CHAPTER 2

The problem of arranging for my appearance on the mound was left up to me. But once I had the magazine’s approval, I dallied around for a while. I went up again to the stadium, sitting this time high over the field in the first row of the third tier where the ushers periodically remind you over your shoulder to keep the paper cups of drinks off the cement balustrade. Far below, Chicago’s Early Wynn performed against the Yankees. I watched him carefully. In a few weeks I would be out there myself—I thought uncomfortably—in that perfect circle of the mound around the slab of rubber, in front the raw marks kicked up by the flurry of the pitcher’s motion, and then back, almost on the infield grass, the white sock of the rosin bag which Wynn didn’t touch that day, being one of the few pitchers who doesn’t use it to dust his fingers dry. He calls the pitcher’s mound his “office—a place where I conduct my business,” and he performed in it with a mean toughness, a pathological hatred of the batter, staring down at him, unshaven, with a baleful glare evident even from the third tier. From up there the malevolence had a physical quality: an attitude of carriage, a heavy sloping walk from the mound when he was done with an inning, moving for the dugout glaring ahead hard as if he was going in there to destroy something in the shadows by the watercooler—a batter, any batter, you felt, they were the enemy, even those on his own team, and you noticed they sat apart from him in the dugout. He is a fair hitter for a pitcher, but when he came up to bat he struck out quickly with cumbersome strokes—like ax strokes—and he stepped away from the plate sloughing his spikes through the grass as if he’d fouled them in the silage of the batter’s box. I wondered about that attitude, so noticeable, wondering how long the belligerency blazed, if it was steady, or if after the game in the locker room it faded, and he shaved and felt better about things, perhaps sufficiently to let a batter precede him through the clubhouse door on the way out, and then a pleasant equanimity existing until his next pitching assignment approached, and with it the temper slowly stirring up, rising like a thick yeast.

As I watched him pitch, what began to stir in me that day was not an attitude, but a move of uneasiness which induced cigarettes and under the seat I kept a paper cup of beer, sipping from it and forgetting and putting it up on the balustrade. Down below, the pitcher’s circle seemed an alien place, and I looked at it as the apprentice fighter must see the ring the first time he comes up the aisle, seeing it under the harsh lights and the officials leaning on the ropes, waiting. Wynn pitched a four- or five-hitter that day, as I recall, an efficient execution, and I remember observing later that it was a performance that lacked character—simply a passionate yet cold and grim extinction of the batters.

So his performance was methodical; you felt he was impervious to all influences but his own rage. The Yankee bench never tried to rile him; even the big crowd was quiet. On my way home I wondered if such a pitcher could find in his career one moment, one act, that was a monument to the rest, and I doubted it in Wynn’s case. In some careers it was easy to spot—the grand gesture that reflected ability and character: Babe Ruth’s called-shot home run in Chicago, the slugger pointing into the deep right-field stands, and then hitting a baseball in there and into the derision which expired abruptly in those thousands of throats; or Ted Williams’s last home run into the late-autumn gloom of Fenway Park, marking his last at bat with a gesture that served less to punctuate his career, rounding it off neatly, than to show once again his contempt for critics who doubted his artistry. In Wynn’s career you felt that there was no such moment—that one victory was indefinable from another, the sum of them merging as an unrelenting continuous vendetta.…

It wasn’t an attribute I could associate with my own career as a pitcher. In school, I had been a fanatic about pitching, throwing stones at tree trunks when there wasn’t anyone to play catch with, but my pitching since those days had started a slow descent into decadence. At college, baseball became associated with beer tankards tilted in the grass—informal games where you forgot the score finally and played with softballs, as big as grapefruits, and as unsatisfactory to hit as pillows. And then eventually the nadir was reached in a game of softball organized in a meadow in France, the last game I played in before appearing in the stadium. I didn’t tell the editor about it. Most of the participants had never played baseball before. It had to be explained to them as we went along. We used a brightly colored beach ball which didn’t travel far in the thick grass of the meadow—bordered on one side by a canal and behind us the Château of Maillebois. The only beaten-down place in the meadow was for two wicker-cased bottles of the vin du pays with glasses propped up around. We had two bats: one a broomstick, the other a fence post so heavy that you felt you had to begin to swing it as soon as the ball left the pitcher’s hand. Out in left field was a young countess, playing in bare feet, and separated from her friend in right field—an ash-blond girl in toreador pants—by a male center fielder, so the two girls wouldn’t get to chatting with each other. The center fielder was very serious about the game: with every pitch he went forward on his toes to get a jump on the ball in case it was hit out his way. He was the one who had suggested the game at lunch in the château—had explained it gravely and organized everyone.

The countess’s husband was pitching and she watched him. Sometimes she would call warmly to him “Ah, Teddy” just to let him know she hadn’t gone, and he would turn and see her there in the meadow and behind her a stand of cypress trees.

Early in the game the owner of the château came to bat. He refused to remove a blue boating blazer he was wearing; he disdained advice on the proper batting form, and arranged himself in a crouched stance in which he stood on home plate and faced the pitcher head-on—like a tennis player receiving service. He picked out the first pitch thrown near him and with a convulsive sweep of his bat he smacked a towering hit out to the countess in left field. She gave a little high cry, as faint and forlorn as a curlew’s; her mouth remained open as she stared into the sky, and she threw up her arms dramatically, fingers wide, the epitome of Anguish in a Victorian mezzotint, and thus she stood rooted while the ball arched over her head and landed beyond her, rolling briefly for the cypress trees. She turned and ran for it, calling out her husband’s name “Teddy! Ted-dy!” and we saw her reach the spot where the ball had dropped, fall down, and rise again with the bright ball in her hand; holding it at arm’s length she began to spin as stiffly as a weathercock revolving in a capricious wind—working up speed in her turns until she let go, like a hammer thrower, and we watched the ball sail briefly against the sky, headed away from us, a toss that almost reached the distant barrier of cypress. She ran for it again. It was evident from her lack of direction, however, and from her peculiar throwing motion, her light cotton dress spinning at her knees, that the countess might twirl the ball and then herself out of sight, beyond the grove or into the canal. Before she could reach the ball the second time, the zealous center fielder, who’d been shouting, “Peg it to second, Gabrielle!” and yelling at the second baseman to move out for the “cutoff,” beat the countess to the ball, sidestepped her headlong rush, and threw the ball mightily toward the infield.

There the château owner, the gold buttons glinting on his blazer, had watched his hit tower over the countess’s head, and then, carrying the bat with him, had charged off through the tall grass, swishing through it with great bounds toward third base, and from there, egged on by a multitude of shouts, he swooped frantically from base to base with all the hysteria of an owl trapped in a pantry—shouting Gallic oaths until the center fielder’s toss was retrieved by the second baseman, who approached, knees wobbly from laughter, and tagged him out in the vicinity of the pitcher’s position. The center fielder wasn’t quite so serious after that. The helter-skelter routes of the play were marked by scores of tiny white butterflies flushed up by those hurried passages through the grass and they hung briefly over the meadow as luminous as fireflies.

Afterward, much later, someone knocked the ball into the canal, where it landed with a thonk, bounced a few times, and floated, turning slightly, just out of reach. We coaxed it out finally, lying on our bellies above the water’s edge and prodding for it with the longer of the two bats, and I remember myriad little green frogs leaping out from under us as if our weight had squeezed them out of the canal bank. It was the end of the day, and when we walked up through the dusk there were lights burning in one of the château towers.…