she was great and it was wonderful that she had opened up baseball to women, and then they changed the subject to gardening, books, music, aesthetics, anything but baseball. They looked like men who had been stood up.

Gentleman Jim knocked on her door that night. She wore a blue chenille bathrobe flecked with brown tobacco-juice stains, and her black hair hung down in wet strands over her face. She spat into a Dixie cup she was carrying. “Hey! How the Fritos are you? I haven’t seen your Big Mac for a while,” she said, sort of. He told her she was a great person and a great ballplayer and that he loved her and wanted only the best for her, and he begged her to apologize to the fans.

It was a good road trip. The Sparrows won five out of ten, lifting their heads off the canvas, and Annie raised her average to .291 and hit the first major-league home run ever by a woman, up into the left-field screen at Fenway. Sox fans stood and cheered for fifteen minutes. They whistled, they stamped, they pleaded, the Sparrows pleaded, umpires pleaded, but she refused to come out and tip her hat until the public-address announcer said, “No. 18, please come out of the dugout and take a bow. No. 18, the applause is for you and is not intended as patronizing in any way,” and then she stuck her head out for 1.5 seconds and did not tip but only touched the brim. Later, she told the writers that just because people had expectations didn’t mean she had to fulfill them—she used other words to explain this, but her general drift was that she didn’t care very much about living up to anyone else’s image of her, and if anyone thought she should, they could go watch wrist wrestling.

The forty thousand who packed Cold Spring Stadium June 6 to see the Sparrows play the Yankees didn’t come for a look at Ron Guidry. Banners hung from the second deck: “WHAT DID WE DO WRONG?” and “ANNIE COME HOME” and “WE LOVE YOU, WHY DO YOU TREAT US THIS WAY” and “IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS THIS IN A NONCONFRONTATIONAL, MUTUALLY RESPECTFUL WAY, MEET US AFTER THE GAME AT GATE C.” It was Snapshot Day, and all the Sparrows appeared on the field for photos with the fans except you know who. Hemmie begged her to go. “You owe it to them,” he said.

That day, she became the first woman to hit .300. A double in the fifth inning. The scoreboard flashed the message, and the crowd gave her a nice hand. A few people stood and cheered, but the fans around them told them to sit down. “She’s not that kind of person,” they said. “Cool it. Back off.” The fans were trying to give her plenty of space. After the game, Guidry said, “I really have to respect her. She’s got that small strike zone and she protects it well, so she makes you pitch to her.” She said, “Guidry? Was that his name? I didn’t know. Anyway, he didn’t show me much. He throws funny, don’t you think? He reminded me a little bit of a southpaw I saw down in Nicaragua, except she threw inside more.”

She gave him a long, baleful look. “Jeez, you guys are out of shape,” she said. “You’re wheezing and panting and sucking air, and you just took the elevator down from the press box. You guys want to write about sports, you ought to go into training. And then you ought to learn how to recognize a slider. Jeez, if you were writing about agriculture, would you have to ask someone if those were Holsteins?”

Tears came to the writer’s eyes. “I’m trying to help,” he said. “Can’t you see that? We’re all on your side. Don’t you know how much we care about you? Sometimes I think you put up this tough exterior to hide your own insecurity.”

She laughed and brushed the wet hair back from her forehead. “It’s no exterior,” she said as she unbuttoned her jersey. “It’s who I am.” She peeled off her socks and stepped out of her cubicle a moment later, sweaty and stark naked. The towel hung from her hand. She walked slowly around them. “You guys learned all you know about women thirty years ago. That wasn’t me back then, that was my mother.” The writers bent over their notepads, writing down every word she said and punctuating carefully. Gentleman Jim took off his glasses. “My mother was a nice lady, but she couldn’t hit a curveball to save her Creamettes,” she went on. “And now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take my insecurity and put it under a hot shower.” They pored over their notes until she was gone, and then they piled out into the hallway and hurried back to the press elevator.

Arnie stopped at the Shortstop for a load of Martinis before he went to the office to write the “Hot Box,” which turned out to be about love:

Baseball is a game but it’s more than a game, baseball is people, damn it, and if you are around people you can’t help but get involved in their lives and care about them and then you don’t know how to talk to them or tell them how much you care and how come we know so much about pitching and we don’t know squat about how to communicate? I guess that is the question.

The next afternoon, Arnie leaned against the batting cage before the game, hung over, and watched her hit line drives, fifteen straight, and each one made his head hurt. As she left the cage, he called over to her. “Later,” she said. She also declined a pregame interview with Joe Garagiola, who had just told his NBC “Game of the Week” television audience, “This is a city in love with a little girl named Annie Szemanski,” when he saw her in the dugout doing deep knee bends. “Annie! Annie!” he yelled over the air. “Let’s see if we can’t get her up here,” he told the home audience. “Annie! Joe Garagiola!” She turned her back to him and went down into the dugout.

That afternoon, she became the first woman to steal two bases in one inning. She reached first on a base on balls, stole second, went to third on a sacrifice fly, and headed for home on the next pitch. The catcher came out to make the tag, she caught him with her elbow under the chin, and when the dust cleared she was grinning at the ump, the catcher was sprawled in the grass trying to inhale, and the ball was halfway to the backstop.

The TV camera zoomed in on her, head down, trotting toward the dugout steps, when suddenly she looked up. Some out-of-town fan had yelled at her from the box seats. (“A profanity which also refers to a female dog,” the News said.) She smiled and, just before she stepped out of view beneath the dugout roof, millions observed her right hand uplifted in a familiar gesture. In bars around the country, men looked at each other and said, “Did she do what I think I saw her do? She didn’t do that, did she?” In the booth, Joe Garagiola was observing that it was a clean play, that the runner has a right to the base path, but when her hand appeared on the screen he stopped. At home, it sounded as if he had been hit in the chest by a rock. The screen went blank, then went to a lite sausage commercial. When the show resumed, it was the middle of the next inning.

On Monday, for “actions detrimental to the best interests of baseball,” Annie was fined a thousand dollars by the Commissioner and suspended for two games. He deeply regretted the decision, etc. “I count myself among her most ardent fans. She is good for baseball, good for the cause of equal rights, good for America.” He said he would be happy to suspend the suspension if she would make a public apology, which would make him the happiest man in America.

Gentleman Jim went to the bank Monday afternoon and got the money, a thousand dollars, in a cashier’s check. All afternoon, he called Annie’s number over and over, waiting thirty or forty rings, then trying again. He called from a pay phone at the Stop ‘N’ Shop, next door to the Cityview Apartments, where she lived, and between calls he sat in his car and watched the entrance, waiting for her to come out. Other men were parked there, too, in front, and some in back—men with Sparrows bumper stickers. After midnight, about eleven of them were left. “Care to share some onion chips and clam dip?” one guy said to another guy. Pretty soon all of them were standing around the trunk of the clam-dip guy’s car, where he also had a case of beer.

Annie didn’t look at it that way. “Pall Mall! I’m not going to crawl just because some Tootsie Roll says crawl, and if they don’t like it, then bull shit, they can go butter their Hostess Twinkies,” she told the writers as she cleaned out her locker on Tuesday morning. They had never seen the inside of her locker before. It was stuffed with dirty socks, half-unwrapped gifts from admiring fans, a set of ankle weights, and a small silver-plated pistol. “No way I’m going to pay a thousand dollars, and if they expect an apology—well, they better send out for lunch, because it’s going to be a long wait. Gentlemen, goodbye and hang on to your valuable coupons.” And she smiled her most winning smile and sprinted up the stairs to collect her paycheck. They waited for her outside the Sparrows office, twenty-six men, and then followed her down the ramp and out of Gate C. She broke into a run and disappeared into the lunchtime crowd on West Providence Avenue, and that was the last they saw of her—the woman of their dreams, the love of their lives, carrying a red gym bag, running easily away from them.