CHAPTER 1
On a late summer’s day I was in New York’s Yankee Stadium, up there on a weekday, and able to get a seat in the sun behind the third-base dugout. I don’t ever remember being as close to a major league baseball diamond. The players were only yards away. You could see their jaws working on chaws or gum, and every once in a while you’d hear a snatch of conversation.
The game started, and along about the fifth inning Mickey Mantle stepped up and hit a home run over the right-field wall. I watched the high, long flight of the ball, and then looked at the pitcher. He was peering into the depths of his glove—a rather proud figure, I thought, trying his best to snub that last minute and Mantle’s explosive force from existence. But he couldn’t do it. At the last second, just as Mantle was trotting in from third, he peeked up from his glove and took one sorrowful glance at the heavy-striding Yankee whose power only seconds before had made his ears, in Paul Gallico’s fine phrase, feel “long and furry.”
The pitcher got through the inning without further difficulty. After the last out he came walking in toward the third-base dugout, his head down, what I could see of it as bland as a vicar’s—not a twitch in it—and then suddenly as he reached the top step of the dugout, just a couple of yards from me, his face contorted and I heard him shout at his teammates, “D’ja get a load of that? That crumbum! Threw him a—” and then his head ducked down into the dugout. I envied him—even his difficulty with Mantle. I leaned far out of my seat trying to hear—hoping to get some indication of what it was like to face Mantle from the pitcher’s mound, to see him begin to uncoil his swing at a pitch, and yet I knew that no matter how articulate the pitcher, still it wouldn’t be enough. It was something you had to experience yourself to know truly, and as I sat there in the summer sun I suddenly began to wonder, timidly, if there wasn’t some way of climbing the field-box railings and getting out there to the pitcher’s mound to try it myself—under major league conditions—just to see what it was like and how I’d get along.
In Spain they have a word for a fellow struck by this sort of foolishness. An espontáneo they call him—the haunted young man who starts moving down from his cheap seat toward the bullring, perching on the end of the seats, upturning the wine flask and hissing a fine stream of wine into the back of his throat, then moving on down until with a sudden rush he drops into the callejón, vaults the barrera, and runs across the open sand of the bullring, perhaps with a cape he’s smuggled in under his shirt but more likely with a rag of a raincoat held before him, moving jerkily but quickly toward the bull—he hasn’t much time—and then with a great wash of noise he’s noticed; everyone sees him—the crowd, the matador and his cuadrilla, the bull. He’ll have less than a minute to perform before the bull is distracted from him, and if he survives, and even if his feet betray him before the bull’s rush, he’ll hear what he’s done it for—the roar of applause in his ears as he’s hustled off, given the bum’s rush with such dispatch that with his feet an inch or so above the ground he jiggles between the hurrying ring attendants like a loosely stuffed straw man.
This sort of exhibitionism is unknown in America. We are a vociferous people, to be sure, and a good hand-cupped yell in support of the team of his choice will lift a man, red-necked, two or three inches out of his seat, and his neighbors out of theirs if his vocal effort is startling enough, but then invariably he sags back down when his breath is done and looks around for the hot-dog vendor. Sometimes, of course, a drunk will take the field, and once or twice a summer at Yankee Stadium a quartet of men in tight trousers and white shirts drop over the low right-field fence with a banner bearing a long political message they intend to display to the stands. They never rehearse, apparently; despite frantic maneuvering on the field they rarely get their bedsheeted banner spread out more than to show a word or two of their slogan, cuba sí…, usually upside down, and then the police move for them. Entwined in their sheets like Laocoön and his sons in the serpents’ grip, they’re collared easily and bundled out—rushed for the exits past outfielders, ignoring the disturbance, tossing a baseball back and forth to keep their arms limber.
These men are Latins, who take the dividing line between spectator and playing field very lightly. In Southern Europe and the South American countries a triple strand of barbed wire is often put around the field to keep the citizens out of the soccer matches; even so the referees run nervously about their duties, keeping an eye cocked to the sidelines for the sudden flow of spectators overrunning the fence to avenge a wrong decision with quick violence.
In the Northern countries only the Welsh seem to have similar tendencies. Like the Latins, they have big, fine voices, and at heart the Welshman is a performer. You see him erupt onto the field during the great soccer and rugger internationals abroad, usually appearing just before the game starts to get the undivided attention of the massed tiers of spectators. He will come across the sidelines wearing a long overcoat, like a circus clown’s, a woolen scarf looped round his neck, and in his hand he carries a leek, the onion-like plant which is the national emblem of the Welsh, waving this thing, a forlorn figure down there but strutting cockily and buoyed along by the vibrant thunder of patriotic songs from the Welsh stands, a sound you hear blocks from the stadium and which from your seat is so powerful and stirring that the comic cavorting of the distant figure comes as a relief. The police gather and go after him. They move at a slow walk. But in their numbers they move across the field in long, treacherous coils like an anaconda—escaped once or twice by the taunting Welshman but not for long: a quick constriction and they’ve got him. The leek flails briefly and feebly, and the Welshman is lifted quickly off the field by two bobbies who support him between them gingerly and with the disdain of two butlers removing a miscreant six-year-old. The Welsh spectators yell their chagrin. But then another Welshman jumps out onto the field and starts that same cocky walk, the long woolen scarf with the Welsh colors trailing, and when the police enfold him he’ll have his successors. The Welsh are a hard people to keep in their seats—the espontáneos of the north.
Comparatively, in America we are content to stay behind the box railings. I recall a middle-aged man, an Illinois alumnus, who rushed onto the football field and tried to tackle Michigan’s great Tommy Harmon just at the end of a long touchdown run. But he did it, apparently, not to show off, or out of temper even, but simply out of exasperation, and a truly overwhelming desire to help his alma mater stop the brilliant halfback. He was unsuccessful, missed his tackle and fell sprawling, and I remember the news photos of him—a portly man in an overcoat sadly getting up from his knees.
Among American sportswriters, however, there was one famous espontáneo: Paul Gallico, at one time the highest-paid sportswriter in New York, a big burly bespectacled man with a stooped but powerful build, and quick reflexes, good enough with an épée in his hand to win fencing championships. In the days before he gave up sports reporting to write about snow geese, and charwomen in the boutique of Christian Dior’s fashion house, Gallico believed that it was helpful for a sportswriter to have played or at least attempted to play the games he would be called upon to describe in his stories—if only that he would gain a better understanding of what athletes were up against and what they were trying to do. In a book entitled Farewell to Sport Gallico devoted one chapter—called “The Feel”—to some of his experiences. He described, among other things, catching Herb Pennock’s curveball, playing tennis against Vinnie Richards, golf with Bobby Jones, and what it was like coming down the Olympic ski run six thousand feet above Garmisch—quite a feat considering he had been on skis only once before in his life. Whichever sport he tried was at the championship level, except water polo, which he refused to do at all. In his primal and tremendous curiosity with regard to sensation—to see “what it was like”—it wasn’t enough to climb into the boxing ring and be hit by a fair middleweight. In 1922, in Saratoga Springs, fresh out of Columbia, Gallico arranged to climb into the ring and box one round with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, then preparing for his fight with Luis Firpo. Dempsey stalked him, whacked him down to the canvas, and when Gallico left the ring he was shaking, bleeding slightly from his mouth, rosin dust on his trunks, his head singing, and, as he wrote, “knowing all there was to know about being hit in the ring. It seems I had gone to an expert for tuition.”
When I came home that day from Yankee Stadium, I wondered if it would be possible to emulate Gallico, yet go further by writing at length and in depth about each sport and what it was like to participate. The impulse to try kept nagging. But what had set me off—the possibility of playing in a major league baseball game—seemed so remote and preposterous that, having caught briefly on the edge of my mind, the whole idea would have vanished in a day or so if I hadn’t read a news story the next morning which reported that after the World Series, then over a month away, an exhibition game was scheduled in Yankee Stadium between an All-Star team from the American League captained by Mickey Mantle, and a National League team led by Willie Mays. The rosters were impressive; just about everybody who had played in the official All-Star game earlier that summer was included: Whitey Ford, Nellie Fox, Billy Pierce, Harvey Kuenn, Billy Martin, and Frank Malzone of the American League, and, among others, on the National League team, Frank Thomas, Bill Mazeroski, Bob Friend, Richie Ashburn, Gil Hodges, and Ernie Banks. I read the short announcement and the list of players, wondering if the occasion would give me a chance to participate. It was billed as an All-Star game, but being off-season and an exhibition, perhaps it would be relaxed and informal enough so that I might be allowed in to pitch an inning. It seemed unlikely, but for a few days I kept toying with the notion of doing something about it until I began to be plagued by those half-forgotten boyhood dreams of heroics on the major league baseball diamond, so many of them flooding my mind that finally I took the newspaper clipping and went to see Sid James, the editor of Sports Illustrated.
At that time the magazine was situated in Rockefeller Center. James had an office on the southwest corner, and past him, as he rocked and swayed in a swivel chair which squeaked badly, you could see down the length of 48th Street—clear to the Hudson River on a good day. I knew James well. I had done work for him previously. When I gave him the clipping, he pushed back his swivel chair to give himself turning room and with a shove of his foot began to dip and revolve, only briefly, because the article was short, and then he pulled himself back up to the desk with a sudden squeal of swivel-chair wheels. He said: “Well, sure, but what’s in this for us?”
“The fact of the matter is,” I said, “that I’d like to play in that game. I’m a pitcher. I want to pitch in it.”
“I see,” he said slowly. His chair was now absolutely still.
“Mind you, I want to write about what happens,” I said defensively. “I mean that’s the purpose of the project.”
“Sure.”
“I’ve no pretensions about any sudden career as a pitcher,” I assured him. “I mean I’m not trying to use my… ah… vague connections with Sports Illustrated to wangle a big-league tryout, or anything like that.”
“That would be a novel idea,” he said. “Incidentally, you can pitch, can’t you?”
“I pitched at school,” I told him, “and at college a bit, and once or twice in the army. But the point is,” I went on, “that I would pitch not as a hotshot—that’d be a different story—but as a guy who’s average, really, a sort of Mr. Everybody, the sort who thinks he’s a fair athlete, a good tennis player, but always finds himself put out in the second round of the club tournament by the sandy-haired member who wears a hearing aid.”
The author pitching as a youngster on the St. Bernard’s School team. (Plimpton Estate)
There was a leather sofa behind me and I sat down in it. “James Thurber,” I said obliquely, “once wrote that the majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees. That’s my fellow, you see, lying there staring at the bedroom ceiling… the bases loaded, and he’s imagining himself coming in from the bullpen, when downstairs the screen door squeaks open and smacks to, and who comes charging up the stairs and into the bedroom but Casey Stengel, there in the flesh, you see… plunging through the bedroom door and leaning over the bed to shout at our fellow there that he’d a hunch, a big hunch, the biggest hunch of his managing career, namely, that our fellow was going to solve his relief pitching problem, and that he’d better get up to the stadium and suit up the next afternoon… and our fellow—despite his protestations, despite the fact that he hadn’t gripped a ball in ten years—did take a taxi the next day, and there he is in the dugout trying to spit neatly between his shoes like everyone else, and in the middle of the game sent in by Stengel with the bases loaded, just like his dream, but it isn’t, you see… he’s really up there on the mound, sweating, the ball as unfamiliar in his hand as something dead… and what I want to write about is what happens to him…”
“Well, that’s vivid enough,” said James. “Frankly it’s the sort of nightmare thing we should hope never happens to anyone we know.”
“I was exaggerating, perhaps,” I said.
“Lord,” said James. “The thought of Stengel leaning over a bed and shouting about a big hunch.”
He pushed back his chair and began to swoop and revolve in it, the springs squeaking violently under him. “Quite a project,” he said finally. “And you’re willing to be that fool guinea pig? Go up there and pitch?”
“Well, I can try,” I said. “If it works out—the article I mean—then perhaps I could do some more sports: tennis with Pancho Gonzalez, boxing with Archie Moore, football, chess, and so forth, and golf with Snead or Hogan…”
James suddenly came forward in his chair. “You know that’s interesting what Thurber writes,” he said. “It’s an awful commentary on the American male—to think he has his mind on such things—but let me tell you what I often find myself doing in bed at three a.m.” He leaned forward, peering past me into the anteroom as if to make sure no one would overhear. “I sink these long, these incredibly long putts,” he whispered. He didn’t play a full eighteen holes, I was to understand—the action all took place on one immense green. The pleasure came in preparation: reading the green, testing the wind, endless waggling with the putter, and then finally executing the crisp stroke—the ball traveling smoothly over an eternity of green before dropping into the cup with a distant but authoritative rattle.…
James paused, and I think if only briefly he was watching a golf ball start to roll across the scope of his inner mind. But then he picked up a pencil and tapped it sharply on the desk. “Well,” he said. “I think the project sounds fine, sounds OK. You just go ahead, and when you think you need us, we’ll do what we can to help.”
I could hear a rustling of papers in the anteroom and the whispering of secretaries which indicated my time was up.
“I don’t see why it can’t be arranged,” he said. “Seems to me,” he continued as I stood up, “that your big problem isn’t going to be arranging these… er… matches, or writing about what you go through, but getting through everything in one piece… in a word: survival. I would advise getting in shape.”