CHAPTER 4

Not long after, I went down to see the promoters in a small office off Union Square to report to them about the prize. Also I wanted to buy a good ticket for a friend of mine who as statistician and observer would sit in the stands and keep careful notes on my performance. I paid for the ticket, and then I asked if they had any advice for me. A promoter named Julie Issacson swiveled around in his chair and asked me if I’d bought any equipment.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t done anything about it… thought I’d borrow some… maybe up at the stadium.”

“Where’d you get that idea at,” he said sharply, “that you can borrow equipment up there? Geezus.” He stuck a cigar out at me, and said: “Very important, what I tell you. Listen. Ballplayers are superstitious—since I am around them all my life and played ball myself eight years I can tell you they are superstitious something terrible.”

“I see,” I said.

“Never talk to a ballplayer about his slump, that’s the first thing. I mean if you ask him things like ‘To what do you attribute the cause of your slump?’ something like that, he bops you one for asking that—know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s not so good to ask him about the wife and kids, but something real personal like a slump, don’t go nagging him about it.

“Then,” he said, “the next thing is never—and kid, look out!—touch anything that belongs to a ballplayer: his equipment, his bat, his glove. You go sticking your hands in a ballplayer’s mitt and he breaks your jaw for you, know what I mean? He thinks maybe you’ll throw him in a slump. So don’t go picking up their mitts or bats. Right, boys?” He turned to the other promoters. There were four of them in the office.

“Right, Julie,” they all said.

I promised them I’d bring my own equipment. What Issacson had said was surely so. For example, there was Benny Kauff, of the New York Giants, who was obsessed with the theory that his slumps were caused because his bats were tired, and he rested them—and it was easy to appreciate his rage if you picked up a bat of his, one of those recuperating bats, and swished it around. Or big John “Chief” Meyers, also of the Giants, who was convinced each bat contained exactly one hundred hits—how he’d take it if you swiped that bat and reduced its quota by going up and hitting a single with it. And it wasn’t only bats. Any piece of equipment seemed endowed with mystical properties. Wes Ferrell, a pitcher on the Boston Red Sox, once blamed a streak of wildness on a new glove he’d just finished breaking in, and when his manager, Joe Cronin, came out and lifted him, he strode for the dugout shouting at the glove, “It’s your fault, your damn fault,” and with the ripping strength of one possessed he dismembered the glove and dropped it behind him as he ducked into the dugout—done with it, leaving it as sad on the edge of the grass as a discarded shoe.

So when I left Issacson’s office I started to outfit myself. I picked up a uniform in a downtown sporting goods shop, and uptown I dropped into a sports shop just off Fifth Avenue and bought a Gil McDougald fielder’s glove for $4.50. The store had more expensive models on display (a good mitt costs $15) but I picked out the McDougald because its price seemed properly pegged to the amount of pitching I’d planned to do. It had leather-thong bindings and a pre-oiled pocket. I looked over the bats, hefting them, swinging them easily in the little shop. Even the light 32-ounce bats seemed heavy. I should have bought one. I had a bat at home, I knew, but I didn’t realize until I looked at it later that it was a softball model. It had a name. It was called the “Little Bomber.”

That afternoon I tried out the glove. It seemed essential to get in at least a couple of hours of practice before the game, so with the glove in the back of the car I drove out to the Palisades with Walter Bingham of the Sports Illustrated staff. We thought we’d throw the ball around, and since I’d probably get a chance to bat the next day, take a few turns in the amusement park’s batting cage. I’d never been in one of those cages before. Bingham explained it was a wire-enclosed area with a machine at one end which served up pitches at varying speeds.

We drove up the West Side Highway in bright cool football weather. On the playgrounds next to the parkway the Saturday games were going on, the footballs twisting across the worn grass, and over the car radio we listened to the Army football team, two thousand miles away, strain toward the Rice Institute goal line.

When we got within sight of the park we could see the high towering screens of the batting cage, but no sign of activity amid the gaudy clutter of Ferris wheels and rocket rides. We parked the car in an empty lot behind a restaurant and walked across to the only concession that appeared to be open—a miniature golf course. It was tended by a man sitting in a wooden candy-striped booth. As we approached he took out two putters and laid them on the counter. We pointed across at the batting cage. It was the adjacent concession. “Closed?” we asked.

“Whole park’s closed,” he said. “Everything’s been shut down a week or so, everythin’ ’cept the golf.”

I said we weren’t interested in golf but were anxious to hit baseballs. Having come all that way, it suddenly seemed very important to get in the batting cage.

“Take a look,” he said. “Everythin’s shut down.”

“You suppose you could get that thing going for us?” I asked, pointing at the machine in the batting cage.

He gestured at his golf course with its iron-pipe and auto-tire fairways. “I’m the golf man,” he said simply.

“Sure,” said Bingham. “But perhaps you know someone who has the key… I mean it can’t be very hard to operate.”

“Look,” the man said. “I’m the golf man… like I give golf sticks to the people who want to play golf.”

We stood for a while. “Well, have you any suggestions?” I asked him. “We’re on an assignment,” I said. “It isn’t as if we wanted to bat baseballs just for the fun of it.”

The man reached out and put away the two putters.

“Look,” said Bingham. “Is there a batting cage like this one within driving distance, within, say, even ten, maybe fifteen miles?”

“Fifteen miles!” The man stared past us at the batting cage. Well, he wasn’t sure, but he thought there was a batting cage in an amusement park a long hitch down Route 17. He’d passed it a few times. Bingham and I kept at him. We wanted to know about traffic conditions on Route 17, whether he thought we could pull in there before dark, and if it was dark did the batting cage stay open under floodlights.

He tried manfully to answer us. Suddenly he could see that we weren’t trying to josh him—that for reasons I’m quite sure he had no intention of trying to fathom it was essential that we swipe away at baseballs long into that autumn evening. He applied himself diligently—trying so hard to help us that I think in his mind’s eye that distant batting cage loomed more distinctly by the second as he talked. “Lights?” he said. “Why they have just rafts of lights over that cage…”

We left him finally and set off purposefully for the car. But once in the parking lot we reconsidered. The trip down Route 17 didn’t seem worth the bother. So we took off our coats, draped them across a car fender, and started tossing the ball back and forth. The leather lacings on the $4.50 McDougald glove snapped almost immediately, but I tied them together and we continued. The arm felt tired. A family of Chinese watched us from the restaurant window, and when the restaurant door swung open, it momentarily let out the sound of the football fans bellowing over the television. Back toward the amusement park I caught a sudden glimpse of the golf man. He was standing there in the meticulous clutter of his course watching us hurling baseballs grimly through the dusk. He caught me looking at him, and he turned back quickly… for his booth, I suppose, to sit in there with his putters and watch the lunatic facade of the amusement park—shrouded now for the winter, the giant maw of the fun house blocked by a board fence—blur and fade into the evening.