WELL, the outcome was that I went up to the Mammoths in September of the second summer, and I pitched 1 inning in relief against Boston.
The word come on a hot afternoon. Me and Perry was laying on our beds in our room in the Blue Castle Hotel in Queen City in the Four-State Mountain League when in come Coker and Canada in their shorts and bare feet. Canada said it was so hot he had took 4 showers since noon. Coker said you would never know what hot was until some summer’s day you was down in a coal mine in West Virginia, and then you would know.
“I will tell you what hot is,” said Perry. “If you was ever to be in the Ford Rouge plant of a summer’s day you would know what hot is. When I lay me down here and I think it is hot I say to myself be thankful you are laying here in your under drawers with this pitcher of ice water in your hand and be glad you are not back in the Ford plant.” He took a drink from the pitcher, and he passed it to me, and I drunk and I give it to Canada. “I only hope I can save my money and never go back to the factory,” said Perry.
Just then in come Mike Mulrooney, manager of the Queen City Cowboys and 1 of the grandest men you will ever meet. He taught me more baseball then any man before or since. Pop set me up and Mike put the finish on. When I went to Q. C. the summer before I was a fair enough country ballplayer, and when I come away I was big-time, and Mike said, “Well boys, leave us phone down and have them send up some steam heat.” This give us all a big laugh, for Mike was always ready with a joke. He flopped down in a chair and begun to fan himself with the newspaper. We sat, and we waited for him to say what he come to say, for Mike seldom come just for the visit. He always come for a purpose. Maybe he would come to tell of a fault he seen in 1 of us, or he would come and wise us up on some trouble another fellow was having. He might say, “Now boys, I want you to help me out with Squarehead Flynn,” meaning Squarehead Flynn the first baseman. “I do not think it is kind to Flynn to call him by the name of Squarehead, so if you boys will just call him Flynn or Bob it will be a big favor to me.” We done it when we remembered, though “Squarehead” seemed to fit perfect. But if Mike Mulrooney was to ask it you could never refuse. Still and all he never jumped right into the business of his visit, and we always waited, and he would talk about the weather or last night’s ball game or some old-time remembrance, and on this day he said, “I do not call this hot. Nowadays the ballplayer has got things better. It is cool at night, and we play so much at night nowadays, and the trains and the hotels is air-condition. I will tell you what I call hot. I remember doubleheaders in St. Louis when it was 110 in the shade.”
“What would you say is the hottest city of all?” said Canada.
“St. Louis,” said Mike. “Washington is close. All of them is hot. I remember hot days everywhere. Yet I was always a good hot weather ballplayer.”
“The hotter it is the better Pop likes it,” said I.
“I have played ball in cold and snow in Boston and wet and dry and thunder and lightning. I once played ball in the flood in Cincinnati. But the worst of all is heat,” said Mike. “However, I did not drop in for story hour. The reason I come is because I just heard from Dutch.” He took a wire out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was the wire I was waiting 20 years to see. It said:
R. DVA 165 SER PD WUX NEW YORK 12 1158A
MICHAEL J. MULROONEY
BLUE CASTLE HOTEL
QUEEN CITY
SHIP ME WIGGEN FASTEST
DUTCH
I have got the wire yet, and I could not believe my eyes, and the other boys come around behind me and looked, and Canada give a whoop and shot out the room and spread the news around. I sat froze to my bed, and the first 1 I saw was Pop in my mind, and I said, “I must send a wire to Pop.”
“I have sent 1,” said Mike.
“I better get moving,” I said, and I begun to cram things in my bags.
Mike laughed. “Do not be in such a hurry, Hank. I have got your plane reservations for 11 tonight,” and I sat back down, and Mike said, “I hope it is the right thing.”
“I am ready,” said I.
“Yes, you are ready,” said he. “But you have still got many things to learn.” He fussed and fidgeted, and finally he said, “I will tell you the truth, for you will hear nothing but lies from now on. You are a natural ballplayer. You have won 21 games this year. You are a regular horse for work. Yet you have got things to learn. When you get up to the Mammoths there will be 1 man that will be no end of help to you.”
“That is Sad Sam Yale,” said I.
“No,” said he, “it is not Sam. Do not listen to a single word said by Sam Yale. Do not play cards with him. Do not drink with him. Do not lend him money nor borrow any. If you see him with a woman put that woman down in your book as a tramp, for if she is not a tramp at the start Sad Sam will make her 1. Everything that Yale touches will turn to shit. Except only 1 thing, and that is a baseball. When he is pitching you must glue your eyes to him and never take them off. You must learn to watch him and never listen to him, and you will learn much about baseball and much about life.”
“Then who is the man that will help me?” said I.
“That is Red Traphagen,” said he, meaning the Mammoth catcher. “When he says something that has got to do with playing baseball you must hang on his every word like it was the word of God. He is the smartest ballplayer in baseball today. If he did not have so much respect for his own personal self-respect he would be in line to be a manager. But he will not brown-nose. On the ball field he will talk only about baseball, and you must listen. If you can remember to do it write it down afterwards and study it once in a while. But when you are off the field do not pay him no more mind then if he was a pillar or a post. He is all full of chatter and nonsense. He does not believe in God. That is 1 thing I hold against Red. A ballplayer must believe in God.” Mike was quite religious himself and went almost every Sunday. I did not know if I believed in God or not. I rather suppose I did not, but I said nothing.
I said, “It is sad to me to hear what you say of Sad Sam Yale.”
“Yes,” said he, “it is sad. It is always sad when a great ballplayer goes wrong as a man. I am not telling you these things out of anything personal. I am telling them to you because I want you to be a great and immortal ballplayer. You have all the makings. You learn fast and never forget. But never listen to Sam nor the men that is his pals. If they was once good in their heart they are good no longer, for Sam Yale has did them in. Steer clear of Knuckles Johnson and Goose Williams and Swanee Wilks.” Mike grabbed the water pitcher and took a swig, and then he took some ice from the tray and dumped it in the pitcher and sloshed it around. “There is nothing more to tell,” said he. “Remember that the parks will be bigger then in the Mountain League. But do not let this make you over-confident. Do not relax too much at first. When you are in trouble rely on your curve and forget the fast 1. Do not forget that the boys you will be throwing against will be hitting harder then any you have ever faced. Remember that you will be throwing against the very best ballplayers in the world. True, some of the best ballplayers in the world will be on your side, too.
“Henry, I will tell you the damn truth. The damn truth is that I can tell you no more about baseball. You are already a fine young pitcher. When you are up there you will be playing the same game you been playing all your life. The ball will be the same, and the bases will be the same 90 feet apart, and there will be 9 men to a side, and the game is still decided by who scores the most runs. The main thing is not half so much the other teams but your own men that you will be playing with and traveling with and be close to every hour of the day from February to October. I have told you what I know about the men. The rest I do not know so well. They are young men. Let me see,” and he leaned back and begun to reel off the men on his fingers. “The Carucci brothers, they are Roman Catholics of the Italian race, and good boys, and they stick together. I do not know them, nor I do not know Lucky Judkins, for he is young and new. Scotty Burns and Sunny Jim Trotter is the rest of the outfielders. They do not mix in with the rest. They stay to theirselves and sometimes I think this is best.
“Ugly Jones and Gene Park are steady hands. You can depend on them. I do not know Goldman or Gonzalez. Gonzalez does not speak the language, and he is just as well off. They are the kind of young men that Dutch is trying to build a club around. That is your infield, for the rest will be cut loose.” Mike looked at Coker and Perry and Canada. “Here is the rest of your infielders right there in their underwear if they show up good in Aqua Clara in the spring. That is a secret amongst us 5, but it is the straight dope from Dutch.
“Red Traphagen will catch about 135 games a year. I have spoke about him and Goose. Bruce Pearson is your other catcher. He was big-time when I sent him up, but he does not get enough work. This has knocked his spirits all to hell.
“The pitching is young. If the pitching comes through you will have a winner up there in New York in the next year or 2. It all depends. Sam and Knuckles and Horse Byrd is your only veterans. Carroll I do not know. Castetter was sent down today, and he will never go back up. That leaves Sterling and Gil Willowbrook and Macy, plus Lindon Burke and yourself. Tell Lindon that if he gives himself 10 seconds between pitches he will help his control.” Mike kept looking off in the distance, like he was in a dream. There was more he had on his mind to say, and we knowed it, and we waited, and he did not say it. I always wonder what it was, and I wonder to this day. Yet he said nothing but only rose and said, “I will see you boys at the park tonight,” meaning Coker and Canada and Perry.
“I will be there, too,” said I, “for my plane does not leave till 11.”
Mike laughed, and he said, “There is no need, but it is up to you.” Then he left, and we begun to dress for supper.
I got in uniform that night and worked out. The crowd give me a fine hand when I come on the field, for they had by now read it in the paper, and I tipped my hat and played pepper with some of the boys. Then I moved down to first base and took a hand in the drill and kept pretty loose.
After the drill I ducked back through the dugout and into the clubhouse, and I was alone. I showered and dressed, feeling sad. I cleaned out my locker. The 4 of us had lockers together, 1 right after the other, and I stuck a note in their lockers, and it said, “I will see you in Aqua Clara in the spring, and we will be in the Series next October. Good luck. Your friend, HENRY WIGGEN.”
Then out I went, catching a cab on Rocky Mountain Avenue. We heard about 2 innings along the way, the Cowboys pasting the hell out of Denver. Perry hit a home run with 2 on in the third. The cabbie asked me if I had ever saw the Cowboys play. He said it was the best club they had in Q. C. in quite some years. I said I had saw them play once or twice and thought particularly high of that fellow by the name of Wiggen. He told me that Wiggen was signed on by the Mammoths and had went off that very day to New York by air. “What is your line of work?” said he to me.
“I am a heaver in the horsehide plant,” said I. That was a joke that me and Coker and Perry and Canada played on people. We would run into some people in a restaurant or a bowling alley or somewheres and get to talking, and they would say, “What do you boys do?” Then Coker would speak up. “We work in the horsehide plant,” he would say. “This here is Henry, and he is a heaver, and this here is Perry, and he is a scooper. I work alongside of Perry. This here is Canada, and he works the far throw.”
They would say, “What is the far throw?”
“Why,” said Coker, “everybody knows what a far throw is. Only a particularly pinheaded person would not know.”
“Oh,” they would say. “A far throw. I did not hear you right at first.”
The cabbie said, “You are a what in a what?”
“A heaver in the horsehide plant,” said I. “Sometimes I am a swatter, but mostly I am a heaver.”
“Where is that?” said he, “for I seem to forget.”
“Why, it is over there near the ball park. Do you mean to say you are a cabbie and do not know where the horsehide plant is?” said I.
“Oh,” said he, “the horsehide plant. Why do you not speak up when you speak?”
At the airport I picked up my tickets and weighed my bags through and bought some insurance out of a machine, 50,000 dollars made out to the New York Mammoths. What a simple soul! Then I read some magazines while they dillied and dallied until finally they left us on the plane. The last I heard we beat Denver 15–3, but I could not get the details, and I have never been back to Q. C. since.