CHAPTER 3

I hurried home from the stadium after seeing Wynn pitch, promising myself that I would train severely—to resuscitate myself from such decadent pastimes as throwing a beach ball under the towers of Maillebois. But the chances came rarely. A week before my scheduled appearance I threw some twenty or thirty pitches to a friend in a field in Bedford Village, but he was wearing a left-hander’s glove with no padding, which caused him to let out an occasional sharp yell when the ball caught his palm cruelly. The yell was involuntary, but disconcerting, and after a while his nephew, aged four, wanted to throw the ball around, and rather gratefully we let him.

In New York City, in my apartment, I was able to do only the mildest form of training. I had a baseball (faintly discolored by the dim signatures of the 1940 St. Louis Cardinal team) which I would hold for a time in my hand, jiggling it, getting the feel of it, and then finally I’d wind up and throw it ten or fifteen feet into an armchair. I also bought a rubber ball to squeeze, to strengthen the pitching wrist—doing all this quite seriously. Carl Hubbell was a rubber-ball squeezer. Bob Feller, the great Cleveland fastballer who holds the astonishing major league record of twelve one-hit games, along with his three no-hitters, spent much of his time not only gripping baseballs and rubber balls in his room, but also wrenching powerful handsprings, and he’d stand around for minutes at a time tossing eight-pound metal balls up and down in the palm of his pitching hand. You were supposed to keep training, even indoors, even if you just sat quietly in the lobby resting your eyes. In his hotel room, Ted Williams of the Red Sox used to survey and perfect his swing by swishing bats in front of hotel mirrors, and on one occasion, misjudging the arc of his swing badly, he demolished a bed which had in it his roommate at the time, a pitcher called Broadway Charlie Wagner.

I found that I didn’t have the self-discipline necessary for such dedicated practice. I couldn’t squeeze my rubber ball for more than a few minutes at a time. You squeeze a ball for a while, and you look at what you’re doing and you say “What the hell…” and you drop the ball into the back of the bureau drawer. Moreover, I did nothing to get my legs in shape; I continued to smoke, and keep late hours, and break training rules that I never really established. I tried to comfort myself with Satchel Paige’s theory about the futility of severe training. “I don’t generally like running,” said the great pitcher. “I believe in training by rising gently up and down from the bench.”

One of the difficulties was that I had to spend much of my time on the phone talking to agents, promoters, and officials—trying to get permission to appear in the exhibition game. I had a short set speech prepared—explaining what I wanted to do—but it didn’t sound like much over the phone. If you thought about it—wanting to pitch in Yankee Stadium—it was such a preposterous notion that it was difficult not to sound like a boy who expresses a desire to drive a locomotive. In my case there would be a snort at the other end of the line; sometimes whoever I was talking to would say “Whazzat? Let’s go through that again, hey?” and when he heard the speech a second time, he would say “What d’ja want to do that for?” before referring you quickly to someone else in the vast hierarchy of officialdom, which meant that the whole process could start again.

The man to whom I was referred quite often was Frank Scott, the players’ agent—a powerful figure in the world of professional athletics. He is often described as the October Santa—parlaying World Series heroics into lucrative engagements on the banquet circuit for the outstanding players. He’s such a success at making money for athletes off the playing field that almost any day on television you can see his clients selling things, showering, shaving. That year many of his ballplayers were hiding behind sandpaper masks in a razor-blade commercial. Sometimes you can see his players extolling a product vocally—their eyes following the lines on the prompt cards.

He was closely identified with a group promoting the game, and he and I had a number of conversations over the phone—always pleasant, but he was skeptical. Most of the time he wanted to know who was to be held responsible. Suppose I got killed. All sorts of things happened on the pitcher’s mound. Did I remember Herb Score and that terrible line drive which nearly blinded him? Or suppose I beaned somebody. Did I want to have a Ray Chapman on my conscience—the fellow Carl Mays killed with his submarine ball?

Finally, in the heat of the World Series, with the exhibition game only a few days away and my appearance still not guaranteed, I took my problem to Toots Shor—the paterfamilias of sports in New York City. He had his old restaurant then, on 52nd Street, where he presided over the oval trough of his big mahogany bar, padding around it to keep company with his faithful who hold belligerently to his oft-quoted belief that a soft drink is something to be consumed between 3:00 and 3:05 p.m.

He took a moment off to listen to what I wanted to do. Halfway through he interrupted: “Yeh, yeh… Gallico, Paul Gallico did that years ago… Jack Dempsey creamed him.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“You gonna box too?”

I told him I was in the light-heavyweight division and hoped to get in the ring, if briefly, with champion Archie Moore.

“You want some advice?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Buy out that diet of Archie’s, and use it—get yourself down to the flyweight division,” Toots said. His blue eyes shut tight and his mouth yawned open like a French clown’s as the laughter began to shake him. When he’d quieted down, he said: “You do what I tell you, hear? May be saving your life. Buy that diet. Or get real nervous: that’s a good way to lose weight.”

“Toots, thanks a lot,” I said. “But at the moment I’m worrying about baseball. I just can’t seem to get started.”

I explained how I’d been talking into phones for almost three weeks and I couldn’t find anyone to authorize my appearance.

“What you need is cash,” he said. “That’s all—cash. Get your editor to put up cash.”

“What for?” I asked naively.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “What you got to do is tell Frank Scott you got maybe a thousand dollars for his players to divide up, and they’ll be so anxious to have you pitch they’ll carry you out to the pitcher’s mound in a goddamn divan.”

Just then my editor, who ate there often, came hurrying past the bar on his way to lunch in the dining room. He had his head down and was moving swiftly, but Toots Shor noticed him and shouted: “Hey Sid, hey SID!” Shor has a very loud voice; some of his cronies refer to him as the Loud Adolescent.

James reeled around and sped in toward us without breaking stride, hurrying quickly to lessen the range of the barragelike voice that had turned every head at the bar.

“God Almighty, Toots, what’s the matter?” he asked.

“Kid here needs cash,” said Toots, pointing at me. “He wants to throw baseballs up there in the stadium, so that means big money for the kid.”

James looked at me.

“It has to do with the project—the baseball game,” I explained.

“Oh yes,” he asked. “I recall.”

“Whassamatter?” continued Toots. “You Henry Luce guys cheap over there in Rockefeller Center or something?” He brought down a cuffing affectionate blow on James’s shoulder blades with an arm that had once hustled troublemakers out of Leon & Eddie’s nightclub.

“Look,” said Toots. “Set up a prize. Put up a thousand. The kid’ll pitch and the team that gets the most hits off him will divvy up the thousand…”

James looked off toward the dining room. “Not a bad idea,” he said.

“Well, what about it?” Toots insisted.

“Why not?” said James slowly.

“Sure,” said Toots expansively. He went into more detail.

I would pitch a half hour or so before the scheduled game, first against the entire batting order of the National League, with the American League in the field, and then, while I puffed out there on the mound, the teams would change sides, and I’d start in pitching against the American League. Sports Illustrated’s $1,000 prize would be awarded to whichever team got the most hits. We decided there was no point in the pitchers batting, so that meant I’d face eight batters from each team.

There, in its simplicity, was the final plan. James, looking down at his shoes, agreed to it, and then went slowly in and had his lunch.

“That’s a lot of pitching,” someone said. “Sixteen men in a row.”

“Nah. It’s a breeze,” said Toots Shor. “Go and phone Frank Scott and see what he says.”

So I phoned Scott and told him about the $1,000 prize. He said, “Well, well, well, that’s fine, that’s fine.”

“What about the responsibility?” I asked him. I couldn’t resist it.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well, suppose someone bops me out there with a line drive. Or suppose I kill somebody out there with my sneaky submarine ball.”

“Listen,” he said. “Everything’s going to be OK. You keep yourself in shape and I’ll see you out there Sunday at the ballpark. We’ll work out the details then.”

He hung up.