The Boys of Summer (12 page)

“I didn’t have to read Grantland Rice to write football.”

“This is a different game.”

“I’ve played it all my life.”

“That doesn’t help you write it,” Bob Cooke said. His blue eyes moved about. A strong hand drummed the desk. “Your story didn’t have any sense of, of I don’t know what,” Cooke said. “I mean once I was covering a game and Rex Barney was wild and I wrote, ‘Barney pitched as though the plate were high and outside.’ That’s the way I want to see you write baseball. You can do it. ‘Barney pitched as though the plate were high and outside.’ “

I was promoted to general assignment, which meant that I was relieved of high school sports. Marsh worried that I was moving ahead too quickly. Cooke disagreed and, in a complex of other tensions, the two held their positions even to that day in the following spring when Harold Rosenthal asked to leave the Dodgers.

The phone rang at the small apartment in Brooklyn. “What are you doing Tuesday?” Cooke said.

“Oh. Hi, Bob.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, and he was excited. “On Tuesday you’ll be covering the Dodgers.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Come on in here and then you better pack.”

I took a taxi all the way to the office. Cooke briefed me. “Just do what you’ve been doing. Write what happens and don’t take things too seriously.”

“ ‘Barney,’ “ I said, “ ‘pitched as though the plate were high and outside.’”

“Attaboy.”

As I started out of the department, Marsh was sitting at his desk, looking blue. “Could I have a word with you?” he said.

“I’ve only got a minute.” I sat in the chair where eighteen months before I had been taught to rewrite essays into stories.

“I opposed this,” Irving said. “I want you to know that. I think you’ll be a fine baseball writer. But not yet. It’s too soon.”

I set my teeth.

“Which doesn’t mean I won’t be rooting for you,” Marsh said. “Go knock ‘em dead.”

That was the
Tribune
then, or one touch of the
Tribune,
as it came into my life. I have forgotten as much as I can forget of its last writhing. Late in the 1960s I had occasion to visit the newspaper and the changes startled me, not merely because they were changes. The floors were littered. Apparently
economy drives now extended to cleaning women. The new managing editor, Buddy Weiss, was rushing about without a jacket, encouraging people, like a football coach losing by four touchdowns in the final quarter. A third of the desks assigned reporters were bare. The staff was small and desperate. Two or three people asked if I knew of any jobs.

“If you wanna do an article, if you know anyone good who wants to do an article, we can pay
anything,
“cried Clay Felker, editor of the
Sunday Magazine
section.

“How much is anything?”

“For the right article, we’ll outbid anybody in the country.” (And for the Second Coming, I’ll go to church.)

I walked into George Cornish’s former office. A fat columnist bulged over his typewriter, cursing and reeking of beer. A hungry-eyed columnist sat nearby, squirming in his chair. “Gonna get them fuckers,” said the fat man. Between the two, a fat, hungry-eyed secretary slouched on a table, her short skirt hiked high on enormous thighs. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she said. “Isn’t what they’re doing to journalism wonderful?”

“Teach them fuckers to mess with me,” said the fat columnist.

Except for the pocked bust of Adolf Hitler, I would not have known where I was.

Underneath a patina of professionalism, the Dodgers I joined in 1952 twitched in shock and mortification. No major league baseball club before had been both as gifted and as consecutively disappointing. In 1950 the Dodgers fell far behind the Philadelphia Phillies, caught them on the last day of the season and seemed certain to prevail when an outfielder named Cal Abrams reached second base with no one out in the ninth inning of a tie game. Then Duke Snider singled to center field and
Abrams was thrown out at home by three yards. The Phils defeated Don Newcombe in the tenth, winning the pennant, and the Dodgers dismissed their third-base coach. During August of the following season, 1951, the Dodgers held first place by a lead of thirteen games. In what has come to be regarded as the most exciting of pennant races, the Giants, now managed by Leo Durocher, overtook the team and forced a play-off series. The Dodgers lost in Ebbets Field, then won, 10 to 0, in the Polo Grounds. The second game turned when Bobby Thomson, at bat with bases loaded, struck out on a curve that Clem Labine broke half a foot outside. A day later, the Dodgers moved ahead and went into the ninth inning leading, 4 to 1. Then came two singles and a double. With one out, the Giants had the tying run on base. Dressen telephoned his bullpen. “Erskine is bouncing his curve,” Clyde Sukeforth, the bullpen coach, reported. “Labine seems tired.” Dressen called on Branca, who threw a low fast ball, then a hand-high fast ball, which Thomson, enacting an antithetic “Casey at the Bat,” lined into the left-field stands. The Giants had won, 5 to 4. Jackie Robinson followed Thomson’s lope, making certain that he touched every base. Ralph Branca wept. For the second consecutive year the Dodgers had lost the pennant in the last inning of the last game of the season. This time the bullpen coach was replaced.

Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst image of ourselves. We are not effective, after all, not truly competent, not manly in crisis. We may dismiss a coach, but we cannot elude blame. We have failed. Everyone knows we have failed. We know it ourselves. We stand naked, before an unflattering mirror, hearing hard laughter that includes our own.

After Thomson’s homer, mirthless pseudo humor pricked the team. What has two legs, two arms and no guts? Why, that would be famous Dodger righthander Don Newcombe. Did the Dodgers always lose the pennant by one game? No; if necessary they could lose it by ten. How do you frighten a Dodger ball
player? You don’t have to bother; he’s already scared. What, asked Sal Maglie, did a certain Dodger and a certain homosexual have in common? Ha, cried Maglie, they both choke up on the big ones.

Against these attacks toward a seat of manhood, the Dodgers set themselves in belligerence. When Leo Durocher, then married to the Mormon actress Laraine Day, shouted at Jackie Robinson, “My dick to you,” Robinson backed out of the batter’s box and cried, “Give it to Laraine. She needs it more than I do.” On another occasion, Durocher, who was coaching at third, removed his cap and scratched a bald scalp. “Hey, skinhead,” boomed a voice from the Brooklyn dugout, “put on your hat before somebody jerks you off.”

Like small boys out to demonstrate toughness, the Dodger bench was loud and hypersensitive and defiant. At the same time, a number of players worked shows of unconcern. “Choking up” simply did not exist, they said. It was imagined in press boxes. What was choking anyway? some Dodgers said they wanted to know. “Well,” remarked Captain Pee Wee Reese, with a small, sad grin, “when you chew gum and saliva don’t come, you’re choking.”

Athletes, like surgeons and concert violinists, know the dry mouth of pressure. It costs them sleep and shapes their dreams. Baltimore once signed a righthander named Paul Swango, who mentioned, after depositing a bonus check, that he did not like to pitch in front of crowds. Swango disappeared into the deep minors, where attendance is sparse. He was not heard from, or heard of, after that. When Roger Maris hit sixty-one home runs in 1961, the pressure of constant interviews so upset him that he began to lose bristly clumps of hair. He never had another comparable season. But neither Swango’s nerves nor Maris’ ordeal is typical.

Pressure can stunt an athlete, but evidence argues powerfully that a major league ball player is fully grown. To make the
majors at all, a man first survives other pennant races, other play-offs. As he rises, pressures rise with him. A Little Leaguer feels the eyes of his parents and his neighbors and his teammates when he comes to bat. If he wriggles helplessly, he has found something out. High-pressure competitive baseball is not for him. A minor leaguer, driving toward the majors, has coaches and scouts studying him every day. The man who collapses into tremors with men on base dies, as the saying is, in Peoria.

A big league ball player ordinarily performs at a specific level, with crests, called “hot streaks,” and dips, called “slumps.” Tension plays on him, but, in the imprecision of human behavior, one can never anticipate how. “I didn’t want to go in and pitch against Bobby Thomson,” Clem Labine concedes. “If you asked me then, I would have said,
‘Sure, I’m not afraid of anything.’
But whatever you say, nobody
wants
a spot like that. If they’d asked me, I’d have thrown the best I could and Thomson would have taken his best cut. Who knows, he could have hit me into the
upper deck.”
One day, under pressure against Labine, Thomson whipped himself to overanxiousness. Against Branca he whipped himself toward glory. With Thomson—with almost every big leaguer, it seems to me—choker and hero are two masks for the same plain face.

On the team Billy Cox played dramatically when most was at issue. He hit Giant pitching hard and in two World Series his fielding moved Casey Stengel to grumble, “That ain’t a third baseman. That’s a fucking acrobat.” Cox’s attention diffused over a long season. Important games refocused it. Pee Wee Reese played well in many crucial games. Duke Snider tied a record by striking out eight times in the 1949 World Series. In 1952 he tied the Series record for home runs. Carl Furillo batted .353, .125, .177 and .333 in his first four World Series. If one wants to advance the overriding choke hypothesis, he must follow labyrinthine paths through inconsistency, leading finally to the borders of mysticism.

But choking concerned many Dodgers because they heard of it so frequently. Even Carl Erskine, when described as “pebble-game,” wondered if the writer were making an obscure reference to swallowing. Erskine could not pitch as often as some others because of chronic arm trouble, which he bore in silence. All the Dodgers’ fundamental lacks were physical. When I was with them, they had no overpoweringly strong pitcher. Christy Mathewson of 1905, Tom Seaver of 1969, won the big games, dominated the World Series and carried a team. Without a superpitcher the Dodgers lost some important games. But self-doubt followed failure. It did not cause it.

Wesley Branch Rickey arrived in Brooklyn during World War II fired by two dreams that were to falter. He would build a dynasty to surpass the Yankee empire in the Bronx. He would personally achieve enormous wealth. Rickey became Dodger president after Larry MacPhail responded to the blast of World War II and re-enlisted. MacPhail’s Dodgers, assembled under a threat of bankruptcy, could not long endure. Rickey reached Brooklyn thinking in terms of generations, and, as soon as peace came, and manpower stabilized, his Dodgers emerged, formidable, aggressive and enduring. “My ferocious gentlemen,” he liked to say. Although Rickey had been banished to Pittsburgh by 1952, every important Dodger pitcher, without exception, had been acquired during his remarkable suzerainty.

Raised on an Ohio farm, Branch Rickey graduated from the University of Michigan, considered becoming a Latin teacher, but chose baseball. Old records indicate that he performed marginally. He caught for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders—the paleozoic Yankees—doubling as an outfielder. In four years he batted an aggregate .239. Then he managed in St. Louis, moving from the Browns to the Cardinals. He never brought home a team higher than third. Gruff Rogers Hornsby replaced Rickey in 1925 and the Cardinals won the World Series in 1926. Rickey was forty-five that year, and without
great distinction. Then he moved into the Cardinal front office and his life turned around. As an executive, Rickey let his intellect run free; broadly, as Henry Ford shaped the future of the business of automobiles, Rickey shaped the future of the game of baseball. It was Rickey who invented the so-called farm system, baseball’s production line. He stocked the sources, a half dozen teams, with young, uncertain talent. As their ability allowed, ball players advanced. In one case in twenty-five, a player proved gifted enough for the majors. It was a bloodless procedure, but effective, and presently the Cardinals dominated the National League. Rickey paid execrable salaries—$7,500 a year was high pay. Considering the attrition rate, he had to curb expenses, but Rickey was also a man of principle. He had a Puritan distaste for money in someone else’s hands.

In the mid-1940s he bought minor league teams for Brooklyn and the old Latinist, having organized a Dodger farm system, next created a camp where legions of players could be instructed. He chose an abandoned naval air station, four miles west of Vero Beach, Florida, as the training site. There among palms, palmettos, scrub pines and swamp, he made a world. The old Navy barracks, renamed Dodgertown, became spring housing for two hundred athletes. The mess hall now served not navigators but infielders. Outside, Rickey supervised the construction of four diamonds, five batting cages, two sliding pits and numberless pitcher’s mounds, everywhere pitcher’s mounds. Pitching excited Rickey. It moved him to melodramatics.

At one meeting of the Dodger command, Rickey lifted a cigar and cried, “I have come to the point of a cliff. I stand poised at the precipice. Earth crumbles. My feet slip. I am tumbling over the edge. Certain death lies below. Only one man can save me.
Who is that
man?"This meant that the Dodger bullpen needed help and would someone kindly suggest which minor league righthander should be promoted? It is a tempered irony that
Rickey’s sure hand failed him where he most wanted sureness. He was unable to produce a great Brooklyn pitching staff.

Pitchers, of all ball players, profit most from competitive intelligence. It is a simple, probably natural thing to throw. A child casts stones. But between the casting child and the pitching major leaguer lies the difference between a boy plunking the piano and an artist performing.

A major leaguer ordinarily has mastered four pitches. The sixty feet six inches that lie between the mound and home plate create one element in a balanced equation between pitcher and batter. No one can throw a baseball past good hitters game after game. The major league pitching primer begins: “Speed is not enough.” But a fast ball moves if it is thrown hard enough. Depending on grip, one fast ball moves up and into a righthanded batter. Another moves up and away from him. A few men, like Labine, develop fast balls that sink.