CHAPTER 11

When Scott pointed toward the first-base dugout and then made a circular motion with his arm upraised—like a squad leader signaling his men to assemble—the American League players started toward us. Being the home team they would be in the field first.

It was, in the vernacular, a pretty fair country ball club.

At first base was Mickey Vernon, twice winner of the American League batting championship and a very stylish and graceful fielder besides. He throws left-handed, which is, of course, a defensive advantage in a first baseman. He fits the general prescription for a first baseman—namely, that he should be long, lean, and left-handed. At second was Chicago’s Nelson Fox—his round kewpie-doll face distorted by the big wad of “Favorite” tobacco he stuffs in his left cheek. He chewed licorice before he reached the big leagues, but his manager got him to change to chaws because the licorice made him sick. He swallowed his chaw on one hideous occasion he refuses either to disclose or discuss. He is a diminutive (150 pounds, 5 feet 8 inches) performer, yet brilliant enough both with the bat and in the field to win the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award the following year. His partner at second base was shortstop Billy Martin, the fiery ex-Yankee. He has a deceptively pleasant face, with melancholy brown eyes in it, and a long nose which got him into the early fights when his schoolmates ribbed him about it. It is a mobile face which has often worked hard and furiously an inch or so away from an umpire’s. The Great Agitator, the press sometimes calls him, but he’s more popularly known as the Kid, with—unlike me—the k capitalized, and he’s a great favorite in the stadium. He was one of the few players who took a personal interest in my struggle that afternoon—sensing, I think, the loneliness and the awkwardness of being new and raw in a situation that in my case I could hardly hope to cope with skillfully. A spirited cockiness was his own defense. Riding into New York that first time, coming up on the long train ride from the St. Petersburg training camp, a reporter found him reading a magazine as the train moved into the Penn Station tunnel. Pretty excited about seeing New York for the first time? “Nah,” said Martin, not yet then twenty. “I saw it in the movies.” Nothing cowed him. He once told Ty Cobb, the legendary high-spike base runner and a noteworthy predecessor in what ballplayers call the “hard-nose” type of play, that he would’ve come into second base with his spikes up on the Kid only once. “After that,” said Martin, “you would have had no teeth.” It may have been a mask, this spirit, to hide the insecurity endured in a childhood of misery and poverty in the California town where he was raised, but it had made him, despite limitations as a ballplayer, a competitor whose drive picked up a whole team. Cobb liked him and grinned when he talked about him. He had such an excess of that competitive confidence that there seemed enough to pass around to his teammates—like pep pills. He tried to give me some of it. He kept up a steady chatter of encouragement while I was working—at least for a while—and I was grateful for it.

Down the line from Martin at third was Boston’s Frank Malzone, silent while I toiled away, but the best man in the league at his position—sharp-featured, wiry, and fast. Durocher once appraised him: “The guy’s got a fault? Dandruff, maybe.” He’s a wonderful defensive player who as the pitch is thrown leans in toward the batter in a pigeon-toed crouch. He has slightly bowed legs, and big feet, and when he poises on his toes to get a jump on the ball he looks like a flippered skin diver about to plunge off a rock. Behind him, out in left field, was Bob Cerv, who that year had a brilliant season for the Athletics despite a fractured jaw which, being tightly wired for much of the season, limited his talk to the tight-lipped variety—whatever his mood—and required him to take sustenance—vegetable soups, orange juices, and such—through a tube stuck in a gap providentially left by a missing tooth in the side of his mouth. He’d lost weight that summer. He usually eats kolaches, big Bohemian meatballs, taking them at all meals, and at his usual playing weight he’s powerfully heavy—a grim competitor with a hard, determined countenance marked by a nose flattened in a boyhood injury.

“Chatting with Billy Martin in the dugout. Amused though he was by the perplexing nature of my assignment, I could sense his understanding and support throughout the afternoon.” (Garry Winogrand)

Playing over in right field was my friend of the batting cage, Harvey Kuenn, twice winner of the American League batting championship. A serious, unflamboyant professional, he keeps his baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes, so first you see the multifaceted Gothic D for Detroit embroidered on the front of the cap, then under the brim, the lower part of his face, severe, deeply burned, and, like Fox, with a chaw of tobacco tucked in the cheek. In center field was Mickey Mantle. Of all of them standing there, Mantle’s was the power you sensed—seeing it in the heavy shoulders and arms sloping from a neck as thick as a water main. His large boyish face has gone heavy; he turns his head slowly, his eyes pale and impassive, so that there is something in his manner of the cat family: imperturbable, arch, and yet because the boyishness is still there he wears a faint expression of suspicious stubbornness, of petulance. The face of the final member of the team, my battery mate, the Yankees’ Elston Howard, wore a puzzled frown because the reporters had been busy with him earlier—his exploits in left field during the World Series, particularly one fine tumbling catch in the fifth game, made him copy as the World Series hero—and I don’t believe anyone had had the chance to tell him why he was to put on his catching tools half an hour before the scheduled game. He hovered over Frank Scott, waiting for him to explain what we were all doing out there.

“Hey, Frank,” someone said (it wasn’t Howard), “what gives? What gives, man?”

Scott looked around to see that we were all there. Then he shuffled at some papers on a clipboard. “Well, boys…,” he started to say.

At this point the recorded music which had been drifting in from center field stopped abruptly, in midchorus of “Tea for Two,” then a stentorian cough came over the public-address system and we heard as follows:

“Your attention, please, (pause) George… P… P… P,” then another pause, the announcer apparently working over a name scribbled on a pad, “Prufrock,” and then repeated with immeasurable confidence that boomed through the stadium, “GEORGE PRUFROCK of Sports Illustrated will now pitch against the ENTIRE National League team, and the ENTIRE American League team… that team which collects the most hits to be awarded a prize of $1,000 by Sports Illustrated.”

“Well, there you are, boys,” said Frank Scott. They were all looking at me. “That’s the idea,” he continued. “Four points awarded for the four-bagger, three for the triple, two for the double—you field first, through their first eight batters, and then you get your licks.”

“You let ’em hit, kid,” said Billy Martin. “And right at us, pul-lease, on the ground and in the big quick hops.”

A few of the players laughed and someone said, “That’s right, kid—you’re out here to do the work; we’re along for the ride,” and around the circle they smiled again, trying to impart confidence, and as we stood together—waiting for something to happen to release us—I felt a sudden kinship with the players. It was an entirely unexpected emotion, since I was so obviously an outsider, but it came: that warm sense of camaraderie one gets, if briefly, as a team member, or in a platoon, or just sitting around a café with friends, never mentioned, but there nonetheless, almost tangible, and it was very strong before abruptly it was dissipated. Someone said, “OK, let’s go,” and the huddle broke up.

Surrounded by the players I had felt protected and grateful for my obscurity among them. But when they withdrew and headed for their positions, leaving me standing alone just off the mound, it was like being unveiled—and one sensed the slow massive attention of the spectators—by then almost 20,000 of them—wheel and concentrate, and almost physically I felt the weight of it. My palms were slick with sweat. I walked up on the pitcher’s mound to find the rosin bag. There wasn’t one there. A new ball was lying just off the pitcher’s rubber. I picked it up but I didn’t turn for the plate. I kept looking out at my infielders, trying to recapture the confidence I’d felt fleetingly in their company; they seemed very far away; they were busy scooping up grounders Vernon was lobbing to them from first base. When Malzone at third wound up and threw the ball, it was close enough to sigh past in a trajectory so flat that the ball never rose above eye level on its way into Vernon’s glove. Out beyond the base paths, the outfielders had reached their positions. They were so far away I didn’t feel we were identified with the same project. The spaces between them were vast. Everything seemed very peaceful and quiet out there. Deep back in the bleachers I could see a man, sitting up there alone, removing his coat to enjoy the afternoon sun.

I finally faced the plate. Howard was there waiting, his big dust-gray mitt up for the warm-up pitches. I threw him a couple. Then I wasn’t conscious of the crowd. I’d forgotten that a pitcher, whatever his stature, concentrates on the strike zone to the exclusion of everything else. He’s hardly ever conscious even of the batter, perhaps a bat waving in the vicinity of the strike zone. The crowd becomes a blur in the background. The noise it makes has a crisp quality, a sharp babble, since everybody’s facing you, but it’s impossible to distinguish its separate parts. Of course, if you listen for it, you can hear the Stevens vendors’ “HOT franks,” “Hey, ICE-cream heah,” and once I thought I heard Toots Shor yelling, but it isn’t like sitting in the stands where you can hang on to four or five conversations at the same time. Mostly you hear your own voice—chattering away, keeping you company in the loneliness, cajoling and threatening if things begin to go badly, heavy in praise at times, much of everything being said half aloud, the lips moving, because although you know you’re being watched, no one can hear you, and the sound of your voice was truly a steady influence—the one familiar verity in those strange circumstances. I recall the first sentence I spoke to myself was “OK, bo, you’re goin’ to be OK. Nothin’ at all to worry about, nothin’, nothin’,” and at that moment, like a crack lawyer springing to rebut, the public-address system announced the arrival at the plate of the National League’s leadoff batter—Richie Ashburn.

He stepped into the batter’s box wearing the bright candy-red pin-striped uniform of the Phillies. A left-handed batter, he punches at the ball, slapping it for a multitude of singles. The outfielders deploy for him like softball players. He chokes so far up on the bat that as he waited I could see his fingers flexing two or three inches up on the bat handle. He presented a surprisingly small target—as indeed all the batters seemed smaller than expected. Half consciously you expect them to rear high over the plate, threatening, portraits of power… but in fact their physical presence at the plate was not as overpowering as recognizing them—to look in and see under the batter’s helmet a face which, jarringly familiar even from the pitcher’s mound, one had only associated previously with newsprint and the photographs of the sports sections.

Behind the plate Howard had settled in his crouch, his big mitt up for the target. Concentrating on it, barely aware then of Ashburn, I toed the rubber with my spikes and with an almost physical jolt of will, I swung into a slow windup. Under the pressure of the moment I half expected to exhibit a pitching form as spastic as the cartwheeling fall of a man from a high tree. But conditioned reflexes took over, and I was surprised at the ease with which I got the pitch off. I was not prepared, however, for what then happened: that, rather than speeding for the bulk of Howard’s catcher’s mitt, the ball, flung with abandon and propelled by a violent mixture of panic and pent-up anxiety let loose, headed straight for Ashburn’s head. Down he went, flat on his back, the bat flung away, and an explosion of sound—a sharp gasp from the crowd—sailed out of the stands as I hurried off the mound calling out, “Sorry! Sorry!”

I ran halfway to the plate. The ball had shot by Ashburn, hit the edge of Howard’s glove, and skidded off toward the stands. Ashburn picked himself up easily, collected his bat, and looked out at me calmly, his face imperturbable. He is one of the few players who doesn’t lace his speech with cussing, his demeanor gentle, but I could think of nothing to say to him. So I shrugged—an inadvertent gesture that under the circumstances could only have indicated to Ashburn, and to Howard, standing peering at me through the bars of his mask, that I had no control whatsoever over my pitches. I did not look to see how the gesture was interpreted. I busied myself fielding a ball, a new one, someone had rolled out from the first-base dugout. Then I wheeled for the mound to try again.

I threw three more pitches to Ashburn, finding myself growing in confidence as I pitched. I threw him another ball, then a pitch that he chopped foul. On the next delivery he punched under the ball and lifted a high fly between third and home. Howard threw off his mask with a violence that rolled it almost to the backstop, and with shin guards clattering he went after the ball, got under it, and stomped around with his face upturned like a Paiute praying for rain until finally the ball came down and he smothered it in his big glove.

It took a few seconds, while the ball was being thrown around the infield, before there was any sense of accomplishment—it coming haltingly because, after all, one had expected devastation, not a harmless foul ball glinting in the sun, and finally it did come and I lurched happily in a tight circle around the pitcher’s mound, digging and scraping at the dirt with my spikes, pretending preoccupation, and if there’d been a rosin bag I’d have picked it up and fussed briefly with it. What had seemed an inhospitable place, a steep uneven hill of dirt on which one moved gingerly and awkwardly, suddenly became something of a natural habitat—all around everything was familiar, neat, and orderly. But just as I began to admire the unmarked base paths, the bases unoccupied, with the fielders relaxed in their positions, a player with an established reputation for creating disorder in the pitcher’s domain trotted up out of the National League dugout—San Francisco’s Willie Mays.

I didn’t see him at first. But from the stands a mounting roar of welcome greeted him. He’d been sorely missed in New York that summer, and the majority of the 20,000 were there in the hope of seeing him perform the miracles of play which would leave them breathless and cheering and yet a little guilty, too, to think that his ability, once practically a landmark in the city, was now on display elsewhere.

He gets set quickly at the plate, hopping eagerly into the batter’s box, where he nervously jiggles and tamps his feet in the dust, twisting on his rear foot to get it solidly placed, staring down at the plate in concentration—to sense when his legs feel set—and when they do, he reaches out and taps the plate, twice, three times, with the bat before he sweeps it back over his right shoulder and cocks it. Then, for the first time, he looks out at the pitcher.

Most batters tuck their chins down and glower out at the pitcher from under the brims of their batting helmets—which makes them look properly sinister and threatening. Mays, on the other hand, who has a pleasant face to start with, looks out at the pitcher with a full, honest regard, his chin out, his eyes wide as if slightly myopic, and he seems to inspect the pitcher as if he was a harmless but puzzling object recently deposited on the pitcher’s mound by the groundskeeper. Furthermore, when Mays’s face is set in determination, his eyebrows arch up, so that under the batter’s helmet his expression is a lingering look of astonishment, as if his manager had just finished addressing him at length in Turkish. But the deception is mild; you see the coiled power of his stance as he waits and the chances are that you’ll turn away to look at something else.

I threw Mays three pitches. The motion felt easy and the first two pitches were low and didn’t miss by much. With the third pitch, though, I was aware that the ball, almost as it left my hand, was heading accurately for the plate and that Mays, flexing his bat back to increase the purchase of his swing, was going to go for it. As his bat came through into the pitch, I could sense the explosive power generated and I flinched involuntarily—not sure that my hands, hung low and relaxed at the completion of the follow-through, didn’t start up instinctively if futilely for protection. But from this flurry of power the ball rose straight, a foul ball like Ashburn’s, I thought at first, but then I saw the ball carrying out over the infield. I had a glimpse of it high above me, small but astonishingly bright in the sunlight, directly above it seemed, and remembering that a pitcher leaves the fielding plays to his infielders I ran head down toward first base to vacate the mound for them.

I misjudged the ball badly. Actually, it came down back of the shortstop’s position. Billy Martin was there to catch it and as I walked back to the mound, he threw the ball to Malzone, and the ball began to go from infielder to infielder—in that ritual of speeding the ball around the “horn” which gives the pitcher a moment to peek modestly out from under his cap and savor what he’s just done. It was fine. It was truly all I could do to keep from grinning.

In recent years, in attempts to speed up the game, such rituals as throwing the ball around the infield have been considered dispensable by some authorities. Sadly, as the so-called deadweight components of the game are pruned away, it is always the pitcher who suffers. The authorities want to limit mound conferences. A few of the more impatient umpires yell at a dawdling pitcher that his pants aren’t falling off, his cap is straight—to quit fussing with them and pitch. In some parks, rather than waste the time he takes walking in from the bullpen, a relieving pitcher is transported to the mound in a whitewall-tired automobile. In Boston’s Fenway Park they have a scooter. The pitcher looks uncomfortable sitting there with a glove on his lap; beside him, the chauffeur is usually grinning—as if delivering a man in particularly ludicrous costume to a charity ball. Actually, the pitcher as the prima donna of the baseball roster needs that long walk from bullpen to pitcher’s mound: his vanity delights in the picture he presents as a lonely but courageous figure, his jacket carefully shielding the pitching arm, tramping his way in past the outfielders as his name is bellowed out over the loudspeaker system. It means he can play the part of the avenging angel without actually doing anything but walking—at least for the moment. The pitcher is happiest with his arm idle. He prefers to dawdle in the present, knowing that as soon as he gets on the mound and starts his windup he delivers himself to the uncertainty of the future. Similarly, the ritual of throwing the ball around the infield allows the pitcher to postpone the future; it allows him to fuss around on his hill of dirt like a gawky hen; he can pick up and drop the rosin bag; he’s given a moment or so in which to preen himself on his accomplishments. It is the fine moment of his profession. It was certainly the fine moment of my afternoon. When Mays hit that towering fly and it was evident it was going to be caught, I stood absorbing that October instant so that it would be forever available for recall—now blurred, of course, and fragmentary like the nickelodeon films of the Dempsey-Firpo fight you see in the amusement parks, but still sufficient to put one back there on the mound: seeing again, and feeling the sudden terror of Mays uncoiling his bat, but then watching in surprise the ball rise clean and harmless, Billy Martin circling under it, hooded and efficient with his sunglasses down, catching it then and removing it from his glove to peer at it as if he’d never seen a baseball before, then firing it down to Malzone, who also looked at it, across then to Vernon for his inspection, and during this you felt coming on a maniac grin of achievement which you had to control, knowing that pitchers don’t grin after getting a man out, so you solemnly stomped around the mound, tidying it up, watching with sidelong glances the ball whip from infielder to infielder, the great blue-shadowed humming tiers of the stadium out of focus beyond, until finally you remember Nelson Fox, the big orange-size chaw pushing out the side of his face, trotting in to the mound, looking at the ball in his hand, jiggling it, inflicting it with magic, then popping it in the air at you and saying, “Come on, kid, easy, easy, easy.”

That is all of that day that I really care to remember. Perhaps a bit more: that when I got the ball from Fox it felt familiar to the hand, a weapon suddenly adaptable, an instrument perfectly suited to my design. Of course, I should have known better. Polishing the ball, the glove slung on the wrist, I turned on the mound and saw Frank Robinson, the great Cincinnati slugger, standing in the batter’s box, and I knew then that the pitcher’s pleasure is a fragmentary thing, that the dugouts, like sausage machines, eject an unending succession of hitters to destroy any momentary complacency a pitcher may feel during an afternoon of work.

Regardless, as I looked in at Robinson—Howard behind him adjusting his mask—I thought, Well, why not, I’ve done pretty well so far—now’s the time to unleash the curveball, the hook. And perhaps if the hook works, I’ll chance the change of pace and maybe even the knuckler. Given the opportunity I knew it would be unforgivable not to try all the pitches in my repertoire; and so, swallowing hard, nervous again after the heady triumph of retiring the first two batters, I worked my fingers around the seams until I had the ball held properly for the curve. Robinson, the victim, was standing easily in the batter’s box; Howard had settled into his position, his glove raised as a target. I remembered then Ed Bailey’s stern charge to indicate when a curve was coming up; but I didn’t see how I could tell Howard without tipping off Robinson. My catcher would have to fend for himself as best he could, I thought, and I pumped my arm twice and swung into the windup.