Authors: Bill Branger
I hurried to the street and went over to Second Avenue to get my car from the parking garage, George owned the parking garage and I had a deal Drove crosstown to the West Side Highway, then up the West Side to the GW Bridge and back across to Fort Lee.
I spent twenty dollars in an Italian restaurant for a plate of tortellini and sauce and a couple of MGD beers. They had highlights of the game on the TV above the bar and everyone was watching. The first highlight was the brushback and the second was the brawl. But the rest of the highlights consisted of Raul Guevara stroking the ball all over the park.
“That kid knows how to hit,” the barman said to no one.
“He looks like Reggie Jackson,” said a guy at the end of the bar.
“Yeah, but this ain't October,” the barman said. “You think they found a real player down there in Cuba?”
“If I had a dime for every April hotshot the Yankees ever brought up, I'd have enough to pay my bar bill,” the customer said.
“Well, they won,” the barman said, still staring at the set.
“One game.”
“That's the way they win them, pal, one game at a time.” “Tell me in September,” the customer said.
“I dunno, maybe that guy Ryan Shawn ought to get kicked out of every game,” the barman said and laughed. It was certainly a thought.
Charlene called me around ten that night. I'd had the phone machine on and it had recorded three or four hangups. I mentioned this to her.
“I don't like leaving messages on machines, Ryan, It's like being kept waiting.”
“I would have called you as soon as I got in.”
“Where you been?”
“Putting the troops to bed,” I said,
“My, my, does a manager do all that?”
“Manager do what a manager gotta do “
“They say on TV you got cut.”
“Got a spike in the face. Don't worry. I'm still handsome as I ever was.”
“I really didn't believe you were going to go through with this,” Charlene said. “Someone at the hospital says to me today that they wanted to know how I felt about you being on a team full of wetbacks.”
“And you said?”
“I said you liked it just fine.”
“And they said?”
“They didn't say nothing more to me if they knew what was good for them.”
“You don't have to get in no fights on my account, Charlene.”
“Oh, I don't, do I? I suppose you never thought of the effect this was going to have on our relationship, did you?”
“I know I didn't want you getting all balled up by it, Charlene. You got your life and I got mine and the only thing that's important is that we got each other.”
“We've got each other. Do we, Ryan?”
“Don't we?”
“Well, I know you got baseball and what I got is people feeling sorry for me that I got you “
“Well, don't let people's pity get you down. It's a game and it's a salary and after next September, I'll be back in Houston to stay and we can be thinking on opening up the health food place.”
“Ryan Patrick, what if I was to say right now, âJust quit.' Would you?”
I paused for a long moment. “No, Charlene, I wouldn't. I've come this far, might as well see the thing played out.”
“I didn't say quit, I said âwhat if,' but you gave me your answer anyway, didn't you?”
“I guess I did,” I said. “I love you, Charlene Cleaver, right down to the soles of your pretty little feet.”
“But not that much,” she said. She was getting in a mood or she was in a mood. Depended on when this all started with her.
“Well, I just wanted to see if you were all right and it appears you are.”
“I miss you, Charlene. We play the Texas Rangers beginning of May on the West Coast trip.”
“I know when you're next in Texas, Ryan, I can read a schedule.”
“I know that, Charlene. I just want to say how much I miss you,” I said in my quiet, gentle way.
“Oh, Ryan,” she said.
Well, there it was. She was doing Scarlett O'Hara and I was doing Bronco Billy. Different themes.
“I do want to be happy,” Scarlett said.
“I want you to be happy.”
“I really hate what you're doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“Everything wrong,” she said.
Well, that doesn't lead to a whole lot of discussion. So I kept quiet and waited for her.
“Well, Ryan. I got to go now “
“Stay and talk a while.”
“You miss me?”
“I told you that.”
“Well, you can say it again “
“I miss you, Charlene.”
“All right. Well, I got to go now.”
“Charlene â”
Click.
I could call her back, but what would be the point of that? She was in a mood and I suppose someone had said something to her that was worse than she'd told me and it had made her mad â angry â and the next thing had led to the next thing and now I was about two thousand miles too far away from her.
I knew how she felt.
! could even have sympathy for her point of view. It's a terrible thing when a man gets all involved in something as basically silly as baseball. I used to look at baseball uniforms from a different perspective, and they looked dumb to me. That bothered me because I was wearing a uniform, too, so I put the thought out of my mind. Baseball is full of things like that. Take a catcher's gear â the mask, the mitt, the crotch pad, and the chest pads â the whole getup is as basically silly as a woman wearing a corset with little clips holding up her stockings. On the other hand, you don't think of things like that when you're seeing them the way they're supposed to be seen, sort of in context.
My head was full of this kind of thinking. Always is, when I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly that Charlene wants. She wants me to quit the game but she wouldn't have any use for me if I did â I know that â so what was it that she wants?
Hell with it. I opened a can of beer and turned on the TV and started watching my old friend Clint Eastwood. He would have been as puzzled by Charlene as I was, I knew that much.
The players got their first death threat of the season delivered by messenger to their rooms in the East Side Hotel. It was Day Two of the season, as the more pretentious sports writers like to put it.
The threat was wrapped in a box of candy that, when Orestes read the threat, no one ate. (Later turned out the candy wasn't poisoned and the cops in the crime lab ate the evidence.) The threat was in Spanish, which was good thinking because I'm not sure the boys would have understood it in English. It said they would all die very soon and die most painfully if they did not go back to Cuba where they came from. Something like that.
Of course, the boys didn't tell me about it for a couple of days because they were still trying to decide if they trusted me. But when TÃo was almost run over by a cab when he decided to take a midnight stroll around the East Side after a game, they spilled it. (Turned out the cab driver was just a regular guy showing a regular cabbie's contempt for any and all pedestrians, not just Cubans.)
This is a wonderful country because we have a lot of experience dealing with death threats. George took it very seriously and so did the cops. So did the FBI, which was called in on the matter. Everyone had a good time, particularly the tabloids, which went to the sleaziest of extremes, speculating this was a plot by Castro to embarrass the United States. As if he needed any help.
The death threat made me sick to my stomach and I thought it would do the same to the kids, but I was wrong. Maybe, being an American, I take death threats more seriously than they do. Maybe it was their Cuban macho.
Whatever it was, they greeted the Boston Red Sox visiting town in the next series like the poultry man greeting a crate full of chickens,
George, in his cynical way, had been right about filling the ballpark when you have a winner. The old loyalty days are over, for players as well as fans. Give them a winner and they'll show up, George started getting celebrity requests for tickets and “Larry King Live” had him on to talk about his breakthrough in Latin American relations.
It was cold in the Stadium for the Boston series, which consisted, naturally, of night games. But still the people came out and cheered and applauded and drank George's four-dollar beers. I did tell George to lose the Cuban lag and anthem and he had the good sense to do it after the
New York Times
ran an editorial saying the lag was “inappropriate.”
We banged Boston the way we banged Kansas City. Suarez was learning. He was a fastballer and I was trying to teach him a slider the way Deke had taught me. And I was teaching him about the plate as the plate is in the Bigs.
The batter don't own the plate. He knows it, which is why he blusters so much. It's a hard thing to hit that little ball coming at you at 95 miles an hour in the best of times. It comes down to instinct, and when you're a little light on instinct, which most hitters are, you bring in other tools. Like intimidation.
The rubber is 60 feet 6 inches from the crown of the plate. That works both ways. The hitter, after all, does have this big stick, and when he takes his practice swings, he is showing the top end to the pitcher and threatening him with it. So the pitcher has got to see the ball as a threat, too. Show the hitter who really owns the plate and the boxes around it.
â I could hurt someone (Suarez told me when we were practicing one afternoon in the bullpen).
â Hurt him or he's gonna hurt you.
â I don't want to hurt anyone.
â There's only been one player ever got killed by a pitched ball. Think about it, Ramon. Only one in all these years. Hell, that's statistically insignificant, (Needless to say, the last two words were in English.)
â I don't know (Suarez said).
Somehow, he got the idea. Foxgrover from the Red Sox teed off on him one second inning, and by the fifth, Suarez had learned. Foxgrover got plunked on the left wrist and trotted down to first, holding the injured appendage and shouting curses at Suarez. The ump shouted a warning and Suarez just nodded. Statistically insignificant.
After two series, we had yet to lose a game and sat atop the American League East at six and oh. Raul Guevara was hitting .489 and
Sports Illustrated
tried to jinx us by putting Raul on the cover.
Everyone in the locker room had his own copy of
SI
that week and I tried to calm the boys down by telling them it was a long season and you figured even a good team loses more than a third of its games. These guys were bullet-proof on nothing stronger every night than pizza and beer.
And they were filling the park. It was still cold in New York in April and night games take it out of you sitting in your long underwear through three hours, but the house was filling up. George was humming “My Way” night and day while he checked the receipts.
There was a lot of security at the Stadium normally, but now there was more, reinforced by a detachment of the Finest and a sprinkling of FBI guys casing the layout. The FBI also wanted metal detectors at all gates, so the Stadium began to look more like an inner-city high school The president had surreptitiously laid on a contingent of Secret Service men who are trained to look for assassins. The whole thing made me nervous as hell.
Still, baseball was baseball. When you're into the game, it's the only thing there is. You're aware of the crowds, of course, and cheers are better than boos, but there is this other thing. You are on a field and your teammates are with you and this other team is over there, pros just like you are, and they are watching you. Watching. You want to be good because your salary gets paid on your pitching ERA or batting average, but you also want to be good exactly the way you wanted to be good in high school ball. You just want to stick it to the other side.
Ballplayers tend to be the least sentimental people on earth. It's a tough haul, getting to the Bigs, and staying in the Bigs is tougher. After you retire, you're still hanging around to catch some of the atmosphere, but mostly it's because it took so much out of you to become a Big, you ain't got nothing left. You sell used cars or golf a lot but, shit, that's just waiting to die. It's the reason old ball players have that empty look to them behind the suntan and face-lift and golf pro shirts.
We lost heavy the first away game in Cleveland's pretty stadium. Ramon Suarez was shellacked in the second inning and he just couldn't believe it when I pulled him out and put myself in. It was like I was sending him back to Cuba by banana boat.
â Just go on, Ramon, this is no big thing, you just ain't got it tonight. â I have it tonight and every night, those whores, those Indians.
â No slurs, now, Ramon, just go on and siddown, will you?
Bill Donnelly came out to the mound with his mask in hand and said, “What's the matter, Ryan? He don't wanna go? Or you gonna have two pitchers on the mound for the next batter? It doesn't say anything in the rule book about two pitchers at a time.” That's umpire humor and it's good to ignore it whenever its ugly head pops up. It just encourages them,
“Bill, just gimme a minute, willya?”
“Hurry it up,” he said.
Orestes, also on the crowded mound, just glared at him. An ump had thrown him out of the first game when all he'd been doing was protecting his pitcher from the charge of Tommy Tradup.
â Tell him, Orestes.
â- You gotta go sit down, Ramon.
â Why? What have I done?
â You allowed two runs and the bases are loaded, Ramon. Do what the man says.
â He just wants to come in and take my victory away from me.
â Oh, grow up, Ramon (I said).
Shoulders slumped, little Ramon went back to the dugout. The crowd booed him in a cheerful way and he stopped at the dugout steps and gave them the finger. That quieted the booing, of course, the way it always does.