CHAPTER 15

My statistician had some further notes on those two men sitting in front of him. One of them had put a white handkerchief around his neck to protect it from the sun, and they sat relaxed, slowly rocking the beer around in the big paper cups, and they said as follows:

“Feel that sun, hey? Injun summer.”

“Mmmm.”

“Hey, you know something? I never heard of no guy called Prufrock. You sure that guy pitching’s called Prufrock?”

“That’s the way it come over the PA system—Prufrock.”

“There’s a guy around the league what they call Marv Blaylock, or there was—and then there’s Ike Delock of the Red Sox, a pitcher, y’know, but, man, that fellow out there don’t look like no ol’ Ike, know whatta mean?”

“You don’t suppose it’s Shucks Pruett out of Higginsville, Kentucky?”

“No, it ain’t Shucks Pruett. Listen. Tell me something. Why do you keep bringing up Shucks Pruett anyway? You got some special thing about Shucks Pruett? He a cousin of yours, or something?”

“I didn’t say so. I like the name—that’s all. Shucks Pruett. He was a pitcher, y’know, not such a hot one either—for the Phillies back in the late twenties.”

“Yeh, yeh, you told me.”

They sipped at their beer, and presently, the one with the handkerchief around his neck, the anti-Pruett of the pair, leaned forward and squinted out at the field.

“Hey, you know something?”

“No, what?”

“I’ll tell you one thing—Shucks Pruett or no Shucks Pruett—about that guy pitching out there. He’s the palest pitcher I ever saw. Lookit that face of his—shining out there like a six hundred-watt bulb. You ever see anything like that?”

“Yeh, how ’bout that…”

“Hey, you know something else?”

“No, what?”

“Tell me this. Who’s he talking at? He’s talking like a house afire out there. You know what I think… I think the sun’s affected him, or something.”

“You got a point, y’know. Lookit that strange herky-jerky pitchin’ motion of his. He looks pretty shook up.”

It was true. The physical disintegration had started in while Hodges was at the plate and it progressed quickly. John McGraw once advised a rookie going in to pitch against Honus Wagner: “Chuck the ball as hard as you can… and pray.” My trouble was that I had been doing exactly that against all the batters from the first. For twenty minutes I had been burning every pitch in, feeling that if I let up and tried to guide the ball across the plate the control would vanish utterly. I hadn’t bothered to pace myself, and by the time Hodges stood in at the plate I was exhausted. I felt the numbness of it seep through the system like a sea mist. Acutely conscious of the physical self, I fancied I could see that engine straining and laboring—the heart crashing and thundering in the rib cage like an overworked pump, the lungs billowing in and out as they whistled heavy warm gouts of air up the long shaft of the throat, and below, the stomach churning and ambulating and wondering why breakfast hadn’t been sent down to it that day, or lunch, for that matter, and peeved about it, and then this whole oscillating edifice would tip and sway in the delivery of a pitch, the muscles convoluting and squeaking, off the pitch would go, and then as everything came to a shuddering and wheezing pause at the end of the follow-through, down the long thin corridors and shaftways between the taut tendons would drift that jeering inner voice of mine: “You nut! You fat fool nut! Y’all missed the plate again!”

When I finally got the ball over and Hodges lined out his hit, I felt like lying down. My interest in the proceedings was strongly affected by that oncoming dizziness—with its high ringing sound like the mooning hum of a tiny bug caught deep back in the confines of the ear, and while the ball was being fired in by Mickey Mantle in center, I was bent over, puffing hard, and trying to clear my head of its sounds and mists. I could feel the October sun pressing on my neck. When I looked up, Stan Lopata, the Phillies catcher, was settling himself in the batter’s box. He has a pronounced crouch at the plate as he awaits the pitch, hunched over as if he’d been seized by a sudden stomach cramp. Naturally, his stance diminishes his strike zone considerably, despite the fact that he’s a big man, and I looked down at him in dismay. In fact, my voice, still jeering from the sidelines, produced a perky comment about Lopata which made me smile in spite of myself. “Mah God!” it said. “Lookit what y’all got yo’self into now… that’s nobody else up there at the plate but Ed Gaedel… that’s who that is, and yo’ jes’ tell me how y’all gonna pitch to some cat like that…”

Ed Gaedel is the name of the famous midget that Zack Taylor, manager of the St. Louis Browns, sent up to bat against a Detroit pitcher named Bob Cain in the first inning of the second game of a doubleheader played in St. Louis in August 1951. The midget had been signed by Bill Veeck, the St. Louis general manager who may have been inspired by James Thurber’s short story “You Could Look It Up”—about a minor league manager who in the throes of his team’s slump sends in a midget as a pinch hitter. The inner voice didn’t dredge up all these facts—just the name Gaedel, and if you looked in at Lopata’s coiled stance, crouching there as if he was sneaking up on a bullfrog from behind, you saw how appropriate the choice was: Gaedel measured 3 feet 7 inches and weighed 65 pounds. He came to the plate wearing the number ⅛ on the back of his jersey, swinging three miniature bats, and presented a strike zone which could not have been more than eight inches in height. Since he then adopted a crouching stance—not unlike Lopata’s in miniature—the zone must have been shortened to not more than five or six inches. Cain didn’t come close with any of his deliveries, and after four balls had sailed over his head Gaedel trotted down to first where an outfielder named Jim Delsing was sent in to run for him. It wasn’t his last appearance in a baseball game. After his major league contract was disapproved on the basis that his participation was not in the best interests of baseball, he turned up in a sandlot game in Syracuse, New York. The pitcher wasn’t upset by the diminutive strike zone and struck out Gaedel on three called strikes, whereupon the midget turned to the umpire and cried at him shrilly: “You’re the worst umpire I ever hope to see.”

I threw Lopata four quick balls, wide of the plate, but I wasn’t as lucky as pitcher Bob Cain of Detroit. The nightmarish apparition of Ed Gaedel only faced him for the minute or so it took him to issue a walk. But under the special rules of my pitching stint four balls didn’t walk a man. You were stuck with him. There was no way by your own action (unless you got three strikes on him, which was unlikely) to get rid of him—as you’d throw out a botched canvas and put a fresh one on the easel—no hope of throwing four quick balls and getting a new batter up there with a stance that was pleasing to the eye: Ted Evans, for example, an English circus giant who offered his dubious services to Bill Veeck after the Gaedel affair—a man who claimed he was 9 feet 3½ inches in height, and who would have had a truly splendid strike zone. No matter how much you willed it, when you looked up, there was Stan Lopata, seemingly as permanent a fixture at the plate as a cast-iron garden sculpture. I threw him fifteen pitches. My mouth was ajar with fatigue, and I was swept by the numbing despair that must grip English bowlers who often have to work on the same pair of batsmen for two or three hours, often more. Lopata and I were a sturdy pair, joined together by the umbilical cord of my wildness—and also by his propensity for hitting fouls. He hit six of them, lashing out like a cobra from his coil, and the ball would flee in big hops down past the coaching boxes or loft into the stands.