CHAPTER 13

Ernie Banks was followed in the batter’s box by Frank Thomas, then playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was the only batter I faced who loomed over the plate. Despite a large, homely, friendly face over which his blue plastic helmet perched like a birthday paper hat, Thomas’s size made him look dangerous; he had an upright batting stance, which made him easier to pitch to than Banks, but the bat looked small and limber in his hands, and when he swung and missed one of my first pitches to him I imagined I heard the bat sing in the air like a willow switch. For the first time the batter’s box seemed close, and I could understand why many pitchers manipulate the follow-through of their pitching motion, which brings them in toward the plate by as much as six feet, so that the glove can be flicked up to protect the head in the event of a hard shot toward the mound. You never can tell. In 1947 Schoolboy Rowe threw in a pitch toward Stan Musial and back came the top half of a bat cracked directly in two, whirring at him with the speed and directness of a boomerang, and struck him a brutal blow on the elbow of his upflung arm. Even batters worry about crippling a pitcher over that distance. A hard-hit line drive, after all, will cover those 60 feet 6 inches in a sixth of a second. Babe Ruth had nightmares of such a thing, and there’s a body of thought which believes his fear of smacking down a pitcher was why he changed his batting style (he was originally a line-drive hitter in the early days with Baltimore) and started swinging from the heels of his pipestem legs to get loft and distance.

According to my statistician in the stands, it was the seventh pitch that Thomas whacked in a long high arc, very much like that of a Ruthian home run, deep into the upper deck in left field. The ball looped in at the downward end of its trajectory and above the swelling roar of the crowd I could hear it smack against the slats of an empty seat. The upper deck was deserted and it was a long time before a scampering boy, leaping the empty rows like a chamois, found the ball and held it aloft, triumphant, the white of it just barely visible at that great distance.

The ball was hit well over four hundred feet and after the roar that had accompanied its flight had died down, you could hear the crowd continue buzzing.

My own reaction, as I stood on the mound, was not one of shame, or outrage. Perhaps it should have been, particularly following my difficulties with Banks, but actually my reaction was one of wonderment at the power necessary to propel a ball out of a major league park. I could hardly believe a ball could be hit so far.

Later that afternoon in the locker room I asked Billy Pierce, the great White Sox southpaw, about the effect of the home run on the pitcher. He’d been talking about the major league curveball, what a marvelous and wicked weapon it was at its best, and the unwelcome shift into the batter’s province threw him off. “Home runs?” he said in a high, querulous voice. He shrugged. “Well, the effect of the damn things depends upon their importance in any given game,” he said reflectively. “Look at Branca.” He thought for a while and then he said: “But when that ball sails out of the park, even if it doesn’t mean a damn thing, you just feel awful stupid.”

Pierce’s mention of Branca, of course, was in reference to Bobby Thomson’s home run off the Brooklyn speed pitcher in the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff play-off game in 1951. In the films of that stupendous moment you see Branca wheel to watch the flight of the ball that lost Brooklyn the pennant, then start slowly for the dugout, but almost running finally to get out of that wild public demonstration into privacy where he could project that scene over and over again in his imagination, never quite believing it, puzzled that the script wouldn’t change and the ball curve foul or into an outfielder’s reach. An enterprising photographer got into the Dodger dressing room—it was barred to the press but he got in somehow—and took a picture of Branca within minutes of his disaster. The photograph, a strange one, shows him facedown and prostrate on a flight of cement steps—as if he’d stumbled on the bottom step and fallen face forward, his body absolutely as stiff as cordwood with grief. The effect of that home run finished Branca, practically speaking, as a pitcher. Afterward he toyed with the idea of changing his uniform number, which was 13, but he never did. Perhaps he knew that nothing would help him.

I found I couldn’t explain the effect of Frank Thomas’s home run, at least not to Pierce, because in actual fact I felt a certain sense of pride in that home run. Every time I return to Yankee Stadium—to a football game, for example—I automatically look up into the section where the ball hit, it was section 34, remembering then that I felt no sense of stupidity but in fact enjoyed a strong feeling of identification with Thomas’s feat—as if I was his partner rather than opposing him, and that between us we’d connived to arrange what had happened. It was as if I’d wheeled to watch the ball climb that long way for the upper deck and called out, “Look, look what I’ve helped engineer!”

It wasn’t a reaction I could have explained to Pierce without being accused of being in sympathy with the enemy. Besides, he was back on pitchers, talking about curveballs, the gloomy consideration of Branca, and the batter and his prowess postponed, laid away in the shadows, as he described a bright and cheerful world full of pitching splendors.

“You’ve got to see Donovan’s curve,” he said eagerly. “Can’t tell about the curve on TV. Got to catch it, try to catch it, to see what the thing does. It breaks so you can almost hear it.”

So we talked comfortably about pitching. I told him that I’d thrown one curveball that afternoon. “It was the first pitch I threw to Frank Robinson,” I said. “It almost ran up the foul screen. It got away from me.”

“I see,” said Pierce. “So that’s what it was.”

Later that afternoon, Gil Hodges, the Dodger first baseman, complained that I had thrown him a curveball. He followed Thomas in the lineup and, despite the fact that he hit the curveball for a sharp single to short center, he spoke to me reproachfully. He told me he didn’t think curveballs were allowed.

I was surprised at the high respect major leaguers hold for the curveball and how they hate to bat against it. If a curve is hit safely, the batter attributes his success less to his own ability than to being given the chance to take advantage of a fault in the curve itself. “That hook hung up there just long enough,” he will say later in the dugout, meaning that he was able to get his bat around on the ball before it broke. Any player who professes to prefer taking his swipes against curveballs is looked upon with suspicion. And indeed in the history of the majors only a few players have had the reputation of preferring to see curves thrown at them: Hornsby, for one, Rollie Hemsley, Moose Skowron, Roy Sievers, Ducky Medwick, and Al Simmons, these last two despite both having the fault of stepping away from the pitch with the forward foot, falling away “into the bucket”—supposedly suicidal against the curve. They compensated for their faulty swings with amazing eyes and quick strong wrists. There are others, of course, who do well against curveball pitchers, but nonetheless the curve has always been better known for destroying reputations. Jim Thorpe, for example, probably the greatest athlete who ever lived, never stuck in the majors because a curveball fooled him too often. A rookie’s classic letter from the training camp begins: “I’ll be home soon, ma. The pitchers are starting to curve me.”

Frankly, I don’t remember throwing Hodges a curveball. But I remember other things about his lengthy tenure at the plate, right from the beginning as he stepped into the batter’s box, hitching up his baseball pants, reaching out then and rubbing up the fat part of his bat as he set himself, picking again at those pants as if about to wade into a shallow pond. He has outsize hands, which you notice when he stands in at the plate. They span over twelve inches, and Peewee Reese, his captain, used to say of him, in connection with those big hands, that he only used a glove for fielding at first base because it was fashionable. They call him Moon, and I remember how he looked, the rather beefy pleasant face under the blue helmet, and the blue piping of the Dodger uniform, and while I don’t remember throwing him a curve, I remember the line-drive single he hit, how easy and calculated his swing, and how sharp that hit of his was going out… but mainly I remember something else.