CHAPTER 9

Out on the field there was enough going on to keep you active, to keep your mind off the embarrassments of the past and the commitments of the future. In front of the dugouts, some of the players were still warming up, tossing the ball back and forth; a few pepper games were in action—a batter chopping short grounders to three or four of his teammates—a number of these little games going on so that all around, along with the slap of the ball into leather, you heard the clean sharp sound of the ball against the hard ash of the bat. Another sound you heard, above the steady and increasing hum of people moving into the stands, came from the long thin fungo bats that give off a sound as if they were made of cork when they loft out the high practice flies to the outfield; you could watch the ball hang out there forever above the rim of the stadium, hit so high that when the fall started, it was absolutely perpendicular into the glove of the distant fielder, who moved under it gracefully, jogging a few steps after catching it, and then lobbed it stiffly, as if his arm was sore, in to a relay man out behind second base; he would pick it up and roll it in toward the fungo hitter, where it would lie for a while before perhaps being picked up, given a little toss, and then with the slight pop of the fungo sent out again on that long climb above the stadium rim. There was no lazier or more pleasant pastime than watching good fungoes hit, unless it was catching them. I wanted to run to the deep outfield and try, particularly in the infamous left field of Yankee Stadium, supposedly the most difficult field in the major leagues, where often you see a fielder stumbling around as if fighting off a wasp—a nightmare sun field where apparently the sun and the cigarette haze combine to remove the perspective from a fly ball’s flight.

But it was more important to get the pitching arm limbered up, so I resisted going to the outfield and looked around for someone to warm up with. I hoped to sidle up to a pair tossing the ball back and forth, and find that easily and without any explanation necessary I’d be included. But such wasn’t the case. I’d stand in alongside Gil Hodges, for example, tossing the ball with Stan Lopata. Tapping my glove speculatively, I’d wait for Lopata to throw me the ball. But he wouldn’t. He’d throw it to Hodges, and Hodges’d throw it back to him, and he’d throw it to Hodges, and I’d watch the ball hungrily, and if I had sufficient brass and self-assertion I would have called down to Lopata, “Hey, Stan-baby, watcha think I’m standing heah for… for the love o’ Mike throw me the ball!”

But I didn’t yell anything like that. I moved off quietly to another pair, and being frustrated there, went on to another, and finally I ended up warming with the National League batboy.

He was about fourteen or fifteen, I’d guess, a stocky fellow wearing a Cincinnati cap which Don Newcombe had given him. He was proud of it. He said Newcombe was “terrific.” He called him “Newk” and he referred to the other players by their first names and with easy familiarity. “Junior—that’s Jim Gilliam of the Dodgers y’know—” he would begin, “was saying just a while ago…” and then he would chatter on about what Gilliam had said, his information peppered with ballplayers’ nicknames and statistics such as the weight of so-and-so’s bat. He had an open friendliness that kept him talking while we tossed the ball back and forth and occasionally I would say, “Is that so?”

After a while he said he had to quit because he had his job to do. At the time I envied his poise, that confident rather shrill voice gossiping on, and particularly that he had work to keep him occupied. I don’t mean to suggest that I was intimidated by everyone in Yankee Stadium that day, but if one is to be accurate about these things, you did envy those who had clear-cut jobs to do—even if it was looking after bats, or selling hot dogs, or ripping tickets in half at the gate. You envied the people coming into the stands who would sit in the sun, and the ushers who looked at their ticket stubs and used a dusting mitten on the slatted seats and got a quarter for doing so. At least, their immediate future was predictable; the worst that could happen to the majority of the people would be a little mustard spilled on the shirt front or perhaps the team of their choice would lose.

But for me the future was uncertain and perhaps the best I could hope for was survival without shame. From time to time I’d look out at the pitcher’s mound and then beyond at the Longines clock in the scoreboard out past deep center field. I’d say to myself, “Bo, in one hour (or half an hour, or twelve minutes—whatever it was) you’re goin’ to be out there, you damn-fool aggressive nut!” and the punch of nerves would come, deep in the stomach, just about bending me over.

And yet you knew that if someone leaned over the box railings and offered to change places you’d ignore him. Simple curiosity kept you going; and also a sense of resignation—as if it had all been set inexorably in motion long ago, that day when Mantle hit his home run and the idea crossed your mind to try the big leagues for an afternoon.

And then from time to time, even in those attacks of nerves, there was exhilaration—in which you suddenly looked at everything through the pop eyes of the rookie just coming up, seeing Yankee Stadium for the first time, and touched by his same foolish excitement. Temporarily, you forgot your inadequacies and the stigma of being an impostor. The single fact that you had on a uniform and wore a glove made you a ballplayer. There were odd moments—and they came increasingly as the afternoon went on—when you felt not only comfortable but confident. Once, I heard someone shout, “Hey, kid!” and I went over to a box near the Yankee dugout and there was Toots Shor. He had a big grin on his large, pleasant face, and when I got to the box railing he threw a big affectionate jab and said, as I recall, “How’s the soupbone?”—asking after the condition of my arm—and so I leaned against the railing and told him. I told him it was a little rusty, but then I found myself talking in a low confident drawl about that arm as if it was a property of great distinction and value. It didn’t make any difference, or at least not too much difference, that you heard someone down the line saying, “Who’s that gabbing with Toots? The batboy? Great big batboy, eh?” and you heard the other one say “You got me, Charlie, but he ain’t no batboy. Toots Shor talking to a batboy? You nuts?”

When my warm-up associate had bustled officiously off on his labors, proud under his Cincinnati cap, I wandered around the field for a while. There were many men in mufti on the playing field—photographers, officials (occasionally I’d see Frank Scott and nod at him), reporters, and here and there you’d see the motion-picture cameras set up on tripods, the lens aimed at a ballplayer and his interviewer—the latter cheerful and eager, asking his questions through a quick nervous smile, rarely looking at the ballplayer beside him. You’d hear him ask: “Well, how d’ja think the season went for you, Bob?” and then he’d shift the thin rodlike microphone to the ballplayer, who was usually tall and ill at ease, and he’d glower down at the microphone and say, “OK, I guess.” Then the interviewer would snatch the microphone back and say into it, cheerfully yet earnestly, “Well, d’ja think you’ll do better next season? Or what?”

Sometimes, of course, a player would display confidence in front of the microphone that bordered on the brassy, and the air around would boom with a ruckus of pleasantry and affection. “Well, Harry, it was just great t’talk to ya, and thanks a mile f’having me on the show,” the ballplayer would say, leaning forward after the microphone like a horse after a stalk of grass as the interviewer sought to snatch it back, so that with their heads close together their esteem babbled into the microphone from two fronts at the same time. Eventually the ballplayer would leave, and the interviewer would shake his head slowly, a look of reflection, even of awe, on his face to indicate that we’d all been in the presence of someone pretty special.

I hung on the fringes of these interviews, listening, and then I’d move on. No one took any notice of me except on one occasion when a photographer, crouched behind a boxlike still camera set on a tripod, told me I was in the way. I stepped quickly off to one side and watched. His subject was a ballplayer I didn’t recognize. Briskly chewing his gum, he was standing waiting for the photographer’s instructions.

“OK,” the photographer said finally. “Make like you’re fielding a grounder.”

The ballplayer stopped chewing. He dropped quickly into a crouch, grotesquely stiff, as if he was being clubbed to the ground; he placed his glove down by his shoe tops, and across his face a look by which he meant to indicate intense determination—as if a baseball was actually skipping toward him. In truth, with his eyes staring, he seemed to wear a look of horror—as if what he was going to field was not a baseball but the onrushing charge of a large and wildly berserk animal.

“OK. Great!” said the photographer.

The player straightened up, his face suddenly bland and peaceful, and the jaw began to work again on the gum.