Thirst (4 page)

Red Beaumont of the Boston Braves, who threw twenty-seven in the third inning of the second game of a doubleheader against the Dodgers, July 31, 1953, in Brooklyn. Men proceeded from one sack of dust to the next in a graceful and reserved trot, unable to better simulate the dirt-raising helter-skelter of real base-running. The bases were loaded, there was motion and they remained loaded, so that the field appeared unchanged. The only measure of time was the addition of another run on the scoreboard.

Beaumont’s arm felt fine and he could sense nothing wrong in his delivery. Nevertheless, he had lost the strike zone. For a lifetime it had hovered there, accommodating the shoulders and knees of thousands of batters without his conscious prompt; now the mental discipline required for its conjuration could not be found even if his life depended on it—and indeed it
was
the supports of his life that were at stake. Somehow the physical (the windup, the release, the follow-through) was no longer linked to the abstract (the idea of what
constituted a proper pitch). He was a man out of control.

He stared at the plate. Three figures were poised there, nearly touching in three dissimilar crouches. His catcher had not come out to talk to him since his third walk, not even to offer him an encouraging pleasantry. Sixty feet six inches was as close as he wished to approach catastrophe. Stalling his windup, Beaumont looked around. The onrushing dusk had dissolved the faces of the spectators and the players and had muffled the infield chatter. He could not find his manager among the shrouded figures indistinctly stirring in the dugout. The bullpen was empty. With the game already out of reach, he had been abandoned, his salvation and what was left of his decent earned run average not worth the use of a reliever.

After the first walk, on four straight pitches, he had been disgusted, after the second he had been worried, after the third panicked, after the fourth heartsick, after the fifth angry (at his catcher, his manager, God, himself), and after the sixth in despair. Now these emotions were washed away, leaving him pale and cool. A lonely bird, either a pigeon or a seagull and probably lost, wheeled above the right field stands, dipped below the light stanchions, and then, as if impeded by an unnatural heaviness in the atmosphere, desperately pumped its wings to clear the upper deck. Its fleshy underside was brighter than anything in the ballpark, brighter even than the ball in the pitcher’s left hand. Beaumont followed it with his eyes, and when they returned to the plate he could not understand the odd
configuration of men before him any more than the bird could. He saw himself as the bird had seen him, a solitary figure on a little hill, no longer part of the elaborate structure of rules, statistics, schedules, and histories that defined the strike zone and the need to pass a ball through it.

His head down, he walked off the field and into the dugout, flipped the ball to one of the coaches, entered the clubhouse, changed into his street clothes, and left the ballpark. The passersby on Bedford Avenue did not recognize him as a ballplayer. The moment he melted into the anonymous city he experienced an unconditional release, which the Braves announced later that evening. No one ever heard from him again. When his family and friends thought of him, they imagined him without a shave and a little mad, a man without a past. No one ever again called him by his real name, which nevertheless remains in the official records of the National League.

Joey Serapica of the St. Louis Browns, with 121 in 1938. An itinerant second baseman with no power, he had always been a good bunter—but never nearly as good as he was that year. He drove the pitchers and the infielders crazy. He’d bunt regardless of whether or not there was a man on base, regardless of the score, the inning, the number of strikes on him, or the condition of the field. He’d sometimes square around before the pitcher even released the ball, inviting the first and third base-men to charge in, and still he’d find a place to drop it.

He could, in that one extraordinary season, catch hold of a fastball inside at the letters and lay it twenty feet up the foul line of his choice. And it would stay there, not rolling at all, except perhaps to bluff going foul. It wouldn’t, however, cross the chalk, and the infielders would just stand there around it as if it were some strange mushroom they had found growing at the lip of the base path.

Sportswriters called it the “Serapica Poke,” the way he would reach out and jab the ball with his bat. The term was not used with affection. Indeed, the name was bestowed upon the maneuver to indicate that it was not a true part of the game, as were lower-cased singles, doubles, and home runs. The offense was that there was no defense against it. It was as if he had found a new way to play baseball or, even worse, some loophole in the rules. In the same way that the introduction of a new physical law would threaten to modify the operation of all other physical laws, Serapica’s bunt singles threatened the complex and delicate arrangement—the exquisite balance between the batter and the team in the field—that governed the game.

It disturbed Serapica too. For him the bunt hit was easy, a single that needed little more than to be willed into existence. If everyone did it—and it did not seem beyond the strength and agility of any professional athlete—there would be no baseball at all.

In a game shortly after the All-Star break, with his team behind 6-0 in the ninth inning, Serapica faced Washington’s Mitchell Wilner, who was pitching a no-hitter. The catcher started up to the mound, but Wilner
stared him back to his position. He already knew what he was going to throw. His first three pitches were very high and very away. With a 3-0 count, Serapica stepped from the box, dried his hands on his shirt, and checked the third base coach for the sign. There wasn’t a single person in the ballpark who didn’t know that he had been ordered to lay off the next one. Again Wilner threw well outside the strike zone, but, just as the umpire was about to tell him to take his base, Serapica leaned over the plate, nearly toppling, and intercepted the pitch. At the time, it seemed an act as malicious as the Lindbergh kidnapping.

The ball dribbled forward and then abruptly stopped. Wilner lunged off the mound, his legs pumping with the ungainliness of a toddler’s. Both the catcher and the third baseman joined in the pursuit of the ball, which, even though it remained motionless, appeared to distance itself from the fielders with every step they took. Reaching to pick it up, the pitcher felt as if he were chasing it down some dangerous hole in a field that was buckling around him, under stands that were about to tip over. He fell to his knees. As he grabbed the ball, he saw Serapica cross the first base bag.

Still on his knees, but with a pitch as hard and accurate as any he had thrown that afternoon, Wilner pegged Serapica in the small of the back. The impact arched the runner’s body as if it had been impaled. The ball dropped to the ground a foot away from the bag, and the 7,854 paid attendance cheered. Wilner’s intent had been clear, but the Browns did not protest and the umpires ignored it. As Serapica took a small lead with
the next batter approaching the plate, he himself felt that he had deserved the expanding, purpling bruise.

Ed Fortunato’s call on a 2-2 pitch thrown by Buster Smith of the Troy Haymakers in a home game against the Philadelphia Athletics, August 2, 1905. Fortunato said it was ball three, but it had just touched the outside corner, a perfect pitch—especially since Philadelphia’s batter, Amos Zeldin, had been badly fooled on the pitch before, a lazy curve very wide of the plate. Smith scowled but neither he nor his catcher said anything: you couldn’t gripe every time.

Now, however, with two out in the top of the eighth, Troy ahead six to four and an Athletic at first, the batter owned a full count. Smith was obliged to go to his fastball, a pitch he had been struggling with all afternoon. Trying too hard to keep it down, he threw it into the dirt for ball four. The Troy manager popped from the dugout and signalled for his left-handed reliever, Eckert King.

The large Sunday crowd gave Smith a big hand as he left. The fans were profoundly happy: the sun was warm on their faces, the air was fresh after a late-morning shower, and in the inning before the Haymakers had scored five runs. All season long Troy had rallied in the late innings, and going into today’s action it was tied for second, only a game behind the Athletics. After years of hovering around .500, the team was in its first pennant race. The fans were ready to collect on their patience.

King’s first pitch, however, was belted out of the ballpark, startling a few pedestrians on Carthage Road. As Bobbo Miller, the Athletics’ cleanup hitter, trotted around the bases behind his two teammates, the stands were virtually silent, as if the spectators were consulting their rule books to determine how to score a ball that clears the outfield fence by twenty feet. Then there was a dark, fevered murmur.

On the playing field, the Troy Haymakers grimly paced around their positions. King would have gladly taken back the excellent season he had been having if he could have also taken back that last hanging curve. What hurt the players was not the size of the home run, nor even the fact that it put the team back in the hole, 7-6. What hurt, what stung, was the knowledge that they should have been out of the inning with the previous batter.

Fortunato himself felt a little sick, a little tired of umpiring. He had realized his mistake as soon as he called the ball; he had whispered a prayer that it would not be fateful. He wished that he could be replaced by some unerring engine, a mechanical referee.

Meanwhile, the worst thought that could enter a sportsman’s mind percolated through the team’s collective consciousness: the game’s outcome was predestined, as was the outcome of the entire season. In their last turn at bat the Haymakers went quietly, as if they were down not by one run but by fourteen. In the first inning of the first game of a road trip the following Tuesday, the Haymakers’ best pitcher gave up
five consecutive base hits. The team went on to lose six in a row, dropping out of the pennant race like a stone, and finished with its worst record in seven years. The players were demoralized, slowly taking a sullen faith in the idea that it took something less tangible than hits and good pitching to win, and whatever it was, they didn’t have it and couldn’t get it, ever. They forgot the game with Philadelphia; the awful losses that followed were what seared their memories that winter and the following season.

Around the same time the fans quietly decided that they had overestimated not only the Haymakers, but baseball itself. Their hopes, their passions, and their carefully drawn evaluations of the team’s abilities had proven dependent on a mirage. They had been suckered. It was a stupid, cruel game, which owed less to calculable talent than to the merciless whims of fate. After peaking in 1905, the annual attendance to Troy’s home games fell in each succeeding year.

Soon all that was left were a few fanatics, men whose partisanship was insincere. They knew nothing about baseball. When they cheered the Haymakers, they were really only cheering themselves for having the romantic notion of attending a ball game and rooting for the home team. Troy schoolboys, more exacting in their allegiances, were likely to find it easier to name all the players on the New York Giants than to name the Haymakers’ starting nine. Only 72,000 paying fans entered Troy Memorial Park in 1908, and that winter the team traded all its players, changed its name, and moved to another city.

The trade made on March 11, 1931, between the Petrozavodsk Boilermakers and the Aix-en-Provence Bantams. The two teams had been fierce rivals since the beginning of history, always close in the standings, either vying for the American League pennant or trying to climb over each other out of the cellar. They had developed distinctive styles of play, the Boilermakers known for their big innings and intimidating pitchers, while Aix went for the gonfalon with the hit-and-run, the timely base hit up the middle, and great defensive play. Fueled by geographic proximity—the two cities glowered at each other from opposite banks of the Missouri—the baseball rivalry came to define the cities themselves. With their breweries and slaughterhouses, the Aixers thought of themselves as more refined than the Petrozavodsk polloi, whose brute force mined the coal and forged the steel that brought the city its wealth. The intensity of their rivalry was renowned, supplying newspaper feature columns throughout the country with tales of fans who fasted and grew beards during losing streaks, places of worship that held special services before important games between the two teams, barroom brawls in faraway Cathay and Patagonia over the teams’ respective merits, and even the Petrozavodsk man who bludgeoned his wife to death for making an admiring remark about an Aix pitcher’s pick-off move to first, and then the local jury that refused to convict him.

Even for those citizens who took little notice of the baseball teams that campaigned in their name, for whom baseball itself was a time-wasting pursuit, the city
across the river held a dread fascination. One could see it from the waterfront, shimmering in the haze. Despite the lurid reports that made their way into the national press, a commercial traveler from one city who found himself in the other did not necessarily risk some terrible prank or indignity upon his person. Yet his disorientation was acute, as if he were walking the streets of some kind of dream city, the sidewalk spongelike and the sky-scrapers on a tilt, a place that existed in the physical world only in the sense that it was not the other place. Going about his business, riding the streetcar, buying a cigar, even breathing the local air, the traveler might feel himself a bit of a traitor, or even unsure that it was really himself doing these things. He hurried home.