The Boys of Summer (15 page)

“I wanted to ask about pitching.”

“Too many incubators and too many guys that get blowed.”

“It’s kind of hard to write that in the paper, Chuck.”

“What? Whoop? Yup. I see what ya mean.”

“Well?”

“Water seeks its own level,” Dressen said.

So my grandmother had told me once in Brooklyn. Chuck Dressen had a small pinched face. He began to remind me of my grandmother.

“Charlie’s goddamn right,” Pitler said.

“Ya pitch ‘em and pitch ‘em,” Dressen said, “and they eliminate theirselves. The pitchers eliminate theirselves and the hitters seek their level like water.”

“Charlie’s right,” Jake Pitler said.

“Water seeks its own level,” Dressen said. “A .220 hitter will hit .220 if you play him long enough and a .320 hitter will hit. 320.”

“Like Stan Musial,” I said.

“Aah, Musial,” Dressen said. “I gotta way to pitch to Musial.”

“How?”

“A slow curve. That’s public enemy number one. The curve. A slow curve breakin’ in on Musial tit-high.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“The pitchers won’t listen to what I say.”

“Who’s your best pitcher?”

“Newcombe, but the Army got him.”

“Who would you say is your best ball player?”

Dressen winked. He had small eyes that darted.

“Not to write,” I said. “I’m just asking, Chuck.”

“Not to write?”

“I heard you promise,” Pitler said.

“Robi’son,” Dressen said, “is the best ball player I ever managed, anywhere.”

“Color doesn’t matter?”

“Lookit,” Dressen said. “I know about that Klan. I don’t go to church, but my folks was Catholics and them Klan bastards burned crosses where I grew up. I never got much schoolin’, but
I know a lot of things. Now on this team there’s some guys, they don’t like Robi’son, or none of ‘em. But that don’t mean shit because we’re gonna win the pennant and when they see it’s Robi’son getting them World Series money, he’s gonna look awful white awful fast.”

We had another drink and I asked about Joe Black, who had pitched well that day in Mobile. “Might,” Dressen said. “Dunno. Ain’t afraid. College guy. Maybe. Does he get blowed? Dunno. Maybe in relief.”

There was no privacy with the team and very few secrets. That night on the Pullman rolling toward Virginia Joe Black hailed me from his roomette. “Hey, man. Sit down. Ya wanna talk a little? I used to teach in school. I’m not a dummy. Hey. How you like the South?”

Black was six feet three and very dark, with fine features and a bull neck. “How do
you
like the South?” I said.

Black grinned. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “They won’t let me in.”

“You take your family to Vero Beach?”

“That’s what I mean,” Black said. “There aren’t any colored in Vero Beach. They got a whole separate town for colored, called Gifford. You been to Gifford? No? I don’t believe that town has running water.”

Black looked out the window. The train was hurrying through bare Piedmont Hills. Spring had not advanced beyond Tennessee. “Hey,” Black said, gazing with large, soft eyes, “am I gonna make this club?”

“How do I know?”

“You talked to Number 7.”

“That’s right.”

“He like that game in Mobile? Six good innings. Hey. I can give better than that. And I’ll protect them. And I don’t walk many. And I hum it pretty good. You know what Campy says, ‘Ah hums that pea.’ “

I put a hand on Joe’s huge arm. “I’ll see if I can find out a little more,” I said. “You really want to make this ball club, don’t you?”

Black dropped his drawl. “If I could express myself as well as Shakespeare,” he said, “I still couldn’t tell you how much.”

From town to town the Main Streets had their sameness. Drugstores by Rexall, king of condoms. Drygoods by Stern & Fein, or Fein & Stern. Movie houses playing something closed in New York City.

The weather turned raw. Labine’s arm continued to ache. Black pitched three shutout innings. Everyone caught cold. The Vick Chemical Company shipped cartons of nose drops to the home offices of the team. Charlie Dressen said Preacher Roe would pitch opening day. We reached Washington. We were out of the South. We played in Baltimore. I asked Dressen if he felt he had to win a pennant to keep his job.

“Nah,” he said. “That fellow before me won eighty-seven. Last year I won ninety-seven. The way I look at it, I’m ten games ahead. Get it?” He whistled, winked and squeezed my arm. “Write it that way,” he offered. “I’m a friend of Bob Cooke. We’ll be home tomorrow. I’ll be talking to him.”

Fala died. The Philharmonic played
Elijah
with choirs singing from four scaffolds. Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
was published. We were home.

“Okay?” I said to Cooke on the telephone.

“Fine. You showed something. Only one thing. Call them ‘the Dodgers.’ Don’t call them ‘the Brooks.’”

“Okay?” I said to Marsh.

“You didn’t hear from me, did you? When you do hear, that’s the time to worry.”

Between the conclusion of spring barnstorming and the opening of the season, the Dodgers played three games with the Yankees at Ebbets Field. Even in sour years the Dodgers did well in this series, after which they began to lose while the Yankees stormed Olympus. “We’re better than the
Yankees,”
I had complained to my father long ago. “Why can’t we beat the Cubs?” Gordon Kahn always answered with apothegms: “Spring training proves nothing. The Yankees have learned the trick of winning when it counts.”

“Will you be covering the Yankee series at all?” my father was asking now on the telephone, after the team and I returned to New York.

“No. I’m getting three days off.”

“That’s a pity. Those games are often interesting.”

“Spring training proves nothing,” I said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t be too certain of that.”

“Besides, the Yankees have learned the trick of winning when it counts.”

“That’s true,” my father said, “but remember this: Change is a hallmark of baseball.”

He wanted to see me about a number of matters, he said. I suggested Bleeck’s, my home arena, and the day before the 1952 season began I wrote a thousand words on what to expect of the Dodgers and went to the bar. Gordon Kahn walked in, wearing a sports jacket over a sleeveless blue sweater, a clip-on bow tie and rumpled pants. He nodded and said with grave affection, “So it turns out you do know how to spell.”

That warmth and Leo Corcoran’s martinis melted contention.
“I always had a difficult time explaining baseball to two people,” Gordon Kahn said, “one of whom you know particularly well.”

“Mother.”

“The other was Clifton Fadiman. Whenever I wanted to use a baseball question on ‘Information Please,’ Kip announced, ‘I know nothing at all about baseball!’”

“Did he know baseball?”

“No. It was true. But he said it with so much pride, he sounded as if he wanted an award.”

“The Clifton P. Fadiman Baseball Ignorance Award, Olga Kahn, donor.”

“Hey.”

“Sorry.”

Gordon looked at me and said, “How did you like the beat? How did you find it? Were you surprised?”

“Jesus, yes. You can’t believe the goddamn South. You wouldn’t have believed Mobile. I’m telling you those Southern creeps will start a riot at a ball park before Robinson is through.”

“You know we had Robinson on ‘Information Please,’ and when I asked him how he did at school, he said he ran track and played basketball, football and baseball for UCLA and got Cs and was darn glad to get them.”

“Jack? Said ‘darn’?”

“Or something of the sort.”

“This guy is under assault every minute of every game, and he has to fight for every breath and he doesn’t say things like ‘darn’ or ‘heavens to Betsy.’”

“Profanity is superfluous to English,” Gordon Kahn insisted.

But you have inverted reality, Father. English is superfluous to baseball profanity.
I choked down that response. I did not want to tell my father that. Here he had been imagining major league baseball for fifty years and now his son, not yet twenty-five, had found out the imaginings were fluff. He knew techniques
and final scores, but of the rough reality of baseball life (I could have argued) Gordon Kahn knew as little as the award-winning Clifton P. Fadiman. To make that argument to this gentle Victorian, I would have had to cite Dressen’s sex counsel, to repeat dialogues in true language; in short, I would have had to be willing to be cruel. “I guess so, Dad,” I said, “but the fellers curse more than either of us would have figured.”

“But there are men on the team of real intelligence.”

“Well, Erskine is very bright and Preacher seems to know a lot, but look, I’ve only been with them for three weeks.”

“I wanted to talk to you about the ensuing months,” Gordon said, in abrupt formality. “How is your wife?”

“Fine.” She had begun working as a guidance counselor in the then obscure ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our separate ways would converge again only when a first son was born. But I did not want to discuss forebodings of divorce. “She’s working hard,” I said.

“Your mother and I are somewhat concerned about the specific ambiance where
you
work.”

“What? Now wait a minute. Look at this bloody bar.” At 6
P.M.
Bleeck’s was crowded with
Tribune
and garment people. “There are probably more good writers here now than you two have known.”

“And of course you include yourself in that modest evaluation.”

“Maybe.”

“I was referring to the dugout anyway. You know you have to work at writing and you have to work at reading, and your mother and I feel it would be sensible if you joined us in weekly readings of
Ulysses.
That presumes you are still interested in Joyce. What we have in mind are readings aloud, and then discussions, on Tuesday nights.”

“Tuesday nights are night games.”

“Wednesdays then.”

“I guess that would be all right. I’ll check at home.”

“We should try and see one another more often.”

“Right,” I said. “We should. Let’s get a bite.”

“No. Nope. Can’t do that. Always eat at home. It’s almost 6:30, and your mother doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

He walked out of Bleeck’s and I returned to the martini. Reading Joyce aloud on Wednesday nights in Brooklyn. That would be something to tell Dressen, Robinson and Young.

“Hey, Kahn. You the sportswriter?” a stout man was asking.

“Yeah.”

“Well, who’s a better pitcher, Erskine or Roe?”

“Apples and pears.”

“Who do you like better?”

“They’re both good.”

“If you had to pick one for a big game?”

“All right,” I said, forgetting Joyce and marveling at my own authority. “Erskine.”

“You’re full of shit,” said the stout man, “and I’ll tell you why.”

The team broke astonishingly well. That April Clark Gable was divorcing Lady Ashley and Rudolf Friml was marrying his secretary and for the first time a live picture of an atomic explosion lit television screens throughout the country. “Atomic bomb blast in Nevada,” the
Tribune
announced airily, “tops two on Japan.” I was disinterested. For me the month was Jackie Robinson batting .478 and Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo and Billy Cox hitting close to .400. Except for a loss to Sal Maglie, the team appeared invincible. “Hodges ain’t hittin’ for beans,” Dressen said. “When he starts and Reese, we’ll beat anyone, even Maglie. There’s tricks to this game, kid.”

“What about Labine? Is his arm getting better? It’s been pretty cold.”

“I remember when I was with St. Paul,” Dressen said. “We
trained in Fort Smith, Arkansas. We had this pitcher Howard Merritt who had a bad arm near the elbow like Labine. It was so cold in Fort Smith there was ice on the field every morning. One cold day Merritt was standing around and the manager yelled, ‘Go in and pitch.’ In that cold Merritt worked the trouble out of his arm and he won twenty games that season.”

“That’s right,” Jake Pitler said.

Five years later when the
Baseball Encyclopedia
was published, I looked up Howard Merritt. He had never pitched in the major leagues.

Early May portended struggles. Robinson’s hitting fell off. Roe’s arm seemed frail. The team began to lose, and on May 4, a few hours after Harry Truman concluded a televised tour of the White House by fingering a passage from Mozart’s Sonata Number 9, the Dodgers fell to second place. Dressen, desperately concerned at losing another pennant and with that—for all the bravado—his job, mentioned on a train to Pittsburgh that, “Maybe we really ain’t got a chance.”

Charlie had offered a variety of confidences to me because I was careful about what I used and also because that was his nature. Now his simmering indiscretion erupted. “Goddamn,” he said. “They ain’t tryin’ in the front office. Last year, I wanted Shuba, they gimme Russell. Now they’re stickin’ me with two outfielders who ain’t major leaguers.”

“Jim Russell is gone,” I said.

“I mean Thompson and Williams.”

“But Thompson’s a helluva fielder and Williams can do a lotta things.”

“They ain’t major leaguers.”

“I don’t understand, Charlie. Doesn’t Walter O’Malley want to win? Doesn’t Buzzy?”

“They got a whole organization. They gotta worry about Montreal and St. Paul and them. When I was in Oakland, I worked for a
good
owner. Brick Laws. He said to me, ‘Charlie,
do what you want.’ He let me run it.” Oakland, then a modest franchise in the Pacific Coast League, lived as Dressen’s Eden, free of snakes. “I wisht we did it here the way we did it when I was in Oakland,” he said. “That’s where we really knew how to do it right.”

I slouched out of Dressen’s drawing room toward my roomette, trying to piece out his meaning and unable to understand that what he said had no meaning at all. He was worried and casting about. But our young relationship, illiterate
Meister
and ingenuous student, made me freight all his words with importance. Further, I shared his concern. As Stanley Woodward foretold, I was as much Dodger fan as newspaperman. Going to sleep that night, over the clatter of a Pennsylvania roadbed, I thought of poor Dressen and his Dodgers, who were also my Dodgers, undermanned, a second Light Brigade. It would be a disgrace (I thought) if mismanagement at the top cost the team first place yet again. The next day, at the conclusion of my account of the game, I reported: “Charlie Dressen says that he may not win the pennant as long as he’s stuck with two ball players who, he says, ‘ain’t major leaguers.’ “ I did not mention Don Thompson or Dick Williams. I was furious only at the front office.

As soon as the
Tribune
appeared, Buzzy Bavasi telephoned Dressen and said that he, Walter O’Malley and Fresco Thompson were agreed that personnel matters should be discussed only within the ball club. “It isn’t a good idea for a manager to second-guess the front office to a writer, any more than it’s a good idea for a front office to second-guess a manager at contract time. Isn’t that right, Chuck?” Bavasi said. “I’m not blaming you, or blaming anyone, but you ought to know that Walter’s pretty sore.”

Dressen sought me out at Forbes Field the next afternoon and said, “Why did you write that?”

“Why shouldn’t I have?”

“You got Buzzy and them mad at me.”

I slammed a palm into my hip. “Goddamn, I didn’t think.”

“It’s okay,” Dressen said.

“Goddamn, Charlie. Sorry. I didn’t know.”

He turned, embarrassed by my apologies, and scuttled to the water fountain in the dugout.

“If I’d known,” I said, blushing.

“Kid,” Dressen said.

“Yeah?”

“They ain’t givin’ me the best pitchin’ either.”

The Dodgers, loud in victory, were raucous in defeat. Dick Williams, who reasoned that he would be thrown off the bench for calling an umpire “motherfucker,” cogitated and found a solution. “Hey,” he’d shout. “Ump. You’re a mawdicker.” That satisfied Williams and drew a blank look. Dressen was more direct. An umpire named Frank Dascoli called plays with sweeping gestures. “Hey, adagio dancer,” Dressen bellowed. “Call the pitches right.” The hardest needier that May was Jackie Robinson. When Robinson becomes excited, his high voice rises and, from his position at second base, he maintained a running commentary on umpiring. One afternoon when Forbes Field was uncrowded, I sat next to the field and took longhand notes during one base on balls.

“[Ball one] Oh, no. Ball shit. Don’t worry. Bear down, Ralph. Where was it? Where was the pitch? Goddamnit, ump, do the best you can. Don’t let him bother you, Ralph. Bear down. [Ball two] Good pitch. Goddamn good pitch. Where you looking, ump? Stay in the game. Bear down, Ralph. Don’t mind him. [Foul ball] There’s one he didn’t blow. Bear down. [Ball three] Oh, no; oh, shit. Where was it? Where the hell was it?” He trotted to the mound, said something to Ralph Branca and walked slowly back to second base. “Play ball,” the plate umpire shouted. “What?” Robinson was moving to his normal fielding
depth. “Wait’ll I’m back. Don’t mind him, Ralph. He can’t hurt us. We already
know
where he stands. Attaboy. Good pitch. [Ball four] Hey, ump, what the fuck you trying to do?”

On May 13, with the Dodgers back in Ebbets Field, the National League president, Warren Giles, issued a memorandum that called on “all Dodgers and especially Jackie Robinson to strive for courtesy in their address to umpires.”

“The son of a bitch,” Robinson yelled in the clubhouse. “He singled me out. Now I wonder why the son of a bitch would do that?”

“Must be your soft voice, Robi’son,” Reese said.

“Shit,” Jack said, but he grinned. Pee Wee could always make him grin.

“Do you think it’s because you’re colored?” I said. The words sounded elephantine.

“Is it because I’m colored?” Robinson repeated. “Ask yourself a question. Does Giles make public memos about Stanky, about Durocher?”

A few days later Giles appeared at Ebbets Field to present Roy Campanella with an award as the Most Valuable Player of 1951. Giles interrupted his routine remarks. “And right here in Brooklyn,” he said, “let me say that the National League and I are proud of Jackie Robinson and the prestige that he has brought to our league.”

I watched Robinson’s face through binoculars. He seemed to chuckle and his smile was hate.

A third child and second son, named David, was born to the Robinsons on May 14 and Jack responded with a triumphantly aggressive game that brought the team back to first place. The Chicago Cubs led Preacher Roe, 1 to 0, when Willard Ramsdell hit Robinson with a knuckle ball. That loaded the bases in the fourth inning. A walk and ground out scored two runs. Now Robinson led away from third as Roe, whose lifetime batting average was .110, stepped in to bat.

As Ramsdell wound up, Robinson charged as if to steal home. After ten strides he stopped dead, his spikes swirling dust, and retreated. The pitch was low. Ramsdell wound up again. “There he goes,” shouted someone on the Dodger bench. Robinson charged still farther in another challenge. The second pitch was wide. A knuckle ball is hard for catchers to handle and Robinson’s rushes were not only distracting to Ramsdell but forcing him to eschew his best pitch. With the count three balls and one strike, Robinson burst for home and did not stop. Ramsdell’s hip-high fast ball had him cleanly beaten. Robinson sprang into a slide; it seemed as though he would crash into Bob Pramesa, the Cub catcher. But that was a final feint. As Jack slid, he hurled his body
away
from Pramesa, and toward first base. Only his right toe touched home plate. Pramesa lunged and tagged the air. “Goddamn,” screamed Willie Ramsdell. “Ya shoulda got him.” Then Roe singled and Ramsdell had to be taken out. The Cubs did not challenge after that.