The Boys of Summer (36 page)

“Everybody on the staff threw curves off their fast ball,” he said. “They used the fast one to set up the hitter. That helped me. I used one curve to set up another. I had some tricks.”

Roe chewed Beech-Nut gum, which he says gave him a slicker saliva than any other brand. To throw a spitter, you use a fast-ball motion, but squeeze as you release the ball. The effect you want, Roe says, is like letting a watermelon seed shoot out from between your fingers. The fingertips have to be both damp and clean. Before throwing the spitball, Roe cleaned his fingers by rubbing them on the visor of his cap. Between innings he dusted the visor with a towel. To “load one,” Roe wiped his large left hand across his brow and surreptitiously spat on the meaty part of the thumb. The broad base of the hand was his shield. Then, pretending to hitch his belt, he transferred moisture to his index and middle fingers. Finally, he gripped the ball on a smooth spot—away from seams—and threw. The spitter consistently broke down.

The other Dodgers knew about the spitter. Carl Furillo says that he could tell all the way from right field. “When Preach went to his cap with two pitching fingers together, that was our signal,” Furillo says. “That meant it was coming. If he went to his cap with fingers spread, then he was faking.”

Within the year 1948 word spread that the skinny Pittsburgh lefthander had learned a great new drop in Brooklyn. Hitters talk to one another. They knew what Preacher was throwing. But no one caught him. While he fidgeted, Roe studied the umpires, as a prisoner might study turnkeys, always on his guard. His closest call came when he had wet the ball, and suddenly Larry Goetz charged from his blind side. Goetz had been umpiring at second. “The ball, the ball, Preacher,” Goetz roared.

Roe turned and flipped the baseball over Goetz’s head, perhaps
six inches out of reach. Reese scooped the ball, rubbed it and threw to Robinson. Jack rubbed the ball again and flipped to Hodges, who threw across the infield to Billy Cox. Cox examined the baseball. It had been rubbed dry. Then he said to Goetz, “Here, Larry. Here’s the fucking ball.” Roe’s control was never better than when he was under pressure.

An extra pitch developed when several hitters read a connection between Roe’s touching his cap and his new drop. Did he have vaseline on the visor? A sponge worked into the fabric? No one knew. Everyone theorized. The dry cap on which Roe cleaned his fingers was regarded as the source of moisture.

“Soon as I figure
that
one out,” Roe said on the Viola roadside, “I got
another
pitch, my
fake
spitter. I go to my visor more and more. Jim Russell with the Braves one day was looking when I went to the cap and he stepped out. He comes back in. I touch the visor again. He moves out. This went on three or four times. Finally, Jim said, ‘All right. Throw that son of a bitch. I’ll hit it anyway.’ He’s waiting for that good hard drop. I touch the visor and throw a big slow curve. He was so wound up he couldn’t swing. But he spit at the ball as it went by.

“So you see what I got. A wet one and three fake wet ones. Curve. Slider. Hummer. I’d show hitters the hummer and tell reporters that if it hit an old lady in the spectacles, it wouldn’t bend the frame. But I could always, by going back to my old form, rear back and throw hard. Not often. Maybe ten times a game. Right now I could still throw pretty good, if you had a glove and the sage was down and we walked over there into Gray Field. But for just about ten minutes, that’s all. And I wouldn’t be able to comb my hair tomorrow.

“Well, now, pitchin’, you know, is a shell game. You move the ball. You make the hitter guess. There’s more than two pitches you can throw at any one time, so the more often he’s guessing, the better off you are. The odds are he’ll guess wrong. That was mostly how I won so many dang games. Thinkin’ ahead of ‘em.
Foolin’ ‘em. Slider away. Curve away. Fast one on the hands. Curve on the hands. Curve away. There’s a strikeout in there without one spitter, but maybe I faked it three times.”

“Why would you do that article?” I said. “What was the point in confessing?”

“Bad reckoning, I got to say. It wasn’t money. Frankly, we were trying to legalize the pitch. The objection to the spitter is that it was supposed to be hard to control. Not everybody can control it and not everybody can throw it, but I controlled mine and Murry Dickson controlled his, which broke upward, and so did Harry Brecheen. I was famous as a control pitcher and here I was gonna knock the argument to pieces. I was led to believe that if one man could prove that it wasn’t a dangerous pitch, the spitter would be legalized. That’s what I set out to do. But the article made it appear, or the folks who read it seemed to think, that the spitter was all I had. Made me look bad, an’, of course, nothin’s been legalized. The game is all for the hitters. The other year hitters had a bad season, so they got hysterical. They lowered the mound. Hitters come back strong. Now are they gonna come back and do something for the pitchers? Hell, no.

“The batter’s sitting in the circle with a pine tar cloth. Puts tar on his hands, up to his elbows, if he wants, and rubs that bat and gets up there and squeezes and it sounds like a dad-gum car comin’ by you, screechin’ its wheels.

“But if it’s a poor old pitcher, he better not put his hand in his pocket, or touch his hat ever, ‘cause they’re gonna come runnin’ to shake him down. I don’t get it.”

The sun was flickering behind a stand of oaks.

“Here,” Roe said, “to prove my argument, do you think that, as smart as umpires were then and as smart as they are today, a man could have stood out and throwed the spitter time after time without one of them snapping onto you? When people say
all
I had was a spitter, I tell ‘em they’re insulting the intelligence of umpires.”

“But when umpires asked you for the ball, you rolled it to them.”

“That’s right. They had no business asking. If a man is runnin’ around on his wife, there’s only two ways he can be caught. That’s for him to be seen or for him to admit it.

“If they want to say I’m breaking the rules with the spitter, to hell with ‘em. I sure wasn’t goin’ to admit it when I was pitching.”

“Was there a sign, Preacher?” I said.

“In the very beginning, but not fer long. Campanelly would sit back an’ shake his head. I’d stand on the mound and shake mine. We’d go on a bit and all the time he’d never give a sign. Heck, he told me one day, ‘Preach, I don’t need a sign for the spitter. I caught ‘em for years in the colored leagues.’”

Roe laughed. His laugh is warm and youthful. Laughter is the youngest part of Preacher Roe.

“How come that field’s overgrown?” I said. “Where do Ozark kids play baseball now?”

“Don’t,” Preacher said. “We got Little League and school ball, ‘course, but the old town teams is gone. We got all these new roads. And tourist business. People are eating better. But the young fellers, ‘steda workin’ on pitching, drive over to Memphis, in three hours, and spend time listening to rock music. They
tell
me it’s good for the region, but look at that field.” The pale-green sage shivered in the wind. “Funny, isn’t it?” Roe said. “Same thing in these woods as where Ebbets Field was in Brooklyn. There’ll never be a ball game here again.”

Pee Wee Reese was riding a ship back from Guam and World War II when he heard the wrenching news that Branch Rickey had hired a black. Reese had lost three seasons, half of an average major league career, to the United States Navy and he was impatient to get on with what was left when a petty officer said, “It’s on shortwave. His name’s Jackie Robinson. A colored guy to play on your team.”

“Is that a fact?” Reese said, deadpan.

“Pee Wee,” the petty officer said, in a needling, singsong way. “He’s a shortstop.”

“Oh, shit,” Pee Wee Reese said.

Across a brace of nights, Reese lay in a bunk, measuring his circumstances and himself. He’d won the job at short, in the double caldron of two pennant races. Now the old man had gone and hired a black replacement. The old man didn’t have
to do that. But wait a minute (Reese thought). What the hell did black have to do with it? They’d signed a ball player. They’d signed others during the war. White or black, this guy was gonna learn, like Cowboy Bill Hart and Fiddler Ed Basinski, that the war was over now, and the
real
Dodger shortstop was still named Pee Wee Reese.

“Except—except suppose he beats me out. Suppose he does. I go back to Louisville. The people say, ‘Reese, you weren’t man enough to protect your job from a nigger.’ “ In the bunk, only one response seemed right: “Fuck ‘em.” “I don’t know this Robinson,” Reese told himself, “but I can imagine how he feels. I mean if they said to me, ‘Reese, you got to go over and play in the colored guys’ league,’ how would I feel? Scared. The only white. Lonely. But I’m a good shortstop and that’s what I’d want ‘em to see. Not my color. Just that I can play the game. And that’s how I’ve
got
to look at Robinson. If he’s man enough to take my job, I’m not gonna like it, but damnit, black or white, he deserves it.” Reese did not speculate on the reactions of other white ball players, but before the Navy transport docked in San Francisco he had made an abiding peace with his conscience.

Three themes sound through the years of Harold Henry Reese, son of a Southern railroad detective and catalyst of baseball integration. The first was his drive to win, no less fierce because it was cloaked in civility. A second theme was that civility itself. Reese sought endlessly to understand other points of view, as with Robinson or with Leo Durocher or with a news photographer bawling after a double-header, “Would ya hold it, Pee Wee, for a couple more?” The final theme echoed wonder. He played shortstop for three generations of Brooklyn teams, and came to sport droll cockiness. Yet near the end, sitting on a friend’s front porch and
watching a brown telephone truck scuttle by, he said with total seriousness, “I still can’t figure why the guy driving that thing isn’t me.”

Reese played Dodger shortstop the year I entered high school. He played Dodger shortstop when I covered the team. The year I left the newspaper business, he batted .309. He was still able to play twenty-two games at short when he was forty and the Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles, in 1958. “He came from Kentucky a boy,” Red Barber liked to say, his voice warmed by sparks of Southern chauvinism. “And he-ah, right he-ah in Brooklyn, we saw him grow into a man, and more than that, a captain among men.”

By the time I met Reese he had been team captain for five years and had devised an unpretentious twinkly style of leadership.

“Good God A’mighty,” he’d cry in the batting cage after cuffing a line drive to right.
“Another
base hit.” The big hitters relaxed and laughed and winked.

“How ya doin’, Roscoe?” he greeted McGowen once after a long night game in Philadelphia.

“Not so good, Pee Wee,” the gray-haired
Times
man said. He began a monologue on the bad hands he had lately drawn at cards.

Reese listened sympathetically. Then he said, “Roscoe. Did it ever occur to you that maybe it isn’t the cards, that you just might be a horseshit poker player?” Even McGowen smiled.

It all seemed so casual that Reese stepped with apparent ease from pleasant trivia to more serious things. He was Jackie Robinson’s friend. They played hit-and-run together and cards and horses. Anyone who resented Robinson for his color or—more common—for the combination of color and aggressiveness found himself contending not only with Jack, but with the captain. Aware, but unself-conscious, Reese and Robinson came to personify integration. If a man didn’t like what they personified,
why, he had better not play for the Dodgers.

Duplicity annoyed Reese. A young Dodger pitcher sat drinking with a girl once when two newspapermen drifted into a hotel bar. “Christ,” the ball player said. “Gotta get outa here, ‘fore them guys see me and put it in the paper.”

Splitting beers with Snider nearby, Reese called, “Hey. You have it wrong. The writers don’t want to be treated like stool pigeons. You got caught with a dolly. Run and you make yourself look worse. Buy them a drink. Hell, writers get caught with dollies, too.”

In the clubhouse Reese’s drawl rarely showed an edge, but between games of one important double-header Billy Cox angered him. “I can’t play no more today,” Cox said. “Bushed. I gotta save something.” Gil Hodges gazed into a locker. Carl Furillo shrugged. But no one spoke. Finally Reese called, “What are you saving something for, Billy? An exhibition game in Altoona?” Cox played the second game.

Reese could have managed the Dodgers. After the overthrow of Dressen, he towered, the obvious successor. “It was not specifically offered,” he says, “but they gave me the impression that if I wanted to run for the office, ask real strong, I could have it. Thing was, I didn’t want to run.” Later he spent one season as a coach. From that point he might have succeeded Walter Alston and he certainly could have managed somewhere. But he quit after a single season. He was rejecting the eternal pressure, the abrasive life, the suffocating responsibility and, I suppose, the eventual firing that is part of a manager’s condition of employment. His reason cut deeper than the outward calm. Before Pee Wee Reese retired as shortstop, he had developed a case of stomach ulcers.

He took a job telecasting ball games once a week for NBC. “How do you like that?” he said, with cultivated mildness. “They’re paying me to talk into a microphone and I still pronounce the damn word ‘th’owed.’ “ But he was proud of this
success, as he was proud of the others, and losing the NBC job to Mickey Mantle wounded him. When I telephoned Reese in Louisville, I said that I was sorry.

“That’s show biz,” Reese said. “Don’t get lost coming here. Make it for brunch. The house is out in Bealesbranch Road.”

He was comfortable, I knew. He owned a storm window business and a bowling alley and part of a bank in Brandenburg, Kentucky, and the Cincinnati Reds had hired him to broadcast for a season. “I liked the old NBC job,” he said, “but face it. I was never a name like Mantle. I was hanging in and my time ran out. Now it’s running out in Cincy, too.”

The contentious present has whirled his name into controversy. According to newspaper accounts, a black group in Louisville accused Reese of renting bowling lanes only to whites. Driving out of Roe’s Ozarks, through forests, into the Mississippi flats across west Kentucky hills, I wondered intermittently what could have happened. The man had worked ten years for integration, sharing a measure of Robinson’s triumph, and ten years after that he stood accused as a segregationist.

“Come in,” Reese said, at the door of a rambling, unpretentious house. Bealesbranch is a street of comfortable homes, with tidy lawns and landscaped plots, bespeaking means, if not wealth. Reese guided me through a large carpeted living room, to a veranda under a viny lattice. “Beulah will get coffee,” he said. He wore slacks and a knitted shirt. His body looked trim. He eased onto a pale chaise longue. His hair was sandy. You could still read Puck in his face. A choir of birds saluted the morning.

“Nice here,” I said.

“We like it.”

“What’s this racial stuff about you?”

Reese sat up. “What racial stuff about me?”

“The papers said your bowling alley was lily-white.”

He winced.

“Could Robinson bowl at your alley?”

“Look,” Reese said. “What happened was that a black team wanted to use it on a night when all the alleys were taken by a league. Now maybe that
league
was all-white. I don’t check on all the customers. In this climate, charges get wild. But hell”—disgust sounded—“I wouldn’t run a segregated
anything. A
little while later, just by accident, I bumped into Robinson at an airport. He’d been speaking somewhere. He came over and asked if I was trying to make him look bad. I began to tell him what I told you, and he just started laughing.”

Reese shook his head. “That Robinson. You remember the time he first got into the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. We’re all on the bus and the black guys got in cabs to go to their hotel in the colored section. And Jackie gets on the bus.

“ ‘Hey,’ Campy shouts. ‘Come with us, Jack.’

“Jack says, ‘No, I’m going to the Chase.’

“Campy says, ‘Oh, man. Come
on.
We’ll all get in the Chase eventually.’

“Jack says, ‘I know. But I’m getting there
today.’”

The housekeeper appeared with coffee. “I’m gonna make this man work,” Reese told her. “He intends to write about me because he’s forgotten how hard I am to write about. What I mean,” Reese said, “is that Robinson or Durocher, stories about them write themselves, don’t they?”

“Red Smith says he’s waiting for a story that writes itself. He says he always has to push the keys himself.”

“But there’s nothing
colorful
about me.”

“Well, why don’t we start by talking about other people, say someone who’s doing what you didn’t want, managing—Gil Hodges.”

“Okay, but I don’t have a real good memory.”

Reese raised his feet and sipped coffee. “When Gil first came up, a catcher, there were two other catchers around. Bruce Edwards, who was fine, until he put on weight. And Campy.
We could play three catchers at once. Edwards at third, Hodges at first. And Campy where he belonged. Gil could play anywhere, but I didn’t think he would
ever
manage. It’s like me being a telecaster. If someone had told me I’d be doing national TV, I’d have said,
‘No way.’
I wasn’t that clever. I wasn’t that much an extrovert. Rooming with Gil, and we roomed together on one of the trips the team made to Japan, I didn’t think he’d be able to take over a club. He wasn’t tough enough. Once Dressen put money in Gil’s hand and said, ‘If there’s a play at first and you think the guy is out and they call him safe and you get th’own out of a ball game, I’ll give you fifty.’ Gil wouldn’t do it. People like Maglie always knocked him down. I said, ‘Gil. When one of those guys th’ows at you, why don’t you drop that bat, or after the game just go up and grab him’—strong as Gil was—’and say, “If you ever come close to me again, I’ll
kill
you.” ‘ Gil laughed. Nothing riled him. I didn’t think he’d be tough enough. But he’s become real tough, I hear. And I can’t believe that’s Gil.”

“To your right,” I said, “Billy Cox.”

“Best glove I ever saw. He could be compared only to Brooks Robinson, but he had a better arm than Brooks and more speed. A lot of times he’d field the ball absolutely wrong.” Reese sprang up and crouched to field a ball hit to his right. “Instead of backhanding, Cox would go for them like this.” Reese reached right, but holding up his palm. “That’s so awkward you know it’s wrong. ‘Cept Billy did it. They talk today about the six-finger glove. Billy wore a four-finger glove. So he picks up this terrific smash wrong, with a terrible glove, making it look easy, and then he’d hold the ball. I’d holler, ‘Billy. Th’ow the damn ball.’ Ol’ Cox, he’d just set there, then he’d get the man by half a step.”

“Campy was a man you enjoyed.”

“Oh, I sure did,” Reese said. His voice had been even and cheerful. Now sadness touched him. The voice changed from major to minor. “Damn terrible thing,” Reese said. Then, picturing
Campanella well again, “Campy was the best I ever saw at keeping the ball in front of him. Watching Johnny Bench, who will be one of the great catchers of all time, that’s one thing he has to learn. On the breaking ball that bounces, don’t try to catch it. Just keep it in front of you.

“Playing short, I was aware of signs. We might use the first sign after ‘two.’ A catcher goes ‘one-three-two-one,’ that’s fast ball. The ‘one’ after the ‘two.’ But you have to change once in a while.” Reese learned sign stealing on the 1940 Dodgers under Durocher and carried the lesson into the fifties. Whenever he reached second base, he tried to read the opposing catcher. If he detected a sign, he had ways of tipping the batter. Leading away in a crouch, hands on knees, might mean he had seen a curve sign. Leading away with hands on hips or standing straight might mean fast ball. “Robinson never wanted signs. Hodges always did.”

“Of course,” I said. “Hodges needed all the help he could get against good righthanders.”

“Didn’t we all?” Reese said. “But you see why I was so aware of signs. Once in a while Campy would just go down and pump ‘two’ for a curve, and I’d think, ‘Hell, they’re gonna pick that one off.’ But, what the hell, maybe I was giving the other teams too much credit.”

Beulah brought more coffee. Reese was relaxing and moving easily from man to man. “Carl Furillo,” he said, “had this great arm, but he threw a tough ball to handle. He was so close, especially in Ebbets Field. He played that wall better than anyone. If it hit the screen, the ball came straight down. If it hit somewhere else, it came straight back. If it hit another place, it went sort of up in the air. The guy, Furillo, would never miss. And here was a runner coming into second base and Furillo threw so damn hard the ball shot off the grass. You could get to dread that play. But you had to make it.

“Late in my career, I found out Carl was bitter against what
he called a clique. Snider, Erskine, some of us out in Bay Ridge, our wives were close together, and we played bridge. Carl lived over in Queens. You didn’t just drop by. I talked to Carl about it. I said, ‘We have no clique. We have nothing against you. It’s one of those things.’ I don’t remember what he did. I think he nodded. He feels he wasn’t close to me, but, hell, I could never get close to Carl.”