Kid from Tomkinsville (16 page)

“That? That was Roger Stinson; used to be with the Cubs. Whad’je do all winter, Jake—hunt? Say, what do you-all hunt in those North Carolina woods? Lions?”

“Nope. Squirrels. Just squirrels, that’s all. I did plenty of squirrel hunting last winter.”

Someone came in and threw himself on a bench. “Phew! I’m tired. Hey, there, Chiselbeak, gimme a Coke. Tired? Yeah, and you’d be tired too if you’d pitched for batting practice twenty minutes and then hit grounders to the infield thirty minutes on top of that!”

“You’d have been in fifteen minutes sooner if Red had only stopped a few.”

“Yeah. I can make him look awful good or awful bad with that-there bat.”

“Hey, Tucker... Roy... you got a new stance, haven’t you... since last year?”

“... and just lemme tell you one thing... He’s good, that rookie is. He’ll give Jerry a battle for his job, you see if he doesn’t. Led off for Knoxville last summer. And has he power! Tells me he can play anywhere in the infield too.”

“Say, Tom, did you see that lad Street today? He warmed up right-handed, and then when they played those three innings he went in and batted left-handed.”

“Yeah. Bingo Murray was like that. He’d bat right-handed against the southpaws and lefthanded against right-handers. That Street may do some hitting this year. Here comes Rats. Hey there, Rats old sock. What’s the matter? Don’t give him a Coke, Chiselbeak; the boys hit him out of the box. How come, Rats?”

“Oh... I dunno. I was wild. You know how it is the start of the season. Besides, the wind out there... it always blows down here in Florida....” A guffaw rose from the showers.

“The wind! The wind, nuts! He’s a lefty, ain’t he?”

“You bet he’s a lefty. Tha’s why umpires wear shinguards.”

Yes, it was great to be back. The long, tiring practice, those hours of punishment were now fun. The Kid loved it all, loved chasing fungoes in the outfield, loved the throwing to bases and the plate, loved most of all the batting practice. His hitting was truer, less spasmodic, and several players noticed it. One evening Dave came up to him in the lobby of the hotel.

“We’ll start the first inter-club game tomorrow. I’m using you at center field on the Yannigans. You boys will have Razzle to start, and then Jake and young Speed Boy Davis, this rookie from Atlanta. I want to see what he really has. By the way, Roy, haven’t you changed your batting stance?”

“Yes, I have, Dave. I practiced all winter, you know. Shortened my stride like you said.”

The manager looked at him a minute. “I thought so. You’re swinging level too. Least, you were every time I saw you this morning.”

“I’m trying to, Dave. You know I like to hit.”

He put his hand on the Kid’s shoulder. “Remember what I always told you, Roy. Any kid who doesn’t pull and isn’t afraid’ll be a good hitter. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Yes, it was great to be back. To be with them all again, to go out to practice and watch Dave on his hams behind the plate, hear him shout:

“All right now, squeeze play.” It was a bunt down the third base line which he had to field to first or second, fast work, and fast work for the basemen too. There was the same speed and the same stress on speed as ever, but there was less pressure on the team because Dave’s methods were different from Gabby’s. He was less of a scrapper, less voluble, quieter; but he was in there every second, watching, missing nothing from his post of vantage behind the plate.

“Wait a minute. What’s the matter with you fellas out there? You oughta run a man down on bases with two throws. If you chuck that ball round it gets hot. Now try it again....”

Perhaps the thing which most heartened the Kid was the morning a robust, sandy-haired and freckle-faced man, in a loud sports jacket and a Panama over his eyes, joined them. He shook hands with everyone on the clubhouse porch, although the Kid didn’t stop as he tromped past to the field for fear MacManus had forgotten him. Later in the morning the great man was sitting in a box and talking to Dave, who was standing below with a bat in his hand leaning against the rail. Roy had been in a pepper game and came near to chase a loose ball.

“Hey... Roy... Roy Tucker... how are you anyhow?”

The Kid picked up the ball and saw the great man smiling at him from the front box. His hand was stretched out. “Say, I’m glad to see you back.” He said it as if he meant it. “Mighty glad to have you back. The old whip okay, is it?”

“Yessir. So long as I don’t pitch, it’s just fine. Doc Masters been all over it; says he thinks it’ll hold up all right.”

“Now, that’s dandy. I’m glad to see you back ’cause you had some pretty tough luck last year. It’s good to know they couldn’t lick you; that’s the kind of a fighting ballplayer we want on this man’s club. Eh, Dave?...”

The old catcher looked at the Kid and the Kid looked at Dave.

“Yes, Mac, we’re expecting him to be useful this season. We want a fighting ballclub and there’s a place for everyone who can scrap.”

The Kid walked back to the pepper game in a glow. No wonder everyone on the club was willing to work their heads off for a man like that, to pitch out of turn, to run wild on the bases, to take dangerous chances to win games. Fight? Sure, he’d fight. He’d show ’em. Naturally... there wasn’t any chance of displacing Case or Swanson or Scudder, the three fielders, yet he hoped just what Dave had said: to be useful.

Going back to the pepper game he passed a short, perspiring chap in a white suit with a gray felt hat over his eyes. He was smoking a cigar, had a newspaper folded up under one arm, and his hand in his trousers pocket. Casey.

“Hullo....”

The little chap looked up, surprised, saw one of the team in uniform, and hastily replied:

“Hullo, how are ya?...” It was evident from his inquiring glance he had no idea to whom he was speaking. Ten months before, the chunky man had been writing columns about the Kid and calling him by his first name. Now he couldn’t remember who he was.

“Hullo, Mac... hullo there, Dave.” The sportswriter paused a second because he was out of breath from his dash across the field. He had news, and was anxious to convey it to MacManus himself, and first. “Say, Mac, the office just wired down, wants to know if you’ll take that one!”

“What one?” The Irishman sat erect in his chair, alert and suspicious. He was suspicious of every newspaperman but especially of Casey. “If it’s one of Murphy’s cracks, I’ve nothing to say.”

“Yeah, I know, but here’s what he said about...”

“Don’t care what he said. Tell him to mind his own business and let us mind ours, will you?”

“Sure, sure, I will, Mac. Only this is straight from their training camp. No fooling. He says the team which beats the Dodgers will win the pennant this year.”

There was a moment or two of silence.

“He did?” MacManus was slightly puzzled. He knew his rival probably didn’t mean it. And yet...

“Uhuh. He says the team that beats Brooklyn will win the pennant. Only he doesn’t know which one of the seven it will be.”

D
IFFERENT MANAGERS; DIFFERENT WAYS
of running a ballclub. Gabby stressed fight. Fight and discipline. You had to do what Gabby said, and like it. Every member of the club had to be in his room in the hotel at eleven and answer when old Chiselbeak made the rounds and knocked on every door. Dave abolished this. He stressed one thing: initiative. Each man was to live sensibly, to do his own thinking on the field. For instance, signal-stealing, a pastime of Gabby’s which Charlie Draper, the third base coach, had developed into an art, was abandoned. As a catcher Dave knew far too much about mixing signals to feel they did you much good even when you knew them.

“I was on the old Senators back in the ’33 Series, and Monte Davis stole all the Giants’ signals. What good did it do us? We couldn’t lick ’em. Any first-class catcher can mix up signs so that wiseacre out there on second will be crossed up. If he signs in a fast ball and the pitcher serves a hook—well, you know the answer. That’s one reason you don’t find Scrapper Knight or the good hitters taking information. I want this club to play heads-up, percentage ball; most of all I want them to do their own thinking out there, not be relying on someone handing them the signals....”

But if signal-stealing was out, much of the raucous spirit which Gabby had instilled into the club stuck. They were still a noisy, fighting team, they still got on with umpires like a family of wildcats, were still cordially disliked by those gentlemen and respected if not feared by all adversaries, even though they had finished the previous season in sixth place. Gabby’s pep and ginger was not entirely lacking, either, for Harry Street at short turned out to be an acceptable replacement. Confidence? He had it, a-plenty. Pep? Fight? He was full of it. His eternal chatter, his everlasting slogan: "Hurry up there... take your time...” rang out over the diamond from the field or bench every day. At first the team and especially the older players, save the Kid, his roommate who knew him best, disliked him; to them he was still “that fresh young busher at short.” Then during the pre-season training camp games they began to admit grudgingly the youngster had something. Afraid of nothing, Harry was making stops back of second Gabby would never have touched. In the early stages he led the squad in hitting. Before long everyone had an opportunity to see that he could turn the heat on the enemy also. It was during the trip north when the Dodgers were playing one-night stands with the Detroit Tigers that young “Childe Harold,” as the sportswriters named him, stunned both teams.

Harry believed the bigger they are the harder they fall. So he turned his attention to the biggest thing at hand, Scrapper Knight, the great Tiger star who for six years had led the American League in batting, and after a long career was slowly nearing his end as a big-time player. The terror of pitchers, he was also the terror of fielders on the basepaths because more than one of them carried Scrapper’s initials carved on shinbones or hips. In the first game of the series, with the score three to one for Brooklyn in the fifth, Scrapper singled and the next man slapped a beautiful low line drive to Karl Case in right. The Tiger star, with a generous lead off first, saw it wasn’t going to be caught and, as was his habit, tried for third. Passing second, Harry gave him the hip, not crudely enough to attract the attention of the umpires, but sufficiently to throw him out of his stride so he was cut down by two feet at third base. When the two teams changed sides, Scrapper walked over. He was boiling mad.

“The next time you try that, you fresh young busher, I’ll cut your legs off.”

Harry stood holding his ground. Chin to chin he looked the great man in the eye.

“You’ll cut nothing,” he said coldly but distinctly. “You been bulldozing guys on second for years, but you can’t pull that stuff on me. Next time you come round I won’t be so careful; I’ll spill you on your ugly old face.”

For almost the first time Scrapper was speechless. Players didn’t talk back to Scrapper, let alone fresh rookies; they had respect for him. He was dangerous. He was the star batter of the League. He was Scrapper Knight,   the great Scrapper. Now everyone had heard the boy’s rejoinder, old Stubblebeard the umpire, several members of the Dodgers, as well as four or five Tigers who gathered about to watch Scrapper carve the youngster up. They all stood transfixed.

While the veteran was struggling in his throat for words, the boy suddenly broke in again:

“Listen, Scrapper. Everyone knows you’re through. Why don’t you turn in that uniform and give yourself up?”

The big fellow heard for the first time the sentence he had been dreading for months and months, words that no one had yet dared say to him, words he knew in his heart, knew in his legs where it counted, were true. He, Scrapper the great, was almost through. The young blighter was right. He looked, glared, hesitated, started to throw a punch at the boy’s chin... and then turned away. That was all. There wasn’t any more. But from that moment even the veterans on the Dodgers respected this amazing youngster.

The previous season during the early games, Roy had been making a name for himself on the mound, while Harry sat in the dugout watching Gabby cavort round short. This year their situation was reversed. Harry was out there playing, while except as an occasional pinch hitter, a role he didn’t much enjoy because of what was at stake, the Kid saw little service as the team moved north. He warmed the bench, eating peanuts and listening to Dave. Learned things, he did, too. Especially about defensive strategy for, as he began to realize, Dave was one of the real strategists of the game. Casey and other sportswriters had hinted during the winter and spring that Dave would try to do the catching, that Babe Stansworth, the regular catcher and a .325 hitter, would be exchanged for a sadly needed pitcher now Dave was back. Nothing of the sort occurred.

Although he took his turn behind the plate occasionally, Dave let Babe continue as first string catcher, but he never let him or anyone forget who was running things. If the new manager was less pointed in his comments than Gabby, and if he did no sensational master-minding, he had definite ideas and ran his own show with a fine sense of where to place men and what to do under every circumstance, for he knew the hitters better than anyone in the game. Gradually the Kid saw the field as a checkerboard where each man on the club was at a certain place on a certain play; slowly he observed things that as a pitcher he had never seen, or more likely seen a hundred times and always taken for granted without thinking. How, for instance, the fielders studied the batters, or how Dave waved them from side to side, in or out, with the scorecard in his hand as different hitters stepped to the plate. How outfielders watched the wind currents and judged plays accordingly, how when two men were able to catch a fly the one who took it was always the one the catch left in a throwing position. These and dozens of other things the Kid realized, sitting there on the bench in half a dozen cities between Clearwater and Brooklyn.

They started the season playing well. As Casey remarked in his column one morning, the Dodgers always started playing well. They could be counted to be up front in May and well to the bottom in September. Dave shut his lips when he read this but said nothing. By the end of the first month, as Casey had predicted, the team was in third place, playing snappy ball. But they still needed one first-class pitcher to fill the place left vacant by the Kid. None of the new men proved reliable, while the regulars were all a year older. Dave knew this. So did MacManus who spent hours and hours in planes and trains looking over likely prospects. One deal he wanted to make was for Elmer McCaffrey, a southpaw who had won sixteen games for the last place Phillies the previous season. But this was blocked because the Phils wanted money; plenty of it, plus a couple of players.