CHAPTER 12

In baseball parlance they speak of a pitch “getting away” from the pitcher. As I came through the delivery of my curve, I failed to snap my wrist sufficiently and my hook got away from me in majestic style—sailing far over both Robinson’s and Howard’s heads to the wire screen behind home plate. If it had hit a foot or so higher, the ball would have caught the netting of the foul screen and run up it to the press boxes. It was such an extraordinarily wild pitch that I felt I had to make some comment; what I’d done was too undignified to pass unnoticed, and so once again I hurried off the mound calling out, “Sorry! Sorry!” Howard and Robinson gazed out at me, both startled, I think, perhaps even awed by the strange trajectory of my pitch, which was wild enough to suggest that I had suddenly decided to throw the ball to someone in the stands. The embarrassment was intense. Afterward I made some inquiries as to how that pitch of mine compared with some of the wilder heaves around the majors. Perhaps I would have felt better if I’d known that, while my curve may have been one of the tallest thrown, it certainly wasn’t the wildest. In an exhibition game Chuck Stobbs, for example, the Washington left-hander, nearly brained Alvin Dark, who was kneeling in the on-deck circle a good sixty or seventy feet off the plate; Stobbs lost his grip on the ball during his windup and since there were men on base he had to go through with his pitch or commit a balk. The ball shot past Dark, who didn’t say a word; he stared briefly out at the mound and then he clapped on his batter’s helmet. On another occasion, Stobbs—who seems to have a propensity for this sort of thing—bumped the ball against his side during the windup and threw it off his fingertips into the seventeenth row of the grandstand. He counted off those rows afterward. He said he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

My own reaction was one of such embarrassment at seeing that pitch sail off that my repertoire was immediately reduced to the simple fastball. Later I was accused of throwing another curveball, but I could not have done so intentionally. I stuck to the fastball for the rest of the afternoon.

It took me a few pitches to steady down after the attempted hook. Finally I threw a pitch Robinson found to his liking. He is a thin, long-boned player who hangs his head over the plate to watch the pitch coming in. He has wonderful wrists, strong, supple, and in St. Louis he once sprained his wrists while checking his swing—which would indicate both his power and his speed of reaction. He brought his hands around on the sixth pitch I threw him (a friend in the stands acting as statistician was keeping track) and it was over the plate and chest high. Often a pitcher has a premonition as soon as the ball leaves his hand that the batter is going to feast on it. He sees the bat flex back and instinctively he knows that the batter’s timing is right, that the ball’s not going to do anything to escape the sweep of the bat coming through, and as it does he hears the sharp disheartening whack of ash against the ball and the drive lines out past his ears. In Robinson’s case, the ball soared between Mantle and Cerv in deep-left-center field, dropped between them, and rolled for the Babe Ruth memorial out by the flagpole. By the time the ball was back in the infield, Robinson was standing on second.

The public-address system announced “two points for the National League” and Robinson, his job done, trotted in from second base.

Actually, it didn’t feel too disheartening, that double, because Robinson didn’t stay on base to remind you of it. If he’d been leading off second, swaying his body, poised for flight, and you had to work off the stretch, peering around and worrying about him, you would have had the evidence of your inadequacy as a pitcher right there nagging at you. Perhaps the one, if very slight, compensation for the pitcher who has a home run hit off him is that it leaves the bases uncluttered of the opposition and in the pristine state the pitcher prefers. His dismay may be intense watching the ball fly out of the park, but at least it is temporary: the batter circles the bases and is back in the obscurity of the dugout within seconds.

So I didn’t have to worry about a man jiggling up and down the base paths. But there was something else bothering me as I watched Ernie Banks, the home run king of the National League, step out of the on-deck circle and head for the plate. Of the six pitches I’d thrown to Robinson one or two had seemed to me to catch the strike zone. He hadn’t gone for them, and there was no umpire to contradict his choice.

I hadn’t arranged for an umpire for the simple reason that I didn’t trust my control. Often, during those nervous days just before my appearance in the stadium, I’d had a recurrent presentiment of losing control of my pitches and having an umpire award an unending succession of bases on ball. Such nightmarish things did, after all, happen even in the major leagues. Not long ago, Ray Scarborough, a pitcher on the Washington Senators, after giving up seven runs in the first inning of his first appearance in the majors, which was against the Yankees, started against the Red Sox soon after and walked the first seven men he faced. Bucky Harris was his patient manager at the time, and when the seventh batter tossed aside his bat and started trotting down to first, he walked out to Scarborough and reached for the ball. “Son,” he is supposed to have said mildly. “I think maybe we’ve had our workout for the day, don’t you?”

Under the peculiar setup of my pitching stint, if there’d been rigid rulings on balls and strikes, I might easily have eclipsed Scarborough’s feat, and found myself, as a result, standing uneasily in the magazine office downtown after the game trying to explain what I’d done for the $1,000—namely, that I’d enjoyed the opportunity of walking every man I’d faced—which would have been a total of sixteen.

So I made no arrangements about umpires.

I didn’t consider, however, the possibility that the batters—and quite properly since money was at stake—would get finicky about the pitches and wait for one they felt they could get a “holt” of—as they say. Even if a pitch was in the strike zone, they could let it go by if they felt uncomfortable about it without any fear of penalty—without an umpire screaming stee-rike in their ears.

However, as I stood on the mound watching Banks set himself at the plate, I wasn’t overly worried. After all, I’d thrown thirteen pitches to three batters, which indicated the control was reasonable, and not bad pitching—considering who was throwing them—even if one of them had nearly beaned a batter, another was probably the tallest curve ever thrown in Yankee Stadium, and the last one Robinson had smacked for a stand-up double.

I had a grand opportunity to study Banks. Or, rather, Banks was up at the plate for such a long time that for days afterward a slight and regretted tug at the memory would unveil him clear in my mind’s eye: a right-handed batter, slender, standing very quietly back in the farthest recesses of the batter’s box with none of the nervous fidgeting of a Mays or a Ted Williams, his bat steady and cocked up vertically behind his right ear, rarely leveled out in a practice swing as he waited with his eyes peering out calmly from beneath the Cubs’ outsize and peaked cap. His whole attitude was of such detachment that I found it unnerving to pitch to him. Once in a while he’d step out of the batter’s box and, resting his bat against his knees, he’d slowly pour dust from one palm to the other before settling back in with an attitude of faint disdain, as if in his opinion the pitcher’s stature was that of a minor functionary whose sole duty was to serve up a fat pitch.

As it happened, a fat pitch was certainly what Banks wanted. He won a Most Valuable Player Award for his performance that year, crediting his success to his ability to lay off the bad pitches. An excellent habit, obviously, and he had no intention of breaking it as he stood in against me. I threw him a total of twenty-three pitches. There may not have been an umpire to judge their quality, but it was certain that Banks found very few to his liking. Sometimes he would lean over and watch the ball right into Howard’s glove, then look up with a small encouraging smile, as if to indicate that it was close—that if the pitch had been a shade nearer the center of the plate, why, he would have whipped his bat around. Occasionally he would foul a pitch off into the stands, and from the first-base dugout someone would roll a new ball out to the mound; I’d pick it up, stalk back onto the mound, gaze mournfully at Banks, concentrate then on the bulk of Howard’s catcher’s mitt, crank up, and let fly. As I worked away, my control began to vanish under the pressure. My sense of well-being, not bothered by Robinson’s double, began to deteriorate; I started to talk to myself loudly; the mound, the pitching rubber, previously so familiar, quickly became alien ground that I stumbled over and couldn’t get the feel of with my spikes; the baseball itself seemed noticeably heavier, the seams awry; the whole process of throwing a baseball with accuracy became an absurdly hard task, and as I pitched, Banks seemed to recede into the distance, along with Howard, until the two of them looked like figures viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

What does a pitcher do when things begin to collapse around him? Almost surely he looks for assistance, someone to trot in to the mound and minimize his difficulties, to bolster him with encouragement. If the situation indicates that his skill has leaked away under the pressure, he expects his manager to come out and replace him. I remember Bob Turley, the great Yankee speed pitcher, describe a jam he’d manufactured for himself in the 1955 World Series—the first Series game he ever played in. He loaded the bases in the first inning and had Roy Campanella to face. Fidgeting, trying to pull himself together by breathing in great gulps of air, Turley turned and looked hopefully out at the bullpen. Nothing was going on. He peered into the dugout. His manager, Casey Stengel, was sitting with his legs crossed, leaning forward and looking up at the box where the Yankee owners were sitting. Turley had one quick image of working in Washington the next season—then the ultimate penalty for ineptitude. But then Yogi Berra came waddling out toward him from the plate, and Turley felt better. At last, he thought, I’m going to be all right because here comes Yogi to give me some advice. “Boy,” Turley reported Berra as saying when he reached the mound, “boy, you’re in one helluva jam.”

The gravity of my situation with Ernie Banks was compounded by not having anyone I could turn to. Even such cold words of comfort as Berra offered Turley would have been welcome; but Elston Howard, my catcher, cared so little for the business at hand—having a full game to catch later on—that often if my pitches were out of the strike zone, or in the dust, he’d let them skip by without budging for them and the balls would thud ignominiously against the backstop. Howard is a serious competitor and very studious about his play. One winter he spent hours working on his batting stance, swinging at a ball suspended from a wire in the basement of his home. I don’t think he was at all clear why he was engaged in this pregame malarkey. Occasionally he would rise from his position behind the plate, turn to the dugout, and shrug his shoulders in a massive pantomime of bewilderment. Once I heard him shout to someone in the dugout, “Hey, gettin’ bushed out here”—referring to himself.

Naturally there wasn’t anyone in either dugout I could complain to—neither teammates nor even a manager. In fact, it struck me then that if I went completely to pieces there was no one to relieve me. Until my grandiose scheme to pitch to both leagues was fulfilled, I was doomed to toil away—condemned, as someone pointed out later, to a curious modern adaptation of the myth of Sisyphus, the unfortunate Greek whose endless task it was to push a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have it topple from his grasp. The only encouragement I had was the faint, apologetic smile of Banks himself. A quick, embarrassed look around my infield was no help. Their faces were averted: Mickey Vernon was looking solemnly into his first baseman’s glove; the others were either preoccupied with their shoe tops or scratching with their spikes in the dirt of the base paths. In the outfield I caught one awful glimpse of Mickey Mantle—turned toward one of the other outfielders and patting his mouth in an ostentatious yawn to show his boredom.

I turned hurriedly from that spectacle, rushed up on the mound, and began spraying pitches in at Banks as if by sheer volume I’d get one where he’d swing away. Occasionally the fouls would lift lazily into the stands and out of the corner of my eye I’d glimpse the people in that section rise, their arms outstretched, and the ball would fall in, engulfed like a pebble tossed into a field of wheat.

I asked my statistician, Bob Silvers, after the game what the spectators’ reaction had been during the time of my troubles with Banks, and he said they took it very calmly—more calmly certainly than the febrile activity on the mound suggested I was taking it. He jotted down the following conversation between two men sitting in the sun in their shirtsleeves, one of them wearing a straw hat.

“Hey, who’s that guy?”

“What guy?”

“Guy pitching.”

“Donno. Some guy called Prufrock.”

“Which?”

“Prufrock!”

“Who the hell’s Prufrock?”

“Beats me.”

Each sentence was followed by a long pause, while the beer was sipped from the big paper cups, the mind just barely ticking over in that splendid October sun.

Finally, on pitch number 23, Banks lifted a high fly ball out to Mickey Mantle in right-center field, who was not so busy yawning that he didn’t see the ball arch out toward him, and standing on the mound I saw he was going to catch it, and I gave a big shuddering sigh of relief to think that no longer did I have to look in to see Banks standing there with those red-striped blue socks high on his legs, his small head leaning over the plate, the thin smile… and when he came up after the game and we joked about it I told him that one of the lasting impressions of that afternoon would be the relief I felt watching him trudge back to the dugout, trailing his bat along behind him as if it had become heavy during that long stay of his at the plate.