CHAPTER 8

A little later, the players started to leave the locker room. Many of them, just before they’d reach the door, would shuck the wrapping off a chaw or a piece of gum and you’d see the jaw begin to chomp down hard. Gum and chaws were a large part of what was to be remembered about that day: you saw the wrappers, in the spitboxes or on the dugout floor, and the players’ cheeks puffed out with chaws, the constant spitting, and then always the jaws working, so that in the dugout you’d often hear—as a sort of tree-frog background—the slight clicking and popping of new sticks of gum being broken down. I have never liked gum, or tried a chaw. One major league player—Enos Slaughter—chews both of them, mixing bubble gum in with his chaw “to keep it cudded.” The chewing, all those jaws working on something, made a deep impression. Later on, for example, I heard that Eddie Collins, the greatest of the second basemen, would remove his gum when he had two strikes on him and stick it up on the button of his cap. Perhaps he did it to change his luck, but my feeling is that he must have done it as a form of chastisement—denying himself the pleasure of that gum until he got his hit (he was the best two-strike hitter, they say, of all time)—so he could pop that gum back in quickly and gratefully. Deprive a ballplayer of his gum, or his chaw, and he’s more uncomfortable than if you threw a hat on his bed—which they spoke of as being the most devastating bit of bad luck that could be suffered.

I kept dawdling around in the locker room. It was time to leave for the field, but I stuck to my cubicle, sitting in there alone, not necessarily enjoying its privacy, but not especially eager to get going. Carefully, I took off one of my spiked shoes, rearranged the sock, pulling it tight around my heel, then settled the foot back into the shoe, doing all this slowly, painstakingly, until finally when I looked up the big locker room was almost deserted. The trainer was fussing in the cubicles across the way; I could hear a shower dripping, and among the locker-room pillars the cigar smoke had settled in a heavy fog bank, fed by thin streams from the sandboxes.

Once outside the locker room, I wasn’t sure which way to turn. I wandered briefly in the long corridors. They were crowded: ushers, attendants, vendors. The inch or so the spikes added to my height threw my stride off, and I stalked through the press uneasily, spikes crashing against the cement. At one juncture I looked through an open door into a room crowded with men climbing into ushers’ clothes. Before I could move on, one of them looked up. “Hey, man, lookin’ for the field?” he asked. He began his grin. He meant it as a joke, of course, taking it for granted that any man in a baseball uniform would know; but then I said, “Yes, I am looking for the field,” and his grin vanished as if I’d hit him. “Nat’l Leaguer,” I explained. “Stranger in this here park.” Slowly he came to the door and then he gave me the directions to the National League dugout. They were painfully simple (“Just down there to the left”) and I nodded. Behind him I could see the other ushers looking—caught cataleptic, a coat half on, a leg poised over trousers, a hand at a cap’s brim.…

“Much obleeged,” I said. My voice, striving for confidence, took on the nasal whine of the hillbilly; the usage was one foreign to me, one I haven’t used before or since, but I said it, “Much obleeged,” then turned and hurried for the corridor indicated. It slanted steeply downward to a patch of daylight at the far end; I passed a canvas stretcher hung on pegs set in the wall, and then at the end of the slope I took the few steps up into the bright sunlight flooding the dugout.

In front of me, suddenly, at eye level, was the playing field, unbelievably vast, startlingly green after the dark of the tunnel. In the looming stands the stark symmetry of empty seats was disturbed only here and there by an early spectator. After the reverberating confines of the corridors, the great arena seemed quiet and hollow, and you felt you’d have to talk very distinctly to be heard. But there were new sounds, faint but crisp, the sounds of batting practice, the slap of the ball into the glove, the cheerful whistles of the ballplayers, and these were engulfed in the cavernous spaces under the jade-colored facades, and made echoes of, and while I stood there the incongruous strains of a Hawaiian hula-hula started up over the public-address system and drifted thinly, shredded by wind eddies, through the stands and across the green baize of the playing field.

I sat in the dugout for a while, almost imprisoned by my awe of the scene in front of me. After a while, I was surprised to note, as I sat there, that the dugout is one of the worst vantage points in a ballpark; from his position in the sunken dugout, slouched on the bench, his back to the cement wall, the ballplayer, literally at ground level, has a worm’s-eye view of the proceedings on the field. Since the pitcher’s mound is raised over a foot above the infield, and the whole field is sloped for drainage purposes, the players on the far side of the pitcher’s mound seem to be wading around in a sea of green. As seen from the third-base dugout, the second baseman seems to be in up to his knees, and beyond him the right fielder is in up to his neck, just his face and cap visible above the configuration of the pitcher’s mound. I could understand why Casey Stengel complained he couldn’t see Albie Pearson, the diminutive American League outfielder, from the Yankee dugout. Literally, if he could see anything, it would be the peak of Pearson’s cap. Furthermore, as I sat in the dugout watching, I felt no sense of perspective, so that a ball batted out toward shortstop Billy Martin, say, to my untutored eye could have been going anywhere in the infield. Of course, years of watching from the dugout give depth to the flat perspective: “Oh-oh,” the ballplayers would say. “Billy’s goin’ t’have trouble with that one,” and sure enough, the ball would just skip by him into the outfield.

During this time the dugout was deserted, the ballplayers out on the field. Like the cubicle back in the locker room, it was safe—a querencia—and I slouched down on the bench. On the wall at one end was a printed notice which read “Players Must Not Bat the Ball Toward the Grandstand During Practice.” I read the sign, and then reached out and picked up a protective plastic helmet from a pile on the dugout steps. I tried it on over my blue cap. It tipped down over one ear and I heard the faint crowd noise, the hula-hula music, the chatter of players on the field, amplify and murmur like the sea sounds of a conch. I straightened the helmet. I stood up and ran a hand over the handles of the bats set in their racks. Then I went down the length of the dugout, down the duckboards chewed raw by spikes, to inspect the watercooler. The watercooler is traditionally the target of attacks by outraged ballplayers, usually a kick or a blow with the palm of the hand. The one I was inspecting seemed to have escaped undue damage; a push at the plunger produced a prompt stream of water; it worked with a faint and disdainful electric hum. I was peering down its sides when I looked over my shoulder and saw that Don Newcombe had come into the dugout. He was settling down on the bench, his great jaw working on some substance. He was watching me. I put on my glove, tapped my fist into it, and hurried up the three steps onto the playing field.

They say that the first time Lou Gehrig was called upon to bat in the major leagues he ran up those same three steps (the Yankee dugout used to be on the third-base side), slipped and fell headlong among the bats (which in his day were laid out in rows in front of the dugout), and then, crimson-faced, everybody guffawing behind him, went on to the plate to strike out on three pitches. I don’t mean to suggest that my first steps on the playing surface of Yankee Stadium were as embarrassing; but for me, at least, they are just as painful to recall. A few steps away from the dugout, conscious that Newcombe was watching me, I realized I was still wearing the batter’s plastic helmet. I reached up for it, but it tumbled loose from my grip. It fell and rolled in the dust. I bent quickly to pick it up, clawing at its tortoise-smooth sides, but just as I got a grip on it, my blue cloth cap fell off. Holding the helmet in my free hand, I tried to pinch up the cap with the leather fingers of the fielder’s mitt, but succeeded only in shoving the cap along the ground, hunching along after it like a hunter after a crippled partridge.

All this was played out in front of the dugout—as if Newcombe was sitting in the orchestra pit looking up at a stage on which a performer was indulging in some grotesque pantomime of awkwardness.

By the time I’d managed to scoop up the cap I surely could have made a joke of the whole thing, and then sat down in the dugout with Newcombe and asked him for bits of pitching lore. Perhaps he could have helped me prepare my “book” on the hitters. But, as it was, when I stepped into the dugout, holding both cap and helmet, I looked miserably into his long-boned face, laid the plastic helmet down among its fellows, and jumped back out for the playing field. I had spooned up so much dirt in my cap as I’d pushed it along the ground that when I slapped it back on my head, the red dirt poured past my ears in a cascade and pattered around my feet. I don’t know what Newcombe made of it all. There was a lot of dirt in that cap. He must have noticed it.